Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

by Guðberger Bergsson

  I’ve never been forced to eat the ice to survive, as the saying goes. No chance, then, that I’ll be able to commission a ghostwriter to write a bestseller in my name in time for the christmas market—I will have to write it myself—the way those others did, Schiaparelli the fashion queen, Rockefeller, and old Kalli, the lumpfish king. These are the labors of rich people in this country who do nothing for the arts, when they plead their existence, the publishers and the royalties there on the table to support writers, who do not need to focus on anything but spelling. Why are these wretches complaining, these ghost writers who are up to their knees in middling fish- and ship-owning men, bankers and notorious drunks? Do not complain about your brothers in America, ghostwriters. There’s work enough to go around, no fear, if you’re someone who knows how to write poetic phrases and rich imagery:

  The storm was dying in the intense suction of the ocean, as fog hunkered over the surface, broad and vast, bright in the soothing evening calm, as if everything was covered with an oily film.

  It was early morning. Far and wide along the shore, breakers had washed loose kelp up onto the sand; it lay in huge tassels on the tide line. At the shore’s very edge stood five children, stirring long sticks through the tufts of kelp, looking for lumpfish.

  The old man sat on a large basalt boulder up on the ridge, his huge, callus-covered fisherman’s hands passive on his large knees. He had convinced himself. His face was marked with salt runes, with life’s wisdom. Get up, whispered the springs, peeling off the lips of a generous man, you’re calm now, satisfied, you great cannibal.

  His attention was suddenly grabbed by the children crying out; they had found a rotting lumpfish. The old man got up, his withered limbs stiff, and inched his way slowly down the sharp rocks of the seaside cliff. In the past, he’d strolled along easily, young and adventurous when at sea and in foreign taverns with their drinking and the noise, among great men who took on all the challenges the world threw at them: as did he, Kalli, the lumpfish king.

  Later the story continues with the writer in vigorous form, so when the reader puts the book away he is well satisfied, sitting in his chair after christmas dinner. The book is well worth its price, with its large doses of supple writing and exciting plot:

  20% places and the names of people; 2% trials, peril at sea, and amazing rescues; 19% scenic descriptions scattered throughout the book’s chapters; 3% poetic sex, which runs together with the poetry of the scenic descriptions (in bestsellers it’s traditional to save sex for near the end of each chapter, so that the reader feels his brain has been mentally masturbated prior to reading the next section the next night. What’s literature but mental masturbation for the emotions?); 7% reflections and conversations with intelligent animals the character has acquired as friends; 11% food and conditions on ships (comparisons of past and present); 15% forebodings and dreams (dream women, Kalli is far too healthy to get dream pussy at sea); 7% Kalli the lumpfish king himself, the creation of this character who is, of course, “driven by powerful contrasts” as the academics term it. A “lively final surge and conflict at the culmination.” This is important stuff.

  I, on the other hand, tortured myself on my bed. Self-torture is a healthy practice; through it, each and every one of us benefits, tormentor, slave and executioner.

  I tremble if I laugh; I tremble if I cry; I tremble if I’m cold; I tremble if I’m hot; I tremble if I’m happy, terrified that she (joy) will disappear; I tremble if I am terrified by lust. Conclusion: trembling is my natural reaction.

  Put mildly, dreams are an abomination to me. I cannot feel sorry for myself. I know people who hang about at the kitchen table at night, pulling memories from the past and mewling and smacking their lips over past nights, infecting each other with highfalutin words and the plagues of memory, all bundled up in questions about the afterlife and stacking up problems for themselves about their burial: should it take place inconspicuously; should I get myself cremated; should I have myself buried; do I want a headstone; do I want a cross; do I want nothing at all; do I just want wood; do I want marigolds and stepmothers; would it be good to drown at sea; would it hurt to burn in flames; is it awful to suffocate; is it best to die of a heart attack in your sleep? These are people’s real-life problems. But as I have said many times, my past, Tómas Jónsson’s past, is as much hidden from me as is my future. I have no ill will in my conscience; everyone can be calm toward me. People’s dreams represent pure agony to me. I want realism. I insist that people must think systematically, the way I do. To me, the old Snow White is much better than the new Snow White, the old Pinocchio more entertaining than the new Pinocchio, the descriptions fuller in the old Robin Hood than the new version. None of this new stuff matters to me. In my last will and testament, I wrote: I want a sloppily made, wave-washed stone on my grave; no flowers; a black coffin. And absolutely no graveside ceremony or hymns. And if someone wants to create a memorial fund, just give the money to any old charity.

  why should I cause myself an inconvenience with contempt for the newborn or the unborn (who are in all likelihood going to get born)both during World War II and after I often lay awake joyful at having been born in a country without military service glad to have been born at a time when the din of weapons was not customary amid a nation where people’s sense of honor was so paltry that they did not defend themselves except perhaps when offended by a cousin or by never speaking to a sister the big nations should learn from us our delegates should tell them that at conferences and what would have become of me in the sagashunched & hands uselessI imagine mothers carrying their children outside the walls in the sun like badly repaired ceramics and struggling to buckle onto them wire arms and wire feet to take them to schoolcrying or with hairy faces like apes like the paupers in Turkey who ate edible seeds containing synthetic chemicals for controlling pests and Miss Gerður read to us about it from the newspapers terrified about the irresponsible mothers; if women were unexpectedly to start giving birth to cats instead of children like in a fairy tale that would not happen surprise anyone this adventurous century has made us immune to life’s adventures could I hate something which was too much for me could I hate the mountains or the house blocking my view or the ocean isolating me

  I am completely bound to the passing moment. I am the passing moment. I am time itself. I have no remarkable experiences. I have no spare moments from the past.

  it seems that earlier in this work I regarded the ballpoint pen to be crucial, the end point of writing technology, an outdated opinion I can see through my typewriter and electric typewriterand I am reluctant to admit that here in my small apartment that is different from all other apartments and the isolation of the ocean opinions become unique and much longer-lived than the thoughts they grow fromover time the electric typewriter will probably be wired up to people’s brainsI must include these reflections in my sketch of thoughts about stationery, past and presentprobably my thinking is less at risk of decaying probably I am unable to think in harmony straight for more than two, three minutesI have grown so dulledI was I was have reached this place I becomeI who once put together seven columns of mathematical examples in my mind could compete with a calculator read Petrarch at night could disrupt my thinking when the midday coffee caused me to dream eccentric dreams and still connect my thought up again to previous thoughts when I woke my Títa

  now I say cat and think about the unrelated topic of the blind men in Brueghel’s painting who in my mind are joined together by slender-bellied guide dogs rather than sticks and I count up to a hundred and two then I think about blind cows and count backward to one and end the sentence as if I had always intended itthe cat lies in Tómas’s bed and see the experiment has succeeded tolerably my confidence restored I passed the Stanford-Binet got a certificate in the ability to continue where I left off

  Sadness crept over me on the bed. Age, castration, and grief seized me.My god I was like a man out amid the lava powerless as when rain falls and grass seedI thought i
n my youth perfection was on the way. Nothing will ever be accomplished, except what is inorganic and dead: Death itself. Maybe I’m too fat to be able to remember anything for more than a moment. The outer surface of my body is too far away from my soul. Aristotle probably came to this same conclusion after he grew older and fatter. My age keeps the century company, then the companionship breaks off. We diminish to the same degree as we expanded. No one came to the president asking for vessels and equipment to explore unknown western continents. He begged for the import of the electron microscope. He looked into the microscope, where everything is terribly large, multipart, and endless. Scientists are tasked with deriving a vaccine from stupidity cells and vaccinating against knowledge that portion of humanity which is of no benefit. Science covers all potential targets. Maybe at Yale University in the United States they will succeed at eking the wisdom material from Einstein’s brain (his brain is kept deep-frozen in the hope they will succeed; it is merely a matter of time) and inject it into the brain of an unborn child; that would be a major milestone, for a fetus to have Einstein’s knowledge. The X-portion of the human race that is not needed to develop or produce would be allowed to live in the fields in perfect idyllic leisure, but the Y-portion would spend their lives in a laboratory, working to perfect the playground for the X-portion. A vaccine solution using knowledge hormones would give each Y-child a splendid advantage in reaching the multi-part desire Icelanders have to enter into the living life of Perfected People. (Miss Gerður said the Russians had managed to steal a piece of Einstein’s brain and planned to get ahead of the Americans in producing a vaccine. DDR is a kind of DDT in German expansionism.) I wouldn’t have minded antibiotics along with the multiplication table when I was three, Sigurður said. One could adopt this evolutionary course: the firstborn inherits the father’s intelligence at his death—as he did in ancient times, taking ownership and custody of the family—and the world would quickly be transformed, said Ólaf. They smiled indulgently at Miss Gerður. Otherwise I don’t see potential for breakthrough, says Ólaf. But I am sure: science will, as times move forward, nullify the smug irony of people like Ólaf and Sigurður. I am in favor of vaccine production being in private hands to allow competition for price and quality. Before my death arrives, they will have discovered eternity. Until that time, my only job is to survive. For what. Dear friend:

  Life is worth more than all the wealth which is said to have been amassed during the many-storied past of the city of Ilion, so long as peace lasted, up until the sons of Achaia came there; it is worth more than all the treasures housed in the stone house of the bow-carrying god Phoebus Apollo on the dread rock Pytho. Oxen and fat sheep can be stolen, tripeds and bay horses may be taken, but a man’s soul man does not return, nor gets handed back, once she has become a traded commodity.

  Was this apartment no longer my unambiguous property. Was I not master and lord. Why did I sit idle and let muttering barbarians hold me prisoner like a criminal conscience. I was captivated by the barbarians’ mysterious muttering. I sat gravely still, a fossil on the bed

  stand and be like stone

  yet do harm to no one

  and the muttering of the barbarians flowed over me. I was like Jónas, Guðrún’s current husband in Hvolsvöllur:

  Once upon a time, a rich farmer lived in the remote countryside. The farmer was unmarried and worked alone, ruddy-cheeked, of good physical health, short height, chubby, huge-lipped with red gums that grew over his teeth; blood constantly oozed from them. He was forty years old when he began to resent his celibacy. Reading poetry one evening raised in him nearly intolerable thoughts about womanly flesh. He engaged a housekeeper, Lýkafrón2 by name: a doughy and fulsome young spinster from the nearest town, quiet, sweet-mouthed, mannerly, a worker. The woman took to all the farm chores well, though enjoyed the company of horses or being with the cows in the cowshed most of all. She refused to sleep in the farm, saying that her position was unfitting for a straw mattress and a bed, so she nested in the vacant bull stall. The farmer often poked into the circumstances and way of life of the woman in the cowshed. In the mornings, before he tended the sheep, the farmer snuck to the cowshed door and entered, going inside on several occasions without being found out. But early one Saturday morning, he stood by the cowshed door and heard verses being recited. Lýkafrón sang:

  cows all alone merrily gnawed

  tooth to belly ferrying grass

  udders swinging as they chewed

  in Jónas’s well-tended pasture

  He cautiously opened the door and saw the woman standing behind a cow and washing her hair under its stream. Her locks were thick and long and down to her waist. While Lýkafrón plaited her hair she sang to the cows, a song known in Hvolsvöllur:

  the cow is proud of its station

  pride sits in its heart

  never sick in herself3

  seen in my animals

  The farmer remained in the doorway no longer, song bursting from his lips. Jónas:

  my queen from dim lands

  do you drink in a cow’s land

  Lýkafrón answered in a duet:

  you have regarded my habits

  and I promise to marry you

  The farmer grasps the cowshed shovel and walks to the middle of the stage:

  Here you see a wretched rafter

  Lýkafrón, playful, sweet-mouthed, bashful:

  Inapt confusion in the bull stall

  The farmer, rejoicing:

  She gives me her chastity

  She (mimes; the cows light cigarettes [Verfremdungseffekt]; a banner for emphasis) overwhelmed with emotion (a mask):

  such breaking is life’s course

  They embrace. And grateful for country life, they decide to wait until their passion will be lawful.

  Tómas Jónsson. A draft for the icelandic Opera.

  All this happened in summertime (as you’ll have noticed, the bull stall in the cowshed was vacant; the bull was of course out in its enclosure)4 and every evening when the farmer returned home soaked to the crotch, having been haying in Þýfðastykk, Lýkafrón rolled up her sweater sleeves, knelt silently, and rinsed the farmer’s socks with water from the pitcher. He sat over her the while, on the only chair in the house and peeled his calluses, which had become waterlogged and softened from exposure; he removed them from his heels and soles with the edge of the bread knife. The whole time he secretly made encouraging hand gestures for Lýkafrón’s attention. Her arms were bright and untouched by sun or human hands.

  exposed arms

  but from there

  all air and fluid, he thought, and immediately decided to be done mowing meadows or, in the autumn, to free her from the cowshed and bind her with lifelong icelandic promise- and faith-bonds. He felt most strongly that their interests and nature were of the same family, stemming from country roots and a love of the earth; they were both introverted and reticent. In the evenings they talked quietly about animal herding, wage exploitation, and “some” who put on airs with mowing machines, which tore up and wounded the grassroots. Before they asked god, in the name of Jesus, to give each other a restful night, the farmer said he intended to take on a winter laborer, a man who would free her from her more arduous outdoor work. After this, he wrote his diary, noticing that very day had been thirty years since he had first mowed Þýfðastykk.

  Until this day, Þýfðastykk Day, Lýkafrón had never shown signs of any needs other than to demonstrate that her housekeeping was worthy of care and honor, but when he made his proposal of marriage, she welcomed the offer, and they were married in the Lutheran faith and vaccinated the first Sunday after the third lambing round-up, in a small rural church.

  Rev. Páll from Staðastaður married them, expounding Titus’s letter I: 10-13: “For there are many insubordinate, both idle talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole households, teaching things which they ought not, for the sake of dishonest gain. On
e of them, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’” Rev. Páll had left them a winter laborer, and with these words he aimed to warn them. On the wedding night the farmer looked at his new stock, who was cheap to manage and whom he had gained without giving up any possessions (it would suffice to send Reverend Páll, for the next three years, the meat from lambs three-winters-old as a payment for the service performed), while she undressed and climbed into bed, eager to break the spell. The farmer had protested against Lýkafrón still sleeping in the bull stall, saying she could sleep in her knit cloak; it would be cold in this attic, and anyway, he himself always slept naked; knitted chafed tore at him in his sleep. He slept, however, with a rust brown sheepskin on his abdomen in order to soak up his pus. Lýkafrón cracked her fingers at such kindness and fell asleep. The farmer had a habit of reading poetry in bed at night before he prayed to god to set a wall of powerful angels over them, a defense against the devil’s devices. He held to this faith. Lýkafrón was tired after the wedding preparation that had been added to her daily work. The excessive amount of food she had consumed during the day had given her wind, and when the farmer, after reading his poetry, made to treat her fittingly, to kiss her and reach out for her corner of the sheepskin, she snorted and sneezed due to the snuff which fell into her nose during the kiss; then she scampered over to the wall and turned her back onto him. He bit her then gently on the ear, the rural custom, and said:

  Well, that’s that, my lamb ewe.

  The night passed like many other nights. They slept, woke, dressed, and yawned, content in the autumn dark.