- Same story again?
- Same old world again.
She never knew her father. She said: ‘I saw him once.’ She was sixteen at the time. One day he came into her parents' inn.
‘That's your father,’ her mother said.
‘A coachman.’ The road from Ghent to Zaventem is made of words.
- Anything else?
- Its mythology. But that doesn't get put into words. Stories are sold. Consumer goods replace what happens. Commodity. There is no other word for it.
‘After all these years,’ says Vlemynckx' mother. ‘Our Alain. He could come and give me a hand sometimes.’
As for me. I once met a stranger.
‘I don't exist’, I said.
‘You don't exist?,’ she cried. ‘But then you're dead already!’ Wave-like surges squeezed the café together. White wine was thrown about by the glassful. Sweeties fell from the ceiling.
‘I'm alive, as you can see,’ I yelled, but she had already vanished.
On the Vilvoorde viaduct everything is at a standstill. ‘And always love you...’ I prefer to listen to Flemish singing on the radio. Then you don't start wondering about yourself if you start crying.
‘I go to the cinema a lot,’ says the taxi chauffeur.
‘I'm interested in the hired bouquets, the comings and goings of extras,’ says Passant. ‘In a film.’
‘He never goes to films,’ says Traveller.
‘And always love you...’ Pluck the waves, aerial, whip through the air, noble rod, at the tips of nine o'clock. Vilvord for ever. The reason I go to films?
The manager of a cinema once gave me a bit of film. It was night-time. I waited till it got light outside. It glimmered, lightened, went through every verb in the book, until a pale-red radiance from the sky came through the window. I held the pellicule to the washed-out glass.
Film is everything that life is about. An actress gets down on top of a man and shoves an icepick between his ribs. Conquistador II. Beautiful women fall for pigs of men. Now that's what we call guts, Freud, Lacan, anyone you like. Prisons, real life and only then ourselves.
Third. Photo number three.
Bergendries. Beside the radio with the cities and the world hangs a birdcage with black eyes. The siskin is molting. We say ‘moult’. And ‘mew’. A chiffchaff.
‘It's moult. It's got to be moult.’ What difference does it make to real life? Upright bicycles, Protestants, butter, Dutch gin, cigars? Do they grow tobacco in the polders? Nous sommes, vous êtes, nous aimons. The siskin is all white fluff, bars and matt glass. It is grieving because spring is coming, because it is still alive. When it was winter it sang against the loud hail, it answered the soundless snow. It's dead, I think:
‘Ach, wie meine Seele!’
‘It must have gone crazy!’ Und ich?
‘He's burned his bum on the paraffin stove, Maria.’ Ein Röslein stehn? She