Little Caesar (18 page)

It was the girl with the flyers, and her words were spoken in complete earnest. I had to bend over to hear her.

‘That’s what we’re trying to tell you. If you’d like more information, come with me.’

Her friends kept droning the same words,
IT AIN’T NO ART TO TAKE MOUNTAINS APART.
We walked over to the shopping cart.

‘What interests me,’ I said, ‘is exactly what you people have against Schultz.’

It looked like she was about to roll her eyes or start clucking with her tongue, but she restrained herself. She asked, ‘Are you familiar with the work of this Mr. Schultz?’

‘Not particularly. I mean, I don’t know much about it.’

‘There’s something very wrong with that man. And with a world that views him as an artist . . . His work as art.’

The words were like bitter rinds in her mouth. Behind us the mechanical cadence of the chorus halted. She said, ‘Mr. Schultz acts out his vandalistic urges on nature, which can’t defend itself.’

From the cart she dug out a few photocopies, I saw a pile of folders marked
PRESS
– this kind of activism was, in its own way, highly organized. I pointed at the press kits.

‘What are those?’

‘Are you a reporter? Foreign? You sound foreign.’

‘England,’ I said.

‘Well then, would you write down the name of the publication or network you work for, and your email address, so we can keep you up to date on our activities?’

The
Norwich Evening News
was the first newspaper that came to mind. She handed me a press kit, in which I hoped to find more substantial information about Schultz.

‘But now I’d really like to go inside,’ I said.

‘Oh, but you can’t do that. We’re not letting anyone in. Usually we wait till the police come . . .’

She looked at the others, then at her bright red Swatch.

‘They’re a little late today.’

‘Who?’

‘Yesterday they were here before noon. Come along, I have to . . .’

‘Who are you talking about? The police?’

‘What do you think, that we’re going to go away voluntarily?’

A man came out of the building. A clipped gray beard, neatly dressed. The gallery owner. He was trying not to yell.

‘Go away,’ he said, ‘get out of here, you people.’

‘You know we can’t do that,’ one boy said.

‘You people are obstructing the freedom of expression. Fascism. Deplorable.’

‘You could also see it as free publicity,’ the boy said.

The natural leader, handsome, gangly, maybe the son of a judge. Stenciled on the back of his jacket was a portrait of Che Guevara.

‘Guys,’ he said, ‘could I . . .’

‘This is art, damn it. Not politics. You people are turning it into politics. Wrong! Wrong! If you want politics, go to city hall. Go bother them. This is a gallery.’

‘Everything is politics, I’m afraid,’ the boy said.

Behind the man, in the doorway, I saw a young woman wearing heavy-framed glasses. The lenses were ponds of contempt.

‘Fuck off,’ the man said. ‘All of you, fuck off!’

Now he had starting yelling despite himself.

‘You’re the one who chose to display his work,’ the boy said.

At a sign from him the others began chanting again. Loud and monotonous, you could easily hate them for it. The man and woman disappeared. The chorus stopped.

From my vantage point across the street I watched things develop, but there wasn’t much to hold my attention. They passed out flyers, smoked cigarettes, grew bored. The girl who had given me the press kit looked over a few times, waved once. I was sitting with my back against a tree. A position of strength. This was the same way I had watched the children at the locks, dissected the group dynamics of the strong and the weak, long ago in rural Groningen. A bottle-green memory.

Lethargy settled on the protestors across the street, there was at the moment nothing to feed their identity as activists. I opened the folder and started reading.

Schultz had bought a mountain in Panama’s Darien province, the borderland between Central and South America – an impenetrable jungle region, no roads; the world began again only on the other side, in Colombia. He used Emberá Indians as laborers, hired them to help him carry out
Abgrund
, the destruction of his mountain. He was tearing it to the ground bit by bit. The report said he was already almost halfway there. There had been protests, conservationists and anti-globalists had joined forces against him. I found a sheet of paper with a summary of the activities carried out against
Abgrund
– petitions, protest marches in Panama City, before the Panamanian consulate in Geneva, the embassy in Brasilia, accompanied by the dates, the names of the committees and the estimated number of demonstrators; picayune detail lent the efforts an official air. And there were lists of endangered animal and plant species in the region. The picture slowly emerged of a reckless hater who squeezed the life out of all those little animals with his own two hands, who crushed rare flowers between his fingers.

Mitchell Rhodes, a fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, had tried to visit
Abgrund
. He got as far as the boundaries of the terrain itself and was stopped there by guards. FARC militiamen, AK-47s slung over their shoulders. Rhodes and his companions, two guides and a biologist from the University of the West Indies, had been assaulted, shots had been fired in the air.

The press kit contained copies of aerial photographs of a clearing in the jungle, the dreary wasteland of a mining operation. A steep, lonesome mountain in the middle. I thought I could make out conveyors, bulldozers, barracks. Smoke from bonfires. Down there, somewhere, was my father. Concerning Schultz himself, his motives, I found little. Speculations, no facts. Words like ‘demonic’ and ‘fascistic’ reflected the authors’ opinions, but clarified almost nothing. I was disappointed. I had hoped to find him, or at least get a little closer.

The girl crossed the street.

‘Hi,’ she said once she was standing in front of me, ‘you were sitting there reading so quietly . . .’

‘Not a lot happening, is there?’

‘A boycott calls for a lot of patience.’

‘Is that what you call it, a boycott?’

‘That’s what we’re doing, a boycott. With a high degree of public agitation.’

‘Straight out of the Demonstrator’s Handbook?’

‘Sort of. But if you’re a reporter, I probably shouldn’t tell you too much.’

‘I’m not a reporter. I only wanted the press kit. Sorry.’

She had something awkward about her, a kind of beauty which I could imagine that only I might be able to appreciate.

Two police cars stopped in front of the gallery. We crossed the street, I kept my distance in order not to be confused with the demonstrators. The tall boy was handcuffed, the girl with the flyers kept pushing her way up to the front, it seemed as though she
wanted
to be arrested. Five protestors were taken away, the others were chased off with batons.

‘You can go inside now,’ she said as she passed.

The wheels of her shopping cart rattled on the concrete. The incident seemed to have made no impression on her. She smiled in a way I couldn’t figure.

You could call it my introduction to my father. In the flesh. I strolled past his work slowly, trying to see in it the world of his thoughts. The mind of a man turned inside out. A series of paintings on rough wooden panels, all unevenly sawed. They looked like dark landscapes, uprooted as though by war. Each had a vanishing point, a darkness where the earth seemed to swallow itself. Once that black hole had caught your eye, everything seemed to move towards it like a mudslide off a hill. The catalog noted that the works were displayed behind Plexiglas; in view of the maker’s controversial reputation, vandalism could not be ruled out.

In the middle of the gallery a black square had been cordoned off, made from tarps hanging from ceiling to floor.
Abgrund
was being shown inside it. I struggled with the tarpaulin until I found an opening. Flickering images on the screen, vibrating blue light. Wooden benches had been arranged in close rows, as in a church, and I was the only visitor. The film ran in a loop, I came in somewhere in the middle. Heavy thuds like mortar fire, a cloud of dust in the distance. The camera, perched on someone’s shoulder, moved towards it. Then that voice, rambling amid a landscape of boulders.

‘The absolute core . . . cracking the shell.’

It was the first time I’d ever heard his voice. My breath caught in my throat. Hello, father. His English was like that of the SS officers in war movies. I tried to figure out what I was looking at. A man in a ruin of his own making. His mumbling.

‘The West. Oh, how we laughed at the West!’

He aimed the camera at the mountain in the distance. I was squinting, trying to make out whether there was anything worth seeing, looking for things camouflaged, when an explosion tore away the mountainside; dust, grit, chaos. The voice guided the viewer to the earth turned inside out. A rumbling, the camera’s eye looked up, more stone rolling down the slope.

‘How does one become a god, I asked them. How. By defeating the old gods. By reason of overweening pride. By not being the possessive slave. Weakened, smitten by the tiniest violation of his slavish happiness. Let us be butchers. Bear witness to our predilection for a universe of blood and bones. Create a cosmic slaughterhouse . . .’

Close to the end of the film: that mountain again, the camera fixed now, a man approaching from the distance, a bulky shape. Then the explosion, premature, the fraction of a second it takes for the shockwave to knock down man and camera. The screen whirls, the camera like a dead man’s open eye staring at the sky. Raindrops fall on the lens. Someone picks up the camera and its glides over a man’s legs, registers for a moment his face seen from below – a short, grizzly beard spotted with gray. The flashing whites of the eyes, like those of a dog suddenly appearing beside you in the dark.
Mediohombre
. My father. Immeasurable loneliness was his task and his fulfillment. He created nothing but emptiness around him. It was a nuclear longing, the things shall never rise up again, he will rule over his grave for a million years. Schultz walked towards the place of the explosion, a climb. The camera swerved, a view of treetops as far as the eye could see. Higher. You could hear him panting. Sometimes he paused and pointed the camera at the destruction. Around it nothing but jungle, green and feverish at the edge of an open wound. That he had been there all those years . . . I tried to imagine the volume of stone, the mind-boggling effort needed to move it all. The hollow gaze of the Indians as well, that comment on the futility of yet another hallucinating gringo come to bend the earth and the people to his will. They were used to this, their history was a litany of defeats and subjugation, their fate was hereditary.

‘Only the proud know what falling means, the chasm. The abyss at your feet. That one little step. That longing.’

The hissing of the wind, sometimes an animal noise like a dentist’s drill. His snorting breath. Far below, people were moving, forming chains; obedient ants.

I didn’t watch the entire film, at least not to the point where I had come in. Going out the door, I felt nauseous. The searing light – sunglasses, I needed a pair of sunglasses. From the glare of an over-exposed photo, the girl I’d just met suddenly appeared. I was not surprised.

‘So, are you convinced?’ she asked.

‘Wait a minute.’

I squatted down, with my hands covering my watering eyes.

‘Hey, can I do something?’

‘Could I borrow your sunglasses for a minute? I think that would help.’

I let some light in through my fingers to get accustomed, then accepted her glasses. Colored lenses, a comfort to my eyes. I stood up. The girl in rosy light.

‘I needed to sit down for a minute,’ I said, ‘I was completely blind.’

‘Are you allergic to light?’

‘Not that I know of, no.’

‘Your eyes are watering really bad.’

‘Did you come back to demonstrate a little?’

‘No. I just came back.’

A confident smile. Little teeth, the moist pink gums. To take my tongue and feel how smooth that would be.

Her shopping cart was parked in front of the diner window. She was drinking tea. She pointed at the stitches on my eyebrow and asked what had happened. Concerning the milkshakes going to other tables, she knew the quantity of sugar, colorants and fat they contained; the hamburger I’d ordered she commented on in terms of the origin of the meat, labor conditions in the meat-processing industry and the issue of waste. It was like clutching a landmine. She said, ‘That’s true, in the long run. That’s why it’s so hard to convince people, because it doesn’t pose an immediate threat. We’re not made to see long-term threats. We jump to our feet at a rustling in the bushes, that’s what we’re made for; a disaster fifty years from now doesn’t matter much to us. In evolutionary terms, we’re not prepared for the solutions to the problems we’ve created ourselves. We act as though nothing’s wrong. Our day in the sun is more important.’

‘You’re certainly well-informed,’ I said.

‘That’s right, joke about it. While you still can. So what did you think of the work of our Mr. Schultz?’

‘
Mister
Schultz?’

‘Um-hum . . .’

‘Lonely. It’s lonely. I’ve never seen anything that lonely.’

‘A strange choice of words. For something so criminal, I mean.’

‘Have you seen it?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I don’t have to.’

‘You go out demonstrating against something you haven’t even seen? That’s ridiculous.’

She shook her head stubbornly.

‘You don’t have to crawl into the sewer to know that it stinks.’

‘Nicely put, but it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘I look . . . well, you can look with your principles too, if you get what I mean.’

‘Pretty blue principles.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Just kidding.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Yes, I noticed that.’