Free The Forbidden Kingdom by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff Page B

side of the world? It took you centuries to drive the Moors out of the country, and before you know it they’ll be back. They’re waiting just across the water. They can learn a thing or two here. For centuries they have searched for the philosophers’ stone. In twenty years you have converted the country’s best blood into gold. Who profited by it? Even the court is here as a covert form of begging.”
    On the ships there was muttered approval, on the quayside deathly silence.
    “Let the English and the Norwegians, who in their own countries are stricken by poverty and damp, sail to the East. This country is fertile and rich, never too cold and never too hot. Da Gama and Albuquerquehave mausoleums and statues. They should have been strung up. And so should the first man who raised a sail on a boat and left the coast. Accursed be all who seek the unknown, accursed be Prometheus, accursed be Odysseus.”
    Still no one intervened. But on the São Bento a man climbed onto the railings and shouted, “Leave those Ancients in peace, Father. We’re going anyway, because we don’t feel like staying in this country for ever, however beautiful it is.”
    Now the spell had been broken, and everyone started talking at once, and the ladies of the court laughed loudly and shrilly.
    The old man was no longer the threatening Jeremiah, but a poor, sorely tried man who stood craning his neck at the water’s edge, weeping: “Luís, don’t leave your father, don’t go yet. In a year’s time you’ll be able to sell your ancestral lands and do whatever you want… I’ll be dead by then!”
    Soldiers dragged him away.
    On board no one admired Luís for his stoicism. A sailor yanked him off the railings.
    The manoeuvring began. The officers ordered the men to sing and cast off. But soon the ships were far from the shore, and one could just see the courtiers getting up from the stands and hurriedly making theirway home. The quay was empty before they were out of sight, and no one looked back any more.
    Only Luís, who had nothing to do, gazed from the stern at the disappearing land. He looked at the Tower of Belem as if it were his father still standing there. False modesty had made him commit a cowardly act. His father would soon die now, Diana would become queen and forget him. He didn’t intend to return like a hero and participate in a feeble comedy at court.
    But was that why he had made a clean break with the past?
    The birds continued to follow the ship for some way, until the coast was a vague strip of brown. That would soon cease. But it was as if those he was trying to evade were following him, as if he were constantly encountering them on the narrow ship and would soon find it claustrophobic. Was this the broad, liberating horizon that his departure was supposed to bring?
    His eyes filled with tears, his thoughts with lines of verse. He hid in his cabin. In order to appease his father , who was still standing in front of him as he had stood there on the quay, at first tall and threatening, then pleading and weak, he began to write, and tried to transform the painful scene into a great prophetic event, but he failed. He could not master difficult stanzas; helacked the patience. Instead, two lines kept booming through his head:
    Though we’ve bid farewell to the land,
all the pain sails with us on board … *
    and could get no further with that either.
    He went back on deck, which was empty and shiny with moisture in the moonlight; the coasts that he knew slid past deathly pale in the distance. Occasionally a sailor went past without a greeting, pushing him aside if he was in the way. He saw the other ships small, black and deserted on the sea. It was as if these were outcasts like himself, the only silent friends he had left.
    Then he realized that they were ships too, where it was even worse than here. Sleep seemed to him all he could still manage to do, but that proved equally difficult.
    * Quoted in Schneider, p.