‘Schiessen,’ he gasped, ‘gut!’
But the prize piece in his collection was yet to come: a pistol. Or a revolver, I can never tell the difference. He rested the bulky thing on the palm of one hand, and only gave it to P.J. after a good deal of cooing and wooing on her part. He was proud that we were so interested in his collection.
‘This is getting better all the time, Frankie, look!’
She pointed the pistol down the hallway behind us and sighted along it with one eye closed. The cackling laughter from behind the counter gave me goose flesh.
‘Arbeitslosen und Banditen! Bang bang!’
The last thing he handed us was the little bundle containing the passports we’d left at the desk the night before. P.J. traded the pistols for the passports. She opened the one on top, saw that it was mine and stuck it in the pouch on the side of my cart. Her own passport she put in her back pocket. The only one left now was Joe’s. She glanced over at the door of the hotel, then back at the passport. Then she opened it; I sniffed in protest, I knew exactly what she was up to: she wanted to see Joe’s real name. So even she didn’t know! But that was forbidden, no one was allowed to do that! She looked surprised at the way I shook my head so adamantly.
‘You mean you’re not curious?’
Of course I was curious, but that wasn’t the point. Fucking bitch, put it away! But her eyes were already scanning the front page. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. Then she turned the open passport to face me, I saw Joe’s photo in a flash before I closed my eyes. I wasn’t allowed to see this. Everything crowed alarm in the darkness, she had no right, it was blasphemy, no one was allowed to finagle him out of his real name, it was his only secret. As soon as I thought she’d understood, I opened my eyes, but there, twenty centimetres in front of my nose the front page of Joe’s passport was still dangling. She was looking for an accomplice, she was luring me into her corrupt universe, the one Metz had warned me about, oh Christ, how could I refuse her? I focused on the passport in front of me. Joe’s passport photo, a little tough, a little casual. Oh, Joe, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
Naam/Surname/Nom
RATZINGER
Voornamen/Given names/Prénoms
ACHIEL STEPHAAN
The passport disappeared from view, P.J. handed it back to the clerk.
‘Would you please give it to him yourself?’ she said. ‘He’ll come by in a minute.’
He nodded in amazement, he had no idea what had just happened. P.J. rolled me back into the dining room and set me down in front of my beer. A few minutes later Joe came in, wiping his hands on a soiled rag.
Achiel Stephaan Ratzinger.
The man at the desk called him over and gave him his passport. In the doorway to the dining room he smiled at P.J. and said, ‘Do you guys have your passports? He says. .’
‘Yes, love, we’ve got them.’
‘All right. And we’ve got wheels again.’
P.J. lit a cigarette for him. His fingers left oil spots on the paper. Achiel Stephaan. Why the hell had his parents given him such a retarded, Flemish name? Had they named him after a Flemish grandfather? A guru from Westmalle? Whatever it was, we were looking at a man without a secret. And that secret was a Belgian joke. Achiel Stephaan; handed over to the Philistines by his sweetheart, betrayed by his friend.
*
That night in their room I puked all over everything. Joe helped me into the bathroom, I screamed, I think I even begged his forgiveness.
‘You were terrible,’ Joe said on the way home the next day. ‘You threw up all over me, you nut.’
That I had pissed all over his fingers remained our secret. In the back, P.J. remained as silent as the Sphinx.
It’s an X-raylike experience, knowing Joe’s real name. Achiel Ratzinger is the fate he tried to escape; it caught up with him at last. I seem to recall biblical characters being given a different name, after some drastic change in their lives. I scribble a note to Ma, asking to borrow her Bible.
‘It’s never too late to start,’ she sighs.
It doesn’t take long before I hit pay dirt. In Genesis, God himself gives new names to Abram and Sarai. ‘Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.’ Abraham’s wife Sarai also receives a new name: Sarah.
In the New Testament, Peter receives a new name as well, as seen first in the Gospel of Mark: ‘And He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom He gave the name Peter), and James, the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James (to them He gave the name Boanerges, which means, ”Sons of Thunder”).’ The same thing can be found in the Gospel of John, where Jesus says: ‘You are Simon the son of John; you shall be called Cephas (which is translated Peter).’
In the Book of Acts, Saul — that fanatical persecutor of Christians — undergoes a change of name when a heavenly light appears to him on the road to Damascus. A voice revealing itself as that of Jesus shouts: ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ Saul becomes a believer and, for the rest of his life, bears the name Paul.
It seems to me that the patriarchs and disciples were given a name to match their new, elevated status. Men of God who bore their name as a sign of distinction.
Finally, in the Book of Revelations, I read that if we lend an ear to the Spirit, we will all be given new names. ‘And I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.’
Our secret name that is known to no one — P.J. and I, however, have peeked under that stone and are disappointed at what we find: the humiliating tag stuck to Joe’s back, so that when you are around him you sometimes feel the urge to giggle. His Achilles’ heel had lain tucked away inside his name the whole time: nomen est omen. The men of God were given names that made them greater; with Achiel Stephaan, P.J. and I have made Joe smaller and divested him of his dignity. Beneath his self-appointed name he has no clothes.
In the weeks that follow P.J. does a great deal for me, she takes me out for walks (‘Do you want to wear my sunglasses? You’re squinting so badly’) and when evening comes she feeds me frankfurters with obvious distaste. After work Joe comes by and the three of us sit around, making Joe and P.J. seem like a couple with a pathetic child. When I have to piss, Joe helps me. Ma is the only one I let wipe my butt, I still will not tolerate anyone else behind my anus horribilis. That Joe sometimes takes my dick between thumb and forefinger in order to worm it back into my underpants is bad enough. He doesn’t dry it off the way I always do, so Ma has to boil my underpants to get the piss flecks out of them. When Joe helps me I look the other way, as though I weren’t there. I’d kill myself if I ever got a hard-on.
Joe’s real name has brought P.J. and me closer together. Guilt feelings rise to the surface when I’m alone again and lie looking at the dying light of day. Sometimes I see Engel, the expression on his face with which he assesses this, and somehow it seems unlikely that any of this would have happened were he still around. Joe stands alone in the face of a new three-cornered construction of a woman without scruples (‘She is not depraved or bad, she simply lacks a conscience: that is all’ — from About a Woman) and two friends who quietly hate him at times.
When I’m not in the mood to feel guilty I tell myself that it’s actually nothing more than an exchange of intimacies: he’s seen my dick, I’ve seen his name. So what if we know that about him, he has P.J., doesn’t he? It’s only fair that I then take back something in return. Compared to him, I’m nothing but a petty thief. But when in my mind I again hear the hideous laughter of the desk clerk at the Hotel Olympia, I can’t defend that train of thought. Joe Speedboat is more than an adolescent whim, it’s his destiny. The men of God became different people because of their new names, and it’s unthinkable that they could have gone back to who they were as Abram, Simon or Saul. But that is exactly what has happened to Joe. We no longer see the beloved sorcerer’s apprentice, but Achiel Stephaan Ratzinger, like a kind of Christof who long ago tried to disguise how pathetic he was by adopting Johnny Monday as his nom de plume.