The Fish Can Sing (43 page)

Gar
ar Hólm sent me out at once to Fri
riksen’s bakery shop to buy twelve five
-aurar
cakes and to Mikael Lund the chemist to buy sodium bicarbonate. His suit was different to the one he had worn on previous occasions, no better than the other one indeed but brand-new from the tailor’s; and the singer himself was not so physically worn as he had seemed previously, except that the heavenly light which I remembered so well from his youthful portrait was almost completely dimmed; in its place had come the smile of world fame; it never left his face when he was talking to people, but quickly, alas, turned into a tired grimace when he was by himself. Often his expression was dominated by something of the reserve that made so many people find him unapproachable, not unlike the expression characteristic of the inmates of lunatic asylums this century, but which seems to have been the permanent distinguishing feature of the faces of the more outstanding geniuses and world-famous men of the nineteenth century, particularly the poet Baudelaire, if we are to judge by the lithograph on the title-page of
Les Fleurs du Mal
.

He kept on walking over to the mirror and practising facial expressions while he was preening himself, each one more improbable than the last, putting brilliantine on his hair and rubbing glycerine into his hands. He took out his coat and examined it minutely inside and out, and carefully plucked out all the loose threads. He made me help him stack all his heavy travelling cases in various ways, but when he had rearranged them so that each case in turn had been top and bottom of the pile, he suddenly remembered that there were servants available in
the building and started ringing bells. He ordered a knife to be brought so that he could tackle the cream cakes, but when at last the knife arrived it occurred to him that a fork would be a more suitable implement, and when the fork arrived he sent out for a spoon. Finally he ate the cakes with his fingers and rang for someone to find him a napkin, but when the napkin was brought he wiped his hands on his handkerchief.

He often talked in mysterious phrases which somehow only contradicted one another, and sometimes he stopped in the middle of a sentence, because it could just as well end in one way as another; or rather, perhaps, in no way at all. Often, too, it was as if he were thinking about something entirely different to what he was talking about, and he did not always hear what was being said to him, at least not coherently; but sometimes he would react with a start, like a sleeper waking up, to some perfectly ordinary remark that someone might come out with in conversation with him; he would rise from his chair with a sparkle in his eyes as if this insignificant remark had revealed some hidden truth to him. But the very next moment he had withdrawn into himself again. If he were asked something important he invariably made some irrelevant reply. Was he making fun of people? It was impossible to think of anything more hopeless than trying to question him about his private affairs, such as for instance what he had thought about the Pope.

I was now noticing peculiarities in his behaviour which had escaped me before, perhaps because I had never been with him for any length of time. When least expected he would suddenly pull pencil and paper out of his pocket, often just loose scraps, and start scribbling on them complicated figures and working out sums by some system I could not fathom; nor did I think it seemly to ask him, or to try too hard to read what he was writing. When he had engrossed himself in this arithmetic for a while, frowning heavily and often sighing deeply, he would come to again, look around almost absent-mindedly, and then smile at anyone who was present as if he were asking forgiveness for having been lost in thought, and yet with a slightly defiant look as if he were really saying, “I know the result, but I’m not
telling anyone.” Were they perhaps only money-sums that he kept working out apparently so endlessly?

One thing was certain, he had in his pockets an inexhaustible supply of bank-notes, carelessly rolled together, and he never bothered to bend down and pick up any money he might accidentally drop on the floor, even though it represented the price of a sheep. When he sent me out to buy cream cakes he thrust a fistful of bank-notes at me.

“That’s far too much,” I said. “A
króna
will do.” Or as a joke I asked, “Is there perhaps a certain place one can just walk into and collect as much money as one likes?”

“One night you discover to your great surprise that you have not spent all your money that day,” he said. “Next morning you wake up early and go out and buy yourself a hat – and when you have got the hat you realize that you now have even more money in your pocket. You invite a friend, two or three of them perhaps, to come with you to a restaurant, and you eat your fill of all the best food and wines available there. When you simply can’t force down another bite and you leave the restaurant, you discover that you’ve made yet another haul while you were sitting inside. You become flurried and go and buy a house with a garden to try to rid yourself of this trash, but no sooner have you paid for the house cash down than you notice that your money has multiplied through the purchase. Now you are seized with a kind of frenzy that Björn of Brekkukot would never understand, far less your grandmother. You set off travelling round and round the world, pouring out money with both hands to other demented vagrants wherever you go, and you don’t even dare to open your letters because you know that they will all say the same thing: your deposits at I don’t know how many banks all over the world are still growing with ever increasing speed.”

“What has happened?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s the old fairy-tale: you wanted to conquer the world, and apprenticed yourself to a sorcerer. He has taught you a couple of formulas. One morning he asks you to fetch some water and fill the barrel at the door while he is out begging. It’s a contemptible job, fetching water, and you choose
instead to try a magic formula. You recite Formula One and the bucket goes off on its own accord to the well. But when you see that it is going to carry on fetching the water after the barrel is full, you try Formula Two in order to stop it; but the only effect is that the bucket works even faster and fills up the whole house. In your terror you try Formula Three, and now all hell is really let loose. Soon the land sinks. And the bucket carries on and on.”

“But what happened to the sorcerer himself?” I asked.

“He is sitting huddled on some steps somewhere down town, holding his hand out, and the wind knifes through the holes in his rags. The sorcerer, you see, is the person who pays no attention to profits.”

On the afternoon of the day he arrived, he said to me, “Go home and tidy yourself up, I’m going to take you to a party at the Hotel de la Gu
mundur tonight.”

It was a long, old-fashioned shop-building; older men often called it after a merchant with a Jewish surname who came to Iceland from Schleswig or Holstein in the last century. The shop was in three sections. The first section: food, which people were then beginning to call “colonial wares” after all the aromatic produce from distant corners of the world, such as pepper, cinnamon, and cloves. Next to it was the department for dry goods and small wares, with the name
GUDMUNSEN’S STORE
painted in black on a rotting board above the door; and finally there was “The Schnapps”, called by a Low German word that the Danes had imported to Iceland, that is to say, the liquor department. Food and schnapps had once been in the same department, until the increased fishing gave people so much more ready money that the drunks began to silt up the doorway to the shop, singing and brawling and denying entry to women
who were trying to shop for food; so liquor was then moved to the other end to give the food some peace.

The merchant’s residence was on the first floor, four or five drawing-rooms in a row at the front of the building. But the floor was not well enough insulated to prevent the shouting and singing of those down below from being heard upstairs.

As usual in these old merchants’ houses the ceilings of the rooms were rather low. On the white-painted window-sills stood earthenware pots with weeds from the tropics like geranium and fuchsia; these pots were placed in polished copper containers, and round these containers were tied green ribbons with great big bows.

In this house there were ribbons tied in a bow round practically every single thing. The window curtains were tied up with an enormous bow at the top and held together by small silk bows at the bottom. A broad silk ribbon was tied diagonally across the sofa-back with a bow the size of a bull’s rump, and one had to take care not to lean back, otherwise this gigantic knot caught you in the back. The porcelain dogs had bows; there was a bow on the bread-tray and the coal scuttle. There was a blue silk bow on the canary’s cage. The cat came in with her tail in the air, stepping as carefully as if there were burning patches hidden in the floor which would scorch her pads; and Pussy too had a blue ribbon round her neck carefully tied in a bow – in this house the cat wore the same uniform as the canary. Such ribbons and bows were certainly the fashion in well-to-do homes everywhere in the Danish empire in those days, wherever they might have come from originally.

Now I had seen all the ribbons and bows in the house; but what else was there?

I think that what aroused my interest most after this was the older generation of this family, particularly the elderly women, some of whom were very ancient indeed. Here one could see a living example of that mixture of great farmers and little shopkeepers which characterized genteel families in this future capital of the nation in my youth. Foreigners have recently stated in the papers that this capital is a town in which the big wholesale
merchants have the taste of little shopkeepers; and perhaps it would have been no further from the truth to say that when I was growing up, the great farmers liked the kind of things that little shopkeepers usually find beautiful, and the little shopkeepers had a taste for what the great farmers liked.

In itself it was quite astonishing that these typically Icelandic women, wearing the national costume, used an incredible number of Danish words and idioms, and I heard some of them actually conversing in this shopkeepers’ Low German dialect which is more unlike Icelandic than any other tongue we know. And when they spoke Icelandic, they used the most guttural pronunciation they possibly could, as is done in northern Germany and Denmark – used it with feeling and even, I am tempted to say, with actual enjoyment; perhaps the real difference between Icelandic culture then and now lies not least in the fact that if young people have the misfortune nowadays to develop this guttural pronunciation, they go to a doctor to get the “r” moved forward to the tip of the tongue. On the other hand, there was nothing in the behaviour of these elderly ladies to remind one of Danish kindness, or good nature, or humour.

These ladies and their husbands – book-keepers, civil servants, or senior clerks of various kinds, men who have all been completely obliterated from my memory – these people all belonged to the female side of the younger Gú
múnsen’s family; the male line was represented only by his father, old Jón Gu
mundsson himself, the founder of the Store. He was actually a bit “off his food” by then, as we used to say at Brekkukot, knotted, bent, and withered, and had to use a stick all the time. His face could best be compared to those rock formations in mountains; perhaps it would be closest to the truth to liken such old men to fearsome idols – and indeed they come to be worshipped often enough; and it’s no disadvantage either if they happen to own more ships than other people. But I have no reason to doubt that old Jón Gu
mundsson had been as highly intelligent as he was said to be; at least he was undoubtedly intelligent in the way that liquor merchants always are in comparison with their customers.