Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  The modesty of the first few days has left her now, she takes her breasts in her hands and offers them to me, the sensation of her soft, fragrant flesh makes me light in the head. During the act her mouth is always open, with her constant keening she puts herself in a trancelike state, until suddenly her eyes open wide, as though awakening from a nightmare, and she digs her manicured nails into my flesh and moans things in German.

  We take a taxi to Cape Sounion, the driver waits for us at the parking lot. On the reserve that is the hotel on the Lagonissi peninsula it’s easy to forget that you are in a country with an arid climate, that the sun here splits rock. In the pale blue haze over the sea, sailboats and islands are of equal weight.

  At the temple of Poseidon, perched gloriously at the tip of the cape, Lotte shows me where Byron carved his name in the pillar, in graceful letters. She is wearing a sleeveless blouse embroidered with gold thread and a skirt that does not quite reach her knees, everything white, just like the espadrilles on her feet. Her nipples, the bumps they make, press themselves on me. She bends over to read other names scratched in the pillar, and slides her sunglasses with the monogrammed C’s up onto her forehead in order to see better. Her breasts sway heavily under the textile. I feel an erection coming up.

  At the edge of the cape a guide wearing sandals announces in a loud voice that it was on this rock that King Aegeus waited for the return of his son Theseus, who had gone to Crete to slay the Minotaur. Theseus had left with black sails and, if he survived his mission, would return with white in the riggings. But because of the tragic end of his love for Ariadne, whom he was forced to leave behind on Naxos, Theseus forgot his promise and sailed back to Athens with black sails. From Cape Sounion, his father saw the black sails approaching in the distance. Overcome by sorrow, he threw himself into the sea.

  I recall the contours of the legend, it had been impressive even when I’d heard it in a Suffolk classroom. A few tourists leave the group and walk over to the edge, one of them says, ‘It’s not really all that steep. It would be more like rolling instead of falling.’

  Lotte comes over and stands beside me. I know the kind of mood she’s in.

  ‘In Germany you sometimes forget how lovely the world is,’ she says.

  I tell her the story I just heard. We look out over the mythical sea, the line between water and sky has been dispelled, white sails float on the horizon, sons who have slain the beast and are now returning home.

  The plane lands early in the morning. The passengers leave the aircraft and descend the stairs to the bus on the landing strip. It is cold, a purple veil lies over the desert. Between the layers of cold air drift the pungent, titillating odors of another world.

  In the arrivals hall the flash of recognition – even far away and amid the crowd, I see from the way she moves, her silhouette among the others, that it’s her. Imprint. Lorenz. And desperate love as well. That tremor, risen from the depths where the child lies sleeping, opens its eyes now and sees its mother.

  My smile is untainted, nothing grinds between my teeth.

  She has a cobalt-blue mantilla draped over her shoulders. She is crying a little. She throws her arms around me, I feel her belly against my body, her breasts. The repulsion, sharp as a toothache. I will never have a normal relationship with that body. Not even now that we have arrived at the end, now that her days are numbered.

  ‘I’ve got a cab for us,’ she says. ‘Come on.’

  We had telephoned occasionally. At long last she had bought a cell phone, something she had always avoided out of an unspecified fear of radiation.

  ‘Tunisia,’ she said when I asked where in the world she was.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘This is an island, I think. I’ve barely been out of the hotel.’

  ‘And what is the island called?’ I ask, as though trying to help her after she has lost her way.

  ‘Djerba.’

  I was holding a shell to my ear, listening to the hissing of the ocean.

  ‘Hello, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m still here. What are you doing out there?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On Djerba.’

  ‘Oh. Taking it easy. Reading a lot.’

  ‘I mean, why are you there?’

  ‘Oh, well, they didn’t want me anymore. That’s what it really boils down to.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘There was a spot on my breast. You couldn’t see it at all, with a little makeup, but by then they weren’t interested anymore. They said the actors wouldn’t be able to handle it. Just a little spot.’

  My head spun. The moment you knew would come, for which in your blackest hours you had longed. Which you had feared more than anything else. My voice was flat, toneless, when I asked, ‘What kind of spot?’

  ‘A kind of cancer. An early stage. On the nipple, the right one.’

  From the sacred spaces of the past came the requiems I had sung for her. The moment had come. I cursed quietly.

  ‘Yeah, you can say that again.’

  ‘What now?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t worry your head about it, love. It’s only a little spot. Sometimes it even heals over for a while.’

  ‘It’s a open wound?’

  ‘That’s how it started. An infection. A sort of flaky little wound that bled a little sometimes. Sometimes a little pus came out of it. That healed over again but now it’s been open again for a while. I don’t understand it. I eat so many good things, lots of vitamin C, wheat germ. I have this really good salve that I rub on it. I’ve got it pretty well under control.’

  ‘Vitamin C? Against cancer?’

  ‘It’s so good, a lot more people . . .’

  ‘And the doctor? Where are you going for treatment?’

  ‘I’ve heard about this wonderful orthomolecular physician, I want to make an appointment with him. And in Cologne there’s a doctor who has developed a special method . . .’

  And so it dawned on me that she was not planning to go to a hospital for treatment at all, that she didn’t even want to think about an operation. She was placing her fate in the hands of people who called themselves healers. The greatest act one could perform on this earth was to heal another. To be Jesus.

  She was on the far shore of the same sea I was looking at. I left Lagonissi as quickly as I could.

  In the backseat of the taxi, with the desert awakening all around, it was as though we were racing back through time, back to Alexandria.

  The subject lay silently between us, black water.

  ‘Where did you come from now?’ she asked.

  I pointed at the windshield, down the long asphalt road, towards the still-invisible sea beyond.

  ‘The other side. Athens.’

  ‘When you got off the plane I saw that you have the same stately posture as my father. You inherited that from him. So straight and tall. Not that hulking frame that your father had.’

  I saw oleanders and crooked olive trees with bluish-green leaves and occasionally, along the road, women in long, heavy skirts and broad-rimmed straw hats.

  ‘This is where it is,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not far now.’

  Midoun was the name of the village. Then the houses of Midoun segued into more olive orchards, with here and there a house the color of dust, sometimes a few of them huddled together.

  Parallel to the coastline the hotels loomed up, one after the other, countless charter flights poured into them constantly. Bougainvillea bloomed beside the entrance. A man in an emerald-green waistcoat took my suitcase. On the reception desk was a sign. Honored guest, the algae on the beach is a natural phenomenon, we are unable to remove it completely. The algae is a part of the ecosystem. The sea will remove it by itself. The management thanks you for being understanding.

  We went down to the breakfast room. A low mist hung in the room, coming from the fried eggs, bacon, the steam from chafing dishes. We found a little table by the window. The food was spread out over a few islands, between th
em people swarmed with plates in hand. The conveyor toaster was of particular interest to me. You put a slice of bread on a conveyor belt and it was roasted top and bottom by glowing spirals – when it reached the end of the belt the bread fell onto a little slide and was ejected from the machine, toasted and all. An industrial, efficient process, in keeping with the mass tourism along this stretch of coast.

  ‘Mostly Germans here,’ my mother said. ‘It’s very inexpensive. I could spend the rest of my life here if I wanted to.’

  Emotion sticking like a fishbone in my craw. The rest of her life, it might be long or short, what is clear in any event is that Death has reminded her of their rendezvous. Was she always so clumsy with knife and fork? I look at her like a collector. I collect memories.

  At four in the afternoon I awoke from a deep sleep and started the day for the second time. From the window I could see on the beach the plague of algae I had read about downstairs. Dark brown, a thick layer meters wide, tossed up by the sea. Beyond that, along the remaining strip of sand, were wicker parasols.

  The corridors were long and dark, from behind the doors came the sounds of human lives. The wind whistled down the hallways. I almost fell into the elevator, which had stopped a good thirty centimeters lower than I had expected.

  I found her on one of the recliners along the narrow stretch of sand.

  ‘Feeling rested, sweetheart?’ she asked.

  She wasn’t wearing a top. I wondered whether that was acceptable in this part of the world, with its Arab prudishness, but noticed that other women were doing the same. There was a bright red spot on her right nipple. It looked scaly, infected.

  ‘And now,’ I said after a time, ‘what about that?’

  I nodded at her breast. She looked at it.

  ‘This,’ she said, ‘is not cancer, this is a challenge.’

  I shook my head slowly, in disbelief.

  ‘Is that what the doctor said, Mrs. Unger, you have a challenge? It looks scary. Aggressive.’

  ‘It’s not that bad, is it? Like an insect bite or something.’

  ‘The crab, Mother, that’s what bit you.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Those are only metaphors.’

  ‘What are you planning to do about it? Do you even have a plan?’

  ‘I have an appointment in Cologne in December. It’s quite a drastic procedure, you know, it makes you very ill, but I’ve heard such good things about it.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘He sort of heats the cancer, those cells can’t take it and they die.’

  ‘Only those cells? The other cells can take it?’

  ‘Don’t ask me how it works exactly. If you really want to know, look it up on the Internet.’

  ‘I already did.’

  ‘Not well enough, apparently.’

  We drank tall glasses of fruit juice at the nearest outdoor café, beneath a white latticework roof through which the late-afternoon sun threw squares of light. The saddest hour. Families at little tables ate deep-fried dishes. The black waiters were the only ones who smiled. The Arabs looked down on us rather emphatically.

  ‘So you’re not going to go to a hospital?’ I asked. ‘No chemotherapy or radiation?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said. ‘Even doctors advise their wives not to do that.’

  She threw up a barricade of unverifiable information that underscored the correctness of her choice, which I found reckless, and which frightened me.

  ‘We haven’t seen each other for so long, Ludwig, shall we talk about something else?’

  She was planning to settle in Holland for as long as the alternative treatments took, perhaps for good. The wanderings since the loss of our house had lasted eight years, she wasn’t even sure that Warren and Catherine hadn’t taken our household goods to the flea market long ago.

  ‘You’re going to die if you don’t do anything about that breast,’ I said. ‘You do realize that, don’t you?’

  ‘Not do anything? But I’m doing so much! How can you say that? I’ve gathered a lot of information, believe me.’

  ‘When did you find out about it?’

  ‘The first time I went to a doctor was in January. It just wouldn’t heal.’

  ‘This is November.’

  We were silent. Through my straw I sucked up water from among the ice cubes.

  ‘Paget’s disease,’ I said. ‘That’s what you’ve got.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘A preliminary form of cancer, not hard to treat.’

  ‘If they cut into you that can cause the cancer to spread, they don’t tell you that.’

  ‘They.’

  ‘The doctors, that’s who. In the service of the pharmaceutical industry.’

  ‘They have taken an oath, you know.’

  ‘Now you’re being very naïve, Ludwig, please.’

  I had hoped that, with the intercession of time, we would be able to deal with each other more mildly, but the only thing time taught was that these things were immutable, that in all things this first day stood back to back with the last one long ago, so that the mood again became poisoned by conflicts and irreconcilable differences. We had remained the same, we had not escaped ourselves or the other, not even now that the disease had taken root in her.

  At eight o’clock we met in the dining room. Cooks in high white hats fried little fish and thin entrecôtes beside the pool. The luminescent turquoise of the water looked sweet and edible. There is something magical about the glow of swimming pools in the dark; if I ever have a house I want one with a pool, simply because of that edible light.

  The hotel was furnished like a large sailing ship, a mast stood smack in the middle of the central lobby, ropes were slung here and there. Between the staff and the tourists there existed a strictly businesslike contact, when all was said and done each one went home and all memories were lost of this meeting of the peoples. People slipped by each other without touching; watching for a while from a couch in the lobby, one had the feeling that the ship could suddenly drag anchor, and that crew and passengers would be locked forever in this vacuum, with the Buena Vista Social Club on eternal replay.

  Similar feelings of endlessness overtook me in the corridors that I moved down on my way to my room. There was an enormous difference in air pressure between the hallways and the rooms, a horrible whistling and buzzing wormed its way under the doors, pressed itself through fissures. Doors slammed violently. Once, by accident, I stepped out of the elevator too soon and wandered through identical corridors in search of my room, but the magnetic key didn’t fit – lost in the labyrinth, with no thread of love to show me the way out. I follow the sandy footprints of children down the sky-blue carpet, the tracks of little prehistoric predators.

  The flat coastline described a lazy curve, at night you could see the lights of Zarzis in the distance. Seen from offshore, Africa began hesitantly, without emphasis, the land barely rose above water. Very little grew on the silted soil. A dead, flat coast, without striking characteristics.

  The wind came up. That night I closed the doors to the balcony. When I looked out the window in the morning the sea was restless. During the night it had washed away parasols, the water stood in puddles on the little volleyball court. And the sea had brought ashore even more algae. Tons of organic material had been shoved all the way up the terraces, the beach had disappeared completely beneath it. All was foam, chaos. In the midst of that goo stood four men, their trouser legs rolled up. Two of them were carrying shovels. To anyone overseeing the fifteen-meter-wide band of seaweed covering the entire coastline, the shovel was an absurd prop. Later a little red tractor appeared, pulling a trailer, and the men began their Herculean labor. Shovelful by shovelful they scooped up the algae. The parasols remained upturned, no-one seemed to believe anymore in the ruined façade.

  The hotel’s entertainer, spirited and homosexual, is standing at poolside. The group in the water at his feet is trying to keep up with the exercises as he coun
ts down from ten to one in his shrill voice. I try to avoid him as much as possible, because of the longing glances he tosses my way. He counts down in French, German and English, the ghetto blaster roaring at his back. His swimming trunks are tiny and tight.

  She is in the baths, leaning back in a recliner, her body wrapped in a white, much-washed bathrobe. Her feet are resting on a footstool, there are balls of cotton wedged between her toes. She flaps her hands.

  ‘Have a massage,’ she says. ‘It’s lovely, so relaxing. It would be good for you. Sit down, you make me nervous when you stand there wobbling like that. Would you like a cup of tea? What’s-His-Name, you know, he’ll fetch it for you. Ask him to come over, would you?’

  I poke my head around the corner of the relax room and ask the receptionist to send someone over. A few minutes later a man comes gliding in, charm incarnate – smooth and gleaming brown as a waxed piece of hardwood furniture.

  ‘Thé de menthe for Frau Marthe, subito. And this, who might this be?’

  He winks.

  ‘Your brother? Someone else?’

  ‘My son,’ she said.

  ‘Incroyable!’

  How much feigned amazement can fit in one face. He hurries away on his white clogs.

  ‘A real clown,’ my mother says to the vacuum he leaves behind. ‘And a huge flirt.’

  And a little later.

  ‘But I still look pretty good, don’t you think?’

  ‘The cancer’s not on your face, that’s right.’

  I see her sigh but can’t hear it.

  ‘I wanted to ask you to go along with me to Holland,’ she says. ‘At least for the first period. If you’ve got the time, that is.’

  ‘Terminal care.’

  ‘I have no intention of dying yet!’

  ‘Maybe you’ll become ill. That’s to be expected if you don’t do anything.’