Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

‘Not particularly. I mean, I don’t know much about it.’

‘There’s something very wrong with that man. And with a world that views him as an artist. . His work as art.’

The words were like bitter rinds in her mouth. Behind us the mechanical cadence of the chorus halted. She said, ‘Mr. Schultz acts out his vandalistic urges on nature, which can’t defend itself.’

From the cart she dug out a few photocopies, I saw a pile of folders marked PRESS — this kind of activism was, in its own way, highly organized. I pointed at the press kits.

‘What are those?’

‘Are you a reporter? Foreign? You sound foreign.’

‘England,’ I said.

‘Well then, would you write down the name of the publication or network you work for, and your email address, so we can keep you up to date on our activities?’

The Norwich Evening News was the first newspaper that came to mind. She handed me a press kit, in which I hoped to find more substantial information about Schultz.

‘But now I’d really like to go inside,’ I said.

‘Oh, but you can’t do that. We’re not letting anyone in. Usually we wait till the police come. .’

She looked at the others, then at her bright red Swatch.

‘They’re a little late today.’

‘Who?’

‘Yesterday they were here before noon. Come along, I have to. .’

‘Who are you talking about? The police?’

‘What do you think, that we’re going to go away voluntarily?’

A man came out of the building. A clipped gray beard, neatly dressed. The gallery owner. He was trying not to yell.

‘Go away,’ he said, ‘get out of here, you people.’

‘You know we can’t do that,’ one boy said.

‘You people are obstructing the freedom of expression. Fascism. Deplorable.’

‘You could also see it as free publicity,’ the boy said.

The natural leader, handsome, gangly, maybe the son of a judge. Stenciled on the back of his jacket was a portrait of Che Guevara.

‘Guys,’ he said, ‘could I. .’

‘This is art, damn it. Not politics. You people are turning it into politics. Wrong! Wrong! If you want politics, go to city hall. Go bother them. This is a gallery.’

‘Everything is politics, I’m afraid,’ the boy said.

Behind the man, in the doorway, I saw a young woman wearing heavy-framed glasses. The lenses were ponds of contempt.

‘Fuck off,’ the man said. ‘All of you, fuck off!’

Now he had starting yelling despite himself.

‘You’re the one who chose to display his work,’ the boy said.

At a sign from him the others began chanting again. Loud and monotonous, you could easily hate them for it. The man and woman disappeared. The chorus stopped.

From my vantage point across the street I watched things develop, but there wasn’t much to hold my attention. They passed out flyers, smoked cigarettes, grew bored. The girl who had given me the press kit looked over a few times, waved once. I was sitting with my back against a tree. A position of strength. This was the same way I had watched the children at the locks, dissected the group dynamics of the strong and the weak, long ago in rural Groningen. A bottle-green memory.

Lethargy settled on the protestors across the street, there was at the moment nothing to feed their identity as activists. I opened the folder and started reading.

Schultz had bought a mountain in Panama’s Darien province, the borderland between Central and South America — an impenetrable jungle region, no roads; the world began again only on the other side, in Colombia. He used Emberá Indians as laborers, hired them to help him carry out Abgrund , the destruction of his mountain. He was tearing it to the ground bit by bit. The report said he was already almost halfway there. There had been protests, conservationists and anti-globalists had joined forces against him. I found a sheet of paper with a summary of the activities carried out against Abgrund — petitions, protest marches in Panama City, before the Panamanian consulate in Geneva, the embassy in Brasilia, accompanied by the dates, the names of the committees and the estimated number of demonstrators; picayune detail lent the efforts an official air. And there were lists of endangered animal and plant species in the region. The picture slowly emerged of a reckless hater who squeezed the life out of all those little animals with his own two hands, who crushed rare flowers between his fingers.

Mitchell Rhodes, a fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, had tried to visit Abgrund . He got as far as the boundaries of the terrain itself and was stopped there by guards. FARC militiamen, AK-47s slung over their shoulders. Rhodes and his companions, two guides and a biologist from the University of the West Indies, had been assaulted, shots had been fired in the air.

The press kit contained copies of aerial photographs of a clearing in the jungle, the dreary wasteland of a mining operation. A steep, lonesome mountain in the middle. I thought I could make out conveyors, bulldozers, barracks. Smoke from bonfires. Down there, somewhere, was my father. Concerning Schultz himself, his motives, I found little. Speculations, no facts. Words like ‘demonic’ and ‘fascistic’ reflected the authors’ opinions, but clarified almost nothing. I was disappointed. I had hoped to find him, or at least get a little closer.

The girl crossed the street.

‘Hi,’ she said once she was standing in front of me, ‘you were sitting there reading so quietly. .’

‘Not a lot happening, is there?’

‘A boycott calls for a lot of patience.’

‘Is that what you call it, a boycott?’

‘That’s what we’re doing, a boycott. With a high degree of public agitation.’

‘Straight out of the Demonstrator’s Handbook?’

‘Sort of. But if you’re a reporter, I probably shouldn’t tell you too much.’

‘I’m not a reporter. I only wanted the press kit. Sorry.’

She had something awkward about her, a kind of beauty which I could imagine that only I might be able to appreciate.

Two police cars stopped in front of the gallery. We crossed the street, I kept my distance in order not to be confused with the demonstrators. The tall boy was handcuffed, the girl with the flyers kept pushing her way up to the front, it seemed as though she wanted to be arrested. Five protestors were taken away, the others were chased off with batons.

‘You can go inside now,’ she said as she passed.

The wheels of her shopping cart rattled on the concrete. The incident seemed to have made no impression on her. She smiled in a way I couldn’t figure.

You could call it my introduction to my father. In the flesh. I strolled past his work slowly, trying to see in it the world of his thoughts. The mind of a man turned inside out. A series of paintings on rough wooden panels, all unevenly sawed. They looked like dark landscapes, uprooted as though by war. Each had a vanishing point, a darkness where the earth seemed to swallow itself. Once that black hole had caught your eye, everything seemed to move towards it like a mudslide off a hill. The catalog noted that the works were displayed behind Plexiglas; in view of the maker’s controversial reputation, vandalism could not be ruled out.

In the middle of the gallery a black square had been cordoned off, made from tarps hanging from ceiling to floor. Abgrund was being shown inside it. I struggled with the tarpaulin until I found an opening. Flickering images on the screen, vibrating blue light. Wooden benches had been arranged in close rows, as in a church, and I was the only visitor. The film ran in a loop, I came in somewhere in the middle. Heavy thuds like mortar fire, a cloud of dust in the distance. The camera, perched on someone’s shoulder, moved towards it. Then that voice, rambling amid a landscape of boulders.