When Lex took the mask from my face and looked at me, grinning because he could see the fear in my eyes, I hated him deeply. Once, but never again.
One day early on, of an afternoon, we were standing on the boulevard, looking out to sea, when a rowing boat appeared from behind Castel dell'Ovo. Inside, a multicoloured clutch of flapping dresses and hats with ribbons and parasols. High laughs and squeals reached us on the wind. One of the women rowed the boat ashore, skilfully and with powerful strokes. Only when the company grouped together on the quayside did we notice that it consisted of dressed-up men. The transvestites posed in Lex's studio for nothing or for almost nothing. They did it for fun, or rather: to exhibit themselves. A negative kind of exhibitionism, for they would hide their sex between their legs. Most of the transvestites weren't as finely tarted up as the company in the boat. The femmenielli - as they were called in dialect - from the Quartieri especially turned out to be a sorry sight. Their so-called femininity was suggested more than it was depicted: a hairpin, the smallest of pigtails imaginable, a fuzzy jumper, high-heels worn down to one side, those sad little humps of bras filled with stale Stolen goods from ever-full washing lines! They begged the sculptor to be allowed to keep their bras on in order to have a feminine cast of themselves, at
Lex turned them into sexless snowmen.
Early in December, I travelled on some more, to the South, on my own. In complete solitude in Sicily, I wanted to try one more time to get my blood back to purity again. Two weeks would have to be enough to restore my metabolism, in my opinion.
Though I lost some four kilos in a few days through dehydration, the withdrawal symptoms proved less serious than during my journey to hell, Transalpino-style. My body recovered quickly but the worst was still to come. I got involved with number 90 of the tombolella, the Neapolitan game of lotto: la paura, the fear, which in the end drove me, in those godforsaken Christmas specials of Italian Railways, back to Naples and Lex Patijn's studio.
3
On New Year's Eve I finally found the door to the red house on Monte Echia open.
Lex was working in his studio as if, during the past few days, he had been doing nothing but. Upon my entering, he looked fleetingly, almost gruffly, at the door without allowing his concentration to be disturbed: the plaster, now setting, gave him no respite. A greeting was barely forthcoming; Lex treated me like someone who had dropped in only an hour previously ...
He was putting the final touches to plastering his model - no transvestite clenching its sex between the thighs, this time - one that looked like a ballet dancer in tights. A dancer caught in the jump ... that's how the man - legs wide, arms raised to heaven - had been tied to the frame with thin bits of string. Only a part of his right heel was still uncovered. I heard him breathing, snortingly, and immediately I felt the suffocation like a vice round my chest. The model played the death scene.
'Yes, sorry about this,' growled Patijn. 'You see ... I just have In his hand glinted the knee-shears. 'Did you get my telegram?' stupid git. A letter was what we'd agreed on. Telegrams were a separate department of poste restante. But Lex wasn't even listening, so much was his attention being taken up by the meticulous cutting open of the bandage, set almost solid. Behind the model's ears, the blades of the shears cut smoothly through the plaster, across the skull and under the chin. The sculptor put the implement in his pocket and with both hands, very carefully, wrenched the white mask free. I could breathe again. The felt patches fell from the eyes of the and there was Jody Katan's face.
Jody had to blink a few times before he could see me. There was mild panic in his little laugh. We could not even embrace one another. He reeked of the olive oil his body had been covered in so as not to allow the plaster bandages to stick to him.
Lex's workspace was populated with poor imitations of Pompeiian dead: the cocoons of the transvestites, left behind. What was striking was the cramped attitude of most of the dolls.
During one of our first walks through the city I had had to translate POMPE FUNEBRI on the window of an undertaker's for the sculptor. Now it read on the walls of the studio, in his scrawl:
POMPEII FUNEBRI - LEX PATIJN'S ONE THOUSAND DEAD This was the title for his forthcoming exhibition.
Though time and again I almost choked hearing Jody's panicky breathing, his death scenes were still too posed for Lex.
'Splendid! Terrific! But ... much too beautiful. You're a dying swan ... a kneeling ballerina ...! Die like a dog is what you must do ... not like a swan, but like a dog, dammit! Think of your old ma copping it.'
But Jody, packed head to toe in plaster bandages, did not hear him and continued, as Lex sneeringly put it, 'to audition for RADA.'
The fireworks being set off ever more frequently in the course of New Year's Eve, began to agitate Lex. His hands were shaking. At a loud bang on the square in front of the house, the shears slipped and wounded Jody's upper arm. The scratch wasn't that deep but the drop of blood sucked up by the plaster had an effect on Lex like that on a pack of hungry wolves: it drove his fanaticism to extremes. A band-aid, some hurried comforting, and the sculptor went on with his work, fast and practised, cringing and cursing now and then after the explosion of a jumping
It was eleven o'clock, and once again -'for the last time, honest, I swear,' Lex had said - Jody was being covered in plaster, layer by layer. Patijn's nerves, though tensed to the utmost, had meanwhile become prepared for the bangs, now coming in shattering series. When he was done, quicker than ever before, the plaster turned out to be damp and elastic in all places.
'Perfect ... perfect.'
Quickly, Lex freed his model's wrists, and for the eleventh or twelfth time that day, Jody - deaf-mute and blind - began his convulsions. The bandages were still so supple that the actor was able to let himself fall on to his knees without the white crust tearing. The upper torso snapped forwards, supported by a woodenly moved arm ... Imagined suffocation drew a knife through my chest, but Lex thought Katan's pose still too theatrical.
'He doesn't get it. He just doesn't get it, but only just ..: The voice of the sculptor had acquired a whining quality about it. I saw him take a few strips of plaster bandage and dip them in the bucket, after which he stuck them together. It was possible he had seen a crack appear in the harness after all ... Because of the growing noise outside, I had mounting difficulty in translating myself into the rustling silence in which Jody was performing his little play. Just the rapid breathing through his nose was capable of squeezing shut my windpipe.
Lex walked up to Jody with the dripping strip of bandage. He approached him from behind.
Lex ...! What're you doing?'
'Just leave me be a moment ... I only want to put the wind up him ... let him stew for a moment. Nothing more. I'll pull it off in a minute.'
And he knelt behind his lover and pushed the strip of plaster bandage under his nose. With a few light kneading actions of Lex's fingertips the substance was fixed down. I now no longer heard snorting, only a kind of hum from the depths of the white suit. With a jolt, Jody came up out of his pose as a dying swan. The sculptor got a bash under his chin and moved backwards on his knees. The plaster round Jody's arms (I could hear it crack under the force of his effort) had meanwhile become so hard that he could not get them up high enough to free his nostrils himself with his fingers. Emitting muffled groans, he stood in the middle of the studio, underneath the blotchy light from the chandelier. I strode over to him - but Lex stopped me.
'A little longer ... two seconds. He's doing splendidly. This ... this is real. Those wrinkles ... He won't choke that quickly. He's getting plenty of air; I could feel his breath coming through the goo ... I'll pull it loose in a minute, honest.'
His hand was clenched round my arm like a vice and I told myself that there was no point in trying to resist him. Yes, he'd pull that strip of bandage loose any time now and then I, too, would be able to breathe again.
We watched the clumsy dance of a polar bear making attempts
to jump out of its skin and in so doing kicking over the bucket with warm water. Vapour rose from the floor around its stiff paws ... Without realising what it was doing, it stormed right at us. Lex pulled me aside and with a crack the bear ran up against the wall, after which it fell on its back, hard, without being able to break the fall. And that never ending growling tone, close and yet far off, at times drowned out by the bangs outside ... I was surprised at the strength the slightly built Jody still managed to make apparent through the hardened armour.
Finally, Patijn let go of me and I fled outside to give my constricted ribcage some air.
There were only a few shuttered cars on the square. Here and there one stood wobbling about beneath a starry sky almost as clear as that above Agrigento when the town lighting had failed. On the traffic-control tower of the aircraft carrier, deep down below me in the bay, the date 1979 could be made out in luminescent figures. Right now we were still marking '78.
A quarter to midnight and the city, full of unrest, was on the point of exploding. Now already, the bangs were incomparably more numerous and loud than in Amsterdam at the stroke of twelve precisely. A haze of gunpowder fumes began to rise up from the streets. On the top floors of the houses, children held a kind of torch out of the windows which let down waterfalls of liquid light.
Round midnight, the paroxysm reached its climax. The aircraft carrier lit two searchlights trained on the city. They drilled into the curtain of smoke growing rapidly denser, and began to swing about like two mighty arms wishing to sweep this Naples-gonemad into the sea. Out above the tumultuous crackle sounded the wailing sirens of ambulances and fire engines. The bells of all the churches were tolling. Within ten minutes the city had vanished. Wiped out completely. Crawled away into a smog which could not have been denser had it been in London. Above me, there wasn't a star to be seen any more.
I left the square with its gently rocking cars behind and walked up the Via Nunziatella. The gunpowder fumes which by now had also penetrated to the Monte Echia, began to irritate my lungs. To escape from it I wanted to go up Monte di Dio, the Mountain of God, where I believed I could vaguely discern, like an asymmetrical cross, the stand pipe used for work being done to the battlements there.
In the Chiaia quarter I began to mount the steep stairs, but here too the poisonous fumes managed to catch up with me in order to take my breath I gave up in the end and returned - to where there was no longer a city. I descended in the direction of the Quartieri. Down the mountain, the little streets became narrower; they lay there packed ever more closely together. Just as if that entire district had slid down the steep hill: an avalanche of houses that had halted deferentially in front of the posh Via Roma. Entire streets had truncated themselves, harmonica-wise, into stairs.
The back streets were full of stinking, smoking fires around which children clustered. As I approached the Via Roma, I saw more and more people with shawls in front of their faces against the gunpowder fumes. I did not even have a handkerchief on me.
The Boston Blackies' American Bar turned out to be full to the gunnels with drunken servicemen. A marine was trying to bash the head of a mate he was holding by the hair against the wall. But the hair was too short: it slipped from his hand every time.
'You son of a bitch ... You dirty motherfucker ... I'm not leaving until that fucking face of yours has seen that fucking wall a thousand fucking
Near the two combatants stood two SP-s who saw to it that the short-cropped head did not actually get bashed into the wall. One of the policemen was punched in the shoulder by a drunken spectator.
'Hey you, Mr Motherfucker ...! This motherfucker says he just killed his friend. How about that? He's trying to tell you something, something important, but you won't even listen!'
The person who wasn't being listened to was Lex Patijn. He was standing there with his back towards me, apparently unmoved, a bored spectator of the row. What was it that sozzled American had said? 'This motherfucker says he just killed his friend.'
I put a hand on Patijn's shoulder. He turned round and I looked into eyes I did not know even though they were in Lex's face.
'I only wanted to put the wind up him a bit ... I only wanted to let him get in a bit of a lather . . .' He went on repeating these little sentences in a trance. 'I only wanted to leave him stew for a bit ... put the wind up him a bit ...
He also looked repeatedly at his fingertips, maybe because with these he had felt Jody's hot breath, 'right through the goo'.
A little later, as if something just occurred to him, Lex said with an idiotic grin on his face: 'Yes, well, I came here in the end. I thought... I thought: those Yanks will understand me better than those Eyeties.'
Now the row between the two marines had been settled, those Yanks were prepared to listen to Lex. But he seemed to want to retract. 'I only wanted to depict .... to depict his death.'
The SP-s shrugged their shoulders and called the Carabinieri, who in their turn were a long time in coming, possibly because of the New Year's rush. For the time being, the world did not seem to be inclined to take Lex's deed seriously.
Perhaps it was because of the plaster bandaging that it did not affect me to see my friend Jody Katan lying there motionless. He was lying in a comer of the studio like a parody of a crashed wintersport reveller, a joke-figure from a variety show ... But at the same time I was struck by the similarity to the Pompeiian displayed in the bathhouse in a glass sarcophagus: lying on his back, head inclined to the left, raised left lower arm with snapped, drooping hand, right hand in right-hand groin, fingers at the ready to raise the too narrow trouserleg by half a The scissors, with round eyes from which Lex's fingers had hastily freed themselves, stuck in Katan's side. Jody's bandaged arms reminded me of bedsheets, wrung out by hand; the hands little propellers, they might whirr back into their original position any moment now. The breast plate had burst and crumpled; it hung round his body this way and that: a harness of jumbled pack-ice.
At the Carabinieri's request, a doctor cut open Jody's suit. Each piece freed was numbered. The helmet, the felt patches ... No death struggle could be read from Katan's face. Its expression was as neutral as that of a tailor's dummy. He had closed his eyes in life already.
By means of the passport, the body was identified and taken off by ambulance in the end. Patijn and I were taken along in separate cars to the station.
When the Carabinieri let me go after the laborious interrogation, in the early morning, the city's cleansing department was already busy clearing the New Year's Eve ravages. Slowly, a clear sky appeared over Naples. All gunpowder fumes seemed to have still Jody's suffocation seemed to seek to tear my chest apart. I gave myself some heart: before I choked, I would have reached the street where the American bars were.
Jan Hofker
Now, the townsfolk have pressed in from all sides. They occupy all windows, all roofs are black with them. Humming life, warm-stuffy life, working like a great machine of destruction. It is a continuous oppression. Like a nightmare, truly, in clear light of day. Oh, Air ... air. If only it could flee the throat, the entire body ... if only it were gone, that living human mass, reacting in one's head.
That, now, is the End. That, now, is the end of life. That, now, is life, seen through to the very end. Life entire. Including youth - and the village - and the heavy servitude - and the peasant-talk. And all the calculations. All the hope. All the glossing-over. And all the miserable trudging beneath great burdens. That, now, is the end.
Now It comes. Can you still hear? Can you still see? How the legs throb; such tiredness in old legs. Oh, tired, dear, oh dear.
How the crowd hums. Such a crowd. What a mass of people. That is destruction. That is total destruction. That is the destruction of the person right-now before death. Do you not feel that you have now become the least of all men? Irrevocably? For all eternity? Now you are timid. Now you are afraid.
Afraid of each and everyone. All can now command you. A small child might now command yo
u. You move out of the way for a child. Away, gone; you are gone completely already.
You thought Death so terrible. You were not yet paralysed then, paralysed by the machine of formality, by the ceremonial. Now you are paralysed. Do you hear how you do not cry out? You, who thought to crawl and groan? Do you see how Necessity works as does Superior Force? Death is nothing.
Oh, that humming crowd and those quiet whisper-men, at their task of the noose. You no longer cry, you no longer ask for mercy. They would have to spell it out for you now: mer ... cy; mer ... cy. Now, only the masses and the quiet-busy men. You are now docile who never were docile. You are now obliging, ready to help. You do what is wanted. Go where you are wanted to go. You go the way you are wanted to go. You are now feeble, too feeble to will the contrary. All is mood. Most-serious mood. You are to die.
It's coming closer now. Now It will happen. How the crowd does hum. The black-mass crowd in the daytime sun. This, now, is the Universe, eternity. Eternal pitilessness. Lost, lost. This, now, is Death.
That man will do It. That man whose breath you can already smell. That man seen close-by. With the blue eyes. With the sweating forehead in the hot daylight. And coarse-blond hair. Do you hear his voice? He utters sounds. That man close-by will do it. That tiredness the worst.
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Page 19