•
G. tells his mother he will call her at intermission. He turns off the phone by depressing the red button for a few seconds. As soon as the light on the screen turns off, he remembers he has forgotten the code needed to turn the phone on again, a number that is written on his calendar at home. He also remembers that the Hverfisgata movie theater doesn’t have intermissions. What awaits him is an uninterrupted movie, a phone gone dark.
And a Little More Than One Hundred Minutes Pass
As he pursues Aron out of the screening room, there’s about a quarter of an hour remaining in the movie. That the half-Brazilian should have asked for quiet before the movie started is, in retrospect, rather paradoxical, given he was the one gesticulating and yelling during the feature, practically the whole time, as soon as it became clear to him he disliked the movie; in reality, it was admirable how long he allowed himself to watch it. Before the scene that finally caused Aron to stand up and walk out, G. had already decided to see this film again, as soon as possible. From the first minute, he felt he belonged in this movie’s world and, what’s more, as well as feeling that he was part of the opulence and finery adorning the scenes, he felt his father somehow belonged to the group of four men the story followed. Or, rather, he ought to. In short, he had never had such an intense movie experience. And, in fact, it is ridiculous that he leaves to follow Aron out before the movie ended. Aron doesn’t deserve it. And that’s why he thinks to himself, as he quits the room, he will ask the box office clerk on the way out whether there’s another showing tomorrow. But as he walks toward the lobby in the shadows of the theater, his eyes following Aron’s back as he approaches the front door, he sees the blue man sitting at a table in the café. And even though this time the image of the man is made of flesh and blood, and not anything like the prints his father got from the toy shop, the first thing that comes to G.’s mind is the word imagined.
•
But he is not imagined. He is sitting there. With a cup of coffee in front of him on the table. He is looking toward the box office, and G. can see his eyes follow Aron when the latter goes out the door, heading into the rain. The blue man has a baseball cap on his head, red and yellow. It’s a hat with the movie theater logo on it; he must have bought it at the concession stand. It occurs to G. to take a little detour on his way out, so as to avoid the blue man seeing him, but aside from the fact that there’s no way to make a detour, since the only exit is on the same side as the ticket booth, deep down G. actually wants this man to see him. He feels again the sensation that seized him two hours ago, that it’s not a bad thing the blue man is following them. As soon as Aron has left his sight, G. looks back toward the box office, but he cannot tell whether the blue man sees him go past. He decides not to stop to ask about the next showing of the movie or if there is even going to be one, since he can find that out later. He does not want to lose Aron, who undoubtedly is now halfway up Frakkastígur. He seems to be making a beeline for somewhere. G. looks over his shoulder as he emerges outside, but cannot see if he is being followed by the blue man, who seems to be as before, his eyes on the box office. And G. steps down to the sidewalk. It’s raining. Now with the same intensity as in the morning. G. raises his umbrella, but waits to open it, because he sees Aron turning right, at the corner of Frakkastígur. He must keep up with him. He thinks he knows for sure where Aron is heading, and if he is right, then there is barely any point in opening up the umbrella, because he would have to close it again only moments later to enter the place he has in mind: a bar on Frakkastígur, in the middle of a row of houses that extend up to Laugavegur. This is a tavern that suits Aron, he thinks. Even more than the pub earlier.
•
He’s intuited right. Aron goes into the tavern. But what is it like inside? G. has never been there before, only fabricated an image of the place in his mind after seeing, at some point, a few of the clientele gathered on the pavement outside, shivering with their cigarettes and glasses in the bitter cold. But as soon as he stands at the open door, the first thing that comes to him is that people are surely allowed to smoke in here. The pungent stench crashes into his face, mixed with rather old-fashioned rock music, Icelandic, which he feels is surely being played and sung by dead-drunk men, perhaps because it’s being drowned out by the crowd noise on the television from the World Cup in Brazil. Neither the music nor the soccer are set especially loud, but this strange mix of sound causes G. to miss the bewitching and sophisticated music that accompanied the movie a few moments ago, music Michel, one of the four gentlemen in the house in Paris, played on the piano, wearing a light pink turtleneck, and Marcello, in his white cable-knit cardigan, put on the record player on another occasion. The charismatic melody Michel played again on the piano, just before he died on the balcony, is not only something G. knows he will remember for the rest of his life; he sees the notes before him, as if they are physical entities, tiptoeing after him, first at a normal tempo, then picking up the pace, like they did with Michel: the notes running faster than their legs can manage, tangling themselves up.
•
But is he coming after him, the blue man, in his reporter’s jacket? G. looks back down Frakkastígur, but does not see him. On the contrary, sauntering up the sidewalk come three rather heavy and serious men, the sort to have been hitting the streets for a while now, and there is no doubt that they are on the way into the same place as him. One of them is wearing a similar coat as two of the bankers he saw disappearing into the fast food place at lunchtime. Now the coats of the bankers are hanging in suburban closets, he thinks, alongside nylon parkas, sports jackets, and knee-length anoraks with leather buttons; now the bankers are eating their dinners in their houses under the shadow of their clocks, clocks which show it’s dinnertime. G. goes into the bar. And he shakes the water from himself, like a cat.
•
The semi-darkness inside makes him recall the darkness of his phone. And he tries to assess the urgency in calling his mother, like he promised. Would they have a public telephone in a place like this? Didn’t his mother call that sort of phone a ten-króna-phone? If someone was at home in his apartment waiting for him, he would simply call the person and ask her to go to his calendar on the living room table to find the code that would unlock the cellphone. But there’s no one to mobilize in the building on Aragata but his mother, up there on the top floor, and his sleeping father, who is now presumably on his back, done-in, as G. imagines Aron phrasing it. He can hardly call his mother to get her assistance turning on his phone, only so he can call her back. He walks up to a young woman sitting at the end of the bar, wearing an apron around her waist, and so likely employed there. He asks her if they have a telephone. She points toward the restrooms, and says she thinks the phone on the wall in front of the toilet still works. But where is Aron? Possibly he has gone to the toilet. Aron whom, given his reaction to the movie, G. had expected ten minutes ago would yell out in terror when the toilet in the Parisian house exploded, with the worst possible consequences. It was a really creepy scene, one of the darkest he’s experienced in a movie. But he smiled as he watched it. He laughed internally. He may even have laughed out loud. Because something inside him opened up, seeing the toilet erupting the way it did, spewing out of itself everything that was meant to go down into the earth. But from Aron all he heard was silence. He had, to put it plainly, been rendered speechless, he thinks. And for the rest of the film the stench of the toilet lay over the house. It was not until Michel expired on the balcony railing shortly after that G again heard from the half-Brazilian, so stricken he seemed to be over the exploding toilet.
•
Ugo, Philippe, Marcello, and Michel. Those gentlemen once again become vivid in G.’s mind as he recalls them. Philippe, the owner of the building in Paris; Michel, the one who blew up the toilet. He has yet to see what becomes of Ugo and Philippe, what their fate will be by the end of the film. But why didn’t he stay in the movie theater? Shouldn’t he have rather walked tow
ard the screen than away from it? This in turn leads him to wonder why a forty-year-old European film has such a harsh effect on someone of Aron Cesar’s temperament. Should it not rather have had that effect on G. himself?
•
But what were the names of the individuals holed up here, in this bar on Frakkastígur? Is Eddi, Aron’s friend, hidden somewhere in the depths of all this darkness? He notices a man sitting at the bar, a man of about forty, in some kind of distinctive uniform, a jacket with epaulettes, and he feels like this man must be called Sævar. Or Garðar. This man knows the guys who enter the place after G., the men he saw walking up the street. While G. chooses a seat near the bar he watches these same men “survey” their everyday surroundings, as he describes it to himself; the everyday is certainly in full force inside here, as well as outside. A rainy wet Tuesday in late June, and the World Cup tournament about halfway over. He thinks so, at least. It turns out that these men also know Aron, though they all seem to be considerably older than him. Because when Aron comes out of the toilet, he stops at the bar to chat with them, some kind of reunion. G. hears Aron mention the name of the movie theater on Hverfisgata. Indeed, he believes he hears some numbers mentioned, and speculates that the debate at the bar has turned to the purchase and sale of whatever Aron has to offer. But the conversation quickly goes back to focus on the movie, and there is general laughter. Then Aron orders a beer. And a shot of something; G. doesn’t hear what. Aron then takes out his phone and walks away from the bar, toward the front door, while he is waiting for it to be answered.
•
Here I am before all of you … But G. is seated; there’s no way you could describe him as “before” or in front of everyone, for the main advantage of this particular meeting place is undoubtedly that it allows you to be solitary … a man full of good sense knowing life and death … Being in a dive like this reveals that you know nothing, neither about life nor death, though G. feels he has gotten a little insight into the two worlds from the hundred minutes he spent in the movie theater … with gloved hands I let life go … Something to that effect was a line of a poem by Corbiére; he thinks he has remembered it right. In my distastes above all I have elegant tastes. You know that with gloved hands I let life go … Michel had orange rubber gloves on his hands when he lifted up to the sky the pig’s head from the butcher’s truck. Le nouveau style, as he described the gloves in the beginning of the film, taking them from the packet to try them on. Plus sensibles. Elastic and durable. Le nouveau style.
•
“Where did you send me!” he hears Aron shout into the phone. “Blast from the past? What were you even thinking?” Aron moves back closer to the bar, to get his drinks, and he sees the man in uniform pass the shot glass in his direction, the one Aron ordered, but the other man whips it quickly away at the next moment, with a mischievous expression, and knocks it back. And grimaces. Then waves to the bartender, and asks for another shot. And he laughs a forced laugh. G. understands at this moment that the names that he tried out for this man together form the name of the street Sara lived on, in the garden house behind her parents’ home. Sævargarðar, out in Seltjarnarnes. Where the violin disappeared from the window. Where the married couple’s social gathering on the promontory got so wild that the housewife’s violin lay forgotten on the windowsill. It was at an altogether more elegant place than this one here on Frakkastígur that he later negotiated a price for the instrument. How large had the amount been? Was it not further proof of his parents’ general indifference that they never asked any questions about their son’s increased income? The transaction took place in a hotel, not far from Laugardalur. Helpfully, the buyer didn’t live in this country. G. remembers the proceeds being enough for his two dining chairs, his bookcase with glass doors, a smoking table, a chaise longue and console table, and, last but not least, the Indian secretary at which he wrote. And there was still a considerable amount left. So easy to look at, so hard to define. He can still taste the brandy from the bottle, the memory still satisfies any need he has for an alcoholic drink, he can even still feel the rigid fence-post against his back, and the soft texture of the instrument. If it is right that the past is a foreign country, then he does not want to live there.
•
There’s no evidence that Aron lets the behavior of the uniformed man get on his nerves; rather, he is busy talking on the phone. “Why would you think I’d have a good time?” he says, shocked, and gets loud encouragement from Sævar-or-Garðar, “Let him have it!” And then he has a new shot in his hand. Aron holds the phone to his ear with his shoulder, and walks with his two glasses across to the next table over from G.’s own. “Luckily I wasn’t born when this abomination was made,” says Aron as he sits down, just as shocked as before, but now laughing. “What was it all about? Some men, and not just some men, but some elegant, finely-dressed men with splendid careers going to a house and deciding to eat themselves to death!” Then Aron quotes from the film, and to G. it sounds as if he does so verbatim: “If you don’t eat, then you don’t die.” Aron says he doesn’t want to talk about it any more. But he continues regardless: “He’s lying there with a bulging belly, and while another of them stuffs him further full of mashed potato, he tells them his mother forbade him …” He pauses here, possibly because the person he is talking to has interrupted him. “That she forbade him from doing so, ever since he was a small child,” he adds. Aron is talking about the character Michel, but G. guesses that he is unwilling to plainly state the character’s problem. “Why are we being shown something like that? Why would you, of all people, send someone to something like that? What’s that? My mom? My dad, rather. You don’t understand what his people are like. Yes, they’re from São Paulo.”
•
But despite the antipathy La Grande bouffe seems to have aroused in Aron’s mind, it is clear that he is moved to discuss it further. And G. must admit to himself that he admires how artfully Aron manages to tiptoe his words around what most troubled him, how he sidles past saying directly that the pink-clad Michel’s mother prevented him from breaking wind since childhood, that that suppression had gone on to cause his death. “It kills him!” Aron exclaims into the phone, and for a moment G. feels like the half-Brazilian actually feels compassion for the character in question. During the screening, Aron had plainly protested, if you interpret his “no” quite literally, when it was first made clear that Michel was in trouble because of his accumulated bloating, when he got up from the dinner table where they sat, the four gentlemen with the three prostitutes and the teacher Andrea, and went out onto the terrace and down to the gravel in front of the house, where he farted so loudly, and for so long, that he was forced to cover his ears, it was as if some kind of machine had been set in motion, like something was taking off. And when Andrea, a little later, just before the toilet erupted, sat on top of Michel, and the sounds from his body became aqueous and swelling, Aron had had enough, and voiced his feelings from his seat with such loud complaints that one of the other moviegoers got fed up with Aron’s voluble commentary, echoing the way Aron had been annoyed with G. at the beginning of the movie. But, to be fair, Aron succeeded in making himself understood. The person shouting at Aron, on the other hand, had used such unintelligible words that G. felt sure neither Aron nor he could parse the words, even if their meaning was abundantly clear. G. ponders what kind of movies might suit Aron’s taste, and what he had expected when his friend recommended the movie over the phone at the sports bar. He let himself stick around for roughly a hundred minutes, up until Michel’s death scene; he was able to make it that far. G. realizes he is beginning to defend Aron. Had Aron been intelligible, and another patron not? Are men like Aron ever intelligible? If G. explained things to Aron, would they be intelligible to him?
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