Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

‘Only those cells? The other cells can take it?’

‘Don’t ask me how it works exactly. If you really want to know, look it up on the Internet.’

‘I already did.’

‘Not well enough, apparently.’

We drank tall glasses of fruit juice at the nearest outdoor café, beneath a white latticework roof through which the late-afternoon sun threw squares of light. The saddest hour. Families at little tables ate deep-fried dishes. The black waiters were the only ones who smiled. The Arabs looked down on us rather emphatically.

‘So you’re not going to go to a hospital?’ I asked. ‘No chemotherapy or radiation?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said. ‘Even doctors advise their wives not to do that.’

She threw up a barricade of unverifiable information that underscored the correctness of her choice, which I found reckless, and which frightened me.

‘We haven’t seen each other for so long, Ludwig, shall we talk about something else?’

She was planning to settle in Holland for as long as the alternative treatments took, perhaps for good. The wanderings since the loss of our house had lasted eight years, she wasn’t even sure that Warren and Catherine hadn’t taken our household goods to the flea market long ago.

‘You’re going to die if you don’t do anything about that breast,’ I said. ‘You do realize that, don’t you?’

‘Not do anything? But I’m doing so much! How can you say that? I’ve gathered a lot of information, believe me.’

‘When did you find out about it?’

‘The first time I went to a doctor was in January. It just wouldn’t heal.’

‘This is November.’

We were silent. Through my straw I sucked up water from among the ice cubes.

‘Paget’s disease,’ I said. ‘That’s what you’ve got.’

‘I know.’

‘A preliminary form of cancer, not hard to treat.’

‘If they cut into you that can cause the cancer to spread, they don’t tell you that.’

‘They.’

‘The doctors, that’s who. In the service of the pharmaceutical industry.’

‘They have taken an oath, you know.’

‘Now you’re being very naïve, Ludwig, please.’

I had hoped that, with the intercession of time, we would be able to deal with each other more mildly, but the only thing time taught was that these things were immutable, that in all things this first day stood back to back with the last one long ago, so that the mood again became poisoned by conflicts and irreconcilable differences. We had remained the same, we had not escaped ourselves or the other, not even now that the disease had taken root in her.

At eight o’clock we met in the dining room. Cooks in high white hats fried little fish and thin entrecôtes beside the pool. The luminescent turquoise of the water looked sweet and edible. There is something magical about the glow of swimming pools in the dark; if I ever have a house I want one with a pool, simply because of that edible light.

The hotel was furnished like a large sailing ship, a mast stood smack in the middle of the central lobby, ropes were slung here and there. Between the staff and the tourists there existed a strictly businesslike contact, when all was said and done each one went home and all memories were lost of this meeting of the peoples. People slipped by each other without touching; watching for a while from a couch in the lobby, one had the feeling that the ship could suddenly drag anchor, and that crew and passengers would be locked forever in this vacuum, with the Buena Vista Social Club on eternal replay.

Similar feelings of endlessness overtook me in the corridors that I moved down on my way to my room. There was an enormous difference in air pressure between the hallways and the rooms, a horrible whistling and buzzing wormed its way under the doors, pressed itself through fissures. Doors slammed violently. Once, by accident, I stepped out of the elevator too soon and wandered through identical corridors in search of my room, but the magnetic key didn’t fit — lost in the labyrinth, with no thread of love to show me the way out. I follow the sandy footprints of children down the sky-blue carpet, the tracks of little prehistoric predators.

The flat coastline described a lazy curve, at night you could see the lights of Zarzis in the distance. Seen from offshore, Africa began hesitantly, without emphasis, the land barely rose above water. Very little grew on the silted soil. A dead, flat coast, without striking characteristics.

The wind came up. That night I closed the doors to the balcony. When I looked out the window in the morning the sea was restless. During the night it had washed away parasols, the water stood in puddles on the little volleyball court. And the sea had brought ashore even more algae. Tons of organic material had been shoved all the way up the terraces, the beach had disappeared completely beneath it. All was foam, chaos. In the midst of that goo stood four men, their trouser legs rolled up. Two of them were carrying shovels. To anyone overseeing the fifteen-meter-wide band of seaweed covering the entire coastline, the shovel was an absurd prop. Later a little red tractor appeared, pulling a trailer, and the men began their Herculean labor. Shovelful by shovelful they scooped up the algae. The parasols remained upturned, no-one seemed to believe anymore in the ruined façade.

The hotel’s entertainer, spirited and homosexual, is standing at poolside. The group in the water at his feet is trying to keep up with the exercises as he counts down from ten to one in his shrill voice. I try to avoid him as much as possible, because of the longing glances he tosses my way. He counts down in French, German and English, the ghetto blaster roaring at his back. His swimming trunks are tiny and tight.

She is in the baths, leaning back in a recliner, her body wrapped in a white, much-washed bathrobe. Her feet are resting on a footstool, there are balls of cotton wedged between her toes. She flaps her hands.

‘Have a massage,’ she says. ‘It’s lovely, so relaxing. It would be good for you. Sit down, you make me nervous when you stand there wobbling like that. Would you like a cup of tea? What’s-His-Name, you know, he’ll fetch it for you. Ask him to come over, would you?’

I poke my head around the corner of the relax room and ask the receptionist to send someone over. A few minutes later a man comes gliding in, charm incarnate — smooth and gleaming brown as a waxed piece of hardwood furniture.

‘ Thé de menthe for Frau Marthe, subito . And this, who might this be?’

He winks.

‘Your brother? Someone else?’

‘My son,’ she said.

‘ Incroyable! ’

How much feigned amazement can fit in one face. He hurries away on his white clogs.

‘A real clown,’ my mother says to the vacuum he leaves behind. ‘And a huge flirt.’

And a little later.

‘But I still look pretty good, don’t you think?’

‘The cancer’s not on your face, that’s right.’

I see her sigh but can’t hear it.

‘I wanted to ask you to go along with me to Holland,’ she says. ‘At least for the first period. If you’ve got the time, that is.’

‘Terminal care.’

‘I have no intention of dying yet!’

‘Maybe you’ll become ill. That’s to be expected if you don’t do anything.’

‘But Ludwig, maybe I would have been dead a long time ago if I’d let them cut into me. You read so much about women who have a breast removed and then die because it spread to the lymph glands or brain.’

‘I’m sure there also plenty of women to whom that doesn’t happen.’

Two girls in white uniforms come in. One of them sits down at her feet, the other settles beside her; they finish the treatment. Visions of hospitals, the earnestness of doctors. You have only that one, irreproducible life — they see dozens come by, just like you. You don’t understand how that can be, that they don’t attach the same importance to your life as you do: the feeling that someone has insulted you gravely.