B007P4V3G4 EBOK (28 page)

As his first model in Naples, I had to shave my body as smooth as
that of an Apollo. Over the hair on my head I wore a tight
bathing cap. Lex would dip each strip of plaster bandage, before
attaching it to my naked body, in a bucket of warm water. On
contact with my skin, the bandage turned icy cold within half a
second.

Work was done from bottom to top, my head coming last. Lex
ordered me to close my eyes: he put felt patches on the eyelids.
My ears he filled with soft wax and began to plaster them shut with
bandages. My jaws and lips, too, ended up rock solid. In the end, I
was only able to breathe via my nostrils - but very gingerly, in
tiny draughts, for my chest, too, was pinned

Never before had I been sealed off from the world more
radically. A deaf-mute, blind man can move, at least; I was frozen
solid in the ice. Not to see, not to hear, not to speak, not to move
a muscle ... only maintaining contact with the atmosphere through
tiny gasps of air through one's nose ... How long did I keep up
this absolute isolation? Two minutes? They seemed like two hours.
Hours during which I learned to be amazed that I could still hear
something like the rustling of silence. A little patch of skin had been
left bare underneath my right heel. It was there that Lex scratched
me with his nail as a sign that I was to perform my Pompeiian
death scene. I could not feel that my arms were being freed. In the
panic that suddenly seized me, the stiff suit became as pliant and
elastic as pyjamas.

When Lex took the mask from my face and looked at me,
grinning because he could see the fear in my eyes, I hated him
deeply. Once, but never again.

One day early on, of an afternoon, we were standing on the
boulevard, looking out to sea, when a rowing boat appeared from
behind Castel dell'Ovo. Inside, a multicoloured clutch of flapping
dresses and hats with ribbons and parasols. High laughs and
squeals reached us on the wind. One of the women rowed the
boat ashore, skilfully and with powerful strokes. Only when the
company grouped together on the quayside did we notice
that it consisted of dressed-up men. The transvestites posed in Lex's
studio for nothing or for almost nothing. They did it for fun, or rather: to exhibit themselves. A negative kind of exhibitionism, for
they would hide their sex between their legs. Most of the transvestites weren't as finely tarted up as the company in the boat. The
femmenielli - as they were called in dialect - from the Quartieri
especially turned out to be a sorry sight. Their so-called femininity
was suggested more than it was depicted: a hairpin, the smallest of
pigtails imaginable, a fuzzy jumper, high-heels worn down to one
side, those sad little humps of bras filled with stale Stolen
goods from ever-full washing lines! They begged the sculptor to
be allowed to keep their bras on in order to have a feminine cast of
themselves, at

Lex turned them into sexless snowmen.

Early in December, I travelled on some more, to the South, on my
own. In complete solitude in Sicily, I wanted to try one more time
to get my blood back to purity again. Two weeks would have to
be enough to restore my metabolism, in my opinion.

Though I lost some four kilos in a few days through dehydration,
the withdrawal symptoms proved less serious than during my
journey to hell, Transalpino-style. My body recovered quickly but
the worst was still to come. I got involved with number 90 of the
tombolella, the Neapolitan game of lotto: la paura, the fear, which in
the end drove me, in those godforsaken Christmas specials of
Italian Railways, back to Naples and Lex Patijn's studio.

3

On New Year's Eve I finally found the door to the red house on
Monte Echia open.

Lex was working in his studio as if, during the past few days, he
had been doing nothing but. Upon my entering, he looked fleetingly, almost gruffly, at the door without allowing his concentration
to be disturbed: the plaster, now setting, gave him no respite. A
greeting was barely forthcoming; Lex treated me like someone
who had dropped in only an hour previously ...

He was putting the final touches to plastering his model - no
transvestite clenching its sex between the thighs, this time - one
that looked like a ballet dancer in tights. A dancer caught in the
jump ... that's how the man - legs wide, arms raised to heaven - had been tied to the frame with thin bits of string. Only a part of
his right heel was still uncovered. I heard him breathing, snortingly,
and immediately I felt the suffocation like a vice round my chest.
The model played the death scene.

'Yes, sorry about this,' growled Patijn. 'You see ... I just have
In his hand glinted the knee-shears. 'Did you get my
telegram?' stupid git. A letter was what we'd agreed
on. Telegrams were a separate department of poste restante. But Lex
wasn't even listening, so much was his attention being taken up by
the meticulous cutting open of the bandage, set almost solid.
Behind the model's ears, the blades of the shears cut smoothly
through the plaster, across the skull and under the chin. The
sculptor put the implement in his pocket and with both hands,
very carefully, wrenched the white mask free. I could breathe
again. The felt patches fell from the eyes of the and
there was Jody Katan's face.

Jody had to blink a few times before he could see me. There was
mild panic in his little laugh. We could not even embrace one
another. He reeked of the olive oil his body had been covered in
so as not to allow the plaster bandages to stick to him.

Lex's workspace was populated with poor imitations of Pompeiian
dead: the cocoons of the transvestites, left behind. What was
striking was the cramped attitude of most of the dolls.

During one of our first walks through the city I had had to
translate POMPE FUNEBRI on the window of an undertaker's for
the sculptor. Now it read on the walls of the studio, in his scrawl:

POMPEII FUNEBRI - LEX PATIJN'S ONE THOUSAND DEAD
This was the title for his forthcoming exhibition.

Though time and again I almost choked hearing Jody's panicky
breathing, his death scenes were still too posed for Lex.

'Splendid! Terrific! But ... much too beautiful. You're a dying
swan ... a kneeling ballerina ...! Die like a dog is what you must
do ... not like a swan, but like a dog, dammit! Think of your old
ma copping it.'

But Jody, packed head to toe in plaster bandages, did not hear
him and continued, as Lex sneeringly put it, 'to audition for
RADA.'

The fireworks being set off ever more frequently in the course
of New Year's Eve, began to agitate Lex. His hands were shaking. At a loud bang on the square in front of the house, the shears
slipped and wounded Jody's upper arm. The scratch wasn't that
deep but the drop of blood sucked up by the plaster had an effect
on Lex like that on a pack of hungry wolves: it drove his
fanaticism to extremes. A band-aid, some hurried comforting, and
the sculptor went on with his work, fast and practised, cringing
and cursing now and then after the explosion of a jumping

It was eleven o'clock, and once again -'for the last time, honest, I
swear,' Lex had said - Jody was being covered in plaster, layer by
layer. Patijn's nerves, though tensed to the utmost, had meanwhile
become prepared for the bangs, now coming in shattering series.
When he was done, quicker than ever before, the plaster turned
out to be damp and elastic in all places.

'Perfect ... perfect.'

Quickly, Lex freed his model's wrists, and for the eleventh or
twelfth time that day, Jody - deaf-mute and blind - began his
convulsions. The bandages were still so supple that the actor was
able to let himself fall on to his knees without the white crust
tearing. The upper torso snapped forwards, supported by a woodenly moved arm ... Imagined suffocation drew a knife through my
chest, but Lex thought Katan's pose still too theatrical.

'He doesn't get it. He just doesn't get it, but only just ..: The
voice of the sculptor had acquired a whining quality about it. I saw
him take a few strips of plaster bandage and dip them in the
bucket, after which he stuck them together. It was possible he had
seen a crack appear in the harness after all ... Because of the
growing noise outside, I had mounting difficulty in translating
myself into the rustling silence in which Jody was performing his
little play. Just the rapid breathing through his nose was capable of
squeezing shut my windpipe.

Lex walked up to Jody with the dripping strip of bandage. He
approached him from behind.

Lex ...! What're you doing?'

'Just leave me be a moment ... I only want to put the wind up
him ... let him stew for a moment. Nothing more. I'll pull it off in
a minute.'

And he knelt behind his lover and pushed the strip of plaster
bandage under his nose. With a few light kneading actions of Lex's
fingertips the substance was fixed down. I now no longer heard
snorting, only a kind of hum from the depths of the white suit. With a jolt, Jody came up out of his pose as a dying swan. The
sculptor got a bash under his chin and moved backwards on his
knees. The plaster round Jody's arms (I could hear it crack under
the force of his effort) had meanwhile become so hard that he
could not get them up high enough to free his nostrils himself with
his fingers. Emitting muffled groans, he stood in the middle of the
studio, underneath the blotchy light from the chandelier. I strode
over to him - but Lex stopped me.

'A little longer ... two seconds. He's doing splendidly. This ...
this is real. Those wrinkles ... He won't choke that quickly. He's
getting plenty of air; I could feel his breath coming through the
goo ... I'll pull it loose in a minute, honest.'

His hand was clenched round my arm like a vice and I told
myself that there was no point in trying to resist him. Yes, he'd
pull that strip of bandage loose any time now and then I, too,
would be able to breathe again.

We watched the clumsy dance of a polar bear making attempts
to jump out of its skin and in so doing kicking over the bucket
with warm water. Vapour rose from the floor around its stiff paws
... Without realising what it was doing, it stormed right at us.
Lex pulled me aside and with a crack the bear ran up against the
wall, after which it fell on its back, hard, without being able to
break the fall. And that never ending growling tone, close and yet
far off, at times drowned out by the bangs outside ... I was
surprised at the strength the slightly built Jody still managed to
make apparent through the hardened armour.

Finally, Patijn let go of me and I fled outside to give my
constricted ribcage some air.

There were only a few shuttered cars on the square. Here and
there one stood wobbling about beneath a starry sky almost as
clear as that above Agrigento when the town lighting had failed.
On the traffic-control tower of the aircraft carrier, deep down
below me in the bay, the date 1979 could be made out in
luminescent figures. Right now we were still marking '78.

A quarter to midnight and the city, full of unrest, was on the
point of exploding. Now already, the bangs were incomparably
more numerous and loud than in Amsterdam at the stroke of
twelve precisely. A haze of gunpowder fumes began to rise up
from the streets. On the top floors of the houses, children held a
kind of torch out of the windows which let down waterfalls of
liquid light.

Round midnight, the paroxysm reached its climax. The aircraft
carrier lit two searchlights trained on the city. They drilled into the
curtain of smoke growing rapidly denser, and began to swing
about like two mighty arms wishing to sweep this Naples-gonemad into the sea. Out above the tumultuous crackle sounded the
wailing sirens of ambulances and fire engines. The bells of all the
churches were tolling. Within ten minutes the city had vanished.
Wiped out completely. Crawled away into a smog which could
not have been denser had it been in London. Above me, there
wasn't a star to be seen any more.

I left the square with its gently rocking cars behind and walked
up the Via Nunziatella. The gunpowder fumes which by now had
also penetrated to the Monte Echia, began to irritate my lungs. To
escape from it I wanted to go up Monte di Dio, the Mountain of
God, where I believed I could vaguely discern, like an asymmetrical
cross, the stand pipe used for work being done to the battlements
there.

In the Chiaia quarter I began to mount the steep stairs, but here
too the poisonous fumes managed to catch up with me in order to
take my breath I gave up in the end and returned - to
where there was no longer a city. I descended in the direction of
the Quartieri. Down the mountain, the little streets became narrower; they lay there packed ever more closely together. Just as if
that entire district had slid down the steep hill: an avalanche of
houses that had halted deferentially in front of the posh Via Roma.
Entire streets had truncated themselves, harmonica-wise, into stairs.

The back streets were full of stinking, smoking fires around
which children clustered. As I approached the Via Roma, I saw
more and more people with shawls in front of their faces against
the gunpowder fumes. I did not even have a handkerchief on me.

The Boston Blackies' American Bar turned out to be full to the
gunnels with drunken servicemen. A marine was trying to bash the
head of a mate he was holding by the hair against the wall. But the
hair was too short: it slipped from his hand every time.

'You son of a bitch ... You dirty motherfucker ... I'm not
leaving until that fucking face of yours has seen that fucking wall a
thousand fucking

Near the two combatants stood two SP-s who saw to it that the
short-cropped head did not actually get bashed into the wall. One of
the policemen was punched in the shoulder by a drunken spectator.

'Hey you, Mr Motherfucker ...! This motherfucker says he just
killed his friend. How about that? He's trying to tell you something,
something important, but you won't even listen!'