Little Caesar (7 page)

‘Look,’ the man said.

My mother’s hand was resting on my shoulder; we peered over the edge, down where he was pointing.

‘I’m making a wall,’ he said. ‘To stop the sea.’

In the distance, a low, dark barrier had been thrown up against the foot of the cliff.

‘What the sea washes away during a storm, I put back the next day. If I didn’t, we’d soon be standing in the water here.’

He was talking to the horizon.

‘Not a meter of the cliff gets lost down there anymore. A soft seawall, made of building debris. A closed system.’

‘But . . .’ my mother said.

She pointed to where his wall stopped, a few hundred meters to our right.

‘On its way,’ the man said. ‘By next winter, I’ll be here.’

He pointed to the spot below our feet.

‘Once the foundation’s been laid, it’s just a matter of keeping it filled. Every year I lose thirty-five to fifty tons of material. On a good day I can have a thousand tons added. At a pace of forty to fifty truck-loads a day. In two years, once the wall’s reached the northern end of the cliff, all I’ll have to do is keep it up.’

A utopian. It was seductive to listen to. We stepped back from the edge. The house was about fifteen meters from the cliff.

‘It’s lovely here,’ my mother said. ‘Does it all belong to you?’

He nodded.

‘And you really want to sell this?’

‘None of the children are using it. An empty house is an unpleasant thing to look out on, that’s what the wife and I think.’

His house was located back behind ours, further inland. It had white plastered walls and a pointed roof that stuck up above mountains of scrap and the wild growth of thorn bushes. The houses were thirty meters apart. He would be our neighbor. If he and his wife were nice, a path would be worn through the bushes; if they turned out to be bastards I knew my mother would start thinking about a fence. She was quite solitary, I had never seen her try her hardest to make contact with others. Vast towers of cloud parted, sunlight came gushing between them. We looked at the house.

‘Tudor,’ the man said.

His name was Warren Feldman, and he had just sold us a house.

*

A few weeks later we were able to move into the house, which was being eaten from the inside by wood-boring insects and threatened from the outside by erosion. These factors were accounted for in the price. It was not an expensive house. The taxi took us there slowly, the driver swerving around the potholes in the road. Warren Feldman was just coming out the front door, in overalls, a paintbrush in one hand and a blue jerrycan in the other.

‘Well folks,’ he said.

Then he fell to the ground. Boom, just like that. In the same taxi, we took him down to the doctor in Alburgh. Without ventilating the place, he had been slapping some poisonous substance on the beams to stop the woodworms and the long-horned beetles. He was sick for a week, and we couldn’t enter the house for a few days. We took a room at the Whaler.

‘At least he’s a man of his word,’ my mother said.

The scrap metal around the house was gone, it had been moved to his own backyard. March came, the gorse blossomed, before long we were a raft in a sea of yellow flowers. They smelled overpoweringly of coconut. The days turned warm after a cold winter, we slept on bare mattresses, happy refugees in our own house.

Then the crates arrived. At an invisible signal they had been loaded onto a vessel in the harbor of Alexandria, sailed across the sea and unloaded at Norwich. The house was flooded with the ten thousand things. I had watched them being packed with regret, now I watched them being unpacked with reluctance. This house was so much smaller than the other one, yet still everything fit in. I didn’t understand my own reluctance. Perhaps, having grown accustomed to temporary addresses, I had realized that it is no shame to live without a history. Since leaving Aunt Edith and Uncle Gerard we had stayed at hotels, we had seen Venice and spent a long time in London; it had been difficult for her to find a house that was suitable and not too expensive. Hotel rooms, I had noticed, can serve as an antidote to melancholy.

The house was now overrun by the past. The piano was in the living room. Pathways had been cleared between the cupboards of dark, heavy wood from Rajasthan, the glass chandeliers, between artworks by Bedouins from the Sinai, camel-hide lampshades, floor lamps of chased copper – a museum in which only she knew the origins of things. With the arrival of the crates, the light had been pressed out of the house. A tomb full of magic objects for a highly individual mystic religion.

I fled into the summer. Skylarks soared up to higher spheres and sang in religious ecstasy. Farm machinery growled through the rolling fields. I loved the
flowing
life on the beach. As soon as the weather even slightly allowed, the English tossed off their clothes and surrendered to the sun. How on earth could people be so white? I received mugs of tea from women sitting in front of their beach cabins. The cabins were smaller than the crates from Alexandria, and furnished with homemade cupboards full of glasses and a counter with a stove. The women sat in deckchairs all day, wearing their floral bathing suits and exchanging high, sing-song noises.

Usually I was alone. I didn’t mind being alone. Sorrow and happiness had a deeper hue then. Sometimes I looked up suddenly, at the edge of the cliff, and saw my mother there, gesturing to me. She never shouted. She waited until I could feel her eyes burning at the back of my neck.

She almost never went into the village, and the beach was a place she rarely visited. Sometimes she would go for a swim very early in the morning, or later, once the bathers had gone home. On very rare occasions she would sit in the shade of a windbreak, wearing her big Dior sunglasses and wiggling her toes in the sand. She established no bonds, exhibited no social behavior.

*

We found a housekeeper, Margareth. Her boyfriend, an unemployed Arsenal fan, brought her and fetched her again each day around noon. Margareth polished and dusted the objects in the house, slowly and carefully, and when she got to the end she started all over again. She did the shopping for us in Alburgh and prepared the evening meals.

I grew up in a world of women. I developed an unhealthy interest in bath oils. Sometimes my mother got the urge to cover me in makeup. I never put up a struggle. There was no masculine counterpressure, no male role model. Warren was too far away for that. I understood girls very well indeed, in fact I shared their interests and pursuits. I wrote in a diary with a little golden padlock and burned incense in my room. On my thirteenth birthday my mother gave me olive oil shampoo and a pot of Lancôme facial crème, and I was
pleased
. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. That’s not normal. It was a wonder that I wasn’t teased about it at school. It was perhaps only because there were girls who were in love with me that I avoided the suspicion of homosexuality. From my very first day at that school I was awash in excited whispers. That never stopped.

Virtually all my father’s possessions had been put out on the sidewalk in Alexandria, except for the scale model of a tower he had been building in the harbor of Alexandria, a few rolls of blueprints, his sketchbooks and the preliminary models for a group of statues. Those statuettes were in my mother’s bedroom. They depicted my father and my mother locked in the act of mating. From the shadows of her boudoir they came out to meet me, fantastical creatures of rough clay, half-human, half-beast. It was only now that I began to notice them; they had been around all my life and had simply become a part of things.

The first time I asked where the models came from was during one of our sessions before the mirror at her vanity. She was doing my face. Painting me, that might be a better way to put it – first she applied a heavy foundation of Pan-Cake that obliterated all expression, then drew a new face on top of that. She looked at me so intensely while she worked, the way she usually looked only at herself in the mirror; I loved that undivided attention.

But I wasn’t to be put off: once again, I asked why he had portrayed them in that way.

‘Your mouth, Ludwig, you moved!’

But she knew very well that there was no getting around an answer. And so it arrived by fits and starts. During the first year they were in love he had immortalized them countless times.
As man and woman
, was what she called it. That answer didn’t satisfy me.

‘As we were making love,’ she said then.

He had photographed their coupling from various angles – material for
Blind
, a group of what was to be seventeen life-sized porcelain statues of my copulating parents, in a host of positions. Some overlaid with mosaics, others with cloisonné, they had long stood in the Guggenheim at Bilbao. A Kama Sutra built to scale.

‘But if I wasn’t born yet,’ I said to her face in the mirror, ‘then it could be that I was being conceived right there, at that moment, right?’

Her shy laugh, the hand reaching for the mascara.

‘Now just sit still for a moment.’

She brushed the mascara onto my lashes, I kept my eyes fixed on the clay figure of the woman on her knees, the bearded man behind her. The satyr taking her from behind. I thought:
Here you come, Ludwig Alexander Unger, here you come!
and laughed – straight through all the makeup, the face of innocence, the laugh burst forth like a new day.

‘Oh, damn it,’ she grumbled, ‘I was almost finished.’

We spent a lot of time in front of the mirror. Gradually my eyes opened wider. I loved the narcotic sweetness of her bedroom, the heat of her body close to mine. It excited me. Sometimes I masturbated afterwards.

I was her makeup doll, she would tell me things from before my memory began. I had the impression that in making her historical sketches she used the eraser more often than the pencil. While she was painting me, my eyes opened to her icons as well: a pen and ink portrait of the Maitreya, a pastel of Jesus of Nazareth, a photograph of Bhagwan torn not entirely intact from a magazine. These were the fixed points in her personal pantheon.

‘They look like him,’ I said.

My geisha face was expressionless.

‘Hmmm?’

‘Those men, they look like him. Like my father.’

Her smile wavered. Mentioning him caused her pain. Physically.

‘No they don’t,’ she said.

‘Yes they do. They all have beards.’

‘But that doesn’t mean . . .’

‘And those piercing eyes, like they want something from you.’

She shook her head. I pushed in the knife and twisted it.

‘Why are all of them hanging here on the wall, but there isn’t a picture of him in the whole house?’

‘Stop it, Ludwig. Those are examples to me . . . universal teachers . . . inspiration. Call it whatever you like. But it doesn’t have anything to do with your father.’

I pointed at the statue of them mating.

‘They look like him,’ I said.

‘I don’t know what’s got into you today, but I want you to stop right now.’

But I didn’t stop. There was a pleasant sort of wakefulness in my head, something related to hunger. What can be seen, will be seen.

We lived at the edge of the world and could fall off at any moment. We knew that when we moved in. That the house was a risk. That although Warren was building a line of defense, there were unknown factors. Our preservation depended on the pace at which the wall progressed, the quantity of material he could obtain. We didn’t know that in the month before we arrived
five
meters of the hillside had been lost. Warren did the best he could, we never doubted his trust-worthiness.

‘Put everything inside,’ he said once during our first winter there. ‘Make sure everything’s battened down. Seriously.’

From my bedroom window on the first floor I saw it coming. First the gusts of wind. The playful nudges. I heard it crack. In the sky above the sea psychedelic colors flowed together, bursts of rain lashed our house. I saw sulfurous skies, then watched as everything turned
green
, the green of sunglasses – the sky had fallen on its side, the rain was coming in horizontally. Clouds of dark blue ink curled in on themselves, like an animal writhing in pain. The storm came closer, the light was sucked out of the world in a vortex.

‘Ludwig!’ my mother shouted from downstairs. ‘Stay away from the windows! Don’t get close to the windows, that’s what Warren said.’

The wind grew stronger, I remember my amazement at the power of something that was invisible.

The storm lasted a day and a night. Its voice made our ears ring. Everything shook beneath the pounding drumbeats. We lit a fire in the hearth but the smoke came back through the flue. We had put some things in the shed and fastened down others, but we had thought too much about the word
storm
and too little about a sky that was turned against us. The roof of the pantry was lifted and ripped off, we found it later in the bushes. The house felt like it was being torn from its foundations. Everything clattered and whistled. My mother went outside with a flashlight to fasten a shutter. She came back inside in a frenzy.

‘The wind,’ she panted. ‘So strong. Can’t breathe.’

We sat up for part of the night, wrapped in blankets, and finally fell asleep in the living room. We knew: when we awoke, the sea would have come even closer.

Looking out the window in the half-light of morning, I saw the dark figure of a man out there. His coattails were flapping. I pulled on my boots. The wind knocked the air out of my lungs. Along the path between the thorn bushes I walked to the cliff’s edge, where Warren was leaning into the wind.

‘Here . . .’ he shouted. ‘And there.’

A huge breach had been knocked out of the seawall further up. Under our feet the waves were washing up all the way to the cliff. His hand on my shoulder,
don’t get too close, boy
. The cliff could have been undermined, it could collapse, we would drown in the foaming sea. We looked at the ragged edge, and I saw Warren’s concern. A new boundary had been cut out. I tried to stand beside him like a man sharing his concern, I knitted my brows and let earnestness take possession of my body.