Joe Speedboat

by Tommy Wieringa

  A layman could have diagnosed it as bulimia nervosa.

  Commonly, the image the bulimia patient has of her own body is out of synch with its actual girth. Those around her see normal proportions, but the patient herself looks in the mirror and sees a swollen monstrosity. Puking is the only way to control the monster, and the resulting feelings of shame aggravate the sense of loneliness. For women who suffer from bulimia, the world is a twisted mirror in which they constantly try to adopt the correct pose.

  Those who only rarely vomit think this must be a painful, intensive activity, but it is very easy for the puke girl. She has trained herself to vomit in a way that remains hidden from the outside world: we see no red eyes, smell no sour breath. She sticks toothbrushes and spoons down her throat or, with no other means available, presses two fingers against her uvula. The toilet seat is raised, the view fills her with disgust, but she braces herself and thinks: OK, here we go.

  In Tessel’s case, the detrimental effects of gastric acid on the teeth (the rapid destruction of tooth enamel results in cavities) was only a minor problem: her father was a dentist.

  With that, my final doubts were swept away; the only figure presenting itself from within this description was P.J. Eilander. Her secret lay spread before me on the table.

  Tessel now controlled her weight with the most invisible form of self-mutilation: vomiting. Within her grew an existential void and a sense of her own intrinsic worthlessness. These were her last authentic emotions. In the outside world she reacted to the emotions of others with behaviour that she had copied: she knew that comforting went with sorrow, and that joy had to be met in turn with confirmation of that joy. She herself knew only the derivatives of emotions, echoes from the days when she was fat and miserable. Her inner world was a cold, blasted place; calling out to her from the ruins were pudgy boys and girls, drowning in their own fat.

  The special thing about Tessel was that the course of her life had been cut in two: one part – far away, on another continent – in which she had been fat and miserable, and another in which she was desirable and where – outside her own family circle – no memory existed of who and what she had once been. Inside herself she exterminated every memory of the former character, of the life that had caused pain, along with feelings that were deep and real. None of this was visible on the outside: one saw only an intelligent girl with an above-average sense of humour, a pleasant person to be around.

  Her sexual development was normal: she kissed boys on occasion and lost her virginity at sixteen to a young Turk in the resort town of Alanya, where she was on holidays with her parents and a girlfriend. Her first real boyfriend she found at the age of seventeen, a boy from her village without a ghost of a chance. She held him completely in her sway; Tessel had discovered the limitless power of beauty and unscrupulousness. When she went off to university she forgot the boy as carelessly as she might have lost a hairpin. He had served his purpose; Tessel had used him to reconnoitre and refine the possibilities of sex as a weapon. She was ready for bigger things.

  This was Tessel when I met her. When she introduced herself to me at the annual literature meeting of the Faculty of Letters, there was electricity in the air. Four days later we slept together for the first time; lying in my bed was a perfectly beautiful, perfectly heartless monster.

  I thought back on P.J.’s behaviour in Mousetown, when she had tormented that frightened mouse and isolated it from the rest. Independently of each other, Joe and I had both had our misgivings; that ungirlish cruelty had revealed a side of her we would rather not have seen.

  I was happier than I had ever been in my life. Tessel combined a touching gentleness with pornographic sexual abandon. She was, without a doubt, the funniest woman I had ever met. She was a dream, because she gave me everything I longed for: she supplied to order. This was the miracle of which she was capable. To her parents she was the ideal daughter, to her teachers a talented student, and to her drinking friends a lecherous bitch who danced on café tables and wound men around her finger. And to me . . . to me she was Love with a capital L. She showed me what I wanted to see most, and I wanted to believe in that. She nourished hope – of love that was meant to be, of two separate halves that find each other amid a crowd of millions.

  In every social situation she unerringly reflected that which was expected of her. Her mimesis was perfect, except in one regard. One area of life was inaccessible to her, because she neither knew nor understood it: intimacy. This she could not imitate, in the same way a chameleon cannot turn white.

  Sex was Tessel’s substitute strategy for intimacy.

  How was I to know that, from the very first day, she slept with other men as well? When I found a text message one day that proved she had at least one other lover, I punched her in the face twice.

  To be desired by many men was Tessel’s magic charm to ward off her mother’s curse: that her sexual market value was low and that she would attract only fat boys. When, by a complete fluke, I found out that that first act of unfaithfulness had not been the last, I hit her again and this time raped her as well. She wept as she came, and told me it was the best sex she’d ever had. There were nine other men. Each cock that penetrated her confirmed that she was wanted, and pretty. The liberation was always short-lived, for she lacked the inner conviction of her own beauty. She would go looking again, be desired again, again the wings of ecstasy would spread and again she would return disillusioned to the gorged, quivering image she had of herself. By way of necessary counterbalance she always had a lover to come home to safely, to uphold the appearance of normality.

  Somewhere in those turbid times I told her: ‘You could not have dealt me a harder blow.’

  She thought about that for a moment. Then, in utter calm, she said: ‘Oh yes, I could have.’

  I asked no further.

  Tessel was the Whore of the Century.

  I had to stop reading, I was shaking too badly. Here was a man who was asking himself in despair how he could have loved a woman who was merely the reflection of what he expected from a woman. He had dissected the cadaver with a sure hand. It was fabulous and frightening.

  First Metz, and now it was Joe’s turn. And I was the only one who held all the pieces of the puzzle; I had known P.J. before she knew Metz, I knew who she was with now, and – although I experienced a moment of doubt – Joe had to read this, he was headed for catastrophe.

  The next time he came to see me I slid the book solemnly across the table. He picked it up, looked at the cover (a detail of some fuzzy painting representing a female body), read the blurb and put it back on the table. He frowned.

  ‘I don’t know why you read shit like that,’ he said.

  That was all he ever said about it. In fact, Metz had predicted Joe’s reaction to a tee: ‘We don’t want to see them for what they are, and thereby multiply the damage they will cause us with time.’

  ‘By the way,’ Joe said, standing in the doorway. ‘Is it OK if P.J. comes along to Poznan?’

  We left on 5 May, in the early morning hours. Lots of houses in Lomark already had their flags out for Liberation Day. It was one year ago that Joe had suggested I become an arm wrestler; from the very beginning, Poznan had lain in the future like a promise, it was the most important tournament of all. Despite the bizarre way everything had sped up since the events in Rostock, I had trained like mad and even sparred with Hennie Oosterloo. I had tried out a number of different openings on him, and sometimes let myself be pushed almost to the table in order to learn how to come back from hopeless situations. Oosterloo was useless otherwise, I was now in a completely different class.

  I acted normal toward Joe and P.J. Everything fine, no jealousy, no revelatory literature: business as usual. Everything would have to run its course, and I would assume the role of clinical observer. Joe had ignored the warning and was fair game now. Someday he would come back and ask to look at that book and kick himself for having chosen to be blind.

  It was at l
east a ten-hour drive to Poznan. Joe stayed behind the wheel the whole time, P.J. occasionally massaged his neck, we were witness to a perfectly harmonious love. At times everything that had happened seemed only a diabolical figment of the imagination: we laughed and Joe and P.J. sang songs, and it was as though Engel wasn’t rotting in his grave and that damned omen of a book had never been written.

  We reached Poznan before nightfall, steam coming from the radiator. Joe parked the Oldsmobile in front of the Hotel Olympia, an uninspired colossus from the days of socialism, with an endless number of floors and enough beds for an entire army.

  ‘Look at that,’ Joe said as we entered the lobby.

  He pointed at the digital clock above the desk, which showed both date and time: 5.5.19:45. It took a moment before I realized that this was the exact date of Holland’s liberation, a stimulating coincidence that lasted only a minute, when the clock hopped to 19:46 and the moment was over. Joe asked for two rooms, one for him and P.J. and one for me, for that was how things now stood.

  After a knock on the door, Joe came in.

  ‘Everything OK? Bathroom and everything?’

  He dropped into a chair by the window and looked down at the street.

  ‘Man, I’m exhausted. Tomorrow’s the big day, François.’

  And, after a while: ‘I think I’m going to hit the sack, I’m still seeing the white stripes on the road.’

  Oh Joe, please look at her the way you once looked at me and saw me on the dyke – Jesus, Joe, you don’t know what you’re getting into . . .

  ‘I’ll see you bright and early in the morning, Frankie. If you need any help, dial zero and then five-one-seven, that’s our room number.’

  The window provided a view of concrete and asphalt. Low sunlight coloured everything orange; here, too, Man was concerned only with himself. I closed the heavy synthetic curtains but opened them again a little later; darkened rooms while it’s still light outside depress me, I think because they remind me of death. Since Engel died I also couldn’t stand the smell of tallow, which had filled every corner of the funeral home. I tried to read a little in Go Rin No Sho, but couldn’t keep my mind on it. Then I waited for darkness to fall, while down below the Poles lived their lives and inside me the multitude of things came washing in. There was nothing more I could do.

  *

  The tournament was in a gym on the south side of town. Two competition tables and fifty-seven wrestlers, about half of them lightweights. A strong entry. Right before the gong announcing the first two bouts, the man I’d been waiting for so long came in at last: Big King Mansur. Although it was as much a sensation as, for instance, an entrance by Muhammad Ali, and I had actually been expecting an even number of virgins to be strewing rose petals before his feet, it was in fact only a black man walking into a seedy gym. He wasn’t very big either, more stocky, with exceptionally broad shoulders. His head was shaven and the light from the high windows of the gym reflected off his scalp. Beside him was a slender woman in sunglasses whose classic petiteness told me she had to be French. She was the kind of woman tennis players and football stars marry, the kind you see on TV sitting in the stands with her hand over her mouth when things get exciting.

  Joe nudged me, I nodded that I had seen him. Mansur and the woman sought out a quiet corner, the only quiet corner in fact in the packed gym, and the woman was sent off to fetch two chairs. With slow, deliberate movements Mansur took off his jacket and T-shirt and fumbled around in a sports bag until he found a little vest. When he stuck his arms through the straps I saw his awesome latissimi dorsi, the muscle group referred to in the world of strength sports as ‘wings’. Joe told P.J. who Big King Mansur was, that we were looking at the unassailable world champion, the fearsome Beast #1.

  ‘And Frankie has to wrestle against him?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ Joe said. ‘If we’re lucky.’

  The crowd itself consisted of people with conventional bodies – smooth, fat and white, just like in Rostock. We figured out that if I won all my bouts the fourth match would be between me and Islam Mansur. The first two matches weren’t much of a problem. The third one I almost lost to a guy I’d seen doing his stuff back in Liège, a black man from Portsmouth. But then I thought about Islam Mansur, how badly I wanted to go up against him, about how today could be the day, and I beat the Englishman just in the nick of time.

  It took two bottles of beer to keep the spasms under control. P.J. rubbed my shoulders, Joe was on pins and needles. Would I be able to give Mansur a run for his money? Was there any sense in hoping he’d have a bad match, that his concentration would flag? P.J.’s hands produced shivers of pleasure, I was sucking up beer like a sump pump. Then it was time. From the corner of my eye I saw Mansur coming out of his corner and approaching the table, the consummate human machine. Joe rolled me over to the table and helped me onto my stool. Just briefly he laid his hands on my shoulders – I felt the missing fingers on the right – and looked me in the eye.

  ‘I believe in you,’ he said, and let go.

  I was on my own, across from a force of nature. Mansur sat down.

  Arm Saint, at last.

  He seized the peg (damn, his left arm was just as big as his right, he really could take on opponents with both at the same time) and slid his elbow into the box. Only then did he look at me; bulging eyes, lots of white around them. His palms were white too. I put my arm on the table and we engaged. Solid as a wall, like laying my hand against a warm building.

  From what I’d seen of Mansur’s earlier matches, I knew that his openings alternated between the Fire and Stone Cut and the Red Autumn Leaves Cut (‘The Red Autumn Leaves Cut means knocking down the enemy’s long sword. The spirit should be getting control of his sword’); I readied myself. His palm was dry and soft, mine was little and clammy. Mansur kept his eyes on me the whole time, I knew it was part of his strategy to hypnotize his opponent with a penetrating, uninterrupted stare. In an interview he had once said that his greatest strength came ‘from inside’. ‘When your spirit is concentrated, you can block out everyone around you. Your opponent is the centre of attention.’ Although that may sound rather banal, I could actually feel his energy grow solid and I was drawn into his gaze. I became the glowing core of his attention, sealed in a vacuum by his eyes.

  ‘Go!’

  Mechanically I tightened all my muscles and felt that enormous hand pulling all power toward it. For a moment I wrested free of those eyes and looked at his arm, lined with quivering muscles trying to break through the skin. Then I resumed my spot in his field of vision. In that way we had finally become the middle point of the universe, Mansur and I, and I felt a deep sense of gratitude and justice. I knew that the outcome was unimportant; all that mattered was the fatefulness of this moment, the collision of two heavenly bodies that had sought each other out in boundless space, forces coursing toward beauty and destruction. The moment of impact went slowly, without a sound.

  I withstood his attack; my defence had improved in the course of time. The muscles in his neck were tight as snares, from his shoulder had grown a low hill that I’d never seen in another wrestler. Was that P.J. who screamed? With my eyes I traced the course of a vein on Mansur’s forearm. All my life I had longed and sought for something without flaws, without contamination, and in my dreamlike state I remembered a story about perfection – about Chinese artisans, masters of the art of lacquer painting, who would board a ship and only start work on the high seas; on land, minuscule dust particles might contaminate and spoil the lacquer.

  The triangular construction Mansur and I formed belonged in that category: perfect, superhuman – we were far beyond time and space now, the roar of the crowd I heard only as though it were coming from a valley far below. A great deal clearer was the sudden sound of a dry twig breaking close to my ear – I felt us losing balance, being slung back into the world, heading for the end.

  Only then did I become aware of a raging, maddening pain in my forearm, the flames wer
e shooting out of it, and I saw Mansur let go of my hand and look at me in amazement. Halfway down my arm the pain was bundled like a glowing knot. I knew the bone was broken. The muscles had stood up to Mansur’s inhuman strength, but the radius or the ulna had not. Snapped like a twig; I bellowed in rage and pain. Joe was at my side.

  ‘Frankie, what is it?’

  I shook my head, this was the end of everything, it was the bone that turned out to be my Achilles’ heel, I would have to start again from scratch. Mansur came over to us.

  ‘I think he broke his arm,’ Joe said.

  Mansur nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was a good fight.’

  He looked at me, thought about it for a moment, then corrected himself.

  ‘It was a spiritual fight. You are a strong man.’

  He raised his right hand to his heart, the same way Papa Africa had always done, and disappeared with the woman into the crowd of inquisitive onlookers.

  ‘We have to get to a hospital right away, Joe!’ P.J. said. ‘He’s turning all white.’

  I suddenly went limp with pain and felt that I would throw up at any moment. The arm lay useless in my lap. My sole weapon: broken. Two taxis were waiting outside, the drivers leaned smoking against the grille.

  ‘Hospital!’ Joe barked. ‘Krankenhaus!’

  The rest was exactly what you might expect: the shot of painkiller, the setting of the ulna, the splint, the sling, the whole shit thing. The only startling detail was that we had to pay the equivalent of almost 500 smackers, to which end P.J. loaned us her credit card. For that price we got to take the X-rays home with us. Now I couldn’t do anything anymore, at most scratch out a few block letters with the fingers sticking out of my plaster sleeve. In the taxi on the way to the hotel, Joe turned to me.