Mauritshuis
In Hague it barely snows, but frosts harden the ground. I abandoned my bike and walked. The hat, the gloves, the scarf and the coat did not hide me from the cold. The city remained silent, almost mute, under a diaphanous sky.
The bare trees of the avenue, the unpretentiousness of the royal palace, the canals, the cars with diplomatic plates, the brick buildings and the gothic emptiness of the **Grote Kerk** suggested a toy court.
Interior of Noordeinde Palace
I ended up on the pond that extends in front of the **Binnenhof**. The frozen surface supported the parliament buildings as in the 'View of Delft' of Vermeer . The analogy made me smile.
At the far left of the complex stood the baroque quadrangle of the Mauritshuis , the museum where the panorama of the neighboring city is preserved. The relationship between container and content activated my aesthetic gambling. My days follow each other in links generated by memory. The rest is alibi.
Vermeer's 'View of Delft'
My alibi in The Hague was Eugenia , a decorator, who was looking for Delft tiles for a whimsical client's bathroom. delft : tiles of, view of and view that I remembered in sight of . As I entered the museum, I thought that the confluence was excessive. I had tired of Vermeer's painting before I saw it.
I decided to wander between Paulus Potter's cows, Fabritius's goldfinch and Rembrandt's anatomy lesson. Damascus walls and wood created a warm atmosphere, alien to the city.
I was wondering the reason for the predominance of pale green when i found her I wasn't looking for it because I've always run away from clichés. In museums I tend to avoid the famous piece, the one that is repeated in the media until cancellation, the one that stars in films with an excess budget. But there it was like when at a party you bump into someone you didn't want to see.
And he looked at me.
The girl of the pearl
There are works that expose you, and I didn't want that to happen to me with _ The girl of the pearl _. Surrendering to Vermeer's canvas was like falling before the Mona Lisa : a banality; so, using my default solution, ran away.
With my second warm Duvel in the Zwarte Ruiter I wrote to Eugenia. The density of the beer, the light jazz, the echoes of liquor on the boards, and the Thonet chairs they compressed a Nordic warmth. Believing myself safe from myself , I thought that my aesthetic-emotional drive It had been as absurd as it was worrying. The Christmas episode with Stella still aroused a bitter taste. My drift towards the unrealizable grew.
Stella was a model that I had seen hundreds of times in the media. Her hair reddened her and a pallor of Pre-Raphaelite air It made me stop time after time at the pictures of her. I tracked down her name through a friend she had worked for and, by chance, one day we ran into each other at an event.
My verbal pirouettes were met with indifference. There was no contact. A year had passed when at Christmas my dispersion led me to Tinder , and there she appeared, on the screen. The image of her was partial and confused, but recognizable . She answered and we stayed that same afternoon at my house. I bought two bottles of champagne, selected a bossa nova playlist on Spotify and adjusted the lighting.
It was an hour late, but it arrived. I was wearing black . Her hair, adapted in my memory to the graphic image, seemed on fire. She was enthusiastic about an Etruscan sarcophagus and she sat on a sofa across from me. She drank three, four glasses and she talked as if we knew each other.
She with a smile she ironic about my anger when she stopped me; she had stopped following her on social media. It was true, although I denied it, and that tension led to a laughing and inconsequential sex . She didn't make it to the end, but I thought she had fun. I opened the second bottle of champagne and we didn't stop talking until she said goodbye to her.
When she left I thought that yes, that already, that she had broken the barrier that separated me from the image ; but not . The days that followed, my messages returned succinct answers, deliberately postponed, evasive. I felt vulnerable, exposed, confused by an idea whose veracity I was beginning to doubt. Perhaps her satisfaction hadn't been real; perhaps she had only been the object of a game as dispersed as mine. Was Stella two-dimensional? Was it my pearlescent necklace?
One-night stands are steps in a museum room. You stop in front of the work, enjoy it, sense a link, and move on. After a few days a detail may persist, but the composition is disfigured. A screenshot replaces the gesture that smiled in front of your lips . With Stella it was not necessary because he had followed her on networks again. In your Instagram pictures she saw someone distant, unrecognizable, alien; a simulacrum of who occupied my bed for a few hours.
With the third Duvel it happened . The pearlescent girl displaced Stella. I tried, but was unable to remember her face. The frightened eyes, the turban and the parted lips of the Vermeer girl took over my memory. I could have turned to her virtual self, but I didn't. it was better this way . The cell phone rang. It was Eugenie. She had asked for wellies at the hotel. We could take a walk through the dunes of the beach of Scheveningen and eat at an Indonesian. The day was clear. He would pick me up in a few minutes.
Scheveningen beach