False River, page 11
Unfortunately, she wasn’t rich, not really. The hotel stay was an affectation, an extravagance. Although she’d make a lot of money from her novels, she would always spend far too much. At the time of her death in 1908, she would have absolutely no money at all.
Her real name, the one her English mother gave her, was Maria Louise. She was born in Bury St Edmunds, a small market town in Suffolk, and her father, Louis Ramé, was French. He was much older than his wife, and they were unhappily married. Her parents lived most of their married life apart, with Louis Ramé disappearing for extended periods of time, to France or casinos or both. There were rumours that he was a secret agent. He was last seen alive in 1871, fighting in the streets in Paris during the Prussian siege, and was presumed to have died among the barricades, in a bombardment or a political demonstration, or from famine.
Maria Louise grew up in England among her English relatives, but when she started writing she began calling herself Marie Louise de la Ramée, as though she were a French countess. Before long she’d acquired a shorter pen name — Ouida — and demanded that everyone call her that. William Allingham, the Irish poet, described her as having ‘a clever, sinister face’ and ‘a voice like a carving knife’.
Ouida didn’t have enough money to keep writing in bed at The Langham. Her profligate French father had spent most of the family money, including the English portion of it, so in the late summer of 1871 she and her mother set out for the Continent where everything was cheaper. They were aiming for Florence, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning — another English writer trying to stretch her income — used to live.
Their first stop in Europe was Brussels, and they stayed there for a while in the Hôtel de l’Europe on the Place Royale. This was an older hotel than The Langham — Berlioz had stayed there in 1842, Dumas in 1851 — housed in an eighteenth-century mansion in the expensive French-speaking Upper Town; it has changed names and owners over the years, and is now home to the Magritte Museum.
Ouida and her mother made brief visits to other places in Belgium, probably including Antwerp and its surrounding villages. Paris wasn’t far to the south, but it was a dangerous place in 1871 (see: father’s death, above). When they left Belgium, Ouida and her mother travelled via Germany and Austria to Italy, the place she’d spend the rest of her life.
Somewhere along the way she wrote a story called ‘A Dog of Flanders’, published in an 1872 collection of the same name, drawing on notes and impressions from her stay in Belgium.
‘A Dog of Flanders’ is a tale — either mawkish or heartbreaking, depending on your point of view — of an adolescent boy and his dog. The boy is called Nello, and he’s a poor orphan raised by his grandfather. The dog is called Patrasche, and Nello has rescued him from an abusive owner. Dog and boy deliver milk from their village on the canal to Antwerp, while Nello dreams of becoming an artist like local hero Peter Paul Rubens. He’s desperate to see Rubens’ great altarpieces, The Elevation of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross, in the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, but the paintings are hidden behind curtains; he can’t afford the price of a ticket.
Local rich girl Alois is Nello’s only human friend, but her father bans them from seeing each other. Nello wants to enter a competition to win the money to go to art school, but can’t afford paint. All he can submit is a charcoal drawing.
Lots of terrible things happen to Nello because of cruel men, classism, capitalism, winter, etc. On 23 December it’s bitterly cold and his grandfather dies. On Christmas Eve the local mill burns down and Nello gets the blame. Cold and starving, he and Patrasche make their way into Antwerp. Snow is falling, and it’s almost midnight by the time they reach the Cathedral of Our Lady.
Mass has just ended, so the doors are wide open and the great works by Rubens are uncovered. For the first time in his life, Nello can see them. He and Patrasche, his faithful dog, fall asleep at the altar. In the morning the priest finds them huddled together, frozen to death.
Forty years after Ouida spent her days in bed at The Langham hotel — scribbling on purple paper, wearing her hair loose to evening parties, plotting a life some place where hotel rooms weren’t quite as expensive — she died. She was living in Viareggio, near the sea, with one maid and a number of dogs. Dogs were her great passion, and she believed in feeding them a lot: boiled liver and bread at 11 am, beef and rice at 7 pm. Big dogs, she believed, could have captain biscuits — hardtack — as a treat, and little dogs could be fed sponge cakes.
At the end of her life she had no money left, and even the carpets on the floor had to be sold. She’d been evicted from various rented properties in Italy, and her belongings had been seized more than once. When her mother died in 1893, Ouida wouldn’t part with the body for ten days; she was ashamed that her mother would be buried in a pauper’s grave.
In the winter of 1908 Ouida realised she was dying. She asked her maid to care for the dogs, though she had never really trusted Italians. ‘When you can no longer feed them,’ she said, ‘shoot them with a revolver.’
The New York Times printed an obituary, because Ouida was a character; she dressed in gaudy clothes and brandished a riding whip; she loved dogs but disliked other women and all Americans; she looked down on Tolstoy because he admired Dickens, and so on. In 1908 some people still read her books, though many of her novels were sensationalist or a little ridiculous; one book was titled Held in Bondage. Her work had been the target of satirists for a long time. Purple ink, purple flowers, purple prose.
A Japanese diplomat living in New York read the obituary and went out to buy a copy of ‘A Dog of Flanders’. Like Ouida, he loved dogs.
He sent copies of the book back to Japan, where he was sure it would be popular; he was right. ‘A Dog of Flanders’ was translated into Japanese and became a much-loved children’s classic there, read by generation after generation of sentimental Japanese children. Film and television adaptations were made, in Japan and in the United States. Nobody in Belgium knew much about it.
In 1982 a man named Jan Corteel was working in the Tourist Information Office in Antwerp. He’d never heard of Ouida or ‘A Dog of Flanders’. A Japanese tourist came in asking about it, and Jan Corteel started investigating. He decided that the village where Nello lived was Hoboken; in the nineteenth century this lay just outside Antwerp. The story described the village as on a canal and a league away; the cathedral was visible to the northeast, and there was a windmill where Alois and her snobby family lived. Hoboken seemed to fit the bill, because it was on the Schelde River, and there used to be a windmill there.
Jan grew obsessed with the story. Promoting ‘A Dog of Flanders’ became a vocation for him, the way painting was for Nello. He was also obsessed with Japan. He started collecting Japanese books and magazines about ‘A Dog of Flanders’. He learned Japanese. He made fifteen trips to Japan.
One of the many Japanese tourists who came into the Tourist Information Office asking about ‘A Dog of Flanders’ was a woman named Yoshimi. She met Jan there; he was standing behind the counter, ready to answer her questions. It was 1997, and he knew everything about ‘A Dog of Flanders’. He was forty-seven years old and Yoshimi was twenty years younger. She returned to Japan, but they kept in touch. After two years of a long-distance relationship, Yoshimi moved to Antwerp to live with Jan.
They married in 2001, but the love story didn’t last. Jan Corteel wanted a traditional Japanese wife; Yoshimi wanted to become a Dutch-speaking European with her own bank account. She got a job as a cleaner at the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, the place Nello and Patrasche froze to death, clutching each other in front of the Rubens paintings. Yoshimi didn’t like Jan waiting for her after work. She told him she wanted to travel home from work alone. She told him not to hold her hand in public.
Their relationship got worse. Yoshimi refused to have sex with him anymore. She refused to eat meals with him. She refused to speak to him at home, other than replying ‘yes’ or ‘no’. She divided up the household appliances, like the kettle and toaster and coffee maker; some were his and some were hers, and he was not permitted to touch any of her things.
One of her co-workers at the Cathedral of Our Lady was a Belgian named Pierre, who either worked behind the counter in the book shop, or worked behind the counter in the library, depending on which newspaper account of their relationship you believe.
Yoshimi and Pierre fell in love. Jan Corteel found out his wife was sleeping with another man, but begged her not to leave him. He was obsessed with Japan. He wanted his traditional Japanese wife. It was 2008; they’d been married seven years. He didn’t want to let her go. And also: a film crew was making a documentary about him and his discovery of ‘A Dog of Flanders’. Without him there’d be no Dutch translation, no little statue of Nello and Patrasche in Hoboken. Without him, Toyota would not have paid, in 2003, for a second monument, a bed-like slab of granite outside the cathedral in Antwerp. He knew more about the story and its local associations than anyone else in Belgium.
One morning in January 2008 Jan Corteel rang the police and told them to come to his apartment. He lived on Ferdinand Verbieststraat in Antwerp, a quiet and ordinary street of low, shut-eyed apartment blocks. Perhaps he lived in the sturdy sand-coloured thirties block with concrete balconies, the Carrefour supermarket on the far side of the street beyond a serene green median; perhaps he lived in the scruffier seventies block, boxy and down-at-the-mouth, further along the street. Because it was winter, the trees planted along the pavement were bare.
The previous evening he’d been invited to a reception at the Cathedral of Our Lady. Yoshimi refused to go with him, but she’d turned up anyway, canoodling with Pierre, flaunting their relationship. Jan felt humiliated. He was well-known in Antwerp because of ‘A Dog of Flanders’, and because he was now director of the Tourist Information Office. Everyone at the reception could see Yoshimi and Pierre pawing at each other. There was Jan, standing right there, the object of public pity, or scorn. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He’d had enough of Yoshimi and her open contempt for him. But he couldn’t confront her — not at the cathedral, and not at home that night.
The next morning, when the police arrived at their apartment, they found Jan Corteel in his pyjamas, blood on his hands and clothes and face. Yoshimi they found on the living-room floor. That morning he’d stabbed her twenty-two times with a kitchen knife — two kitchen knives, in fact, with black handles; they were possibly Japanese as well. There were wounds in her liver, her lungs and her heart. He’d strangled her, too, just in case.
Without ‘A Dog of Flanders’, Jan Corteel would have never travelled to Japan, would have never grown obsessed with it. He would not have married a Japanese woman. He would not have become a murderer. After all, he didn’t murder his first wife, Lydie, though she too was unfaithful to him. When Lydie confessed to an affair, all he did was slap her once in the face. They never spoke of it again — the affair or the slap. Instead they spent twenty years sleeping in different bedrooms, staying together for the sake of their three children. Jan only moved out of the marital home in 1997, the year he met Yoshimi.
His three grown-up children testified at Jan Corteel’s trial. They said he bottled things up. He never spoke of his feelings. He had a tendency to let women walk all over him.
In court Jan wore spectacles and a dark suit and a white shirt. His cropped hair was grey. His skin was northern-European grey, like the dim light of a winter’s afternoon. The public gallery was packed with his supporters, including some Japanese tourists.
The prosecutor said that Jan wanted to control Yoshimi. He wanted a Japanese trophy wife and was enraged at the prospect of losing her to another man. He was jealous and egotistical; he was too obsessed with Japan. But his lawyer told the assize judge that Yoshimi bullied Jan. Sometimes she grabbed him in a headlock, pulled at his eyelashes and drummed her fingers against his forehead. After these incidents she’d glow with sadistic pleasure. Jan was so traumatised by her bullying that he’d been planning to kill himself. Instead he’d killed her, but only because of what had happened the evening before at the Cathedral of Our Lady.
He was found guilty of manslaughter, and sent to prison in Antwerp for fourteen years. Filming of the documentary about him and ‘A Dog of Flanders’ was suspended.
The street in Antwerp where Jan Corteel lived with Yoshimi is named for a sixteenth-century astronomer, mathematician and Jesuit priest named Father Ferdinand Verbiest; he was obsessed with China, and spent the last thirty years of his life there, initially squabbling with Protestants and avoiding execution, and later inventing things and advising the Chinese emperor. There is a statue of him in his hometown of Pittem, which is neither in nor near Antwerp.
There is a statue of Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp, near the Cathedral of Our Lady, but no statue of René Magritte in his hometown of Lessines. There is a statue of Ouida — holding a dog — in her hometown of Bury St Edmunds, a place she despised.
The small sculpture of Nello and Patrasche stands outside the Tourist Information Centre in Hoboken. Today Hoboken is part of Antwerp, not a separate village, and it’s more industrial than rural. (It’s not the Hoboken that Frank Sinatra comes from; that’s in New Jersey.) Tourists can catch the number four tram there and visit a rebuilt model of a windmill; they can peer into the church where Nello and Patrasche would have been buried if they had been a real boy and his dog, and if they had come from Hoboken, and if churches in the nineteenth century were enthusiastic about burying dogs owned by paupers.
Ouida was buried in a coffin made of chestnut, in the mountains near Lucca. That the low-lying granite monument in Antwerp is shaped like a bed is entirely coincidental. Although she wrote in English, few readers in the English-speaking world have heard of her. We have short memories. At some point no one will have heard of Edith Sitwell or Rudolph Valentino or Dame Nellie Melba either. At some point — only slightly more distant — no one will have heard of Barbara Cartland or Nelson Eddy or Jennifer Lopez; the Kardashians will be as obscure as the Dolly Sisters.
Officially, the monument to ‘A Dog of Flanders’ in Antwerp is a bench, not a bed. Few of the numerous film adaptations of ‘A Dog of Flanders’ use its original ending, the one written by Ouida. The death of the boy and his dog are seen as too sad.
Billy the Kid
Imagine if you dug him up and brought him out. You’d see very little. There’d be the buck teeth. Perhaps Garrett’s bullet no longer in thick wet flesh would roll in the skull like a marble. From the head there’d be a trail of vertebrae like a row of pearl buttons off a rich coat down to the pelvis. The arms would be cramped on the edge of what was the box. And a pair of handcuffs holding ridiculously the fine ankle bones. (Even though dead they buried him in leg irons.) There would be the silver from the toe of each boot.
His legend a jungle sleep.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
When I was a child, before videos were invented, my mother and I used to watch old movies on TV. They were screened on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and many of them were in black and white. I lay on the window seat, and my mother sat in her usual prime position, on a two-seater sofa that changed over the years (orange wool to green leather), knitting basket to her right, TV straight ahead.
She’d always loved going to the movies: during her childhood in England, they ran continuously from 10:30 in the morning, and patrons could enter at any time, so my mother would stay on to watch films over and over again. Under-fourteens were supposed to be escorted by an adult, but my mother’s big sister was an usherette at one of the big cinemas in South Shields, and would smuggle her in through the exit door.
A lot of the films my mother knew best and wanted me to watch with her dated from the forties and fifties — musicals, dramas, war films; Three Coins in the Fountain and Bonjour Tristesse; Sophia Loren in Houseboat; Lucy and Desi in The Long, Long Trailer; the Ma and Pa Kettle movies. She especially loved Westerns, and so did I: they were exciting if sometimes perplexing, because it seemed obvious that Jeff Chandler and Debra Paget — two of the stars of my favourite, Broken Arrow (1950) — were not actual Indians. I didn’t realise that the hero of our much-loved fifties series Zorro — enjoyed by the whole family in endless re-runs — was really a Sicilian from New York who later played astrophysicist John Robinson in Lost in Space.
Even if they were filmed on California backlots, cowboy-and-Indian movies suggested a Southwest that was stark and dangerous, a place of canyons and ravines, mountains and deserts, merciless sun. This was the home of Cochise and Geronimo: the ferocious men of the Apache and Comanche burned Jesuit missions, swooped on wagon trains, fended off attackers and raided ranches. In rickety towns of saloons and hitching posts, drunk men fell into water troughs, and gunslingers, rustlers, bounty hunters and sheriffs had shoot-outs in dusty streets. Log forts awaited the cavalry. It was border country, disputed territory, the Wild West.
And it was the home of Billy the Kid — the place the boy outlaw grew up, went bad, was shot by Pat Garrett and — dead at the age of twenty-one — soared into the popular imagination. Paul Newman played him in The Left Handed Gun (1958). In The Outlaw (1943) he outwits Garrett and rides off into the sunset with Jane Russell. The truth was nothing like either film, of course. Billy the Kid wasn’t a Hollywood star. He lived a short, unromantic and violent life. Much of it was spent in Mexico or New Mexico, on the run, hiding in the hills, crossing the Rio Grande. He stole cattle and killed people.
I grew up and left New Zealand; Westerns went out of fashion, as did black-and-white movies. But the surreal landscape of the Southwest and its feral citizens, however fake and misrepresented, were implanted in my imagination. A few days after Christmas 2003, my husband, Tom Moody, and I set out from snowy St. Louis, Missouri — his home town — to drive to California for a wedding. I told him that I was particularly keen to pick up Route 66 wherever we could, so I could take corny pictures of an America I only knew from movies and eighties jeans commercials. But really I wanted to get a glimpse of the even older West, and look for traces of Billy the Kid.
