Bathsheba is sitting on a cushion, her face bowed to the floor, King David’s letter in her right hand. He wants her to go to him, quick as she can, it’s an order. Maybe King David has also told her that her naked beauty has kindled his desire. She has read the fatal letter, and already her gaze is elsewhere. Just inside the frame, crouched over her feet to her left, the old servant woman purifies her before the sacrifice. Bathsheba’s eyes are lost in the future, and she looks at nothing. I am looking at nothing. There’s no writing on the white sheet clasped in my right hand (and if there were, I wouldn’t be able to read it). You’ve pulled a few locks of hair from their fastening behind my neck; they frame my face. Behind the canvas, I can hear your brush stroking the painting and stirring the paste. I raise my head, I smile at you. My arms rest on air, and I settle back into my pose.
Rembrandt gives a great stretch in the warm bed. In the silent house, he’s still resting, later than most days. Titus and the pupils are still asleep. Every seventh day at eight o’clock, I go alone beside the cold canals to the Oude Kerk. Before leaving the Breestraat, I massage Rembrandt’s back and shoulders, I count the little bones of his spine, working the way the flesh moves. Because keeping your arm up (always the same one) for hours on end all those long days of painting, because painting’s suffering. I tell myself I’m just giving back a little of the good he does me every day.
On the kitchen table, I’ve placed bowls, plates and tankards for breakfast. Rembrandt will find milk, beer, bread, cheeses and herrings. If Titus comes down in time, his father will serve him. Together they’ll play with the light from the coloured window panes. Then they’ll go up to the studio. If he screws his eyes up at his easel, Rembrandt will see the unfinished painting as though he’d never set eyes on it before. He’ll choose the day’s first brush. He’ll make the bristles spring between his fingers, he’ll smooth them down, make sure they’re glossy and pliant. He’ll hold the oils up to the light to check their transparency, then he’ll squeeze the tubes of colours.
With his brush, he’ll stir the paste around on the palette, then load it on to the canvas. Palette to canvas, palette to canvas till evening falls every day of his life. He doesn’t go to church. But he speaks to the light and answers to God. When he screws his eyes up. Every day.
The man in black is preaching from the pulpit. Beneath him, the men and women stand with their backs to him, muttering together in circles. The women hold their heads up; they’ve got nothing to be ashamed of in their colourful dresses, whispering behind their earrings swaying and sparkling in the light. Red-faced, like they’re strangled by their ruffs, the men wear velvet and black satin, and pat their bloated bellies, as swollen as their purses, with the flat of their hands. I can see the fat on the outside, and I can guess it’s there on the inside : I turn away so I don’t vomit. The richer they get, the fatter they are. Over by a pillar, a baby screams for milk; quick as she can, his mother passes him from one breast to the other. And behind her, where the shadow’s darker and a stone’s been overturned by the gravedigger, deep in the empty blackness of an old tomb waiting for the next corpse not yet eaten by worms, behind the spade, behind a fleshless skull that’s rolled on to the next stone, two dogs are picking at the bones. A rat runs by. The dogs growl. Maybe with their barking and their hot breath they’ll wake the worms lying dormant and replete in the dust of men.
The man in black leans down to the rich and poor, the healthy and the sick who’ve gathered in church to hear him. In a moment of fear, they raise their eyes to the preacher and the wrath from his toothless mouth.
‘How can the people of God adorn themselves like this? How can they come to church wearing satin, brocade and leather worked in silver and gold?… Howl, inhabitants of Maktesh, for the merchant people are cut down; all they that bear silver are cut off.’
The two dogs are barking, their lips drawn back like they’re swearing at each other. They’ve sunk their teeth into a dead bone, one at either end of the long tube, legs stiffened, hunched in the void before them; they pull and they push, shaking their heads madly, leaping from side to side, fixing each other with wild, staring eyes. Their mouths are trembling and steaming, their teeth bared threateningly either end of the bone… until the congregation forget the wrath of God and burst into merry laughter.
Four carriages are driving about the streets of Amsterdam. They’re made in France for princes. The man in black with the gilded horse that gallops through the city’s winding streets is Doctor Tulp. He’s the man who opens and dissects the corpses. Rembrandt told me. His name’s stolen from the tulip*, and in his carriage, he goes to visit the sick rich; it’s quicker than walking, and he doesn’t get so soiled from the bricks of the street on the way.