And when he got another raise they ate soup every day from then on, and Coba bought three silver napkin rings, one for Bobi too, and from then on she didn’t want to pack lunch anymore when they went for a Sunday walk in the country, the way she always used to.
Their friends had moved up in the world too: Bonger, the doctor, and Graafland, who was head clerk in the Postal Service and had given up writing books, and van der Meer, who sold cars and wanted nothing to do with poetry. The ones who hadn’t moved up in the world they never saw anymore. There was Kool, for instance, who always scarfed down his sandwiches and who had schemed to reform the world for so long that he ended up shipped out to the colonies, God knows where. They wrote to each other at first, but that stopped after a while, they ran out of things to write about. He had run into Hein again a while ago, who was determined to be a painter. He painted the inner essence of things’ souls but that didn’t bring in any money and after his father died he was flat broke. The little poet hadn’t seen him for years.
One day he was walking down Pieter Vlamingstraat and saw him, dressed like an undertaker: Hein, who had shown a painting at a gallery once, called Portrait of a Young Tubercular Syphilitic (in French no less) and “theosophical in conception.” They were burying a local grocer. The men in black stood on the sidewalk holding umbrellas. Hein too. It was drizzly. He had a mourning hat on his head, a top hat, crooked, too small. His formal mourning coat with knotted cords was buttoned up tight, it was much too small for him and was almost bursting open, it stretched over his rib cage with ridiculous creases everywhere. “My goodness,” Hein said, “what a fine fellow you’ve turned into.” Right then, thank God, they carried the dead grocer out of his house. It’s not so easy to move up in the world, even if you know deep down that you’re still a little poet. In any case, he didn’t like walking around in that neighborhood very much and after that day he never wanted to set foot there again. And then you sometimes had to let yourself be taken out to eat, and be handed a menu you couldn’t make heads or tails of, not a single line. During the first course you take too much of everything since you don’t know what’s coming next or how far along you are, and then you try to do better in the next course and end up with too little of everything, and then you have to smoke a big heavy cigar on an empty stomach. That’s when you wish your father had just gotten you a job in the sanitation department where you could walk around on a quiet, sunny canal street in the morning in a blue smock, with a garbageman’s rattle and a shiny leather cap with a brass number on it, rattling your rattle without thinking about it, in thick double-soled shoes.
And twenty-eight years farther on down the road to the grave he saw his father’s gray head. He had always done well too and had not accomplished anything special either. He saw himself with exactly the same head having trudged along for another twenty-eight years and felt like he was his own father. And twenty-three years behind him trudged his daughter, still just a little girl. Bobi wouldn’t get anywhere in the next twenty-three years either and yet she would walk the same road he was walking, the same and yet different. It was an absolutely meaningless procession, the little poet thought. It weighed on his soul.
But inside this harmless, proper, bourgeois young gentleman there still lived something that wasn’t a gentleman but a person, someone who didn’t want to just die, who wanted to build a tower of his own that reached up into the blue sky and would stand forever. And who was a wild animal too, who wanted to devour all the indifferent creatures, living and dead, who acted like he wasn’t there, and wanted to keep devouring and devouring until it was all wolfed down and he was the only thing left with nothingness.
But he didn’t know how to start, so nothing ever came of it. He never got any farther than having a poem accepted in a magazine now and then. The Handelsblad praised him, but they praise so many people; Professor Scharten, thank heavens, called him “very promising”; his friends, who had turned into serious men, said an appreciative word or two about it when they saw him, but they no longer got very worked up about anything. And slowly the issues of the magazines began to crumble away, just like the little poet’s life, and other than that nothing happened. The people in the office didn’t read any magazines but he wrote under a pen name anyway.
One time, on a pleasure cruise, he saw a young couple, fiancés, sitting and looking at the water — the boy had his right arm around the girl’s shoulder and held her right wrist tight and she had put her left hand on his right hand and they sat like that, pressed close together. The little poet looked at them, it’s so lovely to see a nice young couple like that. That these children are excited because they want more, that they are only getting each other worked up for what they can’t do and don’t dare to do, that they never know where to stop— no one ever notices that or thinks about that. It was very lovely, and maybe the truth was that they had just recently gotten engaged and were still satisfied with being madly in love with each other. Then they looked at each other and he said:
I look aslant into the pools of your eyes
And see a blue and golden spark
and he kissed her on the lips. She blushed: “That man is watching.”
That was the only time in his life that the little poet ever felt his own life being lived in someone else’s head, and he was even more embarrassed than the girl and blushed too and gave a quarter to the man who came around collecting money for the musicians.
After that there was no one, among the dead or among the living, who showed that they had any idea of what the little poet felt in that poet’s head he was dragging around with him to his inglorious grave.
The little poet had had enough. He had one good thing left:
My dead heart is so hard to bear …
But he threw it into the kitchen stove. There was no fire in the fireplace since it was summer.
And then he got so enraged at everything, living and dead, that he interrupted his endless eroticism and wrote a grim and bitter little book that made him famous right away. But that happened later, we’ll get to that.
For the time being he only gritted his handsome teeth and then he said out loud, alone in his room, “To become a great poet and then to fall, dammit!” He had untied the laces of his shoes and he kicked one of them off with such violence that it startled the missus downstairs.
That was in the summer. By fall the little poet had gotten to the point that it was “impossible” to get away from the office. His aunt had reason to be pleased — her nephew was “terribly busy.” He spent three or four evenings a week at the office. He was supposed to spend a week with her, in Velp (she was living in retirement at the time, having sold the family business), but he couldn’t get away, just like a real businessman.