Rituals Read Free

Inni sold a small plot of land still left from his inheritance from his guardian, dined with the estate agent in the Oyster Bar, took Zita to a friend in Amsterdam South, and then offered Lyda a creme de menthe. "I'm seeing you home tonight," he said, deciding that this was a proper Amsterdam approach. "Are you now," she said, cocking her head like a parrot that wants to hear that same funny noise again. She took another sip, and as he saw the green liquid slithering in, Inni felt a slow excitement rising up from his toes.
    Lyda lived in West. After the menthe, there had been the equally unending staircase to her attic, which had excited him immensely, and finally the room itself with the cane chair, the Nescafe, the marigolds, the coconut mat, and the framed portrait of her father, a bald Lyda, looking down suspiciously from the realm of the dead into the room, to see whom she had brought home this time. Inni found it touching, the nakedness of someone he had never seen naked before. The fact that you could, with a few moves of the hand, somewhere in a wooden bird's nest on some floor or other in a nameless neighbourhood, reduce a fully dressed, upright-walking stranger to the most natural state, that the person who a few moments earlier had been sitting in an espresso bar leafing through Elsevier was now lying naked beside you in a bed that had never existed before, though it had been in existence for years - if there was anything that could ward off death, blindness, and cancer, this was it.
    Lyda was large and white and soft and full, and after the predictable course of events during which she had called out for her mother, the two of them looked like a failed attempt at flying, something sweaty that had crashed. Both of them were covered in a silvery layer of lacquer from her hair, which, after they had unpinned the candy-floss web, hung down to her hips. They lay still for a time. In accordance with the rules, Inni was sad. As he let the embrace with the bigger Lyda seep away into his memory gap, he felt, as usual, bitter at what was bound to happen next. They would disentangle themselves, maybe wash, he would descend the long staircase like someone descending a staircase, she would fall asleep in her own nest, tomorrow she would drink creme de menthe again, with idiots, and they would die, each one separately, in different hospital beds, ill treated by young nurses who were not yet born.
    *       *
    He groped behind him on the floor where, before getting into bed, he had seen a packet of Caballeros. As he half-raised himself and Lyda began to grunt softly under him, he suddenly looked into Zita's eyes. Paper eyes, but still Zita's. It was the photograph from Taboo, spread over two pages. Now, thought Inni, I am in Pompeii. The lava is pouring over me, and I shall stay like this forever. A man, half on top of a woman who, in the unthinkable "later", no one will know was not his wife, his head raised and looking at something that had become invisible forever. What he felt was sorrow. A hundred times he had seen this photograph, but now it was as if behind this portrait pinned to the brown wallpaper with four drawing pins, there was a universe consisting only of Zita, which he would never be able to inhabit again. But what was it? Cool, green eyes cut from impenetrable stone. Had they ever looked at him with love? Her mouth stood slightly open as if she were about to say something, or had just said something that would forever put an end to Zita and Inni — a Namibian curse, an annihilating, soft-sounding formula. It would wipe out the juxtaposition of their ridiculous names and would banish him forever from her life, not only from the time that was still to come — that would be just bearable — but also from times already past, so that what had existed would then no longer exist. For eight years he would simply not have been there! He looked more and more intently at the paper face that every second changed