It cut me in two like a river. On the one shore, Joe was the one I loved like no other; on the other he was my opponent, because he had hijacked my fondest dream. I didn’t understand how those things could exist side by side and even trade places in the wink of an eye. How mistaken I had been: I had seen Christof as my greatest rival – and that was what Joe had become.
And P.J. grew only more beautiful. She wore a thin, light-gray woollen suit-dress, her black heels clicked on the paving stones as she walked out of the church in front of me. Beneath the waisted jacket her buttocks screamed to be caressed; above them, on her lower back, rested Joe’s hand, just as the uncallused hand of Lover Boy Writer had rested there not long before, and Jopie Koeksnijder’s before that. She had her mother’s high waist.
Girls were weeping around the grave. I knew a few of them from school, Harriët Galama and Ineke de Boer for example, even the horrendous Heleen van Paridon – who, for as long as I’d known her, had resembled a neurotic housewife with a dusting obsession – and many others I had never seen before. Engel’s fellow students. They wore mad outfits that probably passed at the art academy for expressions of highly individual taste; that they all looked pretty much the same in them was beside the point. One extremely tall girl in big yellow basketball shoes was taking photographs. Beneath her brown tweed jacket she wore an unnerving candy-pink skirt; the combination with her pretty face made my eyes hurt.
It was with such women that Engel had consorted since leaving Lomark – he had slept with them on mattresses on the floor, with background music by manic-depressive musicians with long hair and a death wish. After the deed they ate olives or chocolate and experienced a deep sense of uniqueness and irreproducibility. Now that Engel was dead, those girls came to Lomark and were amazed at his provincial roots and his father who looked like a bicycle racer from the days of black and white film. Eleveld stood in the inner circle and listened intently to Nieuwenhuis who, because it was Eastertide, read aloud from Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. He again shared with us the mystery of eternal life: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. This was his outflanking manoeuvre, to assuage the pain and puzzlement of death. Diametrically opposed to this you had Musashi, upright and in full armour, for whom the Way of the samurai is the resolute acceptance of death. According to Nieuwenhuis, trumpets would sound before we were resurrected to immortality; Musashi says nothing of things of which he has no knowledge. What he does know is the way one should die: ‘ . . . when you lay down your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon yet undrawn.’
What we do find, in the final section, ‘The Void’, is this: ‘What is called the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. Man’s knowledge cannot fathom this.’ Musashi offers us one way out of ignorance: ‘By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void.’ That was precisely why Nieuwenhuis and the Apostle Paul rolled off me like water off a duck’s back: they didn’t start their reasoning with things that exist, but with a nutty kind of messianism.
I heard jackdaws flying over, by reflex I looked up to see if I could spot Wednesday. A fire of longing roared in my chest.
‘But thanks be to God,’ Nieuwenhuis said with a dying fall, ‘which giveth us the victory, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.’
Meanwhile, Engel was still dead, and the bottomless realization began to dawn that I would never, ever see him again.
At Het Karrewiel they were serving white buns with ham or cheese. There is comfort in the hunger we feel when we have lowered a loved one into the grave; hunger is unmistakably a sign that you’re alive. The eating of white buns distinguishes us from those to whom we have said farewell; we eat, we live – they are eaten, they are dead. With white buns in Het Karrewiel we return with a feeling of relief from the gates of Hades; our time has not yet come.
I had hoped we would stick together that afternoon, but everyone went their separate ways. Joe walked P.J. back to the White House, Christof took off with grooves of bitterness at the corners of his mouth – he wasn’t yet accustomed to this unusual rivalry at the heart of the friendship. I sat at home in that stupid suit and knew that the world had changed beyond recovery. And this wasn’t the end, there was a great deal yet to come. With Engel’s death, a crucial stabilizing force had disappeared from our social construct; I had a strong sense of more decay on its way, not much farther down the line.
At six o’clock I opened a can of frankfurters and shook them onto a plate, which I put in the microwave. Before eating them I dragged them through the mustard, because the taste of frankfurters always makes me think of morbidly deformed chickens in the death camps of the factory farms. Schnitzel or frying sausage produces the same disturbing awareness, with one phrase in particular haunting my mind: ‘pig pain’. As I ate I listened distractedly to that art program on Channel 1, the one where the interviewers are primarily interested in the life of the artist and almost never probe into his work. The girls I had seen today around Engel’s grave, I suspected, would end up someday on programs like that, reflecting with the earnestness of a child staring at its first turd in the potty. On the radio you almost never heard anyone talk about things like arm wrestling or bulldozers, those were worlds hidden to them.
Halfway through the frankfurters, an interview was announced with the author of a new novel, About a Woman: Arthur Metz. It took a couple of seconds for it to hit me: this was Lover Boy Writer. In my thoughts I had never referred to him by his real name, that would have implied that I recognized him as a man of flesh and blood whom P.J. had loved. The pseudonym helped me to keep my distance from that hated fact. First they played a song, then the female interviewer came back. I listened tensely.
‘With us here today we have the poet and writer Arthur Metz, whose novel About a Woman appeared last week. He’s here to talk about that book. Welcome, Arthur.’
A vague crackling in the mike.
‘Come a little closer to the microphone, Arthur, so we can hear you. Maybe it’s good to start off by noting that the narrator of your book is a writer who, I believe, resembles you rather closely. But the first question that came to mind when I read your novel was where you found the female character, Tessel. She’s the tragic heroine of the story, and I had the idea that she stood for the modern woman with all her troubles: the demands of eternal youth, for example, and the constant struggle against overweight, which I think a lot of women will be able to identify with. Did you intend About a Woman to be a modern novel of manners?’
It took a moment before a reply came, the writer cleared his throat rather loudly. The first audible word was ‘uuh’.
‘I could have given the book another title,’ he said then, ‘Whore of the Century or something, but my publisher, uuh, didn’t think that was a good idea.’
‘Why Whore of the Century?’ the interviewer asked. ‘That sounds like a personal vendetta. Is that what it is, a personal vendetta?’
‘There are no great novels without a personal vendetta.’
‘But did the events in the book actually happen to you, is that what you’re trying to say?’
‘I, uuh . . . I don’t write anything that doesn’t fall within the possibilities of my own existence.’
Metz seemed to squeeze his words out one by one, like a turtle laying its eggs in a hole in the sand.
‘That’s an awfully sweeping statement. Could you be a little more specific? What do you mean by the possibilities of your own existence? Do you mean that in this book you’ve described the facts as they could have taken place?’
‘Uuh . . . Yes.’
‘So you’re saying this is pure fiction?’
‘At a certain point, many writers have to deal with a woman who forces herself upon them as their muse. Tessel lives in the terrible realization that she is empty inside and, at the same time, that she does not fill anyone else’s life with, uuh . . . love. She wants to be the most important thing in som
eone else’s life, in order to forget herself. And then preferably a, uuh . . . writer.’
‘But why does she want that?’
‘She dispels her feelings of emptiness and, uuh . . . futility by, on the one hand, fits of bulimic gorging, and by seduction. On the other. She looks for a writer in order to be immortalized as his muse, in order to, uuh . . . recover her self-worth. Against the emptiness. A dangerous and extremely beautiful parasite . . . in fact.’
‘Well yes, as I read your book I also had the feeling that she is both monstrous and helpless. Somewhere you write that she is a ”muse by calling”, a muse without an artist to immortalize her. Have you ever met anyone like that yourself, someone who perhaps inspired you in the writing of this book? I mean, it has such overwhelming autobiographical intensity.’
After a fairly long silence you could hear the spark wheel of a lighter scraping against flint, followed by cigarette smoke being inhaled with obvious pleasure into the tiniest branches of the bronchia.
‘First we’re going to listen to a song,’ the interviewer said. ‘Here is the lovely “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen.’
It was much too nice a song for this shit day: full, welcome tears ran down my cheeks. Far too soon we returned to the interview with the writer.
‘While the music was playing, Arthur, you told me that you wrote this book within a very short period. Was there a reason for that?’
Metz mumbled something about necessity and rage; in fact he didn’t seem to want to talk about his book at all.
‘You also deal here with a very controversial subject,’ the interviewer tried. ‘You state that physical violence is the logical conclusion of all intimate contact. The scenes in which the writer assaults the girl Tessel are among the most distasteful in the book, but perhaps even more shocking is that you seem to say that such violence is justifiable.’
‘Violence, uuh . . . is much more multifaceted than many people think. Perhaps one would do better to look first at the conclusion, in other words at the results of human actions, before deciding what is violent and what is not. That imposes nuance on the, uuh . . . absolute distinction between culprit and victim.’
Then he repeated the word ‘victim’, more to himself it seemed, as though it were a new word to him.
‘But there’s no way to justify physical violence against women, is there?!’
‘I, uuh . . . I’m not justifying anything,’ was the weary reply, ‘I’m recording a process. As a, uuh . . . Lover of the Truth.’
With this the interview was more or less over. The irritated female interviewer tried to bring the writer back to life with a few more of her surges of moral current, but he was sunk in the morass of gloom and contempt.
I was alight with curiosity about the book. I knew that the character of Tessel was made after P.J.’s image, and I had found it exciting to try to decipher the writer’s messages across the airwaves. I strongly suspected that he had encoded P.J.’s surname, Eilander, in the first name Tessel/Texel, after the island. What’s more, Metz demonstrated the see-through rhetoric of the chronically self-authenticating depressive, and that fascinated me.
Three cold frankfurters still lay on the plate, the mustard was showing traces of the dark crust that, within twenty-four hours, would begin to crack.
The next morning I went to Praamstra’s bookshop, which specialized in the better Christian literature and had an excellent assortment of titles such as A Personal Talk with God or The Gospel of Jesus in the Life of Your Child, and ordered the novel About a Woman. Author: Arthur Metz. Delivery time: ‘Usually two days, but it might take a week, just so you know.’
If I hoped to make even a ripple at the international arm-wrestling tournament in Poznan on 6 May, I was going to have to be in top form. Joe was convinced that this time Islam Mansur would really be there; a shot at the first prize of fifteen thousand smackers was something he wouldn’t want to miss. I intensified my training program as I felt necessary, and although I saw Joe regularly during the week – he often spent the weekend in Amsterdam with P.J., or at Dirty Rinus’s working on his bulldozer – I told him nothing about what I’d heard on the radio. What is lacking cannot be counted, saith the Preacher.
On Thursday, About a Woman was waiting for me at Praamstra’s: 316 pages, that will be twenty-nine-fifty please, thank you very much. P.J. would certainly see the book in Amsterdam, and it was very much the question whether she would be pleased about that – the advance radio review did not bode well for her. It felt like I was toting someone else’s confidential medical files around with me, and when I got home I started reading right away. The story interested me least of all; I was looking for the character of Tessel. I found her in the chapter entitled ‘Puke Girl’, which began by sketching the socio-cultural background against which eating disorders made their appearance:
In 1984, the readers of Glamour magazine were asked what it was that would make them happiest. We would expect their response to have been: wealth, pleasure and holiday destinations with guaranteed sunshine. But that is naïve: 42 percent said that weight loss was the key to happiness. It was in that same decade that Tessel was born to South African parents. She was sensitive, intelligent and fat. Tessel grew up in a society in which being overweight was condemned as a visible sign of weakness and a lack of self-control.
The cult of the low-fat body followed on the heels of the increased self-determination of women – the foodstuffs industry, clothing and cosmetics producers responded with a compulsory model that made slenderness synonymous with desirability and success. In the history of mankind, no other period is found with such rigid directives for the ideal proportions of the human body. No dictatorial system has ever succeeded in imposing such an all-inclusive Körperkultur; the bodily ideal of the Third Reich was made possible at last by modern industry. Within the commercial propaganda, a healthy, slender body with a well-balanced BMI (body mass index) is the only vehicle for positive self-awareness, friendships with other healthy, attractive individuals and professional self-realization.
When Tessel began awakening to her own sexuality, bathroom mirrors and reflecting glass surfaces in public spaces entered her life. With her blond curls and pretty, broad face reminiscent of Eskimo girls, she was not unattractive. Her locomotor apparatus, however, was swaddled in a layer of fat that was visibly thicker than that of the other (largely white) girls in her class. Her kneecaps receded further due to the girth of her thighs; when she looked down, her neck formed a fleshy bib. Her sexual awareness began with repulsion toward her own body.
Major events influence our lives only in small part; a casual comment or chance event often has a greater impact on one’s life than does the first man on the Moon or the discovery of the structure of DNA. The decisive sentence in Tessel’s life was spoken by her mother, one muggy afternoon as they were shopping for shoes in Cape Town. ‘Look, just your type,’ her mother said, and Tessel knew exactly what she meant. In front of them, a fat little boy was walking along with his mother. He wore a pair of short trousers that showed his chubby calves, he had a Springboks cap on his head. It was a pedagogical faux pas, and Tessel froze in horror.
The fat boy on the shopping street became her sole prospect for the future. She was doomed to kiss fat boys, sit beside fat boys at school and at university, she would marry a fat boy and give birth to fat boys. She considered suicide.
I looked up from the page and felt that my face was warm and flushed, as though I had stolen a look at someone’s secret diary: P.J.’s secret diary, to be precise. Were these the things she had told Metz in her infatuation, before they split up amid hatred and violence? It was sensational reading and, thank God, Metz wrote much more fluently than he spoke. The writer continued:
Around the time that Tessel began considering the practical aspects of suicide, her parents decided to emigrate to the Netherlands. South Africa’s future loomed before them as an orgy of violence, a national free-for-all. Tessel realized that she could make use of the i
nterruption to leave behind her life as a fatty. Her new existence could be drastically less ponderous. To start with, she skipped the meals on the plane. The pangs of hunger with which she arrived at Schiphol Airport she welcomed as the first victory over the old her.
For the first few months, the family was in transit. Tessel, with an impressive show of willpower, pressed on with her starvation diet. She ate only that which was absolutely necessary, and then only to put her parents’ minds at ease. Within two months she had lost fifteen kilos, and then another seven before they moved to their new home.
In the new setting no one knew she had ever been a fat girl, and she never showed anyone pictures taken of her in South Africa. In amazement, Tessel noted that she was considered pretty, and not simply pretty but beautiful; she had girlfriends, boys fell in love with her. The metamorphosis was complete. She was, in fact, half her old size, but she still felt: fat. For years, upon entering a boutique she would first go to the racks of outsize apparel.
Tessel had stopped starving herself; that had met with too much resistance from those around her. Now she ate in accordance with a strict, clockwork regime of small quantities of low-fat, low-calorie foods. Her inner resistance to such stultifying discipline resulted in eating jags, moments at which she allowed herself a brief respite of complete excess, when she could let herself go and bury her sorrow beneath an avalanche of cookies, marzipan, chips, ice cream and chocolate. And, in regret at having violated her own rules, she then vomited it all out into the toilet.
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