I was petrified and not strong enough to stop them, by God, not strong enough because of that stupid Andean idiosyncrasy, because of the helicopters flying over our apartment, because of the dying child, because of W.O.T.N., because of my wife and son who were waiting for me in our new life, because of the fiction that distorts everything in the most inopportune moments.
Based on a true story
Paint It, Black
BY BOB VAN LAERHOVEN
Parc de Forest
This story was originally written in English
I
Tumultuous roaring. Very picturesque. Also very annoying. Peeping through the window. Peeping is an art form. Some houses farther, in the café at the corner of the rue de Bosnie, there is a top-of-lungs argument. The curtains—red-and-white checkered—in the windows of café El Principado have been closed. I’m familiar with that sign: hoo-ha between Muslims and genuine kiekenfretters, as the residents of Brussels are nicknamed. Lots of creative curses and threats. Someone storms out of El Principado, chased by a heated individual armed with a wooden bat. Police sirens. Oh well, night business as usual in this working-class district of Brussels, the metropolis of Manneken Pis and the European Union, in that order.
I return to my atelier. I’ve equipped the veranda of the old house I’m renting with sunlamps, normally used for growing plants in winter greenhouses. The lamps are there to focus, to get the color right, to blindfold my dreams until they become paintings. Already, the title of my new painting has descended upon me: Les mangeurs des enfants. First I had Cannibals, but no, not intricate enough. Les mangeurs des enfants is disturbingly elegant. Politicians, clergymen, and teachers around the table, dissecting spastic young children. Child Eaters.
Spectacles on nose, brush in hand, anticipation in breast. What comes creeping? A void between the image I have of the picture, and the brush. The moment of magic is gone due to the argument at the café. Thank you, Brussels lowlife, thank you, followers of Allah. The ringing telephone is a God-given excuse to stop painting.
But who could be ringing at two o’clock in the morning?
* * *
“I noticed a pattern in your work, Drees De Grijse.” Serge Butoyara talks with a drawl, not a good sign. “You can’t paint a picture without at least one naked woman.” Fuck, here we go for another nighttime telephone marathon. Serge is on the warpath again, fueled by God knows how many lagers, and wondering what is more important: his hatred for all living beings or his self-hate.
“It so happens that I love naked women, Serge.”
A weird sound, something between chuckling and hissing. “So I noticed.”
“Is that the reason for your call?” Something in me is stirring. It’s caution.
“Each time I wanted to run away from home, my father threatened that he would cut off my big toe.”
“Why your big toe?” Humor him, he’ll get to the point.
“Without your big toe you can no longer walk,” Serge Butoyara clucks. “I already prepared myself for my new name: Nak Gudwa.”
“Oh?” Politeness is a wonderful thing. It makes you blank.
“It means eight toes. Why don’t you come over and have a beer? Or we can drive to Paris and order champagne.”
“Where is Jeanine, Serge?”
“Or we can fly to Stockholm. Picture it, Drees: a coal-black man like me in a pure-white world. Symbolic, don’t you think?” Serge begins humming some lyrics of the Stones’s “Paint It, Black.” Nice falsetto.
“I’ll come over one of these days and paint you in a snowy landscape, okay? Where is Jeanine?”
“She’s on her knees right before you, Drees, and she has your dick in her mouth. You’re swelling, oh yes, you’re swelling, and she sucks slowly, only she knows how to do it like that—and you’re laughing at me, you bastard, you think I’m a miserable joke.”
Time to put down the phone.
Serge has figured it out.
What happened between me and his wife.
* * *
Three nights later. Telephone ringing. Picking up.
Sniffing sounds.
“Serge?”
No answer. Humming. Then: ancestral African dialects, who knows what curse the damn Tutsi is reciting? I softly place the phone in its cradle.
Two minutes later: ring ring. Fuck off, Serge. But I know that I’ll pick up again and be nice to him.
“Hello.”
“A survival trip, Drees. The two of us. Now. A race to the finish. Parc de Forest . . .”
“And having my dick bitten off in the park by some mutts from those asshole dogfight organizers? I know better ways to get my kicks, Serge.”
“I’m aware of that.” He’s being very polite. Not a good thing.
Silence. I’m a patient man.
“But you’re out of touch as always,” he goes on. “The cops have cleaned up the place. Bye, nightly dogfights . . . Only peaceful greenery now.”
“I’m not a nature freak. Besides, it’s well past midnight. I need my beauty sleep.”
“A survival trip in the park as warriors. You and me. If we survive, we’ll split Jeanine.”
“Oh? Which part do you get?”
“Don’t try to be funny, Drees. You’re not. Never have been.”
“Fuck you, Serge, it’s one thirty. I want to sleep.”
“Coward. No-balls-man.”
“Okay, I’ll be at your den within half an hour, you simian.”
I know I shouldn’t go. Serge is a wreck. He sniffs too much ether. I can’t instill a more subtle need in him, like cocaine for instance. Ether in this day and age . . . How full of self-loathing can you be?
With Jeanine away on a trip to Italy, maybe I can convince Serge that it was her fault.
His wife seduced me, oh how she seduced me.
* * *
A confident push on the bell button. Drizzling rain in the middle of the night. A survival trip in a godforsaken Brussels park? Knowing Serge, it’ll be a booze run again. Oh well, let’s hope he has forgotten everything about Jeanine and me. He can’t keep his thoughts together for longer than ten minutes; his short-term memory is fucked. That’s why Serge is not a famous painter like me but a forger who earns lots of money, ten times the amount that I do, fucking celebrated as I am.
I don’t have to worry. Serge won’t hurt the man who sells his brilliant forgeries to Mafia men who in turn hawk them to rich nitwits.
But more than anything else: I don’t want Serge to think that I’m afraid of him. The Tutsi thinks I’m a white shithead? I’ll show him that Drees De Grijse is solid.
“Nagaibara, Drees!”
Oh Jesus, look at him standing in the doorway with his bells, his beads, a ring through his nose, his shield, his assegai. His long naked legs reflect the light of the street lanterns.
“And then they say I don’t have all five together, you simian.”
You should see his nostrils when he laughs royally, their delicate vibration.
In my car, I ask him, just to start some conversation: “Are you progressing with that forgery of the Greuze?”
That must be the source of his recent überfoolish behavior: the falsification of the Greuze is hellish work and demands tons of concentration and the lifestyle of a monk. Serge knows that. He must realize he’s wasting time being mad because of Jeanine and me. When he’s immersed in an all-demanding forgery, he knows that his wife has to freak out now and then. That’s how Jeanine is; she has not been dealt with a generous amount of patience. She doesn’t mean any serious harm.
“The Greuze is tougher than I thought, old chap.” Now he sounds like some queer old Englishman. That means his condition is worse than I thought.
“Meijers is getting impatient.”
“Meijers can drop dead and fuck his dead mother.”
“Be careful with Meijers. He would follow your advice and then blow your brains out.”
I’m the middleman between Meijers and Serge. Meijers makes tons of
money on the forgeries. For my part, I try not to complain.
Serge’s mouth sags. He smells of gin. “I’m not careful. I’d rather die than be fucking careful.”
“Okay, okay.” I shouldn’t pique him too much.
What I saw of the Greuze forging is perfect. In the Renaissance, Serge would have been a master painter. Now he’s a falsifier who has to watch his step. The art business is controlled by gangsters. They’re very civilized and all that, so they hire big guns when you’re a pain in the ass. Serge is always a pain in the ass, whether he’s sober or drunk.
He once told me he killed his father when he was ten. I don’t buy it. He has a big mouth and lots of delusions. It’s been a few days since he told me he knew about Jeanine and me, and everyone is still alive.
So why should I be afraid?
* * *
While I park the car on l’avenue du Parc, Serge mumbles: “What would you do if you thought you had cancer?”
“Spend all my money on one gigantic party with naked black women in, yeah, spatterdashes, their bellies circled by beads in the most politically incorrect colors. We’d bathe in champagne and perform exquisite and lavish hanky-panky, then take the plane to Gauguin’s grave where I would put a bullet in my head while my Negro goddesses chant some heavy gospel.”
“I think I have cancer.” Serge points at his crotch. “There. Ball cancer.”
“In civilized countries they have ball doctors.”
The whites of his eyes suddenly seem extremely bright in the light of the street lanterns that bestow a romantic touch upon Parc de Forest. In daytime, lovers walk the park lanes holding hands. People who hold hands can save the universe. Serge and I don’t hold hands.
“Serge Butoyara in a hospital?” he says. “A warrior in a sickbed that you can adjust to sixteen positions?”
“Don’t you think you exaggerate a little with that warrior pose?”
“I’m not exaggerating enough.”
“Cancer, my ass. I bet it’s just a nervous breakdown of your niggerish thingy due to stress.”
“Oh? And how, pray, has my niggerish thingy become so nervous, Drees, my dear friend?”
“How should I know?”
Serge doesn’t answer and stares past me at the trees, the strategically placed small sculptures in the park, the romantics, and so on. I’ve always considered trees to be sneaky bastards and at night they’re even worse. Greenery is for animals. I like street scenes filled with Flemish lowlife and the smell of paint.
When he gets out of the car, Serge’s plumage hooks behind the door.
“Did you think you’re Shaka Zulu? And where did you get those feathers?”
“From the Senegalese Dance Theatre. They performed in Brussels yesterday. At the Ancienne Belgique. I told them I was looking for props for a painting.”
“Wait a second.”
I take a picture of him.
In black-and-white.
* * *
My lungs are about to burst. I try to keep my eyes steady on the feathers before me. I may be almost forty-nine but I have the heart of a thirteen-year-old, give or take a few years. Serge doesn’t do a freaking thing all day except paint, munch fast food, and gulp down weird cocktails of his own making. But now it seems he has grown wings. His long, sinewy legs pump up and down with terrible efficiency.
“Serge! There! A rabbit! Spike it with your assegai!” My voice is croaking. Serge doesn’t stop, doesn’t even turn his head. I’m wheezing like an old cow. I get it: he wants to humiliate me. I have to come up with another trick to hide the fact that he’s much younger than I am and that his breath takes him much farther than mine. I’ll pretend that I’m tripping over something and—
I trip over a tree root; pain shoots through my left ankle. I cry out, with my nose engulfed in the rich smell of dung and leaves. I roll over and grasp my ankle with both hands. The pain fades slowly. I groan loudly again just to be sure that Serge gets the message. Yeah, I’m having a ball lying on the wet ground in the fine drizzle that sweeps over a very somber Parc de Forest at two thirty a.m. Loneliness, that’s what I feel. Even the street lanterns of avenue de Forest behind that wall of trees seem a galaxy away.
Serge has stopped running but doesn’t inspect my injury. The way he’s standing, he is really looking down on me. His naked chest gleams as if it’s oiled.
“Don’t shine your flashlight in my eyes, damnit . . . Help me!”
Serge doesn’t move a finger. The light from a street lantern some ten meters away polishes his assegai with an eerie glow.
“It’s because of Jeanine, Drees, that I’m feeling this way.”
“This way? What way?”
No answer. Suddenly, I’m not feeling so secure. Why didn’t I turn my heels and go home the moment I saw him standing in full African regalia in his doorway?
“Don’t start again, Serge. Better help me.”
“I know how Jeanine is. When she closes the door of our house behind her, she is not the same as when she’s with me. I understand that. I’ve learned that. If she has some booze in her delicious belly, she becomes another person. Eight times out of ten she comes back to our house unblemished, where I sit and wait. Maybe even nine times out of ten . . .”
“Serge, I think my ankle is broken. And don’t be so melodramatic! Shaka Zulu gets paid to rant like a biblical prophet on TV.”
“Those other times, those few other times, those very few other times . . . well, I don’t know. Maybe there have been other such occasions. I don’t want to know about them. They don’t understand Jeanine, they don’t know me. But you . . . you know both of us. And I am a very old-fashioned man: I value my honor.”
I try to get up. I can handle this. I must be able to look him straight in the eye.
In spite of the biting pain, I crouch up on one knee. Softly, Serge pushes me back with the shaft of his spear.
I remember clearly how excited I was when Jeanine finally gave in a month ago. Probably she was weary of my endless cajoling. Or maybe I had made her curious bragging about my prowess in bed. Jeanine turned out to be far from a disappointment. I flew on cloud nine when I left her in the drab hotel room we had rented to make it more sleazy. I was mighty flattered. But later that evening, I began worrying about Serge. Suddenly I strutted a lot less. This simpleton, this gifted artist, this goddamn Tutsi, was my friend. A friend who loved his wife definitively and was very possessive of her. Oh Jesus, I thought, no good can come from this. I telephoned Jeanine, told her precisely that. A hoarse chuckle, followed by a whisper: “It wasn’t worth it.” I didn’t ask what Jeanine meant by that and hung up.
“Surely your honor can wait till we get home—we’re not in some kind of backward bush here. We’re in Belgium, for God’s sake.”
“You could have asked me for money. I would’ve given you money to visit the most exquisite Somalian hooker in Brussels. Your hairy white body pressing against a woman the color of old copper, with muscles like an antelope—wouldn’t that have been a sight to behold?” He pushes the assegai against my belly button. “Hmm?”
“Oh yeah, a treat, definitely. You can’t blame Jeanine, Serge. I was like a cockroach to her, blinded by the light . . . It was stronger than myself.” I try to push the spear away. “Actually, I didn’t really want it to happen.” The spear doesn’t yield a millimeter.
“But still you made it happen.”
“Because Jeanine is the snake in paradise, you fool! You of all people should know that!”
“Narobong geteng ino.” The spear is traveling down my belly to my balls.
“Oh God, not this mumbo-jumbo again. This is not the moment for silly curses, Serge.”
“The correct translation is: Go fuck an ox. I can even transform you into one.”
“In that case, I prefer you slicing my throat, if you don’t mind.”
Fast as lightning he plants the spear between my legs, only a breath away from my testicles, into the ground. Ay, oh my, I can see raw pa
ssions marching over his face.
“I was just a fancy for her, Serge, but only you can truly handle her, you’re the man . . . If only you could see that.”
“That’s not what this is all about.”
“It’s exactly what this is all about.”
I struggle upright, lean against a beech tree. A flash of brown and silver. With great power the assegai is pushed into the tree, again with uncanny precision and this time only a whisper away from my head. We eyeball each other.
“You’re not going to off me, are you, Serge?” I try to stretch my leg, but the pain in my foot makes me somersault down on my ass again.
“You’re under my spell now, fish belly. You’ll never touch a woman again, and you can forget painting anything meaningful from now on.”
“Never again?”
“Never again, Mr. Pale Dick.”
“Okay. I’ll never touch a woman again, and from now on I’m a lousy painter.”
“You remain my best friend. But from now on you’ll be a lousy painter.”
We exchange crooked smiles.
Then Serge lifts me off the ground and carries me to the car. He decides to drive when it becomes clear that I can’t use the clutch with my right foot.
The whole way back I’m sweating blood and water. At this hour there are almost no living souls on the road, but Serge has only once before in his life driven a car: when he let his white Belgian father bleed to death in the bush.
* * *
“Drees, light of my eyes! I’m in the Hilton bar. Meet me here, we have to talk.”
“I’m very busy, Eliath.”
“Oh, painting a masterpiece again? Why should you? So famous already! Must be no fun being workaholic Drees De Grijse. Come on, let’s wine and dine at Comme Chez Soi.”
“I’m having it here, comme chez moi, Eliath.”
“Drees, be nice to me. I want to talk about Serge. That boy’s in great trouble. He’s a bigger hassle than the whole goddamn intifada. I’ll have to set him straight, teach him the ropes.”
“I’m on my way.”
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