Angels

After Zbigniew Herbert’s “Preliminary Investigation of an Angel”

In the southern Dutch city of Maastricht, an angel has died. His body is naked, his head and arms removed. His torso slumps forward while the points of his sitting bones reach for heaven. If I dared, I would stroke his leather throat.

His yellow feet still flush with blood. They hang off a pedestal as scarred as his soles. Surely an angel can revive, however long ago he fell, composed as he is of light.

I want to hold this gluey angel in my arms. To breathe life into his flanks one rib at a time until a slow fire incarnates. I want his body to define the limits of mine but that is not the design of his maker and un-maker, the Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere.

She built my angel out of wax, epoxy, metal, wood, and iron. She hung my angel from his head until it unfixed. De Bruyckere applied instruments and interrogations to bend my angel to his cloudy knees. What else could he do but submit?

She named him Per Benedetto. He has been dead for many years.

Tim is an American with a shaved head and many tattoos, one of which spells P E A C E on his knuckles in a language I cannot read. Since Tim moved from Amsterdam, we don’t see each other often. We’ve agreed to meet at the entrance of the Bonnefanten Museum to visit a De Bruyckere exhibit called Angel’s Throat.

The museum is sited at what once was the Bonnefanten Convent. The name is a pun for the model orphans, the bonnes enfants, who were raised within its walls. Now the museum sits in a post-Modernist building on the Avenue Ceramique. Its twenty-eight meter tower is shaped like a rocket.

It’s August and humid in Maastricht. Tim wears a faded t-shirt and baggy jeans. His loose-jointed limbs move easily down the steps. He kisses me on both cheeks in the local way though neither of us is Dutch.

We met at a writing group almost a decade ago. At the time, we were both writing novels. Mine was about a woman who could not speak. His centered on a man named Daniel who comes to learn that he’s an angel.

On the second floor of the Bonnefanten Museum in Room 4 of Angel’s Throat, three archangels poise on pedestals. Tim greets them solemnly, one by one, as if they were royalty or long-lost family. Though the angels are life-sized atop high plinths, Tim is almost tall enough to look them in the eye.

But there is no eye. De Bruyckere has cloaked her angels in a weight of skin and tufts of fur. Face, hands, torso are masked. Only the legs are exposed, muscles coiled. Each angel pitches forward on their toes, at war with the downward pull of doom and the desire to return to heaven. Why do they hesitate between knocked-out teeth and confession?

Some say the angels are failing.

I find Tim in a room of angel wings made of distressed blankets, epoxy, feathers, skin, and the wax casts of animal hide. One part opera cloak to two parts abattoir. Pinned to hooks on a wall, the wings assemble like so many coats in a steamy bar. As if the wearer needed respite from his angelic tasks or in anticipation of the next volunteer to step forward.

Tim is a Buddhist, a jam-maker, a man who grows his own tomatoes, a Midwesterner who speaks with a lisp. Innocence lines the folds of his t-shirt. I wait for him to heed heaven’s call.

Scattered among the black leather couches in the Bonnefanten Museum lie stiff paper sheets with poems written by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. One is titled “Preliminary Investigation of an Angel.”

Tim and I sit side by side, close enough to exchange all manner of confidences. After my first question, his cheeks flush with blood. His tongue doesn’t hesitate. From his lips, drops of stories run down to shape on the floor a familiar prophecy. I have heard all these stories before.

In first grade, Sister Angelina hung naughty classmates by their belt loops from the hooks on her chalkboard. Archangel Michael presided over my first Communion at our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Church. Every Christmas, angels adorned our fireplace, tempting fate with their toilet roll skeletons, crepe gowns, and cotton wings.

Tim must notice my silence but I cannot see his distress. I never hear the blow that fixes his spine between cloud and mud puddle. The angels of my youth were always triumphant, exalted. Until now, I have never witnessed an angel suffer.

For Belgians like De Bruyckere, horses are indelibly connected to World War I. It was the last conflict helped on by battle horses and the first to deploy mustard gas. Horses killed in battle were left to bloat until their carcasses exploded.

Inside a glass display case lie three horses, one on top of the other, as if caught in mid-gallop. The middle horse has a blanket wrapped around its face, perhaps as a comfort, perhaps to blind. A wide leather strap entangles their legs into the iron ferrule of the display case. I stand before them in a shadow of sorrow. The case is far too small to contain their bulldozed bodies.

For many years, I thought of Tim as the angel in my life.

Once I saw another De Bruyckere horse in an underground museum embedded deep in Tasmania. This one was hairless, its skin too like my own. A rope circled its midriff. The horse’s back had been broken at an angle too acute for anything other than violence. The cords in the horse’s neck strained in extremis.

Since Angel’s Throat, Tim and I haven’t spoken. I’d like to see him to say I’m sorry but I hear that he lives these days in a Buddhist monastery somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He never said goodbye.

With this essay from her unpublished work we want to honor the memory of Karen Kao.

The museum referred to in Tasmania is the incomparable Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.