Tulip Fever Read online

  “I said, I have changed my mind.” She turns her face from his and buries it in the pillow. “What I told you at dinner . . . I have changed my mind. I don’t want another painter.” She pauses. “Let that man come back.”

  6

  Maria

  Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret places is pleasant.

  —JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632

  Down below, in her bed in the wall, Maria sleeps. On the floor she has laid her shoes upside down to keep away the witches. Outside, the canal exhales its chill breath into the air.

  The fog has cleared. The moon slides out from behind a cloud and shines on the rows of houses that line the Herengracht. They are rich people’s houses, built to last; their brick gables rear into the sky. Sightlessly, their windows shine in the moonlight. Between them lies the canal. A breeze ruffles the water; it creases like satin. Far away a dog barks—first one and then another, spreading like news of the outbreak of war, a war that only the dogs know is approaching.

  The night watchman tramps through the streets. He blows his horn, announcing the hour, but Maria snores in the childless house. She dreams that the rooms fill up with water, and her master and mistress, locked in their curtained bed, float away. The sea rises and submerges the city but now she is a fish swimming through the rooms. Look, I can breathe! She is free while all the others drown—all but her babies. A flickering shoal, they swim behind her. They dart here and there, suspended above the checkerboard marble floors.

  Maria smiles, mistress of her underwater palace. Others have died so that she can live, and in the world of dreams this seems perfectly fitting.

  7

  Cornelis

  If the poet says that he can inflame men with love, which is the central aim in all animal species, the painter has the power to do the same, and to an even greater degree, in that he can place in front of the lover the true likeness of that which is beloved, often making him kiss and speak to it.

  —LEONARDO DA VINCI, Notebooks

  Two weeks pass before the next sitting. Cornelis is a busy man; he is always out and about. He has his warehouse to run, down in the harbor. At midday the Stock Market opens and he hurries down to the Bourse. Amsterdam is awash with capital, and dealing there is brisk, often frenzied, because the place closes at two. In addition to this he has civic duties for he is a prominent citizen, a man of substance in this burgeoning city. It is 1636 and Amsterdam is thriving. The seat of government is in The Hague, but Amsterdam is the true capital of the Republic. Trade is booming; the arts are flourishing. Fashionable men and women stroll along its streets, and the canals mirror back the handsome houses in which they live. The city is threaded with mirrors. They reflect the cold spring sunshine. Copper-colored clouds lie motionless beneath the bridges. The city sees itself in its own water like a woman gazing into a looking glass. Can we not forgive vanity in one so beautiful?

  And hanging in a thousand homes, paintings mirror back the lives that are lived there. A woman plays the virginal; she catches the eye of the man beside her. A handsome young soldier lifts a glass to his lips; his reflection shines in the silver-topped decanter. A maid gives her mistress a letter. . . . The mirrored moments are stilled, suspended in aspic. For centuries to come people will gaze at these paintings and wonder what is about to happen. That letter, what does it say to the woman who stands at the window, the sunlight streaming onto her face? Is she in love? Will she throw away the letter or will she obey it, waiting until the house is empty and stealing out through the rooms that recede, bathed in shafts of sunshine, at the back of the painting?

  Who can tell? For her face is serene, her secrets locked into her heart. She stands there, trapped in her frame, poised at a moment of truth. She has yet to make her decision.

  Sophia stands at a window. She has not seen Cornelis approach. She is standing halfway up the stairs. The windowpanes are tinted glass—amber and blood-red. In the center is painted a bird trapped in foliage. She cannot see out. The sun shines through, suffusing her face with color. She stands there, utterly still.

  Cornelis thinks: she is already a painting—here, now, before she has been immortalized on canvas. Then he feels an odd sensation. His wife has vanished, her soul sucked away, and just her outward form remains in its cobalt-blue dress.

  “My love—” he says.

  She jumps, and swings round.

  “Did you not hear the knock at the door? Mr. van Loos is here; he is waiting downstairs.”

  Her hand flies to her hair. “He’s here?”

  CORNELIS HAS PLACED a vase of tulips on the table. He has asked for it to be included in the painting, for tulips are a passion of his.

  “I bought these at some expense,” he says. “They are tulipa clusiana, forced under glass. That is why we can enjoy them at this early season. They were grown by the Portuguese Jew Francisco Gomez da Costa.” The white petals are flushed with pink. “It is no wonder, is it, that a poet compared them with the faint blush on the cheek of chaste Susannah?” He clears his throat. “Do they not remind us of the transitory nature of beauty, how that which is lovely must one day die?”

  “Perhaps that’s why we should grasp it while we can,” says the painter.

  There is a silence. Sophia shifts in her seat.

  “I hardly think you would find that teaching in our Scriptures.” Cornelis clears his throat again. Painters are known to be godless, disreputable fellows. “Besides, I have found my heaven on earth.” Cornelis feels a rush of love for his wife. He leans down and touches her cheek.

  “Don’t move!” says the painter sharply. “Return to your position please.”

  Cornelis, stung, puts his hand back on his hip. Sometimes he gets carried away and forgets that he is having his portrait painted. But it is hard work. Standing upright makes his back ache.

  Jan van Loos stands behind his easel. He paints noiselessly. The sound of brushing comes from the next room, where Maria is sweeping the floor.

  “Is it not strange, this madness that has gripped us?” asks Cornelis.

  “What madness?” asks the painter.

  “Have you surrendered to this passion yet?”

  The painter pauses. “It depends what passion you are talking about.”

  “This speculation on tulip bulbs.”

  “Ah.” The painter smiles. “Tulip bulbs.”

  Beside Cornelis, his wife shifts in her seat again. Cornelis decides that this painter is somewhat slow-witted. “I thought we were a sober people,” he says, “but over the past two years we have become a nation possessed.”

  “So I have heard.”

  “And it has enslaved people from all ranks—turf cutters and barge skippers, butchers and bakers. Maybe painters too.”

  “Not me,” replies the painter. “I know nothing of business.”

  “Ah, nor do they. But great fortunes have been made and lost. These new hybrids that they have been growing—they fetch the most astonishing prices. Thousands of florins, if you know when to buy and sell.” Cornelis’s voice rises with excitement; he, too, has greatly profited from this tulipomania. “Why, one Semper Augustus bulb—they are the most beautiful and the most valuable—one bulb was sold last week for six fine horses, three oxheads of wine, a dozen sheep, two dozen silver goblets and a seascape by Esaias van de Velde!”

  The painter raises his eyebrows and carries on working. A petal drops, like a shed skirt, from one of the tulips. It lies on the table. Sweep . . . sweep . . . goes Maria’s broom. They can hear her humming.

  There is a drowsy, drugged atmosphere in the room. Cornelis suddenly feels alone, as if he is traveling in a coach and everyone else has fallen asleep. Why doesn’t his wife respond?

  “It is not a native plant, of course—it comes from Turkey. When I was a young man the tulip was known only to the cognoscenti —aristocrats and horticulturalists. But we are a green-fingered, resourceful people, are we not? And, nourished by our rich soil the humble bulb has been devel
oped into ever richer and more spectacular varieties. No wonder people have been losing grip of their senses, for even in death a tulip is beautiful. Your own colleagues have immortalized them on canvas—the Bosschaert brothers, Jan Davidsz de Heem—pictures of astonishing realism, which, unlike the flowers they depict, will continue to bloom for generations to come—”

  “Please stop talking,” says Jan. “I’m trying to paint your mouth.”

  Sophia makes a snuffling sound. She is laughing. She stops, quickly.

  Cornelis’s skin stings, as if he has been slapped. Where is the respect? He has so much to teach his wife, so many years of experience in the world. Sometimes he suspects that her attention is wandering. She is so young—such a pretty creature, but her head is full of nonsense. He suddenly misses his first wife, Hendrijke. How solid and reliable she was. Hendrijke never set his blood on fire, he never felt for her what he feels for Sophia, but she was a true companion. Sophia is so moody—one minute loving, the next distracted and skittish. For the past few days she has been acting quite strangely.

  He sets his face in a stern expression. He puffs out his chest and grips his cane. He is not entirely sure that he likes this fellow. Sophia herself had voiced her doubts. But they have started; they had better go through with it.

  8

  The Painting

  How may paintings have preserved the image of a divine beauty which in its natural manifestation has been rapidly overtaken by time or death. Thus, the work of the painter is nobler than that of nature, its mistress.

  —LEONARDO DA VINCI, Notebooks

  Jan van Loos is not painting the old man’s mouth. He is painting Sophia’s lips. He mixes pink on his palette— ocher, gray and carmine—and strokes the paint lovingly on the canvas. She is gazing at him. For a moment, when the old man was talking, her lips curved into a smile—a smile of complicity. He paints the ghost of this, though it is now gone.

  There is no sound in the house. The painting, when it is finished, will look the most tranquil of scenes. Downstairs, Maria has fallen asleep. Exhausted by love, she snoozes on a chair in the kitchen. Willem crept into her bed, the night before, and crept out at dawn. As she sleeps, the tomcat drags a plaice across the floor. He, too, does this noiselessly. This small theft is detected by nobody.

  Upstairs, something else is being stolen. Cornelis, too, is drowsy. Sunshine pours through the library window. There is a stone chimneypiece here, supported by caryatids. The sun bathes their breasts. The fossils wait, through centuries of waiting.

  Half an hour passes. The painter has scarcely touched his canvas. He is gazing at Sophia. Behind her, on the wall, hangs a Descent from the Cross. It is an Italian painting, by the school of Caravaggio. Christ is being lowered. Light illuminates his naked torso. He is no pale, passive, Northern Christ. He is a real man—broad shoulders, muscles, ropes of veins. He has suffered and been slaughtered. The weight of him, upended, fills the frame. He seems to be sliding down on the heads of the couple below.

  Beneath Christ stands the old man, the patriarch, his chest thrust out above his spindly legs. His face, cushioned by his ruff, dares the viewer to question his fitness as one of God’s chosen. Beside him sits his beautiful young wife. Her hair is pulled back demurely from her face but pearls glint within it, winking at the viewer. They tell a different story. On her lips there is the faintest smile. For whom is she smiling, the painter or the viewer? And is it really a smile at all?

  Cornelis is talking but nobody listens. Sophia and the painter gaze at each other with a terrible seriousness. Another petal falls; it reveals the firm knob of the stigma.

  Jan starts to paint. The disrobed tulip, in the painting, will be back in full bloom. Centuries later people will stand in the Rijksmuseum and gaze at this canvas. What will they see? Tranquillity, harmony. A married couple who, though surrounded by wealth, are aware that this life is swiftly over (the scales, the skull). Maybe the old man was talking, but he is silent now. They didn’t listen then and now nobody can hear.

  His young wife is indeed beautiful. Her gaze is candid and full of love. The blush remains in her cheek but she has perished, long ago. Only the painting remains.

  9

  Sophia

  I saw the green parrot hanging in the parlour. Although he was caged, he spoke beautifully . . . And he was so cheerful in his prison, as if in a wedding house . . . If I may be your slave, take me, in slavery, Tie my hand to your hand, let the wedding ring be the band.

  —VAN DER MINNEN, 1694

  I am walking with my maid down the Street of Knives. It is a bright, blustery morning. Outside the shops the blades glint in the sun, as if soldiers are standing to attention. My little soldier’s dozy tonight . . . I squeeze my eyes shut.

  “You’ve never played Head in Lap?” Maria asks me.

  I open my eyes. “What’s that?”

  “One boy chooses a girl and buries his head in her lap. The others take turns smacking his bottom and he has to guess who they are.” She chuckles. “And the more they smack, the deeper goes his head.”

  It rained in the night; the buildings look rinsed. High above us a maid leans out of a window and shakes a duster. We are going to the market. We walk down the Street of Cakes, sighing at the smell. A man raises his hat and smiles.

  “Do you know him?” asks Maria.

  “Do you?”

  “Smack his bottom and see if he guesses.”

  We giggle. Sometimes, when we go shopping together, I feel like a girl again with my sisters. I feel released from that great chilly house. However much you bank up the fires, it is impossible to warm the rooms.

  If I may be your slave, take me, in slavery. The ruination of my family cut short my youth. My girlish dreams evaporated in the cruel climate of our straitened circumstances. Of course I felt affection for Cornelis, and gratitude; I am ashamed to admit, at the time, that I was also glad to escape the miseries of my life at home. But recently I feel that I have exchanged one kind of imprisonment for another.

  It is March; spring has arrived. Maria and I walk under a horse-chestnut tree. Its sticky buds have split apart; the packaged leaves spill out. Their tender green stabs my heart. Approaching the square, we hear the murmur of the market. At first it is faint, like the sea. As we walk nearer it grows into a roar—the stall holders shouting out their wares, the clatter of carts. My spirits rise.

  A one-legged man swings past us on his crutches. He grins at us and licks his lips. Maria laughs. “Hello, peg leg, missed your dinner?”

  “Maria!” I pull her along.

  She laughs; she doesn’t care. Today she looks shameless. Her bodice is unlaced, revealing the freckled curve of her breasts. I ought to admonish her. I ought to quote her the proverb about wantonness. If you peel an onion you produce tears. Yet I envy her—how I envy her! She is free, she is young—far younger than I feel. Next to me she seems like a clean blackboard, whereas I am full of crossed-out scribbles that I can no longer decipher.

  To tell the truth, I am not sure how to manage a servant. Sometimes we are confidantes; sometimes I draw myself up and impose my authority. Maria takes advantage of my inconsistency, for I am not yet accustomed to being the mistress of a house.

  I am not sure of anything. My moods, recently, have been seesawing. I have decided that next week Maria and I will spring-clean the house. I will engage another servant to help us. We will get down on our knees and scrub away my wicked thoughts; we will polish away the grime. Devoting myself to duty, I will punish my body until I am exhausted.

  We arrive at the square. My spirits soar again. I am flooded with love for everything—the gulls, blown about in the sky like pieces of paper; the women, fondling fruit under the flapping cloths of the stalls. A dog drags itself along on its bottom; its eyes say look at me, as if it is performing a comic turn for my benefit. I smile at the hawkers and the quacks. “Fresh cabbages, fresh carrots! Fresh cinnamon water! Fresh aniseed liquor, settle your stomach or your money back! Fresh pl
ump capons, two for the price of one, hurry while stocks last!” A boy plays golf between the women’s skirts, swerving and ducking, whacking his stick against the ball.

  The sun slides behind a cloud. I am suddenly overcome by repulsion. The wretched dog is not playing a joke; it has worms. Up in the belfry the bell tolls the hour for me, summoning me to atone for my sins; I am surprised nobody turns to stare. The great Weights and Measures building looms up as threatening as a tidal wave.

  “Madam!” Maria nudges me. We are standing at the vegetable stall. “I said—how many parsnips?”

  The stall holder is a big, purple-faced man. He has one dead eye; it is closed in a permanent wink. I know him well, but today he seems to be leering at me as if he knows my secret. I suddenly feel naked, as peeled as the onion that will surely cause tears. These people milling around— surely they can see into my wicked heart?

  Maria holds out her pail and the man tips in the parsnips. I fumble in my purse.

  And then I see him. My heart jolts against my rib cage. It is Jan van Loos, the painter. He is making his way through the crowd toward me. Today he wears a green cloak and black beret. He stops, to let a man roll a barrel past. He holds my gaze. The sounds recede like a wave retreating, hissingly, back into the ocean. For a moment I think: he just happens to be here. We will greet each other politely.

  I know this isn’t true. He has come here to find me; he has hunted me down. He pauses behind a poultry stall. The bald bodies dangle in front of his face, their claws clenched in a spasm of recognition. Raising his eyebrows, he indicates my maid.

  I tap Maria on the shoulder. “I’m going to the apothecary to buy some snuff.” I shove my purse into her hand. “Finish the shopping.”

  “How can you buy snuff, madam, if you have no money?”

  “Ah.” I pull out some coins. My fingers feel rubbery; they won’t obey me. Shoving the coins into her hand, I leave swiftly, my purse pressed to my breast as if that will protect me.