Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

‘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.