I have never been all that interested in the so-called explorers, all except one: Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan as he was known to us in school. True he was killed in the Philippines, so he never made it back to his starting point in Spain himself, but it was his initiative and vision which brought about the first circumnavigation of the Earth. No one combined strength of will with cosmographic perception and nautical know-how the way Magellan did. The others hit upon a bit of land here and there, but it was Magellan who tied a string around it all, binding all of the individual discoveries together, threading the pearls neatly onto a strand so that they formed a circle. There could no longer be any doubt: the world was round.
There were times when I thought of my Project X as a Magellanic voyage. Like Magellan I wanted to find other routes, new straits to sail through. I dreamed, not least, of an outcome every bit as deep-reaching as his: a completely new view of the world. Magellan showed the people of his day that the world was bigger than they thought.
I soon came to look upon the plastic tablecloths filling the living room as sails, especially when I aired the room and the sheets flapped gently in the draught. I was not in Hegdehaugsveien at all, I was on board my Victoria, the only one of Magellan’s ships to make it home. Magellan sailed round the Earth. I wished to sail round, to encircle reality. When I read those layers upon layers of words, I felt a breeze blowing inside me, or rather, I felt as if something were being opened up, as if I were about to acquire more of that profound insight of which, all my life, I had known myself to possess only a subset. Meanwhile, the work, the thinking, was taking its toll on me. It is said that while crossing the Pacific Magellan’s men lived on worm-eaten biscuits and dirty, foul-smelling water, before they took to eating rats and sawdust, and chewing hide ripped off the timbers. During the Pacific Ocean phase of the Project I led an equally spartan, if not quite so drastic existence. Leonard’s Italian cuisine was a thing of the past. If I did get round to eating anything, I tended to fall back on Spaghetti à la Capri, which I did not even bother to warm, just spooned straight from the tin. It reminded me of my childhood, when the only provisions we needed for a walk in the forest was a stock cube to lick.
The actual crossing of ‘il Pacifico’, a totally unknown area, was Magellan’s greatest achievement. They thought it would only take a few days to sail from the New World, America, to the Moluccas, the centre of the oriental spice trade, instead it took almost four months. Magellan could almost be said to have discovered the Pacific, its vast scale. I too wanted to find something like that: an unknown, or underestimated sea. In selecting the main classes for my new system I gave priority to those subjects pertaining to the mind or things immaterial. I aimed to disentangle a hidden, as yet unrealised, meaning from the world. Fold out reality. A few of today’s particle physicists maintain that we can have no conception of the greater part of the universe simply because it is comprised of a form of matter so essentially different from anything we can imagine. I know it sounds strange, not to say crazy, but I believe that during the most transparent phases of my Project I was on the track of something like that.
Once, I was waiting for Margrete outside a cinema. She took a taxi from work. I observed her through the dark, tinted window as she was paying the driver. I could only just make out her face. The thought struck me that she was trapped inside a black crystal. That I would never be able to break through to her.
The longer I stayed in that room, among those transparent panels covered in writing, the more the feeling I had had ever since studying the spider’s web was confirmed – a hunch which was reinforced by the notion of circumnavigating the world: I ought to arrange the subjects in a circle. Like a wheel.
I reorganised the room. This time I hung the sheets in concentric rings. And the first time I sat down on a chair in the centre and scanned the headings of the subjects and the classes surrounding me, receding layers of script, words forming sentences of sorts, spokes radiating to an outer rim, I sensed what a tremendous boost this gave to my thinking. Everything seemed to explode. I saw patterns of breathtaking beauty. I glimpsed concepts, totally new sciences, with names as yet unuttered by any human being. I caught flashes of solutions in which everything interlocked – not by dint of thousands of tiny gear-wheels, but with all the categories mixed up in such a way that gear-wheels meshed with butterfly wings and crystals, the whole thing encircled by elementary particles. I was thrilled, but I was also startled. The plastic tablecloths seemed to glow. For some time I felt that I was on the threshold of a breakthrough which would have incalculable consequences, that I was all set to make a magnificent contribution to civilisation. There I was: friendless, gaunt, dead-beat, but I truly had created a chandelier of knowledge, three-dimensional, something that could be considered from all sides, with every piece hanging in its rightful place in relation to the others, not packed in boxes and tucked away singly on shelves. At my most audacious moments I felt I was on the scent of something comparable in importance to the alphabet, something which would enable us to form new concepts; an instrument by which mankind could steer, one which could give progress a hefty, and most timely, nudge.
During those first weeks, when we spent more time in bed than out of it, I told Margrete about my endeavours, about the project which I had, by then, abandoned. She got a big laugh out of my descriptions of this, laughed heartily and sincerely, as if it really was a priceless joke. But she caressed me too, as if to console me; she ran a finger wonderingly over the double scar I have over one eyebrow: ‘Hey … you’ve got an “X” on your forehead,’ she whispered. That was all she said, but I ought to have known what she meant.
And then I met my Silapulapu. Silapulapu was the chief of the natives who killed Magellan on the little island of Mactan. On the threshold of his great triumph, almost at the very moment of victory, Magellan was run through by spears. And that is pretty much what happened to me.
I woke one morning with an awful sinking feeling in my stomach and a bitter taste in my mouth. I leapt out of bed and ran, stark naked, straight into the centre of my circle. It was all just a blur. I stared at the transparent plastic sheets covered in writing, only once again to see nothing but chaos. I tried to regain my clarity of vision, but everything was just grey. Māyā, I murmured under my breath. Everything was māyā. I spent the whole day wandering around in a daze, staring, reading, thinking. My eyes hurt, my head hurt, I felt sick from exhaustion, from hunger, from lack of sleep. I was still naked when I climbed into bed that night.
I ought probably to repudiate my grotesque project, make fun of it. And yet I have to admit that I look back on those years with something akin to respect. It may have been a ridiculous venture, but it was beautiful. And who knows, maybe, for a second or two, I actually was only millimetres away from a Pacific Ocean discovery.
I stuck at it, almost in spite of myself, for another few weeks, hung up still more closely-written plastic sheets at different points around the circles. All in vain. Nor was my base at the College of Architecture of any use to me now, my studies of the construction and design of some of the world’s most audacious buildings: the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Opera House in Sydney, the Parliament Buildings in Brasilia. I had an idea that the problem lay in the number of main classes. I would have to prune them, single out those which I felt might function in the same way as the spider’s anchor points for the first foundation threads. I thought of Francis Bacon who had managed with just three categories: Memory, Imagination, Reason.
Eventually, almost dropping with exhaustion and possibly inspired by Uncle Melankton’s attempt to reduce the Encyclopedia Brittanica to a single word, I managed to gather everything under two headings: Matter and Mind. Then: Living and Dead. And finally just one: Storytelling. This single main class could thereafter be split up into subdivisions consisting of bigger and bigger lies.
I gave up. It was – and I say this even when looking at it with today’s eyes – the greatest defeat of my
life. Or the second greatest. My only comfort was that my shipwreck had been a private affair. No one ever learned of it. I held my peace and went to work in television. I suppose I could say: with Storytelling. Lies. When they showed me the studio, the little cubicle from which I was to do my announcing, in my extraordinary naivety I thought to myself: this could be the perfect hiding place. I did not know that television was a medium within which a fool could be taken for a wonder.
I had one little ray of hope, though. On that day when I found Le petit prince by Saint-Exupéry on the Deichman’s well-organised shelves, Karen Mohr opened the book and read a sentence aloud to me in exquisite French and then translated it: ‘It is only with the heart that once can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’ I did not think about it at the time, but I thought about it when I abandoned my Project X: maybe it was not my eyes, nor even my brain that I should be training, concentrating on, if I was to discover something new, but my heart.
I reached this insight at about the same time that I met Margrete again. All of the subject headings in the world, all of Melvil Dewey’s thousands of sections, flowed smoothly into one: Love. And who knows, perhaps it was those crazy hypotheses which gave wind to Margrete’s sails and caused her to set course for Norway once more. She certainly told me that for a long time she had considered settling down somewhere else. But then she had been overcome by an uncontrollable and inexplicable urge to go home.
And now, ten years later, I was standing facing this same woman. And yet even after ten years and thousands of experiences of love I could not understand why she should suddenly seem so hostile; why, towards the end of a confused conversation, she should have worried so much at the necklace that the string snapped.
Pearls sprayed everywhere, went tumbling to the floor. The sound triggered a memory from my childhood: I had knocked a bag of peas out of the cupboard as I tried to sneak a handful of raisins. They made an incredibly complex sound, those peas. A māyā sound if ever there was one, layer upon layer of the same sound, in different nuances of tone. I can still recall the sight of it too, how slowly the pearls, which had suddenly acquired an even deeper sheen, fell through the dim lamplight in the living room, as if they were not falling, but drifting, floating downwards. I noticed how Margrete seemed to be trying to follow each individual pearl with her eyes, the course of each one, at the same time. As if her eyes were doing the splits. And since I was watching her more than the pearls, I saw how she, too, positively fell apart and tumbled to the floor, shattering into pieces that rolled off in all directions. She muttered something which I only grasped after she had muttered it several times: ‘My life’s thread has snapped.’
Then she simply walked out. Or at least, she turned in the doorway and said goodnight. She paid no mind to the pearls, it was as if they were now worthless, a currency which had fallen disastrously in value after a terrible crash – of a moral, not an economic, nature.
I felt I ought to pick them up. I crawled around the parquet floor on my hands and knees. I knew there were forty-six pearls; an increasingly tipsy Mrs Boeck had announced this fact often enough at the party earlier that evening. I hunted for all I was worth and when I counted them an hour later, in the middle of the night, I had forty-five. I have always had a suspicion that the missing pearl, that particular pearl, held a secret. Or that it was not a pearl I had lost, but Margrete.
Over the following days she never asked about the pearls. She seemed apathetic. Almost as if she were doped up. The black discs of her pupils put me in mind of a solar eclipse. She complained of headaches. And the nights were different. I would wake to find her lying sobbing. One night she screamed out loud, shook the bed-head like a child. As if she thought I was not there, that I had left her. Gently I got her to lie down again, speaking soothingly to her. Her head looked so small in the big bed, against the white bed linen. It reminded me of the minuscule portrait on the white wall in Uncle Lauritz’s flat. I had had the same thought then as now: love was a massive map on which there was just one big white patch, an undiscovered land – all except for one small face.
I returned the pearls to her one Sunday morning, at breakfast. Everything seemed normal enough – the orange juice which she had squeezed herself, English marmalade and two exquisite flowers in a vase on the table. We were alone. I had had the necklace restrung, with knots between the pearls. And I had bought a new Akoya pearl, identical to the others. Margrete took the necklace and counted the pearls. Or no, she did not count them, she ran them through her fingers as she was saying something to me. She smiled. And then she began to cry. For joy, I thought. ‘This one’s new,’ was all she said, her fingers around one pearl, the third from the loop side of the clasp. The jeweller had shown me where he had put the pearl I had bought. ‘One of the original pearls is gone,’ she said.
She could tell by feel that it was a different pearl. She could see with her hands. She could sense that I had been with another woman in Lisbon. She could run her fingers over me, over my penis and know right away that it was no longer the same. This was an intelligence beyond my ken. Margrete could not only read books, she could read the temperature of the skin, the light in the eyes, the taste of the lips, the body’s secretions.
I confessed. Or rather, I merely said: ‘You’re right, something did happen in Lisbon.’ She put up a hand, a stop sign: ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’ And yet, if she knew, why was it that only after this did I sometimes catch a new look in her eyes. Not jealousy. Her eyes told me that she was hurt. Humiliated. Or forsaken, lonely. That look said she knew she was not loved. That was what destroyed her. She became more and more quiet after that.
Can you kill a person by neglecting to think about them?
Sometimes I can delude myself into believing that I gave up on love back at the point when I abandoned Project X. After all, if I stopped believing it was possible to arrive at a unified whole, then I also stopped believing in love.
Not long after this evening I found a scalpel in our bed. I was making the bed, and there, between the two single mattresses, lay a scalpel, a chillingly sharp surgical instrument, a lethal weapon in the hands of an expert. Like a sword laid between us. When I asked her about it she made light of it, she must have dropped it, was all she said, she used it to cut the pages of the occasional Danish book. I couldn’t help wondering, though. She was a doctor. I felt scared. Slept with my hands under the duvet.
The next few weeks were marked by Margrete’s baffling behaviour: fits of rage, emotional outbursts over the slightest thing, bouts of weeping. She cried so much that she made me feel as if I had thrown sulphuric acid in her face, her features were so altered, the flesh looked ready to slip right off the bones. Then came a period when she simply seemed lost, sad. Engulfed by darkness. Occasionally I would find her sitting dead still in a chair, with unhappiness written all over her. She looked as though she was trying to do a very easy jigsaw puzzle, one with only six or seven big pieces, but could not even manage that much. ‘Buck up,’ I told her one day, quite sharply. If only I had known.
Now and again, when I tried to talk to her, to get through to her, I was reminded of when I was a teenager, hunkered down in front of the radio, fingers delicately searching out the music stations on the medium waveband. Still I did not seriously begin to worry about her until near the end of this phase, which culminated during a Christmas holiday when she seemed apathetic. Blank, I would say. It was clearly all she could do just to exist. She shuffled around her own house as if she did not even know that this was where she lived. I did not realise how bad things were, though, until there were no longer flowers on the breakfast table, no freshly ground coffee, no orange juice which she had squeezed herself. The gold glint in her eyes was gone. I could not help thinking of granite. She seemed hard through and through. Not like stone. She was stone.
Even so, and I am not trying to defend myself here: she did not stay off work and I never saw any sign of Kristin being affected by it.
I could not even say for certain how many months – years? – this thing that I called her ‘problem’ lasted. And then, although I did not actually notice the transition, she was, to all intents and purposes, her old self again, recognisable for that vibrant, reckless beauty. I believed, I wanted to believe, that everything was okay. Things between us were still a little strained, that was all. War cleanses, as Karl Marx said, but when at last she kissed me again, I felt as though there was a pane of glass between our lips. As if I was already in a prison and she was there to see me, in one of those visiting rooms you see in American films.
Most dreadful of all: her virtual absence of sexual appetite and non-existent orgasms moved me, at one point, to accuse her of having taken a lover. Margrete took me to Xi’an in China. It was like a second honeymoon. For some months I hoped that everything was going to be the same as before, including our love life. But then we lapsed back into our old ruts, circles that never touched.
One night I came upon her standing in the dark kitchen with the fridge door wide open, her face lit by the stark light from inside. I thought she must be feeling peckish, looking for something to eat, but she just stood there like that; stood there for five minutes, ten minutes, stood with her face coloured by that white light, in the way too big T-shirt she wore as a nightie, gazing into the fridge. She reminded me of a pearl. Exquisite, but impenetrable to the eye, hiding its nature under layer upon layer of opacity. In the end I had to speak to her. She did not wake up, but turned slowly to face me. Leaned against me. Her face was cold in the hollow of my throat.
The Discoverer Page 49