Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  Selwyn was down on his knees; a tub of steaming water beside him, he was scrubbing the contents of my stomach out of the carpet.

  ‘So it is her,’ he said to the carpet.

  ‘Sorry about the mess,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t know about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘No.’

  The screen behind him was dark. I turned on the TV again. Selwyn stood up.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  There she was again, the mother-from-the-girlish-photos, naked now, with a camera’s eye between her legs, zooming in on little curls of pubic hair and a pouting cunt in between, nothing I hadn’t already seen in hundreds of other pictures – except this was my mother into whom the man was wedging his way.

  ‘Christ, Ludwig, turn that off!’

  But I wanted to see what there was to be seen. This was the time and the place for it, another opportunity would not soon present itself. My head in my hands, I watched the stranger mating with my mother, but without the sound on, sound was too much to bear. Selwyn was standing beside the door, nervous, perhaps listening for the sound of his parents coming home. Minuscule drops of sweat on her upper lip, the irony had now made way for an expression of all-consuming pleasure. She had her hands clasped behind his little buttocks and was drawing him in deeper. I ran the tape forward. The events followed each other at a lightning pace. It was about the rivalry between two men, and it involved four women: a lady meant to represent the upper classes; an Asian beauty with little breasts; a blonde, nondescript girl; and then my mother, the star of the film, who emanated a certain unassailability. At the end she was taken by both men at the same time, who seemed in this way to have laid aside their conflict. It was raw, no-holds-barred porno, in garish, heavy color. It was hideous, every erotic tingle was snuffed out by shame and confusion. My heart pounded wildly in my chest. I fast-forwarded to the credits, then hit play. The names rolled down the screen, hers first.

  LILITH – EVE LESAGE

  I stood up too quickly, a flash of dizziness almost knocked me to the ground. I waited until the snowy interference went away, then walked out of the room without a word to Selwyn. I went outside like a narcotized man – the son of. The earth might open up and swallow me, I would be grateful. Eve LeSage. Marthe Unger. Porn star. My history was in need of rewriting. All my life I had been walking down the street with a bell around my neck. I bore the brand of shame. The rumors would seep through the walls like moisture, they would whisper behind my back, the suffering would have a name.

  A watery sun shone through the grey vapors, the weather was clearing up quickly now. Silver stripes pulsed on the sea’s surface. In the distance, further than I had been able to see for days, a lonely white wave rose up; for a long time I had been hoping to see a whale, I longed for those great souls of the sea who spoke their mysterious sonar language under water.

  At home I went up to my room and sat down at the desk. I couldn’t imagine a life beyond that moment. Every once in a while I was caught by an unexpected fit of retching, eruptions of slime and gall. I kept the wastebasket close at hand. I could have taken my diary and scratched out my feelings in letters of blood; instead I closed the curtains, lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

  The next morning the sun had returned, the weather was blustery. Before my window, gulls fought their way into the wind. They hung above the edge of the cliff, great black-backed gulls, and continued to flap their wings stoically, even when being blown backwards.

  I hurried out the door and stayed away all day. For some time, I don’t believe my mother even noticed that I was avoiding her. I slept a great deal. I slept my way through the shock. I looked up Eve LeSage on the Internet. There was plenty to be found. She had acted out her roles alongside Linda Lovelace and Sylvia Kristel, for a time she had been a cult figure. Lilith was viewed as artistic in its day. She had played in six films. Lilith was the very first, and it made her a star. I found photographs and interviews; websites where her memory was kept alive – she had suddenly left the sex industry behind, various rumors circulated on the web about the reason why.

  One evening I was sitting with her at the table. We were eating jacket potatoes with crème fraiche, beans and chili sauce; I sculpted a landscape of snow and blood in my gouged potato. I could hear her chewing. Swallowing each bite. Her cutlery scraped across my nerves. This time, when she looked up, I didn’t lower my eyes.

  ‘Is it possible that something’s bothering you?’ she asked.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Ludwig?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Something wrong. Does the name Eve LeSage mean anything to you?’

  She raised the fork to her mouth and chewed slowly, cautiously. She nodded almost indiscernibly.

  ‘It had to happen sometime,’ she said.

  Silence followed.

  ‘I didn’t know whether I should let you find out yourself,’ she said, ‘or whether I should tell you about it.’

  So you just did nothing.

  ‘I was grateful for every day you didn’t know.’

  I slid my potato to one side.

  ‘It’s so . . . filthy . . . I’ve never seen anything so filthy in my life.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said ‘. . . for you. You’re the one I feel sorry for. For you, I wish it hadn’t . . . that it could have gone differently. That I could have spared you this.’

  ‘Too late.’

  ‘Too late, that’s right. I tried to keep it from you. I’ve always dreaded this moment. Later, someday, I’ll tell you how . . . how it went. If you want to know. There’s more to it than you see right now. Than you can see. My life, back then, it made sense. I don’t know how to say it . . .’

  ‘Six films. Six.’

  ‘It wasn’t a crime, Ludwig.’

  ‘Prostitution is illegal.’

  ‘They were films. I’m not proud of it, not at all, but I’ve never regretted it terribly either. I can imagine . . . for you it’s different, it doesn’t have anything to do with you. You weren’t even . . .’

  ‘How could you?’

  ‘I’m not my body, Ludwig, it’s just a vehicle . . . I didn’t hurt anyone, on the contrary. Except for you, now. But you weren’t even around then, you can blame me for it but you mustn’t hate me for it, sweetheart. Okay? You mustn’t hate me for it.’

  I had no words left. Not one.

  ‘Ludwig, would you please not look at me that way? Your father used to look at me that way. So . . . full of disgust.’

  Two tears, the one beginning its descent before the other.

  ‘I don’t want you to look at me that way, do you understand?’

  In the days that followed the subject came up a few times. She didn’t ask for understanding, she explained the circumstances under which it had seemed more or less normal to her to act in porno films. I noticed that knowing about the background to it watered down my rage. It reduced the distance between me and that gross blunder. In other words, life went on. It sought a balance between extremes, and kept on doing so until a certain degree of everydayness returned, a way to go on. It wrapped itself around the alien irritant like an amoeba around a bacteria.

  At the club, they already knew about it. I was sure they talked about it when I wasn’t around. Sly jokes were made on occasion, but I learned to live with it. A well-known saying has it that football is a gentlemen’s game played by thugs, while rugby is a thug’s game played by gentlemen. Among footballers I would have suffered social damage, but at the Alburgh Rugby Football Club I was given consideration, and not condemned – something I have always credited to the degree of refinement that goes along with rugby.

  On the field I became more reckless. The technically perfect tackle is one thing I never mastered, so I simply threw everything I had at my opponent, sometimes with surprising results. I played in the second row and was injured as often as I was not. One rec
overs quickly at that age. While making one of those insane tackles, I broke my collarbone. They said the boy I hit came from Sizewell, home to the nuclear power station whose dome we could see on the horizon on clear days, like a pale, setting sun. It felt like smacking into a bus. The boy could not have been older than seventeen, but he already had a bushy moustache. An injury bears the signature of the one who caused it – for the rest of my born days, I will never forget that boy from Sizewell.

  The English have a useful expression: ‘adding insult to injury’.

  A letter arrived at our house from the district council, signed by the local secretary, A. Brennan. In it we were summoned to leave 15 Flint Road before 21 October. If we left within the time allotted, the council would see to the razing of the house, the removal of the debris and the cleaning of the plot. If we did not comply, the damages – including the cleaning of the beach below – would be recouped from us. If asbestos had been used in the house, the damages could be even more considerable. The tone of the letter was bland, as though we were being asked to no longer put our rubbish out for collection on Tuesday, but on Wednesday. The date, 21 October, was repeated in the final paragraph; on that day, gas, water and electricity would be cut off.

  We had landed in the danger zone, there was no denying it. All those years the abyss had been stalking us in a slow, creepy dream, now it was about to pounce.

  The day the letter arrived, the outside eastern wall of the house was still four meters from the edge. It could take years, but it could also happen that same winter. My mother was at the table, the letter in front of her.

  ‘They don’t waste any time,’ she said.

  I read the letter twice and found no reassurance in it anywhere, nothing about replacement housing or compensation. We were caught between erosion on one side and official pragmatism on the other. My mother was sitting straight up in her chair. The memory of her, copulating.

  ‘What about the insurance?’ I asked.

  She smiled grimly and shook her head.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘You can’t insure yourself against things like this. I tried everywhere, almost every insurance company there is. Their argument was that we were aware of the risk when we moved in. We . . . I . . . accepted the risk.’

  ‘So what now?’

  No reply came. I more or less understood what was looming over us: no house and no escape route either; family and friends were nonexistent. We were consigned to each other. She had bought this house with the proceeds from the house in Alexandria; we had been living off the remainder, and off her savings. Now her investment was crumbling quickly. The letter from the district council reduced the value of our property to a debt. I wasn’t sure she really saw the extent of the catastrophe. Her composure was outrageous. In the privacy of her bedroom, I suspected, she turned to her mentors for support; the bearded men with piercing eyes to whom she went for counsel. She was convinced that there was a higher plan behind everything. Events like this were learning moments. The assignment of meaning, favorable or not, provided comfort. The bitterest reality could be borne as long as you saw meaning in it. The primeval defense against the void. Her conviction had nothing to do with God, she said, but if you looked carefully you could make out his shadow on the floor.

  I went upstairs and kicked my desk. Framed by my window was a kite, veering wildly. Behind it the glistening sea.

  That evening I shoveled Margareth’s fish pasties into my mouth in huge chunks.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Ludwig . . .’

  ‘Hmm . . .’

  ‘. . . but we’re not leaving. We’re staying here. This is our house, and they can’t force us.’

  I frowned in puzzlement.

  ‘Without gas? Water? Light?’

  ‘I showed the letter to Warren. He says it would be no trouble putting in a few pipes and cables between his house and ours. And we can buy bottled gas in the village. See it as a sort of camping. Warren will give us all the help we need.’

  ‘Yeah, because he feels guilty.’

  It was around that same time that the first layer of sand and clay was dumped along the base of the cliff below our house. Pending the verdict of the court of appeals, Warren had resumed work. From the day the letters began arriving, we lived in limbo. There were letters from lawyers, from the power company, the waterworks, municipal summons – my mother used a clothes-peg to clamp them to the lamp above the table, thereby giving fate a festive touch.

  It often takes a long time, but once the powers-that-be bundle their rays into a searchlight there is no escape. The linkage of information is a steel fence that slowly closes in. An all-encompassing authority, impersonal as a chemical process, had nestled in our life. The date was written on our lintel. The day would come – and distant as it seemed when the first letter came, just as quickly did 21 October arrive. It was a Saturday, however, so nothing happened. But on the very next working day the flame died in the geyser. The heating went off. A few weeks later, a van from Eastern Electricity pulled up and parked along the road. Then the lights were gone too. Water no longer rattled in the pipes. Warren dug a trench to our house. Switches and wall plugs suddenly became useless ornaments, the telephone stopped working. Within a few days Warren had seen to all these things, a strip of churned-up soil bound his house to ours. My bedroom window was now permanently misted over because of the paraffin stove I used to heat the room. Margareth cooked with bottle gas. But no matter how skillfully our lives skirted these obstacles, we were aware that – however you looked at it – these were the final days. That lent them a certain beauty and significance. Time possessed a degree of urgency for which I would later search in vain.

  There were three storms that winter, none of them with the force of the legends of 1286, 1342, 1740 or 1953. Warren’s seawall was battered away at a few spots, it was only below our house that a piece of the cliff was actually lost. A severe chasm now extended inland. Grass sods hung over its edge. Things were starting to get personal. Whenever the water struck, when the shivers rang through the house, we sat bolt upright. Then the silence drifted in like the fog.

  At the end of that next spring I finished secondary school. I was eighteen, older than most of the pupils in my class because of the year I’d missed after Alexandria. Despite the urging of my tutor and the headmaster, I refused to consider university. As I walked out the door of the latter’s office, he said to me, ‘You have a good mind, Ludwig, it would be a pity not to use it well.’

  I played piano at the Whaler and earned a lot of money for a boy my age. I was one of the first to buy a cell phone, and I had a computer in my bedroom. For the rest, I played rugby. Whenever I put in my mouth guard the sand would crunch between my teeth; lying in my bed at night, after the match, the grains of sand grated beneath my eyelids. I enjoyed the armor of aching muscles that girded me up for days after a match, the satisfied frisson of the body sorely tested. Someday, far in the future, you’d pass a rugby field and feel the painful yearning for Vaseline on your eyebrows, sports tape around your vulnerable spots, the pre-match nerves in stomach and fingertips that caused even the best, most experienced players to pop off again to the loo beforehand – and you would ask yourself how in heaven’s name you had ever become locked up inside that old body, and when you saw the bodies out there smacking together and scrambling back to their feet as though they had merely tripped, you would shut your eyes.

  My mother and I live together in elegant separation. There is no reason to go into things any deeper. Sometimes I am able to see her the way I used to; that is to say, without the things I know now. The fact that things are ambiguous, not clear-cut, has been peppered into me. My mother has led so many lives already, her life with me was merely one manifestation. That makes you unsure of yourself. You can imagine suddenly being all alone, all the rest falling from you like wilted leaves, the skin of an onion.

  It is our last summe
r on the hill. I have been excused from the assignment of having to belong anywhere; my mother’s past has everything to do with that. Now I am a freak, and therefore free. I could walk around naked, my skin no longer a shield against heat or cold but a permeable membrane – my body glides through the mild outdoor air like a paraglider above fields of corn. Along the wooded banks, trees stand like congealed forest fires, the dust of Flint Road covers my shoes. Even though I’m amid the lush nature of Essex, the cedar-like crowns of the Scots pine in the distance still remind me of Africa, my image of the savanna, a sensation so powerful that I can let it roll on for minutes at a time. The farmer’s binder has been shuffling back and forth across the fields for days, spitting out black bales of straw. The undeveloped plots between the road and the cliff’s edge are choked with head-high thistles, tansy, poppies big as a fist and daisies radiant in their simplicity. Butterflies waver above the polyphonic buzz of a field of flowers. The telephone poles along the road breathe creosote vapors, sparrows and sand martins sitting on the wires like notes on a staff. The borders at Warren and Catherine’s are exploding with voluptuous blue hydrangeas and then, suddenly, seen from the corner of my eye, the sparrows fall from the lines as one and dissolve into the mulberry hedges at the side of the road.

  That winter our house was lost. At last, I would add from this vantage. A storm just before Christmas put an end to the wall, granting the second flood tide free access to the cliff. Warren never got the chance to fill up the lost earth; those were the first weeks of the new year, weeks during which almost no building was going on and no rubble was available.

  Factors, circumstances.

  When the forecasts began speaking again of bad weather, Warren appeared at the door with a face like iron.