Long life
Another language
Nigel Nicolson
s I waited in the lobby of my hotel last week, the manager was having a tele- phone row with a distant customer, suppli- er or rival hotelier — I couldn't tell which, or what the row was about, because he was Speaking in Flemish. The intensity of his indignation was unmistakable, and from his gestures and intonation one could follow the development of the quarrel and imag- me the responses, just as a skilled mimic can suggest an entire football match by imi- tating the actions of the goal-keeper. Having slammed down the telephone, he continued to mutter imprecations like dying thunder, and then turned to me, still glowering with rage. I had been warned never to speak French in Bruges without asking permission first, but he spoke good English, and I asked him not about his row, but why it was that in one of his country's major cities even public notices like train timetables and street signs were written in a language that no foreigner except the Dutch and less than half the Belgian peo- ple can possibly understand. He replied, rapidly cooling, that it was due to the third- century split between the Germanic Franks and the Romanised Celts. 'Just like the people of Wales all speak Welsh,' he added to console me. I did not correct him.
In the Groeninge museum there is a marvellous painting by Jan van Eyck of the Madonna with Canon Van der Paele, and I was struck by the Canon's remarkable resemblance to my hotelier. Things haven't changed at all. It is true that the Canon was wearing an expression of extreme devotion uncharacteristic of my friend. All those 15th-century paintings combine pious severity with explicit scenes of brutal execu- tions and charming landscape vignettes in the background. It is only when you step into the next gallery and the next century that you find religious pictures in which the ghost of a grin is allowed to flicker across the lips of a saint.
But in spirit Bruges is still mediaeval, looking back to the days of the Burgundian dukes as the springtide of its inspiration, and when the city celebrates its fame, as it did this year on Ascension Day, it is by pro- cessions of holy relics slowly passing under heraldic banners strung across the streets. If the architecture is not genuinely mediae- val, it is a passable imitation of it. The sur- rounding countryside is so flat and dreary that the citizens compensated for it by erecting enormously high towers like the famous belfry that has overlooked the main square since about 1300, and the town hall that is the loveliest secular Gothic building I have ever seen.
I went to Bruges for no other reason than that I had never been there before, much as Desmond MacCarthy saved up Venice for his old age. It does not compare to Venice or Amsterdam. The Renaissance is strangely lacking and the canals are insignificant except for the picturesque stretch patrolled by the tourist motor- launches. But it has other virtues. Modern buildings have been fitted in with scrupu- lous care, never too high, their materials never discordant, and everywhere there are fingers of water or greenery that penetrate the city. Quiet, cobbled courtyards sur- round a statue or end in a stone archway below a stepped gable, exactly as in the backgrounds of the Memlings and Van Eycks. It's a place for walking, and at the middle or end of the day, the restaurants are welcoming and the food delicious.
Lest I make Bruges sound too sentimen- tally attractive, let me add that an enor- mous fair occupied one of the central squares, with clanging roundabouts and the violent music and colours that go with them, and that my contentious hotel- keeper is still, for all I know, yelling into his telephone before turning to his guests with the Flemish equivalent of 'Have a Nice Day'.
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