Little Caesar (17 page)

‘Erotic art,’ he said, ‘is tickling a cunt with a chicken feather. Porno uses the whole chicken.’

Marthe Unger wanted someone she could count on, and Rollo Liban had a Levantine nose for the right time and the right place. He got her into movies that made money, and saw to fringe benefits that included cool, quiet hotel rooms, vodka and cocaine. He wanted his trade to look ‘classy’, the association with criminality and the abuse of women was bad for business. Actors and producers in the adult industry were being taken to court, the
FBI
was running major undercover operations against the producers of pornography, but there was no stopping porno. The contours of an industry emerged, today’s star made way tomorrow for a new one.

‘It is a little depressing,’ she told Al Goldstein in
Screw
. ‘Every week there are a hundred new starlets waiting to take your place, especially in Hollywood.’

But Rollo Liban took good care of his star, she appeared mostly in the more
aesthetic
productions; the real raw smut, he felt, was something for Linda Lovelace or C.J. Laing.

It was the golden age of porn. The genre was subversive, hip: syphilis and gonorrhea were easy to treat, abortion had been legalized after
Roe vs. Wade
, and the only contraceptive was the Pill. The word
AIDS
began making the whispered rounds only a few years later; at first the disease limited itself to homosexual men.

As Eve LeSage she plays in six porno films before the dark stranger of the threepenny novel makes his appearance. The umpteenth party, scenes of fatigued excess. Then, suddenly, there is someone who doesn’t fit in; he stands a bit to one side, smiles when spoken to, but keeps his distance. Atypicality as a mark of character. He keeps his coat on, a bomber jacket. Heavy work boots on his feet. She asks who that is.

‘Mmmm,’ growls Price du Plessix Gray.

Du Plessix Gray, aging queen and theater critic, is a friend. He says, ‘Hmmm, mmmm. A wayward laborer, perhaps?’

An artist, she hears later: a European like her. Would she like to be introduced? It turns out not to be necessary. Like a boxer he comes out of his corner, straight at her; she feels the room shrink to become his presence.

‘I know who you are,’ he says. ‘I’ve read about you.’

A German accent so thick she feels at liberty to say, ‘
Ach wie gut, dass niemand weiss, dass ik Rumpelstilchzen heiss
.’

‘
Sie sprechen Deutsch?
’

‘My grandfather was German. I grew up close to the border.’

‘You are Dutch, I assume?’

She nods, amused. His name is Bodo Schultz, he’s from Austria, a village in Carinthia. Like so many Austrian artists he hates his fatherland. You can tell from looking at him that he was raised on
Knödeln
and
Rostbraten
, a hulking farmer, boulder-like, a massive neck and shoulders. She feels like running her fingers through his coarse hair.

His studio in Manhattan looks out on the massive pillars beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The building itself looks like a shipwreck washed ashore, wind and rain have free play.

She goes to visit him. He talks about his work, but only with difficulty. She wanders past monochrome sculptures, human figures in hideous postures, twisted, suffering. She is reminded of frozen battlefields, the casts of bodies at Pompeii.

He has just returned from Okinawa, where he designed a pavilion for the World’s Fair: a column of ice forty meters high, a tower veined with deep-freeze elements. Corridors, stairways and rooms had been hacked out inside the tower, when the sun shone you found yourself at the heart of a diamond. Its arches, arcades and suspended stairways caused his tower to be compared to the phantomlike interiors of Piranesi. The reference to such romanticism had thrown him into an uncontrollable rage. He is working on a new design, another tower, for a
concours
set up by the city of Alexandria. Marthe Unger finds him surly and gracious, the latter in spite of himself. It moves her to see him do his best on her behalf. They sleep together on a mattress in the far corner of his studio.

‘Happiness,’ he says, ‘is this.’

She is proud that she can elicit such feelings in him, it gives her a special status, like making friends with an animal in the wild.

Southern Belle
is her final film. Abby Mayer punches a hole in the door, he screams, ‘I’d rather lose you to a car wreck than to . . . to love.’

She says that sex with anyone else is out of the question as long as she loves this man. It’s that simple, and with the same ease with which she started, she stops. To Schultz she says, ‘Those were my fifteen minutes. They dragged on a little.’

They marry quickly. There is no family at the wedding. Price du Plessix Gray is her witness, the owner of the Greek grocery around the corner is his.

Schultz works on a statuary group he calls
Blind
, dozens of life-sized sculptures of the two of them in the act of coition. Everyone, it seemed, felt the need to portray her naked, copulating; life’s demands on her were limited. The legend of her beauty was fed by her sudden disappearance. From being the fantasy of countless others she now became the muse of a single man. She left New York for Alexandria. Schultz began preparations for
Wachturm
, his tower in the city’s harbor, the shadow of the Pharos. I entered the world at the Egyptian British Hospital. When I was baptized, her artificial eyelashes fell off. For the rest, nothing special.

The treasure trove of the ancient world, the library at Alexandria, was destroyed by fire. A tragedy beyond bounds. In the 1980s a new library was built, a huge and prestigious project. It was meant, by way of compensation, to be one of the largest libraries in the world. At the same time a plan was hatched to rebuild the Pharos, the legendary lighthouse that has been shining in the eyes of civilization since time immemorial. The Pharos was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and was destroyed by a series of earthquakes. At its feet there arose an Arab fort; archeologists still search for its remains on the seafloor. For the design of the new tower, the city government organized a competition among artists and architects. Scores of plans were submitted, breathtaking reminiscences, but in the end my father received the commission. His tower was to be built in the harbor of Alexandria, the city would look out upon it, the antique glory would be revived. Bodo Schultz, master builder, would follow in the footsteps of Sostratus. But Bodo Schultz’s tower would produce no light: his would be black as obsidian. Every bit as tall as the old tower, one hundred and thirty meters. But the Pharos, according to legend, had been built of white marble, three storeys high, with a huge fire at the top that could be seen miles out to sea. That tower was an invitation to come ashore, to Alexandria, backdrop to that marvelous history play of old revolving around Cleopatra, whose own loins had been a haven to Julius Caesar and Marc Antony.

Bodo Schultz’s tower broadcast a different message.
Avoid this harbor while ye may
, it said.

Alexandria lies between the desert and the Mediterranean Sea. The city encompasses its eastern harbor and bay like a womb. The bay is protected by two forts; between them, an elongated artificial island was once thrown up to break the waves before they reach the city. The island is a few hundred meters long, and ships can enter the bay on either side. There, on that island, was where Schultz’s tower would rise:
Wachturm
, an obelisk black as a shadow, his tar-drenched middle finger held up to the world. The tower was closed on all sides, there was no telling whether it protected the city against intruders or actually held it hostage.

Schultz spent most of his days on the island. Many months went into laying the foundations. In my mind’s eye I see him amid the cranes, cement mixers and bulldozers, while shiploads of building materials keep coming in. He acted as the classic artist-builder, the way Daedalus had, bringing his dark vision to life with his own hands. The island is easy to see from the Corniche, the seaside boulevard that encircles the bay in a lazy curve. In bad weather one sees the sea rising high and dark behind it, while the calm surf in the harbor hardly changes.

After dark my father took the boat back with the last of the workers, arriving home only after I had been put to bed. My mother once made a home movie in the garden, perhaps with the idea of sending it to his family for Christmas – greetings from the outlands. I am sitting on a little orange tricycle with a sort of pickup bed at the back and staring the whole time at my mother, who is holding the camera. I forget to move the pedals. A hand against my back pushes me along, then we see the rest of the man, but only from behind, a bent figure. I look at my mother again, and the scene ends there.

The second part of the home movie must have been made that same day, I’m wearing the same clothes. I’m sitting on a swing at the back of the garden, behind me stands my father. He is wearing a white T-shirt, it fits tightly around his torso. He is strong, a Carinthian farmer.

He is built for adversity; if the ox dies, we’ll just pull the plow ourselves. Picasso had a body like that.

‘Are you having fun, Ludwig?’

My mother, operating the camera again, but I don’t answer, because the swing is going fast and high.

‘Bodo, it’s scaring him.’

My legs fly higher and higher, the little doll’s feet sweep helplessly.

‘Bodo, stop it, he’s frightened!’

The film stutters and goes black. Not suitable for sending to the family. The mysterious thing about those images is that his face is never seen, only that hand, that arm, that torso. Even during the swing scene, his face remains in shadow.

‘Now that you mention it,’ my mother said when we looked at the film many years later.

She told me how frustrated he was; he hadn’t counted on the conditions in Egypt, which were tough and resulted in messy delays. I imagine it as having been something like the
Tower of Babel
, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder: little men contributing stone by stone to an arrogant, godless project. He cursed the inefficiency and the leisurely way they lifted their hands to the heavens when the wrong building materials were delivered. He incurred the workers’ wrath with his brutish treatment, his frequent shouts of
Scheiss doch auf Allah!

Winter came, a bitter west wind delayed the work, and two storms in rapid succession finally brought it to a standstill. People say he beat laborers, those little fellahin in their djellabahs who had come in from the countryside to earn a few piasters in the big city. In the light of later accounts, that is not unlikely. It is commonly known of disturbed, narcissistic characters that they regard all adversity, even when imposed by inanimate factors such as the weather or natural disasters, as a personal insult. These things provoke a deep, impotent rage, everything is conspiring against them, that is why they shake their fists at heaven and flail the waters of the Hellespont. Or, as Captain Ahab said:
Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me
.

I think my mother was deeply shocked by the dark storm clouds that gathered over her. She had never seen him like this, a tense and enraged Austrian out to build a tower in the harbor at Alexandria, a barbaric ruler over a ragged legion of day laborers, an obsequious throng, his subjects.

Wachturm
sprang from the soil like a poison toadstool, decked out with an intricate network of wooden scaffolding on which countless little men made their way up and down. Medieval! Medieval in the sense of manual labor, bond service and feudalism, those same conditions – in other words – which still pertain in large parts of the world, so that
medieval
perhaps describes not just a historical era, but also a packet of conditions that floats around the world, regardless of time or position, and is unpacked here or there. Whatever the case, the Pandora’s box bearing the label
MEDIEVAL
had now been delivered to that elongated barrier island.

The tower was not completed. After three years my father went away and never came back. He left many things behind, unfinished, a tower, a marriage, an upbringing.

(Later, in Alburgh, I was eleven or twelve at the time, I was given a box of Playmobil. I built a castle with it. The good guys lived in that castle; the bad guys gathered in a black tower that was not made with plastic building blocks. Only much later did I realize that that black tower and
Wachturm
were one and the same; it was the scale model of
Wachturm
that I had played with all those years.)

It was a good two-hour walk to La Cienega Boulevard. The Steinson & Freeler Gallery, it turned out, was located in an old, single-storey commercial building, a bright orange oblong. Before the entrance, marked by a set of smoked-glass doors, a little crowd had gathered. These were not art lovers, it seemed to me; the dreadlocks and clothing daubed with political slogans were too much in evidence for that – the fashion statements of left-wing activists. They unrolled a banner, a girl was taking flyers from a shopping cart and handing them out to passers-by. Someone was toying around with a megaphone.

I crossed the street and took a flyer. Stop this maniac from desecrating holy mountains. The maniac portrayed was Bodo Schultz. I wormed my way through the activists to the entrance, but that wasn’t supposed to happen – they lined up between me and the door and began chanting, as if in a dream

‘IT AIN’T NO ART TO TAKE MOUNTAINS APART. IT AIN’T NO ART TO TAKE MOUNTAINS APART.’

As though by magic, their looks became combative – from a gaggle of freeloaders they had been transformed into a militant cell. Their arms were locked together, it looked like experimental theater, with me as the sole member of the audience. Behind me, two of the demonstrators raised the banner, you could read the words through the back of it:
VIOLENCE AGAINST NATURE IS VIOLENCE AGAINST MANKIND.
A voice beside me said, ‘Immoral art is a crime, that’s how we feel about it.’