Woman: What astonishingly wicked thoughts you can have, a nice young man like you and soon to be a bishop! Don’t you realise that Juan and Theresa were top saints? Don’t you understand that this is the Soul talking to God? How can it be said in any other way?
Embi: Is such poetry not some sort of mockery on the part of the saint?
Woman: Mais qu’est-ce que tu veux, mon petit? There is always some sort of mockery. From one mockery to another! What should saints and poets take as an example, if not this mockery! Always some new mockery or other, and mankind never the wiser. It’s like conjugating irregular verbs in German, immer gleich schön!
Embi: Because I hope you are both a top saint and a puritan, madam, I want to ask you about a small matter before we part: when nothing is any longer right or wrong, why have we human beings come into existence, and what are we to do?
Woman: Why are you concerning yourself with that, my dear?
Embi: Is any person so lowly that he doesn’t carry the universe on his back like Godman Sýngmann? If human intelligence fails, what is there for a person to lean on?
Woman: Wouldn’t you rather try to take part in human folly, my dear? It’s safer. But remember, you have to do it with all your heart and all your heart and with all your heart—and what was the third thing again? Yes, consider the birds of the air, I had almost forgotten that.
Embi: How did you yourself manage?
Woman: Manage what?
Embi: To keep these looks, that colouring, that shine in the hair—
Woman: Gently, gently, my love, never say too much to women of my age, and least of all about their skin and hair, because then they might start getting mixed up. As you know, we are hunted for our skins. To tell the truth, I put a tiny bit on my face before you came.
Embi: When I talk to you I know well that you could be my mother, and I have no right to demand answers from you. And yet, I know you have lived different lives, sometimes many at a time, and must have suffered disappointments and sorrows more than most people—how do you manage to stand erect?
I play blind, said the woman.
Embi: Do you mean that the one who doesn’t take the game seriously won’t get disappointed?
Woman: Do you know that the birds ate my fish while I was asleep?
Embi: Yes, it was a rather unsuccessful sequel to the Easter story by the bioinductors, I think; at least not an entirely felicitous execution of the idea.
Woman: I’ll have to invite you to a party at home instead.
Embi: Thank you. Well, that’s just about everything, I think. My bus leaves around noon.
Woman: I’ll take you in the Imperial, of course.
Embi: Thank you very much, madam, but I’ll take my scheduled bus. Anything else might be misunderstood. And now I’ll say good-bye. Hmm. But there was one thing I wanted to ask you before leaving: I ask out of pure curiosity, let me point out; and you don’t require to answer.
Woman: You’re welcome.
Embi: The first time we met you told me quite casually that you ran an establishment in South America for a time. Was it of your own free will, or against it, that you became matron of such a house?
Woman: It was a fine house. It was like any other first-class nightclub that opens in the evenings and has dancing and various numbers featuring naked girls. Dinner is at half past midnight, with honest delicacies like cuttlefish à l’Espagnol, which I still miss. It’s another matter that young girls find it rather monotonous in the long run to start the day by sleeping with notables of the republic, and to be woken up at night to go up on a platform and display their bare midriffs to the public.
Embi: And you didn’t find it at all immoral?
Woman: On the contrary. Never a drunk to be seen. Only rather boring. More fun knitting sea-mittens.
Embi: Not unnatural at all?
Woman: Everything very natural. And extremely Catholic. The obverse side of Catholicism. Yet I never understood brothels until I started living with the nuns. Evangelicals never understand brothels, any more than they understand the Vatican.
Embi: May I put it on record that you rate immorality and convent life roughly on a par, madam?
That I don’t know, said the woman. But in our society the rules about love are made either by castrated men or impotent greybeards who lived in caves and ate moss-campion roots. Sometimes also by perverted celibates who walk around in skirts, some say wearing women’s knickers underneath. Decent women would hardly have cared to have a Church Father as a table companion.
Embi: We have now heard that the popes have become nice people.
Woman: God created all souls equal, and therefore it would be unchristian to suppose that there are fewer saints among popes than cowherds. It’s another matter that when I was in North America, a woman sent an inquiry to the Vatican about a trifling matter: she asked if it were lawful to sleep with a man without starting a baby; and secondly, if a baby were conceived against the law, what did the pope think should be done? The kernel of the answer was very clear once the rhetoric had been scraped off it: beget children or else go to hell.
Embi: I thought the pope talked in Latin.
Woman: I hope nonetheless that you now understand why we have both the Vatican and the brothels in Catholicism. When I had given up my psalter in South America and had started to read advertisements in North America, the only literature in the world that nowadays preaches the good and believes in life and fills the reader with confidence and optimism, I became so enamoured of an advertisement for a cream to produce non-smell intercourse that I hurried out to buy a tube.
Embi: I’ll note that, madam.
Woman: Yes, and add that it’s a great mercy for a woman who thought she had long since stopped being aware of herself, to be allowed to talk to a polite and well-brought-up young man: you would have been just right for my daughter.
43
Uncertain Balance, Etc.
I put the notebook away in my pocket and brushed the report from my face like a swarm of midges.
The woman rose from her chair. It was still the time of day when few genteel ladies are stirring. She walked over to the window and as she brushed past my chair she patted me on the cheek once again, this time with the palm of the hand, and I caught an aroma of woman. She stood at the window and looked out to sea. Her profile was heavy with melancholy with a hint of fierce decision: an uncertain balance. Such a profile evokes in my mind an association with the pungency of a cold rose thawing the hoarfrost off itself some autumn morning. Where does creation end and destruction begin? The distinction is indeterminate, like certain decimals. The wolf-fetters you find in some works of art, fashioned from cat’s footfall, bird’s spit, and woman’s beard—they are also present in such a profile.
Woman: Don’t stare like that, my dear. Say something instead.
Embi: Where are you going, madam?
Woman: Why do you ask?
Embi: You offered to drive me—where to?
Woman: To wherever you say: there’s nothing better than a polite travelling companion.
Embi: Madam, if I wanted to turn around in my life and asked to be allowed to go with you to the ends of the earth, do you think it would be out of politeness?
Woman: Haven’t I told you that I have come to join my husband?
Embi: Didn’t I tell you that the pastor had gone to repair a quick-freezing plant?
Woman: Are you sure I’m not a ghost?
Embi: So much the better.
Woman: Ghosts have mauvaise odeur.
Embi: You are fragrant.
Woman: Oh my dear God, to hear the child speak! I blush! I have never been shy like this with a man. I’m sweating! How on earth is it possible to talk like that to a woman who has had daughters and seen them into the grave! I feel giddy. (At that the woman dived into the pocket of her dressing gown for a mirror and a lipstick and did herself up half in confusion, half as if to gain time. Then she put the things away.) Haven’t I told you that I adhere
to the Roman Catholic faith? I can never say a word to you again, now.
Embi: I don’t want to talk either. It’s enough for me to have found you. I follow you in silence.
Woman: And also when I am in a wheelchair?
Embi: A wheelchair makes no difference.
Woman: And also after you have slept with me for one night?
Embi: I am a puritan.
Woman: It’s terrible to hear the child talk! God in heaven help you! A puritan—where did you learn that word? Have you never been in love with a girl, or what?
Embi: Not particularly.
Woman: A little?
Embi: Yes, just a little.
Woman: And what happened?
Embi: I was shy. Not all men can command the cruelty needed to enter into marriage: there are some horrible practices involved—especially towards young girls.
For a while the woman had been looking at me out of the corner of her eye as if she were secretly amused even though of course the innocent chatter of such an inexperienced man shocked her. I was prepared for most things—except that she would burst out laughing. She tried to hold herself back at first, certainly, but that only made bad worse. Soon she lost control of herself completely. The next thing I knew, she had flopped down beside me in midlaughter. I couldn’t see any special reason for such excessive laughter; perhaps there never are any logical reasons for laughter. But I was all the more aware of how the woman rose and fell, swelling, on the settee beside me. Am I so funny or something? Until I realised if I was not mistaken that the woman was crying. She fell against me with the salty weight of the surf and sobbed bitterly into my shoulder. She seized hold of my knee with her long, strong hand, the white skin on the back so strangely rough in texture.
I have no doubt said more than I should, I said, because I’ve never been used to women, least of all a woman like you. Now I’ll get up and try to get away and ask you not to hold it against me, madam.
Woman: Can’t you see yourself, man! Don’t you understand that you have awakened me? It is because of you that I am aware of myself again after a long sleep. You are bound to the one you have awakened. You shall follow me to the ends of the earth. Now I am going to touch you naked.
And with that touch alone the woman had taken me to her completely.
44
Away
In Chinese literature there are many references to calves, and the master Kvangtse says these words: A wise man’s expression is like that of a newborn calf. In some variants of the text, this is said to be reduced to: A wise man is a newborn calf.
This was an orphan calf and no one knew what had become of the heavy-uddered cow, his mother. He got no other swill from the fairy-ram woman Hnallþóra than cakes softened in coffee, which brought on all kinds of ailments. Though you gave him a good long scratch, he didn’t have the heart to low when you left him again; he just gazed after you, gloomily. It now seemed to me that this calf’s forehead was neither as bulging nor hairy as before. He seemed to be feeling better in these three or four stomachs that are said to be found in any one calf. As was said before, he had now been joined by some rams and had started to live off the abundance of the land. This company now lay chewing the cud in the churchyard. The rams stood up and stalked away when I approached, but the little calf came towards me; probably thought that I would give him some coffee.
When I had given him a little farewell scratch round the jowls and snout and had walked away, at first he watched me as I went and then trotted along behind to the lych-gate—he had somehow or other got in through it even though he couldn’t get out again. He uttered a little broken-voiced sound, like the bass in a children’s concertina, by closing both corners of his jaws and only just opening the mouth. And on that note this report on Christianity at Glacier should come to an end, as far as I’m concerned. I hope I’m not exceeding my terms of reference as reporter, or depriving my lord bishop of the opportunity of thinking for himself, if I end this document with the hope that the much-mentioned calf will survive.
It is doubtless right that in a report one should not expound but express. One has tried to see the thing, or at least couldn’t help seeing it, with this eye that some people think we have inherited from the monsters of earth history, instead of looking with the eye that dwells deepest in universal space.
An unbreakable obligation is involved in seeing and having seen. The report has not just become part of my own blood— the quick of my life has fused into one with the report. Inadvertently I had not only been an eyewitness but also the motive power of things unknown. Who will roll away the stone from the mouth of the sepulchre for us, it was once asked. Who will redeem us from a report?
After a daylong feast with all the delicacies that are to be found in the trunk of an Imperial, the woman now drew the curtain, locked her door with a key, and the house no longer existed. The undersigned stepped into this woman’s heavy car. We drove away with the evening sun on the nape of our necks—home.
Away—home.
It was one of those wholly beautiful May evenings when life’s happiness lies open before mortal man. On such a day the ancient Greeks used to say: No one is happy before his dying day. The glacier, the tureen-lid of the world, arches over the secrets of the earth. It gazes after me and the woman, perfectly still, in the certainty that if it moves a tiniest fraction it would crack open for the mouse to jump out.
She drove easily along the rolling gravel road, almost free of traffic in the early summer. The mountain range to one side, broad marshlands towards the sea on the other side, with gravel banks and erosion wherever it was higher and drier. Streams and rivers cascaded off the mountains and flowed under the bridges on the road and ran down through the lowlands to the sea. The sound of birdcalls from the marshes and moors drowned the muted tyre-noise of the car. The woman drove well, certainly, but cautiously, as if she were a little out of practice.
What impelled a resourceless young man with a duffel bag into such a woman’s car? What was the strange web of events into which I had suddenly become interwoven?
Was this woman’s embrace perhaps that shelter which is called the mother’s lap, and is the only place where people live secure on earth as long as it lasts? Was not such an embrace as this woman’s a little too large to enfold a travelling boy? Were not other women at Glacier more suitable, and yet doubtless with a nice embrace in their own way? Why hadn’t I leaned against Miss Hnallþóra, who had seen a ram? Wouldn’t I eventually have got fish—at least on the sly—instead of the lady having baked and baked until the Great Powers ate the cakes? This young man who wandered almost unpaid about the country on behalf of the bishop, couldn’t he by some knack have ingratiated himself with the merry widow Fína Jónsen from Hafnarfjörður and become a partner in the good scrubbing brush that had cleaned God’s House at Glacier? Wasn’t it time that the widow got rid of that boring ordinary Icelander, Jódínus the poet, whom she only loved in moderation, to put it mildly? I am sure that, thanks to such an excellent scrubbing brush, she would let me live with her down in Hafnarfjörður so that I would never have to think about anything other than the herring news on the radio and the bankrupties of the quick-freezing plants, and then go out to buy an evening paper.
Had I set off with this woman because she drove a bigger, sleeker car than other women at Glacier? And because she had inherited more than most other women, so that her millions lay scattered like brushwood all over the world in dollars, pounds, piastres, and pesos, unlikely to do anyone any good except her husband pastor Jón Prímus, who nonetheless was already the richest man in the world? Did I see in a vision jet planes and yachts, palaces and hotels, the golden sands in Miami and the skis in Garmisch-Partenkirchen—not forgetting the high culture in London Paris New York Los Angeles Buenos Aires and whatever they’re called, all these places in the weekly magazines? Not forgetting Lima in Peru, where the sea-mittens went.
Who am I to have fallen victim to the sorcery of stumbling on an image that Go
ethe had looked for and never found, eternity in female form? Had the Almighty yet again visited the person who was as totally destitute as the snow bunting on the ice, and revealed to him a mystery? The foremost women of the world all speak to me with one mouth: the Virgin Mary with the Infant on her knee; the Greek golden age with the washerwoman bun and Venus from Willendorf, vulgar and Simon-pure with her face hidden behind her hair and her buttocks bare, the bitch-goddess of mythology, the Virgin Whore of Romanticism, Ibsen’s fate-woman, the Mater Dolorosa of the Gospel—but above all the good abbess, Saint Theresa from Spain, in search of a new Saint John of the Cross.
45
Home
She stopped the car and we walked alongside running water in the world and watched mallards swimming in pools under the banks. There, too, swam the ever-bowing northern phalaropes (phalaropus hyperboreus). We sat on a moss-grown promontory with a bird-knoll on top, and we looked at a herd of horses in a hollow; the horses had started carrying their heads high after the ordeal of winter, biting one another, kicking up their heels, squealing, wrinkling their noses, mating. Newly marked lambs were still bloody about the head, some unlicked and only just born, others not born at all. Seldom had the sun been as bright all spring as today, but towards evening a gold-coloured fog was born far out to sea.
We came to a café that was some kind of modern heaven on earth, a compound of plastic, shellac, oil paint, turpentine, and glass but suffering from a lack of the smell of food and people. Here there was no sustenance to be had except boiled sweets. For thirst one could get carbon water, which is also out of this world, and we drank this from an unspeaking waitress. We sat side by side at a wafer-thin plastic table that stood on spindly iron legs in this shiny turpentine heaven outside existence. The woman looked from far within herself at her companion, caught his head now and again and placed it under her cheek, sighing and whispering that tonight we would go together to the end of the world; then put the head back where it belonged. But when we came out, the golden haze that a while ago had looked like a cold theatrical fire away on the horizon had reached land; a black cloud obscured the sun.
Under the Glacier Page 19
