Can it really be true? Does no one weep, whisper, do they not give one another a comforting hug, they have to! It’s as if they are immobile, transformed into pillars of salt, as if in this final moment they have looked back and seen what no human being can bear to see.
Then, suddenly, the bells chime, the organ strikes up, and six men in dark suits carry the coffin out of the church, who are they? where do they come from? the father isn’t one of them, he is walking behind the coffin next to the sister, wearing dark clothes and strangely impassive, just like them, the six dark-suited men of various ages, men who have not been mentioned with a single word, but must have been there all along, beyond the language, on the outskirts of the story, like distant relatives he has never mentioned because they were nothing to him, because he wasn’t in touch with them and couldn’t see why he ever should be, but all the same they have of course been there all the time, beyond “the endless summer” they have lived their lives with wives, mothers, sons, and daughters, and now suddenly, at the final and exactly right moment, they have entered the story and have commandeered the coffin and are carrying it out of God’s house, out under the low wind-swept February sky, along the bare, slightly sloping churchyard’s crunching gravel paths in a straight line toward the hole in the ground, that’s his spot. They stop, secure the ropes, and lower the coffin onto the joists, without a word and still just as impassive, almost professional, as if they aren’t anything other than what they are doing at this very moment. Then the six men brush the grime from their hands, take a step backward and make room for the pastor. He hasn’t said anything yet, just the words of the Bible, as if there had been an advance request for no form of personal reference, just the basic necessity, thank you, the ritual: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In sure and certain hope of glorious resurrection, through the Lord, unto eternal life.” The pastor says the last bit in a slightly quieter voice, as if it’s impossible to believe, but has to be said according to the book. The father is standing behind him, and at his side the sister, the father doesn’t touch her, doesn’t even take her hand, she is totally alone, little shivers run through her, she tries to hold back the tears, she knows that she shouldn’t weep, but she can’t stop herself, she wants to weep. Around them, behind the dark-suited backs are the wives, a couple of grown-up daughters, no children; and slightly farther away again, standing in their own little group, like some kind of audience that doesn’t actually have any business here: the girl, the mother, and her Portuguese husband, the two little brothers, the slender, sensitive young boy, the female friend, and the lanky artist. None of them live on the island any more, it is a “desert” or a “deserted” island, the handsome boy was the only one left, or rather, the only one who went back, not to retrieve, but to give up, and it really was like a homecoming for him, as if that was what he had longed for all the time, all the way through “the endless summer” too: to come home, home to the dark little detached house, the—after the mother’s cancer-death—deserted, empty house, where the father lurked like a ghost, the definitively hopeless place, the terminus, to which all routes lead: death, he could finally surrender himself to it, uninhibitedly, brazenly, not just to death, but to that which is worse, the most rigorous of all taboos: to crave it, at last he didn’t have to live up to life any longer, life’s gift, his handsome body with all its possibilities, all its potential life, all the things he could do and ought to do with that gift of being born in the best, the safest, the richest, the most open of all worlds, and, what’s more, with the ideal body, a body that would be able to learn everything, a mind and an intelligence that would be able to think out the unthinkable, perhaps, yes, just think! No, he couldn’t be bothered, he had just one wish: to come home, home in the humdrum, the empty, the hopeless, home. Neither the dark-suited nor their wives have said hello to this bunch of godless strangers, not so much as looked at them, as if they are unwanted, accomplices in the shame that has been drawn down upon the family, only the sister occasionally turns her head and glances at them, quickly, as an entreaty. They are freezing cold, the February wind catches hold of their hair and the Portuguese artist’s olive-dust coat, tears at it, thrashes with it. Twenty, maybe thirty years later they’re still around, spread across the world like vestiges, residues of life, the kind that can be wound up in a single crumpled sentence, but which can in fact take several decades to get rid of. The girl and the sensitive, slender boy who across the years, and every time they return from each their travels and each their adventures with other, unfamiliar or far too proximate genders, have kept on meeting up and resuming something that is long since over, in the way young people still find it difficult to let go of what has been, because it was so short and it can’t be true that it’s already over, it has to last forever, we think and say to one another “till death do us part,” we say, and it’s not until much later that we realize it isn’t just young people and the first falling in love, but love and life that are already over in the here and now to which you abandon yourself and in which you momentarily vanish, and that both love and life, just like God, are something we create after it, the miracle, has occurred, once it’s over, that’s when it comes into existence in the tale. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In sure and certain hope of glorious resurrection, through the Lord, unto eternal life.” The ritual is over, the soil has been thrown on the coffin, and the six dark-suited men walk in front of their wives, sisters, and daughters, and with the pastor as a sort of intermediary between the believers and the godless bereaved from “the endless summer,” across the churchyard toward the parish hall, silent, purposeful, as if the waiting postfuneral reception is also a part of the ritual, something that (according to the book) has to be done not to guide the bereaved through their grief and give it structure, but as the triumph of the believers.
The parish hall, a mausoleum to the nineteen-fifties with dark paneling, long tables and varnished benches like a community center. The dark-suited men sit with their families and the pastor at the one long table, shoulder to shoulder and backs to the survivors of “the endless summer,” who are also uninvited guests here, spread along the other table, too many to vanish, too few to form a community. No one says anything, it’s a funeral feast bereft of the feast, no redemption, just the meek clinking of china cups on saucers and the blackness of the grave replicated in the coffee, reflecting the faces of the believers, pale and serious, but not from grief, on the contrary, in the triumph of the faith, dry and taut, like the faces in Bergman’s least dramatic, most oppressive films, which are also the humble, the most sparing, just the fundamentally requisite, a man, a woman, a bare church interior, the gray light from yet another gray day outside. Just once, the sister turns and casts a quick disconsolate glance at the godless sitting around the other table, and the mother smiles sadly to her, and the sister looks down. The father on her one side, the pastor on the other, not a word is spoken, the father just sits staring down into his cup. Now what? It’s as if the ritual has ground to a halt, the silence is no longer that of the faith, but of emptiness, an abyss opening up. First the one and then the other of the dark-suited men leans slightly forward and looks discreetly along the table toward the father, but the father doesn’t react, and the pastor makes no move to shoulder the responsibility. At length, a young man stands up, one of the dark-suited, a cousin to the handsome boy, he strikes a single “clink” with his teaspoon on the coffee cup, clears his throat in the silence that was already there, and speaks. He says that death is God’s punishment of the sinful, that nothing is meaningless, that disease, every disease, is a warning, and death is never unjust, no matter how early it occurs, it always has a message, and thus this day is not a day of mourning but of affirmation and proof that God, the Almighty, looks down upon us and weighs our words and our deeds, and that some people’s lives are an insult, not just to life and creation, but to Him. Then he sits down, the last word has been said, and “the endless summer” is definitively over.
But in the silence, the tale fades away, in defiance and as preposterous as love it follows the bereaved out into the emptiness: the two little brothers whose father, the so-called “stepfather,” had suddenly disappeared leaving them fatherless or that which is worse, with a displaced and humiliated father, whose nasal, bitter voice they will still occasionally hear, on the telephone and during sporadic weekends staying with him in the little low-ceilinged wing of his older brother’s farmhouse, the nasal, bitter voice that within a few years will eat him up, the bitterness will become the cancer that bitterness is, a quiet fretting of the flesh, and before anyone knows it, and before he turns fifty, he’s dead, and nothing will be left, not a commemorative plaque, not a mitigating word, just this merciless sentence, and then, perhaps, a consideration of them, the two little brothers, “he was their father, after all.” And the lanky artist, he who will meet his God, will put every idea of art behind him and return home to the island of his birth, not in order, like handsome Lars, to abandon himself to his own death, but in order, like a true Christian, to abandon himself to someone else’s and accompany his mother on the last steps along the path home to the Lord, never to return to life and the two little children in the capital city, but quite simply to remain living with his father in the half-empty, dark, and by now very run-down small detached house on the outskirts of the provincial town. Every Monday, in the late afternoon, these two elderly widowers of the same woman will be seen stepping out of the scullery door and disappearing into the carport and a moment later they reverse out in the now also quite rundown and no longer particularly cheap-to-run car and drive together to the nearest supermarket and do the shopping for yet another week. At an age of forty-seven or -eight, he will all of a sudden, like a belated Joseph, decide to take an apprenticeship as a carpenter, and subsequently the now seventy- or eighty-year-old parents of his old school friends, who had already left home several decades ago and have made a career in the capital city or abroad or have at least established a little nuclear family in the adjoining neighborhood with a small detached house, car, wife, children, and perhaps even grandchildren, every afternoon, when they’re out walking the dog, will see this barely fifty-year-old apprentice carpenter and widower of his mother in his faded-brown work-wear, and with the traditional folding ruler wobbling back and forth in his thigh pocket, bent over the handlebars of his father’s old gentleman’s bicycle like a scrawny secretary bird or the cadaver of a heron tramping its way from the vale and up the hill toward the residential neighborhood. At that point in time, he has long since lost contact with the rest of the survivors from “the endless summer,” and the only friend from his adolescence that he still occasionally sees is the other once-so-obviously talented of the neighborhood’s gang of hopeful sensitive budding artists, a son of a university lecturer, who, just like the lanky Twiggy one, had already displayed an amazing talent for drawing at the age of ten, and by his early teens was responsible for all the illustrations in the school magazine, which he also helped to edit and for which he wrote articles, while also being, one is here tempted to say of course, one of the most gifted in his grade and, again of course, played the piano, both Bach and Beethoven, sight-reading, improvisations, and his own little compositions, and, at the same time he was, of course, goalkeeper for the football team, the first team, and one of the three players who for the first time ever in the island’s or at least the club’s history brought home the cup from the boys’ national table tennis championship; no sooner had he started at the senior school in town before his first feature article appeared in the local newspaper and simultaneously a long lyrical account—“The Evening of Multiple Emotions”—of the first school party appeared in the student magazine, and at the age of just sixteen or seventeen he made his debut as a poet in the leading journal of poetry in the land. Just like the lanky one, and possibly to an even more promising degree, he can become whatsoever he chooses, but no matter what that might be, it will without doubt be something big. And at this very moment, when all doors to the world are open at once and it is merely a question of choosing the one (or ones) through which he will make his entrance onto the world stage, his older sister, an entirely charming and sensitive pale young woman who is of course engaged to one of the school principal’s talented sons, starts hearing the sound of every single ambulance siren or fire engine as a sign that her beloved has been in an accident. Before long she is being spotted wandering restlessly around the neighborhoods in a flowing nightdress, hair tangled, madness in her eyes and in loud discussion with herself, until all of a sudden, whoosh! and she’s gone, and it’s said she’s been put away in the secure unit, which evidently (the daughter’s fate, or maybe rumors about this fate in the very small residential neighborhood) is a severe blow to her father, the university lecturer, who is himself a sensitive person and at the annual parents’ cup at the son’s table tennis club, which he, carrying the same winner gene as his son but perhaps not the same obvious talent, is determined to win every year, he always ends up losing control, hammering the paddle into the table and bad-mouthing his opponents, the other boys’ fathers, all of whom are self-possessed citizens with jobs in banks, the municipal authority, or smallish companies, until the son, at the musical climax, both entreating and gentle, must first lead his trembling and heavily sweating father to the locker room (to cool down) and then, helped by one of the self-possessed fathers and his rather firm grip on the father’s arm, is assisted down to the parking lot to the car, which, however, on the advice of the assisting father, who is most resolutely of the opinion that the university lecturer is probably still too affected (indeed intoxicated by fury) to be able to drive a car in a responsible manner, they opt to leave there, whereupon they, the son still only wearing his club shirt and short blue table tennis shorts, walk homeward in silence through the quiet residential roads. A few weeks after the daughter’s admission to the secure unit, the university lecturer also starts arguing loudly and publicly with himself, and it is not long before, for the first time in the history of the provincial hospital, the journals show that father and daughter are both in the secure unit, at the same time. From that day on, all the son’s careers come to a standstill, as if all those wide open doors to all the bright futures on offer also slam shut in his face and lock him up in a vacuum or an afterlife he never puts into words, as if it was his own personal holocaust, after which it is no longer possible to write poems or create art. With due modesty, he commences a university course in literature, which he never finishes, but also never abandons, he becomes quite literally an “eternal student,” lives for extended periods with his mother in the, like the lanky artist’s childhood home, now very run-down and dark little detached house, or in a rented room or in small two-roomed apartments in the dullest neighborhoods of various towns. At the age of thirty, he at long last publishes his first and for the next twenty years only poetry collection, which is not, as you might otherwise have thought or at least hoped, a fervor of fate and frailty in the tradition of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Celan, but instead just treats with and of the view from the window in front of his desk and the dust on the windowsill. He is no longer young and agile, but oldish, overweight, has a bald patch, and above all looks like an attendant, and that’s exactly what he is: cloakroom attendant at the concert hall in the Broadcasting House or relief assistant in a small bookstore. Now and then, when he’s home visiting his mother, he meets up with the lanky middle-aged apprentice carpenter, never “at home” with one or the other, always somewhere out in the, as in all detached house neighborhoods, strangely deserted public forum, in the dusk they can be seen pottering around the same quiet residential roads on which thirty or forty years ago they worked out their wild visions of other worlds, and they always end up on the same bench in the churchyard, where the lanky middle-aged apprentice carpenter as usual gets onto the message about the Grace of God and The Life Everlasting, but without ever convincing the other. And while they sit there (or before
or after) and long after they have finally realized it’s all over for them too, the once so alive young girl with the delicate bones and large soft breasts and the no longer just slender and sensitive but alarmingly emaciated one, yet to become the elderly woman who some day will be able to tell this story, will meet one last time, and at a churchyard again, of all places, but in the summer this time, and they will sit in the sun on one of the grass-covered graves, and she will say to him that in the photographs taken of her in the summer after “it” (the funeral? the child they never had?), black-and-white photos, her skin looked all gray, she’d got wrinkles, and her eyes were dead. And she, who could have made her mother a grandmother at the age of thirty-five or -six, will never have children, nor do the two little brothers have children; for many years, until she’s in her late fifties, the aristocratic mother has no grandchildren, as if there is a curse on the family, decreeing that it will not be allowed to live on after them, and it is not until the youngest brother, who has been the wildest and darkest in temperament, passes the thirty mark—suddenly becoming deeply religious and marrying a woman from an evangelical Lutheran revival movement family—that a descendant is born, a little girl with a father who, unlike his own father, isn’t paranoid and pitiful and full of hatred toward humankind, but, like the very same father, grim and determined with a dark glacial look in his eyes. And unlike the mother, who after the sixth of her seven possible lives, which she has lived under each of her six husband’s surnames, reclaims the seventh time around her maiden name under which she lives for the rest of her days, the daughter elects to keep the surname she just happens to have been given, which is neither her father’s name nor that of the tall fair man she spent her many early years believing to be her father, but is the name of one of the many fathers in her life with whom she hasn’t ever had anything in common, the man who, what’s more, had terrorized half her childhood, transformed it into a claustrophobic hell under detective surveillance and turned her into a resident of Twin Peaks, yes, the stepfather, the man with the gun, the pitiful one himself, let us call him Mads. But maybe it’s not her choice, just yet another result of the indolence that for the first decades was hedonistic, but gradually just became a dull resignation, in which she goes from having been “the dark round and soft girl with the delicate bones and big soft breasts” to being ever more disturbingly overweight, albeit still animated and gesticulating, as if there still was life. And whereas the mother, for each of her seven lives, moves on to another astonishingly idyllic or peculiar place, the daughter will stay put in the small semi-dark apartment in a side street in one of the more run-down neighborhoods of the capital city in one of the buildings in which the stepfather’s older brother Buller had once invested his portion of the inheritance, and into which in her early twenties she had been most graciously allowed—by this stepfather’s older brother, who never condescended to speak to or with her directly, but had his secretary reply to the humiliatingly humble letter, virtually a begging letter, the girl had sent him, a plea for just the tiniest little ground-floor or attic apartment, for which she would of course, like anyone else, pay the full rent, inclusive of electricity, gas, heating, and whatever extras might come on top, such as a rent increase in connection with “improvements” to the property—to move, temporarily, just a single girl’s digs, a springboard before being launched into life itself with the husband who would prove to be the great love of her life, and with whom she would have her children, which she never gets, neither children, nor husband, nor any proper actual life, she will never get there, it gets stuck at the temporary point, the single girl’s digs, the loneliness, the one quarter-finished training course after the other and the resulting more or less random and always short-lived temporary jobs, and all of it done under the same name, which she has fundamentally and from the very outset hated. When all is said and done, the Portuguese youth and his luminous, aristocratic wife—the two who, in the narrative folly, had briefly been king and queen—were the only ones in the godless bunch at the windswept churchyard who, as the pastor throws the three spoonfuls of soil onto the handsome boy’s coffin, really understand that “the endless summer” is now over. Like a perfectly ordinary southern European man and a slightly older, somewhat emaciated, but still upright and dignified woman, they will rise from the table in the parish hall and a few weeks after the funeral they will part, and he will pack his belongings and travel back to Lisbon bearing the name that, in the narrative folly, he had given her and which seems to be the name of “the endless summer,” and he will carry on his life there as if nothing has happened in the interim. And yet: they part, never to part, over the years they continue to send one another long passionate letters, and every time something terrible happens in one of their lives, or when on the contrary nothing has happened for far too long and life seems to have ground to a halt, in the middle of the night, when they are, each at their end of the continent, lying in the dark next to a new other and suddenly complete stranger, he or she has to slip silently out of bed and grab the telephone and with trembling hands ring the other, and they will talk for hours, weep, fall silent, and laugh, and the other woman and the other man, lying in the darkness behind them, suddenly wide awake and listening to this incredible passion, will feel dejected and devastated while also understanding that the pain they are feeling is not a humiliation, maybe not even caused by an abandonment, but what they are witnessing is something unique, something that only occurs once, not just in someone’s life, but perhaps in the whole story, that these two unreasonably loving lovers are in a way also victims of the incredible, the exception, which revokes all regulations and is unreasonable, because it doesn’t reason with anything else, it is indeed the exception, and something they just have to live with. But of course that is not humanly possible, there is no longer anyone who is that selfless. Sooner or later the younger, slender and slightly nervy Portuguese woman behind the artist’s back will rise from the bed and walk out to the balcony with its view across Alfama and the Atlantic Ocean in the distance, and she will stand there for a moment in the darkness, silent and with a face that no longer expresses anything, and she will feel the warm breeze against her naked flesh before finally letting herself fall. And the somewhat older, self-assured and excruciatingly ordinary Danish man behind the aristocratic woman’s back will be increasingly overcome by raging outbursts of jealousy, will stab quivering knives into the kitchen table and, under the strain, of course, out of his mind, will maybe even lash out at her, until one day she can no longer bear it, and despite his anger, his accusations, and his tearful entreaties, she quite calmly leaves him, packs her belongings and moves, first to a dilapidated sun-yellow farmhouse in a humid valley surrounded by bogs and nightingales some kilometers south of the provincial capital, later with the younger of the two little brothers to a small dark three-room apartment, and finally, once he, the youngest, has moved to the capital city in order to embark like his father before him on a training program in a bank, she settles in a modest townhouse on the Kattegat coast, where she spends her final years living alone with the lover who has, throughout the preceding six lives with six totally different men, loyally and silently accompanied her like a shadow: the stallion. And the young boy with whom it all began, this fine, slender and oh so sensitive boy, who was never going to strip naked with another man, never rub his skin against another man’s skin, will finally understand the old woman he is, frail and mercurial as cobweb, almost just a voice now, a being beyond age, who has withdrawn from the times and lives as a shadow among strangers in the “City of Light,” sits alone here in the high-ceilinged room in a neighborhood of nostalgia, her own muse, who has let go of the notion of a future, turned her back to it and, face to face with those who still are and those who will be, tells of that which has been lost and perhaps never existed until now.
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