It seemed unlikely that she would have gone home to her parents, but still I looked up their number in Augusta.
A woman said hello? I said hello? back.
‘Hello?’
‘This is Ludwig Unger, I’m . . .’
‘Hello?’
I hung up and tried again.
‘I guess something went wrong,’ the woman said. ‘It’s been snowing.’ She didn’t know where her daughter was.
‘Yesterday I ran across a picture of her, such a sweet child. She still is, of course, but back then, so . . . You can’t imagine that, that your heart breaks sometimes when you see what they were like.’
The child, a rank weed, should have grown no further, now it’s too late.
‘You sound too young to have children yourself. Do you have children?’
Sarah had disappeared for a while before, then she simply forgot to tell people where she was.
‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, ‘we mothers do enough worrying already. We worry so much that it’s enough for everything and everyone. That’s why we’re here, to carry the worries of the world. Sarah’s real strong, she adapts quickly. A real survivor.’
I had made contact with a white and distant land, a woman was writing her fears in the snow.
I didn’t see Sarah again. She must have wondered who had folded her clothes so neatly. Whenever the TV shows demonstrators railing against G8 summits or Olympic Games in a rogue country, I still examine the crowd. A shopping cart perhaps, with Sarah pushing it, her clenched fist raised in the air. When I dream of her, she laughs at me. Crazy Ludwig, don’t go thinking you miss me. Shame spots my skin like a disease, in her I have passed on while she is still always in me. You only get one chance, and it’s better not to end up in a position in which you have to ask a woman for forgiveness.
What I would have liked to be able to say was: I have learned to be at home wherever I am. But perhaps this comes closer to the truth: I have learned not to desire a home wherever I am. In that way, the life of a musician moving from hotel to hotel is almost tolerable. To pose no demands that exceed the possibilities of that particular place and time.
‘The language of music, people speak that wherever you go, don’t they?’
A sentence which people often use to start up a conversation at the bar. The commonplace is our natural habitat, the cliché our private lives. Sometimes an unexpected story follows, the trauma or the glory of a human life.
I learn how to drink without slurring my words. To beat back the drunkenness. Reeds beaten by the wind, the stalks bend over further and further towards you, the important thing is to remain upright no matter how the alcohol rages through your veins. I’m conscientious about my little jobs. It’s a delicate balance, I go to the trouble of getting things just the way I want them: that is to say, I sometimes insist that they give me a room and that the hotel, if at all possible, be in a favorable climate zone. Portugal, the Caribbean, Monaco, the Côte d’Azur, cities with Dior and Chanel in their coats of arms. The palaces in which, after the nobles left, the hoteliers have taken residence.
Cannes, the Majestic Barrière – the shrouded life, the sounds muffled by the thick carpets. Time eludes us with a whisper.
Biarritz, Hotel du Palais. The dazzling Atlantic light, life that passes you by like a caravan through the desert sand.
I live in little rooms beneath the eaves, on floors where the elevator never arrives, where the staff polish shoes and copper. Sometimes I am given a real hotel room, when occupancy is low.
On the beach I say hello to people I saw in the bar the night before. The women, older than me, eyes that flash like stars. They count out the shrinking capital of their beauty. I am the investor who enhances it for them. In disbelief, they receive me in their beds. With the persistent hardness of my sex I take away their shame. It fills them with pride. They are the ones who have caused that turmoil, that boiling of the bloodstream, and they will help me to get rid of it as well. That is the deal.
In Biarritz, Abijail Falcón is awaiting her divorce. She comes out of the gym, she is wearing shiny white stretch pants, she looks healthy and hungry. I’m sure she’s had her breasts done. Before I come in her, she says, ‘Is this normal? Are you sure you don’t have some kind of deviation?’
The Argentine uses herself against me, she doesn’t believe in altruism, only in pathologies.
I don’t object when she insists on buying me a new wardrobe in the shops along Avenue Edouard VII.
‘You were made for Italian fashion,’ she tells me, seated on a pouffe, her smooth brown legs crossed at the knees.
She was virtuous for twenty-four years – although she quotes Leonard Cohen with a malicious little laugh when she says give or take a night or two – but now she follows her desires.
‘Life is short, dearest, shorter than you might think.’
I sport light linen blazers by Corneliani, a light gray woolen sport coat by Zegna; I have my doubts about pegged trouser legs, but Abijail says the pants make my ass look good. I enjoy making her feel like I’m some sort of erotic toy. That’s what she’s paying for – or at least her soon-to-be-ex, the car manufacturer from Córdoba, is: the gold card has his name on it.
After a few days she reveals her predilection for straddling my face, to ride me like that, rubbing her cunt over my mouth and nose. Then she takes possession of my member. She has little to lose, the older woman, restored like a monumental mansion, her eyes full of playfulness and defeat.
I avoid sleeping with them. To wake up beside them is an intimacy I cannot bear. Two or three times I accidentally fall asleep; by early light the dilapidation is more than I can stand. All lust then immediately reverts to its opposite.
‘Stay, would you,’ says the heiress to the Krause fortune in Karlovy Vary. ‘I’ll pay you for it.’
It proves negotiable. The repression of disgust can be expressed in cash; the start of all prostitution. But I don’t stay long in Karlovy Vary, the hard, bling-bling world of the Russian mafiosi who settled there after the fall of the Wall does not particularly appeal to me.
On the volcanic island of Nevis, on the other hand, I stay for six months. I rent a well-lighted room on the outskirts of Charlestown, above an eatery where they serve excellent Creole food – beans, rice, goat meat. The jungle starts where the houses stop, my balcony is only a few meters from the edge of it. Sometimes at night you hear something heavy crash to the ground, a piece of fruit perhaps, a branch. Above the bed, which creaks like a ship in distress, a mosquito net hangs in broad pleats. I like lying under it, staring at the wooden ceiling, the fan, and thinking about the winding road that brought me here.
I play at the Four Seasons Resort, a haven of hysterical luxury. It wasn’t easy finding a job in the Caribbean. I sent around a promotional CD, with a résumé and flattering photos in which you see me seated at the grand piano in the hall of mirrors at Grand Hotel Pupp. The Four Seasons’ regular pianist has gone to Miami for six months, that’s the slot into which I fit. Beside the pool in the evening a steel band plays, I sit at an undependably tuned piano at the edge of the patio. The sea washes in with a sigh, people walk hand in hand along the surf, which is lit up by phosphorescent plankton – you can have a good time there.
I meet Tate Bloom from New York. She’s a public relations manager for the Four Seasons chain, she has an office job in New York and travels every few weeks to Nevis, the Bahamas and Costa Rica, to maintain the local contacts, as she puts it during an introductory dinner in the dining room. She hands me her business card. I hand her mine. I’m feeling rowdy and steal bites of food from her plate.
‘Please, Ludwig,’ she says, ‘try to respect the process.’
That’s enough to give me a hint of what the future has in store.
She has red hair, a Jewish-looking face, an Irish-American background. Tate is thirty, only a couple of years older than me, it will be nice to be normal again. We go to Eddy’s Bar in my little four-wheel-drive rental. The music is loud
, we can barely hear each other. A black man comes over and sits down at our table, he talks to Tate and a few times fetches us bottles of beer. He puts Tate’s glass on a napkin and pours her beer slowly. His dedication is over the top. He’s friendly to me. Being desired by two men does her good, she laughs and glows. Her light slip-ons gleam like silk. The polish on her toenails is still fresh. I tell the man it was nice of him to bring us beer, but that I’d like to continue my conversation with the lady now, without him around. He gets up, starts to say something, but then leaves without a word of protest. Tate is aghast, she says, ‘Do you know who that was? The owner!’
‘He was putting the make on you. Three is a crowd.’
She forgets her decorum for a moment, she bursts into laughter. In the car we kiss. She smells sweet, her teeth are perfect. American. Like new.
‘I have to get back to the hotel,’ she says, ‘I can’t . . .’
The sky is wide open, its cool breath pours over us. I park in front of the Creole restaurant and she goes upstairs with me. Her resistance has an end. She whispers nasty things in my ear, words I’ve never heard that way before. I push into her a little ways, then there’s an obstacle.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
I’m drunk and boundless but she refuses, the tampon stays in. She exhibits an exciting pattern of surrender and refusal. She kneels in front of me on all fours, her body floating like a pale spot in the satin of the night. I smear saliva on my sex and put it in her with short, steady thrusts. Her little cries are broken by the pillow. She holds her hand back and presses it against my pelvis, a brake. I’m dizzy with pleasure. The jungle begins to throb. A cry rings out there, then another, then the tense silence returns, the bated breath.
She moans.
‘Oh, fuck. Oh, goddamn.’
We ride the rhythm of spasms. The blue mist in the room surrounds us like a shell.
She shakes me awake, frightened.
‘What’s that?’ she whispers.
‘Monkeys,’ I whisper back.
They move in little bands along the forest’s edge. Sometimes one of them will dare a leap onto the roof. They have flap-ears and black, serious little faces. I go to the window and see them in the weak, peach-like light, moving cautiously from tree to tree.
‘I have to get back,’ Tate says nervously. ‘You have to give me a ride.’
I drop her off along the lane of palms that leads to the Four Seasons; she doesn’t want the staff to see her now and know that we were together. She chooses a shortcut across the golf course, her heels punch holes in the mossy grass. She takes her shoes off, holds them in one hand and walks towards the first row of apartments, then disappears from sight.
That first night determines our routine. We sleep together, we wait till morning, the rustling of the monkeys at the forest’s edge, then I take her back to the hotel. During my time on the island she flies in from New York four times, for a couple of days. The last time she brings with her a new player in the game: Todd Greene, a designer, a New Yorker like her, they’re going to get married in December. The fisher – men have drawn their sloops up onto the sand for the season, you know that there is a skeleton of ancient trusses and planks beneath the thick layers of paint, the green, the blue, the yellow, the names Praise Him, Morning Star, Light of My Eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I should have told you before.’
I wonder to myself whether you could swim to St. Kitts, how long that would take. Or whether you would perhaps sink halfway, in peace, swaying like seaweed.
‘I wanted to be honest,’ she says, ‘I didn’t want to keep anything from you, but you’re a risk. Haven’t you ever noticed that? That women want to save you? I think – I know you won’t let yourself be saved. You enjoy the attention, the worrying about you, but you don’t want to be saved. That’s your life. I’ve thought about it, about a life with you, but I kept seeing scenes of people being dragged down while they were trying to rescue someone else.’
A silence. Then, ‘That wasn’t very kind. I’m sorry.’
‘I guess . . . I guess I thought it might amount to something.’
‘What do you mean, Ludwig? What exactly might it have amounted to?’
‘A possibility.’
‘That’s not particularly reassuring. A possibility. A woman wants to hear a bit more than that, you know. What kind of possibility were you thinking of ?’
It took a long time before I came up with the answer. Then I said, ‘The possibility of a roof over my head.’
I went on with my life as a liability. Many things were relegated to the background. During those years I was the lover of wives, widows, women who said but I’m old enough to be your mother. That was what I goaded them into, to care for me, to feed and clothe me, to be my mother. The only way that could happen was along the road of sexuality. I couldn’t stand them when they acted like nervous schoolgirls or when I saw them paying too much attention to their appearance before we went out to dinner at a restaurant. I preferred to have them be a bit indifferent towards my person, but to take full possession of my body.
I had, generally speaking, little to fear from them, as little as they did from me: we were not out to fool ourselves. Concerning our position with regard to the other, there was to be no doubt. Upright statements of infatuation I responded to by putting an end to relations. Emotions disturbed the process. An older woman who asks may I hold your hand? and then begs for your love is a terrible thing to see. It is disgusting. I was ashamed of myself then for having prompted that disfigurement, for being part of that disfigurement.
It was an equilibrium that demanded a great deal from both parties. The woman who was best at it was Lotte Augustin, a German. I met her on the Lagonissi peninsula, close to Athens. She had a life to go back to, which helped. She was the ironic beauty from the television series, who appears whenever a murder has been committed upon a wealthy industrialist – the detectives repress their awe of crystal and Japanese wallpaper as they enter the salon. As soon as the widow appears, blonde, a red suit-dress, rings glistening on her fingers and looks that are the subject of professional maintenance, you know who did the killing.
That Lotte Augustin is staying at this particular resort says a great deal, but not everything. The expenditure of one thousand euros a night for a Junior Waterfront Suite with private pool must not feel like the loss of a limb. Not even when you extend your stay twice, for a week each time. After that she goes back to her life, her work, to her marriage to a CDU federal state minister that had remained intact first for the sake of his career, then for the sake of the children, and now simply because it has already remained intact for so long. Against the tanned skin above her breasts, gleaming and redolent of suntan lotion, there hangs a little golden cross. She is not a church-goer, but sometimes she prays for her children’s souls.
I feel her prying eyes in the piano bar. She smiles distantly at me from behind a magazine. Later on she says, ‘I thought you were German.’
‘My grandfather was German. I’m half Dutch, half Austrian. Two times almost a German. Does that count?’
She shakes her head.
‘Fraternal peoples.’
She bears an air of fluid melancholy. She has sold the shares in the health-care interim management company she set up, for three and a half million euros, she still holds a position on the board of supervisors, but has turned the daily management over to a woman in her early forties – she believes that women have to help each other climb the ladder of success. She spends a lot of time phoning from her recliner beside the infinity-edge pool. I float in it and try to remain motionless. From that position the water of the pool blends perfectly into that of the Saronic Gulf. None of the people she talks to know that she is almost naked. Her heavy breasts hang a bit to one side of her chest; when you lift them, the skin in the creases beneath is pale. Her areolas are almost black from the sun, the prominent nipples always erect. Beside the recliner is an ashtray with a layer of sand in i
t; a skyline of Dunhill filters marked with red lipstick. When she speaks German she is forceful and to the point – when she switches to another language her personality changes along with it. In English, she is less confident. She hesitates over certain expressions and words, sometimes she will finish a sentence in German, irritatedly. She swims without getting her hair wet. I lie in wait like an alligator. Her blue eyes glisten. Her pubic hair is thin and closely shorn, she pays careful attention to the magazines and the latest fashion. We mate on the broad marble steps of the pool. The water makes her dry, later it gets slipperier. She lays her head back on the sun-warmed marble. She wears waterproof mascara. The light makes its way into her open mouth, I see gold molars, worn fillings, I avoid the flow of her breath. All the scents of age can be masked, except for this one. The water laps against the pool’s edge, sparkling drops slide from her oiled skin.
The obscenity of this intercourse excites and repels me. The longer I put off my orgasm, the longer I can keep the worst of the repulsion at bay – the confrontation with suspicions about my own perversity, the reasons for things that someone my age is not supposed to do. The shame concerning the latter, until I am back in my room, until sleep has passed. The next day the feelings of lust return unabated: the climb to the high dive, the fear and the delight just before the leap, the fall, with an exploding heart.
Lotte Augustin accepts this pattern of comfort, ecstasy and escape. She says, ‘This must be a lot stranger for you than it is for me.’
It is an uncomfortable, interesting observation. Her desire for me, so much younger than her, in the flower and recklessness of my youth, is healthy. Everyone wants to possess youth, it is a respectable longing. That I make love to a woman who is almost sixty, on the other hand, is sick. But all forms of human intercourse, no matter how different in kind, tend towards a certain equilibrium. And so we cancel out her age against my sickness. Biology against pathology.
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