Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom Read Free Book Online Page B

had seen on our trip. There were no figures, no sign of any creatures which, no matter how strange, were in some way recognisable. Instead, there was a defiant, impenetrable black with a shimmer of light glinting through it – a contradiction that drew me into the blackness, exactly as I was later drawn to the artist. But none of these words bring me any closer to the matter at hand. To an outsider, it must have seemed ordinary enough. At a private viewing, you stare at a painting too long, tune out everything around you, the voices, the people, think the forbidden phrase ‘like a black cloud’, wish you could block it all out, the violence, the horror, the fear, and feel yourself being sucked back into that cloud, as though you had never travelled to and across a country that had been the stuff of your childhood dreams, but instead had travelled straight to this painting as if to an exorcism, an exorcism that can occur only if I let myself be sucked back into the taboo. Tears flow down my cheeks, but luckily no one can see them since I am standing with my back to the crowd. What they do see if they are looking this way is the gallery owner coming over to me, saying, ‘You seem to be quite interested in that painting,’ catching sight of my tears and beating a hasty retreat after a mumbled, ‘I’ll introduce you to the painter,’ and only coming back with him much later, after I have dried my tears, which well up again when he is standing before me because he himself is his painting. All that has to do with the pain of healing – so much I understand. I say nothing, not even to Almut. I expect nothing, I have surrendered myself to it. The gallery owner must have told him something, because he stood there before me without saying a word, whether out of shyness or because his thoughts were miles away I couldn’t tell. And I still can’t. Sometimes I think he doesn’t see me, that even when he touches me or has sex with me, I am invisible to him, someone without a soul, a mere shape or figure – and he is right about that – as if what we do has no substance, as if his pre-announced departure can be felt in everything, in his long silences, his stillness, his refusal to see me although I am dying to be seen and know I won’t be – I knew all that the moment I saw the painting.
    That is all there is to tell. The week he granted me is almost over. The gallery owner, who was drunk by the end of the evening, said to me, ‘I’m only lending him to you. Take good care of him. And for God’s sake don’t ask him about his paintings. He’s not allowed to talk about them. It’s too complicated to explain. Taboos, secrets, totems – a whole world you’d be better off not knowing about.’ He gave us the key to his cabin by the ocean in Port Willunga. On the first day, we walked along the shore, an endless walk. It was high tide, and I had the feeling that the surf was roaring just for me, as if to make up for the silent figure at my side. From time to time he pointed out a bird and told me what it was called. Otherwise, he didn’t say a word. Only a brief statement at the beginning, uttered without looking at me, as a kind of Declaration of Independence, that at the end of the week he would be ‘going back to my mob’, without even mentioning which part of Australia they lived in. We walked until dark, then went back to the cabin. He was familiar with it, had obviously been there before. And obviously with other women. He did not switch on the light, but put his hand, the fingers spread wide, on the nape of my neck. Even though it was the lightest of touches, I could feel how calloused his fingers were. Surely it isn’t possible for someone to touch you so lightly and yet give you a feeling of being lifted? The next thing I knew I was being rocked – there is no other word for it – a kind of endless rocking that blended in with the sound of the surf, the heave and swell of the ocean, which wrapped me in its