Little Caesar (33 page)

‘That depends,’ she says.

Then it’s time for them to leave. The fruit trees across the way are in blossom. Blackbirds chase each other, cackling beneath the barberry. The people are tired to the bone.

The pain she talked about was not the pain she felt.

‘As long as it’s bearable, it’s bearable,’ the GP said.

We talked about my role in nursing her. Terminal care, Dantuma said, was a completely different story.

Uncle Gerard called, asked me to come, they needed to talk to me. I got a shortbread biscuit along with the coffee. Aunt Edith started.

‘We’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘Gerard and I . . .’

He nodded.

‘. . . and first of all we want to say that we think it’s really good what you’re doing there all by yourself, we admire that. But we think it would be better for her to come here. For as long as she has left. Then you don’t have to do it all on your own. It’s going to get really difficult. Nobody can do that alone.’

‘Maybe Dantuma can arrange a place in a hospice,’ I said. ‘And besides, I don’t know whether she’ll want to. She’s not’ – and here I couldn’t help laughing – ‘the easiest person.’

‘Marthe will realize that it’s the best thing for her and for you,’ Uncle Gerard said. ‘She can’t leave this up to you on your own.’

‘But where would I stay?’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to drive down here every day from the city . . .’

‘Plenty o’ room here,’ Uncle Gerard said.

That was the message I took back to Meeden. She wasn’t in the living room. I poked my head into her room. She was lying on the bed.

‘So glad,’ she panted, ‘you’re back.’

Tears were running down her cheeks. The nightstand had been knocked over, the flame under the oil had been extinguished in the fall. An epileptic seizure. The first. She couldn’t be left alone anymore, not even to pop out for some shopping, the risk of another seizure was too great for that. It didn’t take me much effort to convince her to move to Bourtange. Maybe she had only been waiting for someone to ask.

She lay in the guestroom, where the blue-flowered wallpaper was the same as ever. I sat on the edge of the bed, bending over her the way she had once bent over me, when she’d said goodbye before her big trip. For the first few days she still came down the stairs at times, but that soon stopped. She no longer had the strength to get out of bed. The bedroom smelled of urine, Dantuma inserted a catheter and gave her morphine. The pounding pain in her head obstructed the blessing of a deep, uninterrupted sleep.

The poplars along the canal wore exuberant, fresh green. I walked down to the locks, it wasn’t far, not the Homeric journey of my memories. Once she was no longer around, I would have no-one left. Only a father in the jungle. No more shared past, not a single
remember when
.
The Last of the Mohicans
meets
Alone in the World
, only now you’re crying for yourself and not for some dead Indian or for a little orphan boy roaming the back roads of France. Not my kind of thing, crying; I always feel like someone’s watching. I always cry in tandem.

This morning she thought we were on Kings Ness, she was worried and sad because we were going to lose everything. Now, in her terminal unrest, those things affect her more than they did at the time. She groans quietly in pain, like a little dog. She can barely work down her pills. With angelic patience, Aunt Edith feeds her little sips of water. I’m glad we came here, that her deathbed stands where her cradle once stood. Sometimes Uncle Gerard and I are cheerful – just the two of us, Aunt Edith is not equipped with that particular feature – and laugh loudly at jokes that aren’t even that funny. A herald of relief ? The canary’s cage is hanging in the front room. The bird is silent as the grave.

She’s so afraid sometimes, from the inner depths her demons are now freeing themselves. I sit in a chair beside her bed and watch her body withdraw from life, as Elias Canetti wrote: the dying take the world with them. Where to?

Dantuma injects her with sedatives, and an antipsychotic to ease her confusion. She crawls back into herself, deeper and deeper all the time.

Sometimes, like a swimmer, she surfaces for air.

‘Ludwig,’ she says, ‘my faithful Ludwig.’

Then she’s gone again, back into the depths where no-one can follow.

One time she awoke with a start.

‘Come! Come!’ she said agitatedly.

I leaned over her, she threw her arms around my neck and pulled me down with unexpected force. Her mouth was on my neck, the dry, cracked lips, sucking greedily at my flesh. A lover’s kiss, the last attempt to return to life – with a scream I pushed myself away from her.

‘Jesus Christ!’

I rubbed my neck, where the vampire kiss still burned.

Aunt Edith came running up the stairs.

‘It’s nothing,’ I said, ‘I was only startled.’

She lay in bed grinning, her obscenely large teeth bared.

Dantuma boosted the dosages of Dormicum and Haldol. Above her cheekbones was a gauntness, her temples had receded to hollows. The emerging pattern of her skull. When we saw the dark spots appearing on her arms, the prognosis became more precise. Her calendar was reduced to days, hours. One more time she raised her head above water. She saw me, around her lips appeared the shadow of a smile.

‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ she whispered.

Through a clump of tears I said, ‘Yeah, Mama, I’m all right.’

She closed her eyes, frowned slightly.

‘Funny,’ she murmured. ‘You never called me Mama before.’

The crematorium in Winschoten. The female funeral director, Aunt Edith, Uncle Gerard and me. Sitting at the back is a man we don’t know. Aunt Wichie has written me a card. Aunt Edith hands it to me. Regular, thin handwriting, the way she was taught eighty years ago at a village school in the peat district. I put the card in my inside pocket. First the funeral director, who tells us what we are going to hear. I already know, I picked it myself. Moody Blues, ‘Nights in White Satin’, an abridged version. Then ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ – songs she sang on the streets of Los Angeles. I step up to the front. I’ll call you Mama. Ignore the embarrassment. I will tell the people how beautiful you were, honeysuckle, roses. Don’t worry, I won’t go too heavy on the mush; your life, after all, is reflected painfully enough on this day. This is your audience: a man we don’t know, your sister and brother-in-law with whom you weren’t on speaking terms and me . . . well, you know how that was. It takes two, and we never pulled our punches. Too heavy, this? An anecdote then, the light touch. About your vanity. That once, deeply insulted, you told me someone had guessed your age as forty-five.
But you are forty-five, aren’t you?
I said. You:
But then that’s still no reason to say it!

Canned laughter, please. Uncle Gerard’s chuckle is really a bit too paltry.

Of all the requiems I’ve come up with for you in my life, this final one is truly the most wretched. It’s so prosaic, real death doesn’t sound at all like a requiem, it doesn’t echo at all. A requiem is thinking about death, not death itself. Sometimes I used to tell you the texts of my funeral orations, a game, a charm against misfortune. As long as I could tell you about it, everything was as it should be. One time I accidentally predicted what would actually happen much, much later. I told you what I would say if you would die after a long illness. I used the word
strong
. You bridled.
Strong? You could say that about anybody who’s been sick a long time. A little more special, if you please.
I replaced it with
fearless. Much better
, you said.
Do that one
. This is your day, Mom, here is your word, you fearless one. You chose it yourself.

But that I, in my youthful impetuosity, called you an
angel
, I take that back. You were not that. Or at least no more than half. The other half truly consisted of more warm-blooded material.

Well then, it’s now up to me to determine how you will be remembered, the counterfeiting has begun. You no longer harass me with who you are. I can love you better that way. Peace, Mother, peace. The loveliest lie wins, as it always has. Too much truth isn’t good for a body. The same thing goes for loss. And now that I have no-one left to lose, I prefer to have you around in my memories as good company. If you have trouble going along with that, then please try a little harder. Try to humor me a little for a change.

I am now someone without you. That knowledge . . .

Better to play something for you. I’ve chosen Beethoven’s
Marcia Funebre Sulla Morte d’un Eroe
, especially for you. I’ll play it for you as though I were in the Royal Festival Hall. And if you sort of close your eyes and peek through your lashes, then that’s where we’ll be. I’m waving to you. You’re moving further away, you’re all the way at the back of that dark concert hall now, I can barely see you. Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye.

After laying a hand on the coffin and mumbling things, we left the auditorium – the dispatch would take place in our absence. We stood together in the reception room, a bit bedraggled. The unknown man came up to offer his condolences, his eyes averted,.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Nice of you to come.’

And then, to his back, while he was already walking away, I asked, ‘Excuse me, sir, but could I ask your name?’

He turned around, took a few steps towards us.

‘Boender,’ he said.

The Rolodex, and fast! Boender?! Boender!

‘The musician!’ I said. ‘You went with my mother to Los Angeles . . .’

He nodded.

‘A long time ago, yeah.’

The local dialect. Aunt Edith and Uncle Gerard stood there, staring blankly at this encounter that moved me for reasons I didn’t quite understand.

‘Guitar player, right? Route 66?’

‘Yup,’ he said.

A farmer’s hands, ashamed of themselves. Dark, callused lines on the fingers.

‘Do you still play?’

‘Oh, a little rockin’ in the city. Bars and cafés. Nothing special.’

I wanted to talk to him about her, about how she had been, that mother of mine, before I was there, when she was still young, not quite a girl anymore, but I could feel the situation slipping away from me. He took a step back, with his eyes fixed on the carpet, and said, ‘Well, take care then.’

And disappeared. The ghost who had accompanied her to the City of Angels, tossed aside once the light focused on her. I suddenly realized why he touched me: the convoluted thought that he could have been my father.

MEDIOHOMBRE

Why the hell isn’t there a flight to El Real? The man from Aeroperlas raises his hands in surrender: next week, if I understand correctly. It’s nothing but a ribbon of asphalt in the jungle, that airfield at El Real, where I have to go to find him. Aeroperlas runs a sporadic service there with little prop planes. I feel like kicking something to bits. I walk away, then back to the ticket counter. Is there any other way to get there? He consults with a colleague. I would have to travel to Yaviza, I hear. From there downriver to El Real.

I go back to my hotel in Panama City. The thought of staying here for a week is a burden. I have no sightseeing plans, and I can’t motivate myself to come up with any, either. What had quietly waited in the wings all those years has suddenly become urgent.

Very early the next morning, I deposit my bags in the trunk of the taxi. The new bus terminal: from there, they’ve assured me, buses leave for Darién, the eastern province that borders on Colombia. There’s no road between the two countries, the Pan-American Highway is chopped in two by rivers, mountains and virgin rainforest. With all the horrors that go along with that. In any case, I can almost certainly catch a bus as far as Metetí.

Darkness still. A sliver of moon, light clouds. I’m much too early, no buses leave before nine. I eat breakfast at the terminal. Mr. Chen fries banana-and-honey pancakes for me, he says, ‘El Real is just like Macondo. Why do you want to go there? Nothing but wilderness. I was born there, but I haven’t been back in twenty years. Not my kind of place.’

A black woman slides up to the counter, moaning and sputtering. Shopping bags everywhere, her broad lap is covered with them.

‘You’re going to Darién? Oh my God! Are you sure? The Indians there eat people! I’ll keep you in my prayers. But right now I could use a soda.’

The bus stops at a filling station, men are rocking their cars back and forth to get more gas into the tanks. As the day wears on, the thinking stops. You become a sack of flour, a bale of cloth, you wait for them to come and unload you. Trees are dropping big, brown leaves.

The Policía Nacional at Caňazas, all two of them, make me get off the bus. In their little office they jot down the information from my passport. Flipping the pages, turning it sideways, peering at stamps. I know just enough Spanish to get by.’

‘What is your destination?’

‘Yaviza.’

‘That’s off limits. You cannot go to Yaviza without permission from the ministry.’

‘So I’m going to Metetí.’

‘Okay, that’s fine.’

Trucks laden with red logs for the civilized world behind us. Huge trunks stripped of their bark. A routed army, humiliated and sent on transport – a cloud of dust in its wake.

At Agua Fria the asphalt stopped. People climbed off the bus. People vanished. The driver pointed at a waiting Toyota Hilux pickup with men sitting in the back. The truck pulled away. I ran after it, shouting, ‘Yaviza? Yaviza?’

‘
Yaviza, si!
’ the men shouted back.

They grabbed my suitcase and pulled me up onto the bed. Nodding, laughing: that was a close one, gringo. In the cab, the driver ties a bandana around his face to keep out the dust. We hold on tight, the truck jolts, slams into potholes and rolls up out of them again. Children with slingshots are walking along the road. Their fathers are carrying rifles. Indians with machetes, their hair stiff with dust. The end of another day. I wrap a T-shirt around my head. The men toss me an occasional, worried look, a stranger in their country. Nothing they are wearing or carrying is new. Around here, adapting means fading, becoming drab, wearing thin. It goes automatically, the heat and the humidity eat away at everything. It happens before you know it.

The village at the end of the road. Yaviza. The last stretch driven by starlight. The moon wasn’t showing its face yet. Only one hotel, and I keep my suitcase closed to shut out the vermin. From now on, I vow, I will shake out my shoes every morning. (National Geographic Channel wisdom.)

Across the dark river, the Chucunaque, the shadow deepens, a sheer wall of plant life; somewhere there,
in that
, is where he is. I stand on the wooden dock above the river, where the boats moor at high water. The water is low now, the pirogues are bobbing around at the bottom of the pilings. I hear the Indians mumbling down there. The feeling that the darkness is slowly inhaling, expanding. Its voice of countless insects singing clearly. The Indians are sitting in the dark, murmuring, in their long canoes along the bank. Voices kept small, like those of refugees. What are they talking about? The river races by without a sound, carrying the gleam of onyx. The light of the stars refracted in its ripples.

Beneath a pair of glaring lights, dozens of men have gathered for the cockfight. An impromptu arena around a circle of sand, lined with wooden benches. They’re waiting for the second rooster. The first one is already in the ring, picking at the sand, nervous, worked up. His opponent is having the spurs tied on. It’s not a fair fight; the first cock is angrier, he leaps in the air aggressively and chops at the second one. His opponent gets slaughtered. After a few attacks he lies bleeding on his side, his head raised, watching fate descend on him.

*

A canoe is taking me to El Real. I sit on a crosspiece in the middle, the boat isn’t much more than two feet wide. Tito is at the helm, his wife and child with him. An old woman is sitting in the bow. Downstream goes easily enough, we barely need the motor. Close to the bank, a man in a little pirogue tosses out his net. Early-morning mist is hanging between the trees. In front of us, a dusky mountain ridge rises up above the jungle. He is beginning to make himself known. He was here. The trees remember him, the river’s memories float to the surface. Along the dark banks you can see how high the water reaches at times. The sun leaps up above the trees, is catapulted into the heavens. The old woman covers her head with a towel on which a map of Panama is printed, Darién covered by a giant toucan. The family behind me disappears beneath umbrellas. The occasional hut with palm-frond roof along the high banks. Astride the serpent’s back we go deeper, for that is how it is, we don’t go further, we go deeper and deeper. The Indians pay no attention to me. I fill the emptiness with thoughts. I ready the emptiness for his arrival. In which of his guises should I expect him? The father? The god-slayer? Will we recognize each other, sniff at each other, fangs bared like predators? Has he been waiting for me, will he welcome me as though it weren’t him, but me, who was lost?

Ripples patter against the hull, my hand cuts through the water like a keel. The canoe turns, crossing the current for a moment, then moves up a narrow tributary. The water soon grows shallower, the old woman calls back to Tito to warn of obstacles. This is how El Real died; the river silted up, goods and people could no longer reach the town. Transport is possible only during the rainy season, when the water is high. A pallet across a brace of pirogues, the platform on which a car, a truck or a generator can be conveyed.

The river grows ever shallower. The muddy bank is covered in a layer of algae, of a greenish hue I’ve never seen before. The old woman sounds the channel with a stick, the canoe scrapes bottom. Big white herons fly off, croaking. The woman spits into the rusty brown water. Sticking up out of the mud, close together, are straight stalks topped with a heart-shaped leaf. The sun blasts its flames in your face, my shirt is soaked, it’s like inhaling burning air. Stumps, amputated and deathly, block the way. The steaming forest on both sides, a tangle, a knot. Prismatic dragonflies chase each other above the mire. Now the women are pushing the canoe through the mud with long poles, Tito guns the motor. That is how it goes, meter by meter through the muck that belches forth its rotten breath. The jungle summons up abhorrence and enchantment, a greenhouse full of increase run amok. Ibises step calmly through the mud. The young woman climbs into the water to push. I take over her punting-pole, but soon we all have to leave the boat, all except for the child. They go barefooted, I keep my socks on. I sink deep into the mud. The Indians think that’s funny, they laugh. I’m afraid of the hard things I feel beneath my feet.
Guerrilleros
swallowed up by the mud? The bones of conquistadors? We push the canoe upstream in silence, slaves of the infant king. Huts on poles rise up along the shore, the shadows of human forms inside them. The thin smoke from smoldering fires. The forerunners of El Real. We guide the bow of the canoe towards the bank, where more and more dwellings huddle. Just before we leave the water I step on something sharp with my right foot, it cuts deeply into my heel. I climb onto the shore quickly, pull off my sock and see bright red blood welling up from the gash. Standing around a barrel, the Indians rinse away the mud. I hop over to it and wash my foot. A long, deep wound, I can see the meat beneath the colorless callus. They bring my suitcase ashore, I put on clean socks. Between houses on stilts and the walls of corrals I hobble into town.

A few paved pathways lined with houses, here and there a shop, an open, horizontal shutter to provide shade, on display a smattering of toilet paper, insecticide, soft soap, sweets and canned food. When evening comes the shutters are lowered and locked. People point out to me El Nazareno, a wooden hotel on the main street with rooms on the top floor. The key is with the boy in the shop next door. I have the room facing the street. Before the window hangs a little red rag.

At the edge of El Real I find a Red Cross post. A nurse looks at my foot but can’t do anything to help, it will have to heal by itself. She gives me a bottle of iodine, a roll of gauze and adhesive bandages. The prospect of delay depresses me; for the time being there is no way I can hike on through the jungle as planned. And so I go limping back to El Nazareno.

In the days that followed I tried to find out about Schultz, about where he might be holed up. It had to be somewhere in the jungle around El Real, the research I’d done back in Europe had shown me that much. It was there, after the completion of
Abgrund
(
completion
– a strange word for something that had been actually made to disappear), that he had started on
Titan
; he had been able to summon up enough vital hatred for yet another act of destruction. To get there, though, I needed a guide. From the travelers’ handbook to Panama I had drawn the name of one man, Edmond Solano, who was apparently the best guide around. But when I asked the rangers at the Agencia Ambiental about him, the man talking to me mimed a pistol with thumb and forefinger, held it against his temple and pulled the trigger.

I lay on my bed, tangled up in the rotations of the ceiling fan. It was dark outside, a powerful chirping rolled in over El Real from the surrounding forest. What I knew: five hundred years ago conquistadors had built an outpost here, along the banks of the Río Tuiro, to ward off the bandits who preyed on the gold kept upstream at Santa María. Even deeper into Darién, to the south, lay the Cana Valley, where the gold mines were. In Santa María the gold piled up until there was enough to warrant putting together an armada and taking it to Panama City.

The bed sagged like a hammock, a drab, membrane-thin blanket was all I had over me. The temperature had barely dropped at all.

Past the army post, a canopy under which drowsy soldiers lay on cots, was the office of the Agencia Ambiental. There I was given the cold shoulder. The rangers’ faces froze when Schultz’s name was mentioned. I limped back and forth, back and forth between the hotel and the settlement. The wooden houses stood on pilings of wood or cement, underneath them chickens pecked amid the garbage. In the shade of the palm and mango trees, men were training their roosters for the cockfights. With a rapid movement they would toss the bird to one side, to teach it to regain its footing quickly. They would lay their rooster on its back, to see how quickly it was back on its feet, again and again, dozens of times in a row. Then they staked the bird by one leg in the shade, a tin can of fresh water beside it. Sphinx-like old folks watched from porches. Screens at the windows, fans slicing the thick, hot air. I had taken the laces out of my shoe to give my foot more room. The blood pounded in my heel, I hopped along on the ball of my foot. The walking wounded.

After a few days my hands began to swell and go numb, I was worried about infection. I spent the hottest part of the afternoons lying in my room; I could see it, I would have to be airlifted out to Panama City, delirious. My right hand amputated, the left one saved only in the nick of time. The foot would have to be treated for gangrene. In the water stains on the ceiling I saw deformed babies. My eyes slid lethargically over the details, a nail in a plank, little mounds of sawdust on the floor. The beams were eaten hollow, you could see the round entrance and exit holes. Some of the beams were nothing but a tube filled with crumbly sawdust, held together by the paint. If all the other noises were to stop, the vibrating zoom of insects, the crowing of roosters, all you would hear would be a close-set, uninterrupted gnawing. One day this room, this hotel, would be devoured whole.

I dream of her, my living, sorrowful mother, she says, ‘You’re starting to look less like me all the time! Look at that . . .’

‘No! No! I look like you, here, see!’

Like waking up bleeding. No mercy, godforsaken. My hands feel like they’re going to burst, they bob on the strings of my arms like Disney balloons. I miss her the way I used to miss her, at moments when I had hurt myself badly and all my childish soul became a scream of desolation, a scream for my mother who wasn’t there.

I started asking passers-by whether they had heard of Schultz. An old man nodded earnestly and walked on. A woman began rattling away in Spanish. I tried to calm her; I had noticed that I could understand some things when people spoke slowly.

‘She says he was here,’ I heard a voice say in crystal-clear English.

As though, after swinging the dial back and forth for a long time, you suddenly hit upon a radio channel with good reception.