The Endless Summer

by Madame Nielsen

  Next moment they’re back in the Danish provincial capital, and “the endless summer” is to carry on as before, but it’s as if it can’t recognize itself or can’t quite remember how it went about it, as if in their absence time has suddenly started to pass, and the Portuguese light has merely been a glimmer of the impossible or hasn’t been at all. And this is also when the girl and the slender, sensitive, and oh so fine boy part, but say that it is precisely so as not to part, and she goes with the other one, the handsome one with the swaying arms and beautiful open and always empty hands, to America. But that’s a different story, which obviously takes place at the same time as this one, because everything in this coursing tale actually happens at the same time, but it will nonetheless be told at the end, in the cadence (as a final sigh), because it is the one that harbors the definitive, unlike this story of impossible love carrying on across separation and cessation and forever chiming in all of them, continuing long after “the endless summer” is long since over, across death, all this death that is to come.

  So here he goes again, the beautiful Portuguese youth, this mythological figure, walking down the street in the Danish provincial capital, alone, defying everything—closed faces, self-contained, miserly Protestantism that no longer has any god other than work, the endless winter, darkness, snow that the moment it kisses the asphalt is changed into slushy, mucky drifts along the curb—wearing his olive-dust-glinting gentleman’s coat, the newly-greased light-brown leather ankle-boots, and the hat, now no longer the “artist’s hat” of “the endless summer” at “the white farmhouse,” but a classic gentleman’s hat as worn by the patron from his hometown, head held high and still occasionally dazzling the passersby with his smile, his shoulder-length chestnut-brown hair, which she occasionally cuts at the round dining table in the little room on the fourth floor; but as the weeks, months pass, and the winter doesn’t seem to make any progress or look like it will ever come to an end, the slush soaks into the coattails as dull white-rimmed stains on the previously so olive-dust-glinting, the boots can no longer keep the slush out, they too get rims of the salt used to de-ice the streets, the leather starts to crack, the hat loses its supreme patron shape, even the chestnut-glowing hair seems to be kind of splitting, his gait becomes increasingly stooped, with slightly hunched shoulders, no longer seeing Everything like he used to and having energy for Everyone and no longer suddenly exploding with the laughter that could usually cause even the most cautious and self-reliant to stop, against their will, in their tracks or at least turn their head as they left the bank or supermarket and look across at him and happen, against their will, to smile, not that he’s starting to resemble them, he is still an exception, but more as an exotic and delicate, proud and beautiful animal captured and restlessly pacing back and forth or in tight circles on the slushy asphalt in a run-down provincial town’s zoo. You should have seen him! she gushes, the girl’s mother, now his wedded wife, she who had not for an instant throughout the entire honeymoon seen herself, now tells her daughter and the two young boys, the slender and the handsome, about the sight of him as he really is, unfolded to the full, in his own world. What you all see here is just a shadow! she says, thinking of him as he at this very moment, in the midday hour, enters the café on the square in his native Portuguese town, oh, if you only knew! she gushes shrilly, pressing her slim hands with their strong bones against her cheeks, tears brimming in her eyes, Stina! He was radiant! They idolized him, Stina, they did. And then abruptly sad: none of you will ever see him like that, not here, Stina, I don’t know how he can live here, in this country, I can’t do that to him, he belongs down there, but I can’t abandon my children, I can’t! she virtually whispers in the frailest of aristocratic voices, thinking about the two little brothers.

  But one day the impossible happens, the Danish provinces catch sight of him, all of a sudden he is taken in from the cold and granted an exhibition, not at the museum, that’s true, or at the somewhat more modern art house, nor at one of the few professional galleries in town, but nonetheless a solo exhibition, in a bank, none other than the head provincial office of Danske Bank itself, ten paintings and graphic prints hung on the walls behind the hard-working backs, clearly visible to all the customers as the glass doors slide silently aside and they enter. Now it is just a question of time, a few days, weeks, then one of the customers will make a move, one of the nouveau riche, yuppies, who have become aware of contemporary art and its investment potential, and buy the first picture. The one will lead to the other, news spreads, the local gallerists plus a couple of young international comets from the capital will come visit, the second will outbid the third, and the bank manager and curators from the museum and art house and a number of the younger trendsetting artists will look in, all doors will suddenly open and “the endless summer” will stream in and link them with the world and the time and give him the name and the place in the social order that he sooner or later will need to have if he is really to be able to live his life here. As soon as the deputy manager, who is in charge of the bank’s art association, has held his short speech for the guests and those few employees who are not duty-bound to pick up children, or are going out of town for the weekend (the bank manager is himself unfortunately unable to attend due to an unforeseen meeting in the capital), the Portuguese artist places his glass on a windowsill and walks toward the restroom and past it through a side entrance and vanishes. A few hours later, when the others, having spent time at a café where they have celebrated him in his absence, arrive home, he has gone to bed. For the next few days he does not leave the apartment, lies in bed until late afternoon, then he gets up, puts on trousers and a shirt and walks past the bathroom door without looking in the mirror and spends the rest of the day at the table in the sitting room gazing down at the tablecloth or leafing idly through some books or piles of old sketches. Suddenly one morning he has arisen before she wakes, has dressed and gone for a walk and doesn’t return until late evening, and one night he doesn’t come home at all. Next day they have their first argument, intensely, stridently, she suddenly looks like a woman approaching forty, she weeps, then they make love, intensely, loudly, and afterward they lie side by side with eyes open, shocked, lonely, and afraid of the future that until this moment has not existed at all. The telephone rings, it’s the daughter asking if they should pop by. Not now, she says, perhaps tomorrow, replaces the receiver and goes back to the bed. Next morning the daughter and the two young boys drop in, and for a few hours they again sit as they used to, at the table in the sitting room, each cradling a cup of milky coffee, listening to music and not really saying anything. Suddenly he stands up and looks at the three young Danes, and they know that the time has come for it to happen. They put on coats, shoes, and boots, and just then the mother walks out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped tightly around her chest and another wound in a turban around her hair and she comes to a standstill and asks them where on earth they are going? On the way down the stairs, the girl shouts out, wait! but the other three just keep going, practically tumbling out and on down the street toward the town center, he is at the front in the middle and now without a hat, shoulder-length brown hair fluttering in the March wind, and behind him, one on each side, the handsome and the slender, like the guardian angels in The Simple-Minded Murderer accompanied by trumpets from Verdi’s Requiem under a heavenly host of clouds rushing away from the final showdown they are hurrying toward, a showdown with the zeitgeist and the game they refuse to play, the oncoming random late-Monday-afternoon shoppers are brushed aside and left gawping like upturned pawns and gazing after them without grasping what is about to happen (and without, as is customary, grumbling or shouting, “look where you’re going, will you, man!”), until they reach the bottom of the street and, just before the bridge over the railway track, turn in through the bank’s main entrance, the doors giving a servile squeal as they draw back and make way for the supreme act that he, the artist with his fluttering hair and dashing olive
-muddy coattails accompanied by his two guardian angels, without stopping, without even glancing at the employees—cashiers, clerks, deputy managers, and the bank manager who just happens to have come down from his office on the second floor and is standing in the middle of it all in conversation with one of the deputy managers, all of whom turn or look up in a moment of arrested time—and without respecting or even noticing the yellow security lines that mustn’t be crossed, continue alongside the walls and while walking lift the first painting off the wall, then the next, and by the third the smile breaks out, and then, finally, he explodes in that overpowering laughter the world hasn’t heard at all while the pictures have been hanging here, visible to all and sundry, but which will now return in the prodigy’s supreme gesture and rejection of the game and its rules and the era in which it is being played, a showdown not just against the system of banks and money and the economy and the hierarchy, but with the entire culture it manifests, the nation, climate, human nature, not to mention the accursed endless winter, before anyone has stopped them, before anyone so much as shouts “stop!” or “hey hey, wait a minute!” they have removed the last of the ten paintings and prints from the walls and are on their way back, in a fluttering of hair and laughter and canvases flapping against the glass doors, which at that very moment slide aside for the breathless, confused, and yet again unjustly neglected girl, who has spent the last hundred meters of street building up to her elegy and now opens her mouth, but the moment she sees them she suddenly understands everything and also just has to give in and forgive, wait! she calls out, and romps along behind them out into freedom, the real, supreme freedom, the one beyond any order, out of this world, out in the impossible, “the endless summer,” where time does not exist.

  For the rest of the day and evening and long into the night they listen to loud music and dance in the little sitting room among the chairs and the paintings that are leaning any-old-how against the walls, on the cupboard, the windowsill, warped and scratched and retired from the world. They drink wine and bake bread from the last bag of flour, half a liter of milk, and the shriveled remains of a box of raisins the girl finds behind the stack of plates in the cupboard, the little brothers, who are actually no longer that little, don’t have to go to school tomorrow, no matter which day it might turn out to be! the mother gushes in her strident aristocratic voice, and he explodes over and over in his all-embracing laughter and falls back into the armchair and closes his eyes and spreads his beautiful fingers so the skin between them whitens, and laughs. “The endless summer” is back, and that’s a fact, and of course it isn’t, something has happened, for a moment they were out in the world, they had been cajoled or tempted, but had rebuffed it, brilliantly, that they had, but nonetheless now it exists, time, as a possibility, they can’t stop themselves thinking, at any time, even here while they dance, in the explosion of laughter, in his toss of the head and backward jerk in the armchair and the crashing of the armchair and later, when they are lying in the darkness, in the throes of cannibalistic lust, in his bite and her bitten lips, and in her misty eyes, next morning when she steps out through the bedroom door and sees them, the girl and the two young boys and the little brothers, lying there in the sitting room on mattresses that overlap one another, asleep in the morning sun, yes, even there, in the tears in her eyes and the smile that breaks out, it exists, the future, all the things that can happen. It is not the bite in the apple that makes the Fall. It is the idea of a life after this one-and-only now.

  It is spring, then summer, “the endless summer,” they say, they name it as if invoking it, “the endless summer,” as if it is language that creates the world, and not just a case of people being unable to exist without language. And one day in early June, or more likely late August, the girl packs her backpack for a trip to America with—not her slender, hypersensitive boyfriend, but the other one, handsome Lars with the swaying arms and beautiful empty hands. Yes, him. He’s there too. What has actually befallen him during the summer? What has he done, has he amounted to anything? Has he at least made an attempt? Isn’t he writing a poem? Does he talk about it? About being an actor, then? Well, yes, he does indeed. But does he do anything about it, does he attend a course? No. Doesn’t he paint watercolors, make drawings, just a sketch? To be sure. But does he finish it? No? Girlfriends? Yes yes, he meets girls all the time, he does, beautiful girls, sensitive girls, easy, smart, cold, charming, crazy, calm, poetic girls, but it never amounts to anything with them, he gives up, they don’t break up, it just doesn’t go anywhere, or it dies out or comes to nothing, time finishes it off, just a couple of days is enough, and by then nothing has really come of it. All that’s left is the smile, the lazy but always beautiful movements, the swaying arms, the open hands, this glow of a lifelong enjoyment, which is just a glow. In actual fact, he doesn’t enjoy a single moment, nothing, it’s all just resignation.

  Departure to America: railway station: farewell to the others: the mother, the Portuguese painter, the slender, sensitive young boy who will never really look like a man, the two little brothers, the handsome one’s little sister and, of course, the lanky Odense lad, we’ll bring him along with the others into the railway station to wave goodbye to the America-bound travelers: she, the girl, wearing one of her big loose summer frocks, the chipped polish on her toenails, ribbon sandals and the long, sun-bleached, split hair, the slightly hysterical voice she has inherited from her mother, stooping under the weight of the cumbersome faded-blue backpack. And handsome Lars? He sets out, “as he is,” he doesn’t need anything else: his young body, simple clothes: jeans, T-shirt (white), a light knitted sweater tied loosely around his neck (the suntanned neck), the shapely feet (suntanned, the summer sand between his toes), a pair of ankle socks in a pair of sneakers, and that’s it, a small backpack, the smallest, the most everyday, the practical Fjällräven (the type that most people use for an afternoon at the beach), and in it a windbreaker, an extra T-shirt, an extra pair of briefs (besides the ones he is of course wearing, even though they haven’t been mentioned here), toothbrush, toothpaste, passport, visa, a wallet with a few hundred dollars, that’s it, a person didn’t need more than that as the twentieth century drew to its close.

  Do they land in New York? They do indeed. Like you do. They’re in New York, it’s day one, he wants to go down to the Lee Strasberg Institute, gateway to the dream of being an actor, to Broadway and Hollywood, she’d like a wander first, Central Park, the Empire State Building, see a bit of it all. He can’t be bothered, he wants to find the Strasberg Institute. She goes with him down to the Strasberg Institute. And then they’re there, an old building in a side street, a scratched metal door, loads of young people walking in and out, perfectly ordinary young people carrying bags and small backpacks with their rehearsal clothes, most likely, scripts under their arms. No one he recognizes, no stars. Nothing happening. What had you imagined? she says. He doesn’t know, be discovered, probably, he wants to be a movie actor. They’re there for half an hour. Then they leave. What now? We’ve only just landed! she says. He sighs. They stay in New York for a week or two. Like you do. She sees a bit of it all, excited, overawed. He goes along with her. Or he spends a day at the hostel, lies in bed and looks at the ceiling. Then they move on. They don’t rent a car (like you usually would) and drive across the continent to the Pacific coast. They do the trip by bus, Greyhound (like indeed you also would), but even by the time they get to Santa Barbara, where one or the other knows someone or other, they’ve started getting on one another’s nerves, or more to the point: his indolence, which unlike hers is not pleasure-filled, gets on her nerves, that he can’t be bothered to do anything, not even here in the New World where everything is possible and the sun is shining. She wants to go to the beach, see the Pacific! have a go at surfing! diving! meet new people! fall in love! What with? With the whole thing! He can’t be bothered, he stays up by the house, all that exertion, first you have to get there, then get back. They part company, he hitche
s north, ends up in San Francisco, and that’s where it happens. What?

  He doesn’t know who or what he is, for pity’s sake. Isn’t it enough simply to exist? All that stuff you absolutely have to try out. Why? What is it you have to find out or arrive at? He’s right here, damn it. He closes his eyes, let it happen, once, okay, just the once. What? Back home on the island, in “the endless summer,” he did of course smoke hash, once (it made him sleepy, even more lethargic, fall asleep), get drunk (made him melancholic, sentimental, pining, instead of dancing and letting himself go, gave up, didn’t even give in, just slumped on a chair at the table, stuck his finger in the hot wax under the flame, withdrew his finger and let the wax dry on his fingertip and stared at it, the finger, the wax, rubbed it off and stuck his finger in the liquid wax under the flame, went off into a reverie, and so forth), of course he knows, he’s intelligent, he’s perfectly capable of seeing himself, he smiles, lazily, indolently, no end to his charm, after all, now he’ll just give it a go with another man, just the once, it’s not anything he’s been thinking about for ages, not anything that has spent years of longing inside his flesh, “ah!” not anything he’s had to hide throughout his entire boyhood and youth in the little provincial town with all its restrictive norms and rules, not recurring sighs at the sight of a tight boy-butt, not an irrepressible frisson of desire to be able to say, uninhibitedly, coquettishly, “hi, girls, so how are we today?!” when they meet in the gay bar, after all, he’s not “coming out,” what happens just happens, first option: he drifts around the streets, up and down them he goes, the steep streets in the sun in San Francisco, the narrow streets in the slightly older, run-down, charming neighborhood with all the colorfully painted houses, this atmosphere of the eternal hippie, time that can no longer be bothered to pass, it suits him, he likes it, he sits for a while in the sun in front of a café, or at the bar counter in the late afternoon, flickering sunlight shining in through the windows, handsome as he is, fair, the sun-bleached salty hair and the suntanned limbs, the carelessness, laziness of his movements, which here on the American West Coast suddenly seem provocatively nonchalant, coquettish, irresistible, first the one, then a second, then a third guy comes over to him, would he maybe like a drink or a freshly-squeezed juice, “how are you doing?” and “where do you come from?” he can’t be bothered, he just smiles, laughs with a sigh, this damned charming sexy breathy laughter, why, after all, why not, they get talking, the evening draws in, it gets dark, and the other guy suggests they go home to his place, and that’s what they do . . .