Little Caesar (27 page)

I barely hear what she’s saying, until she asks, ‘What are you doing here, for heaven’s sake? You follow me around like a vicious little dog. Why, Ludwig?’

‘To save you,’ I say. ‘To keep you from making a complete mess of things.’

Her shrill laugh, almost hateful.

‘To save me? Do you have some kind of Messiah complex or something? Please, stop it. Save me? It’s been a long time since I’ve felt as down as I have ever since you . . . Go save yourself, buddy.’

*

And so came the unexpected end to my European tour with her. She weeps, again, and I remember the words from the shredded Bible I had found on the street:
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh
; I have done precisely the opposite. She tosses her knife and fork into the bowl of chef ’s salad and pushes back her chair with a screech. The people at the next table look up as she leaves the restaurant, bent over, wrapped in her sorrow. Then they look at me. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

I went back to Los Angeles. From one defeat to the next. Between the airport and her house I died of misery. It was a stroke of luck that I hadn’t returned her key before I left. The apartment had not been abandoned, as I had feared, but seemed barely occupied either.

‘Hello, Dylan,’ I said to the fetus.

I stood motionless amid the chaos. I had left this paradise of my own accord, my return was a clandestine intrusion, a breaking and an entering. The apartment seemed to have been left in a hurry, but then it had always seemed that way.

‘Where’s your mother, Dylan?’

The answering machine showed a blinking number 20. I tossed a T-shirt over it. The daylight was fading slowly, I sat on the edge of the bed and thought about the state of inertia in which I found myself. Shadows were crawling out from the objects in the room. Even putting on water for tea seemed like an effort from which I might never recover. After a little while I fell back on the bed, my hands folded behind my head. If I craned my neck I could see the photo of the fetus. I drifted in and out of sleep.

‘I was in Vienna, Dylan,’ I said. ‘Not your kind of place. Austria is a completely racist country. I was in Prague too. In fact, I can’t remember seeing a single black person. Maybe if I’d paid more attention.’

The black coach in Vienna, the rattling sound of hoof beats.
Der Tod, das muss ein Wiener sein
.

‘Life is strange, Dylan. I’m trying to reconstruct the train of thought behind the stupid mistake I made by leaving your mother – what was I thinking? What kind of idea could be weighty enough to make you leave the sanctuary of love? I should make a sacrifice, I haven’t forgotten about that. Maybe a self-sacrifice, to show her what that is. To set an example. You and I are both sons, we both know how difficult all that can be. What we basically need is a mother who gives herself away for us. But giving yourself away isn’t exactly in my genes. I should know, because I tried. The sacrifice was not accepted, more or less as I’d predicted. I thought maybe it would bring us closer, that we would belong together again if one of us had the courage to forget his own self-interest, without restrictions, without conditions, all those things that make a sacrifice look more like a transaction. The sacrifice didn’t create the orderliness I was looking for. All it brought was more distance and chaos. It wasn’t the right time or the right place and, more fundamentally, we’re not the right people. It might be my fault for expecting results. I took it to the market and hung a price tag on it. I wanted harmony. But that calls for dedication, and that’s exactly what she doesn’t have. I was going to show her how it was supposed to work. I didn’t take myself into account. By leaving your mother, I scotched my own desires. But scotching your desires isn’t the point. That’s not a sacrifice, that’s self-castigation.

‘During our last supper, coincidentally or not, she asked me whether I had a Messiah complex. Maybe I actually
was
seeing myself in a sort of holy light, while in reality I was her vicious little dog. I’m ashamed of being arrogant enough to think I could be someone else’s salvation. In the plane on the way here I had a lot of time to think about that. It’s amazing how, in one fell swoop, you can chase away the only two people who really matter. At first they fought over me, like the two mothers before King Solomon – and now neither of them wants to see me anymore. Be glad you didn’t have to go through all this, Dylan, be glad. Especially the loneliness. Sometimes that can be glorious, you soar above the world on wings of wax, above everything and everyone, with that kind of loneliness it’s actually a pity not to have an audience, no oohing and aahing. But you also have the other kind, when you’re buried like a stone under the earth, all locked up in yourself, and no-one comes to dig you up. You might be there, you might not, you’re dead to the world. My optimism, if you can call it that, consists in not making a production of that. In not bowing to the heaviness or to the lightness.’

The irrepressible light of morning, you had almost forgotten how pure it is. The day lies before you like a swimming pool without a ripple, you’re the first bather. Gradually it becomes populated with the things that were interrupted by sleep.

Where Sarah is.

My knees go weak when I consider the possibilities.

I leave the house only in order to go shopping, to get takeaway meals, grab a macchiato on Rose Avenue. That light, the glaring, open sky, I can barely stand it. I hurry back to the apartment’s shadows, to my waiting room. She could come back any moment, and be gone again before I arrive.

The days faded into each other. I folded her clothes and piled them neatly in the wooden chest. My fingertips slid over cloth that had been a second skin to her. I went to a laundromat to do the dirty clothes and looked at the crotch of her panties as though reading her diary. Her underwear, the pale stripes at the crotch often in plain view, had been scattered everywhere, despite my comments. Her voice, sounding offended, ‘But we’re open down there, Ludwig . . .’

‘Your mother’s a dirty girl, Dylan,’ I said. ‘The sweetest dirty girl I know.’

Sometimes my heart leapt at a noise from the backyard, but no-one ever came. I lit the candle in front of Dylan’s photo. Someone had to keep the ritual alive. It had to be her hands that held him, it was a dramatic gesture, I could see her doing it, and also the father’s revulsion at the theatricality of it.

One afternoon I went out, to
UCLA
, to see whether they might know where she was. The girl who went to fetch the boss seemed vaguely amused, as though I were not the first to ask about Sarah. The boss came, looking like a man who had never been able to cash in on his college degree. She had quit weeks ago, he said, he had told her she could always come back.

‘She’s a good person to have around, always cheerful, even when the going’s tough.’

‘Do you know where she went? Why she quit?’

He raised his hands and shrugged.

‘A boyfriend maybe? She didn’t say anything, in fact I don’t know very much about her, now that you ask me.’

It seemed unlikely that she would have gone home to her parents, but still I looked up their number in Augusta.

A woman said
hello?
I said
hello?
back.

‘Hello?’

‘This is Ludwig Unger, I’m . . .’

‘Hello?’

I hung up and tried again.

‘I guess something went wrong,’ the woman said. ‘It’s been snowing.’ She didn’t know where her daughter was.

‘Yesterday I ran across a picture of her, such a sweet child. She still is, of course, but back then, so . . . You can’t imagine that, that your heart breaks sometimes when you see what they were like.’

The child, a rank weed, should have grown no further, now it’s too late.

‘You sound too young to have children yourself. Do you have children?’

Sarah had disappeared for a while before, then she simply forgot to tell people where she was.

‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, ‘we mothers do enough worrying already. We worry so much that it’s enough for everything and everyone. That’s why we’re here, to carry the worries of the world. Sarah’s real strong, she adapts quickly. A real survivor.’

I had made contact with a white and distant land, a woman was writing her fears in the snow.

I didn’t see Sarah again. She must have wondered who had folded her clothes so neatly. Whenever the TV shows demonstrators railing against G8 summits or Olympic Games in a rogue country, I still examine the crowd. A shopping cart perhaps, with Sarah pushing it, her clenched fist raised in the air. When I dream of her, she laughs at me.
Crazy Ludwig, don’t go thinking you miss me
. Shame spots my skin like a disease, in her I have passed on while she is still always in me. You only get one chance, and it’s better not to end up in a position in which you have to ask a woman for forgiveness.

What I would have liked to be able to say was: I have learned to be at home wherever I am. But perhaps this comes closer to the truth: I have learned not to desire a home wherever I am. In that way, the life of a musician moving from hotel to hotel is almost tolerable. To pose no demands that exceed the possibilities of that particular place and time.

‘The language of music, people speak that wherever you go, don’t they?’

A sentence which people often use to start up a conversation at the bar. The commonplace is our natural habitat, the cliché our private lives. Sometimes an unexpected story follows, the trauma or the glory of a human life.

I learn how to drink without slurring my words. To beat back the drunkenness. Reeds beaten by the wind, the stalks bend over further and further towards you, the important thing is to remain upright no matter how the alcohol rages through your veins. I’m conscientious about my little jobs. It’s a delicate balance, I go to the trouble of getting things just the way I want them: that is to say, I sometimes insist that they give me a room and that the hotel, if at all possible, be in a favorable climate zone. Portugal, the Caribbean, Monaco, the Côte d’Azur, cities with Dior and Chanel in their coats of arms. The palaces in which, after the nobles left, the hoteliers have taken residence.

Cannes, the Majestic Barrière – the shrouded life, the sounds muffled by the thick carpets. Time eludes us with a whisper.

Biarritz, Hotel du Palais. The dazzling Atlantic light, life that passes you by like a caravan through the desert sand.

I live in little rooms beneath the eaves, on floors where the elevator never arrives, where the staff polish shoes and copper. Sometimes I am given a real hotel room, when occupancy is low.

On the beach I say hello to people I saw in the bar the night before. The women, older than me, eyes that flash like stars. They count out the shrinking capital of their beauty. I am the investor who enhances it for them. In disbelief, they receive me in their beds. With the persistent hardness of my sex I take away their shame. It fills them with pride. They are the ones who have caused that turmoil, that boiling of the bloodstream, and they will help me to get rid of it as well. That is the deal.

In Biarritz, Abijail Falcón is awaiting her divorce. She comes out of the gym, she is wearing shiny white stretch pants, she looks healthy and hungry. I’m sure she’s had her breasts done. Before I come in her, she says, ‘Is this normal? Are you sure you don’t have some kind of deviation?’

The Argentine uses herself against me, she doesn’t believe in altruism, only in pathologies.

I don’t object when she insists on buying me a new wardrobe in the shops along Avenue Edouard VII.

‘You were made for Italian fashion,’ she tells me, seated on a pouffe, her smooth brown legs crossed at the knees.

She was virtuous for twenty-four years – although she quotes Leonard Cohen with a malicious little laugh when she says
give or take a night or two
– but now she follows her desires.

‘Life is short, dearest, shorter than you might think.’

I sport light linen blazers by Corneliani, a light gray woolen sport coat by Zegna; I have my doubts about pegged trouser legs, but Abijail says the pants make my ass look good. I enjoy making her feel like I’m some sort of erotic toy. That’s what she’s paying for – or at least her soon-to-be-ex, the car manufacturer from Córdoba, is: the gold card has his name on it.

After a few days she reveals her predilection for straddling my face, to ride me like that, rubbing her cunt over my mouth and nose. Then she takes possession of my member. She has little to lose, the older woman, restored like a monumental mansion, her eyes full of playfulness and defeat.

I avoid sleeping with them. To wake up beside them is an intimacy I cannot bear. Two or three times I accidentally fall asleep; by early light the dilapidation is more than I can stand. All lust then immediately reverts to its opposite.

‘Stay, would you,’ says the heiress to the Krause fortune in Karlovy Vary. ‘I’ll pay you for it.’

It proves negotiable. The repression of disgust can be expressed in cash; the start of all prostitution. But I don’t stay long in Karlovy Vary, the hard, bling-bling world of the Russian mafiosi who settled there after the fall of the Wall does not particularly appeal to me.

On the volcanic island of Nevis, on the other hand, I stay for six months. I rent a well-lighted room on the outskirts of Charlestown, above an eatery where they serve excellent Creole food – beans, rice, goat meat. The jungle starts where the houses stop, my balcony is only a few meters from the edge of it. Sometimes at night you hear something heavy crash to the ground, a piece of fruit perhaps, a branch. Above the bed, which creaks like a ship in distress, a mosquito net hangs in broad pleats. I like lying under it, staring at the wooden ceiling, the fan, and thinking about the winding road that brought me here.

I play at the Four Seasons Resort, a haven of hysterical luxury. It wasn’t easy finding a job in the Caribbean. I sent around a promotional CD, with a résumé and flattering photos in which you see me seated at the grand piano in the hall of mirrors at Grand Hotel Pupp. The Four Seasons’ regular pianist has gone to Miami for six months, that’s the slot into which I fit. Beside the pool in the evening a steel band plays, I sit at an undependably tuned piano at the edge of the patio. The sea washes in with a sigh, people walk hand in hand along the surf, which is lit up by phosphorescent plankton – you can have a good time there.