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Romancing Amsterdam
A travel essay about how a place can make or break a budding relationship
“I feel defeated,” Angelica Lehmann said.
I sighed under my breath, and lay down on the bed next to her. “Why?”
“I think you don’t like me anymore.”
I rolled on my back, scrambling for words. Tucked here in the Bulldog Hostel, the claustrophobia of our attic room – grey wallpaper on the walls and ceiling, dull green paint for the bedside table and bathroom door, a dark-grey carpet, a cramped bathroom that smelled of sewage – made me feel more trapped and morose. How could I explain to Angelica that two days in Amsterdam was all it took for me to realise I didn’t want to be with her? That my test had already failed? That I didn’t find her attractive any more? That now, in this wonderful city, I yearned to be alone and free, because the state of aloneness would open possibilities while being with her had emasculated me?
“Well,” I said. “I am not as madly in love with you as I thought I was before meeting here.”
“Thanks.”
“I still like you. Maybe you expect too much from me?” I was being diplomatic, perhaps even subtly manipulative – but I didn’t have the courage to walk away, completely and forever.
“Perhaps I am too romantic for you?”
Outside, the bells of the Nieuwe Kerk in Dam Square started chiming on the quarter, a lilting and melodious and tentatively desirous chime. It gave Amsterdam the provincial atmosphere of a small town. I stood up and gazed out of the window. The gothic spire of the church was set against a sky the colour of dirty dishwater, dusted with the orange of the streetlights. For a moment I stood transfixed at the window, peering over the back-gardens of the townhouses, the gardens as small as shafts, the jumble of houses following the twisty course of the alleys in central Amsterdam. From my vantage point, the exaggerated, tilting gables of the houses were both homely and spooky – greyish and smoky silhouettes. I watched the lights in the windows come on and off, and then followed the movements of the occupants. Amsterdam, with its high-density living, and the Dutch irreverence or oblivion for privacy, is the most public of cities. The bell chimed again, and this time it sounded like a weep over lost love, and it made me restless. I said, “Let’s enjoy our time and then see what happens… Take it day by day.”
She nodded, but her eyes were hollow. Our brief honeymoon had already ended, and I wondered how much she could read into my thoughts. Did she realise that our sojourn in Amsterdam would probably be the last muted gasp of our short relationship?
It had all started in Malta eight weeks earlier, when love – or so we thought – had blazed across our vista like an unforgettable sunset. She had been studying English when we met, six days before she was due to leave for Hamburg, her home town. For her last weekend we planned a three-day trip to Gozo, Malta’s rural sister island. It was a romantic, intimate weekend, at an island that has a bend for fantasy and legend, and is in many ways stuck in a medieval era. We lodged in a 150-year-old farmhouse. In the morning’s we were awoken by the crowing of the roosters and the booing of the cows. We ate the traditional pizzas cooked in wood-fired ovens, and ravioli as large as purses bursting with sheep’s cheese. We got drunk on the fortified walls of a 500-year-old castle whose limestone face is weathered to the colour of sandstone. We skirted along a 200-metre high sea-cliff, the blue sky and sun-dappled sea unfolding before us forever. We chased crimson sunsets. And we had sex in the car in a remote corner of the island, and when we looked up we saw a bright and populated Milky Way. “It seems to be there for us,” I murmured.
That’s when we decided to meet again in Amsterdam. In Gozo the romance had been safe because it could exist in a state of suspended reality. And it would have remained safe if we kept it that way by meeting again in a hotel in a village or near a lake, a setting amenable to long intimate nights, terrace breakfasts, candle-lit dinners, nature walks – a place where we would fill each other’s vista, as in Gozo. But I needed to test the tenacity of our relationship in a milieu not easily conducive, and Amsterdam poised that challenge: if I could love Angelica in Amsterdam in January I could love her anywhere. Now, I could see, I had been superstitious about love: I had believed that our love would triumph over the ubiquitous pickings of Amsterdam’s hedonism, and I had been wrong.
Escaping from our room, I went down to the hostel’s common area to wait for Angelica to shower. It was the happy hour, and the bar was full of backpackers squatting or reclining on a piece of elevated floor covered by carpets. The large room was full of smoke and beer and excited cackle and techno music. Joints and bongs were making the rounds, and the air reeked with the leathery narcotic smell of Himalayan hash. I sat on a stool at the bar counter, sipping a coffee, and feeling an awkward otherness and separation. I wished I was free to associate, to make new friends, to hang out, to go partying, to cavort around Amsterdam, to join the backpackers huddled behind me – but I was trapped in an intense and melancholic holiday romance. An Australian traveller, who had just arrived in Amsterdam, quizzed me about the coffee shops and sex. He planned a binge of booze and drugs, and what were the women like? A Peruvian man joined us, and we discussed what nationalities of women are the best looking. Silly or trite conversations at another time and in another mood, but now these were conversations that taunted me.
Everything taunted me – the sexy Dutch woman behind the bar, the Spanish twins with faces rounded and cute like kittens’ faces, the large group drinking whiskey straight from the bottle and puffing on a bong. Everyone here basked in Amsterdam’s hedonistic allures, and I wondered why Angelica and I thought we would cultivate our love to blossom in this lust-crazed city?
That night we ate Falafel in a cheap restaurant that smelled of dirty clothes in a closed room. Afterwards we went on a civil touristy stroll, ambling to Leidseplein, Amsterdam’s tourist-ridden area, to our favorite coffee shop. The Rokeru was a hybrid between an opium den (dimly lit by candles, a pervasive narcotic reek) and a New Age shrine (the Buddhist mandala etched on one wall, benches woven from rope, oriental carpets, and so on). I liked the music with its distorted, superimposed shreds of sounds and its unrhythmic, sputtering beats; and after some cannabis, it became even more wholesome, filling everything so that the music became part of everything – it became the walls, the people – instead of simply a transmitted or invasive sound.
But, as for the question about Angelica and I, there were constant reminders of the cruel difference in the change of milieu. I had to lean close to hear Angelica’s faint voice. In Gozo, I remembered, her small voice had blended with the natural setting, a whisper like the hum of wind filtering through grass and trees – here, her voice sounded like a whimper. It got worse that evening: fifteen-minute silences dissected our discourse, and every spell of self-conscious silence, in a place where everyone else was talking and laughing animatedly, dealt us another blow.
The next day I had the good sense of going my own way for the day. After several days of greyness and rain, the cloudless day was promising. Amsterdam, with its narrow, winding alleys, with its compact centre, with its bicycles floating past in a flurry of clinking bells, and with its disdain for motor vehicles (we had driven here from Hamburg but left the car out of town to avoid the stiff parking fees), is a city made for walking. It is a city that is quaint and sophisticated at the same time. It is liberal and unpretentious and unhurried – unlike other capitals of Europe, few people wear formal suits for work, and none of them are in a hurry, as though every day is a public holiday. And yet Amsterdam is one of the leading lights of the New Economy and all kinds of design, and it has some formidably creative artists. That day I roamed through the cobbled streets and past the canals, watching the ducks and coots and grebes and water-traffic from the arched stone-bridges. How I wished to be staying in one of the boathouses – we had checked, and they were expensive, well beyond our budget. In the Red Light District I was struck by the marriage of the oldest profession and the oldest building in Amsterdam – prostitutes in bikinis in their window-booths surrounded the Oude Kerk, the oldest church. A smell of urine whiffed the air near a sign showing the half-body of a man spewing a dotted line of piss, indicating the open-air booth that enclosed a toilet.
“Coke! Ecstasy!” When I whirled my head I saw a dark man in a corner, his lips moving. “Coke! Ecstasy!” Shaking my head, I smiled at the flatness of his voice, the economic use of his words. No hard drugs for me, not as long as Angelica was around.
I visited the Marijuana Museum and the Sex Museum. Both assumed an educational and academic mission: the Marijuana Museum devoted largely to the history of hemp and its uses and environmental tributes, and the Sex Museum with the theme ‘Pornography through the Ages.’ But what does hemp have to do with mind-altering hash? What’s the link between cannabis plants growing in a hothouse “in natural surroundings” and industrial hemp? In the Sex Museum, what’s educational about centuries-old sex aids and pictures and the clips of porno films produced through the decades? These educational sideshows seemed a pretense for a celebration of sex and cannabis. And both taunted me: I felt like a tethered and hungry dog that couldn’t reach the meat in the mid-distance.
Angelica and I fell into a kind of dull routine. We spent most weeknights reading and sipping tea in the hostel’s bar. Sometimes I would lift my head from the book and catch her staring at me, her eyes burning. In Gozo I had considered those gazes affectionately, as though she was peering into my heart; in Amsterdam her unflinching eyes seemed to be judging me. The nights were long and we devoured each other in feverish intimacy, moaning like wounded animals. She laughed breezily in the middle of the night, recklessly mumbling that the sex was good. But was she deluding herself, thinking that sudden sexual intimacy could patch up our discomfort and incompatibility? Because the sex was good only while it lasted, furious in its romantic finality, the way a pricked balloon swishes through the air before it falls flat on the ground.
Yet the days became easier and unhurried as some of our soreness eased. We did enjoyable and uneventful sight-seeing. We visited the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, where Rembrandt’s celebrated The Nightwatch is housed. We strolled in the Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s largest park. We rambled through the city center, soaking the atmosphere. We sat in cafes with their sweet coffee flavor and took in the city’s face: its buildings, like stacks of books propped on a shelf, some teetering forward, others slightly tilted, their confident facades pock-marked by hollow-eyed windows, and higher up, their gables pompous and eloquent. The lines of buildings, and indeed the whole vista of streetscapes and elm trees and canals, looked curious in its lopsidedness, as if it was a conscious effect (technically, the buildings were ever shifting and sinking on unstable foundations): indeed, the buildings looked like carton cutouts in a giant film set. We pointed out the sights, we wallowed in our flights of fanciful imagination, we discussed the Dutch way of doing politics and business in growing admiration. There were moments when instead of emasculation I felt freely associated, the same way I would feel with someone I had met in the hostel and paired up for a day or two for company.
Some nights we went clubbing, and the soreness returned. Angelica hadn’t been to many dance-clubs in her life, and now she struggled to blend into clubs and enjoy the music. She acted like someone who didn’t belong, following me as though my shadow, and such intense and awkward presence by my side deflated me. Her boredom and cluelessness dragged us to the corners and edges of clubs. I thought, You can be with a lover one-to-one and grow into each other’s presence, but the break-or-make test for a couple comes when you mix with people in a highly social milieu, and Angelica and I were failing. In Gozo I had taken her timidity as a sign of dedication and propriety, while in Amsterdam her lack of assertiveness and her weariness made me feel socially incompetent, guilty by association. In Amsterdam, while everyone was partying, we were watching from the shadows.
If I couldn’t party, at least I had to check the clubs Amsterdam had to offer, information that might serve me well if I decided to revisit. Mazzo, on our last night, struck me as an unpretentious club, with red umbrella-shaped paper lamps dangling from the ceiling as décor. The DJ spun dance-floor acid jazz, with lilting basslines and rhythmic beats, and the dancefloor soon filled up. After a while I felt pity for Angelica, and said, “Do you feel like going home now?” She shook her head. Her gestures, however, suggested boredom. Her face was down-turned, her arms and legs crossed, and not a twitch escaped her limply reticent posture.
At least we never argued or made a scene, I thought when we left Amsterdam, back to our separate homes. We never met or spoke again, and some years have passed now, and my one wish remains unfulfilled: to go back to Amsterdam, this time by myself, because the state of aloneness predisposes an openness to whims and opportunities and associations, and this is crucial for the enjoyment of Amsterdam.
Angelica Lehmann is a fictitious name, to protect the privacy of the real person.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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