Free Rituals by Cees Nooteboom

Suffering, not as an event, but as a deliberately sought, irrevocable punishment. Irrevocable because no other people were involved in it, because this man who was marching along beside him so buoyantly and robustly, like an athlete who has beaten the world record, appeared to suffer from himself, in himself. Without being able to define it at the time, Inni knew he was here confronted with the smell of death, a realm from which one cannot return if, perhaps by accident or simply through inattention, one has strayed into it.
    He was relieved when the bus, exactly on time, drove off. Arnold Taads and his dog had already vanished into the night, the rain, the woods.
     
    The bus, the train, the long walk down the tree-lined roads of Hilversum, along which the villas stood like dark tombs in their gardens, and sultry, heavy scents of flowers after rain — among all this sweetness was a strange taste of farewell. To what exactly he did not yet know, but that a farewell had to be said, was certain.
    That night he did not dream of Arnold Taads because he could not sleep. Yet the vision he had, in which Taads played a part, was more like a dream than anything else. His host was sitting opposite him, exactly as he had done in reality that evening. He was undoubtedly the same man who had taken him to the bus stop a few hours earlier, the man with the two skins and the one eye, a person who had appeared in his life as an instrument of fate. Inni could never refrain from attaching to the word appear that special significance that, for Catholics, it has had since Fatima and Lourdes. Nor could it be denied that Arnold Taads was more of an apparition than anything else, and a seated one at that, a variant never mentioned with reference to the Virgin Mother. The other paraphernalia were all there. From the standard lamp poured a constant nimbus of electrified sanctity around the battered face. The only thing that did not really fit was that this sanctity was unwilling to impart itself to the actual face, which with its many incongruities, appeared to preclude serenity. This was a saint broken in two, who had already suffered so much that he was allowed to bathe in this unearthly glow but whose face still showed so many traces of other, darker worlds that you could not even be sure you were not dealing with a deceptive manifestation of the devil. And now a pimple, lump, wart - he wasn't sure exactly what — some kind of unevenness, an imperfection of the skin, had become noticeable, and the heavenly lamplight carved more sharply the two deep, scornful, tormented furrows running from the sides of the nose to the mouth. Even more than the eyes, because even the blind, directionless eye joined in and filled at least half of the geometric room with unseen torments, he remembered in the half-sleep of that night those two furrows that, like thin puppet strings, controlled the corners of the mouth, making them rise and fall independently of each other. Inni was to regale his friends with the associated story until well into old age, though never without feeling a knife-thrust of guilt towards the dead man he was betraying, who had, in fact, perished through the impact of that story.
    "I can't go back to the Rocky Mountains," said Arnold Taads. "Too old. They don't want me any more. That is why I go to a lonely valley in the Swiss Alps every year. You probably can't form a mental picture of it, and I shan't tell you where it is. I never do. I rent a deserted farmhouse that the owners use only in the summer. People, even those people, have become soft, pampered. Nobody can be alone any more, and no one wants to be alone. They refuse to face the winter and the loneliness up there. As soon as the first snow falls, the valley becomes totally isolated. You can only get there on skis."
    "What about food?" asked Inni.
    "I go down to fetch it once every two weeks. I don't need much. You can live on very little, but nobody knows that these days. In any case