| Days-and-a-Half in the Basiliek
“The present intellectual industry finds it impossible to make room for my thinking,
just as the present economic order finds it impossible to accommodate my life.”
—Walter Benjamin
| Like the small god he aspired to be, Leopold II of Belgium assumed he had the power to reshape the earth. He began construction on the Basiliek of Koekelberg in 1905 by laying the first brick himself, and he announced that the hefty cathedral would tilt his capital city away from its traditional, organic center—the cobble-stoned Grand Place, a town square since medieval times—and toward the towers and spires he impiously erected in his own name. The design of the Basiliek of Koekelberg (i.e., the “Basilica of the Sacred Heart”) drew upon other renowned cathedrals; yet by incorporating modern improvements into the design, Leopold hoped to vault Brussels, and himself, beyond Chartes and Notre Dame. And unlike the haphazard Grand Place, where worn facades shouldered each other aside for sunlight, the Basiliek would stand alone on a hill, swelling in magnitude. Architects razed whole blocks of tenements to make room for the monument and carved out streets that radiated outward from this religious fortress like arteries.
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| But Leopold’s graft didn’t take. Not willing to wait centuries for his cathedral, the king pushed his feudal craftsmen to build faster. Even so, the construction ran into inevitable and expensive delays. Along the way, the architects abandoned the original blueprint, stripping down from a Gothic to a less complicated Art Deco edifice. Not only did that change diminish the Basiliek, it proved a harbinger: Just as modern secular sensibility soon eroded religious faith throughout Europe, so too would the Basiliek soon be effaced from the consciousness of Brussels. With Leopold long dead, the church had to rely on private donations for funds, but Belgians were no longer willing to pay the equivalent of indulgences to enrich their Catholic monument, and the Sacred Heart languished unfinished until 1970, long after Art Deco had gone out of style. Today, the cathedral is somehow looming and obscure at the same time—better known as a cheap place to get a good view of the rest of the city than as somewhere worth visiting for itself. Meanwhile, the Grand Place continues to attract thousands.
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| I had recently arrived in Europe to start over in life, and I spent my first day-and-a-half there at the Basiliek, walking around its unlit apse with a candle. I had come to The Continent in the spirit of Thoreau to Walden Pond, to “front the essential facts of life.” But whereas Thoreau did front facts, I had traveled substantially farther to front essential fantasies, fantasies of the life I thought a writer should lead. I came to Europe seeking the sunny, artistic exile of Hemingway, Whistler, and Pound, of cafes and bullfights and nocturnes—as if the environment alone would remake me into a dashing Byron. Instead, what I most remember are places: cold rainy Brussels, the Basiliek, and the narrow, trod-upon grave of radical writer Walter Benjamin. There’s not a lot to link Leopold II with Benjamin, but they left similar monuments, spaces similar in pathos if vastly dissimilar in scale. Benjamin had died broken in 1940, a real refugee, not an artistic one, and like Leopold with the Basiliek, Benjamin was convinced he had failed at his main artistic ambitions. In fact, I probably would have persisted in Europe in a stubborn, unhappy exile, just like Benjamin, if I hadn’t discovered the vast, dead, empty chambers inside Leopold’s Sacred Heart Basiliek. The king’s failed attempt to transform his city warned me away from making the same mistake with myself.
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1.
| Knowing my cowardice, I’d made myself buy an unrefundable $1,000 ticket to Europe, and I’d bragged to people about my escape there, so I’d have no choice but follow through or be shamed. I considered Europe an ejector seat, to throw me far clear of six unhappy years of college in Minneapolis. But every time somebody asked for details about where I planned to work and stay and write, I hedged, and every broken-off conversation only stoked my suspicions that the trip might flop. The only smart thing I did before leaving was purchase an open-ended return flight, redeemable whenever I felt like coming home. In contrast, my departure date had been fixed for months. I delayed it until just after the Catholic wedding of one of my best friends from high school at the University of Notre Dame—a weekend that turned out to be probably the best 72 hours of my life. I’d been isolated from those friends and their parents and families during college, and after coming back to them, I remembered what the warmth of a real celebration felt like. But just as suddenly as the warmth returned, I had to board the plane and say goodbye to all that. Even before the bilingual stewardess tore my stub at the gate, I was wondering how long I’d hold out.
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| From Chicago, I flew to Brussels for my first day abroad. But “day” is a misnomer. We lifted off at 3 p.m. Midwest time, broke above the clouds, and landed at 8 a.m. Brussels time, so I didn’t see the sun set for over 36 hours. By the time I’d checked into a corporate hostel—with electronic keycards and a pay shower, not the quirky, charmingly dirty nook I’d anticipated—it was just 10 a.m. I had at least twelve empty hours to fill. What’s more, the tedium of that jet-lagged day-and-a-half seemed tame compared to the potential horror of that night, lying awake with my own thoughts, with nothing to do but question why I’d come. I did have a copy of Moby Dick to put me out, but I thought it safer to grab my umbrella and walk and walk and walk through bureaucratic Belgium until I exhausted myself, until knew I could fall asleep without a struggle even in a 26-person dorm room.
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| I assumed the drive to exhaust myself would subside after a few days, but no. Every day there was as existentially fraught as that first, and every day stretched into an empty day-and-a-half I could never fill. The only antidote was locomotion, vigorous exertion that led to animal sleep. On first my marathon excursion through Brussels, I took the long way around everything: no shortcuts, no public transportation, no sitting, nothing to hinder my chance to collapse into bed. Yet after I’d walked every hill I could find, examined every new construction project, and even eaten lunch standing up, it was only mid-afternoon. I refused to hunt for a museum, since I was holding onto the fiction I was not a tourist but a piece of Europe now. When the spitting rain picked up, I decided to walk west under the cover of trees, toward a gigantic tower.
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| It came on faster than I anticipated. As I drew near, the bustling six-lane Blvd. Du Jordin Botanique, which I’d been walking along, stubbed itself on a sudden curb. Traffic had to swing to the side like a diverted river. Where the street should have continued on, there was a half-mile plaza two blocks wide with a white gravel footpath. The plaza’s gazebos and statues were dimmed by the charcoal clouds in the sky, but I enjoyed a wet and surprisingly hushed walk beneath the trees, none of which had a branch less than twenty feet off the ground. They formed a natural tunnel that emerged at the gates of the Basiliek of Koekelberg.
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| Perched on its hill, the monument was probably visible from two miles off, and it was skirted by an enormous park that lay prostrate at its feet. Yet on my guidebook map of Brussels, the Basiliek was obscured by an inset of the Grand Place. The cathedral was beige and solid stone, and any one of its green-copper peaks, if broken off, could have been its own cathedral. Any of the six entrances—all of which had wooden doors as thick as altars and vestibules teeming with statues—could have been the façade for a lesser building, too. As I soon found, the interior decorations were equally impressive: balconies, marble floors, pillars wide enough for ten children to hold hands around. Chapels sprung out like polyps from every corner, each devoted to a different saint. It was also a hollow monument. A mausoleum. The higher stories seemed well-lit, but the gray that had overrun Belgium that day-and-a-half had taken hold of the first floor, too. The light from candles on one end was too feeble to reach across to the other side. A crew of masons made a great din near the entrance, part of a renovation project, but even the echoes of hammers on stone couldn’t reach across the cavernous apse. And in between the ends stood thousands upon thousands of expectant chairs and pews, all empty.
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2.
| To back up a moment, I came very close to never finding my way inside the Basiliek. Despite, or because of, the generous number of entrances, the parish caretakers opened only one to the public. In a typically European way, it was in the back, hidden to all but those who knew where to look. This entrance was not connected to the sidewalk that circumscribed the cathedral grounds, and low trees obscured the door itself. I had doubled back to puzzle over the only visible sign, and had almost given up when I spotted two elderly women approaching what looked more like a loading dock than a cathedral door. I slipped in behind them.
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| I say that was “typically European” because people in uptight countries like the United States or Japan have biases toward efficiency that continental Europeans do not. All over the continent, I was constantly reminded of the pages from Homage to Catalonia where George Orwell describes the utter indifference of even the Spanish army toward keeping a posted railway schedule. Mostly, army trains left late; but at unpredictable times, according the capricious whim of the conductors, they left early, forcing Orwell (a military attaché) to waste hours upon hours and most of his patience just sitting around empty stations. He admired the Spaniards’ lack of subservience to clocks, but realized he was too irrevocably a part of the punctual world to not be miffed.
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| Aside from the Basiliek and my own experience with trains, I felt this mingled exasperation and self-reproach most acutely on the only Sunday I spent in Europe. By then I had made my way to Catalonia, too, and decided to take a daytrip-and-a-half to Girona, Spain. Girona is a university town with sentry walls from Roman times and narrow, uneven brick lanes that run like fjords between buildings. It hosts dozens of professional bicyclists each June, who live there to prepare for the Tour de France. (I, in early July, just missed them.) I disembarked from the train into Girona around noon, thirsty for a cerveza, and in need of air-conditioned shops to distract and tire myself. But while religious Americans barely tolerate reduced Wal-Mart hours on the Sabbath, everything in nominally Catholic Spain, except a few arrogant cafes with cheap croissants for tourists, remained stubbornly closed. Zapaterias, panaderias, carneceros, todos. I would not have been surprised to find the hospital padlocked. In different circumstances, with a picnic basket and a lover, it would have made a wonderful outing, since I had whole parks and streets to myself. And looking back, I admire the Spaniards’ devotion to something so futile. Closing bookstores and malls once per week won’t stop the encroachment of the secular; in practical terms, taking Sundays off is useless. But seeing the entire population refuse to capitulate to corrosive capitalistic pressure . . . there was something deep in that. Even so, at that time I found myself as grouchy as Orwell, overheated and bitchy at the thought of more croissants, already my breakfast, for lunch and dinner.
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| (I wish Europe had held onto others traditions as sacredly. The saddest sight on the Continent, second only to Walter Benjamin’s grave, was seeing the disrepair that a money-changing station in the Pyrenees had fallen into. It looked like an abandoned gas station, with peeling paint and weeds cracking through the concrete. Obsolete currency symbols had already faded from a hand-painted billboard, like hieroglyphs almost too faint to read. At one time, at every border crossing in Europe, those stations must have provided a thousand thrills each day: the strange weight of coins from another land in people’s palms. But all of that has evaporated under the fiat of the Brussels bureaucracy. Euros are as standardized as poker chips.)
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| The apse of the Basiliek was abandoned, too, and there’s nothing as reverent and creepy as a lonely church. I made a perfunctory tour of the unlit bottom before scaling to the second floor, which rose up at least four stories high. There, I paid a young woman behind a desk two euros for the chance to wander around the entire balcony. I was free to tour on my own; but since more freedom was exactly what I didn’t want that day-and-a-half, I lingered near the cashier and examined my ticket, hoping she’d offer to lead me on a tour. Aside from a companion, I wanted someone to explain to me why Leopold’s stained-glass pyramid had rented out its second floor as a gallery for over-earnest devotional paintings. (The answer, according to one travel brochure: “The costs for maintenance [of the cathedral] are so high that the priest has decided to open some annexes of the church for organizations to keep meetings, conferences and parties[!]” I later learned the cavernous Basiliek also hosts rock-climbing and spelunking camps, anything to make a euro.) The young woman declined to break off her conversation with a young man in what looked like a military uniform. I moved quickly out of earshot.
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| Past the awful religious art—I resented that my two euros might contribute to their upkeep—I found a coiled staircase leading up. To mend my self-esteem, I decided on the simple, easily obtainable goal of climbing the main tower of the Basiliek. After a few teenagers raced by me down (I wondered if they’d been making out at the top), the staircase was deserted. I wound upward, and the stairs opened not on a belfry or giant bell, as I hoped, but an outdoor patio. It was still raining, but I took in Leopold’s vision of Brussels anyway with a few deep breaths. The streets did indeed radiate from the cathedral like spokes, just as he’d hoped. It’s just that the spokes were lined with plain apartment buildings and dull bus stops. The cathedral was no vibrant hub. I walked back down, counting 174 steps to the gallery floor, and was ready to be done with the Basiliek.
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3.
| I took a different route to the exit, and my eyes had to readjust to the lack of light in the apse. Only gradually did I become aware of the carved wooden panels lining the walls. They portrayed the familiar Catholic icons from my youth, the Stations of the Cross and allegorical depictions of saints. Once I recognized them, I slowed down as I had with the ticket girl and turned to follow them into a new wing. They were reminiscent of the decorations in the humbler Cathedral four blocks from my house where I grew up in South Dakota. And even though I wasn’t a believer any more and knew the pictures were fantastical, they resonated with me. Simple stories of perseverance and just rewards in Heaven had meaning again at that moment. Religious sensibilities I thought dead turned out to be merely dormant, and real prayers began to bubble up inside me. This wasn’t longing for God, much less Catholicism. I’d studied atheistic physics at a secular university, and the childhood instincts to confess my sins and attend mass each week had died there with less struggle than I thought possible. But in the Basiliek, I wanted to poach the self-peace that religion does offer believers.
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| At the time I was in the middle of Moby Dick, a long enough novel to provide continuity as I transitioned to Europe. It’s a much more comic novel than most people realize, and what happened to me next might have been a deleted scene. Melville had had the same sort of upbringing I’d had, where religion was all-encompassing and “God” explained most everything. Though he’d walked away from religion, it dogged him, too. He found iconic significance in every blubber-strip and greasy try-pot; every harpoon was charged with inner lightning. I can only say that Moby Dick is a dangerous book for someone like me to read and probably should be banned. That afternoon, self-consciously symbolic, I slipped a euro into a lockbox and took a devotional candle and—as rashly as Ahab had pounded the doubloon to the masthead—made a vow and lit the candle’s wick on another candle, already afire, to seal the promise.
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| My resolution—not to abandon writing necessarily, but to let go of the sheer untethered ambition I had about writing—was no less real because I never stuck it out. (No smoker ever had a habit as hard to break as ambition.) But for whole minutes while the candle burned alone in the overwhelming apse, it seemed not a failing anymore to be small, to lead a small life. And it’s no coincidence this release took place in Leopold’s failure to remake Brussels. Surrounding me was the sort of edifice—magnificent, cold, empty—I’d end up with if I didn’t stop trying to transform myself, via fiat, into anything beyond the slightly-built, bookish man I was, beyond the librarian I was probably meant to be. I made plans to redeem my plane ticket right there and return to where I thought I could be small, unimportant, and not unhappy. South Dakota. My preference for a four-story metropolis in South Dakota is humorous to me, though it’s humor with pangs. But for a few minutes in Brussels’s Cathedral, I could tell myself that if the city that resonates with me will never inspire romance in the rest of the world, so be it.
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| I slipped out, thankfully while the candle was still burning, burning. The first thing that happened after I left the cathedral grounds was that my umbrella was wrenched inside-out by the wind. I slept deeply that night.
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4.
| I chugged out of Brussels after three days-and-a-half and crossed France into Spain on an overnight express train, sleeping on sticky vinyl bench in a cab with a family of four. I had to disembark at a border town, Port Bou, because Spanish and French trains, like the east and west halves of the United States, run on rails of different widths, or “gauges.” (In fact, American trains switch at Chicago, the city I’d just left.)
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| In rush-rush tourist mode, I purchased a 10:30 ticket for Barcelona, shoved my back-breaking bag of books into a rental locker, and descended a set of steep steps to “do” Port Bou in an hour-and-a-half. The town was raked, lifting away from the Mediterranean up one broad hill toward the train station at the foot of the Pyrenees, and all its adobe buildings were roofed with stereotypical red tiles. A rash of trinket and liquor stores marked it a tourist town, though it was not yet crushed by them. Near the sea, a trapezoidal section of water had been roped off for swimmers, and the pebbles that substituted for beach sand were black or grey, depending on whether they were wet. I realized that less pretty but less crowded beaches were accessible via footpaths veering around some rocky crags at the edges of town. Wanting to be alone after an unrestful night, I followed the paths deeper into Spain until I could lie down unobserved. My shoulder was so used to my book-lined hockey bag, it seemed a treat to lower myself to the ground with just normal gravitational force.
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| Despite knowing I should enjoy Port Bou’s ambience, my plans for the next few days-and-a-half kept crowding my thoughts. How to get to Barcelona, Mardrid, Andulucia—and Girbraltor and maybe Morocco, too, and where to stay and what to see and whether my Spanish was passable or American. While I was trying to balance this fragile mobile of hours and miles, I came up with a solution. But it was so stupidly simple I disregarded it. Then ten o’clock struck on the bell of the tiny Port Bou Cathedral . . . and by the time the tenth peal rung itself out, I’d decided to remain right where I was sitting. Just as I had in the Basiliek, I renounced my ambitions to see greater Spain. I would hear eleven o’clock rung out the next hour. Giddy again to waste money, I let the 10:30 ticket lapse in my pocket and listened to the waves scraping the pebbles. I went to taste the water. I hadn’t been able to find enough salt for my food in Europe (another American exasperation) and the brine was delicious, for a mouthful. I wish I’d thought to put the expired ticket out to sea, symbolically, but instead stuffed it in a local trashcan.
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| Compared to grey Brussels, Port Bou felt porous, airy, and light. I even found the less-than-charming hostel I thought I’d wanted in Belgium. All the furniture, which the owner could throw out when old, gleamed; everything foundational—tubs, floors, tiles—smelled of dank mildew. For my first outing that day-and-a-half, I hiked up a scorched red hill from Port Bou into France, eschewing the paved highway up, like somebody wanted for crimes. I expected to find no company on the hillside but scrub brush and predatory birds; yet in the folds of the mountains, hidden from Port Bou proper, I found ten wrecked cars that had split the guard rails on the highway and tumbled down the cliffs. None of the rusted car skeletons—axels splayed, tires burst, metal spines mangled—had bone skeletons in the seats any more, but I realized the cars were not without use: they served as landmarks for a colony of Spanish hillbillies, gypsies perhaps, that lived in shanty-towns on the slopes, concealed from respectable Port Bou. Apparently the gypsies kept dogs, too, though, disconcertingly, the chicken-wire dog pens were open and empty. Lizards overran them instead. Since the gypsies probably mistrusted visitors, I glanced for cover every time I came across new coves, in case anyone in a lean-to had a rifle and good aim.
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| I skirted that “town” and made my way to the hilltop, where I discovered the money-changing station. I also discovered my shin was bleeding. Not wanting to beat up my legs more, I took the winding highway back down, sticking to the shoulder near the mountain rather than the opposite shoulder, which skirted the cliff that the broken cars had flown over. It was a quiet descent—until a hand and forearm suddenly groped over the lip on the other side of the road, the sheer side. The man emerging (I didn’t know from where) snagged a scrub bush whose roots had a tentative grasp on the soil, but he managed to rappel up the last few feet. Gaining the top, he brushed off a white shirt that was unbuttoned at the top and that barely concealed a belly at bottom. He saw me, stopped, and nodded, as polite an introduction as I could have hoped for. It turned out he was a Port Bou resident, but in the gypsy spirit he’d been poaching rare local flora, which he carried back to town in a white plastic sack on his wrist. In an exaggerated Ess-pan-yole, so I could follow along, he ordered me over to his side of the road because he thought it safer to face traffic on the walk down rather than have it strike me from behind. Entirely gratis, he added his thoughts about Osama Bin Laden (muy, muy mal) and the reason for the vast number of stray gatos and peros in Port Bou (they bred insatiably).
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| The rest of my stay in Port Bou passed quickly. I would hear the cathedral chime at night while I drowsed in the terrific heat. I swam laps in the Mediterranean and wimped out on buying a fifth of absinthe (which I knew Joyce and Whistler, both exiles, drank) because I didn’t want to admit I’d have to drink it alone. I ordered egg sandwiches at bistros from the exact same illiterate, point-to-the-picture dummy menus that cafes in Belgium had used. I watched corpulent men and over-tan wives finish cases of wine and I sat up nights listening to parties of them chortle, feeling bitterly satisfied, in an I-hate-high-school-anyway mood, at mine being the only light on in my hostel on Friday and Saturday night.
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| I also discovered in Port Bou what I thought I’d wanted when I first came to Europe. An exile. I’d seen notices on Port Bou maps about Walter Benjamin. But, wandering through the Catholic cemetery to kill time one afternoon, I was still startled to read this Jewish-Marxist’s name on a headstone. Fleeing from Nazi Germany in 1940, Benjamin had risked his life to reach Port Bou on the border—only to find that neither Vichy France nor Franco’s Spain wanted him. Having held onto his life only because he thought escape was possible, the denial killed Benjamin. The locals had no choice but to bury him. Perhaps feeling guilty (they were Catholic) they later put up scattered shrines to him—a memorial olive tree, from which I took two olives; a wall of scrapbook newspaper clippings in a nearby chapel; and a piece of public art, Passagen by Dani Karavan, as an “official” monument. Passagen was experiential art, a set of iron steps that tunneled diagonally through a ledge. It terminated at a Plexiglas wall on a cliff face above the Mediterranean. Aside from the dangling feeling above the water, it seemed to have nothing to do with Benjamin.
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5.
| I fled Europe on a United Airlines airlift a few days later. My mom picked me up at the airport and drove me home. Lying on my pillow in my old high school bedroom I found an invitation wrapped in a ribbon and stuffed old-fashionedly with a tissue. It was from a second high-school friend who also coincidentally getting married that summer. I’d gone abroad assuming I’d miss her wedding. In fact, I had time to RSVP.
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| With no job, the days-and-a-half at home were just as tedious as overseas, though less anxious. During the empty weeks before the wedding—again, to nurse my ego with easy tasks—I vacuumed my parents’ carpets, varnished a bookshelf, and walked our dog whenever I was up early. I also tried to find a place in my room to hang the one memento I had taken back—a warped, dark blue aluminum sign that read “Port Bou,” which I’d stolen from a Spanish railyard. But I never did, and rested it on top of a radiator instead. I had no real responsibility those weeks, but instead of spending nights out and reconnecting with high-school friends, I limited my social contact severely. I didn’t want to bump into someone before I had an explanation for why I’d been punted back after only eight days-and-a-half abroad. I had one close call when I ran into a friend’s mother in the vegetable aisle at the grocery store. Mrs. Hutchinson and I made just enough eye contact for her to be suspicious, but not enough to overcome the burden of doubt, and I ducked into the canned soups one aisle over.
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| The wedding was to be my first public appearance since Europe, but I never made it. I got up late on the day of, went for a leisurely run, and, having misread the invitation—it started at 12:30, not 1:30—was in the shower when the ceremony started across town. The crowd outside the small, bland church was waiting for the bride and groom to emerge, to glimpse them as man & wife for the first time, when I snuck up. My arrival managed to usurp everyone’s attention. Before they could say anything, I broke the tension by laughing. The young Ms. Hutchinson hugged me and told me she would have to apologize to her mother, whom she (my friend) had accused of fabricating a story about spotting Sam Kean in the aisles of Hy-Vee. I proceeded to blow off every question my friends asked about Europe, and for that night got away without explaining myself.
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| Each wedding guest got a squat, complementary wine snifter as a party favor. It somehow survived my pocket at the reception and got home unbroken the next morning. I took the two already-shriveled olives I’d twisted off the Benjamin memorial olive tree and slipped them inside so I wouldn’t lose them. |
©SamKean
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