I found myself in a shadowy entranceway with brown panelled walls. At the end of it a door opened and a wave of noise came rushing out. We heard the tinkling of glassware, raised voices and heavy objects being slid across a wooden floor.
The meeting hall was a low room with dozens of chairs scattered around, and there were at least a hundred people in there. A mist of cigarette smoke hung just below the ceiling. I saw tattooed men with bulging muscle groups beneath their tight mesh vests and sleeveless T-shirts. At the centre of the room stood the altar of this fringe cult: the metal table with its upright pegs. Joe went looking for the organizers in order to sign in. I squeezed the armrest of my cart to stop the uncontrollable jerks rolling through my body. Oh cigarette, oh beer . . . I didn’t seem to remember anything about having come here of my own free will. When Joe came back I gestured for a cigarette, he lit one for me and wedged it between my lips.
‘Knock-out system,’ he said. ‘Lose once and you’re finished. They start with the lightweights, then the big boys. The betting begins right before you do, and you start on “Ready? Go!” How you doing?’
I nodded.
‘You start against . . . look here, Gaston Bravo is the guy’s name. I heard someone say he’s a hometown boy, so don’t let yourself be distracted by the cheering. I’ll help you onto the stool, all you have to do is concentrate on that first match. Tut-TUT, OK?’
He took the cigarette from my mouth and knocked off the ash. Waiters were running back and forth with trays, everyone was talking loudly to be heard above everyone else who was talking loudly, the atmosphere was like a sideshow. Right before the first match started the noised swelled even further, two men left the crowd and sat down at the table. There was some heavy betting going on. The referees assumed their positions on both sides of the table, and at ‘Ready? Go!’ the men went for it. The room was too small for the noisy tempest that burst loose then, it was enough to wake the dead. One of them was obviously a bodybuilder, the other a stocky farmhand with a tanned, healthy face. I was pleased to see the farmhand win the first match; he hadn’t looked like the strongest of the two, and it was in my own interests that appearances be deceiving.
The ease with which he won threw the bodybuilder into a poisonous rage, the same kind that overcame Dirk whenever someone got in his way. The second round took longer, but the farmhand won again and went on to the next round. The loser stalked out of the room, pushing a slender, good-looking girl rather heavy-handedly toward the door.
There were another five contests to go before it would be my turn. I saw crude-bodied, potato-faced bastards who you could tell had ploughed on through to this competition table by means of dirty schoolyard tricks, men whose entire lives had consisted of leaning on others, of which arm wrestling was the literal expression. Those who lost had to stifle their swagger for the moment, but you sensed that would be only temporary; before long, to salvage their injured self-image, they would be blaming it on the bad shape they’d been in that day, on a cheating opponent or a referee who was blind as a bat. And their wives and children would go along with the ruse, to avoid incurring worse.
Well OK, maybe they weren’t all that bad, but half of them were for sure. It was a pleasure to see a number of them hit the table.
‘You ready?’ Joe asked at one point.
Yes, that’s why we’d come – for a moment I thought about refusing, or about throwing the match right away. Joe pushed the cart up to the table. It grew quieter, we could feel the people around us hesitating about which of us was the wrestler. And if it was Joe, what the hell was I doing here? When I lifted myself out of the cart, leaning on the stool for support with one hand, a whisper ran through the ranks and grew in volume as Joe helped me onto the hot seat.
‘Mesdames et messieurs!’ the announcer reverberated, ‘François le Bras!’
François le Bras, was that me? Apparently it was, because he went on to announce the other man as Gaston Bravo. I looked at Joe, he was laughing. What a scream. The only problem was, my opponent didn’t come to the table. I could see him in the front row. I knew it was him because the other men were pushing him forward.
‘Allez, Gaston!’
I made a quick estimate: an immigrants’ son, too young to have worked in the mines and therefore now holding down some menial job (later I heard that he worked on the line at a munitions factory in Liège). He was what they called ‘good looking’ (black hair slicked back and big, sentimental eyes).
One of the judges went to see what was keeping him. Bravo pointed at me and gesticulated wildly. I understood, he didn’t want to go against me. Not against a wheelchair case, the same way footballers wouldn’t want to play against a girls’ team. I tried to make eye contact with Joe, who signalled to me to stay calm; confusion worked to our advantage. After some coercion, Bravo came to the table. He didn’t meet my gaze, just sat down and planted his elbow in the box. I did the same and seized his hand. It was a frightened hand, and a wave of disappointment rolled over me. Because of his opponent, the man sitting across from me was no longer taking the game seriously. It was painful and insulting. I had counted on plenty of setbacks, but not this one. I kept myself from looking to Joe for support, I had to do this on my own.
‘Ready . . . Go!’
I struck hard, to avenge the insult. He was already halfway to defeat by the time he seemed to wake with a start and tried to resist, but it was too late: 1–0. The howling of the crowd was terrible to hear, they had all put their money on Bravo, they egged him on with the fury of floor traders at the stock exchange. For the second round, Gaston Bravo seemed prepared to do things differently.
‘Ready . . . Go!’
And there he was, his hand on top. He certainly had impressive biceps, my, and oh, such a finely sculpted torso to put behind them; I had to surrender almost ten degrees, but that was it. Without anger I forced him slowly and without a smidgen of doubt onto the table. Then I held his hand beneath mine for a couple of tormenting seconds before letting go. François le Bras 2–Pretty Boy 0. My first official victory, and I felt no joy. He hadn’t looked me in the eye once, he hadn’t evaluated me as a person but as a defect, and I had defeated him with the power of hatred. I think he didn’t even care; my entire person was hors concours to him.
‘François le Bras!’ Joe crowed, ‘the man of the hour! He didn’t have a goddamn chance, not a chance . . . What’s wrong?’
I averted my gaze, which was full of rage and frustration. Joe gasped.
‘You don’t get it, do you? He wins his first fight and he’s disillusioned about the way it went . . . Frankie, listen to me, the only reason we’re here is because you’re in a wheelchair, do you understand? Without that thing you would never have had a miracle arm, it’s a direct result of, so if some prick draws that to your attention in his own pricky fashion, that’s nothing new to you, is it? Think about the Strategy! Jesus, by the time they get used to a guy in a wheelchair it’s already one–nil! You just fought against some dickhead from the barbell club and you kicked his ass! Would you please try to understand that?’
I tried to smile. Maybe I shouldn’t resent being seen as a freak in these surroundings. Maybe I needed to make that my forte. A bitter pill, but there you had it. ‘Today is victory over yesterday’s self, and tomorrow is victory over what you are today’ – Go Rin No Sho. When would I really start understanding things like that, instead of just toying with the words because I found them so impressive?
‘You want a beer?’ Joe asked. He could see that the arm had started shivering again.
Yes, I wanted a beer, and again I felt that fathomless friendship.
The next match was against the farmhand I’d seen doing his stuff earlier. His kind of strength was different from that of Hennie Oosterloo or Gaston Bravo: more sinewy, as though he could keep it up for hours without getting tired, like a pack animal. The only thing was – and I noted this with a mixture of triumph and regret (because he seemed like such a nice guy) – it wasn
’t enough. I crushed him in less than one minute. He sort of smiled, slid around on his stool until he was comfortable, then put his arm back in the box for the second go. Once again, I got on top right away.
‘You must learn the spirit of crushing as though with a hand-grip.’
Again I pushed through his resistance.
‘It is essential to crush him all at once.’
He was three-quarters of the way to defeat.
‘The primary thing is not to let him recover his position even a little.’
This is How to Crush, as Musashi prescribes it: ‘If we crush lightly, he may recover.’
I had crushed the farmhand, but he showed no sign of disappointment. He got up off his stool, walked around the table and grabbed my hand to congratulate me. He wore his defeat like a saint, and by shaking my hand seemed to forgive me for having crushed him. I would have liked to say sorry or something, or do the whole match over again and let him win, just to stop feeling so shitty about it.
‘Man oh man,’ Joe said, ‘the semi-finals. You understand now?’
Fifteen minutes later or so, what I understood best was this: my next opponent was going to be a Walloon who I’d seen win before, a man who wore at least one gold ring on each of his oily fingers, as well as on both thumbs. Right before the match he would take them off one by one, then slide them back on again when he was finished. One of his front teeth was framed in gold as well. He gave the impression of being built entirely of soot and motor oil. His strength was hard to judge.
We fell into the referee’s ‘Go’ at exactly the same moment. After thirty seconds I was almost certain we were applying the same strategy. I let him come, there was no hurry. Haste comes when you’re afraid of losing. All this time the soot-and-oil man was staring at me with eyes slightly narrowed. He was doing an awfully good imitation of the Stance in Strategy, but in a natural sort of way; he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would study Japanese techniques. He maintained constant pressure on his half of the triangle, and that gave me the feeling he was holding back. He was saving something to use against me at a certain point, and with his hand on top he already had the advantage. The first thing I had to do was correct that situation.
I closed my eyes and bowed my head, and right away I felt the soothing influence of the Glow, that invisible instrument for explosively multiplying power, and brought the triangle back upright. I should have noticed that he was giving in too easily, though, because the moment we reached starting position he struck. He had been waiting for me to take the initiative, and had applied the principle of Tai Tai No Sen, ‘to accompany him and forestall him’, in masterly fashion. When I opened my eyes his golden grin was beaming right at me, and I was leaning over sideways and powerless.
Stay calm, I told myself. Nothing’s been lost yet. I sucked in air; breathe in, breathe out. This was an opponent I had to fight like stone. Going into our second round, I withstood his initial attack. He was feeling sure of himself now, and exerted much more force than he had before. With that, in a certain sense, he had become me during the first round, and I was able to anticipate what he was going to do. When I looked up I saw his eyes closed in great effort. Yes, this was a glorious reversal of the first round!
Before I continue, it might be useful to explain that when you’re arm wrestling you feel a continuous flux of muscle tension, ranging from the very slight to the extremely pronounced, and it’s important to pay close attention to such changes in pressure. You can feel them, like the dying down or rising up of the wind. Musashi writes that in a duel we must make sure that our opponent changes position, and that we must profit from his irregular rhythm.
It was a joy to feel the soot-and-oil man’s power increase, he wanted to beat me quickly. At the moment his pressure crested I yielded just a tad, only a couple of degrees, just enough to cause a minimal modification, and that was the One Right Moment: I threw everything I had into it and pressed him past deadlock at a single go. He groaned in dismay but there was no stopping it, his hand smacked down on the table.
The crowd bellowed indignantly, from one corner of my eye I saw Joe drop back in his chair in relief. The soot-and-oil man grimaced at his supporters, a crowd of gold-bedecked caravan dwellers who made noises that sounded like they were rounding up a herd of bison.
We assumed our positions for the third and decisive round. I looked at him from a kind of inner distance, and saw something I had never seen before in someone I had beaten: humiliation. You could see it around his nose and mouth, little twitches that spoke of a wounded ego. I knew now that he would go for the full offensive, he would show his fellow caravanners that the second match had been nothing but a stupid mistake and, with a total blitz, erase his defeat.
Then I did something that startled him; I brought my lips down to my upper arm and seized the sleeve of my sweater between my teeth. I snapped at it four times to raise the cuff up above my bicep, then put my arm in the box. The twitching of his face had grown worse, he had completely lost the composure of our first match. It had been only veneer, glued on from the outside, not enlightened from within. I was seeing ‘Knowing Collapse’. All things can collapse, Kensei noted in the final weeks before he died. ‘Houses, bodies and enemies collapse when their rhythm is disrupted.’ His advice then, when one sees the Collapsing happen, is to pursue the opponent without mercy. ‘Focus your gaze on the enemy’s collapse, chase him, so that you do not let him recover.’ And he adds: ‘The chasing attack is with a strong spirit, you must utterly cut the enemy down so that he does not recover his position.’
Thank you, Kensei.
We attacked at the same time. He tossed his head to the side and his upper body shot forward wildly. It was the charge of a bull. I closed my eyes, the Glow rolled in like a dark sea, completely at my service. I knew that this was the same rage that had possessed my ancestor Hend Hermans before they smashed his brains out with a crowbar. It ran in the family, the way some people have red hair or stubby fingers. In Dirk and me it had blossomed in full.
I began wrenching my arm back and forth, the way you rock a heavy cart to get it over a hump, to and fro, tut-TUT, to and fro. We shot past perpendicular and back again like a poplar in the wind, I toyed with him until I had enough room for the final push, and on TUT! he went down. Broken at the base, as it were. When I let go, I fell off my stool as well.
For the first time that day I felt a rush of well-being. Joe jumped up from his chair and gave me a powerful hug.
I had tasted blood.
I would go looking for more. I had penetrated to the ecstasy at the core of human existence: struggle and conquest.
All Joe could do was shake his head and say, ‘Super, ab-solutely super,’ and I floated to the ceiling, warm and light as a feather. We had reached the finals, the top two . . .
‘Here, man, have another beer’, Joe said. ‘You’re shaking like a leaf.’
For the first time, I heard someone place a bet on me. Money was changing hands like lightning, someone said it was a ridiculous long shot, there was no way I could win from the last man standing, Mehmet Koç, a prizefighter par excellence. I’d already seen him at work against a black powerlifter from Portsmouth, and it had stunned me a bit. Koç was a kind of Turkish wrestler with chest hair that seemed to grow out of his shirt like an upside-down beard.
‘So, what do you think?’ Joe asked in hushed earnest.
I pursed my lips to show that I was less than confident.
The announcer called Koç’s name, then mine, I heard shouts of dismissal and encouragement. Even though the aficionados all agreed that I didn’t stand a chance, in the course of the last few matches I had won an ambiguous kind of favour.
About what happened next I can – no, I want to – be brief: I was blown right off the table twice by a Turkish Hulk. After having been mistaken during the rest of the tournament, this time the aficionados had it right. There was no strategy one could bring to bear against Mehmet Koç, he was simply much too
strong. I put up all the resistance of a bicycle pump. It was even sort of exciting to be crushed the way the Turk did it, it was the power and beauty of a wave that crashes down on you and leaves you tumbling underwater.
So I needed to become stronger. To practice repetitively. To never let up. But I’d won my very first second prize! After we’d changed the money at the border, Joe split the take with a big casino grin. Five thousand down the middle: I’d never had so much money in my life.
When we got home the briquette installation had been removed without a trace, leaving only the dark spots on the tiles where the washing machine and press had stood. The racks against the walls of my house were gone too, all of it taken away. Without a word. Good, excellent. Fine by me, let’s pretend it never happened.
The burning pain that arose in my forearm thirty-six hours after the tournament was nothing but muscle soreness that would last a few days; more serious and longer-lasting was the inflammation of the biceps tendon. I sat at home immobilized, unable to move myself in any direction. Even the tiniest effort brought on agonies like the paralyzing stabs of pain one felt during the growth spurt of adolescence.
‘That can’t be good for you,’ Ma said, ‘just look at you.’
I made her even more worried when I slid ten hundreds across the table.
‘What is that?’ she said severely. ‘I don’t want your money, you’re my child, I would never . . .’
I slapped my hand down on the table. Then I wrote: Take. It’s nothing.
‘A thousand! That’s not nothing! I’ll put it in your savings, otherwise someone we know will spend it all on God-knows-what.’
Joe Speedboat Page 19
