Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  ‘The same as you, actually,’ I mumbled, but she wasn’t taken with the joke.

  ‘I didn’t sleep a wink all night. This is one thing too many for me right now, do you hear me? I need my sleep. Where were you?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘A girl?’

  Sarah had dropped me off at the hotel. We kissed through the open window, she had driven on to her work – at the UCLA cafeteria. Trays full of food, trays full of garbage. Sometimes she thought: this will all be shit soon. She described her work as a maddeningly endless series of removals.

  My mother asked, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Someone I met.’

  ‘That’s fairly obvious. Please, Ludwig.’

  I ordered a double espresso with a side of warm milk.

  ‘Have you had breakfast yet? Order whatever you like, they have lovely things here.’

  I was brimming with sensational memories. An invincibility that I owed to her. I’d never known that love was like this.

  ‘I think we need to establish a few rules,’ my mother said. ‘I don’t want this anymore. I want to know where you are.’

  I struck out like a serpent.

  ‘You were gone for a whole month without letting me know where you were.’

  ‘And this constant lashing out of yours, we need to talk about that too, I consider it . . .’

  ‘Consider it talked about. Period. So much for the family business. And now, what are you going to do today? Who are you going to get naked with today? In exchange for ten thousand dollars?’

  ‘Ludwig . . .’

  She smiled helplessly at the girl who put my cup down in front of me.

  ‘I don’t know why you came here,’ she said a little later. ‘Just to make me feel rotten? If so, you would have been better off staying in England. This way all we’re doing is getting in each other’s hair.’

  ‘Do you want me to go away? I can do that. No problem, really.’

  The hopelessness – there was no way out. I knew she was right; I was a punitive element and nothing more. Whenever I saw her I wanted to vent my hatred, to torture her. I never missed an opportunity to vomit my gall all over her. The war of words was one I would always win, but the battle against the reality in which she moved and breathed, that never. Once she was out of sight, the rage made way for feelings of loss.

  ‘I’d like to know what your plans are. Ludwig?’

  I tried to summon up Sarah, sarahsarahsarah, but she eluded me. One future had made way for another. Lightness for gravity. My mother may not have known it, but she needed me in that life of leaping-before-she-looked. One checkpoint in the course of the entire day. Our lives were two hands, one filled with uncertainty, the other with which we held each other tight. Or I held her, that was more like it. The lame leading the blind.

  ‘So you either accept it, or . . .’

  ‘Or? Or what?’

  Quietly now.

  ‘Or then I really want you to go back to England. You can apply at the conservatory, I know they would accept you.’

  Her oldest dream concerning me: her son, the concert pianist, the old music temples of Europe. The straight world of culture at last. Caesarion, the fusion of the sex symbol and the artist, beauty and creation. Just as the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra was supposed to have been the union of both their talents, their genius. But what did the historians have to say about Caesarion? Not much, according to the Alexandrian Cavafy: Behold, you came with your vague charm./ In history only a few lines/ are found about you,/ and so I molded you more freely in my mind.

  Caesarion had only one striking talent in fact, and that was for hitting upon the wrong moment. When Alexandria was besieged by Octavian and the city seemed about to fall, Cleopatra sent her son to India at the head of a caravan laden with riches. But for reasons known to no-one, he tried to return to the city where his mother had already committed suicide; the primal tale of the queen and the serpent, how she clutched it to her breast. She died along with her maidservants Iras and Charmion. En route to Alexandria, Caesarion – aged seventeen – was murdered, probably by Octavian’s henchmen.

  A dismal footnote to the story of his parents.

  My mother herself had failed at the conservatory, yet it would be overly cheap psychology to assert that I was meant to mend her broken dreams. In any case, though, she was unrealistic in her estimation of my talent. Middling. She had never accepted that, not back then, not now either. That was painful to me, for it meant that whatever I did she would always see it as something unworthy of me, while in fact it was the best I could do.

  ‘The Royal Academy of Music, I’m sure they’ll have you.’

  ‘About as likely as you someday playing Mary Poppins on Broadway.’

  ‘Oh, Ludwig, but you’ve never even tried! Of course you can. I’m so sure.’

  I grimaced.

  ‘I’m afraid your being sure doesn’t mean much. I’ve told you before, I talked to Mr. Fisk about it. He thought I would be admitted to the first year, but after that, he said, that’s when it really starts. And no, he didn’t think I would make the grade after that.’

  ‘What does a man like that know about it? He never made it any further than piano teacher in some country town. Everyone always thought you played so beautifully, that counts too, doesn’t it?’

  It must have been that she had suffered so miserably under her own lack of talent, which she’d had to compensate for with hard work. The semi-talented need so little confirmation to continue down the beaten track. An encouraging nod, an applause that lasts a fraction of a second too long – that was enough to evade self-insight for yet a little while.

  A shadow fell across the table.

  ‘Hi, girlie,’ Rollo Liban said. ‘Hello, Ludwig.’

  I said nothing, I still didn’t know how to deal with him.

  ‘You ready to roll?’ he asked her.

  She dabbed at her lips with the napkin and nodded. The top buttons of Rollo’s shirt were open, showing a mass of gray chest hair. He was tanned and about thirty kilos overweight. The fat had accumulated around his torso, the white canvas trousers flapped loosely around his legs. When he looked down, his head rested on a pedestal of two or three chins. She stood up.

  ‘Please think about what I said, Ludwig. It’s up to you. Will I see you this evening? Will you be there?’

  ‘I’ll leave a message.’

  ‘Do you have enough money? Here, I’ll give you . . .’

  ‘That’s not necessary.’

  ‘Take it, sweetheart. And now we really have to go, I believe. An interview with, what’s his name again, Rollo?’

  ‘Jay Leno.’

  She giggled.

  ‘Well, we can’t make him wait.’

  A kiss on my forehead, Rollo Liban was already halfway to the door. She followed him, people turned their heads and watched them go. Before me on the table lay a packet of dollars. My economy would become entangled with hers, with the money she earned with her body – that was my bread and butter as well. I put it in my pocket, it seemed warmer than the things around it. The waitress came up to me with a black leather notepad.

  ‘Could I ask you to sign here, please?’

  I climbed the stairs to the next level of the hotel, where I had seen a piano. My fingers slid across the keys; it was tuned. I did enjoy playing, but the love and ambition my mother hoped for were things I didn’t possess. I could earn my keep with it, which seemed better than a life in which you had to call someone ‘boss’ or sat in a conference room with four hundred men and women under the supervision of a painfully facile moderator.

  Behind the reception desk was a photo of the hotel manager, Berny Suess. One day soon I would look him up, but first I went outside, into sunlight, in search of the queen of my night before.

  The journey went from bus to bus. My fellow passengers were, with the exception of the occasional Latino, black. It was very hot, I had the astounding sense of being on a journey that that would never end, t
hat the bus drivers would forget to warn me of my stop and no-one would ever ask for my ticket, like a forgotten article of clothing, a glove slid down between the seat and the backrest. There were lots of traffic jams, we stood idling for a long time. Blacks entering the bus looked up in surprise, as though I were a white man who had come to claim his seat at the front, a Rosa Parks in reverse. The final bus took me into the shady hills, it was cool there, snippets of fiefdoms amid the trees. I climbed out at the campus gates, the terminus; from here the bus drove back into the city, the heat and the grime.

  I walked onto the grounds, which had the eminent air of an old park. Eucalyptus trees raised their pale arms to the sky, piles of bark lay at their feet. Under the trees students were sitting eating their lunches, their books beside them; others were wandering across the soft lawn and talking quietly to themselves, perhaps learning a role by heart; this was a spot for the elect, here you could become whatever you liked, and be the best at it. The things were veiled with a remarkable calm, the nervous haste had remained behind in the city; in these gardens the tone was set by time and reflection. It took hold of you easily, just as the neurosis of mass society did outside these gates. For a moment I reflected favorably on my mother’s suggestion that I go to college; I would be able to spend a few years of my life in a sheltered space like this, with its calm heartbeat. Gray squirrels ran across the lawn, climbed the trees, the kind Selwyn Loyd had referred to during the hunt along Bunyans Walk as an exotic species. The faculty buildings were connected by pillared walkways and broad paths, I saw a Moorish palace, something that looked like the Roman Senate, libraries in the style of the Italian Renaissance with cypresses in front, and everything so clean, so sparklingly fresh that it seemed as though it had all been put there just before I arrived. I followed the trail of students with pre-packaged sandwiches and cups of soft drinks, and entered a covered shopping mall. In the restaurant I was prepared for the shock of reunion, I had imagined seeing her bent over a table, wiping crumbs and rings off the Formica top, but the only personnel I saw were sitting at cash registers or handing out food from behind the display cases.

  Once again I found myself wandering through the eclectic architectural gardens inhabited by young people from all corners of the world, like in the color tracts handed out by evangelical Christians, with lions and lambs lying down together at the feet of an Asian girl, who is looking up in rapture at a perfectly symmetrical young Caucasian man with blue eyes: the born-again Arcadia.

  At last I located the next cafeteria, where the customers took their food from trays piled high for them along a runway of display cases and heating lamps. It was busy. Espresso machines were running at full speed, the hammering of filter holders against waste containers reminded me of the joy of Trianon. Then I saw her. She was wearing a white cap, like a nurse’s, it was pinned to her hair. She was nice to the people whose tables she cleaned. She was someone who believed in reciprocity, someone who might say things like what you give comes back to you, but I wouldn’t let that irritate me, I wouldn’t let it come between us.

  I shook myself awake from the daydream. She vanished through the swinging doors, toting trays full of cutlery and dishes. The girl from Augusta. The girl who demonstrated for mountains and trees one day, and the next wore a white uniform and shouted as she came back from the kitchen, ‘Number 28!’

  She glanced at the tray.

  ‘Meat loaf and potato salad!’

  At one of the tables, hands fly up. Two careless boys, they take their own presence here completely for granted, they have never lacked for a thing – if one day they should discover that they have some filthy disease, they will be incredulous, they will feel betrayed. Selwyn was like them, I used to envy him the good fortune to which he seemed born. And also for his parents, their hospitality, the orderliness they had created. They had made sacrifices to get that far. Considerable sacrifices. They had done without things, limited themselves. They had offered themselves up with no prospect of personal gain. Their children had parasitized upon the flesh of that sacrifice, and it had made them big, strong. They lived in the certainty that, in principle, life would be good to them. The investment of time and effort on their parents’ part expressed itself in that basic conviction, which would not be easily shaken. Life without sacrifice is a mess of shards, a ruin. It was because of his parents that Selwyn had become what he was, a person who didn’t ask himself what his place in life might be, but who claimed the room he needed calmly and unbendingly, like a tree.

  Loss was part and parcel of sacrifice. With sacrifice, you acted counter to your own interests, and gave up the right to bemoan that fact. Complaint sullied the offer, it amounted to taking back that which you had given. Yesterday, at the gallery, Sarah had wanted to be arrested; the arrest was the sacrifice. Only in that way could the act of resistance finally be awarded a crown.

  I looked at her, her light-footed, chaotic dance amid the tables, the landscape of waste, and waved until she saw me. She was startled. She put her tray down on a table and walked over to me.

  ‘You can’t come here, Ludwig! You can’t see me like this . . .’

  She shrugged in dismay and looked down at the white cafeteria uniform.

  ‘I figured, I’ll go take a look . . . see how you’re making it through the day.’

  She looked at her watch.

  ‘I’ve got at least another five hours. I’m exhausted.’

  I nodded.

  ‘But it was . . . it was worth it,’ she said. ‘With you.’

  We were silent, embarrassed suddenly – we’d known each other for such a short time, still knew so little about each other. I got up.

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come and bothered you.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said.

  ‘I have to get back. Maybe I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Oh, things, this and that. Play the tourist.’

  ‘I have to get back to work,’ she said, suddenly agitated. ‘Rush hour!’

  On my way out, there was a tap on my shoulder, and a question accompanied by a nervous smile.

  ‘Will you come to see me tonight?’

  Happiness, pouring out like light.

  ‘Yes, I’d love to,’ I said.

  I walked all the way back to Santa Monica, to the hotel at the seaside, lighter than I had ever walked before, immune to dust and heat, actually running at times. Hamburger joints and car washes and shoals of Latinos in the shade of a taco stand; I clenched my fist and choked back an ongoing shout of triumph. This was not the world as I had known it. This cascade of sensual delights that came tumbling into my soul. Back at the hotel, beside the pool, I witnessed the glimmer of splashed droplets, their sensational beauty. If this too was the world, alongside the one of drabness and habit, then which one of them was the exception? Why was this beauty usually hidden from our eyes? Why all the veils, all the trouble it took to remove them? I thought about Abgrund – was that what he was doing, tearing aside the veil? Revealing the holy of holies? Was my desire to see everything, to reduce mysteries to riddles and riddles to answers, akin to his? Was that the message ghosting about in my blood? I had to backtrack, to return to the whispering that accompanied his act of violence, to experience that which perhaps could not be understood, but which could be seen.

  The cabbie who took me to my father I paid with dollars my mother had given me, making me a child of both. Brightly colored flyers lay on the pavement before the gallery, the remains of this morning’s demonstration, the daily boycott. The dark tarpaulins hung motionless, as though they surrounded the black stone of Islam. It had to be irony, a joke on the part of the gallery owner, to exhibit a work of extreme desecration with the trappings of a shrine. The cleaving of the stone. The space which served as the office was in the back of the gallery, bathed in caustic light. At a desk was the man I had seen yesterday. An old, bedraggled Labrador lay at his feet. I wanted to talk to that
man, but first I had to work my way past the bespectacled secretary, who had adorned herself for the occasion with all the disdain in the world.

  ‘Ma’am, could I . . .’

  She raised her hand.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she said.

  She rose from her chair and slid a folder back into the rack above her head. Then she looked at me over the top of her glasses, which struck me as a strange habit, looking at people over the top of one’s glasses.

  ‘There’s something I need to ask that gentleman over there. Mr. Steinson, is it, or Mr. Freeler?’

  ‘Neither, actually,’ she said. ‘And you are from . . .?’

  ‘I’m not from anything. I just have a question.’

  The man looked at us.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he called out.

  The secretary resumed her position at the Mac, her fingers with their long, painted nails hovering over the keys like a pianist before the concert starts. The man slid his chair back and came over to me. The dog lifted its head with a sigh.

  ‘You wanted to ask something about the show?’

  ‘About the maker, actually.’

  ‘Have you seen the catalog?’

  ‘Yes. But it didn’t say whether he’s still working on his project, on Abgrund.’

  ‘As far as I know, he’s still there.’

  ‘But how do you get hold of his work? Does he bring it himself, or do you go and fetch it?’

  The dog came up behind the man, leaned against his legs. The look on the gallery manager’s face changed, became cautious, distant. Why did I want to know all this? he asked. Perhaps he suspected that I was a demonstrator, a disturber of the peace. I asked, ‘Is it possible to meet Schultz, as far as you know? That’s what I’m interested in.’

  ‘It would be easier to schedule a meeting with the President, I’m afraid. I can’t remember . . . no, no interviews, nothing.’

  ‘I saw the film,’ I said, ‘yesterday. I . . . What I’m curious about, actually, is how you should look at something like this, about what kind of art you’d call it.’