The belfry of the Church of the Holy Trinity is a story in itself. For decades it stood miraculously alone, then sank slowly under its own weight from the cliff onto the beach, where it remained upright — a wonder documented in the annals, paintings and drawings of the day: a lone, arthritic index finger, warning of a fate that had happened long ago.
In nasty weather they say you can still hear the bells of the Holy Trinity ringing in the waves.
When my mother had finished doing my makeup, I would go to my room. The cloud in my chest hot and blood red. I lay down on the bed and unbuttoned my trousers. My head on the pillow I tightened the muscles in my neck — fluttering images on my retina, up to and including the spasms. The minor shame afterwards, mild as a shake of the head.
There was a life before and a life after the discovery of sperm. I masturbated as though possessed. I ejaculated into dirty socks, towels and the insides of trouser legs, I even ate it when there were no jack-off rags to be had.
The obscene thoughts about my mother, her role in my fantasies, ended one week after my fifteenth birthday. A postcard, with stamps from a faraway country, in a hand I did not recognize, landed in our letterbox. Addressed to me, albeit with the wrong surname. To Ludwig Schultz it read, as though the card was not written but dedicated to me. Schultz was my father’s surname; in England my mother had had it replaced with her own. The text of the postcard consisted of one line, only two words: Love me.
I brought the card to my mother. She took it and read it. In any icy voice she said, ‘From your father.’
My father had sent me a card! I now deciphered the scribble beneath the text as Bodo. He knew I existed, he had spoken my name! And he had given me an assignment. Love me. That was the when the shame fell like an axe. Love me, it said. Not her, his wife, but him, my father. With that barebones message Bodo Schultz had renewed his claim upon her. From far, far away he had read my filthy thoughts, he had looked into the secret chambers. With the postcard, taboo suddenly stood like a pillar of lead between me and my mother. Those two words were his warning, but with the warning also came the absolution: were I to mend my ways he would requite my love with his own. All this lay encrypted in that Love me.
My father’s card gave me a father. A man with handwriting, a hand that wrote, an arm with which he waved to me from a distance, a torso in which beat a heart that might just have kept a place for me.
The front of the card showed a statue of a man. A copper pirate, he had one arm and one leg and was brandishing a cutlass above his head. He was cleaving the deathly blue sky in twain. The yellowish cardboard on the back bore the imprint Cartagena de Indias, and Estatua Blas de Lezo. That must be the pirate’s name, I realized, Blas de Lezo. The postmark told it had been mailed two weeks earlier, one week before my birthday. Perhaps my father had intended it as a birthday card — an assumption that made me happy. He had gone to the trouble to find out where I lived; who knows how many cards he might have posted throughout the years? To Alexandria, for example? Perhaps there was a pile of them waiting for me there, bound up with a red ribbon?
I went to the library and looked up the man whose picture was on the card. I found Blas de Lezo in a number of places, but most useful of all to me was a book entitled The War of Jenkins’ Ear. It dealt at length with Blas de Lezo y Olavarrieta — no pirate, but a Spanish naval hero who had fought from Sicily to Oran. In consecutive order he had lost a leg at Malaga, an eye at Toulon and an arm at Barcelona, and was therefore referred to as Mediohombre, the half-man. His statue stood in Cartagena, Colombia, because he had defended that city against the English admiral Vernon.
Vernon had tried to take Cartagena, the point of departure for the Spanish treasure fleets, with one hundred and eighty-six warships, with two thousand cannons and an army of twenty-four thousand men. Blas de Lezo defended the town with only three thousand soldiers, a couple of hundred Indian archers and a handful of frigates. It was one of those battles that captures the imagination, in which what would seem to be a hopelessly outnumbered band of men defeats an over-whelming army. Blas de Lezo, however, paid for his victory with his life.
I detected no real meaning in it, in the name Mediohombre. The half-man was simply a half-man on a postcard, plucked by Bodo Schultz from a rack in Cartagena to send to his son in England. Behind the hero of Cartagena one could make out a dark old fortress, a wall, the roundels. On the wall a slender metal cross. What was my father doing in Colombia? What wind drove the restless waves?
The face with which he had until then occupied my fantasies, that of a janitor at the Schutz American School in Alexandria, was replaced by that of a Spanish naval hero who, judging from his portrait in copper, had a prominent lower jaw and fleshy lips that pouted angrily.
In my imagination, my father and I never looked alike. I was my mother’s child, as confirmed when I was little by shop girls and little old ladies on the beach who always tousled my hair and said what a handsome little fellow I was.
I don’t know whether my mother was aware of the connection between the postcard and the end of our makeup sessions. Sometimes she tried to lure me in.
‘Oh, come on, just for me, just one more time?’
One winter evening, the house fat and round with the smell of wood smoke and cooking, I let myself be drawn in. One more time, as she’d asked, because I longed for the intimacy between us, which had never been more powerful than when she was doing my face. It smelled so lovely, so heavy, in that shadow chamber of hers, where she slept on a raised bed amid an ocean of pillows. Feathery light veils hung from the ceiling — the holy of holies, shielded from the eyes of the impure. Her atmosphere settled over me like a voile, her smell crept into my nostrils and made my knees weak. She studied my face intently in the glow of the lights on her vanity table.
‘You’ll have to start shaving soon,’ she said. ‘A little reddish, it looks.’
She applied a layer of foundation cream.
‘But your complexion is perfect. You have my skin.’
She had the skin of a young girl. Old skin has no light, it doesn’t reflect it the way a young, tanned complexion will, but absorbs it. Old skin sucks up light the way a wall sucks up basecoat. You can tailor away wrinkles and folds, vacuum away fat and shoot yourself full of Botox, but the gleam of young skin cannot be imitated.
She picked up a brush and tapped it against her hand, the silken soft bristles slid over my face. It was waxen and pale now, a porcelain doll. With steady hand she drew lines beneath my eyes, her breath brushed my cheek. A message blinked on and off like a dying neon light inside my skull — LOVE ME LOVE ME. The mascara brush stroked my lashes, she held her face close to mine and smiled. To my lips she applied Chanel, the bright red lipstick she sometimes wore when she left the house.
A little later, as I was jerking off in the bathroom — Caesarion Philometor — I caught an involuntary glimpse of my own face in the mirror above the sink, just as I reached orgasm, my feminine, corpse-pale likeness, and was overcome by a feeling of such horror and filth that I had to close my eyes to myself.
That next Wednesday evening I went to the field where the rugby club held its practise sessions. It was dark and cold, but the little wooden clubhouse was warm. Out on the field men and boys were tossing a ball back and forth. A tall mast cast out nets of light over them, beyond that was the darkness. From a changing room at the side of the clubhouse came a big man, who asked what I was doing there.