BACK IN A MINUTE

BACK IN A MINUTE

God is a son of a bitch, and one day I’m going to kill him.

Daniel Auteuil in Oliver Marchand’s MR73 (aka The Last Deadly Mission)

It was not all that difficult to get more sleeping pills. I had a quick word with my little man, who has a job with a pharmaceutical firm for which he travels all over the world, and told him that I found it increasingly difficult to fall asleep when he wasn’t around. A few days later he passed me a couple of small boxes and gave me the sound advice not to overdose on the stuff.

He knew I was lying, and that it was not his absence that caused my sleeping problems, but the death of my son Carlos. Carlos Ruiz de Fuentes, who, so the papers said, was a murderer and a suicide, and the son by my first husband. His father, Rafael, and I had had to overcome the greatest familial difficulties to get our marriage approved. For a few years, things went very well in every respect; we had the most wonderful sex, while I tried to curb my urges and had only occasional casual affairs. Then somebody told me that Rafael was also messing around, and with whom, and that he had been involved with the same woman for a number of years, which I considered a real threat to our marriage, one which I could not ignore. I went to bed with the messenger, who then went to boast about it to Rafael. It ended in a divorce and when Rafael died a few years later, it turned out that Carlos had suffered terribly under it.

He could not get along very well with his stepfather – i.e. my present husband – which was the reason he went to live on his own shortly afterwards. First, he set off on his travels, during which time I received occasional picture postcards. The first came from France, where he worked as a waiter in Argelès, a small seaside resort on the Mediterranean, next he was a cowherd in Canaveilles in the Pyrenees, a hamlet with barely fifty residents – from where he also sent me some tall stories about loneliness – and next, he was a tiler in the Catalonian town of Cabrils, in France he assisted in the harvesting of grapes and tomatoes, and he did the same in Greece, only this time with lemons and olives. When he became a tour guide in Fatima, the Portuguese place of pilgrimage, I was flabbergasted, for he had never been in touch with any form of religion, I had seen to that. Next, he was back in Greece and worked as a receptionist at an Athens hotel. Later, he became a night porter in Amsterdam, while spending his days walking along the canals as a sandwich man for a strip joint. The next messages came from Switzerland, where he was a gardener, a farmer, a chimney sweep, a paper boy and a barman.

During his first visit after his return to Antwerp, I noticed immediately that he had not treated his body as a temple, but more as an amusement park. He was submerged in the world of the ‘have-been’ and ‘have-never-been’ artists, he felt comfortable among the failed painters who, for want of talent, were trying their hand at scenery painting, the unpublished writers and those who had at some stage managed to make their publishers lose money on their first and only book, the seedy academics, the do-gooders close to the bar who never went to cast their vote ‘because it’s no fucking use’, the boozers, the soap actors who were not yet recognized in the streets, the strip cartoonists who had found a publisher thanks to abundant subsidies even although nobody was waiting for them, the users of weed and other substances, the members of the anti-America and anti-Israel league. He painted a little and apparently my obsession with sex had continued itself in him, for the first painting I bought was a variation on a work by Félicien Rops, Le diable au corps, which depicted a couple engaged in the act of soixante-neuf, only Carlos had made it a female couple. I bought a few more of his works, including his take on the temptation of St. Anthony, with a lecherous, bosomy woman on the cross, clearly inspired by either an American soft-porn magazine or by the Vilvoorde-based painter and video artist Ruvanti, whose Divina Erotica is part of my small collection of erotic comic strips, as are his graphic novels La philosophie dans le boudoir – after Marquis De Sade – and Alice, his take on Alice in Wonderland. A place of honor has been reserved for Click!, Manara’s ultimate graphic novel which I must have read at least a hundred times, while as a pedophile I lech after the hairless pussies in Young Aphrodites by Philippe Goddin, a book about the artist Paul Cuvelier – the creator of Corentin – who was not too fussy about including the first nude in a comic strip with no erotic intentions. They were all books which Carlos had probably read in secret while still at home, for I had never kept them under lock and key.

Anyway, I also hung his work. Carlos could be very hot-headed at times. He did not want me to buy things in order to help him out, but because I liked them. This was not the case, because I did not see him as a great painter, but of course I did not tell him that. Then one day he turned up with the news that he was madly in love with a character dancer, Evelyne. He took me along to some of her performances and to be honest I have to admit that she was very beautiful and I discovered that I would like to bed with her myself at some stage. One day, Evelyne phoned me and asked if we could have a chat. Then and there, she told me that she wasn’t really in love with my Carlos and that she was thinking of reporting him to the police as a stalker. That was the time we ended up in bed together, and a few times after that as well. One day, I told Carlos that his love was in vain, for his beloved preferred to do it with women and that she had told me so. Carlos left furiously and I heard nothing from him for a few weeks. And then one day I received the following invitation:

“If the food is the best thing at dinner, then something’s wrong.”

You are herewith invited to the birthday party of

CARLOS RUIZ DE FUENTES

to be held at Salons GREET DE BOECK, Lamorinièrestraat 101A, Antwerp on February 22.

Please return the enclosed card before February 18.

I had had a dress made especially for the occasion. At the dressmaker’s, I had opened an art book at the page which showed a reproduction of the painting The Beaver Hat by Edward Arthur Walton. Walton was one of the Glasgow Boys, who painted in the style of James Whistler. The dress, which reached to my feet, seemed to date from just before the First World War and its high waist-line optimally accentuated my figure. The dress was dark brown with a pink collar, and the cuffs also got pink piping. I was wearing my most expensive fox-fur collar and my round, also dark brown hat was decorated with a few ostrich feathers.

They were all there – the drunks, the mainliners, the smokers, the failures, and so were my husband and I. We were just about the only ones who had brought small presents. My husband had come across a signed drawing by Gilbert Shelton while browsing in a few antiquarian bookshops in search of Kladschrift, a little book by publisher Walter Soethoudt, to whom he had written personally. As it turned out, the writer was no longer in possession of his own publication.

Carlos was mad about Fat Freddy and also about Shelton’s other creation, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. The drawing had been colored in by hand and signed. It was a picture of Fat Freddy’s cat, from the underground comic The Adventures of Fat Freddy’s Cat. Above the cat, a balloon said, “Once a month I like to go crazy, whether I need to or not.”

Evelyne was there as well. There was excessive use of club drugs and the whole thing turned into an orgy of eating and drinking. The daughter of a well-known gallery owner – who already had had to apologize, both verbally and financially, a thousand times for his daughter’s behavior – gave the signal when she started to empty her stomach. I don’t think they had had to mop up such an amount of puke at Salons Greet De Boeck ever before, or after.

When Carlos stood on the table among what remained of the food and called on everybody to listen to him, those who were still able to stand on their feet gathered in a circle around him. There and then he produced an American variant of the Luger P8, which during the eighties and nineties was made from stainless steel by the firm of Aimco, later Orimar. These pistols were marketed under the names ‘Aimco’, ‘Mitchell Arms’ and ‘Orimar’. I know this, because my husband used to collect them – though no longer so since what happened at the birthday party, since it involved one of his own guns. Carlos aimed the pistol at Evelyne and shot her through the heart while yelling, ‘You broke my heart and now I am breaking yours.’ Next, he put the barrel into his mouth, pressed it against his palate and pulled the trigger.

When I received the invitation, I had already wondered who was going to pay for the whole sorry mess and now I knew: it was us, my husband and I, and we had also gained a signed drawing by Gilbert Shelton. Does this sound a little cynical? You simply cannot linger too long over matters like these, for it would break your heart.

Carlos had left a letter in which he insisted on being buried next to Evelyne, but her family did not see the point and so we put him under a stone, for while he was alive he had explicitly said that he did not want to be cremated. He had also written down the text that he wanted to see engraved on his tombstone: “Back in a minute”. He got his grave and the inscription, and his text also won me a prize in a beer mat competition.