The Discoverer (82 page)

Haakon Hansen was in a good mood as he and Jonas rattled along the narrow road in the old bus. Jonas had brought a bag of King of Denmark aniseed balls, which he thought might be just the gift for Uncle Melankton. He knew intuitively, although back then he could not have put it into words, that he was to be offered a glimpse of his own potential. He was about to have his fortune told.

Jonas would never forget that warm summer day and the visit to the old folks’ home: the large, white wooden building set amid copper-coloured pines with swaying tops, the blue sky with clouds scudding across it. He and his father walked along a path, over a soft carpet of pine needles, surrounded by the scent of resin and salt water. He was going to meet the family genius, the ‘walking encyclopedia’.

A nurse in a pristine white uniform showed them up the worn stairs to a room in which they found Uncle Melankton sitting by the window in a mouldering spindleback chair; a room with flaking paintwork, a room that stank of piss and sweet, half-rotten bananas. ‘Someone to see you,
Melankton
,’ she cried, as if talking to a child. Jonas noticed that the room was
completely
bare except for a bed and a chair. Not a picture. Not a book. The old man was wearing a shirt that had once been white, but which was now almost yellow, and most definitely not freshly ironed. He was looking out at the garden. He’s dreaming of apricots, Jonas thought. He sees Venus standing in the middle of a fountain, encircled by laden apricot trees.

‘Hello, Uncle Melankton,’ Haakon Hansen said a little too cheerily and rather uncertainly. Even at that point he must have known.

Slowly the old man turned round. Jonas had been expecting a countenance that spoke of matchless sagacity, but this face looked blank. Still, though, Jonas was sure that Uncle Melankton had an amazing memory, that he could come out with nuggets of nigh on divine wisdom at any minute. His face was bathed in sunlight and the furrowed skin had the same warm cast to it and the same deep criss-crosses as smooth, weathered rocks by the sea at the end of a quiet, sunny day. Jonas stood there in his white Sunday-best shirt, hair neatly combed, waiting for some pearls of wisdom, for something close to the essence of life itself to be revealed.

‘Cunt,’ said Uncle Melankton-

For a few seconds there was total silence.

‘Uncle, it’s me, Haakon,’ Jonas’s father said patiently. ‘We brought you some grapes and a bag of aniseed balls.’

‘Cunt, cunt, cunt,’ babbled old Melankton, with a trickle of drool running from the corner of his mouth.

‘Totally senile,’ Jonas’s father murmured softly, half to himself, half to Jonas. ‘Totally gaga.’

Jonas liked the fact that his father did not seem embarrassed, and did not try to smooth things over. Although he could not have said why, he felt an immediate sympathy for this family member. He opened the bag of aniseed drops and slipped a couple into Melankton’s hand. The old man promptly popped them into his mouth and a blissful expression spread across his face, as if he suddenly remembered that he had once shaken the hands of kings or dallied with beautiful women in distant harbours. Haakon Hansen sat down heavily on the bed and lifted Jonas onto his knee. They sat there for a while, as if they had to stay for a set length of time so as not to offend convention’s invisible timekeeper. They sat there with Uncle Melankton, the pride of the family, as he rocked back and forth in his chair, muttering ‘Cunt, cunt,’ every now and again, sucked on another sweet and stared out of the window at the clouds sailing swiftly, like Flying Dutchmen, across the sky, above pine-tree tops which, with a little stretch of the imagination, could be likened to luxuriant pussy hair.

Jonas did not know what to think. He was not disappointed, though. Some profound truth about life
had
been revealed. Later it would occur to him that this man’s words had given him his first sight of mankind’s strange ability, for good or ill, to simplify complex concepts. It was a phenomenon he would later encounter again and again, in the most unexpected areas of life: the
Encyclopedia Brittanica
boiled down to one word.

As they were leaving, Uncle Melankton winked at Jonas and stuck out his tongue, on which an aniseed drop lay moist and glistening – almost as if his words had taken the shape of a sparkling, polished ruby.

In time, this experience would give rise in Jonas to a certain anxiety. He became wary where girls were concerned. It might even be that part of the reason Jonas was so slow in making his sexual debut lay in his boyhood meeting with Melankton Hansen. Senile old man or no, Jonas could not help interpreting that slavering ‘cunt, cunt’ of his great-uncle’s as an explanation of sorts for his return to the island at the mouth of the fjord, for why his gifts were never allowed to burst into full bloom. The path from cultivating one’s genius to cultivating one’s genitalia could be appallingly short. For a long time, Melankton represented for Jonas the living embodiment of a dilemma, the question of either-or. Not until he met Margrete again was Jonas able to see, thanks to her, that the one did not necessarily exclude the other. By then he had for years been labouring under a sad misapprehension, been afraid that he would go the same way as Melankton: that the yearning for life would be forced to give way to the yearning for sex life.

But now – he had been cured, believed himself to have been cured, ages ago of such stupid ideas. The Jonas who stood in that small corner tower in Belém had long since dismissed any possibility of suffering the same fate as Melankton; of setting the highest goals for oneself, of meaning to do
something
that no one else had ever done, only to have to settle for less. Right now, though, he had only one thought in his head, the one which has, down through the ages, formed a common bond between most men: a constantly churning ‘cunt, cunt’. He had had a hard-on for some time. Marie felt it, but did not turn round, still seemed totally absorbed in scanning the bend of the river and the sea below. And then, with one foot – he had to admire her technique – she flipped shut the two narrow, red flaps which served as a door, while at the same time lifting up her skirt, positively offering herself to him, and not only that – offering the confirmation of a possibility to which he had closed his eyes for far too long: he could bring his grand and noble project to fruition while at the same time satisfying his basest desires. The enticing backside before him could be viewed as a globe, and the crack in it as a strait into which he could sail. All at once she seemed more impatient than him, as if she did not wish to give him time to think; she started fumbling for the zip on his fly, an unmistakable sign which gave him the courage to carry out this operation himself, to take out his swollen member, pull down her panties and then, almost without having to push at all, let his erect penis be piloted into her, up inside her, by the slippery fluids which were already present in abundance. And he knew, although he would not admit it to himself, that he had reached his goal, that this had always been his goal. This was why he had left Oslo so quickly, barely stopping to pack, when he heard that she was here. Margrete had been furious, it had not fitted in with her work schedule
at all, but he had not listened to her, simply had to jump on a plane, knew it was his only chance. He found out which hotel she was staying at and on the very first morning he stationed himself a little way off, to watch the entrance. He hardly recognised her, though, when she came swinging through the door in her almost frivolously girlish outfit. He had lost sight of her down in the maze-like gridwork of Baixa when she walked out of a stationer’s in the Rua do Ouro, but had spotted her again, thank heavens, outside the café on the Rossio. He may, for one resolute moment, have thought that he could
actually
manage to talk her round, but deep down he had always known that it would end here, with him driving into her from behind like a – yes, exactly what they called women who slept their way to the top in NRK: a telly tart.

He heard the waves breaking against the bank behind the tower, heard seagulls crying. He saw himself from the outside, saw himself standing there like a panting rhino, a primeval, galloping beast. He stared at the shining sea. Discovered nothing. Only that intense light. I was dazzled, he told himself, as if memorising something to use later in his defence, an answer to the question as to why he did it. And all the time she just stood there, seemingly unfazed, gazing out across the Tagus and the countryside on either side of the river, and perhaps it was the fact that he could not see the look on her face, had no way of knowing what she was thinking, which worked him up to such pitch that he knew he was going to come at any minute, that for once he would not be able to control himself and that this was the aim: not to control oneself, but simply to succumb to a fateful moment of ecstasy in which all else was forgotten; surrender to the madness, a madness much worse than banging one’s head off a wall, because there can be seconds when your life is turned upside down, when you do something that can never be altered,
something
which will have the greatest conceivable consequences. And behind this thought again he knew that he would never be able to blame it on a fit of madness, because underneath the frenzied, and to some extent, false
excitement
, lay a cynical, crystal-clear and quite deliberate plan.

He climaxed, so violently that it seemed to come all the way from his toes, but as he came, in a complete daze and yet one hundred per cent aware of what he was doing, she pulled away from him, held onto his penis with one hand and let his semen spill into the other. Afterwards his thoughts would keep returning to this action; he could not help marvelling at how, by some instinct, she had had the presence of mind, or sensitivity of muscle to detect the final engorgement preceding his first convulsions, and had managed to draw away in time. And he never forgot how, in full view of him, she slung the semen she had caught in the palm of her hand out over the river, in a sowing action, and how, still bent over her, he was sure he saw the drops of sperm
fall through the air, glittering, truly sparkling in the light before striking the water far below, like a shower of pearls. He thought: that’s a life being tossed out there, the life I really ought to have chosen.

Afterwards – he did not remember much of what happened afterwards – she had turned and looked at him. She put a semen-drenched finger to the scar on his forehead, the wound from that time when he had been thinking too much during a skipping game, as if wondering what it was, or as if she were saying: Now you’re marked for life. And he could not help thinking that what he considered the badge of his nobility, the proof that it was possible to think parallel thoughts, was now smeared with semen. Then she had quickly tidied herself up, opened the door of the tower and smiled – a smile that was neither accusing nor rueful; a smile which said that she would neither belittle nor make too much of what had happened. And, whether because of that smile or what, he saw that this, this act, even though it was not all that immoral, and even though it was the sort of thing that millions of people did every day without blinking and without it having any serious repercussions – that in his, Jonas Wergeland’s, case this was the one thing in life he should not have done. He knew that from the instant his semen touched the palm of her hand, or from the second the drops of sperm hit the water below, his life was spilt, ruined, as strangely and inexorably as tearing a tendon – only a tiny tendon but still enough to make one collapse in absolute agony. I’m going to fertilise the whole world, he thought, but I am dead.

They walked down the stairs and took a taxi into town, drove past the vast Comércio Square down on the waterfront, before ending up at a small
restaurant
, a
tasca
, in Alfama, not far from the cathedral. He remembered very little of that meal. The food was probably excellent. The wine too. He stared at a building on the other side of the street, faced with glazed tiles so begrimed that the pattern on them could only just be made out, like another world, behind the dirt. He sat as if in a trance. Remembered only that she appeared to be having a nice time, that she revealed a charming – surprisingly
charming
– side of herself, that there was a smell of grilled sardines, that darkness fell outside, that the tile-covered building front took on a deeper and deeper glow; lots of small, identical tiles combining to produce a mesmerising effect, rather the way kiss upon kiss can do. He had a vague idea that they had talked about many things, that someone had sung, possibly the proprietrix, and that she, Marie, had suddenly got up and said she had to go. But before she left, this he remembered quite clearly, she had leaned over him and whispered in his ear, as if it were a big secret, that he shouldn’t worry any more about his series, it would be okay. ‘We’ll figure something out,’ she whispered, as if she really cared. ‘We might be able to dip into the DG’s kitty.’ Then she made her
way out, waving to their hosts, flashing him a smile, one of those rare smiles that sticks in the memory. ‘See you in Oslo,’ she said from the door. ‘And go easy on those Brazilian soap operas. Take a ride on a tram-car instead.’

He completed his television series. And it was good – some said brilliant. A substantial additional injection of funds made it possible for the remaining programmes to be made. He would be hailed as an artist who did not
prostitute
himself – this was the very word used in several reviews. He had read them and hung his head. But still he could not rid himself of the thought that Marie H. had done it out of genuine sympathy for his project. That the
incident
at the Belém Tower was neither here nor there as far she was concerned.

He was left sitting dejectedly in a
tasca
in Alfama, staring at the fish bones on his plate with no memory of having eaten fish. There was just one thought racing around his head: of Margrete. Daniel had been right. The soul did lie in the seed. To anyone else this would have been a mere bagatelle. Only he perceived the true gravity of it. Because he was married to an extraordinary woman, there was no telling how she would react to a ‘bagatelle’. At some point she would ask him what he had done in Lisbon. She would spot right away, however well he washed himself, that he had come back with a smear of semen on his forehead. He knew even then, as he sat in that
tasca
in Alfama, that one day he would stand over Margrete’s dead body and ask himself why she had done it. And he knew that he would be forced to answer: Because I didn’t think about her here in Lisbon. Or rather: for the first time, with this act, he had given open expression to his lack of empathy, his unforgivable blindness. He knew what Margrete was like, that he ought to have considered the labyrinthine turnings of her mind, but he pretended not to know.