He stands at his desk in the kitchen, raises his pen and waits. In front of him lies a folder with his poetry cycle Aroma of Ashes, to which he wants to add a poem to read out at the concert later. He wants to read something new and he waits for it to come. When it arrives, it will feel at home. He has everything here. His books that cover every wall, including the basement’s. His old harmonium, at which he used to compose when he was still doing that sort of thing – including ‘The Valeyri Waltz’, which continues to earn him royalties. The postcards he collects. The stones he brings back from the shore. His paints, pens, a pocket knife, some beautiful dead leaves. All his past shadows. He has turned into a barnacle here, as he’ll tell anybody who asks why he doesn’t move back south. Here he has his own life – and Unnur’s too, even though she passed away long ago. When it flutters onto this white sheet of paper, the poem will feel at home.
He lifts his pen expectantly, takes a sip of cold coffee, puts his mug back down and looks up, stroking his beard. From the window he sees Kata Choir gliding past on her bike, her forehead wrinkled in concentration, wearing a white dress with blue polka dots. He smiles and scribbles something in the notebook lying next to the white sheet of paper. He writes ‘sea’, ‘shore’, ‘grass’.
The poem has fluttered away into tomorrow, it has abandoned him. It has disappeared into the lands of limpid blue. He knew it had wings, sails, time, direction and tone. Everything flows. And tonight, when the sun has set and the wind abated, and the eider ducks have tucked their beaks under their wings, while a lone seagull soars towards its cliff like a sonnet, Smyrill the poet will return to the shore, sit on a rock with pen and notebook and wait patiently for his poem. He will hear a resonance. The song of the stars that sounds across the seven seas.
When I’m Sixty-Four
The afternoon teems with life. Standing on the steps outside his house after his daily nap, Árni puts his unlit pipe in his mouth and watches the dandelion seeds wafting in search of somewhere to take root. He hears the distant squeals of children playing on trampolines, the screeches of birds over the sea, the clattering of a motorboat returning to shore, lawnmowers, the burbling of a radio – and here comes Kata Choir on her bike, wearing a white dress with blue polka dots. He watches her pass and lifts his pipe, but she doesn’t seem to notice him.
He goes back inside, pees, washes the slumber dreams from his face, brushes his teeth – taking his time, as if it were morning – and gazes into the mirror for a while without seeing himself or anyone else. He goes to his bedroom, feeling the old, worn wooden floor shift warmly under his bare feet, a welcome sensation – for a moment he feels his own childhood feet on this floor, when he stayed here with his grandparents. He digs out a stripy blue T-shirt and blue-patterned pyjama bottoms, thinking: No reason I shouldn’t wear these.
He wanders into the kitchen, heats a pan of water on the stove and pours ground coffee into a filter, guessing the amount – although he knows it’s right, down to the last grain. He takes the pan off the stove and tips water over the coffee, filling the kitchen with its aroma. He pours himself a cup, lifts it to his lips – but suddenly it’s as if he can hear something; his eyes light up, he gets to his feet and goes back outside. He stands on the steps for a while, surveying the scene. He looks up at the church directly opposite his house, severe in its black wood panelling, he sees the mountain, feels the warm breeze on his cheeks, catches a glimpse of life in the village.
And goes back in, closing the door behind him.
He sits at the kitchen table and carefully takes a sip of his coffee, staring into the void in front of him. He doesn’t listen to the radio or read the papers. He is swaddled in many layers of silence. He returns his pipe to its place in the rack that he’d brought down from the attic when he moved here. It holds four other pipes and he chooses a new one with the same care that he applied to sipping his coffee. He has a packet of Edgeworth tobacco that he has sent specially from England (using old connections). He keeps the tobacco in the fridge with a potato in the packet to stop it from drying out. He enjoys the fumbling around that goes with pipe smoking, and thinks: No reason I shouldn’t smoke. He stuffs the pipe slowly – loosely at the bottom, tightly round the middle, loosely at the top. The zip as he strikes a match temporarily breaks the silence, and a moment later he is wreathed in the warm scent of tobacco and feels his mouth filling with its bittersweet taste. He watches the scented wisps of smoke wafting around the old timber-framed house.
Slowly he gets to his feet. Hanging on the back of his chair there’s a blue cardigan, with brown elbow patches he sewed on one winter’s evening last year; he puts it on, stretches and moves off to his study, pipe in mouth and hands in cardigan pockets.
When he came here two years ago, most of the villagers recognized him, wondered why he had come and concluded that he wanted to be alone. They all remembered his father, the world-famous champion trawlerman Tolli Tonne, for many years a Valeyri skipper before he moved south – cheated and moved south to become a herring king in west Reykjavík. Andrés from the museum said he remembered him as a boy visiting his grandparents in the old doctor’s house every summer, but people still didn’t understand why he’d bought the house – for a lot of money, as rumour had it, although the figures were somewhat fluid and became larger by the day as the story made its rounds. Most people thought that he was going to use it as a summer house, but autumn came and then winter and he was still there. He could sometimes be seen in a tracksuit, jogging around the village. Many found this strange, and Kalli said that he always ran as if he was on his way somewhere, so he promptly acquired the new name Árni Going Places and they stopped calling him Árni Moneybags, as before. Soon, he also started going to the swimming pool in the mornings and attending church on Sundays. Then, when the local choir’s first rehearsal was held in the autumn, he showed up to sing bass. During the break, he talked to the others and happily answered their questions about anything and everything, and also asked them his own friendly questions. Regularly, at six o’clock sharp, he appeared at the Puffin, the little restaurant in the centre of the village, where he read the papers and chatted sociably with the manager, Fríða, and anyone else who happened to fall into conversation with him. He would sit for a while over a glass of wine before eating supper, which was almost always the same: a dish of cod with garlic, fennel and white wine that he had taught the chef – a former hairdresser and drunkard from down south in Hafnarfjörður – how to prepare; except on Thursdays, when he had a pasta dish with anchovies that he’d also taught the man to make. The odd thing was that he never actually seemed to go anywhere at all. He knew few people, despite having once worked a bit for Jói in the Valeyri Fish Factory; he occasionally visited Jói at home and played whist with him and his beautiful wife, the mayor and her husband, and old Lára, Lalli Lár’s daughter, and other pillars of the community – but not Lalli Puffin, Lára’s brother, because those two were not on speaking terms. He liked it here.
He conversed about fishing and the weather, the government and those in power, the president and bankers. Occasionally he told stories from his former life. These weren’t tales of fancy houses, silly money and conspicuous consumption – when asked, he said that he hadn’t been part of all that financial debauchery, although he had of course known the principal players; instead, he sketched vignettes of meetings with the authorities, odd remarks in cloakrooms and embarrassing scenes at banquets.
He was impeccable. His demeanour was calm, his politeness unequivocal, his humility dignified. He sat in a corner of the Puffin, on an old family sofa that had once belonged to Lalli Lár, with his glass of white wine and an unlit pipe in the corner of his mouth which he would calmly relight from time to time – tall and slim, with a pianist’s large hands that could comfortably span octaves, with blue eyes under half-closed lids. Sometimes he had a piece of paper in front of him or a paper napkin, and sketched boats and Mount Svarri – and Fríða. Sometimes, when she wasn’t too busy, she wo
uld sit next to him, he being a man of the world and she having been brought up in Karfavogur in east Reykjavík, among poets and artists. She was of an uncertain age, well preserved, with hennaed hair and a beautiful body easily visible through her tight T-shirts and jeans, and sometimes he thought that she might visit him, breathless, late one evening, in the dark, to go with him to the old doctor’s bed. He wasn’t sure whether he would welcome her or turn her away.
As time went on others came to sit with him, and if someone plucked up the courage to ask why he had moved here, he replied that he wanted a break from people. ‘There are such a lot of people down south,’ he said, ‘and they all want something from me… I wanted…’ he said. ‘I had to get away.’ And he repeated it, dreamily and a little bit affectedly: ‘to get away’.
The villagers sometimes mimicked him when he wasn’t around: to get away… But they believed it. They never asked him for anything and never invited him to anything, but they were proud to be part of that distance he had sought. They felt the need to defend him and shield him from intruders, and when visitors arrived asking about his house and his circumstances they would close up and assume enigmatic expressions and say they didn’t know anything about him and weren’t interested in him, pointing at an abandoned house that had been empty for many years. Everybody knew that he had a secret. Everybody knew that he was guilty of something. Everybody knew that he was serving a sentence of some kind.
This morning he had come outside onto the steps as usual, freshly awake, and looked around with an expression of concentration, as if he had heard something. He had gone back in, drunk his morning coffee and lit his first pipe of the day, filling the old timber house with floating veils of smoke and a soft aroma, and then entered his study and switched on his computer. The day passed. He knew that although he was only sixty-four, he had, being on his own, become an old man. Here he inhabited a desert island. There was no one left. He would die alone among people who were, despite everything, strangers. He deserved this. He had not lived his life wisely. He had got carried away.
When he founded the advertising agency Tailwind in the mid-1980s, with Ágústa and a couple of their friends, it quickly became clear that he was blessed with a talent for life and work in Icelandic society. He was made for the job and the job was made for him. He was equally clever in every aspect of the business. He was a superb draughtsman, could compose a catchy jingle and a slick advertising slogan. He could bend words and make them dance in a wondrous way, sparkling in whichever direction he fancied; they would simply appear when he summoned them, hurry to meet his demands, obedient and humble. He did all the voice-overs for the television adverts himself, with a voice so full of yearning that everyone who heard it was struck by a longing for whatever it was promoting, and so trustworthy that they all knew that the surest way to satisfy this longing would be to obey the voice. His fleet fingers produced reams of drawings. In everything he did, his connection with the target audience’s dreams and aspirations was so unexpected and clever that he seemed to be able to send people up any old blind alley in pursuit of the dancing words and the sensuous voice. His marketing plans withstood all fluctuations in consumer demand. He had a nose for business, spotted trends before others did – and the inevitable downturns too; he sensed the ripples in the nation’s emotional life and knew when to provoke people into buying and when not to. He had a particular gift for picking up on those typical Icelandic crazes, which are like a prospector’s seam of gold or a canny angler’s bumper catch: skipping ropes, toffee, cars, shoes, coats, hair accessories… He became famous for casting his commercial net in waters nobody else thought would yield anything, but where he often reaped a rich reward. He was King of the Catch, just like his father before him – Tolli Tonne, who made his name in the herring years by going where his fairy godmother led him and landing tonnes of fish.
He knew how to read Icelandic society, he knew that it revolved around connections – making connections, being connected. Ever since primary school, he’d understood how to cultivate connections with everyone he met; everywhere he was the life and soul of the party, which was why his dentist was a personal friend, as were the builder and the Member of Parliament, the car mechanic and the bank manager, the bricklayer, the barber, the editor. Acquaintances old and new loved it when he sought their help and felt honoured when he asked them for a favour.
He read the times. The 1980s and 1990s were a period of revolution, when two conflicting economic movements met and would, sooner or later, end up fighting one another – and when that happened he would, if he was smart, be able to profit from the situation, be connected to all the individuals involved without attaching himself to either faction. He knew that he needed to have access to the old establishment – to the fourteen families that seemed to spread their tentacles everywhere, and were thus commonly called the ‘octopus’ – while still bonding with the new, aggressive killer whales, and even the squid, which most people underestimated but remained, nevertheless, a reliable source of revenue – yes, and the sardines and sea scorpions and cod and haddock and even the fucking sea urchins, he said with a grin one evening as they discussed things at his and Ágústa’s home. And their two friends sat there, stolid and sociable, with no inkling that within a month they would be bought out of the firm.
There wasn’t a living creature in the business ocean whose confidence and trust he did not enjoy. He worked for all political parties and all business sectors; he whisked up careers with a magician’s skill. He created a sincere man of the people out of a recalcitrant dairy specialist; a sharp-as-a-needle, red-hot socialist out of a lifeless Danish teacher; a growling Reykjavík-hater out of a village idiot from the western fjords. He created people and trends, life and existence. With bold strokes and in unexpected new directions he shaped reality. He invented pop stars and fashion icons, brought bands together, and duets and trios. He would show up and say, ‘No, you should try…’ Or: ‘Listen, have you thought of…?’ Or: ‘You are only supposed to…’ Or: ‘Remember…’
He sailed with the tailwind, controlling it for each and every customer.
He was always creating. Days passed – evenings, nights, months and years. He was happy. Sometimes he would glance at Ágústa in the evening, before he turned on his computer to continue creating, and think: We should do something together. She sat in the red chair in the corner of the dining room with her feet tucked under, reading novels. He gazed at the soft curve of her neck, her fingers fidgeting as she read, the blonde hair that rippled down her neck and that she sometimes twisted into all kinds of knots and ponytails and then released again to fall over her broad shoulders – there was an unrest about her, and he sometimes sensed this and thought: We should do something together.
But he said nothing. He disappeared into his computer and began to change the way the wind blew, for other people’s benefit.
Sometimes he thought: This is not life. This is just existence. We link our happiness too much to our success, we link our success too much to our well-being – and we link our well-being too much to our consumption. We link our lives too much to our existence.
And yet he didn’t know where such thoughts would lead him. To life? What was he to do? Try to make himself unhappy? Starve himself? Stop living in the beautiful house on Fjólugata, where thrushes and snow buntings sang in the garden in summer, and move to an old turf farmhouse? He mocked himself, thrust the thought away. But used it later in an advertisement for a new variety of tea.
They shared everything and took turns to do everything. He made his anchovy pasta and Indian dishes, poring over recipes and slavishly measuring level spoonfuls – as insecure in his cooking as he was self-confident in all his other creations. Ágústa, however, always cooked the same fish dish, which always tasted different – was never the same – always a new marine adventure. She constantly experimented with new spices and new vegetables and new shellfish, even if the basic dish was always cod and garlic, fennel and white wine. They
drank a glass of white wine each as they ate; he loved watching the bracelets dangle from her wrists as she held her glass, waved it about and laughed with a kind of restless grace, as she told stories of her friend who kept walking into doors, or her mother, who was always begging her to give her a different hairdo but, when it came to the crunch, never dared to go through with it, or of eccentric cats she’d had, hopeless boyfriends, men harassing her when she was an air hostess, and beautiful paintings in cities around the world that had brought her to tears. After supper he chewed nicotine gum and drank a cup of coffee, and then moved into the old dining room, where his computer sat on the table that had belonged to his mother. When he looked up from his evening’s work he would see Ágústa sitting in the red chair with her feet tucked under, cutting something out or watching television. She had brown eyes. He thought to himself: We should do more together.
*
On Thursday evenings they made love. He looked forward to it all week – perhaps this was a relic from when he was young and the television channels didn’t broadcast on Thursdays. He would cook pasta with anchovies, which he found stimulating, and have it with white wine, which also stimulated him, and he dressed in an old red smock or a wide-necked tunic in which he imagined he looked attractive. Each time he touched her he felt a tingle. He touched her hair, cheek, neck, collarbones, arms, breasts, back; he slowly moved her thighs apart, opening her. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, stretched, stroked his chest, grabbed the back of his head and pulled him towards her. The pleasure was overwhelming and fleeting. Afterwards, they lay naked, side by side, and talked about colours and poems. This was their open space. He lay on his back, with outstretched arms and an as yet uncomposed melody in his head.
And the Wind Sees All Page 2
