Anyway, that was the beginning of the end between Louise and me. After that we just tried to live on, as if we were still a family, as if we were able to forget; trying to be adults. For the sake of Jonas.
The week after our violent argument, we manage to create a miracle of harmony. My mother-in-law tends to my needs.
Jonas is unusually quiet while his parents busy themselves with illogical mental exercises. Now and then he asks if we can go fishing.
Louise is busy carrying on long and agitated telephone conversations with her girlfriends. As usual she questions why all the professors at the university are men who do not approve her new and fantastic combinations of subjects and wonders when a divorce is most suitable, taking the age of a child into consideration.
The whole point of her telephone monologues is of course to show the importance of her life compared to mine.
In order to have access to an available telephone line, I register at a hotel where, along with a few other researchers, I set up an opposition camp. We act as a sort of support group behind the union in the usual game play between labor and management. An economist with party book in his pocket turns out to be a real nice guy. The world consists simply of “we” and “they” to him.
While the economist insists that everything can be looked upon objectively, we live well. All I have to do is sign my name and I have both a hotel room and a per diem. My uncle comes over one day and asks how things are going.
I never thought my uncle would pose that question. I am able to calm him.
“People will always want to drink from exquisite crystal, right?”
“I mean with you. How are things going with you?”
My uncle has to leave without an answer. I don’t know how things are going with me.
Fall rushes like a train right into our black winter. Jonas and Louise return to Stockholm. We are commuting as usual. But the chaos is not comfortable. To escape I try falling in love with a waitress at the hotel. But it doesn’t work. I have neither the conviction nor the ability to concentrate. The economist enters the stage and comes up the winner. He perhaps asked her to come to his room and look at his party book?
There are moments when I feel desperate and wish I could return to the sea. But how can I do that when the country no longer has a merchant marine? Besides I need glasses nowadays. It’s no good. I will never learn to see like old boatswain Bengtsson. I wonder if he ended his days in Marseilles?
My day looks as if it needed the whole week. Everything is normal. A meeting with Axel in Stockholm is set up. This is our first meeting after the business with Louise. I have spent great energy to avoid seeing him, but now it is unavoidable. With a faint smile, I drag myself through the familiar old corridors, while acquaintances hug each other, turn away, or just hurry past.
As expected, Axel could not have been friendlier. And I have no double-barreled shotgun along. We converse as if nothing at all had happened and get right down to the business at hand.
Louise has had an offer to write about the male versus the female world of imagery in some kind of oasis in Algeria.
Axel is good at convincing people. He has no trouble selling a bewildered student on the idea of doing a three-unit essay on the practical problems of shoe brushing for left-handed individuals.
I nod. And understand that Louise has swallowed it all tooth and nail. How does he see my future?
We are getting there.
“I have a feeling that you have isolated yourself,” Axel says, sounding like a concerned and troubled physician.
Obviously Axel has been contaminated by the modern catchwords. I play along.
“I feel the same way.”
“Good.”
“My father-in-law is going to buy that advertising sign in the center of Stockholm,” I say. “Isn’t it weird? He’ll probably use it to urge the Swedish people to vote conservatively. That’s his dream. Isn’t he strange? An impossible man to understand. What does he get out of it?”
“You’re always full of little anecdotes,” Axel says, a discontented wrinkle in his forehead. “I read your proposed contribution to our next conference. It has no more meat in it than what you said right now. Why don’t you grow up?”
Axel is obviously fixated on the image of me as an immature child. In order not to disappoint him, I jump him and try to strangle him. If he insists on playing the part of my father, he has to take the consequences.
He is surprisingly strong. We tumble around among piles of papers that illuminate the thoughts of the Swedish people with merciless academic astuteness. It is embarrassing and improperly intimate to fight the man who has been like a father to me during a few dizzying years of hunger for knowledge. And who has had the bad taste to be seduced by my wife. I keep hitting him as best I can but get as much of a thrashing back. Rumors travel like wildfire within the walls of the university. Before we are through with each other, the corridor is filled with people. Somebody has opened the door to get a better view. But nobody tries to stop the fight.
When we have had enough and go to wash up, I have managed to split Axel’s upper lip. He might need stitches. On the left side of my face, he has given me a throbbing black eye. We push our way back through to Axel’s office. He closes the door firmly.
“We have work to do.”
We clean up the office in silence. I am already behind schedule in my day and feel nauseous when Axel suggests we both take the day off. Nobody is even going to notice our absence, he insists.
The fight seems to have put him in an excellent mood. For quite some time he has wanted to go and take a look at the French Impressionists. I must have read about the exhibition? If we go right now before lunch, we don’t have to deal with big crowds.
Silently and staring stubbornly at the ground, I accompany Axel. In the museum’s echoing hall we are the first visitors. I can only see with my right eye. Axel grabs a light hold of my arm and guides me to a small painting that from afar looks to be the least interesting of the lot. It is murky and dark and not at all what you would expect from the French Impressionists.
“I’m going to show you something.”
I look at the painting and read: “Claude Monet. Coin d'appartement, 1875.”
“Yes?”
What does he want?
“Tell me what you see.”
It’s part of Axel’s pedagogic splendidness never to mention his own conclusions. He is of the opinion that a continuous dialogue is the goal.
“A boy,” I say. “He stands a small distance inside the door with … is it climbing plants or drapes? There is a woman dressed in black. … I didn’t know you were teaching art history too.”
Axel sighs and picks at the scab on his swollen lip. It gives me pleasure to note that his speech is slurred.
“I don’t wish you ill. You take care of that very well yourself. Perhaps you aren’t any more than what you usually reduce yourself to be — an emotional idiot, caught in your own pain. You’ll never see other people or the rest of the world if you don’t make an effort.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “That was nicely put. Really decent of you to fuck my wife, too.”
Axel shakes me. His voice echoes in the empty exhibition hall.
“Louise wanted you. She wanted you as a man. Not as a small boy who never dares step out of that goddamned door. For a moment she needed someone who could see her. It happened to be me. Think about it. I have to go.”
He is in a rage and storms out through the swinging glass doors, leaving me to do exactly as he bade me. I stand in front of the painting and think. Unfortunately I can’t think of anything impressively intelligent. Other people seem capable of spouting judgments and opinions the moment they see a splash of oil on a canvas. It has the opposite effect on me.
All of a sudden, I feel Louise rustling by my side. Axel had dragged me here by order of Louise. She had obviously just accompanied Jonas to Småland and turned right back around. Wasn’t that decent of Axel? Such
a helpful type. First he helps Louise, then me, and now both of us.
“Do you see it?” Louise asks. “The oil lamp there in the darkness? It’s placed at the exact same point as the woman’s clitoris. And the clinging vines cover the hard doorjambs. And far inside sits the most dangerous one of them all. Mommy. Monet probably didn’t know what he did. Perhaps he himself never became more than a boy who never took that step outside. Otherwise why would he paint so many women? Look around. Women and children. Idyllic outdoor scenes. But they are being observed. Perhaps by that little boy who never became a man. We were here last Sunday, Axel and 1.1 thought that you and I could talk to each other?”
Louise is rather amusing at times. She ought to be a comic book. Perhaps both of us belong in one?
“Jonas?” I ask.
“With my mother.”
“OK then. Go ahead and talk.”
With sadness and logic, Louise suggests a trial separation. She speaks of Africa and describes Algeria as if I had never been there. I let her ramble on. I should settle down in Småland, she says, and become a father.
We were extremely reasonable and I am still nauseous from it.
It’s early afternoon, and we walk, arm in arm like an old retired couple, home to the apartment. When all is over for a couple, there are still plenty of details to see to.
We go to bed early and undress quickly, like a couple of siblings competing to see who gets into bed first. I negotiate a bit of love-making for old times’ sake. It is as if I wanted to drag her out into my own white desert.
During the night I awaken with the same piercing stomachache as once before. I scream and hit my head against the wall. In some strange way, it helps the stomach pain if I create pain elsewhere. Louise is bewildered. I refuse to go to the hospital. They might put me straight into surgery.
I have always wanted to meet our neighbors on the same floor. Now I do. Only a few years ago, Clara Larsson was our country’s foremost porno film star. Then all of a sudden she disappeared. Many speculated that she may have taken the big step across Øresund and fused with the jolly porno gang in Denmark. But in fact, there she is, reborn as an adult student, wife of a doctor, and next-door neighbor to us. Her husband is friendly and firm. She herself is lithe and strong as a female hunter in the field. I haven’t a chance. There are four of them, wrapping me in blankets and carrying me to the elevator. Clara Larsson is unresponsive to my questions having to do with how a porno movie is made.
“Perhaps I could give you a call sometime?”
“You do that,” she says.
“What’s your number?”
“It’s unlisted.”
Her husband is a doctor. As such he has seen everything and he understands. He brings out his car. They stow me away inside and unload me at Emergency.
With a choked voice and shivering with cramps, I maintain firmly that I am perfectly healthy. Clara Larsson walks off. She has done her bit. Louise confers with the doctors and, finally, I am left lying there, all alone.
“I’m not in pain,” I say. “I mean, it was when I was a kid that I had this pain. You mustn’t cut into me. Promise!”
“We promise,” says a man of my own age, nodding.
I shiver. What if he thinks of Clara Larsson instead of me when he puts the knife to me. But strangely enough, he keeps his promise. Sometime toward dawn, the pains fade away. We agree that I should stay for observation.
“But not on this floor,” says yet another doctor. “Guess which one?”
He reads my chart and continues, “You may walk on your own. Then we’ll bring you down and take a little look inside you. We’ll make a complete inventory before we even think of cutting. OK?”
I am the man they must not make holes in. I wander off, completely beside myself with happiness, to the floor for the insane.
The psychologist has wonderfully brown eyes and looks like Rita Hayworth. We establish perfect rapport right away, and I decide to stay for good. She thinks it is every human being’s duty to understand herself or himself. Sometimes I believe what she says.
I never take any of the medicine, however. I get the pills from the nurse and stuff them into the end post of the iron bed, having unscrewed the small plastic lid. After a day or so, I have to pour water into the post for the pills to dissolve and make room for new ones. One night a strange hissing sound awakens me and I discover that the bed has tipped over. The hollow iron leg has eroded away. In spite of my repeated statements that I am certifiably mad, I stand accused of vandalizing county property when the damage is discovered. Nobody considers what could have happened inside me had I swallowed the medicine. But things could be worse. I have a voluntary nervous breakdown and can decide by myself when to go home.
And when Louise sends a telegram, asking me to come and see her, I throw myself into the Volvo and turn its nose toward Algeria. As if I had not learned one single thing. That was the beginning of the story. Or the end.
But I believe the nonstop drive through Europe is the end. I gain a new understanding of Sweden, where everything is clean, quiet, and, most of all, empty. Black fields with spots of spring snow. Pine forests stretching toward the iron sky. No visible human beings in the village I drive through. The windows in the Pentecostal revival church are illuminated. A lone caretaker sweeps the stairs. There is probably a prayer meeting inside. The railroad station is silent and dark. It has been turned into an emigrant museum. Two refugees from Chile stand beside the hot dog stand. Dressed in thick, padded overalls, they can hardly move. We nod to each other and chew on our hot dogs. They smile warily, and I get on the road again. It’s as lonely as in the Sahara. Until a small boy walks along, happily swinging his schoolbag with books. His future erases the desolation.
I am home and yet not at home. The oil company has removed the gas pump in front of my father-in-law’s place. People prefer to drive forty miles to a larger town to buy gas.
I am disappointed that Jonas is not at home. He is visiting my uncle. I am uncertain whether or not I should join him there. But when the kitchen clock has ticked loud and long enough between each word my in-laws and I find to say to each other, I decide to walk over to my uncle’s house. It’s cold and black outside. Light spills out from the houses, revealing dirty snowdrifts.
My maternal grandmother had one of those glass balls with a motif from Rio de Janeiro inside. The ball was the size of a fist, and when turned upside down it was snowing over Rio de Janeiro. Grandma was always wondering if it really did snow in Rio de Janeiro. Once I offered to investigate the matter for her. She looked at me, and her eyes were disapproving and astonished.
“It’s more fun not to know.”
That’s what she said.
I think of her words as I am standing outside my uncle’s house, looking through the window straight into the kitchen. My uncle is a wonderful, fun person. My son, Jonas, sits in front of him at the kitchen table. He is trying hard to concentrate. I don’t have to guess what he is doing. He is trying to wiggle his ears. One day I will tell him the story of how I ended up in this part of the country. I have to tell about the past in order to break out of it. I know exactly how I will begin:
The snowflakes had a hypnotic effect on me. I was getting more and more drowsy, but I needed to keep my eyes open. What if I missed my station and got off at the wrong one, rushed out into the white arctic tundra, totally dazed, only to be met by wolves who were ready to tear me to pieces! Now, that would be unforgivable and unworthy of a true Trapper.
(From My Life as a Dog)
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My Father, His Son Page 26
