Ventoux. Bert Wagendorp

she seemed to make him mature as a poet in a short space of time. Sometimes they went to Amsterdam to comb the bookshops—and he made passionate use of her suggestions. They were mainly English-language poets like Thomas, Hughes, and Heaney.

      She was subservient to Peter’s talent, as if he were the one who could put her own ineffable longings and pain into words, if only she fed his soul enough. Inevitably, she figured more and more in the poems he wrote, until, almost as a natural progression, he began a cycle that revolved completely around her. To avoid direct association, the girl in the poems was called Anna, but it was clear enough that it was about Laura. Of course she saw that herself, too, but it did not change her attitude. She gave him the beads to make the necklace that was intended for herself.

      Peter’s message was not: I love you. It was about surrender, about a person he could give himself to heart and soul, and from whom he demanded complete surrender.

      We did not see immediately that there was a direct line from Peter’s poetry to reality. For us, a poem was something that was far removed from everyday life. We understood that the Anna of his poetry was the same as Laura, but at the same time, the poems were about a Laura we did not know, who was perhaps a little like Laura, but seen through the eyes of a poet, and poets simply looked completely differently, and disguised reality until it was unrecognizable.

      We did wonder exactly what their relationship was like. We could also see that the dynamic between the two was changing, that, after a while, Peter reacted differently to Laura’s comments than he did at the beginning, and that he paid less attention to them and corrected her more often. Once they had an argument when Peter called her a ‘prudish cow’ because she criticized a couple of sentences in which he was sexually very explicit and said she found them ‘vulgar’.