He did, however, buy a series of cards in the Uffizi, to put on the chair next to his bed. In the cataract of art treasures that was poured out into that exuberant museum street, he was struck by an Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci: an angel who was approaching the Virgin Mary rather furtively, with his head bent and the guilty look of someone who knows that what he has in mind is no good. No wonder the Mary seemed to be thinking: "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Quinten had learned at high school that annuntiare meant "announce": the angel was going to announce to her that, at a later date, she would be impregnated by the Holy Ghost; but according to him there was something much more going on here than simply an "announcement"; this was the event itself. In a moment he was going to pounce on her. Because why wasn't Joseph there? Surely he had the right to know for certain that his fiancee had not deceived him with the window cleaner? Every woman could maintain that she had become pregnant out of pure piety. He began to look for Annunciations in the other rooms too, but in none of them was Joseph there. The sucker was obviously in the carpenter's workshop, where he was earning his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, making crosses for the Romans perhaps, while at home his bride-to-be was listening to the seductive angel patter and letting herself go with an envoy of God. Suddenly he now remembered a relief of the Annunciation on the front of the Rialto bridge in Venice. On the left-hand pillar, at the beginning of the arch, you saw the angel Gabriel, at the highest point of the bridge the dove that he had thrown up, and on the right-hand pillar Mary, waiting for the Holy Ghost in complete abandon. So that dove was no less than the angel's holy seed!
How he would have liked to talk to his father about this. Would he have agreed with him? Perhaps he would have agreed and called depictions of the Annunciation "religious peep shows"; perhaps he would have exclaimed in alarm: "The shameful thought will crush that head of yours!" He burst out laughing. The latter struck him as most probable.
Wandering among the sculptures in the Museo Bargello, on the second day of his stay, he was suddenly reminded of Theo Kern, who had of course been here too, to learn how his colleagues had removed the superfluous stone. Through the windows of the old palace he occasionally saw the Florentines in the street and in the smoky buses, and wondered how many of them had looked at these wonderful things here. Which of them knew that their city had invented the Renaissance? Perhaps the memory of most people in the world didn't extend much farther than their own lifetime; perhaps they didn't even realize that they were living a thousand years after a thousand years ago. Between their birth and their death, they were trapped in a windowless cell; for them everything was as it always had been. Of course that wasn't the case — but in a certain sense it was, because that's how it had been a thousand years ago for almost everybody, and two thousand years ago, and ten thousand. By simply living, working, having fun, eating, reproducing, they had in fact become much more eternal than the eternal masterpieces of all those unique individuals!
He stopped at an arbitrary sculpture and thought: Take that thing there. What was it? A beautiful, naked boy, with his right hand on his crown, his left hand on that of a great eagle, which was sitting at his feet and looking at him devotedly, BENVENUTO CELLINI, 1500–1571. Ganymede. He didn't know the myth, but that didn't matter; he knew in any case that there was an old story behind it. There was a story behind everything. Only someone who knew all the stories knew the world. It was almost inevitable that behind the whole world, with all its stories, there was another story that was therefore older than the world. You should find out about that story!
"Did you pose for that?"
He started. A tall man, who seemed vaguely familiar, looked at him and smiled, but he didn't like the smile. He was about fifty, balding, with dull eyes, a pointed nose, and thin lips; out of his sleeves, which were rolled up, protruded two pale arms with a golden chain around each wrist. Suddenly Quinten remembered who he was: he slept in the same room, on the other side of the gangway.
"No," he said gruffly.
"I saw your guidebook on your chair, that's how I know you're Dutch too. My name's Menne."
Quinten nodded, but he didn't intend to give his own name. What did this guy want? Had he followed him too, perhaps? Menne looked back and forth between him and the statue.
"You two look very like each other, do you know that? I'm sure you have little pointed nipples just like that, and beautiful legs. Except that your eyes are much more beautiful. And that little dick — I bet you've got a much bigger one than that. Am I right or not? Tell me honestly. ." Panting a little, he bent toward him. "Have you got hair on it yet? Do you play with it sometimes? I expect you do, don't you?"
Quinten couldn't believe his ears. What a dirty bastard! Without a word, he turned on his heel and left the room.
"Don't act so offended," the man called after him. "It was only a joke. Let's go and have a cappuccino."
As soon as Quinten got to the top of the steps, he immediately went down three steps at a time, outside, and ran criss-cross through a couple of alleyways to shake him off. It turned out to be unnecessary: of course because Menne knew that he would find him again in the hostel at the end of the day. When he went to bed at eleven o'clock Menne fortunately still wasn't back. Who knows; perhaps he'd gone.
But in the middle of the night he was awakened by a hand wandering around under the blanket between his legs. The guy was sitting on the edge of his bed, stinking of alcohol and with his fly unbuttoned, with a thick penis sticking out of it as blue-white as detergent, at which he was tugging with his other hand at a speed that reminded Quinten of the rod of Arendje's locomotive when he forced it along the rails at full speed. The thing was also a little bent — because of all that jerking of course.
"Get lost, you dirty creep!" he said.
"Oh darling, darling," whispered Menne. "Let me let me. It'll be over in a moment…"
He tried to put his lips on Quinten's, and for the first time in his life Quinten clenched his fist, lashed out, and hit someone as hard as he could with his knuckles. His lover got up with a groan and fell forward onto his own bed, where he stayed with his back heaving. Of course he was crying.
No one had noticed anything. For a few seconds Quinten listened in astonishment to the snores around him. He realized that for the second time he was being driven out of a city. He got angrily out of bed, dressed, packed his things in his backpack, and put the postcards with the Annunciations into his guidebook. He paid the porter, who was sitting on a brown imitation-leather bench reading the Osservatore Romano, and walked down the cool nocturnal streets to the station. In the hall, he sat down among scores of other young people on the ground and tried to get a little more sleep.
53. The Shadow
Even when Onno went shopping in the mornings, Edgar was in the habit of sitting on his shoulder. People no longer paid any attention in the shops. In the street the bird sometimes spread its wings, took off, and after one flap on Onno's crown flew up to a gutter or disappeared behind the houses, but it always came back. Onno was more attached to it than he was prepared to admit — perhaps to protect himself against the possibility that one day it might not come back. Imagine some bastard or other shooting it! Humanity after all contained that kind of scum, who should be ashamed at what they did to animals, none of which had any knowledge of evil and for that reason had to be killed.