Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  Chickens were scratching about on the thatched roofs. In a few minutes the gas lanterns would go on and here and there little generators would begin thrumming.

  Anyone seeing Ché Ibarra for the first time would think he had met his own murderer. But, apparently, inside that exterior of riffraff from a Mariachi film was housed the soul of a poet. His lips knew the shape of the libretto to Le nozze di Figaro. Aldair Macmillan acted as our interpreter. Ibarra glanced at me only briefly, dead eyes in a craggy face shiny with salt and grease. He had the moustache of a Chinaman, its hairs implanted sparsely across his lip. The fireflies gleamed in the bushes behind his house. He nodded in reply to my questions. He knew the way. He had seen Schultz in real life. He was still there. A day’s walk if you left before sunup, otherwise two. He didn’t seem to care at all whether we went or not. When asked what it would cost to lead me there, he shrugged, then said, ‘Doscientos dólares.’

  The prospect of being alone with this man in the jungle frightened me. I could see myself dead, buried carelessly beneath a layer of leaves. That someone like this could love Mozart seemed a comic misunderstanding.

  ‘Two hundred is okay,’ I said. ‘When can we go?’

  Again, indifference. I said I’d like to leave the day after tomorrow, before sunup. His hands lay motionless on the table in front of him. Did I need to bring things, food, water? Ché Ibarra shook his tired head – that would not be necessary.

  Thirty-six hours later, almost empty-handed, I found myself at his door. A backpack containing a few odds and ends. The house was dark. A lemon-yellow moon was lingering over the trees. The chirping of geckos, and the impression that the buzzing and shrilling of insects must be loudest just before dawn. You could lose yourself in that noise, an electrifying tapestry. Just as I started climbing the steps to the veranda, I heard footsteps on the road. Ibarra had already left his house, perhaps he had been picking up a few necessities for the trip. He was wearing a half-filled backpack, he looked like nothing so much as a soldier.

  ‘Venga, vamos.’

  Then he gave me my first view of the prospect that would lie before me all day long, the army-green backside of a man who seemed to consist entirely of sinew and stolid willpower. I felt lucky, and I was on my way, it was going to work out. We plunged into the head-high elephant grass. The last stars in the sky were growing pale, we were rotating again into a new day. The pain in my foot was bearable, the skin had healed over. I picked up the pace, but he was far out in front of me. We crossed a path lined by a dyke that seemed built for irrigation and disappeared into the blue embrace of the forest. Ibarra put in the earbuds of his Walkman. Every once in a while he looked back. The final shadows of the night had tucked themselves away amid the trees, they would quickly be chased away by bundles of sunlight falling through the high crowns. I barely realized that I was on my way to my father. The effort it had taken to get there had relegated my goal to the background. But now every step was taking me closer to him, every meter counted; the less I thought, the better off I was, that would help me to ignore the pain in my foot that was acting up now, the shortness of breath and the sweat seeping through my shirt – I counted my steps, up to one hundred and then back down again. The fanatical hiss of insects had subsided, as it grew hotter that sound was replaced by a low, constant drone. We arrived at a brook that could easily have flowed in England, silver water rolling over a copper-colored bed, to cross it was an act of blasphemy; clouding the holy water, muddy feet on the gold brocade of the temple garment.

  We clambered across the mossy, moist roots of trees, climbed hills of mud, stones shot out from under the soles of my shoes. We still had not stopped for a rest. My mouth was dry. Ibarra warned me not to step on a coral snake that was almost completely hidden beneath leaves and humus. My hands began swelling again and itched. I did my best to keep up with him, while he listened composedly to piano concertos or the requiem Dies irae – baroque absurdities of this continent. I was no longer worried about him gutting me with his knife, I was too exhausted to be afraid. We stopped beside a dark pool amid the trees, a place where elves and sorcerers wrote the course of lifetimes on the black mirror of the surface. Ibarra handed me a bottle of water. He put the earbuds back in and stared into space. Later he gave me a banana. Then a piece of bread and a can of sardines. I dunked the bread in the leftover oil. Ibarra stood up. Apparently he was not planning to take the rubbish with him. Conscientious European that I was, I put it in my backpack.

  The forest showed itself to me as an entity, an organism specialized in brief, flagrant blossoming and sudden death. Minor revelations flared up between the trees, birds like hellish-red flames. I was startled by the fleshy wings of a butterfly that fluttered in my face. I slapped at them. There were animals – insects? – that sounded like a plane flying over, there were others that made the sound of a chainsaw, a dying lamb, marbles knocked together. This was how the forest sounded at a noon hour giddy with heat. My thoughts took on the form of hallucinations. Flowers fell from the sky, in front of me walked a man who, I was suddenly certain, had served with the FARC, a runaway guerrillero – so light-footed and purposefully did he move through the trees. A new storey was built onto my fear: what if he were taking me to a rebel camp where I would be held hostage? Did the FARC operate this deep within Panama? What time was it? Was this the day that I was going to meet him, the man of whom I had no other memory but the rustling of his trouser legs? And what day was that then?

  Ibarra was waiting for me beside a little waterfall. Kneeling, he drank from the stream and gestured to me to do the same. He sat down on the stones and unlaced his army boots. Then he undressed and dove into the pool under the cascade. He swam like a little dog. My sock was red with blood. The sole was soaked. From the rocks along the bank I slid into the water. Little fishy mouths nibbled at my flesh. I went under and drifted over the smooth stones at the bottom. When I resurfaced, we were no longer alone. A man was looking at us. Soiled T-shirt and fatigue trousers, a machete hanging from his belt. They were talking, Ibarra and he. Ibarra was standing naked on the bank, solid as the trunks along the banks of the creek at El Real, seeming completely at ease. They tossed the occasional glance in my direction. While Ibarra was getting dressed, the other man shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack. I climbed onto the bank and caught a whiff of sulfur. An unpleasant kind of watchfulness had settled on the things that happened.

  ‘Hombre,’ the unknown man said to me.

  He shook his head and said things I didn’t understand. A gate was being closed, I understood that much. I breathed deeply in and out to ward off a panic attack. I understood the word prohibido. An obstacle, no more than that. An obstacle.

  ‘No,’ I stammered. ‘No es imposible.’

  He raised his chin.

  ‘Vamos a señor Schultz,’ I said.

  The thin valor of those words, spoken to two men who had only to walk away in order to ensure my certain death. I began speaking in English. That I sure as hell had not come to Darién just to let myself be turned away by the first hillbilly I ran into. That I was his son, that he was expecting me, that he had been waiting for me all his life, that’s right, sir! Waiting for me, his son, the hijo of señor Schultz, and now you – my hand cast lightning bolts in his direction – are not going to try to tell me that I’ve come to the end of the road here, oh no, you are going to let us through, what’s more, you’re going to take us there, me, hijo de señor Schultz, and my man Friday here.

  His head moved slightly, doubtfully, he asked, ‘Usted es el hijo de señor Schultz?’

  I tapped my finger against my chest.

  ‘Hijo.’

  I pointed to the countryside behind him.

  ‘Padre.’

  He took a drag of his cigarette, then squished the glowing cone between thumb and forefinger. It was impossible to tell whether he was thinking about a great many things at the same time, or thinking very slowly about one little thing, stuck between his teeth like a bothersom
e piece of gristle. The smoke from his cigarette hung between us. When it had drifted away the man shrugged and said something to Ibarra, but against the rocky surface of my guide’s expression all announcements dashed themselves to pieces. We started moving. First the unknown man, then Ibarra, then me. That was how we moved through the forest, like the ants at our feet, who carved out narrow roads with snippets of bright green leaves on their backs, heading home to their republics. A shiny blue butterfly flew out in front of me, amid the treetops the embers of the day died out. Dull pain wedged itself between my temples, every single footstep resounded in my head.

  By the time we headed for a spot of light amid the trees, I was counting on nothing. A clearing, columns of smoke rising skywards between the stumps. We stepped out of the shadows into the last daylight – I took a deep breath. Between a handful of huts lay dogs, there were no people anywhere. We walked past the paltry thatched shelters. There was washing hanging outside them. The settlement was suffused with the general messiness of temporary, improvised living. All the trees around the plot had been cut down, elephant grass was shooting up between the fallen trunks. This was an outpost, they were taking me further. Uphill we went now, again we slipped into the trees, this time along a winding path of footprints on the moist ground. Night was falling, I heard loud, mechanical sounds. The song of stone against steel, the strain of powerful engines. Then we were standing at the edge of a scene that would come back in my dreams – a grated, tortured landscape, a work of systematic hatred. A lone, steep mountain, the face of which on our side was eaten away by a malicious brand of erosion. A bulldozer labored across the violated surface of the earth, a plain of ground stone. A truck was flattening out the mountain’s remains. Fires were burning in oil drums, smoking, flaring. Above all this, at the edge of the quarry, was where we stood. We descended along a winding path into the depths. I felt numb and without expectations. He might be there, he might not be. What had I hoped all this would lead to?

  We were heading towards a central barrack. The bulldozer came to a halt, only the one yellow eye of the truck still crept over the terrain. Ibarra and I waited outside the long hut as the workers entered, drawn by the paltry light that burned inside. A few men came out again, tattered and dirty from head to toe like mineworkers. They looked at me, as though trying to see a resemblance with him. They exchanged words, seemed to hesitate about what to do. One of them had to take me to Schultz, none of them was eager to do so. In the end, an old Indian – his face weathered as a gravestone – was given the task. Beneath his unbuttoned shirt you could see his hairless chest, the wrinkled, round belly beneath that. He was my escort for the last stage of this journey. He walked away without looking back, the men pushed me after him. We crossed the dead ground, there was a slope we climbed, I saw the contours of a little building in the darkness. Reddish light inside. I stumbled after the Indian. My heart leapt in my throat, a boulder rolled down the slope. At a little distance from the hut, the Indian stopped in his tracks. In his frail, lonesome voice he called out, ‘Señor Schultz, discúlpame!’

  It seemed that all the currents in my life had been meant to arrive at this moment, here, under the forest at the top of the slope, up to the red half-light coming from the windows and the cracks around the door of flattened tins; it was for this that it had all existed. Señor Schultz, discúlpame . . . the open sesame that would reveal a father, the veils would be parted. Bumping around, then the door opened, shrieking softly on its hinges. A man peered into the darkness and said, ‘Qué hay? Qué quiere?’

  The Indian stepped back and disappeared quickly. The man took a step forward, mumbling, uncertain about the shape in the darkness.

  ‘Mr. Schultz,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s there? Who are you?’

  I broke the inertia by taking a step, by saying, ‘I’ve come here to talk to you.’

  We were facing each other now. It occurred to me that he might be night blind, or simply nearsighted as all get-out, because he still seemed to see nothing but shadows.

  ‘Shall we go inside?’ I asked.

  He backed through the doorway, I stooped and followed him. I found myself standing in a shabby, low-ceilinged room, the hut of a castaway. A man, my height, his beard streaked with gray. He said nothing, just looked. My voice was even and clear when I said, ‘I’m Ludwig Unger.’

  And, as though to refresh his memory, ‘Your son.’

  The silence reverberated between my ears. The man ran his hand over his beard, then laid it on the back of his neck. He walked to the table and sat down. The back of the chair creaked, his gaze swept the ceiling, the kerosene lamp above the table. I thought I heard him making a sound beneath his breath, a thought that couldn’t make it past his lips. There inside him an arranging was going on, the disposition of the things that, on one evening out of a million, had fallen on his head.

  ‘You look like her,’ he said then.

  Again he withdrew inside himself, looking for words, for something to say.

  ‘You always were your mother’s baby.’

  His shack was that of a cynical philosopher, a cur.

  ‘Cat got your tongue, boy? Sit down.’

  There was another chair in the room, beside the bed, covered in clothes and papers. Next to the mattress was the butt of a candle in a tin can, and an almost-consumed green spiral to ward off insects. Now we were sitting across from each other, Bodo Schultz and Ludwig Unger, separated by a lifetime, my lifetime, and it was at that of all moments that my tongue seemed to lie paralyzed in my mouth. He was so much older than I had imagined him. Father, is that you? He filled two glasses from a bottle with no label.

  ‘Maybe this will make you a little more talkative.’

  Ay, the burning in my guts! He assessed me, squinting, as though his eyes were indeed bad.

  ‘How’s your mother doing?’

  I exhaled loudly through my nostrils.

  ‘Not good,’ I said. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Dead,’ he echoed.

  ‘Cancer.’

  He nodded like a turtle.

  ‘Marthe dead. When?’

  ‘May of last year.’

  ‘May. What month is it now?’

  ‘January.’

  ‘Did she suffer?’

  ‘She suffered.’

  ‘There isn’t any other way.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  He drank. Drops remained hanging in his beard.

  ‘That’s fucked,’ he said.

  And a little later, ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘A man brought me. He showed me the way.’

  ‘It’s hard not to be found in this world.’

  I had no other repertoire at my disposal but the primal questions. They were burning in my soul like phosphor.

  ‘Why did you go away? From Alexandria, I mean. Without . . . anything.’

  A laugh, scornful, insulting.

  ‘Did you come all this way just to lecture me on marital ethics, boy? Is that it? Then I can probably expect a few more of your sort to show up here, don’t you think?’

  I drew in my breath.

  ‘I don’t know about your life. I just have a couple of questions. Then I’ll go away.’

  ‘You could have called.’

  He nodded at the satellite phone on the shelf behind him.

  ‘I didn’t have your number, I’m sorry.’

  When he grinned you could see the black holes in his teeth.

  ‘You came here because you want to find out something,’ he said. ‘Do you want to know what you could have figured out anyway, or do you want to know about what you can’t even fathom right now? The point where nothing’s left. Beyond that. Beyond people. Beyond everything. Where cosmic loneliness is your reward. Knowledge in its most supreme form. No more prospects, only chasms.’

  ‘All I want to know is what reason was good enough to leave your wife and child alone.’

  He refilled the glasses. His hand shook.

  ‘Siddhar
tha Gautama looks at his sleeping wife and child. Rahula, that was the child’s name. Ball, chain. Gautama sneaks out of the house and never comes back. He becomes an ascetic in the wilderness. Some people become Buddha. Others anti-Buddha.’

  ‘Ball and chain.’

  ‘Your mother got pregnant. Dozens, hundreds of men had poured their seed into her, I made her pregnant.’

  ‘You were married.’

  ‘No children, I told her that. Absolutely not. Women’s little accidents, phaw!’

  ‘I was unwanted . . .’

  ‘No sad little songs here. Don’t bellyache. She screwed me into it. Lesson one: never underestimate the hunger of the womb. The female animal is ravenous. She punches a bunghole in your flesh, your strength runs out. Your mother? I wanted a woman, I got a household. She kissed as though trying to suck the life out of me. She didn’t kiss, she sucked.’

  Oh, horrible flash – her lips on my neck, the kiss of death.

  ‘Spare me the gruesome details,’ I said.

  His sardonic laugh.

  ‘My answers already stuck in your craw? You just got here. Aw, did he come all that way for something he doesn’t want to know about? Prometheus with his smoking matchstick! Hahaha!’

  A black, exploding star at the center of my chest. He slams his glass down on the table. He says, ‘Love is what she called it, and played the flute on my hollow bones. And you, you belonged to your mother. She even gave you her name, or so I hear. Praise the day I left, that way you had her all to yourself, that’s what little boys want, isn’t it? Mommy all to themselves? With no one to interrupt their dirty little fantasies? When you’re playing with your little weenie?’

  I leaned across the table, my fists clenched.

  ‘You’re going too far now.’

  My breath caught.

  ‘You have no right . . .’

  He shook his head.