Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

‘She dispels her feelings of emptiness and, uuh. . futility by, on the one hand, fits of bulimic gorging, and by seduction. On the other. She looks for a writer in order to be immortalized as his muse, in order to, uuh. . recover her self-worth. Against the emptiness. A dangerous and extremely beautiful parasite. . in fact.’

‘Well yes, as I read your book I also had the feeling that she is both monstrous and helpless. Somewhere you write that she is a ”muse by calling”, a muse without an artist to immortalize her. Have you ever met anyone like that yourself, someone who perhaps inspired you in the writing of this book? I mean, it has such overwhelming autobiographical intensity.’

After a fairly long silence you could hear the spark wheel of a lighter scraping against flint, followed by cigarette smoke being inhaled with obvious pleasure into the tiniest branches of the bronchia.

‘First we’re going to listen to a song,’ the interviewer said. ‘Here is the lovely “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen.’

It was much too nice a song for this shit day: full, welcome tears ran down my cheeks. Far too soon we returned to the interview with the writer.

‘While the music was playing, Arthur, you told me that you wrote this book within a very short period. Was there a reason for that?’

Metz mumbled something about necessity and rage; in fact he didn’t seem to want to talk about his book at all.

‘You also deal here with a very controversial subject,’ the interviewer tried. ‘You state that physical violence is the logical conclusion of all intimate contact. The scenes in which the writer assaults the girl Tessel are among the most distasteful in the book, but perhaps even more shocking is that you seem to say that such violence is justifiable.’

‘Violence, uuh. . is much more multifaceted than many people think. Perhaps one would do better to look first at the conclusion, in other words at the results of human actions, before deciding what is violent and what is not. That imposes nuance on the, uuh. . absolute distinction between culprit and victim.’

Then he repeated the word ‘victim’, more to himself it seemed, as though it were a new word to him.

‘But there’s no way to justify physical violence against women, is there?!’

‘I, uuh. . I’m not justifying anything,’ was the weary reply, ‘I’m recording a process. As a, uuh. . Lover of the Truth.’

With this the interview was more or less over. The irritated female interviewer tried to bring the writer back to life with a few more of her surges of moral current, but he was sunk in the morass of gloom and contempt.

I was alight with curiosity about the book. I knew that the character of Tessel was made after P.J.’s image, and I had found it exciting to try to decipher the writer’s messages across the airwaves. I strongly suspected that he had encoded P.J.’s surname, Eilander, in the first name Tessel/Texel, after the island. What’s more, Metz demonstrated the see-through rhetoric of the chronically self-authenticating depressive, and that fascinated me.

Three cold frankfurters still lay on the plate, the mustard was showing traces of the dark crust that, within twenty-four hours, would begin to crack.

The next morning I went to Praamstra’s bookshop, which specialized in the better Christian literature and had an excellent assortment of titles such as A Personal Talk with God or The Gospel of Jesus in the Life of Your Child , and ordered the novel About a Woman . Author: Arthur Metz. Delivery time: ‘Usually two days, but it might take a week, just so you know.’

If I hoped to make even a ripple at the international arm-wrestling tournament in Poznan on 6 May, I was going to have to be in top form. Joe was convinced that this time Islam Mansur would really be there; a shot at the first prize of fifteen thousand smackers was something he wouldn’t want to miss. I intensified my training program as I felt necessary, and although I saw Joe regularly during the week — he often spent the weekend in Amsterdam with P.J., or at Dirty Rinus’s working on his bulldozer — I told him nothing about what I’d heard on the radio. What is lacking cannot be counted, saith the Preacher.

On Thursday, About a Woman was waiting for me at Praamstra’s: 316 pages, that will be twenty-nine-fifty please, thank you very much. P.J. would certainly see the book in Amsterdam, and it was very much the question whether she would be pleased about that — the advance radio review did not bode well for her. It felt like I was toting someone else’s confidential medical files around with me, and when I got home I started reading right away. The story interested me least of all; I was looking for the character of Tessel. I found her in the chapter entitled ‘Puke Girl’, which began by sketching the socio-cultural background against which eating disorders made their appearance:

In 1984, the readers of Glamour magazine were asked what it was that would make them happiest. We would expect their response to have been: wealth, pleasure and holiday destinations with guaranteed sunshine. But that is naïve: 42 percent said that weight loss was the key to happiness. It was in that same decade that Tessel was born to South African parents. She was sensitive, intelligent and fat. Tessel grew up in a society in which being overweight was condemned as a visible sign of weakness and a lack of self-control.

The cult of the low-fat body followed on the heels of the increased self-determination of women — the foodstuffs industry, clothing and cosmetics producers responded with a compulsory model that made slenderness synonymous with desirability and success. In the history of mankind, no other period is found with such rigid directives for the ideal proportions of the human body. No dictatorial system has ever succeeded in imposing such an all-inclusive Körperkultur ; the bodily ideal of the Third Reich was made possible at last by modern industry. Within the commercial propaganda, a healthy, slender body with a well-balanced BMI (body mass index) is the only vehicle for positive self-awareness, friendships with other healthy, attractive individuals and professional self-realization.

When Tessel began awakening to her own sexuality, bathroom mirrors and reflecting glass surfaces in public spaces entered her life. With her blond curls and pretty, broad face reminiscent of Eskimo girls, she was not unattractive. Her locomotor apparatus, however, was swaddled in a layer of fat that was visibly thicker than that of the other (largely white) girls in her class. Her kneecaps receded further due to the girth of her thighs; when she looked down, her neck formed a fleshy bib. Her sexual awareness began with repulsion toward her own body.

Major events influence our lives only in small part; a casual comment or chance event often has a greater impact on one’s life than does the first man on the Moon or the discovery of the structure of DNA. The decisive sentence in Tessel’s life was spoken by her mother, one muggy afternoon as they were shopping for shoes in Cape Town. ‘Look, just your type,’ her mother said, and Tessel knew exactly what she meant. In front of them, a fat little boy was walking along with his mother. He wore a pair of short trousers that showed his chubby calves, he had a Springboks cap on his head. It was a pedagogical faux pas , and Tessel froze in horror.

The fat boy on the shopping street became her sole prospect for the future. She was doomed to kiss fat boys, sit beside fat boys at school and at university, she would marry a fat boy and give birth to fat boys. She considered suicide.

I looked up from the page and felt that my face was warm and flushed, as though I had stolen a look at someone’s secret diary: P.J.’s secret diary, to be precise. Were these the things she had told Metz in her infatuation, before they split up amid hatred and violence? It was sensational reading and, thank God, Metz wrote much more fluently than he spoke. The writer continued: