Virtually all my father’s possessions had been put out on the sidewalk in Alexandria, except for the scale model of a tower he had been building in the harbor of Alexandria, a few rolls of blueprints, his sketchbooks and the preliminary models for a group of statues. Those statuettes were in my mother’s bedroom. They depicted my father and my mother locked in the act of mating. From the shadows of her boudoir they came out to meet me, fantastical creatures of rough clay, half-human, half-beast. It was only now that I began to notice them; they had been around all my life and had simply become a part of things.
The first time I asked where the models came from was during one of our sessions before the mirror at her vanity. She was doing my face. Painting me, that might be a better way to put it — first she applied a heavy foundation of Pan-Cake that obliterated all expression, then drew a new face on top of that. She looked at me so intensely while she worked, the way she usually looked only at herself in the mirror; I loved that undivided attention.
But I wasn’t to be put off: once again, I asked why he had portrayed them in that way.
‘Your mouth, Ludwig, you moved!’
But she knew very well that there was no getting around an answer. And so it arrived by fits and starts. During the first year they were in love he had immortalized them countless times. As man and woman, was what she called it. That answer didn’t satisfy me.
‘As we were making love,’ she said then.
He had photographed their coupling from various angles — material for Blind, a group of what was to be seventeen life-sized porcelain statues of my copulating parents, in a host of positions. Some overlaid with mosaics, others with cloisonné, they had long stood in the Guggenheim at Bilbao. A Kama Sutra built to scale.
‘But if I wasn’t born yet,’ I said to her face in the mirror, ‘then it could be that I was being conceived right there, at that moment, right?’
Her shy laugh, the hand reaching for the mascara.
‘Now just sit still for a moment.’
She brushed the mascara onto my lashes, I kept my eyes fixed on the clay figure of the woman on her knees, the bearded man behind her. The satyr taking her from behind. I thought: Here you come, Ludwig Alexander Unger, here you come! and laughed — straight through all the makeup, the face of innocence, the laugh burst forth like a new day.
‘Oh, damn it,’ she grumbled, ‘I was almost finished.’
We spent a lot of time in front of the mirror. Gradually my eyes opened wider. I loved the narcotic sweetness of her bedroom, the heat of her body close to mine. It excited me. Sometimes I masturbated afterwards.
I was her makeup doll, she would tell me things from before my memory began. I had the impression that in making her historical sketches she used the eraser more often than the pencil. While she was painting me, my eyes opened to her icons as welclass="underline" a pen and ink portrait of the Maitreya, a pastel of Jesus of Nazareth, a photograph of Bhagwan torn not entirely intact from a magazine. These were the fixed points in her personal pantheon.
‘They look like him,’ I said.
My geisha face was expressionless.
‘Hmmm?’
‘Those men, they look like him. Like my father.’
Her smile wavered. Mentioning him caused her pain. Physically.
‘No they don’t,’ she said.
‘Yes they do. They all have beards.’
‘But that doesn’t mean. .’
‘And those piercing eyes, like they want something from you.’
She shook her head. I pushed in the knife and twisted it.
‘Why are all of them hanging here on the wall, but there isn’t a picture of him in the whole house?’
‘Stop it, Ludwig. Those are examples to me. . universal teachers. . inspiration. Call it whatever you like. But it doesn’t have anything to do with your father.’
I pointed at the statue of them mating.
‘They look like him,’ I said.
‘I don’t know what’s got into you today, but I want you to stop right now.’
But I didn’t stop. There was a pleasant sort of wakefulness in my head, something related to hunger. What can be seen, will be seen.
We lived at the edge of the world and could fall off at any moment. We knew that when we moved in. That the house was a risk. That although Warren was building a line of defense, there were unknown factors. Our preservation depended on the pace at which the wall progressed, the quantity of material he could obtain. We didn’t know that in the month before we arrived five meters of the hillside had been lost. Warren did the best he could, we never doubted his trust-worthiness.
‘Put everything inside,’ he said once during our first winter there. ‘Make sure everything’s battened down. Seriously.’
From my bedroom window on the first floor I saw it coming. First the gusts of wind. The playful nudges. I heard it crack. In the sky above the sea psychedelic colors flowed together, bursts of rain lashed our house. I saw sulfurous skies, then watched as everything turned green, the green of sunglasses — the sky had fallen on its side, the rain was coming in horizontally. Clouds of dark blue ink curled in on themselves, like an animal writhing in pain. The storm came closer, the light was sucked out of the world in a vortex.
‘Ludwig!’ my mother shouted from downstairs. ‘Stay away from the windows! Don’t get close to the windows, that’s what Warren said.’
The wind grew stronger, I remember my amazement at the power of something that was invisible.
The storm lasted a day and a night. Its voice made our ears ring. Everything shook beneath the pounding drumbeats. We lit a fire in the hearth but the smoke came back through the flue. We had put some things in the shed and fastened down others, but we had thought too much about the word storm and too little about a sky that was turned against us. The roof of the pantry was lifted and ripped off, we found it later in the bushes. The house felt like it was being torn from its foundations. Everything clattered and whistled. My mother went outside with a flashlight to fasten a shutter. She came back inside in a frenzy.
‘The wind,’ she panted. ‘So strong. Can’t breathe.’
We sat up for part of the night, wrapped in blankets, and finally fell asleep in the living room. We knew: when we awoke, the sea would have come even closer.
Looking out the window in the half-light of morning, I saw the dark figure of a man out there. His coattails were flapping. I pulled on my boots. The wind knocked the air out of my lungs. Along the path between the thorn bushes I walked to the cliff’s edge, where Warren was leaning into the wind.
‘Here. .’ he shouted. ‘And there.’
A huge breach had been knocked out of the seawall further up. Under our feet the waves were washing up all the way to the cliff. His hand on my shoulder, don’t get too close, boy. The cliff could have been undermined, it could collapse, we would drown in the foaming sea. We looked at the ragged edge, and I saw Warren’s concern. A new boundary had been cut out. I tried to stand beside him like a man sharing his concern, I knitted my brows and let earnestness take possession of my body.
When we bought the house, Warren had said that by the next winter his wall would extend all the way in front our house — he hadn’t made it, not by a long shot. We saw his struggle, the great effort; my mother didn’t want to remind him of his promise already, not now. Besides, there was no use. It was painful. He was doing his utmost.