Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom Read Free Book Online Page A

guardian. Other birds, white, are floating in a marshy pool near the edge of the woods. Beneath us, at the foot of the rocks, I see the pointed pyramids of termite mounds, sand palms as unspectacular as grass, rocks as the building blocks of a destroyed temple.
    ‘I wasn’t making fun of you,’ Almut says. ‘I know what you mean, I just wouldn’t put it in quite those words. It has something to do with melancholy, but also with triumph.’
    ‘Yes,’ I say, and I would like to add that the triumph comes from realising – if only for a moment – that you are at once mortal and immortal, but I don’t say it. ‘Time is a fart’ is a lot snappier, and maybe it boils down to the same thing. ‘The landscape you are going to see is sixty million years old,’ Cyril had said. Yellow Water, Alligator River, ashen colours, mottled white gum trees in moss-green wetlands, traces of a dead river, a bleeding cliff, where a monster has bitten a chunk out of the earth. We have seen enough, it is time to leave. Once, long ago, we began this journey in a room in São Paulo. Now, at last, we have arrived.

13
    HOW MUCH THINKING CAN YOU DO WITHOUT EVER leaving the room? I took a trip in my head and ended up back where I started – in the stillness. The person who met the man in the gallery, now lying at my side, was no longer the same person who had arrived six months ago in Sydney. I suppose I should say, ‘ I was no longer the same,’ and I wish I could, but a gap has been created between me and myself, and I haven’t yet learned how to bridge the distance. Almut says, ‘You’re in love, simple as that,’ but I’m not. It is much more than that. It is getting something as well as giving something up. I am not going to stay with this man, because he will not be staying with me. He made that clear from the start, and that has to do with distance too. He is just as inaccessible as his paintings. You can hang them on the wall, all right, but they are not yours, and they never will be, because they come from a place to which you have no access. The problem is not that I do not fit into his world, or that he would never take me to wherever he comes from, or that he is ashamed of me, or for whatever reason will not present me to the people he is closest to, nor is it the fact that he took me, like an ordinary tourist, to a place where Aboriginal life was presented as a kind of theatre, complete with bush tucker and didgeridoo, campfires and clumsy dancing that bore no resemblance to the dancing I had seen in the museum in Darwin, which meant that he had either underestimated me or insulted me, though there was no point in talking about it since he doesn’t talk. I don’t care. Perhaps he was trying to make something clear to me, something I would rather not know. But when night falls and the nonsense is done with, we are alone again with the silence and immensely few words. I never knew words could be so few and far between. But that is fine with me. Or is it? Is there such a thing as pornography without the porn? Simply an idea in your head, without a graphic image? Pure pornography of the mind, or of a situation, in which a lie changes every move, kiss, caress and climax into something else, something obscene and perverse? I think about this, and yet at the same time I lie here and wait for him to utter one of his infrequent words, for him to touch me again and make me forget my thoughts.
    Almut made some kind of remark about my ‘noble savage’, and for the first time in years I was furious with her. Not at the insult, but at her lack of understanding. She has always understood how I feel, but now I had all of a sudden lost her. It has nothing to do with being in love. It is much worse than that. More obscene, more perverse. If I am in love with anything, it is with a cliff or an expanse of desert. It all started with his painting. I stood there in front of it, not knowing what to make of it. It was unlike anything else I