Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

  fifteenth book

  The soul is a man’s wife. The soul is called Katrín. Katrín is my wife. Katrín means The Pure.

  16. notebook

  You are an adulteress, Katrín. You know no moderation in fornication. I become faint at our eternal squabble, stamped by you day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. I use all handy measures against you, so you restrain your own presence. I have hardly taken my eyes from you; you’re gone. After a lifetime of marriage, I have been able to read deep into your mind and get to know you. I see your reaction. No, I see not feminine intuition but rather asexuality. I need no longer have your presence. We are divorced.

  22 August 1957.

  My days have become quiet. Nothing of import during all this time. A lack of news leads to well-being. Days should ever be thus: uneventful and clear. A man enjoys living alone in a house, never meeting anyone to speak with, pottering away at carpentry in the storage room, cutting out rough materials for a novel; ideally I would prefer that to bone laziness or confusion or whittling little images of you in words. Craftsmanship is a healthy practice. If a life is lived in craftsmanship then a man finds pages for the heart’s proximity, the blood’s folly. I feel people have not immediately departed from me but come to an internal balance and harmony with the environment. People are complex creatures. All rooms are formless and empty, but Katrín bustles in the kitchen in my mind. Her child is very calm and sweet. You do not know it exists. Maybe it does not. So should children ever be.

  She is stuck at home in the evenings. She is always baking and washing and straightening or ironing snow-white linen and pillows, but I lie on the divan asexual and tired and carp after her: Katrín, aren’t you coming in, my dear. Won’t you rest and lie down, I want to talk to you a bit in peace and quiet, my dear. Títa puss can listen to us. When we lie close to each other in a bed that smells so clean and fresh, then we will feel desire, an intimate connection. Don’t you feel things have changed. Don’t you feel much better after you stopped carousing. You must not be angry with me, my dear, if I say what I mean. It is terrifyingly uncomfortable to let cats watch us in bed. Science has proven cats dream. We live in an era of reconciliation and attempts at mutual understanding in international affairs. One of the many things that is unbearable about icelandic literature is when the sheep speculate about the people, the dogs offer intelligent expressions, or the forces of nature conspire to carry out the poet’s thoughts and character in the story. Compare:

  The storm was determined to jostle this noble old man out of the abyss.

  Cats never sleep. Birds sleep on twigs. When as I open my eyes Títa is awake. Cats take pleasure in watching a couple reconcile in bed. Yes, in bed we will desire each other, experience an intimate communication. I eat one egg, hard-boiled, each night. I boil it in the kettle on top of the element. Grogg-grogg-grogg sings the jumping egg as it boils and jumps. It simmers in the cauldron and jars against the element. The child in Katrín’s womb screams fierce with hatred at the womb wall. I want out of your paunch, Mamma, it shouts. I put my ear to her paunch, little tambourine, and listen to the forthright demands of this nucleated child. We listen to the unrest and power in the unborn. I want to see this damn world right away. I think it is going to be an industrious and enterprising subject if it is equally solid with its fists in reality as in its mom’s womb. A child is scarily senseless. But we’re going to hold it still in the paunch as long as possible, so it does not dissipate. Get lost and stay in the paunch, I say, you will not feel better elsewhere. The luxurious life these kids have now, lying in their embryo pose and flailing at the paunch and needing nothing to stay alive. We laugh ourselves helpless and embrace around our laughing boy. Yes, my friend, I say in a mock scream and pat the paunch with my palms and give the stone a little seal-nip, a man has no need to leave the uterus. The stone cries and laughs. We laugh accordingly and Katrín says: You are quite the record. You are homesick. All evening, household joy prevails. We nap embracing variously on the floor or carpet, the divan or inside a wardrobe, and inside Katrín the stone sends out tiny suck-cracks. That dynamo of a stone is scary, I say, not at all bleary-eyed, but worked up and whacking away even though it’s long past eleven. I find her rather worn out, actually, answered Katrín. Then we bed down together with her and look at the little chicklet snoozing between sheets. I want to bite and squeeze the little chicklet but the doctor advised me for stimulation to take a teaspoon of port wine morning and evening. I drink a full eggshell and it passes comfortably into my body after the eggpunch. I drift into a bliss condition but never get to kiss the stone inside Katrín. I also eat a lot of vegetables. It’s my duty to look after my health carefully. I stopped buying food in the refectory. I take a packed lunch to the office with me, which is on the increase; just some snacks. Here we do not have snack bars. The main meal I eat in the evening follows the Swedish model, easily-digested food, rusks and boiled meat. In the morning I eat a Norwegian Breakfast. I set off. I tolerate my neighbors better. I have neither met nor seen Sigurður in my rambles around my mind. He is rumored to be out of work, and no one knows where to find him. Has he gone sailing. I chat with Katrín privately and in confidence about horses, that everything increases except the bank account. And so we write with style and practice written forms: I go down to the pond. I see ducks on the pond. I throw bread crumbs to the ducks. Ducks eat bread. I have written all the warts off me. Good day. Good night. The weather is as it should be. There is no longer any winter in iceland. This country is becoming an absolute America since the American defense force came; it protects us against cold spells.

  1 July or September 1957.

  I miss my presence; that is, the presence of Títa. Any other presence, especially touch, feels uncomfortable to me. She was an extremely agreeable and sociable cat. She cleaned herself so well, always licking her paws, belly, and ass. She made one ashamed. For a time, I had sauntered all alone past her farm of an evening in the weak hope of glimpsing the cat. Sometimes she slumbered peevishly at the window or waddled soft-limbed around the garden amid empty food cans, scraps of wood, human crap, even. Weeds grew and birds fluttered with quivering wings breathing in cold air. I would sometimes venture to the window in the dark in the evening and draw Títa’s attention by scratching the window pane. She detected my presence, mewed, and spit in the flowerbeds. Outside was a single band of twilight. I called to her, behind the garbage cans, and fetched her leftover fish. Then one evening I took her. I long to return to the chivalric era, when splendid men pillaged splendid women and rode fast horses. I do not feel comfortable around empty fruit tins. Katrín does not like cats, but I find cats soft on my body. I have to conceal Títa in the workshop with its wooden smell and sawdust or in the shavings bag along with blocks of wood and surplus art. In the evening I found a solution up along Laugavegur. Of course I had never reconciled myself to the bus. The houses rise around in a tempting row. Foreigners who come to Reykjavík do not recognize the same city they have been to before. Some people love cats. I much prefer them to dogs. Dogs often have filthy behinds, but the cat is a progressive. (I am not revealing any new truth here.) Others prefer dogs, wanting to have a guardian but never to pay an employee a salary. Títa will not let anyone force her into submission. A dog’s instinct is aversion. On the way home tonight I perceived that the world is divided into character groups, not political systems: dog and cat groups. The groups are in all political systems. (I am not revealing anything new here, but everything is still new under the sun.) I feel like I have become a new man affected by new words. Every day renews me toward decay, toward the aging and death that is perfect and new with characteristics that awaken surprise as to how well one gets used to it. Very well indeed. The basement is consistent with itself, buried and reeling in the corners. Here I am, where no one comes. Admittedly, I have for years been eating myself down from the upper two floors, but the basement will make me prosperous due to the rent increases which never fail to ali
gn with the króna. One should never chain up the thing he wants to freely enjoy. These days, people are waiting eternally for devaluation. They come down hardest on me in the form of Ásmundar. I am a prepper in a basement nest. My last stronghold. They will have to carry me out dead from here, dressed in black, an inoculated, satanic Lutheran. Prayers stream from my lips. Reading prayers is pleasurable. After the loss of my sexual appetite (I last had her in June) there is no satisfaction like prayer. I do not masturbate out of political interest, which is for teenagers through adolescence until they get married. The strumpet Jenní went directly from a ball game in the corridor to marriage in the attic. Jenní is what they call infatuated with her sweetheart. They are newly betrothed and he has a car and she says:

  Oh it was so much fun last night, I went on a driving tour in good weather and he began to show me the bustling rats on the Reykjavík rubbish dump and kept saying: No, look. I was so enamored seeing the rats and asked: Are rats that fertile, and he answered, so funny: Rats do not use rubbers. I felt thoughts of rage, which seized me there in the car, the two of us looking at rats. Then he began to tell me about his father who was dying.

  It is said that a dying man feels sensations and regains consciousness just before his last breath, before a howl rises from his lungs and the body topples on its side limp and clammy like a newly-plucked dead hen.

  It is nice to be asexual and have no living relatives and not need to grieve for anyone.

  In the evening I take out the books and check my dwindling balance. I don’t spend long on this. I discovered a suitable pastime that carves away the taxing day. While I work, I change minutes into amounts, working out how much each minute adds to my balance. Time is an endless sequence of numbers. Eight hours are valued at a certain amount of krónur. The remainder of the living day a man sleeps to gain himself the energy to be able to suck up money. The friction of meat morsels in the stomach produces electricity, which powers the heart to pump blood into the body’s arteries, which sucks in air, which cools in the lungs, and the brain is triggered to move the finger and pencil over the paper. It’s like with the windmills at Holtstöðum in Flóa. They were kept running all the livelong day to fill tanks and so Guðrún had light at night to eat and to wash and comb her great and long hair. For their other needs Jónas and Guðrún did not use light; however, a hand lantern burned every night in the hen house so the lay-shy hens lost the thread and eggs poured the whole solar circuit in a volley through the egg hole, even though the law of hens is to lay only in daylight. Here you can see clearly the disposition of chickens. In the evenings, Jónas sat in the hut and noted down numbers of eggs produced, the wind direction, and weather. They are exhausting themselves so they can fall asleep in the dark, he said, putting his arm around Guðrún. Remember to let the hens have some shell-sand tomorrow. They crushed me against the wall. I discovered a moss roof through the slits in the panel. Flies found me and the chamber pot. Disgusting house flies smelling the urine stain and avoiding the fly-catching-trap. Jónas slept with his nose out of bed and breathed in the urine stench too tired to be able to fall asleep. Grandma said it was hypnotic, the smell of sour cow piss. I always believed this because I knew it first hand, breathing in the smell of the night pot, then falling into slumber above it. I need no sleep if you let the chamber pot stay there. Guðrún ferried it to the lair. Cold fingers, which kneaded parcels of butter during the day and powdered dry skýr, looked in on me naked through the knitted underwear until I fell asleep crushed tight by my panel wall in the country and swamp marshes, irrigation ditches and the rain that flowed constantly over haystacks and cemeteries that great, drenched summer. Now, in fall, they get energy from Soginu. Much changes. In the last letter, she said that hens would hardly leave their boxes, so eager they were to lay their eggs. This laying generation of hens

  June 30, 1957.

  Yes, this laying generation of hens, deemed to be above criticism, so I’ll take up the cause. No, this laying generation of hens, whatever anyone saystoday I came across the cat within the paper trash in the yard. The fish-dumpling cans were missing but in their place the yard was full of refuse and cardboard boxes. Once out of trash cans, you can see how everything is constantly changeable, shaped by wind and rain, the effects of which have grooved to my mind. I remember seeing from the window on the third floor a boy had caught cardboard box on a hook, and it was strange to see the box dangling on the hook and the boys beating it with a long stick. By sheer coincidence, fish bites were in the bag. I keep fish in waxed paper. The day was in twilight, and no one there to see. The city resembled a well-taken photo. Títa posed on a cable pole made of a driftwood tree that had turned its tree root up to the sky and its lone star, ready to jump if a snow bunting sat on the sandy snowdrift. Títa, I addressed her. The cat swung from the pole, flying with drawn claws and tightened abdomen through the air to shoot between the barrels; from there she stared at me with eyes glowing in the dark. I opened the bag, pulled the letter from under the composition book and unwrapped the fish. She was not so frightened that she refused to advance, but pawed at the fish. Every time I tried to catch her, she shot behind the barrels and rummaged into the mud. I tried a long time without success to set hands on the beast until my subconscious came into the picture and sent a message: put the letter in the bag, you ass. The letter was nothing but the word “leftovers” and I would have to succeed the first time, or she would be afraid and I would never see her ever again. I put the coat collar over my head, lying with my knees on a semi-dry cardboard box and holding the bag open with my fingers. Títa inched closer and closer. Kis, kisakis, I whispered but the whispering terrified her so I broke off and struck myself on the mouth and scolded myself so my mouth grew still and open and stopped emitting sounds. My knees were waiting, stiff and creaky, and I squatted there with my coattails gathered in my groin. She came with small steps, crawling with her belly full of kittens low to the ground, suspicious, but was no match for the enchanted composition book. She raced into the bag and was headed quickly back out with the spine in her mouth, but I captured her double-quick, closed the bag frantically and allowed myself to fall in the slush on my elbows over the bag, the lock held, but my buttoned coat inhibited my free movement, and I fell into the trash cans. Someone peeked out a window and beat on the pane because of the noise. We rolled in the snow, the cat in the bag, I in the slush, and could not rescue ourselves among the paper trash. A bleary child’s voice (Dorí) called at the pane: a man is stealing the cat and the trash cans. My legs saved me by leaping up with the trash can lid in hand; I could not let go. I ran in curves, there were no obstacles on the way, neither fences nor redcurrant bushes, the house was unenclosed, its fence fallen down, and the flowers had lain lifeless a few months. The route lay through an underpass by a square of houses out to the street. I was satisfied after I had run around five houses, then I took the mother to a nearby vehicle and left the bag behind the front bumper and ran for the house corner to rid myself of the lid, then turned in a calm manner back to the car and retrieve the bag. You might be thinking that the car drove over her, but you’re wrong, it did not move. One night I’m going to check the route I took, after it is safe to (something is missing in the manuscript here) . . . I set Títa up in the workshop. I firmly expected she would be with me for a week, no more; she needs food, which costs money, but I was sure she would stay with me and it would be like a winter holiday for her, in a box on a radiator. Alas, a lot of painful mewing from her bag. On the way home my mouth hummed a silent tune I heard only in my head, not my ears. No one and nothing got in my way except thoughts about Sigurður. I pushed them from me as unnecessary and when I saw someone in the distance I headed right across the street. I do not have tuneful ears but I remember the song the musician was playing on the guitar as agreeable but neither my tongue nor my vocal cords can achieve that characteristic electric sound, no matter how the air is pushed from my lungs. It was a great relief to drop the kitty on the floor. I shook her from the
bag with the composition book and uneaten food. All this occurred and I decided to use the stuff in it that I was writing about Tómas Jónsson. Now I understand how a journal enriches one’s life. Each worthless item gains value if it is brought into words on a page in a composition book. I say this even though I am not a literary fundamentalist who thinks the word is god. I understand just in my own way why Jónas wrote in his journal about wind directions and eggs every night. In order to get the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is well deserving of it as they say in the press, but all too few of those who deserve them get them, my Títa. Fifty years passed without my understanding what Jónas was doing in his writings. A new wind direction was a significant event in the life of this pious man, so smooth was his marriage. Jónas was not unkind to merchant folk who rode out on Sundays, though I used to say: Now there’s one scurrying from the countryside; or: I do not enjoy farting horses in a horse paddock. I confused pudgy animals each glossy as a wet balloon, sweat-marked, with dark and sad eyes. On their necks, surly heads; the horses tossing their light manes trampled and whinnied and kicked. I remember that Jónas jumped off the wall and rolled about the horses’ backs, they threw him to and fro like a feather sack. Jónas could not get a foothold. He could not press himself between horse and harness, so tight were they packed in the paddock, lips stretching to catch a breath. She whispered in the dark, hands cold since her fingers had only recently finished with the butter, and touched my dick: my love, you should not stroke this. She is coming, your mother, soon enough, to bring peace to your home at night. My Tómas, you were not exactly active, but were gentle with the animals and the master of the house and I will miss you forever. You did what was asked of you. I have kept your letters in a special envelope and send you twenty eggs 10 + 10 carefully chosen eggs. This spring I will reach the age of ninety-one, god willing, and everyone is good to me. Our Magga is married. You did not snare her but came here with your wife, you will have enjoyed this fun. This is the twentieth laying hen descended from the proud Italian cock. Do you remember him. Jónas is the same, it is fun to be married even if not to the right person. Enough to do some good. Magga has gotten fat. Surly horses and aroused cows present no surprise for Tómas Jónsson. He treated the countryside like one big udder. Magga’s daughter rushed giggling over the farm’s dirt floor, fat and careful because of the merchant who slumbered Sunday afternoons and let his genitals dangle out from a hole in the bedspread in order to provoke the merchant woman who threatened to splash water on him from the barrel. Jónas wrote patiently: We finished mowing Stórastykkið today. An excellent growth. Four cables. Eight stacks. The same result as last year. In the morning we mow Flötina. Today we began to mow Flötina. An ideal growth. Ten cables. Twenty stacks. The same amount of hay as last year. Tomorrow we go to Hornstykkið. Today we mowed Hornstykkið. A poor growth. Nine cables. Eighteen haystacks. Less than last year, but better haying. Tomorrow we drive to Áveituna. Every day was like that but exciting and new. On Saturdays he wrote in the book: finally, early mowing. I put my palm on Guðrún’s breast. And December 31 each year he signed in ornamental lettering: Now the year has passed. Total: 52 palms. An identical figure to last year. I have nothing to worry about, and I am in full swing. Autumn lay over the countryside. He was never bored, not even in the rain. He was never overcome by nostalgia when he opened the wooden lock and water flooded the irrigation. He drew the wooden bolt from the loop in the water gate to the irrigation gardens and came home with wet crotch, mud splattered, to eat skýr and fall asleep with his nose over the urine-stained yellow chamber pot. Yes, my Tómas, I wanted to come and see the blood sausage competition this year. Jónas has grown tired of skýr, but eats porridge and a chunky slice of blood sausage; his children eat skýr. After eight hours of staying in bed, he woke up, yawned, belched, ran the night out through his butt, ate skýr, stuffed his hat on his head, and a new day began under the cow’s teats. The rain dripped from the roof. The cultivated land now withered, Magga’s daughter giggled a homely giggling and between laying eggs the hens darted drenched about the cowshed mound and thrust their dripping heads under the wet saddle, which was used as coverings on the skin; the hens wore silly expressions and their brains swelled. Títa investigated everything here and adapted immediately to the apartment. I addressed her under the light bulb in the hallway, the light on me as I rubbed my hands: Be welcome, guest, to anything edible you find in Tómas’s den. Be welcome, your clit too. The hens’ ovaries ached after all the laying and rats squeaked in the feedbags in the storehouse. I lifted my head and examined the carved bed rail under the rafters. At some point a dexterous midwife lived in this town. She invented forceps but never got recognition for her construction. She was married to an ironsmith and Jónas said: he used it to pull a glowing horseshoe iron from the fire; at the time it was not customary to retrieve children from the mother’s womb with forceps, my dear. Magga’s daughter giggled and bolted down dried cod heads between meals and fattened happily. She was a master at tearing meat from sheep’s heads and grappling giggling, sly and mischievous out by the farm’s walls. The merchant gravitated to her at any opportunity he could and she would crawl around himwhen no one could hear he said one sentence from the ten he used with her: