Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

‘ Ludwig! ’

I looked up. The tight iron band of my thoughts pressed against my eyelids.

‘Ludwig, where on earth did you come from? How did you ever find this place?’

‘ Vade retro .’

‘Who’s that?’ asked the man she was with.

‘Ludwig, darling, what happened to you?’

‘I came to see how you were doing,’ I say then.

She shakes her head. I see that she’s thinking about becoming annoyed, saying that it was stupid of me to come here, but you don’t say things like that to someone who has traveled halfway around the world for you.

‘Could I ask. .’ the man says.

She turns and looks at him, scowling in irritation.

‘This is my son,’ she says.

Her finger approaches the sutures on my brow, she tries to touch them but I turn my head away.

‘What have you got there, what is that?’

‘Ah,’ the man says, ‘so that’s it. How you doin’, Ludwig?’

His eyes shift from me to the game going on above me.

‘Say hello to Rollo.’

‘Hello, Rollo.’

‘Hello, Ludwig.’

‘Okay, but who’s this Rollo Liban?’ I shouted to her a little later, from the bathroom.

I was sitting on the toilet, but conversation remained a possibility. The bathroom was filled with the smell of her body, the perfumes with which she tried to mask it; lotions, oils.

‘An old friend,’ said the voice from behind the door.

‘What kind of friend?’

‘A friend-friend, never anything more than that. Perish the thought.’

‘So where did you meet him?’

‘Listen, grand inquisitor. .’

The smell was an intimacy, you inhaled someone. To smell her, the maternal scent, made me nauseous.

When I closed the bathroom door, the humming of the ventilation stopped. She was standing at the window. Below was the silent swimming pool. A flat, blue stone. A thin fog had moved in, along with the dusk.

‘Why don’t we take a little walk?’ she said. ‘The pier is lovely.’

In the distance I could see the Ferris wheel on the pier, bathed in shimmering light.

‘You can have your name written on a grain of rice.’

‘I’m not a little boy anymore.’

‘I know that, darling.’

‘You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.’

‘You can’t imagine how depressing London was.’

She turned to face me.

‘Come on, let’s go out. Stop staring at me like that, would you, sweetheart?’

*

There was gym equipment on the beach, with a low wall around it; in the semi-darkness a man was practicing on the bars. She took off her low-heeled shoes and we walked through the sand to the pier. The words were burning in my mouth, but I couldn’t spit them out.

‘People surf here during the day,’ she said. ‘Boys with those boards, what do you call them. .’

‘Surfboards.’

‘It’s amazing, the things they can do with them. They’re completely at home on the waves, they know exactly what they’re going to do. You should take lessons while you’re here.’

A few good moments were all that remained. Who would want to go and spoil them?

‘First I want one of those grains of rice with my name on it,’ I said.

We crossed the heavy timbers onto the boardwalk. Along the way there were people fishing, and others offering useless services. The man who wrote your name on a grain of rice was there too. There was a Latino girl selling Disney balloons, a little stand where you could buy soft drinks, magazines and cigarettes. The Ferris wheel was deserted. It was almost dark, except for a deep purple stripe along the horizon. We stood at the railing. A ring of buoys with bells attached had been set around the end of the pier: an audible warning to those approaching in the fog, which had a way of coming up suddenly here. They made a lonely sound. She said, ‘The pier at home didn’t have bells like that, did it?’

We walked back. The rice-grain man was still sitting close to the entrance. A light-skinned Negro, his hair hanging in matted strips.

‘Lookie there,’ he said in a voice that could make heavy objects shiver.

My mother smiled.

‘This is no woman,’ he said, ‘this is a story. I’ll write it for you on a grain of rice.’

‘It’s for him,’ my mother said.

She nodded in my direction.

‘His name is. .’

He held a finger to his lips.

‘Your name is enough. I’ll be gentle, I’ll write it between heartbeats.’

He bent over and took a grain of rice between thumb and index finger. The hand holding the thin fountain pen moved under the lamp.

‘But it’s for him,’ my mother said, ‘Ludwig.’

‘Magic formulas first,’ the man said.

We stood and waited, curious and ill at ease. The shaman made a zooming sound as he wrote. Beneath the timbers, the water was slapping against the pilings.

A little later he held up the prize triumphantly, and put it in a little glass tube.

‘A grain of rice for you, from your humble scribe on the banks of the Nile.’

He added a drop of oily fluid and sealed the tube with a silver cap on a string. She took it from him. We looked at it. The name was magnified by the curve of the tube and the oil in it: Eve LeSage.

‘What does it say?’ asked my mother, who wasn’t wearing her reading glasses.

‘Can’t you read your own name?’ the Negro asked.

Then she got it.

‘Oh,’ she said coolly.

‘It’s all here in black and white,’ he said, ‘look!’

Reaching around behind him into the box in which he carried his things, he produced a magazine. LA Weekly , with my mother on the cover: EVE LESAGE BACK IN THE LIMELIGHT. A come-hither pose, her forearms crossed beneath her breasts, her face held up alluringly. The snakes hissed on the Negro’s head. My mother, sustenance for the poor.

I took the glass tube out of her hand and slid it back across the table.

‘Don’t believe everything you read,’ I said.

We walked beside each other without a word, away from the pier. I was thinking Eastern thoughts, fortune-cookie things like he who wishes to hide the truth must beware even the grain of rice , which was comical, but not right then.

‘You knew,’ she said.

‘More or less.’

‘That’s why you came.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘I had the feeling you knew.’

‘I’ll never not know anymore.’

‘That’s life, sweetheart. That’s part of growing up.’

‘Don’t give me that horseshit. Please.’

It was silent for a bit. We plowed on through the sand.

‘That’s no way to talk to your mother, you know, I deserve a little. .’

‘Don’t say respect . That’s not one of the matching words.’

‘We’ve talked about this before, Ludwig. I can’t make things any better for you, this is how it is.’

‘And so now you’re going to say you didn’t have any choice in the matter?’

‘Did I?’

The words caught in my throat. From far away I could hear the bells at sea. My voice was thick with frustration.

‘You didn’t have to do this.’

‘You know, I earn ten thousand dollars for every day on the set. That makes up for a lot, okay? Not for all of it. But for a lot.’

‘A well-paid whore is still a whore.’

‘Ludwig, I don’t want. .’

‘But isn’t that the way it is? Do I have to call it something else, just so it’s easier for you to take? Get used to it: the world sees you as a whore. For what you are. For what I am.’

‘Oh please, don’t make such a production of it,’ she said, suddenly calm.

I reach out and grabbed her arm.

‘But that’s the way it is, isn’t it?!’

‘I respect your feelings, Ludwig, but I also have a life of my own. I don’t have to take you into account in all my decisions anymore. I spent twenty years. .’