Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

‘You should have more of me in you. This is pathetic. Tiring. Please just go away.’

  I stood up, holding on to the edge of the table, and shut my eyes for a moment. I took a deep breath.

  ‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘You sent me a postcard. I’d just turned fifteen. You wrote that I was supposed to love you. Why?’

  ‘I wrote that?’

  ‘Love me, on a postcard from Colombia.’

  He frowned and puckered his lips in disbelief.

  ‘Says nothing to me. Must have been someone else.’

  The expanding star filled my chest, my body. To kick the life out of him, slowly and methodically, singing euphorically all the while.

  ‘You’re not the first,’ he said. ‘Trying to define yourself by giving me a whipping! So that’s why you came.’

  O delirium! O infernal tumor in my head!

  He swung his arms and parried like a boxer.

  ‘Ho! Whoa! Ho! Came here to make mincemeat out of your old man, huh? Well just try it, patsy boy.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Look at yourself. Disgusting. I don’t have to whip you. You did that yourself a long time ago.’

  ‘Whoo! Right to the head! Drink up, boy. Talk to me. Months go by around here without me hearing one intelligent, well-put word. Everything around here’s a commodity, every rock, every shoelace, every word. I don’t understand the Indians, and what I do understand I don’t like. I’d rather have Negroes. They’re stronger, better, but almost impossible to get. The Negro doesn’t like it here, the interior. They stay on the coast. And you can hardly blame him, the Negro, for wanting to be at liberty to fry his fish and fornicate at will. Around here we all rot away. Everything. It’s a digestive tract. Illiterate insects eat your books, grind Der Wille zur Macht and any old operating manual into the same powder. Your watch and a truck crumble away under the same corrosion. It’s fascinating. In this world, where you’re dead to the world, you can actively take part in your own nonexistence. In fact, you’re not even there anymore, you look around in amazement at everything that’s still standing, at everything that keeps itself going on the last shreds of rage and willpower. The idealist and the believer see beauty and meaning in that, in nature, but those things can be conquered by the will. The focused will. That destroys them. But indifference, indifference always beats you in the end. Always. That’s the armor the gods have adopted, indifference. Stone for stone, I blow those thrones right out from under their asses. They’ve scared us so badly with their abysses! The gods on high, they laughed themselves silly. But they weren’t expecting to see a horizontal abyss, the abyss that stretches out like a yawn! All his life a person fears the depths, but dies on the flats. You understand, boy, that’s my meaning, that’s the meaning of all destruction. Only destruction has a permanent character.’

  How long must I have listened to that crackling broadcast? I had already heard the sacred earnestness of his words outside there, in the scream of stone. I drank and listened and went under in the man who was my father.

  Later we left the hut, into the humming night, beneath that big yellow moon come out to play. In the depths below the fires were going out. He was staggering out in front of me, down the slope, towards the only place where a light was still shining. We climbed the steps to a half-open barrack where a pockmarked Negress was serving aguardiente to the last of the workmen. When he stepped out of the dark onto the rough plank floor, they all fell still.

  ‘Hola, campesinos!’ he roared.

  They nodded. The woman filled two glasses. The men were sitting at wooden trestle tables covered in glasses and bottles. The generator behind the building was throbbing off-beat with the Vallenato from the speakers. On the makeshift counter, beneath a bright light, was a bowl containing chunks of meat in red sauce. Occasionally the woman waved a flyswatter over it.

  ‘Maria, donde están las chicas?’ Schultz asked.

  The woman shrugged, then shouted something to one of the men. Shuffling to his feet, he disappeared from the circle of light. Later they arrived, the camp followers. Fatigued faces, their dark eyes thick with sleep. Schultz’s favorite was a Creole girl with thin calves and little breasts that were round as balls. He bared his ruined teeth.

  ‘I taught this one to eat with a knife and fork.’

  She sat on his lap and called him Papita. Beneath her petticoat you could see her panties. The other two aimed their attentions at me, but when the conversation died after only a few words, they left me alone. The men seemed to breathe easier now that there were women around. Schultz grabbed his girl by the scruff of the neck. She thrashed about like a wild kitten. I tried to keep my eyes open for danger, but the burning in my gut made me careless. I stamped on the plank floor in time to the music.

  ‘These here are the stupidest assholes in the whole world!’ Schultz called out from behind the girl. ‘They don’t know a damned thing, but give them a bottle and they think they know it all.’

  When he laughed, all conversation stopped.

  ‘As soon as it’s got Indian blood in it, it’s fucked. No use for anything. Listless slaves. Not a thought in their heads. Aimless, tragic peoples. Maria!’

  She filled his glass, the captain of this ship of the damned.

  ‘Take Conchita!’ he shouted. ‘A pussy like a baby’s. You do like pussy, don’t you, boy? You’re not a faggot, are you? Hahaha! Tengo un hijo maricón!’

  The women chattered with laughter, the men flashed their teeth uneasily and avoided my eyes.

  ‘Did your mother make a faggot out of you, boy? Is that what you came here to tell me? Daddy, I’m a turd-burglar? A chip off the old block, that boy, maybe he’s more like me than I thought. I fucked that mommy of yours up the old poop-chute too. That changed the expression on her face, put a little color in that pale complexion!’

  My fists shot out like stilettos, one, two, three times, left and right, he fell backwards onto the floor, girl and all. He lay there laughing on the planks, the blood running from his mouth. The girl scrambled to her feet and ran away. No-one did anything, no-one dared to do anything, an icy calm had descended on me. He tried to pull himself up on a table leg.

  ‘You’ve got a mean punch for a faggot.’

  My foot shot out and caught him in the ribs. He writhed like an eel on a glowing grill.

  ‘Filthy little bastard!’ he panted. ‘Tell that slut to come back here. Tell her to come back, goddamn it!’

  Lying on the planks he looked up at me, the dying cock in Yaviza flashed through my mind. The men kept their eyes averted, no-one looked at us, a fallen emperor is more dangerous than an emperor on horseback. I went back and sat down. Groaning, he maneuvered himself into a sitting position. Maria brought him another glass and filled mine. I wiped my fist on my trousers. Bent over, holding a hand against the side of his chest, he sat there spitting gobs of blood onto the floor. The girl knelt down in front of him, he slapped her hand away when she tried to stroke his face. I pulled my chair over, put my face down close to his.

  ‘I waited for you the whole time,’ I said. ‘I looked for you everywhere, I thought I saw you everywhere. Is that him, does he look like that? No, he doesn’t walk that way. He has to be a lot taller. Brown eyes, not blue ones. When you’re missing something as major as a father, you’re always cutting and pasting, wherever you are. You believe in miracles. Who says I’m not going to run into him here, today? You dream up things that might give him a reason to show up. The story always makes perfect sense, except he never shows up, that’s the only thing wrong with the stories, that he refuses to show up.

  ‘Even earlier than that, the years when you wonder: does he think about me like I think about him? Am I in his thoughts? If I listen closely, can I hear him whisper? Are we able to get in touch with each other in some magical way, through dreams, telepathy? But I only dreamed of you as a phantom, as the silent ghost from A Christmas Carol. Never a face, never that. These, I knew when I woke up, these were the ghosts of impotence and frus
tration. That’s the half that’s missing. That’s what you left behind. Nothing but sorrow and misery. And this, this here, is nothing but the same thing to the umpteenth degree. You spread that nihilistic trash of yours like some contagious disease. The only thing you believe in are the things that are broken. In things that are ravaged. The only thing you can count on is the blackest of the black. Mishmash of moral colorblindness and poignant simplism. Mediohombre, that’s what I called you. How fitting that turned out to be!’

  ‘Let’s drink to that!’ he shouted. ‘Mediohombre!’

  ‘Half a man . . .’

  ‘Mediohombre!’

  His hand had disappeared under the girl’s skirt. She pushed it away, but it kept crawling up between her legs. He was strong, he was capable of bearing things. That was the one thing I admired about him, the kind of admiration that’s tied up with fear; that he endured his life, spared no-one and nothing, and never looked back. And from the maelstrom of the night I fished up yet another clear thought – that finally, once I had returned out of this wilderness, I would no longer have any desires in which he played a role. Not a single expectation would survive this night. Where all feeling has been crushed there opens up a luxurious amount of space for the horrific, delicious mercy of indifference, that guise worn by the gods.

  I awakened with a start because of something moving beside me. We were lying in the corner of a hut, through the thin mattress I could feel the hard dirt floor. She rolled onto her other side. On her brown back was the tattoo of a shackled hand, clenched in a combative fist. The heat pressed me against the mattress. I struggled my way out of that nest of fleas and venereal disease and dressed quickly. I left thirty dollars behind on the spot where I had lain. Shoelaces untied and shirt unbuttoned, I left the hut in search of water. By the barrack I saw Ché Ibarra, standing in the shade of the wall. The scraping of metal claws grated in my ears. The mountain looked down on us and bled. Forgive my father, for he knows not what he does.

  ‘Una hora más,’ I told Ibarra.

  In the barrack I drank three mugs of cool water from a barrel. This was what the river’s song was about. I climbed the path to his house. He was sitting in a chair, in a dingy pair of boxer shorts too baggy for his legs. It was impossible to tell where the piss stain stopped. The skin around his eyes was black and swollen, I had hit him squarely. He was holding one hand to his side.

  ‘I think I broke a couple of them,’ he said.

  His white calves were covered in sores. The jungle was in the process of devouring him. There was not much left of the big man from the stories. The Creole girl was making coffee over a fire outside. She squatted there, waiting for the lid of the dented kettle to start rattling. I picked up my backpack and put it on the table.

  ‘I was supposed to give this to you,’ I said.

  From the bag I produced the plastic box I had carried with me throughout that long hike. I put it down in front of him and zipped up my pack.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s for you.’

  His red eyes shot back and forth between my face and the outsized sandwich box. His hands shaking, he took the rubber band off the box, removed the lid and looked in it.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Ashes?’

  ‘Ashes.’

  ‘Not her ashes . . .?’

  ‘Her ashes.’

  He pulled his hand back as though the box contained a deadly adder.

  ‘Jesus Christ . . .’

  ‘It was her dying wish.’

  ‘Just like Marthe,’ he whispered. ‘Just like her . . .’

  ‘She never understood why you went away,’ I said.

  He doubled up even further.

  ‘She never stopped loving you.’

  And with those words I put on my backpack, said Bye now, and pulled closed behind me not one door, but many.

  That was more or less the way I told it to Linny Wallace. Some things I left out, others I toned down, but it was along those lines that the story spun itself out. In the restaurant they were setting the tables for breakfast. A man walked down the corridor, pulling a vacuum cleaner. We both felt like a gas station that is open twenty-four hours a day; even our clothing, our hair was tired. We climbed the stairs, at the door to her room there was a moment’s hesitation, then she took my hand and said, ‘Come.’

  We undressed, on far sides of the bed. We averted our eyes from each other’s nakedness. I lay curled up slightly, my back to her. The light smell of soap when her body moved against mine. She put her arms around me. Then the shaking started. It came in bigger and bigger waves. I lay there shaking like a Parkinson’s patient, my teeth chattering, dug up out of an avalanche, defrosted. It seemed like it would never stop.

  ‘Shh, shh, oh, take it easy now,’ whispered the woman who was holding me.

  Gradually the trembling decreased, her soft, soothing hands caressed my upper arms and chest, she stroked the tremors out of me. And that was how we fell asleep, the gray morning light leaking through the curtains.

  The cemetery around St. George’s had been full for years, but Warren received a spot in the Feldman family grave, a stone sepulcher sealed with iron doors. The outside walls and tower of the Anglican church were built from the round pieces of flint which the sea brought ashore; it was a large church, the largest building in Alburgh, like a mother hen spreading the down of eternity over the last of the believers. I was the first to arrive. I had on my charcoal-gray suit with a black tie. I was welcomed by the priest, Lindsay Temple, who didn’t seem quite sure she recognized me. My mind was almost sagging out of my body with fatigue. We ran through the program, between the prayer and the reading I would go to the piano and play the Marcia Funebre Sulla Morte d’un Eroe. She wrote down every word.

  ‘Beethoven, right?’

  ‘Ludwig von Beethoven, yes.’

  At Catherine’s request, her own parish priest was also taking part in the ceremony. My head was a bowl full of sparkling wine. Catherine nodded and sat down in the pew in front of me. She was flanked by two daughters, dark as shadows. In the row across the aisle was Joanna, sitting between two Titans and a Titaness. The question of the day: who had most right to the deceased? Who got to claim his memory? Rustling, shuffling, the church was filling up. I saw Terry Mud, wearing his tie as though he’d used it to hang himself. I’d ask him later whether I could stay in his caravan for a while.

  The rose window behind the altar was weeping holy tears of stained glass. Arrows pierced a martyr. The people sat down, the doors closed. Lindsay Temple began to speak. Resurrection, eternal life. He who today we are bearing to his grave. His life in a nutshell, a nod to his second, a nod to his first wife – strict protocol. The chuckling in the pews when his seawall was mentioned. I was dreaming with my eyes open. How once I had left my sleeping body and shot to the clouds like an arrow, higher, past the spheres surrounding Earth, like light past other heavenly bodies, a journey without return, until suddenly her voice sounded, my mother calling Lud-wig! With a start I fell back into my body, straight up in bed; startled, I shouted Yeah?, but nothing but silence and darkness surrounded me.

  ‘I would like to ask Ludwig Unger, a good friend of the family, to come up, he will play for us . . .’

  I play the funeral march faultlessly, I could play it in my sleep. Frozen butterflies extend their wings – melting into tears they rain down on the people. For Warren, for Marthe, I have nothing better to give.

  More Bible readings, the words and formulas like lids too small to contain the bulk of absence. Catherine turns to me and smiles so that my heart breaks. The Lord’s Prayer, we stand up, I hold on to the pew in front of me.

  Amid the sunken graves, the Celtic crosses, stones carved with ships, the people form a hedge, row after row, not everyone is able to see how the coffin disappears into the crypt. People pat my arms, pat me on the back, nicely played, nicely played. The bearers return from the darkness, Cath
erine and her daughters have remained. The cold bites my face, the wind coming off the land rustles between the graves and the bare, gleaming branches. Women sniff. Catherine takes an eternity, after this there will be nothing but dream and memory. The final touch, skin on wood. Shrunken, waxen, she returns from the underworld. Now Joanna and her children disappear into the grave. When they come back, a voice announces the further proceedings. The crowd disperses, later there will be whiskey and music, Catherine and the children would appreciate the pleasure of your company.

  Before I could drink to the dead, before I could stamp my feet to the music and enter into loud conversation, there was something I had to do. I went back to the Whaler. In my room I opened the wardrobe and pulled down my suitcase. I took the plastic bag with the urn out of it. Then I left the room.

  At the Readers’ Room I walked up onto the esplanade. The sea lay glistening calmly below. I walked up past the pier and the winter storage area for the beach cabins to the start of Kings Ness. Warren Feldman’s hill, the realm of King Knut. Sand and stones crunched beneath my leather soles. I didn’t follow the curve of the road but cut straight through, through the tall grass towards the rampant growth of thorn bushes in the distance, atop the cliff. A house had once stood there. It was there that I brought her, and I thought back on that other inurnment, that plastic box full of ashes from the kitchen of Aldair Macmillan’s mother, who had consented in surprise when I asked to shovel them from her oven. A flash of intuition, perhaps, to burden whatever remained of his conscience, to force him to remember.

  A few yellow flowers amid the gorse, flashing like medals on a uniform. From far away, a voice was carried on the wind, someone bellowing Mol-ly! I walked close to the edge; there below you could see the remains of Warren’s seawall. After him the deluge. I needed to ask Catherine about precisely how he handled all that later, when things quieted down a bit.