#12 The Kemna Mystery …

“Son tan importantes, músculos grandes?” our girl next door asks from her doorway as I pass, bike in hand. Twenty-five, twenty-six years old. Every morning, half past nine, our girl next door leaves on her electric scooter, helmet on her head. Every evening, she comes home just after eight. Fifteen minutes later, sure as sunset, there is the sound of the pizza delivery guy’s moped coming and going. Two days a week, our girl next door is at home. Not playing volleyball on the beach in Málaga, not laughing with friends in a café, but at home. She takes garbage bags with empty pizza boxes to the dumpster, scrubs the floor of her house, scrubs the sidewalk I walk on, and does four, five, sometimes six loads of laundry, and every time Heidi and I stumble upon her laundry-loaded drying rack on the sidewalk, we wonder whether we are doing something wrong, doing only one load of laundry every one or two weeks.

Son tan importantes, músculos grandes, are big muscles so important? Despite my bad mood, I suppress a grin when I realize how people would have laughed and pointed at our girl next door had she been twenty-five when I was twenty-five. Not because people were unkind back then, but because they would have assumed our girl next door was deliberately making a clown of herself, gluing centimeter-long, wildly colored pieces of plastic to her fingernails, powdering her face so thickly it looks plastered, painting the area around her eyes blue and pink, wearing long false eyelashes, and applying signal-red lipstick to her strangely swollen lips.

When our girl next door is not taking pizza boxes to the dumpster, scrubbing floors, doing laundry, or eating pizza, she is talking on her phone or holding that phone at arm’s length in front of her face, head tilted, lips pursed, like I regularly see young women do in the Spanish town of Antequera, where Heidi and I have been living for three months now. When our girl next door gets Heidi or me in her crosshairs, she tries to strike up a conversation about nothing. But Heidi and I are no aficionados of conversations about nothing, and ever since that penny dropped, our girl next door has been trying to provoke me in a way that makes me suspect I am meant to lose my temper one day in front of her filming phone. She probably heard me this morning, romping with my dumbbells on our patio, and without breaking stride, I politely reply, “Sabes lo qué es la sarcopenia do you know what sarcopenia is?”

“Is that what you suffer from, then?” she replies wittily.

“Yo no not me!” I say over my shoulder as I jump on my bike—Heidi’s bike actually—and, through a narrow street, hurtle down the hill on which our girl next door, Heidi and I live just beneath the castle of Antequera.

Threatening clouds. No rain. But the cobblestones on which I hurtle down the hill are still wet from last night’s rain, and too late, I realize I am going at least as fast as the day before yesterday, when I discovered that those cobblestones are slippery when wet—and fell. A bend in the street rushes toward me. I brake carefully, brake and brake, clear the bend without falling, and cycle into Antequera’s center, where it strikes me that no one seems to have heeded the government's warning to stay home today because of possible bad weather.

The sidewalks left and right of me are crowded, and eh... quite some people, after all, may have heeded that government’s warning but interpreted it as: let’s not go to work or school today. Mostly young people, hunched over their phones, stroll the sidewalks, and as if my mood is not bad enough already, those young people somehow set me up with an unpleasant sense of perplexity. While tight leggings are fashionable for the young women I see, sweatpants are fashionable for the young men. The leggings reveal enormous buttocks and thighs—not the result of romping with dumbbells every now and then—and the sweatpants reveal a lack of buttocks and thighs—the result of not romping with dumbbells every now and then. The upper arms of most young men are as thick as my wrists—sarcopenia in an advanced stage—their white faces gleaming with Olay—clinically proven, European marketing campaigns assure us—their eyebrows plucked into stripes and dyed unnaturally black, their beards clipped into lines, and their hair coiffed neater than neat.

Perhaps, I tell myself, it is an Antequerian phenomenon, that combination of physical neglect and an emphasis on appearance above the shoulders—and on nails—and again, I suppress a grin as I recall how, in elementary school, I was sent out of the classroom more than once for defying teachers who propagated that appearance does not count in relations between people. But when it comes to the young people I see on sidewalks, there likely is no phenomenon at all. All there likely is is my bad mood casting people in a bad light.

Friday, November 8, 2024. A Dutch friend passed away last week. His funeral is today. Yesterday, I reported at Málaga’s airport for a flight to Amsterdam. My passport expired last month, and I had been convinced that I could still travel within Europe for five years on an expired passport.

“Tienes que reír más y creer en ti mismo you need to laugh more and believe in yourself,” our girl next door snapped from her doorway as I, yesterday afternoon, quite frustrated, walked past her laundry-loaded drying rack toward our patio door on my way back from the airport.

“Tienes razón you’re right,” I politely replied without breaking stride. “A partir de mañana voy a manifestar lo fabuloso que soy starting tomorrow I’ll manifest how fabulous I am.”

I have left Antequera behind. Slowly, I cycle uphill on a country road, sadly shaking my head, remembering how, thirty years ago, after playing a few roles in commercials and television series, I sent a large cardboard tube, a handwritten letter and a photo of myself in it, to an address in Amsterdam. Three weeks later, I found an envelope on the doorstep of my apartment in Marbella’s casco antiguo, its old center, where I lived back then, inside the envelope a letter, typed on a mechanical typewriter—some letters higher than others—Tipp-Ex over some words, handwritten corrections in the margin. An invitation to visit Hans Kemna Casting, signed: Hans Kemna.

A few weeks later in Amsterdam, after a flight from Spain and a short train ride, I timidly entered the offices of Hans Kemna Casting at Herengracht 24. 1950s Furniture by Gispen, framed photographs of film and television celebrities on the walls. A friendly woman introduced herself as Betty, offered me coffee, and told me that Hans Kemna would wrap up the phone call he made in a minute and that her colleague Job was busy with a casting in the back room.

“Child, how good of you to come by!” Hans Kemna exclaimed, after wrapping up his phone call, as if we had known each other for years. Without pause, he then explained that acting is a profession, and suddenly realizing how ridiculous my mission was, I swallowed my protest. Sheer coincidence had landed me in the world of filmmaking in Spain and America. Great. But I knew I lack the talent to be an actor proper, and—worse—I feel uncomfortable when people focus their attention on me, let alone a camera. I had convinced myself that acting in Dutch—I am Dutch, after all—would break with the discomfort, and as Hans Kemna, the casting authority in the Netherlands those days, summed up the opportunities I had to learn the tricks of the acting trade, my thoughts wandered to things I much rather did than acting.

Hans Kemna’s appearance had betrayed him as a man fit to steal horses with. Fearless, intelligent—some feigned clumsiness despite—and blessed with that latent yet well-controlled aggression typical of real women and men. Charmed by the amusement in his eyes, I read in those eyes that he read in mine that I had given up my Dutch acting ambitions fifteen seconds earlier. He cut his summing-up short and suggested we have dinner that evening to then see a play in a theater.

From that day onward, Hans and I met regularly when I was in the Netherlands, and as a downpour of rain soaks me within seconds, I am back in the cozy cellar kitchen of a house on the Singel—Amsterdam’s first canal ring, counting from the inside out—where Hans and his husband, Adrian Brine, lived and where our evenings usually began. Adrian made me tea in a samovar, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and poured Hans a glass of red wine. Until it was time to go out, we talked at the kitchen table about books, theater, and film. Usually just with Hans, sometimes with Adrian as well, we would have dinner at l’Entrecôte et les Dames, at Café Amsterdam, or at George’s Theeboom next door, after which we would see a play and talk to the actors afterward. Most of my nights in Amsterdam, I slept on the couch in Hans and Adrian’s living room, which resembled a museum of modern photography. Sometimes, Hans and I traveled to Antwerp, Brussels, or Paris to see a play directed by Adrian. Nothing pleased Adrian more than having steak tartare at La Taverne du Passage in Brussels, and nothing pleased me more than talking with Adrian about Russian literature as we had steak tartare at La Taverne du Passage.

Talking is not my favorite pastime. With Hans and Adrian I talked a lot, though not on Sunday afternoons, when—weather permitting—we visited het landje, a small meadow along a canal just outside Amsterdam. An old houseboat lay moored in the canal, and in that houseboat or in the meadow in front of it, we drank tea while Adrian read the script for the next play he was to direct, and Hans and I read the books we had brought. Done drinking tea and reading, we drove back to Amsterdam to have dinner and see a play, and I chuckle inwardly when I think of how Hans chuckled at me when after seeing him play himself in a play called Galleryplay—loosely based on his life—I asked him whether he had skipped as many classes at drama school as I had skipped at college.

Hans visited me occasionally in Spain, filming me during one of my performances in an arena—where, preoccupied with other things, I rarely noticed people focusing their attention or cameras on me—and occasionally, I flew to Antalya, in Turkey, where Hadji, a friend of Hans and Adrian, picked me up from the airport to drive me to the small house Hans and Adrian owned in the old center of a small town called Side. Even in Side, in an ancient Roman amphitheater, we saw plays, and as it dawns on me that my life would be so much more enjoyable if I heeded the government’s warnings to stay home because of possible bad weather, my thoughts drift to a terrace on a quay in the harbor of Antalya, where Hans, reluctantly, told me about the violent robbery in Barcelona of which he had been the victim. That robbery had left him with a slight but permanent injury—which I had been stupid enough to point at—and with a sudden sense of shame, quite some Dutch soldiers I once served with in Afghanistan come to my mind, who scream PTSD at every opportunity, not having lived through half of what Hans lived through during that robbery.

Water splashes from under my front wheel onto my face as I spot El Kiosko, coming around a bend in the road, the most charming venta around and also the destination of my trip. I have been cycling for almost two hours, and despite a few climbs, I realize I cycled mostly downhill, meaning that the trip back home will be mostly uphill. Shivering with cold all of a sudden, I remember the five euros Heidi slipped into a pouch on my backpack. I know, though, that guilt will eat me if I treat myself to coffee at El Kiosko today. I turn my bike around, cycle a few hundred meters back along one of the nearly empty reservoirs of Ardales, cross a headland, and follow the next reservoir until I reach a bridge over a stream. I lift my bike over the guardrail, slide down the embankment, crawl a few meters along the stream into the dry space beneath the bridge, rummage in my backpack for what I need to make coffee, and discover that Heidi has slipped a sweater in my backpack …

Water from the stream comes to a boil in a kettle on my gas stove, and I dream back to the days Hans and I journeyed to New York for the premiere of a play directed there by the Dutch director Ivo van Hove. We were having lunch in Little Italy when I suggested a flight over Manhattan.

“Of course …” Hans replied with a raised eyebrow. Two days later, he was sitting next to me in a Cessna 152 at the end of one of the two runways at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, where, via the Washington Bridge, we had driven in the Mustang I rented.

A Gulfstream stood diagonally ahead of us, cleared for takeoff by radio. As I worked through our pre-takeoff checklist, I felt Hans giving me a sideways glance. Until we climbed into that little Cessna, he had assumed I was playing a prank on him. Only when we were cleared for takeoff did Hans realize our adventure was real. But Hans was not a faint-hearted man. As I piloted our plane east and then north, he accepted his fate and turned on the camera that, those days, was kind of glued to his hand. I throttled back and steered east again. Finally, we followed the Hudson River south, and Hans did not give me another sideways glance until someone reprimanded me over the radio for flying over the East River, where, we were told, President Clinton would be landing in a helicopter.

“Child, did you do something wrong?” Hans’s voice sounded in my headset.

“Of course not,” I answered truthfully. “We’re flying over the Hudson, not the East River.”

“Then why don't you just say so?”

“And argue with the American Secret Service?”

“Hm...”

At the height of the torch, we circled the Lady—as the Statue of Liberty was called on the Hudson River Traffic frequency—and then headed north again, waving to the people we imagined behind the windows of the Twin Towers.

Curled up in my sweater, I pour boiling water over the coffee in the filter on the rim of my Stanley thermos, which I have wedged between two stones, and my thoughts drift to the evenings before I once again left for Afghanistan for an extended period of time, evenings I always spent with Hans and Adrian. We usually had dinner at the Theeboom, next door, and after dinner, I would sit squeezed between Hans and Adrian on the couch in their living room, watching, as if it were a ritual, the video Hans once made of our flight around New York's Statue of Liberty. I would sleep on that couch, put on my fatigues the next morning, sling my backpack over my shoulders, walk to the station, and take a train to the military airfield in Eindhoven to fly east from there …

I last saw Adrian in 2016. Grumpily cheerful—typical Adrian—he opened the door at the Singel. We drank tea, whiskey, and red wine in the kitchen, and Adrian admitted that he was nervous about the role of an elderly priest he was to play in a television series in Brussels the following day. Adrian passed away a few weeks later, and as I take a sip of coffee, I finally let my tears flow freely, realizing for the first time in thirty years that every moment I spent with Hans and Adrian had been a moment of mysterious peace. We talked or talked not, but there was always peace, and I think of Heidi, who believes our souls live on after we pass away. I eh… I am but a simple atheist. I never mind, though, mulling over Heidi’s idea of souls living on. Many people, like our girl next door, strike me as soulless. In other people, I sometimes feel I detect bouncing, brooding, or resigned souls.

Never did I meet anyone in whom I detected a more resigned soul than Hans Kemna. He had seen and lived it all, was no longer worried about anything, and the mystery I thought I sensed behind his resignation was an unspoken yet intense appreciation of the moment, which, as I see it, is the greatest good for a soul, whether it lives on or not. Nothing rattled Hans, not even death, but our adventures are over, and with Hans, one of the last real men, a man to steal horses with, has passed away ...

Left and right of me, a carpet of rain frames my dry seat beneath the bridge as I sadly drink my coffee. I take another sip and hand the thermos cap from which I drink to Hans, who is sitting next to me, wearing the khaki camouflage jacket I once gave him. When I look at him, I notice the amusement has not faded from his eyes. He lifts the thermos cap as if to toast with it and says, “Child, don’t worry. I’ll be back before you know it ...”

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