Damn this capitalist lie! “Curse that hag,” I say, as Grettir said of the old woman. It’s precisely these types of people, who never questioned the values and standards of their time, that became Nazis down south in Germany. Sometimes it seems that humans can be impressed with any sort of rubbish imaginable, so gullible and helpless they are.
I would have taken desperate measures to overcome the tedium and emptiness that comes with choosing everything as if off a menu. Was I supposed to build barracks and dig ditches for the Americans? Those soulless creatures! They could all take themselves off to the moon as far as I was concerned—and stay there. Was I supposed to work for them and thereby become like them?
Could I have loved you then?
I don’t regret anything, Helga. You wanted to have it this way. I maintain that, in fact, I never had any choice.
The choice was yours.
And you didn’t want me.
13
Every single day of my life I’ve taken delight in my animals. I’ve saved many a man who had mechanical trouble, because I learned a lot about farm equipment in the Agricultural College’s classes and by my own effort, and I knew how to work a lathe and was fond of iron, as was said of Skallagrímur. I’ve given people lustrous fresh fish to eat and always had a barrel of salted seal-pup blubber on hand, to the great delight of anyone who dropped in. My smoked lumpsucker was known throughout the country, and I received many a word of thanks for it. I’ve bred and improved my sheep stock, which Marteinn, my brother Bjössi’s son, obviously appreciates. I’ve rescued a drowning man and found another one lost up on a heath in a driving snowstorm. I’ve taken shits in snowstorms. Wiped my ass with snow. I’ve waded out to skerries after children and lambs. I sat for a long time on the parish council and the board of the Co-op and made improvements in the butchering process, which I also supervised for the Co-op. I took an active part in the Reading Group of Hörgár Parish and handled its book purchases for a long period of time. I recall the days when farmers thought for themselves and disagreed with the existential philosophy from more southern climes, that claimed life was futile, like a man rolling a rock up a mountainside only to chase it back down again before starting all over.
“That’s utter bullshit,” said old Gísli of Lækur. It simply wasn’t like that. It’s more like the nature of man for him to roll a rock up a mountainside in order to prop it up there on top and then stack stones around it to make a handsome cairn. Man wished to build memorials to his own work. Another philosopher we read in Danish translation says that man’s existential dilemma consists of having to choose everything in this world, which is the root of his unhappiness. I remember Jósteinn asking in his quiet, hoarse voice, reminding one of a distant cry from a heath, if mankind was supposed to spend a long time each morning pondering whether he should have bread or stones for breakfast?
“No, listen, mate,” said Gunnar of Hjarðarnes. He’d heard that this man sat all day in cafés in a big city with the menu before him and used his café existence as the basis for his theories on the lives of all men. That life is about choosing everything as if off a menu. Our discussion continued in this vein. These were people who had come up with their own meaning of life. They were instinctively clever, because no school had told them how to think. They thought for themselves. Such people are gone now, and I scarcely believe they raise them in Reykjavík nowadays.
Here, in the countryside, I’ve been important. And if I haven’t been important, at least I’ve felt I was important. There’s a huge difference. Here, I’ve beheld the product of my hands. I hadn’t yet turned fifty when I went to meet old Jón Eysteinsson, the director of the Agricultural Bank, and paid off all my loans.
Don’t city dwellers complain about not belonging to the world, about being emotionless and dull, and then seek gratification in drugs and extramarital affairs? And then their only question is whether they should kill themselves or not. Or else wait a while. Is there anything more horrible than waiting for life to pass by? Instead of getting down to business and bringing home the bacon. And then they compose poems and write stories about the loneliness and cold of the city. Why did they leave the countryside, after all? Who asked them to do so? If all life is fiction, as they say, isn’t there more growth and goodness in the hayfields, more luster and a fresher feeling of freedom in the air here? You know, Helga, I’ve heard that old Greek and Roman poets, as well as great philosophers and sages around the world, liken life to a dream, to fiction. But a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. You can find the same wisdom simply by turning to my grandmother, who knows neither how to read nor write, but can recite a poem composed by an unknown poet and never considered good enough to write down:
Life is reverie and dream,
calm day, breaking sea and so,
skerry and strong stream,
storm, fog, and powdery snow.
Blossom and sunbeams, we mustn’t forget.
But behind the mountains heaven-high–
none has caught sight yet.
I’m not saying that everything is so heavenly here and the people are utter angels. Of course there’s rumormongering and jealousy and all sorts of other hogwash. But these same people loan you a tractor tire in a pinch. Even Ingjaldur from Hóll—he helped me out when I needed it. He respected me, even though we had differences of opinion. And when he said that about pinching Unnur’s back, I knew that this was done with cows that were difficult to impregnate, and it was the only way he could think of dealing with such a dilemma. He didn’t mean it badly; I saw in his eyes that he wished me well, the dear man.
I’ve learned to read the snort in the bull’s nostrils. Have felt the natural will of my livestock encompass and invigorate me. I’ve seen the blue-clad elf and heard fetches knock on the door. Felt the secret powers of existence in hills and enchanted spots, and shooed off the guardian spirits of the land when my horse balked. Saw the light long ago. No one understands that it’s possible to see the light long ago, but it’s all the same to me if no one understands what is meant. I’ve learned to read the clouds and birds and the behavior of a dog. Perceived the wonder of the settlement of this country and felt the magnificence of its original inhabitants. I’ve sensed the anguish of the leaves in a lunar eclipse and gazed up the slopes feeling my soul lifted from me as I drove the Farmall. I’ve heard my stomach grumble back at the thunder, a little man beneath a big sky; heard the stream whisper that it’s eternal. Made the earth my beloved. Held a powerful salmon. Let the fox teach me what it is to be clever. I’ve felt sympathy looking in a seal’s eyes when I had it in my sights, and spared it. Witnessed both the ferocity of the killer whale and the gentleness of motherly love, and found a place of refuge from the world where the swans sleep. Bathed myself in water pregnant with glistening sun, not in murky pipe water used by civilization, and noticed a distinct difference between the two. I’ve lost my way in a blinding snowstorm leading a horse up a mountain slope and given up, letting the horse’s instinct bring me safely home. Shot a fox shitting. Seen an iceberg overturn. Thrown a lumpsucker at the parish council chairman’s head. Forgotten a corpse. Fetched a smoked woman. Lived on promise alone during the harsh winters of the early sixties, written things in the lacunae of existence, and understood that a man can dream big dreams on small pillows. I’ve kept going, intoxicated with desire and the hope that drives sap into the withered branches of creation. And I have loved, and even been a happy creature for a time.
I’ve seen my progeny grow and mature before my eyes, and I’ve wept and thought of you until my flesh burned. Cried out in the heather scent of late summer. Satisfied my urges. Then wept some more. I’ve seen ravens congregate. Seen mankind naked and forlorn. And felt sorry for it.
Yes. Perhaps I have lived with love, not against it. Love is not just a bourgeois romantic notion of finding the one true match who will fill one’s soul so full that it brims over and splashes out uninterruptedly as if from some eternal pump. Love is also in this l
ife that I’ve lived here in the countryside. And when I chose this life and pursued it and didn’t regret it, I learned that one should stick to one’s decision, nurture it and not deviate—that this is an expression of love. Here beneath the slope of Ljósuvöll is where I had to be. I had no choice.
The choice was yours.
The choice is yours. And I am yours.
Still.
When you became pregnant and asked me to accompany you to Reykjavík, I came to a crossroads in my life. The path that I’d followed up until then branched. I took both paths. Yet neither of them rightly, in the sense that I followed one of them—but had all my heart on the other. With you.
14
Have I mentioned man’s depravity, Helga? I no longer believe in the beautiful teachings, and least of all do I intend to preach them here, on the banks of my grave, in this letter to you. We might devote a few words to the subject, the little that this farmer believes he’s discovered about human nature in the nearly ninety years that he’s lingered here—namely, that deep in each man’s heart dwells a depravity, described excellently by old Paul the Apostle in the Bible, that the good that I will, I do not; but the evil that I hate, I do.
One can say fair things about love, dear Helga, but it’s usually a bad sign, because it means one’s on the brink of opposing it openly. I’ve seen this in a lot of people. They create beautiful poems about love or deliver speeches about it at fine gatherings, but as they vanish back into their daily routines, it’s as if they strip themselves of the trappings of the elegant words and linger loveless the better part of their lives. That’s how it looks to me, the phenomenon itself—man, and me myself, quite frankly. It’s as if man’s desires are never pure and in harmony with the beauty that life has tried to indoctrinate in him. Damned if man doesn’t keep trying to arrange his life completely contrary to the good that he knows is deep inside him! I’m not saying that man does his best to be an unmitigated villain—but perhaps he never makes a decent try for the opposite either. There’s a huge gap between the two, and in that gap is the field where most people hatch into existence, bloom, and wither away. How did it go, that verse of Kristján Ólason?
Deep down inside my heart there lay
—same as others gained indeed—
a clew to point to me the way,
though I to it paid little heed.
So, the rule appears to me rather to be that people usually live at odds with what they preach, whatever form that might take, be it a political agenda or, say, existential philosophy. It’s as if those who talk about dieting always put the most sugar on their pancakes and the worst louts talk about “care taken for human souls”; those who condemn the crime the loudest are generally the biggest criminals; capitalism, which is supposed to make everyone rich, makes everyone poor; and you can bet that freedom, which people talk so much about now, will eventually make everyone slaves.
Once for the Reading Club I ordered a book about Christopher Columbus and America; the book gave an account of his personal diary entries in which he describes the Indians that he discovered on the shores of the Americas. The Indians went about buck-naked and had an abundance of everything, their children made toys of gold nuggets, and they were given to great warmth and kindness. Isn’t such an existence the goal of our civilization? Or have I misunderstood the gist of the grand speeches? Later, after I ordered Halldór Laxness’s translation of Voltaire’s Candide, I saw that the dreamland represented in El Dorado—the most splendid goal of our civilization—is precisely like this little community that Columbus encountered and described two hundred years earlier. On the other hand, what Columbus did to this little dream society that he himself called Paradise is an excellent exemplum on human behavior. After encumbering the islanders, eating and drinking their stores without contributing anything themselves, Columbus and his companions had to flee from their growing and justifiable resentment. Several years later, Columbus returned with armed men, asking the children to show him where they found the gold nuggets they played with; thereafter, they sentenced the whole lot, naked and defenseless, to slave labor, digging gold for him. Isn’t this an excellent allegory for man’s behavior in regard to Paradise—the dreamland and love, which they never grow tired of chewing over, whether in church or at secular gatherings?
Don’t you see the double standard in this, Helga? In all that they say, and on the other hand do. They say: to live is to love. Such is their mantra, but in life itself, they linger in fear and anxiety and dare not go anywhere near love. And if they do venture near it, before they realize it they’ve sold it cheaper than Judas sold Christ. Cowards and laggards, all of them, and I declare to you that I am the lowest of them all.
Wouldn’t it be wise, now that I’ve started scribbling these lines to you, dear Helga, for me to devote a few words to the low and contemptible in this farmer, to his depravity, as it might be called? This depravity never fails to shock me when I grasp for it in candid moments. Why, for goodness’ sake, does a man desire a woman other than his own all his life, yet never takes a single step toward attaining the object of his desire? You see what a Christian life I’ve lived, my dear; of course one mustn’t covet one’s neighbor’s wife. But it strikes me that I’ve loved you, Helga—I never grow tired of speaking your name aloud and writing it: Helga…it kisses my palate before it opens my mouth as wide as it can—that I’ve loved you only to live in anguish and an intentional lovelessness. That the distance from you kindled a longing for closeness, but as soon as that closeness was offered, I withdrew and would sacrifice nothing!
I haven’t been able to decipher the mystery of this behavior, and that for the only type of creature to consider itself sensible! I declare it straight from the heart, Helga: I’ve become like a worm-riddled log, lying here utterly rotten on the shores of time, where the surf will soon take me and no one will shed a tear when I’m gone. Yes, it’s true what the ancients said: “With age comes cowardice.”
15
I was saying that I astonished myself. I don’t know any longer whether my desire for you has anything to do with you at all, or whether it hints only at my sick inclination toward masochism. Were you perhaps the innocent object of this depravity of mine, which lies as if hidden in fissures deeper than the rays of language can reach? I know that others took a shine to you as well—I could see how they drank in your form whenever you walked out of the Co-op. No one can ever tell me that you weren’t the most handsome woman in this parish. And since I’m lancing my boils in this letter of mine, you can probably guess that my longing for you wasn’t entirely confined to my mind. It was a reality in this hapless farmer’s body for many years after things ended between us; the flames couldn’t be quenched in one late evening. If only you could have just gone and not appeared before my eyes every single day in my binoculars! It would have made it easier to forget you.
It was the autumn after little Hulda jumped into my arms.
The lambs were down from the mountain and either at the slaughterhouse or in the sheep shed for their winter sojourn. I was checking the smoothness of a yearling ewe’s rib tips and found no flaws when you and our little private joke about touching the female kind and assessing her contours crossed my mind. I held it by the neck with one hand as I felt its legs, its rump quite thick and filled out down to the hocks; then I ran my fingers along the ribs and thence to the loin and you haunted my thoughts. I started seeing you in place of that damned ewe lamb and felt as if you were near me again, hearing your voice so tender inside me, how you moaned and trembled as I checked the curvature of your breast in the light from the cracks in the equipment shed’s walls, the air pungent with the fragrance of glycerol and grease; so graceful were your curves, I felt as if my palms were filled to bursting with your supple tussocks, and the curls in the coarse wool reminded me of your triangular tuft, and damned if I didn’t catch a whiff of the aroma that enveloped my memory of our first union and I simply had to feel you encompassing me, had to have you and hear you
moan with lustful ecstasy just one more time, inhale your aroma for the final time…
I sank down to the grating and lay there a considerable while. With my ass crack bare and glaring like a pansy in an old slanderous verse. I’m not certain how long I lay there, defeated by my own depravity and devoid of all decency, but I do know that as soon as I’d hitched up my trousers my first task was to slaughter the ewe. I tossed her into a sack, hauled it up into the dory, and sailed far out beyond the reef, where I tied two large sinkers to it and sank it altogether.
The spot where I sank her was not chosen randomly. It was on the fishing bank where your silo could be seen against the waterfall, the tower that carried the echo of when we made love. I let the boat drift for a long time and stared at the bright red blood oozing from the corpse. Little waves rocked; there was a chilly but gentle southeasterly breeze. Now I’ll just let myself go as well, I thought, and completely free of any internal struggle or hesitation, I grabbed the gunwales with both hands.
Reply to a Letter from Helga Page 6
