Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  The treasure trove of the ancient world, the library at Alexandria, was destroyed by fire. A tragedy beyond bounds. In the 1980s a new library was built, a huge and prestigious project. It was meant, by way of compensation, to be one of the largest libraries in the world. At the same time a plan was hatched to rebuild the Pharos, the legendary lighthouse that has been shining in the eyes of civilization since time immemorial. The Pharos was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and was destroyed by a series of earthquakes. At its feet there arose an Arab fort; archeologists still search for its remains on the seafloor. For the design of the new tower, the city government organized a competition among artists and architects. Scores of plans were submitted, breathtaking reminiscences, but in the end my father received the commission. His tower was to be built in the harbor of Alexandria, the city would look out upon it, the antique glory would be revived. Bodo Schultz, master builder, would follow in the footsteps of Sostratus. But Bodo Schultz’s tower would produce no light: his would be black as obsidian. Every bit as tall as the old tower, one hundred and thirty meters. But the Pharos, according to legend, had been built of white marble, three storeys high, with a huge fire at the top that could be seen miles out to sea. That tower was an invitation to come ashore, to Alexandria, backdrop to that marvelous history play of old revolving around Cleopatra, whose own loins had been a haven to Julius Caesar and Marc Antony.

  Bodo Schultz’s tower broadcast a different message. Avoid this harbor while ye may, it said.

  Alexandria lies between the desert and the Mediterranean Sea. The city encompasses its eastern harbor and bay like a womb. The bay is protected by two forts; between them, an elongated artificial island was once thrown up to break the waves before they reach the city. The island is a few hundred meters long, and ships can enter the bay on either side. There, on that island, was where Schultz’s tower would rise: Wachturm, an obelisk black as a shadow, his tar-drenched middle finger held up to the world. The tower was closed on all sides, there was no telling whether it protected the city against intruders or actually held it hostage.

  Schultz spent most of his days on the island. Many months went into laying the foundations. In my mind’s eye I see him amid the cranes, cement mixers and bulldozers, while shiploads of building materials keep coming in. He acted as the classic artist-builder, the way Daedalus had, bringing his dark vision to life with his own hands. The island is easy to see from the Corniche, the seaside boulevard that encircles the bay in a lazy curve. In bad weather one sees the sea rising high and dark behind it, while the calm surf in the harbor hardly changes.

  After dark my father took the boat back with the last of the workers, arriving home only after I had been put to bed. My mother once made a home movie in the garden, perhaps with the idea of sending it to his family for Christmas – greetings from the outlands. I am sitting on a little orange tricycle with a sort of pickup bed at the back and staring the whole time at my mother, who is holding the camera. I forget to move the pedals. A hand against my back pushes me along, then we see the rest of the man, but only from behind, a bent figure. I look at my mother again, and the scene ends there.

  The second part of the home movie must have been made that same day, I’m wearing the same clothes. I’m sitting on a swing at the back of the garden, behind me stands my father. He is wearing a white T-shirt, it fits tightly around his torso. He is strong, a Carinthian farmer.

  He is built for adversity; if the ox dies, we’ll just pull the plow ourselves. Picasso had a body like that.

  ‘Are you having fun, Ludwig?’

  My mother, operating the camera again, but I don’t answer, because the swing is going fast and high.

  ‘Bodo, it’s scaring him.’

  My legs fly higher and higher, the little doll’s feet sweep helplessly.

  ‘Bodo, stop it, he’s frightened!’

  The film stutters and goes black. Not suitable for sending to the family. The mysterious thing about those images is that his face is never seen, only that hand, that arm, that torso. Even during the swing scene, his face remains in shadow.

  ‘Now that you mention it,’ my mother said when we looked at the film many years later.

  She told me how frustrated he was; he hadn’t counted on the conditions in Egypt, which were tough and resulted in messy delays. I imagine it as having been something like the Tower of Babel, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder: little men contributing stone by stone to an arrogant, godless project. He cursed the inefficiency and the leisurely way they lifted their hands to the heavens when the wrong building materials were delivered. He incurred the workers’ wrath with his brutish treatment, his frequent shouts of Scheiss doch auf Allah!

  Winter came, a bitter west wind delayed the work, and two storms in rapid succession finally brought it to a standstill. People say he beat laborers, those little fellahin in their djellabahs who had come in from the countryside to earn a few piasters in the big city. In the light of later accounts, that is not unlikely. It is commonly known of disturbed, narcissistic characters that they regard all adversity, even when imposed by inanimate factors such as the weather or natural disasters, as a personal insult. These things provoke a deep, impotent rage, everything is conspiring against them, that is why they shake their fists at heaven and flail the waters of the Hellespont. Or, as Captain Ahab said: Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

  I think my mother was deeply shocked by the dark storm clouds that gathered over her. She had never seen him like this, a tense and enraged Austrian out to build a tower in the harbor at Alexandria, a barbaric ruler over a ragged legion of day laborers, an obsequious throng, his subjects.

  Wachturm sprang from the soil like a poison toadstool, decked out with an intricate network of wooden scaffolding on which countless little men made their way up and down. Medieval! Medieval in the sense of manual labor, bond service and feudalism, those same conditions – in other words – which still pertain in large parts of the world, so that medieval perhaps describes not just a historical era, but also a packet of conditions that floats around the world, regardless of time or position, and is unpacked here or there. Whatever the case, the Pandora’s box bearing the label MEDIEVAL had now been delivered to that elongated barrier island.

  The tower was not completed. After three years my father went away and never came back. He left many things behind, unfinished, a tower, a marriage, an upbringing.

  (Later, in Alburgh, I was eleven or twelve at the time, I was given a box of Playmobil. I built a castle with it. The good guys lived in that castle; the bad guys gathered in a black tower that was not made with plastic building blocks. Only much later did I realize that that black tower and Wachturm were one and the same; it was the scale model of Wachturm that I had played with all those years.)

  It was a good two-hour walk to La Cienega Boulevard. The Steinson & Freeler Gallery, it turned out, was located in an old, single-storey commercial building, a bright orange oblong. Before the entrance, marked by a set of smoked-glass doors, a little crowd had gathered. These were not art lovers, it seemed to me; the dreadlocks and clothing daubed with political slogans were too much in evidence for that – the fashion statements of left-wing activists. They unrolled a banner, a girl was taking flyers from a shopping cart and handing them out to passers-by. Someone was toying around with a megaphone.

  I crossed the street and took a flyer. Stop this maniac from desecrating holy mountains. The maniac portrayed was Bodo Schultz. I wormed my way through the activists to the entrance, but that wasn’t supposed to happen – they lined up between me and the door and began chanting, as if in a dream

  ‘IT AIN’T NO ART TO TAKE MOUNTAINS APART. IT AIN’T NO ART TO TAKE MOUNTAINS APART.’

  As though by magic, their looks became combative – from a gaggle of freeloaders they had been transformed into a militant cell. Their arms were locked together, it looked like experimental theater, with me as the sole member of the audience. Behind me,
two of the demonstrators raised the banner, you could read the words through the back of it: VIOLENCE AGAINST NATURE IS VIOLENCE AGAINST MANKIND. A voice beside me said, ‘Immoral art is a crime, that’s how we feel about it.’

  It was the girl with the flyers, and her words were spoken in complete earnest. I had to bend over to hear her.

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to tell you. If you’d like more information, come with me.’

  Her friends kept droning the same words, IT AIN’T NO ART TO TAKE MOUNTAINS APART. We walked over to the shopping cart.

  ‘What interests me,’ I said, ‘is exactly what you people have against Schultz.’

  It looked like she was about to roll her eyes or start clucking with her tongue, but she restrained herself. She asked, ‘Are you familiar with the work of this Mr. Schultz?’

  ‘Not particularly. I mean, I don’t know much about it.’

  ‘There’s something very wrong with that man. And with a world that views him as an artist . . . His work as art.’

  The words were like bitter rinds in her mouth. Behind us the mechanical cadence of the chorus halted. She said, ‘Mr. Schultz acts out his vandalistic urges on nature, which can’t defend itself.’

  From the cart she dug out a few photocopies, I saw a pile of folders marked PRESS – this kind of activism was, in its own way, highly organized. I pointed at the press kits.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘Are you a reporter? Foreign? You sound foreign.’

  ‘England,’ I said.

  ‘Well then, would you write down the name of the publication or network you work for, and your email address, so we can keep you up to date on our activities?’

  The Norwich Evening News was the first newspaper that came to mind. She handed me a press kit, in which I hoped to find more substantial information about Schultz.

  ‘But now I’d really like to go inside,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, but you can’t do that. We’re not letting anyone in. Usually we wait till the police come . . .’

  She looked at the others, then at her bright red Swatch.

  ‘They’re a little late today.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Yesterday they were here before noon. Come along, I have to . . .’

  ‘Who are you talking about? The police?’

  ‘What do you think, that we’re going to go away voluntarily?’

  A man came out of the building. A clipped gray beard, neatly dressed. The gallery owner. He was trying not to yell.

  ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘get out of here, you people.’

  ‘You know we can’t do that,’ one boy said.

  ‘You people are obstructing the freedom of expression. Fascism. Deplorable.’

  ‘You could also see it as free publicity,’ the boy said.

  The natural leader, handsome, gangly, maybe the son of a judge. Stenciled on the back of his jacket was a portrait of Che Guevara.

  ‘Guys,’ he said, ‘could I . . .’

  ‘This is art, damn it. Not politics. You people are turning it into politics. Wrong! Wrong! If you want politics, go to city hall. Go bother them. This is a gallery.’

  ‘Everything is politics, I’m afraid,’ the boy said.

  Behind the man, in the doorway, I saw a young woman wearing heavy-framed glasses. The lenses were ponds of contempt.

  ‘Fuck off,’ the man said. ‘All of you, fuck off!’

  Now he had starting yelling despite himself.

  ‘You’re the one who chose to display his work,’ the boy said.

  At a sign from him the others began chanting again. Loud and monotonous, you could easily hate them for it. The man and woman disappeared. The chorus stopped.

  From my vantage point across the street I watched things develop, but there wasn’t much to hold my attention. They passed out flyers, smoked cigarettes, grew bored. The girl who had given me the press kit looked over a few times, waved once. I was sitting with my back against a tree. A position of strength. This was the same way I had watched the children at the locks, dissected the group dynamics of the strong and the weak, long ago in rural Groningen. A bottle-green memory.

  Lethargy settled on the protestors across the street, there was at the moment nothing to feed their identity as activists. I opened the folder and started reading.

  Schultz had bought a mountain in Panama’s Darien province, the borderland between Central and South America – an impenetrable jungle region, no roads; the world began again only on the other side, in Colombia. He used Emberá Indians as laborers, hired them to help him carry out Abgrund, the destruction of his mountain. He was tearing it to the ground bit by bit. The report said he was already almost halfway there. There had been protests, conservationists and anti-globalists had joined forces against him. I found a sheet of paper with a summary of the activities carried out against Abgrund – petitions, protest marches in Panama City, before the Panamanian consulate in Geneva, the embassy in Brasilia, accompanied by the dates, the names of the committees and the estimated number of demonstrators; picayune detail lent the efforts an official air. And there were lists of endangered animal and plant species in the region. The picture slowly emerged of a reckless hater who squeezed the life out of all those little animals with his own two hands, who crushed rare flowers between his fingers.

  Mitchell Rhodes, a fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, had tried to visit Abgrund. He got as far as the boundaries of the terrain itself and was stopped there by guards. FARC militiamen, AK-47s slung over their shoulders. Rhodes and his companions, two guides and a biologist from the University of the West Indies, had been assaulted, shots had been fired in the air.

  The press kit contained copies of aerial photographs of a clearing in the jungle, the dreary wasteland of a mining operation. A steep, lonesome mountain in the middle. I thought I could make out conveyors, bulldozers, barracks. Smoke from bonfires. Down there, somewhere, was my father. Concerning Schultz himself, his motives, I found little. Speculations, no facts. Words like ‘demonic’ and ‘fascistic’ reflected the authors’ opinions, but clarified almost nothing. I was disappointed. I had hoped to find him, or at least get a little closer.

  The girl crossed the street.

  ‘Hi,’ she said once she was standing in front of me, ‘you were sitting there reading so quietly . . .’

  ‘Not a lot happening, is there?’

  ‘A boycott calls for a lot of patience.’

  ‘Is that what you call it, a boycott?’

  ‘That’s what we’re doing, a boycott. With a high degree of public agitation.’

  ‘Straight out of the Demonstrator’s Handbook?’

  ‘Sort of. But if you’re a reporter, I probably shouldn’t tell you too much.’

  ‘I’m not a reporter. I only wanted the press kit. Sorry.’

  She had something awkward about her, a kind of beauty which I could imagine that only I might be able to appreciate.

  Two police cars stopped in front of the gallery. We crossed the street, I kept my distance in order not to be confused with the demonstrators. The tall boy was handcuffed, the girl with the flyers kept pushing her way up to the front, it seemed as though she wanted to be arrested. Five protestors were taken away, the others were chased off with batons.

  ‘You can go inside now,’ she said as she passed.

  The wheels of her shopping cart rattled on the concrete. The incident seemed to have made no impression on her. She smiled in a way I couldn’t figure.

  You could call it my introduction to my father. In the flesh. I strolled past his work slowly, trying to see in it the world of his thoughts. The mind of a man turned inside out. A series of paintings on rough wooden panels, all unevenly sawed. They looked like dark landscapes, uprooted as though by war. Each had a vanishing point, a darkness where the earth seemed to swallow itself. Once that black hole had caught your eye, everything seemed to move towards it like a mudslide off a hill. The catalog noted that the works were displayed b
ehind Plexiglas; in view of the maker’s controversial reputation, vandalism could not be ruled out.

  In the middle of the gallery a black square had been cordoned off, made from tarps hanging from ceiling to floor. Abgrund was being shown inside it. I struggled with the tarpaulin until I found an opening. Flickering images on the screen, vibrating blue light. Wooden benches had been arranged in close rows, as in a church, and I was the only visitor. The film ran in a loop, I came in somewhere in the middle. Heavy thuds like mortar fire, a cloud of dust in the distance. The camera, perched on someone’s shoulder, moved towards it. Then that voice, rambling amid a landscape of boulders.

  ‘The absolute core . . . cracking the shell.’

  It was the first time I’d ever heard his voice. My breath caught in my throat. Hello, father. His English was like that of the SS officers in war movies. I tried to figure out what I was looking at. A man in a ruin of his own making. His mumbling.

  ‘The West. Oh, how we laughed at the West!’

  He aimed the camera at the mountain in the distance. I was squinting, trying to make out whether there was anything worth seeing, looking for things camouflaged, when an explosion tore away the mountainside; dust, grit, chaos. The voice guided the viewer to the earth turned inside out. A rumbling, the camera’s eye looked up, more stone rolling down the slope.

  ‘How does one become a god, I asked them. How. By defeating the old gods. By reason of overweening pride. By not being the possessive slave. Weakened, smitten by the tiniest violation of his slavish happiness. Let us be butchers. Bear witness to our predilection for a universe of blood and bones. Create a cosmic slaughterhouse . . .’