Q by Luther Blissett (most recommended books txt) 📖

Antwerp, 23_rd__ April 1538_

It’s a big house. Two vast floors, with rooms opening up on to wide corridors. Half-naked children run up and down the stairs, some women prepare food in great cauldrons in a kitchen filled with all God’s gifts. Someone greets me with a nod and a smile, without interrupting his work. They all seem relaxed and calm, as though they all shared in the same happiness. A long table stretches through the middle of what seems to be the biggest room, laid with silver cutlery: a beech-log burns in the fireplace.

I feel the same sensation that you have in certain dreams a moment before you suddenly wake up: the knowledge that you’re in a dream and the desire to know what’s behind the next door, to reach the end.

Suddenly his voice reaches me from one of the rooms: ‘Ah, you’ve finally decided to get up!’

Eloi is carving a large slice of meat on a marble table.

‘Just in time to eat with us. Come on, come on, give me a hand.’

He passes me a carving-fork.

‘Hold it tightly, like this.’

He cuts thin slices and arranges them on a plate with a silver crest.

From the corner of his eye he studies my confused expression.

‘I expect you’re wondering where you’ve fetched up.’

My mouth is too sticky to get a word out, I reply with a mumble.

‘The house has been put at our disposal by Meneer Van Hove, a fish merchant and a good friend of mine. You might meet him when he comes back. Everything you see here used to be his.’

‘Used to be?’

He smiles. ‘Now it belongs to everyone and no one.’

‘You mean everything belongs to everyone?’

‘Exactly.’

Two children cross the room chanting a nursery rhyme whose words I can’t make out.

‘Bette and Sarah: Margarite’s daughters. I can never remember which is which.’

He picks up the plate and shouts, ‘Dinner time!’

About thirty people flock around the big, laid table. I am seated next to Eloi.

A tall blonde girl serves me a tanker of beer.

‘Meet Kathleen. She’s been with us for a year.’

The girl smiles. She’s extremely beautiful.

Before the meal begins, Eloi rises to his feet and calls for the group’s attention.

‘Brothers and sisters, listen. A nameless man has arrived among us. A man who’s been fighting for a long time, and who has seen much blood spilt. He was dazed and exhausted, and he has received care and attention in accordance with our custom. If he decides to stay with us, he will accept the name that we choose to give him.’

At the end of the table, a red-faced youth with an extravagant blond moustache shouts, ‘Let’s call him Lot, like the man who didn’t turn back!’

An echo of agreement runs through the hall, and Eloi looks at me with satisfaction. ‘So be it. We’ll call you Lot.’

I start eating with difficulty: my tongue and my teeth hurt, but the meat is tender, first-class.

‘I know what you’re wondering.’

More beer is poured.

‘What?’

‘You’re wondering how we can afford all this.’

‘I imagine it was all supplied by Meneer Van Hove…’

‘Not quite. He’s not the only one to have opened up his coffers to give his property to the community.’

‘You mean there are other rich men who give everything to the poor?’

He laughs: ‘We’re not poor, Lot. We’re free.’

He makes a gesture that encompasses everyone seated around the table. ‘Here we have artisans, carpenters, roofers, bricklayers. But also shopkeepers and merchants. What they have in common is nothing other than the Spirit of God. It is what all men and women have in common, in any case.’

I listen to him, and can’t tell whether or not he’s completely insane.

‘Possessions, Lot, money, jewels, merchandise, serve the body so that the spirit may enjoy them. Look at these people: they’re happy. They don’t have to kill themselves earning a livelihood, they don’t have to steal from people who have more than they do, or work for them. And in turn, the man with more has nothing to fear, because he has chosen to live with them. Have you ever wondered how many families could be fed with what Fugger has in his coffers? I think half the world could eat for a whole year without lifting a finger. Have you ever wondered how much time an Antwerp merchant spends accumulating his fortune? Simple: his whole life. His whole life to accumulate it, to fill his safes, his strongboxes, to build a prison for himself and his own male offspring, and dowries for the females. Why?’

He drains his tankard: his dream was also mine: ‘And you want to persuade the merchants down in the port that the best thing for their spirits would be to give everything to you?’

‘Not at all. I want to persuade them that a life free of enslavement to money and commodities is a better life.’

‘Forget it. I tell you, anyone who is rich has spent his whole life fighting for it.’

He closes his eyes and raises his glass. ‘We don’t want to fight them, they’re too strong.’ He gulps down the beer. ‘We want to seduce them.’

*

The two leather armchairs in the study are very comfortable. I gently sink into them, trying to escape the pains in my ribs. A very long sharpened goose-feather protrudes from a black ink pot on the table. Eloi gives me some liqueur in a little etched glass.

‘Officially, Antwerp is faithful to the Church of Rome. The most devout Emperor insists that his officers maintain an allegiance to the true faith, which is to say, to his power. But many people here secretly support Luther’s ideas. The merchant classes above all have had enough of the Spanish occupation, and of priests who accuse anyone of heresy if they speak out against Catholicism or its lazy bishops. Merchants produce things, they make money, they construct buildings and build roads. The imperial forces impose taxes and inquisitions. It doesn’t add up. Luther preaches the abolition of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and independence from Rome, his German princes have revolted and attacked Charles and the Pope in a formal act of protest. Conclusion: soon or later, Flanders and the Low Countries are going to go up like a powder-keg. With the difference that here instead of princes you’ve got fat merchants. The only reason they haven’t clashed yet is that until a few months ago you crowd were still in the middle.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘The Anabaptists wanted everything. They wanted the Kingdom: equality, simplicity, fraternity. Neither the Emperor nor the Lutheran merchants were willing to give them to them. Their world is based on competition between states and between commercial companies, on orders and obedience. In the words of Luther, whom I had the displeasure of meeting more than ten years ago: you can put all your goods in common if you really feel like it, but don’t think of doing it with the goods of Pilate or Herod. Batenburg was as much of bugbear to the Catholics as he was to the Lutherans. Now that the Anabaptists have been defeated, the two remaining parties in the struggle will soon be at each other’s throats.’

I try to work out where he’s headed. ‘Why are you telling me these things?’

He thinks about it, as though he wasn’t expecting the question. ‘To give you an idea of the situation here.’

‘Why me, though?’

‘You’ve been through the wars. And you lost. You look like someone who’s been through hell and come out alive.’

He gets up and goes to the window after pouring himself another glass.

‘I don’t know if you’re the right person. The one I’ve been trying to find for some time, I mean. I’d like to hear your story before making a judgement.’

Eloi fiddles with his empty glass.

I put mine down on the table. ‘It’s hard to take the smile off your face.’

‘That’s a good quality, don’t you think?’

‘How does a roofer come to be so well-informed, and to talk so shrewdly?’

He shrugs his shoulders. ‘You just have to hang around with the right people.’

‘You mean the merchants in the port.’

‘News circulates around merchandise. As regards knowing how to talk, the friendships that gave me my way with words didn’t leave me time to learn Latin, and I’m rather sorry about that.’

‘Omnia sunt communia. You knew that one.’

A moment of hesitation that masks the usual half-smile of a man who is privy to some trick or an ancient secret.�

‘It was the motto of the rebels back� in ‘25. In that year I went to Wittenberg to meet Luther and present my ideas to him. Germany was in chaos. I was too young and full of ideals for a monk fattening himself in the princes’ dining rooms.’ A grimace. Then, unsure whether he should ask me, he says, ‘Were you with the peasants?’

I get up, already too tired to go on, I need to lie down on the bed, my ribs are aching. I look at him and wonder why I was meant to meet this man, without being lucid enough to answer my own question.

‘Why should I tell you my story? And forget the offer you made to me. I haven’t got anywhere to go, I wouldn’t know what to do with your money. I just want to die in peace.

He insists. ‘I’m curious. At least start off: when it all began, where.’

It’s a deep well: a dull splash in the black water.

The words: ‘I’ve forgotten. The beginning is always an end: the umpteenth Jerusalem, still populated with ghosts and crazed prophets.’

His face fills with horror for a moment, but it must be nothing compared to mine, faced with all those ghosts.

‘Holy Christ, were you in M�nster?’

I drag myself towards the door, my voice hoarse and thick. ‘In this life I’ve learned only one thing: that hell and heaven do not exist. We carry them