Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

by Guðberger Bergsson

  Epilogue (only for Reykjavíkers)

  After some effort I have been able to finish typing the few composition books that Tómas Jónsson left in drawers and had been crumpled there since 1956. At that time I was renting a room in his apartment from people who rented off him, then sublet to me. I was a student; I sometimes played guitar and no doubt often irritated him.

  Examining the books, one sees the pages are handwritten; the handwriting is sometimes illegible, the script blurred, the content a babble. Often one does not know where he is going. In terms of meaning and purpose, it should be borne in mind that no one knows with certainty where art is headed, as much in its poetry as its other elements. Usually art is a journey out into the unknown, unless it is for profit, whether in the form of glorious praise, favors, or hard cash. In some places the script used by Tómas is big and clumsy; it seems to have spurted from the fountain of memory in short rough arches. But perhaps it is that way for natural, external reasons; for example, his poor vision. The reason could be that these books were written blind. Blindness and writing often go together. The poet is in some sense blind when writing. One thing that supports this is that the reader quickly becomes aware that he could start reading even in the middle of a sentence, just as a person can get to know another person anywhere in his life span. Still, Tómas did technically organize a lot. To write, he used a homemade card with two holes. In the holes he put two nails and wrapped some sewing thread around their heads and moved the nails in parallel down the page to mark a straight horizontal line. He did not use ruled paper.

  Most people know these writings as a kind of anti-platform from a man who was the whole of his life deeply ingrained in being defiant. No one, however, should let his opinions hinder them. Opinions can change daily. There is little to the intellectual character of a man who is unaffected by his experiences during a day’s twenty-four cycle.

  Some people are the result of thought. Their lives and actions are not spontaneous, but are grown with care, a hotbed of humidity and the release of moisture. Without thinking, their lives would basically amount to misery. Other people live a wild life that requires little thought. Such people grow everywhere soil is found, fertile or infertile. Their life requires no fertilizer, it just is. Tómas Jónsson is in both categories. As one can see, his life was the sand grain that chance placed inside a shell; because of the constant friction and the wave motions in the sea, lime heaped on the sand grain. (Somewhere he says he is a pearl.) In such cases, it might be chance that decides whether the pearl becomes large or small, ordinary or extraordinary, clear or flawed, with a catch that reduces its value on the market—until it becomes clear that most pearls are this way, are like sea urchins inside.

  Tómas Jónsson is another kind of reality.

  The signature is missing, but it is probably Hermann or Svanur.

  (Written on a loose page.)

  . . . Shortly after noon, it was decided that the car would come for me. This morning while I was unraveling from my unconsciousness taking in oxygen, I asked Anna to look over the newspapers for me, for they have long been my contact with the real world.

  Is there anything in the news, I asked.

  No, it’s all the same: advertising, political squabbles, obituaries and personal essays.

  No new scientific discoveries. No new bombs, I asked.

  Are you interested in bombs, Tómas dear, she asked with the simulated joy healthy people use in the presence of the patient, especially if they think he is not long for this world. They long to cheer him up.

  I am interested in all forms of progress, I replied.

  No one lies to old men who vegetate and slumber away their life experience and wise manner in apathy and futility.

  Old men need to choose a place to live with suitable conditions and a proper environment.

  Everyone has his trash dump.

  My place is an old people’s home with sick, invalid people my own age, people who drag themselves onward by means of cough mixtures and oxygen. In my oxygen-high my brain has recovered weeks of itself. I feel the difference. I think I have never been as independent, happy, and outside myself; I now feel that eternity will not get discovered in the near future, probably never. It’s probably pointless for me to wait any longer to say farewell to this short life.

  Hermann.

  . . . now it is indeed evident that man’s duty is not to believe in a Tómaslife but to bear a yearning in his heart for his nationnonohe thoughtno no

  Then he rose from the divan stiff from dozing and sleeping all day Sunday, hungover, and exhausted with an ache in his arms.

  With weak fingers he scraped the composition books off the floor with shaking hands and threw them into a closet along the wall.

  He thought: I Tómas

  Before he closed the closet door he set the letters between the frame and the door because the latch was broken; he grabbed his overcoat and threw it on the divan. His jacket lay on the floor. He put the jacket on then the overcoat on top and sighed, rubbing sleep from his eyes, wiping the sweat from his forehead, looking at his fingertips, wet and clammy, feeling the air in the room stifling hot, saturated with the scent of liquor. Wine in splotches all over the floor. He tried to rub them away with his toes and he felt about his chest. The pump was running, pumping foul air. And after having discovered where it was, he ambled into the laundry room, let the water run a moment before he bit his teeth over the faucet, turned it on and swallowed icy water that became rocks in his stomach once he raised his wet mouth and tried to urinate. Only a few yellow drops fell from the creased fleshit will leak out as sweathe thoughtin the hallway he came across a fearful, nervous woman:

  Good morning escaped from her.

  Good morning, he said, and got out of the way. He lay in his coat on top of the covers. After a moment thoughts whirled in his head. There was something so peculiar about the way he retreated into slumber and dreams. He was going to get up to shake off his somnolence. At once, sour water rose in his throat and flowed unhindered out in spasmodic spurts over the divan and floor.

  . . . you go ahead . . .

  . . . the man fumbled a few steps along the stairsthe woman pressed a finger to the collar of her nightdress at the chin so her breasts did not flop out the wide neck they flutter after six mouths have sucked milk from them and she had no breasts to drive them from the door that gives life to them in her mind and they have so to speak lived under her feet the whole winter drinking and not drinkingshe wakes at times with her palm over her mouth or to her throat and listens sitting halfway up on the pillows and mornings she slips down into the room and gives him this what the young and presumably poor get in books warm milk and aspirin and she says

  svanur have a little bit of salt and take a B-vitamin and come bathe in hot water upstairs with us

  she bakes pancakes while the one who appointed her to turn on the light at the door goes to work at the butchersshe obeys without a word and turns on the light and looks into the bathroom and looks searchingly at the man pitiful in the dull shine of bulb light as it falls onto his head recently woken from sleephe is in a quarter-sleeve shirt and messy hair with creased pajamasin mind the sight is probably more abhorrent to her than him but the half open door if someone should comehe sees a gleam of light from the room beyond the darkness of the hallway which is crosswise along the corridorher husband is not gone to work he looks along the wall and barely realizes that for the moment he lies asleep in his lukewarm bed with his loose skin clammy on his middle-aged body like a pair of freshly-plucked chickenshe sleeps a captive sleep uneasy dreams in which he stuffs himself with sedative drugs from doctors valium and librium and belladonna against nightmares but suddenly the woman pushes in and says, agonized

  I heard a cry from the cellar

  an awful screamshe addedis svanur committing suicide

  he is probably just writing some nonsense about us

  . . . now there is snow on the shoes in the hallway that she has never yet bee
n out in lousy enough to watch from the stairsshe is barefoot in clogs in the middle of the night she thinks about the scream and her uncomfortable breasts contract and grow firm in the cold she feels how they pull together and tickle at low speed up her sidesto gather her thoughts she feels hastily about her nipples with her cold fingers

  it would not have occurred to them to rent out the single room in the cellar with a door to some uninvited person had not all the cellar holes in town become jam-packed every damp corner crowded even cellars buried below the sidewalk where no daylight ever shines in except perhaps through rusty grates or window squares on the sidewalk so kids cannot kick stones and gravel at the panes so kids jump and rail on the rattling frameshe thought and said in the afternoon in the shop

  I rang up I just put an advertisement in Scene it doesn’t make sense to have a small basement room empty rent it to a single seaman on international voyages who is rarely home

  at this moment she is smoking a cigarette by the telephone her fingers drumming she is hardly a person to engage in a great undertakingshe goes into the kitchen and warms coffee in the same breath a ring she strikes her breast does not know if it is the phone or doorbell

  it’s the doorbell I am goinghe says

  let me I am more meticulous in handling these things than you

  he agreed later to her proposal to change the living room to a bedroom because of the noise that echoed in the room with no furniture just a boy with a guitar in the basement full of smoke and sometimes people who had no place to go and sat around the floor Svanur and his colleagues who came one time with a closet and a divan and these furnishings so the white walls bore some sign of human habitationhe was from a family in the same village as she was and she brought the crew coffee and bread sometimes and envied being young like she had been once and longed for something uncertain to become something that was really nothing

  there was one more day after this night and it was on the next day after that the night disappeared

  the young man lay on the divan and longed to smoke but did not ask for a cigarettehe kept the couple fixed in his mindshe is coming downstairsthe woman opens the doorhe holds the paper he has caught her writing on the sheet

  “The husband is decently dressed, no different from those newly-married husbands who buy meat at the store and have well-established homes, first in the basement because of the lack of rental properties; they may not have a house, but they have a roof over their heads.”

  what should I let come next in the story

  the woman opened the door and said

  yes

  what else did she say

  . . . in such times as I well knew it was possible for someone to rent a cubbyhole even the potato storage under the stairsthe nation growing rapidly and thank god she is not asexual cultivating mushrooms in the basement and she is profiting you say and in another languageyou think there are enough humans in this country and in the world but fertility does not get viewed as the greatest danger to the worldrather suicide than birthmankind kills himself with his sexual functionsyou should live in Chinait is easier for the inhabitants of Hvolsvöllur than PekingHvolsvöllur is not Reykjavík there is plenty of rental housingno one lacks freezer storage or shipsdon’t people lack things everywhere and you think the problem is overpopulation in the world could we have rented the basement unless people increased in number I wonder and for a woman what is healthier than to carry a child for nine months young women is it not too painful no you got me pregnant six times how could I have gotten pregnant in the basement with no running waterin her husband’s mind no arguments arise against her claims he sits belching and shamefaced on the chair feeling heavy after having bread soup for lunch and most of all he wants to crawl into his lair and wait for the clock lie on the divan until bedtime listen to the radio wiggle his toes and have no idea that he is just Tómas Jónsson like other Tómas Jónssonsneither better nor worse a Tómas Jónsson butperhaps dozing inside him is another person other than oh no he has become and is nothing but Tómas Jónssonhe longs to take a spoonful of fruit salad and fall asleepnow she’s come up the stairs after showing the young man the room

  I rented it, she says

  and what now

  now I think we have a house have become homeowners because we can rent to others and charge excessively for the lease the way the man charged us

  She, who later became Katrín, led Hermann down the internal staircase and warned him about the matting on the floor under the lowest step, which was too high compared with the others.