In Amsterdam

After finishing my first degree I embarked on a PhD, but what I really liked to do was hang out in cafés with writers, journalists, and editors. And it was in a café, amid a haze of cigarette smoke and conversations sustained by booze, that I was offered a job at a publishing company. It was more of a suggestion than an actual offer, really, but such distinctions fade as the evening draws to a close. It came from a short man with a bulbous glass in his hand. His eyes were barely visible, since he tended to squeeze them shut, like someone sensitive to light. In reality, the squinting came with the generous smile of Robert Berendsen, a man who not only loved literature but also had a great appetite for life, especially after a few glasses of De Koninck, his favourite beer.

‘Why don’t you drop by tomorrow,’ he had said. ‘I’m looking for a poetry editor.’

As it did all other evenings, the conversation had revolved around books and authors. Someone had mentioned K. Michel’s debut, Yes! Bare as the Stones, which had been published a few days previously. Some poets thought it was loudmouth poetry. Noise. ‘Too many exclamation marks,’ one man shouted over everybody else. ‘I’ve lost count.’

Others thought it was a spectacular collection introducing a wholly new voice. ‘I’ve never read anything like it,’ said a man who wrote for a paper. ‘It’s frivolous, fresh, and profound at the same time.’

‘I don’t think it’s poetry,’ another person said.

It was an observation made at least once a week. It seldom elicited a response. Some people expected poetry to deliver the same as tap water — clarity above all else. And yet the conversations in the pub were almost always interesting, if only because everybody had different ideas about a particular poet or collection. And because they involved alcohol.

The discussions could get pretty intense. Every so often an exchange would become so heated it degenerated into a fight, at which point the barman would step in. ‘Out,’ he would say. ‘Get out! Go and fight outside.’

At university my fellow students and I had studied writers who were six feet under and buried under layer upon layer of literary criticism. We were expected to form our own opinions, but we didn’t feel free to do so. Now we were in the thick of it, in the smoke and the buzz, because only a few doors down poetry was being written, and we could say what others hadn’t said before.

A young woman joined the conversation. ‘I love K. Michel’s sense of wonder,’ she said. ‘It’s a totally different way of looking at ordinary things.’

I felt compelled to make some qualifying remarks. While I thought it was an incredibly strong collection, neither the language nor the form were new. ‘That outsider perspective,’ I said, ‘isn’t that something it shares with Martian poetry? And that goes back ten years.’ It was a movement which had arisen in Britain in the late Seventies, with Craig Raine and Christopher Reid its trailblazers. In their poetry they viewed the world the way someone from Mars would look at the things around us. In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up.

‘If anything, I thought it was liberating to read poems that weren’t written by a melancholic for a change,’ I said.

Robert Berendsen nodded. ‘Away with wistfulness.’

Another round of beers was bought. ‘To the Martian poets,’ someone toasted.

The following year K. Michel would be nominated for the C. Buddingh’ Prize, given for the best Dutch-language debut poetry collection published in the previous year, but failed to win the award. It didn’t detract from the poet’s dream start, though. He had shaken up the literary establishment, or at least a section of it — its crowning glory, poetry. For many, his book opened a door to another world. Young poets tried to bring an even greater sense of wonder to the things around them. Cue experimentation, agitation, hallucination. During that scintillating time of innovation I started a job as an editor at a company that boasted over a hundred years of publishing history.

‘Why don’t you drop by tomorrow.’ It had sounded like a promise that evaporates the minute you exit the bar, but when I climbed the steps to an impressive canal-side house the following day I received a warm welcome from the publisher. Robert Berendsen’s eyes looked even smaller. I was to start the following week.

I shared the news with my parents at the ice-cream parlour. We were sitting in the dining room on the first floor. My brother was downstairs, making coffee for the first few customers. ‘I’ve got a job,’ I said. ‘On Monday I start work as a poetry editor for a publishing company.’

‘What about your thesis?’ my mother asked.

It was a question I had anticipated, but had no real answer to. The truth is, I was stuck with my thesis on anonymous poets. ‘I want to work,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to waste this opportunity.’

‘He says he wants to work,’ my father exclaimed. ‘He can’t wait to get started. Well, you know what? It’s August: grab a spatola and get started. I’ll have a nap for an hour.’

He got up from the table and walked to the door that opened out onto the roof of the ice-cream parlour’s kitchen. There was a lounger there, on which my father now lay his weary body. As he did so we could hear the tubing creak under the tightly stretched fabric. It was only later, after he had retired, that my father started complaining about the many aches and pains in his body: in his back, in his legs, in his hands. Everything ached, even his crotch and his teeth. All his life he had fought the pain, not given in to it, and had simply carried on bending, stoning, pounding, pureeing, pressing, and walking up and down the terrace. There was no time for suffering.

‘He’s having a hard time accepting it,’ my mother said after a while. ‘He’s still having a hard time accepting it.’

I walked down the stairs to the ice-cream parlour. My brother was out front, serving a boy with short, spiky hair. A small queue had formed, mainly children with their parents. It was a warm morning.

I put on an apron and joined Luca. ‘Hello,’ I said, and when no reaction was forthcoming, ‘I’ve come to help.’

Luca nodded, just as he had only nodded when I walked into the ice-cream parlour half an hour earlier.

‘I’ve got a job,’ I said as I filled a cup with vanilla and strawberry ice-cream.

No congratulations, no nothing. He looked at me as though I were a Martian.

In the years to come Luca would do his utmost to say as little as possible to me. Just as he had said hardly anything to Sophia when a boy, he limited his contact with me to a few words. Only when I insisted would he say, ‘I heard you.’ It was supposed to be an answer to a question, except that it wasn’t. At times I felt like charging at him with the spatola.

My father did speak to me, but everything he said resonated with the hope that one day I would convert back to ice-cream. I had strayed, and it was his job to make me realise I had made the wrong decision. I had chosen a life without the ice-cream parlour, without family. Sooner or later I would come to regret it.

‘Do you hear this music?’ he said. ‘It’s Rino Gaetano.’

It was after midnight; the chairs outside had been stacked up, the doors closed. My father had switched on the stereo, something he only did after a good day. A good day for an ice-cream maker is when it’s scorching hot and he has to work like a dog.

I knew the song: ‘Ma il cielo è sempre più blu’, or ‘But the Sky is Always Bluer’. It was a classic, a song with a heart of gold. You couldn’t help but sing along when it came on. As little children we had often hollered it without knowing what the lyrics meant.

My father kicked things off. ‘Who lives in a shack, who sweats for his salary / who loves to love and dreams of glory.’ Luca joined in: ‘Who robs pensions, who has a short memory / who eats once a day, who plays at target practice.’

For a fleeting moment I felt like an outsider. It was a protest song. Rino Gaetano had written the song for all those who suffered, day in, day out. Not for me, not for someone whose job had fallen into his lap, who did have a summer, who had sex with angelic girls and slept till noon. But as Gaetano’s voice got louder and the chorus built, I couldn’t help but sing along: ‘But the sky is always bluer, uh uh, uh uh, / But the sky is always bluer, uh uh, uh uh, uh uh ...’

My mother’s eyes filled with tears as she heard us sing and scream. We sang with the same passion as Rino Gaetano, who had been born in Crotone, a small town on the Ionian Sea, had moved to Rome — to the big city — and achieved immense success, becoming a national hero before losing his life in a car accident at the age of thirty. Life was unfair, but the sky is always blue, always bluer.

Perhaps it was this section that my father loved the most. He certainly sang it at the top of his lungs, an exclamation mark after each line:

Who hasn’t got a house, who lives alone
Who earns very little, who plays with fire
Who lives in Calabria, who lives on love
Who fought in the war, who just scrapes by
Who makes it to eighty, who dies with his boots on

My father didn’t earn very little, didn’t live in Calabria, and hadn’t fought in the war, but he did die with his boots on. Not literally, but very gradually. To him that was the crux of the song. And of his life.

After the song had finished, all three of us were panting, our chests rising and falling in sync, and my father said, ‘That’s what I call poetry.’

He had to have a dig at me.

And kick me when I was down. ‘Rino Gaetano is the greatest poet in the world.’

This was supposed to be followed by the line, ‘Not Shelley, not Szymborska, not Kaváfis, not Atwood’, except he didn’t know the names of any of these poets, ‘with their difficult words and their incomprehensible language’.

According to my father, there was only one poet, and that was Rino Gaetano, who had managed to break through to my father’s heart and touch his invisible soul. The young man from Crotone thought of himself as a writer first and a singer second. After he’d written his first album, he was rumoured to have told the producers to go in search of someone who could actually sing his songs. He didn’t think his own voice was good enough. Too rough, too gravelly. They had to force him into the studio.

I believe you can be both poet and singer. A bard. It’s the way Achilles’ rage was sung, and the way ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ reached us. I have invited Bob Dylan to the World Poetry Festival several times, but have yet to receive a letter back. Perhaps he is waiting for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the olden days the world was divided into prisoners and guards; these days it’s made up of people who think Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize and those who think the very idea is preposterous.

That night I stayed over in Rotterdam, in the attic, with my brother. He pretended to be asleep, but I could tell from his breathing that he was still awake. I waited for the question he had asked so often when we were children; I was hoping he would ask me what was on my mind.

I was thinking of him, or of us really. Of the silence between us.

‘Are you thinking of Sophia?’ I asked after a while.

No reply.

‘I asked if you were thinking of Sophia.’

Last winter I hadn’t been to Venas, because I had intended to work on my thesis. It was the first time I hadn’t come along to Italy. The winter before last I had chopped down a fir tree in the forest with my brother, we had celebrated Christmas together, and we had drunk beer and wine with Sophia in Bar Posta until late. She sat between the two of us on the corner bench and we played Uno. The good thing about playing cards is that you don’t have to talk. The way Luca played, you’d have thought there was an astronomical sum of money involved, ten million lira or something. He was completely focused on his cards and silent, like a professional poker player.

I noticed that his right leg was resting against Sophia’s left leg. A little later, her right leg touched my left leg.

He let her win, but it was blatant only to someone who was his brother. When we played Uno at home in the warm kitchen, my father and Luca were the most fanatical players. Both were bad losers and were known to occasionally whack the table in anger or shout, ‘The two of you are cheating! The two of you are in cahoots together!’ The ‘two of you’ in question would always be my mother and me. There were two distinct camps in our family.

There came a point when I could no longer stand Luca’s silence, the hypocrisy.

‘You’re letting her win,’ I said, and put my cards on the table. ‘It’s no fun this way.’

My brother didn’t say anything. Of course he didn’t say anything.

Sophia turned over the cards I had put on the table. ‘You’d never have won with these,’ she said without batting an eyelid. ‘You’re just a bad loser.’

At times it felt as if there were two distinct camps in Bar Posta too. As if I was the common enemy. But then there were times when Sophia enjoyed seeing Luca in a tight spot, or encouraged me to goad my brother by laying down a particular card. The snowball had been thrown, and I was down but not out.

‘Shall we carry on?’

‘Yes,’ replied Luca, the sneaky bastard.

The cards were shuffled and dealt again. This time I won. I felt vindicated.

We carried on playing until last orders. The place stayed open for another half hour after that.

‘Tell me more about Amsterdam,’ Sophia said. It was a regular question towards the end of the evening. I had already told her about the cafés full of writers and cigarette smoke and the parties after premières and book launches, but every evening she demanded to hear more.

‘You’re not telling me everything,’ she said. ‘You’re holding back information.’

‘What kind of information?’

‘About girls, about women.’

Luca said nothing. Sophia had no way of knowing that he wasn’t talking to me. He had always been like this when the three of us were together.

‘Shall I tell you about Rosa?’

Sophia nodded. ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘She’s tall and blonde.’

‘No.’

‘She’s short and she’s got troll’s teeth.’

‘No.’

‘She’s fifteen.’

‘No.’

‘She’s fifty.’

‘Almost.’

I was glad the sip of beer Luca had just swallowed didn’t go down the wrong way.

‘She’s forty-two.’

‘My mother is forty-four.’

‘You’ve got a young mother,’ I said.

We had seen her walking down the street. None of the lustre had gone with the years — her skin was as luminous as ever. The women in the village gossiped about her at the baker’s. She was said to be cheating on her husband with the roofer: last summer she had been seen emerging from a field with hay in her hair, followed a few minutes later by the stocky, slightly boorish Salvatore Grigio.

Or that was the story that did the rounds and left the village buzzing with excitement, eager for more.

Luca and I had reached the right age for her tight skirts. We looked over our shoulders and stared at her on the street. Last time we saw her, I wanted to tell him that Sophia was his, her mother mine, but Luca had already walked on.

‘I want to know everything,’ Sophia said. Again, she didn’t bat an eyelid.

Everything. That included the collection of poetry I had spoken to Rosa about and the question that always rears its head in discussions, the ‘to be or not to be’ of poetry. In the words of Martinus Nijhoff: ‘Should a poet express what we feel, or should we feel what the poet expresses?’ But Sophia wasn’t interested in any of that. I could skip the poetry.

‘What does she look like? What was she wearing?’

‘She was wearing a short dress and had the sort of breasts any woman would like to have for a day.’

There was nothing wrong with Sophia’s breasts. They were not too big, not too small. Pears, I know now. Beautiful little pears.

Rosa’s breasts were of an entirely different order, a double-sized portion. Not those immense breasts that turn to jelly without a bra. They remained firm and round, like a juicy fruit that takes two hands to harvest.

‘How did you know?’

‘I didn’t know at the time, but it was plain to see.’

Her nipples were erect, as if an almond had been inserted into each breast. It may have been the wind that blew in every time the door was opened. The occasion was a book launch, the location the sumptuous, marble-floored lobby of the publisher’s headquarters; a wooden staircase led to the offices on the upper floors. At the start of the night there were no more than twenty people; by late evening their number had tripled.

Sometimes you find yourself talking to someone and you think nothing is happening. There are no clues, no signs, but then suddenly a single remark changes everything.

We were talking about polka dots. There was a girl there with long braids who wore a dress with cheerful dots on it. She walked right past us.

‘I like dots,’ I said. ‘On men too, on their shirt or socks.’

‘Does that mean you like moles as well?’ Rosa asked.

I couldn’t help it. My gaze immediately darted to her neck, to her arms, to her breasts. There’s the speed of light, and there’s the speed of pupils. I saw moles everywhere.

From poetry to polka dots, from moles to the sheets on the bed that awaited us in a virtually empty attic.

I wasn’t allowed to undress myself. ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘Let me do that.’ She undid the buttons of my shirt. Her fingers were still cold, but that’s the sort of thing only spouses mind. I moved my hands across her transparent black tights and squeezed her buttocks.

‘Take it easy,’ she whispered.

It was the age difference. Twenty years. You’d never guess, looking at her body, at her skin, which was soft and firm in equal measure. I wanted to touch every centimetre of her.

‘You’ve got beautiful fingers,’ she said. It was the first time anyone had told me that.

‘You’ve got delicious breasts.’ I couldn’t possibly be the first to have told her that.

I slid the straps of her dress off her shoulders, but the bra had to stay on a while. ‘What’s the hurry?’ she said.

‘I want you.’

She laughed as she looked at my erection jabbing at the fabric of my trousers.

‘I take it you know the difference between a woman and a girl?’

For a moment I didn’t know what to do, what the next step was. Standing before me was a woman whose breasts I wanted to uncover, but who deemed it too early for the ceremony.

‘Kiss me,’ she whispered.

I kissed her skin — I kissed every single mole I saw. The trail led to her armpit, and from there to her cleavage. She moaned softly.

‘I want to see them,’ I said.

She took my hand and led me to the bed. She took her time. I fell back on the mattress, and it was only then that I heard the music in the room. She must have put it on when we came in. It was a deep male voice, accompanied by a languid bass. Old soul music. I took a fleeting look around. I had no idea where I was, which canal her house was beside.

Rosa kicked off her high heels and climbed on top of me. Her fingers reached for the buttons on my trousers. She did it with one hand, one button at a time. My prick shot forward. I tried to sit up but was pushed back. She shaped her mouth into an O and wrapped her lips around the fabric of my boxer shorts.

‘Jesus.’

I pulled her up by her wrists, bringing her face close to mine. Her cheeks were red, I noticed, and she had crow’s feet.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Something is, I can see it.’

‘I think you’re amazing.’

Her bra came off; she did it herself. Such beauty.

At first I only touched them with my fingertips; it felt almost sacrilegious.

She said something vulgar, but very softly. I could barely make it out. Or had I misheard? I grabbed hold of her breasts and brought my mouth to her nipple.

She no longer put up any resistance, but gave my hands free rein. I rolled her tights down her legs. Her knickers were soaking wet and smelled of her. She kissed me feverishly. Her fingers enveloped my prick.

‘Would you like to go in my mouth?’

She started off tentatively, only the tip at first, but when I was almost completely inside her she let me put my hands on her head and determine the rhythm.

I made her move faster.

It was too much. I closed my eyes.

She must have realised, because suddenly she stopped. ‘You mustn’t come,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

And then, ‘Fuck me.’

I slid in seamlessly, a canoe cutting through water. She had moved onto her stomach, but raised herself up at one point. Leaning on the palms of her hands, she looked back at me. I saw the fine lines around her eyes, which deepened the more she exerted herself. She moved her buttocks, her entire divine backside.

‘Keep going,’ she urged me.

I didn’t share this last bit, nor do I remember where exactly I broke off the story. Would Sophia figure out what had happened next? Luca had drained his glass by now. He looked over to the barman, who was eager to go home too.

‘I wish I could quit,’ Sophia sighed as we walked under the dazzling December sky.

She worked in admin at her father’s glasses factory. The days were monotonous, the same people and the same work every day. They were at odds with her joy, the joy of the girl who continued to catch snowflakes, who could touch the tip of her nose with her tongue. Although she had grown older, she was still extremely young, and more beautiful than her mother had ever been. Gracious and innocent. With eyes that showed no fear.

‘Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?’ I said to my brother, who was still pretending to be asleep. He gave me no answer. It wasn’t hard to guess, of course.

He was to become more and more like his father. It had started with a thumb, and this would be followed by the physical ailments, the twinges in his back, the pain in his knees. He would develop a more pronounced stoop and take an increasingly bitter view of the world around him — the world that had betrayed him, that had denied him his chance of immortality. And finally, he would start hating the woman he had once loved so much.

I wondered if Sophia had enquired after me at all, whether she had missed me, perhaps.

‘Have you kissed her?’

Still no response.

‘Well?’

My brother turned over in bed.

‘Sleep well.’ I counted to twenty. ‘I said, “Sleep well.”’

‘I heard you.’

In Amsterdam I worked with poets on their manuscripts. I discussed their work with them in my office at the publishing company. All I had to do with the most talented writers was point out a lesser poem, one dodgy oyster in a big heap. We spoke about words, their meaning, the stress on particular syllables, their sound. These were conversations nobody else was having. It was like looking at language through a microscope. Then there were poems I had pored over for hours and still couldn’t figure out. When I took it up with the poet, they usually offered a faltering clarification that shed some light on the mystery. But sometimes it only deepened.

‘I don’t really understand it myself,’ a female poet told me once.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I don’t understand the poem myself. Or perhaps I ought to say I only partially understand it.’

I looked at her. She was dead serious.

‘It’s like a dream,’ she said after some time.

I remembered a conversation with Heiman about T.S. Eliot, who once said, ‘I write my poetry under a kind of divine inspiration so that often I myself don’t understand what it means.’ According to Heiman, this amazing statement touched on the very essence of poetry. Unlike prose, poetry required patience. It didn’t take the reader’s comprehension into account. In fact, sometimes it seemed as if a poem couldn’t care less about a reader. ‘A novel speaks to you,’ Heiman said. ‘The writer tells a story. A poet talks to himself.’ Obviously, some poetry strikes an immediate chord, like an arrow into your heart, but equally it can take a while before you get it. There were no rules, there was no recipe. Poetry could overwhelm, touch, comfort, weigh on you or be absolutely weightless. And much more besides. Incomprehensible poetry could be brilliant poetry.

In summer, with the sash window open, fresh air would blow into the office along with the sounds of the canal. You could hear women laughing. If you went over to the window, you would see them sitting on the stern of a small boat. They invariably had long, blonde hair and bare shoulders. Their beauty was reflected in the water. The world was a mirror; everybody told them how beautiful they were. They sailed past, brimming with confidence. This was their time. These weren’t the women in the smoky cafés — these were unapproachable women, women who were already taken or destined to marry a rich lawyer or the heir of a family with a double-barrelled name.

It would be many years before you got to know them. By now they were well into their forties, still blonde, but no longer naturally so, and with long, horizontal creases in their foreheads. Their husbands were older, their children had moved out. Some had bought themselves a dog, a fox terrier or a dachshund, and would walk it in the woods on the outskirts of Amsterdam every day. Others wanted more. They reckoned it was their turn now. They had raised the children while their husband had pursued a career. You would see them at readings. They wore expensive shoes, their legs still shapely, as though they had been embalmed rather than clad in shimmering nylon. Some wore corsets. Maybe they had been keen readers when younger, or they had once been in love with a book, a novel they had devoured in their girlhood bedroom. At any rate, literature was a favourite hobby now. Many of them had never been to university, or else they hadn’t finished their degree, but people who read books radiate the same erudition as a graduate. Or at least that’s what they thought, what they believed.

One of these women was Joan Foks. She wasn’t married, nor did she wear a corset, but she did belong to the circle of affluent reading women. Her husband, a renowned orthopaedist, had died unexpectedly. She had been divine when I was still only a toddler, but she appeared before me with a broken capillary in her face. It hadn’t happened right there and then, but a couple of months earlier. Age had come like a thief in the night.

Robert Berendsen had invited her to dinner at his house, along with five other guests. His wife had cooked, four courses; she had started in the morning. In daily life she was a partner at a prominent maritime law firm, but she knew all the major authors on the list personally. She cared deeply about the publishing company and would read the occasional manuscript when her husband asked her to. Unlike many women in her social milieu, she was independent, and people envied her for her intelligence and dress sense.

I was the only guest who hadn’t been round before. Robert introduced me as a professor of poetry. ‘He knows almost as much as I do,’ he added.

He had met Joan Foks at a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His wife had been ill and she was on her own, since she enjoyed going to the theatre but never phoned anyone. They got talking during the interval. Despite being behind him in the queue for the bar, she had been served first.

‘C’est la vie,’ had been her response when he commented on it.

‘You might have bought me a drink too.’

‘I never buy men drinks.’

It was a joke, albeit one with a grain of truth. ‘Beautifully staged,’ Joan said in an effort to steer the conversation in another direction.

A proud Robert Berendsen had told her that both the translation and the adaptation had been done by a poet from his list. And so it happened that the following day she climbed the steps to his office. Her heels had echoed through the building.

During their lunch, Robert listened to stories about her life. Her husband had become unwell in a restaurant. He thought it was the bisque when in fact it was his heart. He collapsed, surrounded by white tablecloths and people in evening wear. She would never forget the woman who carried on eating. ‘She kept bringing her fork to her mouth,’ she said. ‘Fair play to her, the food was amazing.’

He smiled. She was wearing an all-but-transparent silk shirt. Her nose was dead straight, like that of the Venus in Villa Borghese, the marble statue Canova had made of Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s sister.

She had been to Rome several times and was familiar with the statue.

‘Am I the first to note the resemblance?’

She didn’t answer; that is to say, she didn’t address it directly. ‘The question is whether she posed nude.’

‘What do you think?’

‘She told everyone it was warm enough in the artist’s studio.’

‘That doesn’t sound innocent.’

‘She was a promiscuous woman. Canova wanted to immortalise her as the goddess Diana, but Pauline insisted on being portrayed as Venus Victrix, with the golden apple in her hand.’

The wooden base contained a rotating mechanism so visitors could view the statue from every possible direction by candlelight in the evening. Canova had treated the marble’s surface with wax so it acquired a certain sheen.

‘The story goes that Pauline came to regret it,’ Joan said, ‘and that she asked her husband to remove the statue. He granted the request and had the statue stored in a wooden chest.’

‘Shame,’ was all Robert said, his thoughts on the statue’s skin illuminated by candlelight.

Joan herself had never cheated on her husband. She knew of at least four cases of adultery in her social circle — that’s to say, of at least four women with lovers. She didn’t approve. If you married, you made a promise. If you were unable to keep that promise, or didn’t really believe in it, you shouldn’t have got married in the first place. But perhaps that was easy for her to say. She had married late, and prior to that there had been many men. Which is not to say that she was uncomplicated. She did have certain standards, criteria.

Her husband’s suits were still in the wardrobe in the bedroom. All of his shirts, neatly ironed and arranged by colour, were there.

His most romantic gesture was to give her a piano Erik Satie had once played.

‘Do you play an instrument?’

Robert shook his head. As a boy he had played field hockey, and the love of literature had come after this.

She told him that she had started playing the piano at an early age. The teacher made home visits and told her mother that she had never come across such a talented child, and Joan had overheard. It was a golden childhood memory.

‘I was supposed to go to the conservatoire, but something came up. I went abroad instead.’

She fell silent, perhaps thinking it was too early to tell the whole story, her whole life. Suddenly another memory surfaced: her younger self on the quay of a French seaside resort, bent over. An unimaginable girl wringing her hair. A silver ribbon of droplets splashing onto the hot cobbles, all but hissing.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘that piano was the most beautiful thing I ever received in my life.’

It was the kind of glorious weather that makes you forget your coat in a restaurant. Nothing happened between them, except that they went for lunch again the following day. In fact, it happened so often that people began to notice, and Robert Berendsen had no choice but to invite her home. The three of them had dinner together, which was awkward to begin with, and in fact later that evening in bed his wife remarked, ‘She really is rather beautiful.’

But now she sat at the large table in the living room as a good friend. She looked magnificent, like a woman ten years her junior. The conversation revolved around the work of poets. Not the sacred, the vocation, but the jobs needed to make a living.

‘Joost van den Vondel was a hosiery salesman,’ said one of the guests, an editor at another publisher. ‘He had a shop on Warmoesstraat.’

‘Gottfried Benn worked in a mortuary,’ said a man who had written several biographies.

‘What kind of poetry does that inspire?’

‘Beautiful, degenerate poetry.’

‘Rimbaud was an arms dealer,’ said the young woman who had come along with the editor.

‘But that was after he’d stopped writing poetry.’

‘I didn’t know he ever stopped.’

‘At the age of twenty,’ Robert told us. ‘He spent the rest of his life travelling. Europe, Indonesia, Africa.’

‘Is it possible to stop writing poetry?’ the biographer asked.

‘Borges tried,’ I said. ‘But after a thirty-year break he picked up the pen again. He published another ten books.’

‘He was blind by then.’

‘Beethoven was deaf when he wrote the Ninth Symphony.’

‘Not completely though, right?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Joan replied. ‘At the end of the première they had to turn him round to face the auditorium so he could see the audience applauding him.’

Nobody knew whether or not Borges could still see towards the end.

‘He began to live in his memories,’ Robert said. ‘His poems consist of enumerations. You could read them over and over again.’

Something occurred to his wife. ‘François Villon was a thief,’ she said.

‘And didn’t he kill someone too?’

‘Yes, but he received a pardon,’ I clarified. ‘It was a love rival. He was jailed for theft.’

‘If you want to be rich, you shouldn’t become a poet,’ Robert noted.

‘Byron sold ten thousand copies of The Corsair on the day it was published,’ the biographer said.

‘That was two centuries ago.’

‘You could win the Nobel Prize,’ the editor contributed, ‘and become a millionaire in one fell swoop.’

‘How many poets have won it?’

‘The first Nobel Prize laureate was a poet: Sully Prudhomme.’

‘There have been quite a few: Pablo Neruda, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky.’

‘Yeats,’ the young woman said.

‘T.S. Eliot.’

‘Salvatore Quasimodo,’ I offered.

‘Who?’ someone asked.

‘A truly major poet.’

‘Says an Italian,’ Robert said with a laugh.

‘He thought his work was better than Shakespeare’s.’

‘Has he been translated?’ the biographer asked.

Robert thought for a moment. ‘No idea.’

‘His wife said the Nobel Prize was the beginning of the end,’ I explained.

‘Why?’ Joan asked.

‘Twenty-two million lira at once,’ I said. ‘At long last there was money, but Quasimodo spent it like a sailor. On other women, of course. The year of the Nobel Prize was also the year of their divorce: 1959.’

‘I once had a relationship with a billionaire,’ Joan said. ‘Well, relationship is a big word. I was one of many. It was a long time ago and I was extremely young. I can’t even remember the currency unit. Drachma, was it? Or dinar?’

Joan’s laugh was infectious. Her stories were good, too. How many women can say they have shared a bed with a billionaire, but can’t remember the currency?

‘He had a Swiss watch which was more expensive than ten Lamborghinis combined. He kept saying it, ad nauseam, but as a young girl I was impressed.’

We all looked at her, and then she said, ‘C’est la vie.’

The evening was coming to an end. The dessert plates were on the table, the cutlery placed together on top of them. Coffee was served, and Robert came round with a bottle of Armagnac. The conversation no longer involved the whole table; instead, people talked among themselves. The young woman talked with Robert’s wife, while Joan Foks talked with me. She told me she had spent a lot of time in Italy, but none in the north. ‘Or maybe I have, in Cortina d’Ampezzo.’

‘It’s great for skiing,’ I said.

‘Oh, I never saw any mountains. We stayed at the hotel that’s featured in that James Bond film.’

‘For Your Eyes Only.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Except that it was filmed much later. I was in my early twenties.’

‘I actually saw Roger Moore,’ I told her. The truth of the matter was that I spotted a man in a blue ski jacket who was said to be the English actor. Luca claims it was a stunt double. We had taken the bus to Cortina in the hope of meeting the film’s stars, but had to make do with the autograph of a champion skier.

‘The Miramonti,’ Joan said. ‘That’s what the hotel was called.’

There were three lives: before her marriage, during her marriage, and after her husband’s death. It was into that latter life that she was now gradually admitting new people. She could come across as shy, but wasn’t really. If she seemed shy, she didn’t like you and didn’t fancy talking to you.

There was a time when men had vied for her attention, but most of them never stood a chance. She always asked if they were married. More often than not, the answer was yes.

It was impossible not to picture the young woman she had been, unmarried, available. A Venus. To imagine the pleasure of looking at her, of talking to her, of touching her.

‘I’m renting an apartment on Herengracht,’ she said. It might have been interpreted as an invitation, a remark giving the conversation a different turn, had she not gone on to say, ‘I’d have bought it if the piano had fitted through the window.’ The piano remained in the detached house in Haarlem, which she didn’t want to sell. It’s where her husband’s shirts were still in the wardrobe and she always left a small light on for him. She could see it gleaming in the distance when she entered the gravel driveway.

I asked her if she had children.

She shook her head. ‘I wanted them, though,’ she said.

The conversation ground to a halt. Maybe she thought the question was impertinent, or she found it a difficult subject. To be honest, I had expected her to have children — sons studying abroad or travelling through Southern Europe without a care about the rest of their lives.

‘Do you want children?’ she asked suddenly.

‘I’m twenty-four,’ I replied.

‘That’s a wonderful age.’

‘For children?’

‘For anything.’

‘I don’t think I’m suited to family life.’

‘That’s what I always thought,’ she said and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Until it was too late.’

I looked away, at the broken capillary. It was a small crack in an otherwise perfect face.

‘But men don’t have that problem.’

Simon Vestdijk came to my mind. He had written twenty-four books of poetry and had fathered a son and daughter at a ripe old age. His wife was forty years his junior.

Joan pushed her chair back a little, getting ready to go home. I was going the other way, but offered to escort her to Herengracht.

‘There’s no need,’ she said. ‘Really.’

A brief, awkward silence ensued, as though I had made a different kind of offer.

‘Au revoir,’ she said eventually.

We sold some five hundred copies of most of the poetry collections we published, sometimes fewer, and on a rare occasion we had an upward blip. From a commercial point of view, books of poetry were totally uninteresting, but they represented a different sort of value for the publishing company. Its reputation hinged on it. Poetry had a certain grandeur. It was my job to see to it that as many of our poets as possible were nominated for various awards. To this effect I had to maintain contact with critics who served on juries. It always helped to slip a brief note into a collection, or to take them out to lunch and brazenly recommend a poet.

‘Are you trying to bribe me?’ a female jury member once asked me.

‘I wouldn’t dare.’

‘I think you are.’

‘It’s not unusual for me to have lunch with colleagues in restaurants; it’s part of my job.’

‘Am I a colleague?’

‘We’re in the same boat,’ I said. ‘Of course there are differing interests, but at the end of the day we’ve got the same objective.’

‘Which is?’

‘To serve literature.’

‘And that’s why you’re picking up the tab?’

‘The publisher is paying,’ I replied. ‘Robert Berendsen.’

I signed the credit-card receipt and put the pen down on the white tablecloth.

‘Are you taking the other members of the jury out for a meal too?’

She was teasing me, I could tell by her upper lip.

‘The chairman of the jury is on the agenda,’ I said. ‘But I intend to take him to a more expensive restaurant. Do you have any suggestions?’

‘The Excelsior. It’s got a Michelin star.’

‘Sounds like a good choice.’

‘I need a new dress,’ she then said.

‘For the ceremony?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And high heels.’

She could no longer suppress her laughter.

Lobbying was like flirting, albeit less egotistically. It didn’t revolve around you, but around the poet and his collection. But there were no guarantees. In the end, the prize went to another poet, an established name. A safe choice, which wasn’t uncommon when it came to the bigger awards.

The jury member I had lunched with came over to me after the ceremony. She wore a red silk backless dress. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘I think the dress is better than the winner.’

In an attempt to attract fresh talent, I joined forces with some of the poets on the list and founded a poetry journal. It was to come out monthly and also feature translated poetry. To this end I contacted the World Poetry Festival. I hadn’t been back to the office since Richard Heiman’s death, although I had attended the festival every year.

The new director was older but no less passionate. His name was Victor Larssen and he wore beautiful shoes, two-tone brogues in brown and dark green. Next to his desk stood a basket from which a pug stared at me with beady eyes that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a human child.

Victor Larssen sat at the same wooden desk at which Heiman had written his letters. The portraits of poets still graced the walls, too. Clara Janés, Seamus Heaney, Herman de Coninck, Margaret Atwood, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Sarah Kirsch, Tomas Tranströmer — they had all appeared at the festival, along with hundreds of other poets from all over the world. The bookcase was full of jacketless hardbacks, each annual volume in a different colour. These were publications for internal reference, printed in a very limited edition, no more than ten copies. Every now and then you might find one in an antiquarian bookshop. They contained all the poems that had been read at the World Poetry Festival in both their original language and translation. The paper was thicker than that of a prayer book, and larger too, but ultimately the reading experience was just as powerful.

There were sound recordings as well, countless tapes. The readings had been recorded right from the inaugural festival, in 1969. On many an occasion Heiman had pushed a pair of headphones into my ears, saying, ‘Listen. This is 1973.’ I would hear the tape whirring, white noise, crackling, followed by a poet’s voice. Often they were reading in languages I didn’t understand — Chinese, Spanish, Norwegian — but the tapes were always a pleasure to listen to. The rhythm, the sounds, the silences.

The portraits, the books, the sound recordings — it was a glorious, borderless world. History in poems. It was all there: wars, assassinations, and tsunamis, as well as the sound of summer, the birth of babies, and the scrapping of a Chevrolet Impala.

It felt good to be back. The publishing world was more frantic. Books were meant to follow one another in quick succession, new writers meant to be discovered all the time. If you took your eye off the ball you ran the risk of seeing a promising debutant lured away. It was less of an issue for poetry, but you were surrounded by editors who wolfed down their lunch while quickly making another phone call. Robert Berendsen was not immune, either. He had actually bought a foreign title without having read it first. Fortunately it became a bestseller, the way you can strike it lucky on the roulette table.

‘Have you read Patrick Lane?’ Larssen asked after we had talked about the festival’s most recent edition. ‘I think he may be right for your journal.’

I knew the name, had perhaps even read a poem of his, but no lines sprang to mind.

‘A Canadian poet.’

His dog sat up and barked. ‘Hardy,’ Larssen said. ‘Quiet!’

The animal lay down again and stared straight ahead with those cute little eyes in that sad, wrinkled face of his.

‘I read a terrific poem by Patrick Lane,’ Larssen told me. ‘About a logger who saws off his hand.’ He patted his dog on the head absentmindedly. ‘You don’t happen to know it?’

I shook my head.

‘It was an accident, and a colleague took him to hospital — a five-hour drive over mountain roads, the severed hand in a bucket of ice water between them. The nurse wanted to know the man’s name and date of birth and asked for a piece of paper with his address. That’s when his colleague lifted the logger’s sleeve. The nurse averted her head from the veins and tendons. The doctors examined the wound, but it was too late for the hand: it was dead and couldn’t be sewn back on. The colleague drove back to the north. After several hours he stopped by a bridge and took the hand from the bucket. He couldn’t keep it and he couldn’t really give it to the logger’s wife, either. He considered burying it, but it was cold and dark and he was working the morning shift. And so he threw the hand “high off the bridge and for one moment it held the moon still in its fingers”.’

Victor Larssen slid a stack of sheets towards me. ‘I hope they’re of use to you,’ he said. And then, ‘That image of a hand tumbling in the night sky, appearing to hold the moon. I think it’s phenomenal.’

He laughed. Larssen didn’t have Heiman’s boyish charm, but he did have the same cast-iron faith in poetry. Without it, life was less beautiful for him, too.

We talked about the poets I mentored, and about Robert Berendsen. The two men used to write for the same university paper. Then Larssen shook my hand and escorted me to the door of his office. He didn’t invite me for a drink or a bite to eat in a nearby restaurant, the way Heiman had often done. When we got to know each other better, perhaps. We scheduled another appointment and I was to send him the journal proofs.

Standing on the footpath outside the World Poetry offices, I looked over to the ice-cream parlour. It was November. The awning had been folded away and it was darker inside than out. A note had been stuck to the window of the door: ‘Back in March!’ It was in my mother’s handwriting and included a drawing of a small sun. In the old days Luca and I got to do that. Luca drew a sun and I drew a sun. So we wouldn’t fight.

I stood there for quite a while, not trying to suppress my thoughts. Let them come, a rebellious voice inside me said. Come on then! I can handle you! And so they came; they besieged me. All the thoughts and the questions, the memories, the images. Had it snowed in Venas yet? What did the kitchen smell of? I saw my parents sitting at the table with Luca. I saw my chair. What was Sophia doing? Was she walking around the village, was she looking at the warm lights behind the windows? March was still a very long way off. But not for an ice-cream maker. March came closer every day.

That evening I translated Patrick Lane’s poem in bed. The ice that had melted in the bucket and the water that was thrown away. The severed hand on the river bed like a ‘dark blue spider sleeping’. And then the question: ‘What do you do with the pieces of yourself you lose?’