Horses

Horses are the focus of a brief but memorable encounter between Stella and Gerry in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. Two animals stand in a narrow lane under lamplight; their quiet presence interrupts the couple’s walk and becomes, for Stella, the image she will associate with the district. The horses also mark a turn from looking outward at the city to renewed intimacy between the couple.

The Encounter in the Side Lane

The couple are on the other side of the canal, still within the Red Light District, when Stella stops and pulls Gerry back to show him something. He follows her gaze to two horses standing beneath the lamps in a narrow side lane. They approach cautiously. The chestnut and the spotted grey stand together without moving, their breath visible in the air. Behind the chestnut, a small pyramid of dung is still steaming: the scene gives the animals both a composed, almost ceremonial appearance and an unmistakably physical presence.

Their equipment further fixes the encounter in detail. Saddles, stirrups, reins, and other pieces of harness cover the horses, while a sheath holds what looks like a baton. The chestnut shifts a hind hoof, and its shoe clops against the stones. The animals are not simply picturesque figures: their tack and the baton-like object place them in the working world of mounted policing, even as their stillness makes the lane feel momentarily removed from its surroundings.

Stella’s Attention to the Animals

Stella responds to the horses with admiration and tenderness. She calls them beautiful and recalls that, on her only previous attempt to ride, she felt as if she were sitting on a sideboard. The comic recollection sets her present admiration against her lack of riding experience. Gerry jokes about the steaming dung; Stella answers with the more refined phrase she remembers from her family home, giving the encounter a small exchange of contrasting vocabularies as well as an affectionate tone.

Her attention then settles on the horses’ bodies and bearing. She sees something saintly and aloof in them and compares the veins visible beneath their skin to rivers. The grey shakes its head and rolls its eyes, showing the whites; small sounds come from its harness. Stella speaks gently to it. Her description does not erase the animals’ physicality or behavior: the grandeur she finds in them coexists with a shifting hoof, a headshake, and the sounds of equipment.

Memory and Consequence

Stella says that in future, when she thinks of Amsterdam’s Red Light District, she will remember these two horses and their silent standing. The remark gives the encounter a lasting place in her recollection of the city. Rather than defining the district only by its sexual commerce, her chosen image is of two animals together beneath the lamps, quiet and self-contained.

It is still early, and Stella suggests that they return to the hotel and make an early night of it. There, the couple make love again. Afterwards, Stella says that the horses have stirred her desire. They lie side by side looking at the ceiling, and she wonders aloud why such inclinations come more often when they are away. The scene thus links the horses to a particular change in the evening without making them mere scenery: their striking presence remains the immediate stimulus Stella names, while the question she raises opens onto the couple’s experience of intimacy away from home.