There's constant singing now: soft, shrill and sad. Furthermore, sounds are being formed by the wind, the crackle of spark-spitting fires, dull rumblings, deep inside the dumping ground at times, and by the explosions. And by the soft shuffling of humans and animals around and among these, and around the car. And, of course, by the rattling of the creatures with which the almost naked man now appears to be merging. Countless numbers of such creatures are now crawling over his perspiring body: in his armpits, on his sweating belly and chest, in his pubic hair, his neck, on his arms, on his hands, around his throbbing member. Through the glasses, the man keeps his gaze trained intently on the girl lying asleep, legs wide, in the filth. The fires conjure up a moving sheen on her body and then the man's body arches, jerkily. Off-white drips down the wheel, covers the cucarachas on his thighs, his right hand, and the heavily perspiring, sodden man leans back. In the car that stinks like the immense garbage tip.
Slowly the car with the panting, somewhat dazed man begins to move, half driving, sliding, occasionally borne by a multitude of grey, dusty, scrubby shades: a barely viable life-form, but of a size in which the car is barely noticeable. At first the man with the cucarachas does not notice anything. Then he raises himself up with a jolt and looks around him, wildly. Suddenly it gets through to him that he is covered in those sticky waste and excrement eaters. He screams and then he sees the compact mass of dusty, soiled figures in front of all the windows.
That the car has already been pushed, dragged, hoisted a good way up the tip, this he has not yet noticed. His view outside has been taken from him. He steps on the brake but this makes no difference. The heavy car moves from left to right like a sedan chair, banging down on the waste at times and then being lifted up again.
All of a sudden, the man relaxes. 'Calm down,' he mutters, 'we've been in worse pickles: He laughs for a moment and then he draws himself further upright by the dripping steering wheel and he starts the engine. He accelerates, but the car has been lifted up, rear wheels and all, and the wheels spin in vain in the stinking gas and fetid air.
After a few booming blows, a heavy steel bar forces its way in through the shattered windscreen. The door is opened and a muscular, black gleaming arm switches off the engine and pulls the key from the ignition. The hammer is taken from him. Simultaneously, grabbing arms have pulled away the trousers and the underpants, the waistcoat and the jacket, the bottle and the glass, and in two tugs the shirt is ripped from his body.
The door is closed again and the car is pushed further along up the dumping ground. People are no longer walking alongside the doors so that the man with the cucarachas has something of a view. He sees how progress is being made across the boundless garbage plain; he now sees the fires at close quarters, sees those dying in rags.
Ahead of him, when the mass shuffling the car forwards allows him an opportunity, the man sees how, in the rather bright night, the plain of filth stretches out as far as the horizon will reach. The stench, the heat grow thicker inside the car disappearing slowly but surely ever further away from the barely inhabitable world near the dumping ground.
The man screams. He switches on the lights, but without the keys only the parking lights will work. In a panic, the man puts the car into gear. The car stops. At the rear, people, or life-forms, bang into it. The door is opened again and a blow to the temple almost throws the man from his seat. A hand shifts the gears back in neutral. The lights go out. The door closes again.
People are shuffling towards them from all sides now. Knives are being drawn. Inside the car, the man screams, muffled and futile. They let the car run down under its own steam, down one of the sloping garbage-sides of a deep, black-scorched pit. In a moment or two, the car is covered with a slow, insect-like layer of crawling people. The four doors are pulled open. Almost simultaneously. The car fills up.
A. F. Th. van der Heijden
'Sight ... taste and With both index-fingers Lex Patijn described tiny little circles, fast as lightning, a little way away from his eyes, ears and mouth. When these fall away, you've ... you've got absolute loneliness. Panic, fear and absolute loneliness. Take my word for it. Only the sense of smell remains. And not even that, for you can only smell the plaster.'
He was saying it for the fifth or sixth time already, in a voice getting more drunk by the minute and without remembering that he had brought up the matter earlier on. 'No, honestly: hearing, sight, speech, He couldn't dismiss it from his mind. His words were being dictated by his cowardice. One could smell his sweat in the little dressing room. 'Loneliness, absolute, but I mean absolute ... loneliness.'
Being a sculptor, Patijn had worked on the conversion of an old monastery into an 'educational theme park' for youngsters. He himself had modelled for a number of characters from mythology (crouching as Atlas, for instance, with a big ball on his neck) which had meant that he had been wrapped in plaster-of-Paris bandages, head to toe, after which the plaster cast had been cut into segments in order to be welded into a single entity again and finally painted. The panic and fear and loneliness he had undergone each time, prior to being cut open, had given him an idea. Here he was being handed the possibility, as a sculptor, of giving shape to his idea of
That evening, we celebrated the first night of a play (a free adaptation of The Chinese Wall by Frisch) in which Lex's lover, Jody Katan, was playing the lead. Before drunkenness had struck, Lex told me about his bursary for Naples.
'Not exactly a centre of modem art,' I pointed out to him.
'I've rented a studio in Naples, that's all. Pompeii's the point for me. I'm going to make sculptures like ones that exist there.'
'Has Lex Patijn converted to classical art?'
'I'm not talking about those three, four sculptures they've hauled out from underneath the ashes, no: I mean the corpses. The petrified bodies of Pompeii's inhabitants. They are the true statues ... Not shaped by the limp mitts of some artist but by a malevolent quirk of nature. I'm going to apprentice myself to Mount Vesuvius, if you get my drift. I want to change into a rain of ashes.'
I asked about his materials, his new working method.
'Together with a chemistry student, I'm busy perfecting plaster bandages. We're a good way there but I'd like it to be even more pliable, even more so the model can impress his last convulsions upon my material. Without it tearing. I have my models assume a as naturalistically as possible ... They must die in the harness I apply. The moment the stuff begins to set, I'll cut that plaster suit into pieces I weld together again into hollow dolls. I'll give them a wooden skeleton, if need be.'
'Hm. The hand of the artist isn't lacking ..
'Not entirely. Not yet. My hand - the hand of the one who applies the bandages and cuts open the harness, the artisan's hand, that is - that's the one that may be discernible in it. But the hand of the artist I am must be kept from it as far as possible. Through direct contact with my material the model transforms himself into a work of art. That's the creed of my realism. Look ... that wireless transmission of model to material, that's what I want to be shot of. That's how it's always been, hasn't it: the model stands and poses there - and here, at five metres' distance, I stand at my easel and dip my brush, functioning as an aerial, in the paint on my palette, and my transmission to my white paper or canvas is wireless. The artist as telegraphist. My pursuit now is to carry my paper, my canvas, my white sheet to the model and ... and drape it around him, cutting his suit according to my cloth, so that the model, like Christ with Veronica's cheese cloth, can imprint himself directly on my material.'
When alcohol had begun to heat our feelings and I no longer kept my criticism of Patijn's realism to myself, he began calling me names, making me out to be an 'idealist', by which he probably won't have meant that I entertained such things as ideals.
'You, you see everything through the rose-tinted spectacles of ... he shouted. The deal that had been struck was not to utter the word.
'You, Lex, are a drinker. Alcohol eats away your li
ver, your heart and your muscles. It'll give you tits and your balls will dissolve in it. What you think is a theory, is nothing other than your own jadedness.'
Jody, in his white overall of 'Nowling' or 'Presentman', kept himself to himself and didn't take sides.
2
In order radically to divest myself of the horseflies that had latched on to me in Amsterdam, I accompanied Lex Patijn in late November 1978 on his study trip to Naples. Jody would be following him midway through December when the little theatre on the Nes was to close for a week and a half.
The slightly built Katan, who had only just enough time before curtain-up, took us to Central Station in a taxi. He was wearing his white costume and was already in full make-up. With him between us, we drew a lot of attention, lending something public and theatrical to our goodbyes. The troth my two friends pledged in all haste had perhaps no eternal value, but it would be sufficient until Christmas, in any case.
Our reserved seats were in the rearmost carriage which was otherwise empty - and remained so even when the train was about to leave. I was very chirpy. At the beginning of the evening I had let all poison I still possessed go up in smoke and had inhaled it. For this, I used the coloured little pipes from the 'Blow Football' game - grudgingly, for it was the most revolting of family games from my childhood days: the slimy saliva dripping jelly-like from the tubes on to the But, now I was an adult, I no longer needed to blow on them, just suck. And any inconvenience and all roundabout ways were preferable to me than intravenous or subcutaneous applications.
When, at almost midnight (six hours after my last game of blow football), the train approached Cologne, I noticed that the large dose was beginning to lose its effect - however, this was without my mood suffering in consequence. I was even able to resolve with perfect equanimity never to take anything again. A precious oath, hysterically sworn, wasn't even necessary. Later on, between Bonn and Koblenz, it had left me completely. The chains fell away from me. A solemn moment: here was where my freedom began. Not a trace of the weariness I knew so well ...
The great restlessness only came towards morning, on reaching the Swiss border. Listening meekly to Lex ('Art will only have reached its completion when, in its attempt to depict reality, it coincides with reality itself and thus becomes superfluous. It's art's ultimate task to render itself superfluous, that's to that to approximate that state of superfluity as closely as possible. In other words: art must attempt to destroy itself ... it must attempt suicide, incessantly. In any case, art must strive to make itself as superfluous as possible. To create, in the no-man's-land between traditional art and reality - until the frontier between this noman's-land and reality has been approximated as closely as possible, bar the crossing of I began to yawn. It seemed perfectly normal after a night awake like that, but this was a kind of yawning that provided no relief though it did give you cramp in your jaws.
'Fine, sure: if you're not Lex said, irritated, and he took another swig of Joseph Guy.
'I can't help it. I'm not yawning from hunger or sleep or boredom ... I've never known it like this.'
As I yawned, tears began to flow from my eyes, copiously. A little later a runny nose joined in. In order to dispel my disquiet, I went and walked up and down the corridor. But weakness in my legs which no longer knew how to brace themselves against the train's jolting, soon forced me to sit down again. Severe shivering started. At the same time, I was perspiring from head to toe. The yawning became so bad I was barely able to get my mouth shut at all. I produced gorging noises during this.
Lex, suddenly quite bewildered, fiddled with the heating regulator. We moved to another compartment where it was warmer but the shivering only got worse. Ceaselessly, moisture poured from my eyes and nose and pores. Face, neck, shirt - all wet.
In Basle, the train was given a different composition. Shunting to and fro for almost an hour, which only made me even more ill. I was the one being pulled apart and put together again - carelessly, no body part was in its right place any more. backwards ... a bang in front, a bang at the rear. Again and again, the deck was being shuffled. It was no longer the train we had boarded the previous evening, not by a long chalk. Things would never come right again. When, without interruption, the new train had been running along - almost soundlessly - in the same direction for a few minutes, I fell asleep.
I dreamed of the game of 'blow football'. On the strip of aluminium foil with which I had clad the inside of a tea-strainer I was holding above the flame of a candle, the fine grit began to turn into vapour. This was the moment to inhale, but I could not make a choice from the coloured little pipes. Red, green, blue, yellow ... I didn't know which one to take. My free hand hung above, undecided. And meanwhile the precious substance
No they weren't goosepimples that covered me from head to toe on waking up. Worse: on every square centimetre of my skin, chilled through and through, the little hairs were standing on end. I felt myself to be a hairy caterpillar waiting desperately for the breaking of the cocoon - to be a butterfly again.
Between Rome and Naples I never left the toilet. In my belly the gut was behaving like strands of wrung-out laundry: I could see them wriggling beneath the skin. I sat on the bog like a cowboy on a young bull. The train - shaking me about, tossing me up and hurling me down, quartering me - was pulling me down to the lowest point rather than toward a final destination.
All the way down there, at that lowest point, Lex lugged our suitcases to a luggage depot. On our way to the nearest boarding house, I was forced to let my juices, my slaverings, my crap run freely - twice, no less. . .
That the room had no windows didn't strike one immediately. In one of the walls pasted over with floral paper, there was a square opening which offered a view on to the corridor wall, the wallpaper of which was also floral ... The room amounted to a perfect simile for my condition.
'Keep calm,' Lex said. 'I'll rustle something up. Back in an hour.'
And he left me alone with the fears which came to keep my physical terrors company. I tapped the walls: cardboard. The boarding house was on the fifth floor, which could only be reached via a narrow stairwell. Were fire to break out, I would be surrounded by a labyrinth of floral-papered walls, corridors and blank Hobbling up and down between bed and toilet I waited for Lex's return. Four times, no less, without having touched myself, I'd had an involuntary orgasm. Searing ejaculations devoid of any pleasure. Hellish pain rather than satisfaction.
Late at night, Lex returned with four innocent-looking cigarettes. He had got them for little money from a member of the crew of an American aircraft carrier permanently lying at anchor in the bay. Lex helped me smoke one, my tremors preventing me from holding the cigarette myself. After this, my hands had calmed down to such an extent that I was able to light the second one myself.
'There're special bars here for American servicemen,' Lex explained. 'So-called piano bars. All of them in the neighbourhood of that big fort on the waterfront. They drink Heineken there from little disposable bottles. And there's quite a bit of opium-popping going on there, if you ask me. Even though there's a kind of military police hanging out there. Two of those guys per bar at least. They've got 'SP' marked on their I'll take you along there tomorrow.'
In a quarter of an hour, I had perked up completely. Lex just couldn't understand how that stuff could do such wonders ...
Lex's studio (he had not seen it yet: the rental agreement had been reached by telephone and by post) was high up above the centre of town and the harbour, of which it had a splendid view. It was on the third floor of a house on a comer, painted red, situated on a square which was used as a car park on the top of Monte Echia. As dusk fell, small cars congregated there, their windows pasted shut on the inside with newspaper. A number of the shuttered vehicles would rock gently on their springs ...
Thirty years ago, Patijn's father, together with a friend, had taken up employment in an Eindhoven car factory. At first, they had both worked there in the paint shop but s
oon the friend had gone on to higher things within the same company. His promotion had gone over Lex's father's head, more or less; reason why the friends became enemies. Years later - Lex was paintshop worker had hurled himself from the highest storey of the factory building, on top of his rival's car. That evening, the boss drove home, bowed under the imprint of his subordinate's body.
Lex showed me the photo in an American magazine of a woman who had landed on top of a parked car after jumping from a skyscraper. The roof of the vehicle had moulded itself, elegantly almost, to her shape. D'you see? Like a spoon in blancmange.' He was shouting himself down with that joke. I knew that, with all his indigestible theorising about 'realism in art', he was solely in search of the shape his father had left behind in the tin roof.
I helped the sculptor weld a frame, comparable with the frame of a small bungalow tent. Within that set of tubes, the model would be tied down by his arms or legs in order not to tear the plaster bandages while still soft.
As his first model in Naples, I had to shave my body as smooth as that of an Apollo. Over the hair on my head I wore a tight bathing cap. Lex would dip each strip of plaster bandage, before attaching it to my naked body, in a bucket of warm water. On contact with my skin, the bandage turned icy cold within half a second.
Work was done from bottom to top, my head coming last. Lex ordered me to close my eyes: he put felt patches on the eyelids. My ears he filled with soft wax and began to plaster them shut with bandages. My jaws and lips, too, ended up rock solid. In the end, I was only able to breathe via my nostrils - but very gingerly, in tiny draughts, for my chest, too, was pinned
Never before had I been sealed off from the world more radically. A deaf-mute, blind man can move, at least; I was frozen solid in the ice. Not to see, not to hear, not to speak, not to move a muscle ... only maintaining contact with the atmosphere through tiny gasps of air through one's nose ... How long did I keep up this absolute isolation? Two minutes? They seemed like two hours. Hours during which I learned to be amazed that I could still hear something like the rustling of silence. A little patch of skin had been left bare underneath my right heel. It was there that Lex scratched me with his nail as a sign that I was to perform my Pompeiian death scene. I could not feel that my arms were being freed. In the panic that suddenly seized me, the stiff suit became as pliant and elastic as pyjamas.
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Page 18
