“José, come to me, tonight, late.”
We got to our feet and drove to town without saying another word, then parted with a silent handshake. I knew that his eyes were burning when we parted, but I did not look up. I showed him only my eyelids and fled in the next instant into the hotel.
26.
I had done everything to gratify the whims of my soul; perfumed the cushions on the sofa; burned incense in a little brazier on the mantelpiece. Wine stood on the table in cold, clammy bottles with faded labels and dusty necks: this wine had waited for eager lips for a hundred years, and in a hundred years its spirit, its magic, and its fire had intensified in the dark cellar. Tonight the consecration was imminent.
I had finished my perfumed bath and dressed myself in my softest silk, both outerwear and undergarments. I had put the boy to bed an hour earlier and instructed the maid to leave me alone. The clock struck ten; I threw myself down onto the soft sofa and waited. I listened motionless and silent to every sound that could be heard out in the hall, my senses as delicate and keen as an animal’s. Sometimes I tiptoed to the door and listened. But there was still no José.
Was everything still safe?
I peeked out into the hotel hallway, but no one was about. My maid was sleeping somewhere on the top floor. My guests usually rang at my apartment’s front door without the intercession of the staff, so everything should have been safe.
But then I started thinking about the boy. Would he sleep through it? I thought. My goodness, what if the boy should wake up! This thought struck me immediately with terrible fear. The boy slept in my room, farther down the hall, and when I considered how sensitive he was to everything that happened around him I thought that there was nothing more likely than that he would wake when I least expected it. Our whispering would wake him; the slightest tinkling of a glass or creaking of a chair would be enough to startle him awake. Maybe he would suddenly be standing between the portieres to check on his mother out in the parlor, standing there in his white nightgown, his eyes deep and blue, wide and inquisitive, like the sky itself, his golden locks a mess. He runs his eyes around the room and spies his mother; yes, spies his mother. No, my dear God, that must never happen! Never, never could the boy know that his mother was – that she was – no, never!
I’ve got to double-lock the bedroom door, I thought, and stole into the bedroom to make sure that he was asleep. At his bedside burned a dull night-light, which cast a faint gleam on his innocent and beautiful face as he slept there with one palm under his cheek. My beloved little boy! His locks fell over his little hand; his sleep was deep and tranquil. I stood for several moments over his bed and lost myself in gazing at this angel face-to-face, this holy untouched being who was flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, this, my little god, with which my womb had been graced. And when I forced myself to look back into the parlor where everything was prepared, like a chapel where I had planned to offer my body as a sacrament, I was suddenly seized by ice-cold terror. It was as if my heart frosted over in my breast; I thought that I would faint. My dear God, what had I been planning to do?
How could I have ever thought to commit this crime against my child? What sort of excuse could I ever make to this unsuspecting, unstained, innocent child after such defilement? Because what I planned to do was the same as dishonoring the child itself, my own flesh and blood! How could an adulterous female ever be so audacious as to lay a fingertip on her child’s body, embrace such a holy angel, even if he had once been the flesh of her flesh? In the morning I would be neither a mother nor a woman anymore; I would be an abominable beast, smitten with filth, a soulless animal, a sow that has rolled itself over in the chaff!
And with what feelings would I look into my husband’s eyes when he came home next? What a crime against him! All these years he has surrounded me with luxury, me, more ungrateful, more selfish than any harlot, and I have actually intentionally refused to fulfill the most basic obligations of the wife despite all of his benefactions. I’ve been demanding and wasteful all these years without once extending him a hand, or anything else for that matter, for his gifts. Whenever he wanted he could have shown me out the door of his house like a parasite that had no rights at all! But his patience and benevolence have been untiring. And in these rooms, which he paid for with his money, where every single thing around me was a gift from him, yes, every thread in my clothing, where his child slept safe and sound in his innocence, I did not hesitate to use the first chance that presented itself to drink from the cup of the whore. No, God Almighty, save me from this sin!
Wake up, dear Steinn; wake up! My dear, wake up and sit with Mama a little while. Mama wants to give you pieces of chocolate with rum inside, as many as you want! Listen to me, my dear Steinn, stay awake with Mama for a bit! Mama feels so bad.
A few minutes later a confidential knock came on the door, so quiet that it could barely be heard. And the door opened. There stood José. He was clearly startled when he saw the boy by my side on one of the sofas. His glance was like red-hot iron.
“Pardon me!” he said. “I thought that you were alone!”
“Please, señor,” said the boy at my side. “Have some rum chocolate!”
“No, José, forgive me!” said I, and I stood up with my breath caught in my throat and walked to the door. “Forgive me, but I must ask you to leave! I dare not, José; I cannot; will not! I wasn’t in my right mind this morning. It didn’t mean anything. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
First he looked at me, then at the boy, and because the boy was watching us he was hesitant to touch me.
“Make the boy go!” he whispered commandingly. “I’ll take you! A man cannot be ridiculed in such a way!”
“No, the boy will remain here. If you don’t go, the boy will defend me. Go!”
Then he addressed the boy and said: “Why don’t you go to your room to sleep, dear boy? I have to speak to your mother a little about something that wouldn’t interest you.”
But I knew that the moment I was out of the boy’s sight, José would take me in his arms and I would in the same instant lose all my will and all my self-control. My determination would immediately burn to ashes before his eyes. By receiving a cruel kiss from his lips my soul and my body would be in his power.
“No, Steinn, stay here!” I said.
José waited for a moment at the door and looked at me; that was the first and perhaps the last time that I have stood face-to-face with the background of my being, la meta profetata fuori del mondo. His glance contained the universe of my dreams: another hemisphere, an unknown power, mountains on the other side of the Earth, the silence of the rain forests, the prairie, the whole prairie in its insatiable endlessness, death, the fulfillment of all. And I lacked the courage this first, perhaps last time.
“So you are sending me away?” he said, and added, when I nodded my head in agreement: “With death in my heart.”
He put on his hat in the doorway and turned to go. For a moment I stood as if deranged; I know only this one thing for certain, that in that second I forgot my child – yes, I believe that I would have lost myself in the sight of the child had not José’s magnanimity determined the outcome: he had turned from me.
“No, José,” I said, and touched his arm with my fingertips.
“No, José,” I pleaded. “Not with death in your heart!”
But he had reached the foyer and did not turn to look. I took two steps after him and pleaded:
“Forgive me, José!”
But he was gone.
27.
Early the next morning I sent my husband a telegram: “Come immediately; I must speak to you.”
He telephoned immediately and came that night. I met him at the train station and kissed him. I said that I loved him and was his wife, but that José had tried to steal my love. I said that I hated José. That night I begged him to forgive me for everything that I had done against him. And he forgave me. “From now on I am entirely yours, as I was befor
e Steinn was born,” I said. All the same his caresses were a torture, a mortification, a physical and spiritual injury. And in just a short time he was asleep. I woke just before dawn and looked at him in the gleam from the night-light, at how he slept. I hated him; I wanted to cut his throat. I loved José. I regretted having missed my chance: I had lacked the courage to be craven. One is never gripped with such aching regret as when one has lost the opportunity to sin. The world’s misfortune springs from people’s lack of courage to sin.
I had cast away the cup of bliss that sin alone is able to offer. Maybe I would have been allowed to die in José’s arms that night. The highest bliss is to die in sin. But José had gone to South America. Perhaps he is dead. And my husband brought me to Iceland a little later, home to the tepid banality, home to the poesy, the lie, and the dissimulation.
Love is the only true life. Only love is life. Only love is reality. Everything but love is a lie. Without love everything is worthless and there is no comfort but death. And death, perhaps, is the lover par excellence. A true woman would much rather sacrifice her tears and blood to the murderer of her soul than allow her hunger and thirst for the mystery of the most blissful misfortune be disgraced in the tepid banality of marriage. A woman can never have a higher goal in life than to seize her opportunities to steal from the tree of knowledge.
28.
Diljá threw down the pale, irregularly written pages; no, she had no desire to read any more, had skipped whole sections and still had more than half left to read. She felt as if her hands were filthy, as if a raw egg had been cracked open over them. She hurried over to the windows to look into the face of reality. Spring had arrived in all its glory, the sky over the fresh and green Landakot meadow blue and deep. It was hardly possible, when one looked into this sky, to believe anything other than that life was beautiful, and as eternal as it was beautiful.
Love, love: the most divine thing in life, she thought.
No, dear God, it cannot be that life is sinful. This blue sky would not vault the Earth if it were as abominable as what was contained in these pages. Sacrilege had been committed against her most cabalistic dreams: in place of visions that are dreamt of in maidenhood’s unperturbed mind, her soul had been violated and horrid pornographic pictures smeared onto the wall. From now on this repugnance would form the backdrop to her dreams and would bully her night and day. “My dear God, obliterate these awful visions!” she cried out loud, as she clutched her head like a man losing his mind, rocked backward and forward in her seat. My God, allow me to behold love in its proper light! Love that is holy, inexpressible, how could the most blissful dream of the human heart be a crime against – the holiest thing that anyone can know! Allow me to disappear into the spring sky, out into the purity of Heaven, the eternal blue farthest, farthest out, because I am so frightened!
She looked with the eyes of her friend into the vast, immeasurable blue, because only Steinn Elliði knew what was right and what wrong.
Love; love, chastity, God, Heaven – he understood everything. She cannot think, knows nothing; she hears only several nonsensical words trickle down like rain, or better put, tumble down like hail:
“Steinn Elliði; Steinn Elliði; Steinn Elliði.”
At that moment her desire was so overwhelming that she felt as if her heart would soon be unable to stand it any longer.
29.
She walks up Laugavegur one day at the start of June, alone, having set herself the task of pilfering books from Steinn Elliði. His books had always been available to her, and they were more interesting than most other books. It was a dry, bright day; a fresh breeze from the north, fish trucks on perpetual journeys back and forth as one enters the city, the sides of the trucks painted with black tasteless letters: h/f Ylfingur,21 and she shrinks back now and again from these gorgons; they raise a cloud of dust, bellow and screech. The girl is relieved to turn at last onto the private drive to Grímúlfur’s house down by the sea. His lawn is soft and green like lustrous webwork, and the cuckooflower with the desolate pallor of its chaste eye stares like a young girl out into the verdure and the blue. On the edge of the ditch alongside the road the buttercups tilt their heads, their faces mini-reflections of the sun, fat and blissful. From the lawn ascends an intoxicating and pleasant scent that mingles with the gentle breeze to pervade the girl’s senses, blended with the smell of kelp and sea salt from the straits.
Goodness gracious, how blue the straits are today, thinks the girl, so deep blue and dark blue under the sun, just barely white-misted where the water pulls away from the land, where the waves break; and on the opposite side of the straits stand the peaks, Skarðsheiði like a half-chiseled masterpiece by Einar Jónsson,22 Esja bowed like a sorceress in prayer, and over all this artwork towers the sky, blue as God, eternity, and death.
The girl steps in pretty shoes along the dazzling road, and who should come to meet her but the breeze, which thrusts itself up against her as if it owns her, making her dress flutter, and then does various other things that it is not permitted to do.
The house at Rauðarárvík was more opulent than it was beautiful, built of white-painted concrete, with a red roof, low balconies on the south side, broad steps leading up to an expressionless main door, its style cold, lacking nuance, devoid of all artistry, displaying only the appearance of mechanical calculations.
An elderly woman shows her in to the custodian in the basement: a comely sitting room, portraits of Jón Sigurðsson 23 and Jesus Christ, and sitting in a modest easy chair, Guðmundur in his shirtsleeves, wearing glasses with rusty frames and smoking a pipe, reading from yellowed issues of Politiken that lie in great stacks on the floor. He is a bald man with a gray smiling mustache, one of those kinds of men who start their existence on the parish, slave away afterward like hacks for sixty years without keeping the pot boiling, finally hit the jackpot in their sixties by pure luck, and are now beside themselves with joy from gratitude toward God and men.
“Bless you, Diljá my dear,” he says with long, drawn-out emphasis on every syllable. “Blessed little lady, my how she has grown big. Gunna, Gunna! Come here, my dear, and look at this! What do you think the boys are saying?! How many years has it been since she had two braids behind her head and wanted to play ball games out here in the yard? Gunna, do you hear that? How are you now, my blessed darling? How is all that blessed family doing down south? You don’t suppose they’ll make an appearance here in our blessed cold country this summer? No? Here everything’s always the same, as the girl can see, absolute affluence, God be praised, and I tending our saplings here in the yard now and then, and damn it if the grass hasn’t become absolutely gorgeous seven weeks in, since we didn’t spare the manure on it in the winter, let me tell you! I mowed three times last year though it was hardly worth it the last time, and now it’s almost a month since I took the shutters off the windows, and I open all the windows from time to time to let in the blessed breeze, and in between all that I sit here comfortably like the Count of Monte Cristo and fumble my way through the Danish newspapers that I found in a trunk in the storeroom. And the older they are the more amusing’s the stuff that’s in them, such as, for instance, the Alberti scandal and the Dreyfus affair; how I remember all those grand events now.
“I was at sea in Reyðarfjörður the year that Alberti got in his mess, but these days nothing remarkable happens anymore; all it is now is endless whining about politics–”
After obtaining the keys from the custodian she opened the foyer door and went into the house. Of course Steinn Elliði’s library was on the second floor, but she automatically found herself walking straight into the living room as she was accustomed to doing when the family was home. It was here that boring guests usually sat over their coffee in deep chairs and soft sofas, rattling off vanities for Jófí’s amusement; here there was usually wine on the tables and blue cigarette smoke hovering over the dark furniture, but now it was bleak looking, all the comforts of home piled one on top of the other li
ke wares in a storage room, the window curtains pulled down and the parquet floor bare.
Only the grand piano, that old friend of the family, had not been moved: it and the girl shared common memories; she longed to thank it for everything old and good by stroking its toothed mouth! There was once a time when Steinn had sat upon its stool and decided to become a musical virtuoso on a par with Franz Liszt. She had sat there in the corner and patiently listened to him play after all the others had fled. Several months later it was she who had sat at the instrument, while he stood behind her and sang like Enrico Caruso. There had often been singing here, but now all those notes were lost out in the immeasurable.
At one time there had been no other composer in the world but Edvard Grieg. And Steinn had been uncommonly quick to learn his works, even his most chameleonic song:
Jeg kaldte dig mit lykkebud,
Jeg kaldte dig min stjerne24
He had sung this song after only a half-hour’s practice, whereas Diljá had finally lost heart and given up before its peculiar military cadence, after she’d practiced it a hundred times a day for half a month. Its progressions deceived her.
A little later no other composer in the world but Schubert captured Steinn’s soul. Nothing expressed the human heart with more melancholy magic than the serenade Leise flehen; it held him spellbound night after night; finally he got up one morning around daybreak and slunk down to the parlor, sat down at the piano and began to play the prelude, cautiously, cryptically. He sang:
The Great Weaver From Kashmir Page 9
