The Endless Summer

by Madame Nielsen

  But all this—the jelly slab’s lightning and life’s unfurling as destiny and tale—is as of yet inconceivable. In this present he is still part of “the endless summer,” and one day it isn’t the Portuguese artist, but the slender and far-too-sensitive boy who accompanies the lanky Odense lad into town to spend a couple of days, staying with him in the room that used to be his too. One morning the girl rings from the farm and insists on speaking with her boyfriend. When he is handed the phone, she tells him that something has happened. What has happened? asks the slender young boy. She can’t say. But is it something serious, has grandmother died? No no, she says, that’s not it. So what is it? If something’s happened, can’t she just say what it is? She’s not crying, she doesn’t sound distraught, more like shocked, agitated. He asks if she’s pregnant? Or perhaps he specifically doesn’t ask that, he just thinks it, or tries not to think it. Is it something serious? he asks. But she doesn’t answer that question. Then he realizes she really can’t say it, she can’t even think it. It’s to do with Mom, she says, Mom and . . . In the evening, when he returns to the farm, he can sense it, from the moment he steps in through the doorway and stands in the entrance hall. Everything looks like it usually does, the same slightly dusty, elegant disarray (shadows and light), but the whole house is charged, quivering. Everything goes on as it usually does, the mother makes an omelet with various leftovers, and they eat it with slices of sourdough rye bread in the glow of the candlelight at the round table in the kitchen. Afterward, the mother puts the two little brothers to bed, and the girl and the slender boy and the handsome Lars and the tall, curly-fair-haired “Vikingo” stay at the table while the younger of the two Portuguese, the dark one, rolls a cigarette, and stands up and paces a little back and forth in the periphery of the candlelight glow, comes to a halt by the kitchen table, looks out into the darkness, lights the cigarette and goes outside to take an evening walk, returns half an hour later and sits at the table, turned slightly away, and writes something in the tiniest writing in a notebook or makes some sketches on a sheet of paper. At night, it proves impossible to sleep, as so often before the sensitive slender boy lies awake, but whereas he usually listens to the silence in the sleeping house, he can now sense that all the others are awake too, listening. Next morning, when the girl and the slender boy and the tall curly-fair-haired Portuguese are sitting at the kitchen table in the morning sun, each cradling a cup of milky galão coffee and maybe chatting a little or not really saying anything and waiting for lazy, apparently so life-loving, wonderfully handsome Lars to appear and sit down with his forbearing sort of sighing smile, the mother comes down from the bedroom on the second floor, wearing as always the white bathrobe and with her long fair hair combed back and tightly gathered in a ponytail, and her eyes are bright and unseeing and shining with madness. She makes herself a cup of coffee, heats up the milk, pours the milk into the coffee and stirs it with a teaspoon, her movements are calm, flowing, as if they are enjoying themselves, she places the cup on the saucer and carries it over to the table and sits down and looks at them and looks through them and takes a sip of her coffee, and smiles, not at anyone in particular, and each of them knows that it is me, me alone she is secretly, unseen by the others, smiling at, a calm smile, madly, secretively luminous and bland, as if she is telling them something she herself doesn’t understand, and then it is gone, as if the smile wasn’t hers, but something that slid across her face, through it, and each of them thinks, without thinking it, that perhaps it was just the light, the clouds momentarily parting, and the table between them smoldering forth in an arabesque of light-shade, a quaking reflected in her face and sinking into itself. A little later, the dark young Portuguese comes down, he too as usual already dressed, shirt, waistcoat, trousers, the shoes, which in a moment he will take out and polish sitting in the sun on the doorstep, are dangling from two fingers of his hand. He doesn’t sit with the others and he doesn’t eat anything, doesn’t even pour a cup of coffee, but that’s not unusual, he often doesn’t eat anything until sometime in the afternoon, maybe he takes an apple along on his morning walk; he rolls a cigarette, paces a little back and forth while turning the cigarette between his fingers, he doesn’t smile, nor does he look at the others, nor does he look away, he is, and just like the mother he is radiant, but not like the sun, it is an invisible radiance that can only be seen by the bodies of the others, an intense, wild, and tightly reined radiance, as if he alone is composed of pulsating blood. And the day passes, as the day always passes, the mother goes out to her horse (somewhat later than usual), the little brothers play, argue, fight, the four youngsters laze about, and he, the younger Portuguese, the dark one with the elegant hands, the long fingers he likes to spread, gather, spread again, so you are drawn to looking at them and as soon as you’ve looked away you want to look at them again because you cannot get enough of looking at them, the way they spread so the thin skin between them is stretched, “whitens,” and is gathered again, pleasurably, stretched and gathered, sits on the doorstep in the sun and polishes his shoes, puts them on, stands up and takes an apple from the bowl and drops it into the waistcoat pocket and disappears across the fields and doesn’t return until dusk. And for the rest of the evening and night and for the days, evenings, and nights to come, they are all a little quieter than usual, going about their business without looking at each other, eyes cast slightly downward, sliding to evade one another’s gazes, each smiling quietly, filled with an almost unbearable delight, but without saying anything, without talking about or even mentioning “it,” they don’t have to, they know that the others know that they know, filled with a happiness that isn’t theirs, but is also not the mother’s or the Portuguese youth’s, a happiness that is the world’s happiness. And every morning, and every morning just slightly later, perhaps just a couple of minutes, so the day starts to tilt, and “the endless summer” sets off into a quivering slide, the mother walks out of the bedroom against the light from the east-facing window, in her bathrobe, her long ivory-colored hair combed back and gathered tightly in a ponytail with the muddy-green hairband, and chewed lips and shining eyes, not “wild,” more like mad or shocked, but not at the Portuguese youth or at herself, but shaken by the passion, that it can be so intense, devouring, that it becomes carnivorous, cannibalistic. And when they encounter her, by chance, on the stairs, on the way through the entrance hall or in the kitchen, they have to cast their eyes downward because it is too much, too intense (and at the same time joyful, making them want to laugh, to rejoice), and she knows it and bears it, aristocratically, as if nothing has happened, carries on as usual, puts the kettle on to make coffee, heats the milk, pours it, stirs it with the teaspoon and drinks, slowly, pleasurably, terrified, and without sitting at the table, she simply can’t. And behind her, like a rearing shadow, or not until a few minutes later, along he comes, the just seventeen- or nineteen-year-old Portuguese youth, the man who is the cause of and has done all this, which they cannot put into words, brazen, silent, proudly striding down the stairs and into the kitchen, now almost and only just almost smiling in the way and with the self-assured masculine delight only possible in a southern European, um homem machão. And the others look at him, and he looks them in the eye, and it is they who have to smile and then quickly (smiling) look away. And so the days go on, in joy, quivering, and all partake in breaking of the bread, eat it and drink the milky coffee and wine, consume each of the daily meals as if it were the Eucharist, in silence, jubilation, and joy. At no point do they talk about it, they can’t, what should they say? how should they say it? but they share it, openly now, abandoning themselves heedlessly to the days and nights, the light and darkness and movements of the body, the music they listen to, conversations about everything else just not it, which at the same time is the only thing they, without mentioning it, talk about. The only person who isn’t wholeheartedly rejoicing—apart from the two small brothers who possibly sense it but are still too young to understand what it is, a
nd even though they too see the Portuguese youth come out of their mother’s bedroom, behind her, like a menacing shadow, a sorcerer enveloped in a dark cloud, and they too react, the eldest, the hypersensitive, fair, nervy one, he falls more frequently, hurts himself, weeps, must be comforted by the mother, it has to be the mother, she has to comfort him and pick him up, the youngest, on the other hand, closes down, becomes sullen and will not accept the mother’s hugs or cautious overtures—is the daughter, she can’t take it in, like the others she is also about to explode, but from desperation, as if it’s her existence and not the mother’s that is under threat, she, the young girl, the only almost-virgin in the house, she who should be the object of all four men’s desire and lust and eyes, she who is meant to be hitting her stride, blossoming and beginning to live her life as woman, breaking away from her mother, she has been passed over, neglected, wiped out by her own mother, brazenly, she who needs the mother to envy her adolescence and yet acknowledge her right to that adolescence and step into the background as a solid and unshakable picture of motherliness and not an agitated, bitten-to-bits wild creature who does indeed, on stepping out of the bedroom and straight out to her two small sons and her teenage daughter, assume her aristocratic and awe-inspiring supremely lofty bearing, her queenly dignity (not for a moment is she “beside herself” or unstable, quite the contrary, she is so much inside herself and at one with herself in her aristocratic iron grip that she is about to explode), but cannot possibly hide the bitten lips and no way can she conceal her joy (the madly shining eyes). During the nights, it is now the young, dark, and soft girl, the daughter with the delicate bones and the large, now far too motherly breasts, who lies awake and thinks about it and has to wake up the young boy and talk to him about it, which he can’t talk about, only listen to her attempts to put into words, and during the mornings and afternoons, when she, who is otherwise impossible to get out of the kitchen, bed, or her sunny spot in the yard leaning against the hot stables wall, drags him along on wandering walks along lanes, past fields of leeks, barley, potatoes, fields with piebald cattle and the occasional horse, walks during which she constantly and to his annoyance, simply from nerves, agitation, linguistic mayhem, dries up and just stands there trying to articulate something she can’t identify but has to verbalize so she doesn’t explode, the slender young boy can sense how her unsuccessful attempt to say it slowly starts to take the shape of outrage, his girlfriend is outraged, endlessly outraged at her mother, her own mother, that she is behaving like that, brazenly, like a teenager, a tart! And the slender boy has to laugh, which just makes the girl’s despair deepen, her feeling of being forsaken, not just by the mother and the men’s eyes, but also by him, her boyfriend, who she perhaps doesn’t love and never will love, but with whom she is at least in love and by whom she has an insatiable need to be looked at and listened to and understood and, above all, taken seriously.

  Now “the endless summer” unfurls and comes into bloom. They start making trips to town, expeditions of conquest perhaps, but more like triumphal processions (they have already won, the king, the queen, and the whole realm), after dinner they pile into the van, the mother at the wheel, the Portuguese youth in the passenger seat, and all the others: the two young Danish boys, the slender and the handsome, the daughter, and the two little brothers whose bedtime has been abandoned, they just go along, no matter where, no matter when, laughing as they are squashed together or pushed down under the sweeping headlights of passing (police?) cars, (the other Portuguese, the tall strong one with the fair curls, “o Vikingo,” has obviously slipped out of the picture, they don’t talk about him, hardly remember him any more, he’s probably just gone home to his world and Time and the university course he, in consultation with his father (and maybe his older brothers or uncles) had decided to start once the summer was over sometime in September); the mother, who always drives far too fast, almost hazardously, but with such skillful conviction, at least twenty kilometers an hour faster than the traffic laws (which apply to everyone else, of course, but cannot possibly apply to them) allow, snaps the van in and out between the vehicles ahead like a yo-yo, out and then, at the very last second, dazzled by the headlights of the oncoming traffic, in again, and the Portuguese youth’s explosive laughter at her side, uninhibited now, neither he, she, nor the others try to hide anything any longer, neither their joy nor, as far as the girl is concerned, the raging despair, he laughs loudly, flings his upper body and head backward so the seat jolts, and his dark-brown and in the glare of the oncoming headlights abruptly flaming mane flounces in the air. And later, when they have reached the center of town and have parked the rusty-green van in a probably not completely lawful (but cheeky, so cheeky that they have to laugh in delight as they leave it) spot, on a corner or on the edge of a motorcycle parking bay, and walk toward the café that is currently the place to be and the social hub of the town, where the in crowd come, and the façade of which is made of glass and has a protruding, greenhouse-like pavilion that illuminates the whole square out front, the way in which they, like a royal couple with their entourage, stride in through the glass foyer, he, the Portuguese youth, straight-backed and nonchalant with the longish chestnut-burnished hair and the long, elegant, olive-dust-colored gentleman’s coat sweeping out from his back, exploding in a blaring laugh that momentarily drowns out the music and causes all the (very Danish) café guests, who are sitting scattered but compactly at small round tables all the way up and down the bar and in the rooms at either end, to turn and look toward the door, at him, he pays them no attention but merely bursts again into his brazen masculine laughter with a smile that almost seems to cast a glow across the turned faces, illuminating them, and at his side, her, the fifteen-sixteen-years-older aristocratic tall luminous woman with the strong bones and the ivory-colored hair that hangs all the way down her back, proud, but nobly restrained like a queen, and behind them, behind the king and queen, the others, the extras, the entourage.