Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

  fifth composition book

  my spirit has grown vigorous for some reason finds joy in these verses which I sing aloud energized by the gift of oxygen

  I sit in an easy seat

  swing-rock with nimble feet

  my gaiety gets me to itch

  unspun wool will stretch

  but I remain unable

  remember how the verse begins

  to spin from fine thread

  the way delightful things feel

  this or something like it

  I bellow it as I remember it that’s fine by me then rock music intones inside my ears and carries to my ears the hoof-percussion of fast-footed horses crescendoing in the silence and I fling myself awkwardly from the chair nauseous from the oxygen sometimes I rush out and they hold me down on the floor while life swells atop me abates ebbs I come to equilibrium as a new percussion of hooves soothes Hvolsvöllur to stillness and Anna says did you scribble on yourself with a biro and stop scraping away in the covers I do not want the burden on my conscience of having to wash away whole novels from on the cover so I built a writing boardstop writing on the damask cover I am getting a plastic duvet cover for you

  my gaiety gets me to itch

  unspun wool that stretches

  now I’m going to take great care:

  the sequence of waking expresses the presence of morning

  a good sentenceor were the nightfields clearing home to turn back to the daystill a better sentence a reciprocal sentenceI will write ten influential sentences and ten reciprocal sentencesThe car splashed quietly along the wet street. The car stopped nearby here. The day was coming to its senses after the night: first with a singular car sound; an alarm clock rang; light came through the bathroom window; a door slammed in an empty corridor or the front door. Silence. Then the city’s alarm clocks resounded, a choir behind double-paned bedrooms. I sometimes paid attention to how the facade of the building opposite awoke. The first lesson, how a building wakes in winter: Take a stance by the window in your room. Let your arms hang. Relax your shoulder muscles. Open your mouth, though not so much you drool, and stretch your neck. While watching, a student could efficiently use the time to urinate: place the chamber pot right in front of you. Look out between the window hangings; the cold from the pane will wake you up. First, a single light suddenly ignites. A luminous rectangle forms on the wall of the house (someone waking before the clock does, dawdling to stand). Open the window; light scurries up and down the wall, up and down the stories crisscrossing with the noise of alarm clocks. One clock rings the longest, one dim window (the window of the lazy man, planning to doze five minutes more) the turd of society all the other windows look down on contemptuously. A student’s eyes must make darting movements to catch each light as soon as it lights. Two fire up simultaneously in opposite corners; the student has to use the chameleon method. After the lights are on, the student can see before his very eyes the first act in the day’s play. Look at the stage: People appear briefly clothed only in their underwear. Men, hungover from the weekend, swallow aspirin and guzzle milk right from the bottle. They barely catch their breath, open their mouths to warm their throats following the ice-cold refrigerator milk. The door left open while they finish drinking from the bottle. They belch and slam it shut. By seven o’clock, a light is on in almost every window. Everyone knows this, man and child: people wash in their bathrooms; fetch themselves porridge cooked the night before, drilling the porridge out from under the skin inside the saucepan, using a wooden spoon which has been allowed to stand in the pot overnight; a wife willingly rises to her feet alongside the man, heats the coffee and examines herself between her breasts or her underarms while he gets himself clean; she will crawl back into bed after he leaves. She disappears from the kitchen while the man drinks coffee at the table (you can only see his mouth chewing below the kitchen valance), brushes her teeth in the bathroom. She comes back and bends over the man and it is almost guaranteed the light will go off for five minutes and after that you will only see an exhausted man, legs trembling after the flesh has exercised. At such times, the student should continue to study without instruction. I had never

  From the shadow theater. Tómas Jónsson

  before paid particular attention to the day arriving. I made little of it. Sly feelings of solitude attended me. Morning light tightened in my chest. I suppressed the restlessness in my neck; that much I remember. How long passed before I noticed my untenable position. I had sunk down in a heap in the bed. A snowman outside on the sidewalk had melted in the night, his head was broken across one shoulder; the coalcubes of his eyes had collapsed into elbow patches. My neck was stiff and sore, gray to the core from the cold, and the flesh on my thighs was curd-white and clammy. My body is close-cropped with hair except under my hands and around my genitals. Darker hair than on my head. My genitals are darker than my body. I noticed eyes scrutinizing me. Cats’ eyes glow in the darkand I and II was drenched with sweat, which I found out putting a hand under my undershirt. I could wipe the sweat off and make my navel overflow with the water. I have an innie now, but it used to be an outie. Mom called him the wick on the opening of a little cask or else beetleball, and my school friends were jealous that I had such a special navel, which sank into the sea and now—ten years later—rises again from the sea. My life story, my survival, could be traced via the movements of my belly button.

  Note: Navel story. (parody)

  I pushed myself up and got to the door beyond which there buzzed the same mutterings as before; only a little more tranquility and contentment—which is perfection—rested over everything. The muttering rumbled, whispered, and rumbled. Lying on both knees I saw the muttering. The immodesty totally evident to eyes through the keyhole. Muttering lying outside in in the hallway almost covered with coats and piled trousers heaped on hooks. Muttering standing hobbled by his pants. Their plan was to not stop until my coat breaks, falls to the floor, its loop worn out. Had I had my syringe at hand or an angelica stem I would have sprayed them through the keyhole with water or angelica seeds. Finally I woke from my hibernation, watching them move in uncanny fashion across the floor oneafteranother and plunging again under the heap of clothes, their buttocks quivering, one mutterer coming out from under the coat heap with hands over eyes and looking at the other, all laid up under my coat. And I . . .

  . . . rise up against a chair back with stiff kneejoints; dizziness singing in my ears along with two telephone poles.

  . . . take myself to the bed . . . let the alarm sound loud and cracking.

  . . . sit for a while after the ringing ebbs out along with two telephone poles.

  . . . open the door into the hall, which was shamefully dark.

  . . . fumbled at the electric board, replaced the fuses in their housing. No evidence visible. The mumbling gone, they had never been there, though I saw them. Títa stared at me, the puss stood in the corner and wearing my overshoes. She picked me up and put me back to bed. I fell asleep and I woke to an alarm. I opened the door and peered into the hall ready to knock heads and slam doors. I had guessed correctly. My overcoat lay in a pile on the floor. The loop was worn through; now I could no longer continue to hang it. The loop was much darned (never anything but poor table scraps) and no longer the color fasten together wrestling with linen and tape or document clasps. Down the lapels and on the overcoat’s right side a film of mold adhered to the fabric and dust from the floor thanks to the dirt in the streets. I brought it into to my room. The overcoat had become a rag, more or less, but back when it was new men envied me the way people once envied Jónas Hallgrímsson’s blue coat. (I can’t possibly do that: Jónas the great Romantic poet stands forever in my mind’s eye, more than a century back, stuck in a snowdrift wearing his blue coat, the winter of 1841, and these verses of Goethe, from Prometheus, came to his mind there: Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen / Nach meinem Bilde, / Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei, / Zu leiden, weinen, / Geniessen und zu freuen sich, / Und dein nicht z
u achten, / Wie ich. It was those thoughts the poet Jónas Hallgrímsson used to free himself from a Reykjavík snowdrift.) I set the coat down on the bed heedless of the duvet slip. I get my instrument kit—an old firstaid box—with my shaving gear and walk down the hallway to the toilet (sometimes I could sense Jónas waving a bottle and provoking the dead city-life with its inner spirits either that or he lay flat and collapsed in the snow, but the way he posed the blue color of his coat contrasts well with the snow, with the poet dressed up for the snow and mountains) but the door was locked from the inside. In all likelihood the mutterings had moved inside. I put my eye to the keyhole and a white whirlpool of flesh spun before me.

  I find it impossible to understand how I dragged myself home unassisted in the storm drenched and beaten by wind and rainI have lain here ever since not moving from my bedI have not taken off my clothesAnna brings food in for me and puts the tray on the chairI sit embracing the cat and wait to let him have a go at the ratsthrow me in the trash and mill manure out of me in the waste disposal station and take me over to the grasstender in our well-kept garden when the landscaper, well the garden’s owner now, says yes, the frost has gone from earth and the time has come to see summer flowers in beds the onions are coming up from under the sidewalk now it is time to choose the right garden fertilizer

  I returned to my room. I threw myself on the bed, defeated. Obviously I was not man enough to openly oppose disgrace even in the confines of my own home. Take my possessions away from me. Tan me with the cane of self-esteem and I shall swish it with “when it comes down to it I can get by without her” and “at least I make money from the lease” and “if I do not rent to them I would be forced to rent to others.” I think. Lying prone on the bed. Lying pancake-flat without moving my legs or joints in order to protect myself: the threshold, gold bronze baseboards, the faucet tips, the cabinet doors, sensitive to ridicule because of my outtie, when everyone use has a beautiful innie, each and every member of the Homeowners’ Association. I could not go to the meetings because of the risk that someone would bend down and say: There’s some sort of pimple poking out your knitted vest. Perhaps it is just a button made of bone on my trouser string, I would say. He would believe me, and soon a rumor starts that I have a wart on my belly. People’s curiosity would increase, ending with a proposal for required swimming for the organization’s members; no one is allowed to leave, or else he would lose his favorable rental terms. And when I stood there naked (having given up on finding an old-fashioned swimsuit, the sort that offers privacy above the navel; swimming trunks nowadays only cover a man’s genitals), the belly button, Angler, would be exposed (I had named my navel Angler), and they would burst out laughing and say: rent, and rent at high cost. Look, we have ascended Stapafell Mountain. And they would take my arm and let me poke inside their craters where most people are ticklish, and laugh: perhaps you don’t have much chance swimming; you’ll probably sink to the bottom; god knows when you can drop that barrel and learn to float. I barely took any notice as I lay there on my overcoat. I felt I was too far gone now the tenants were showing the homeowner their claws and acting so impudently. A man who goes to work in a stiff white shirt daily, never arriving late. Going about in a worn overcoat. His conscience frayed. I never allow myself the comfort of self-criticism, but instead will rush violently in on them in the restroom, where she is standing at the mirror shelf with an ashtray. It has Satyrs on it, crowned with laurels, riding horned asses and looking playfully at the white porcelain water glittering on the elephant bone skin of the nymphs who are at the far end of the forest pond, overflowing with cigarette butts and Sveinn’s ashes. I will ask Katrín: Do you know the meaning of this? No, she says, surprised; a cheap ashtray, one I bought for next to nothing. It’s German. No, you’re looking at a biggish part of the god-world molded in porcelain. The tray is a bit obscene, she says, if you look at it closely. Tómas Jónsson the gentleman grins. In earlier centuries, Katrín, there was no clear distinction drawn between the world of gods and men, I tell you. The gods were even endowed with more human a nature than men themselves; all epic characters were heroes; it was the fashion of the time; the epidemic from Paris had passed their time. But it’s remarkable, and how. Women in past centuries did not force their husbands to work in car-repair shops and suffocate in carbonic acid, which stifles them and incites them to mischief and manslaughter. Sveinn would not have done well back then; he prefers lying under cars, though not under me and my needs. What’s the point of this ashtray. Okay, take it easy, artists are allowed to represent nudity in stories, photos, and paintings of gods; no one could be offended or blame god for their motives, perverse as they often were, so artists could deal in god-like emotions, taboo for men, such as lying naked by a forest pond and allowing someone to stare at you. She stares at Tómas with open mouth. Next time I take a shit, I’ll keep the door open, Tómas, if that’s what you want. I could maybe let a horse look at me at the lake by Þingvellir but I would be mad if I got naked down at the Reykjavík pond and let some genius like Hjörvar K. stand there painting a picture of me, although I have nothing against naked statues or pictures in the square. Would you yourself stand naked on a plinth. She is going to offer him coffee and discuss things further. I’ve never been able to put myself in a statue or painting’s shoes, perhaps because of how cowardly and hypocritical I am. I’d hate being all stone; I absolutely cannot have vaginas in front of my eyes. But I knew Sveinn had ordered her to sit on his pants facing him at the table on Saturday while they drank their evening coffee, having sent the youngest kids to bed, because I had seen her hurrying across the corridor as I was roaming about and I could not tolerate such incidents in the apartment, even if they kept it to themselves and pulled the shade down on the kitchen window.

  she poured a rose-red bath salt from the canister into the tub’s deep bottom and stirred the water with her hands as the salt grains dissolved the bathroom was locked from within but I heard water slosh with the slightest movement of her legs splashing over the rim to the floor singing she got out her hair wet and wrapped in a towel she let her bathrobe fall aside and the disabled old man look at her in the doorway her hanging breasts swinging easily she made a face and opened wide white eyes coughing head trembling hands that fiddled with the pencil he could see just a hand’s width’s distance without his glasses but sensed the bath salts felt for his glasses’ case but she moved it from the chair bit her lip over the desk crept barefoot to him stood still as a grave at the edge of the divan which he touched and the comforter tautened and rushed into the air he twisted his mouth and turned up his nose as she let the robe fall to the floor and fell on her palms supporting against the wall a bridge over this disabled old man balanced on the divan and let her breasts hang over his writing board she moved her hands and rested herself against the sturdy resistant linoleum of the floor Títa puss are you there he fumbled around for her are you up on the chair she raked her nails over him and he cried out and struck out at the dangling breasts who the hell is this he made a sound pulled back and fell down onto the pillow cursing she slipped quietly away and kept screeching and hissing until she reached the kitchen covering her mouth writhing apart and together with laughter his forehead on the tablecloth kicking his feet in spasmodic fits almost rolling about the table laden with dirty coffee cups crying sighing in a fit I’ve never seen such a thing never such agitation from any animal he renders me witless and she gulps down cold coffee from a little pitcher and sucks at the grounds with Sveinn hiccupping he’ll kill me for sure she thought and that struck her calm only occasionally shaking with laughter and went to the bathroom took her nose drop bottle filled it with water and sprayed it into his face from a distance so he yelled and cursed and she came rushing in what exactly is she up to anyway she brought the glasses’ case over to the comforter at arm’s length and scolded some imaginary kids how did you get in buzz off upstairs go home while he complained that the apartment gets left unlocked during the day threatened to drive them
out the door and could easily make a scene so Sveinn herded him home before the old man fell asleep after the spraying thinking someone had splashed water on him some imaginary kids from the upper story while she erupts in laughter on the toilet seat and screws the nose dropper back on with shaking hands

  When I venture back with the shaving kit, the house is awake. Moving about on bare feet which take me out of my room, the kids are at their morning activities, stacking chairs on the table like thrones or linking them together in a train

  —We are arranged in a single line. We are standing close together. I end up in the middle of a row and am roughly handled by those behind me so I bump into the back of the guy in front of me and he says: Don’t scratch me with that angler on your stomach. We are told to get out of our rows and circle around the pool, from which steam rises, the odor of sulfur mixed with chlorine. I sneeze and start to worry about our descent into the infernal basin. We only complete one lap, then some physical exercises to increase our flexibility, to make the blood flow and move; then there is a short speech from our swimming instructor about the need to have swimming pools for the citizens of a nation that floats in the ocean. We applaud his speech and line up at the pool’s edge. He grasps our shoulders, pulls them back and draws his finger down our spines. You don’t know what swimming is; you have such crooked spines. A green pool full of hot water will open your eyes and mouth wide, clench your toes on the concrete edge so you can kick off well. He walks backward with a whistle in his mouth, we bend our knees, and when the piercing whistle rings out and echoes in the moldy air, we stab ourselves forward and land flat on the water. Almost everyone’s stomach hurts and we want to crawl back out to retch and spit out the bile. I drank a ton, and immediately became nauseated from the stench of sulfur. I am sent to stand in the shallow pool with two barrels on my back. I cling to the handles without the courage to let go the way the teacher urges me, preferring to just lie still and swing my hands uselessly in an arc; I bend at the loins and my toes, heavy as lead, sink to the bottom. I have to admire the others’ skill, those who that very first day could retrieve a coin from the bottom. I just think that you have shamefully heavy lead-weights for toes, he says and comes to the edge of the brimful pool with a long pole, from which a loop hangs. I slip the loop over my head as he instructs me and am held out to dangle from the edge. The loop is fashioned into a swing and I hang there the whole swim session, to the amusement of the others. They swim around me, collecting the money the instructor scatters from his pockets. That first week I spent helpless in the swing. On the Monday of the second week, I could float by the edge. By the time the course was over my fingers had succeeded in grasping a ring from the bottom of a shallow pool. I was awarded a swimming certificate: Able to Swim Independently. The others were all excellent swimmers, especially Herjólfur, who could fish one tiny coin after another from the deep end with his feet. Because he could swim so well he showed us considerable disrespect, especially the taunting he gave me. But on the last day, while we were covered with goose bumps in a cold shower, a stone fell out of his ring and bounced underneath the rail. Because he really didn’t want to lose the stone, he bent down by the rail near the drain, his rear end on full display. I was seized by an involuntary response, grasping my chance to dart to the toilet, grab the toilet brush, which looked like a battle-ax, and drive the hard bristles against his sagging balls with immitigable pleasure, because he had wet testicles. Most youths got teased during the course. Sprayed with water, smacked on the ass with a wet towel by his neighbor, and other things, which the cheerful group came up with between them. My learning to swim may seem contrary to my character—hydrophobic—but the answer is that a person constantly breaks his own rules, approaching the incredible like the teachings in the book The Argument Paradox have proven. From within the couple’s bedroom came the sound of Sveinn’s morning hacking, the effects of the carbonic acid poisoning. The kids howled and fought for furniture with any weapon available: forks, spoons, knives, flowerpots. From the musician’s room emanated neither sigh nor cough. It is no different than spending the whole day like a dirty sock, I thought as I prepared to shave. In a large mirror, between the nymphs and satyrs on the ashtray, I loomed large, made into a massive picture: an almost globular head with a freckled scalp and hairy ears: gray, obstinate tufts. The image turned carefully to the side: deep folds on the neck, slightly red (clear now) from friction against a stiff collar. A night-shadow beard, white and mad-spiked, peeks from the vein-split skin; a thick club nose with coarse nostrils and a greasy bridge; moss-eared; under the shoulder straps of his undershirt, by the bluish vein-marked chest, grow frostgray blotches; his abdomen swells out over thin curd-white feet which reveal the picture is sitting in a chair: the image steps onto the chair, lifts his torso and rakes white nails over the curd-white flesh of his clammy, cold belly; the image tries to perform some desperate hand movements but becomes increasingly thwarted in spite of his morning’s exercise; it presses its face fast against the mirror to examine its mouth: the red uvula dripping drool; a throat covered with blue veins; the scabrous palate; the lappet under the tongue; the darkened teeth. The treads of the teeth marked by seventy-seven years cycling past. The image got goose bumps and sighed as it thought: I’ve become this sorrowful old picture. He plunked himself on the rim of the tub and sighed again. This man deserves rewards for his age and his decency. Here you sit. This is you. No, I was not allowed to think like that for long. The door was grabbed from outside, the knob yanked, twice. What, is the door locked, who’s loitering on the toilet. I dove into my clothes, hesitated a moment, and doggedly resisted. I and I alone decide how long I will sit on the toilet, I thought. Now, because I have never made a habit of trampling on others and because I try my utmost to be obliging in my daily transactions, at least while in the office, I came to an agreement with myself: they must keep up their side of the bargain. The woman had discarded dirty kids’ clothes in the tub and hung her lingerie, full of red bows, white lace and red string, on the shower (as she did when they took a bath together); his wet underwear lay in a heap under the chair. Because mess and chaos and a delta of water lay all over the floor, I rarely went into the bathroom on Sunday mornings. I was moved to tears at how they abused my affability.I would put them out tomorrowafter the door was grabbed hard again, and having the strongest contempt for the little brats’ laundry and the yellow milk shit I decided to get away quickly, before I vomited. Yet I proceeded carefully, pouring after-shave lotion up my nostrils and waiting for a minute to pass on the clock. I used embroidery scissors to trim the hair in my nose, sneezed, and washed my face with cold water. Oh, it’s you, Tómas. I thought it was one of the kids, she said. Anna was waiting by the door, dandling an infant in corduroy bib overalls from her arm. Never mind, I replied. And there’s dirty stuff in the tub, too. You might have not been able to take a bath . . . I washed myself earlier. She grabbed her intimates, stuffed them into the neckline of her dress and stroked her bosom with the palm of the hand. I went past her, headed straight into my room, opened the window, and ventilated the heavy air of its sleep. A fresh breeze flowed in and I pushed the door open a little. I needed something. I bore more of a grudge against Anna than Katrín. Anna always looked away when she talked to you. Sure, she’d answer, raven-haired and steaming, but she was smiling at something else: her son, Hermann; the door handle; her thumb, scratching nervously at her cuticles with the nail of her middle finger. Her every gesture revealed her rural character. When I do business with people, I make sure to look up or into their eyes while speaking. She knew, of course, that I had been born and grown up in the same area as her long before she entered the world, and that we were distant relatives. She had scarcely lived here for six months when her behavior and gestures altered, her answers changed, and Anna Þórðardóttir (actually Hansdóttir; she’s illegitimate) stopped talking to me like a ghost or a deceased husband, through her nails, into thin air or her coffee cup, and instead stared at me with a provoc
ative, defiant, aggressive expression. Since Katrín did not pay my words any heed, I started being formal with her. I was courageous, put her in her place and said: Madam, it seems to me that merely ignorant people adopt formal address. Aaah; she was surprised. I thought everyone was equal in modern iceland. She looked down, at her belly, where Stína hid, smiled a crafty grin, but slunk off to use speech the way a decent housekeeper should. Our fellow tenant Anna has never gotten familiar. Since the beginning, things were frosty, despite charming behavior from both parties. Anna is a devious personage. Shortly after moving in, she thought to offer me coffee. I looked at her and accepted politely. I always suspect a fish is sleeping under a rock. She was plying me with schemes, confusing everything with friendship and familiarity, a scam to get me to lower their rent. The artifice was too simplistic for me to step into the trap. In an affluent society, a wife loses her insidious nature, becomes tame, a dull but well-dressed house-pet, a degenerate lapdog; she is all surface, skin you stroke and fondle without any deeper pleasure. After relations she leaves you empty, seedless, emotionally untouched, and yawns in a loud way from the nest of her duvet, licks her lips and asks for a cigarette. Annakatrín.