He crosses past Nørreport toward the King’s Garden and enters the gate at Brandes Plads with a nod to the bust of Georg Brandes, brother of Edvard, who in 1888, having read the first thirty-page fragment of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, correctly predicted for him a great literary future, encouraging him to expand it into a novel, though he could not know Hamsun would end in shame due to a combination of senility and 1930s National Socialist sentiments.
The blood pounds in his pumping legs as he passes Aksel Hansen’s sculpture Echo from 1888—a realistic representation of the doomed nymph unable to express her love, able only to call out a repetition of the last word spoken to her. Her form is alert and distressed amid the beech trees, and Kerrigan thinks of her vainly pursuing Narcissus, himself doomed to love only his own reflection. He considers the fact that this ancient Greek myth is embodied here in this sculpture in a Danish public garden. Why? As a warning? Against being lost in oneself? He wonders if he will ever again open his heart to love. If he ever really has in the first place.
Kerrigan marvels that in his fifties he is still seriously asking what love is. Beyond passion, custom, tradition, social commitment? He thinks of Licia, asks himself if his love for her had been genuine or mere delusion, and the thought touches off emotion so terrifying he feels he could be cast in stone by fear, trapped in it like Echo, like Narcissus, like a child hiding under a bed in terror of the unknown gods who drive the wind and rain, hurl spears of lightning, rouse the booming of thunder.
His legs begin to tire, but he will not slow while the demons are after him. He leaves the park at a fast clip, cuts toward H. C. Andersens Boulevard, loops around Dantesplads, Dante’s Place, named for the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) on the occasion of the six hundredth anniversary of his death “so that the Danish people might strengthen their soul with Dante’s spirit.”
From the center of the traffic island in the middle of the boulevard rises Dantesøjlen, the Dante Pillar, sculpted by Einar Utzon-Frank. Atop the pillar stands not Dante Alighieri but his beloved Beatrice, who, in the paradise of The Divine Comedy, guides him to the supreme bliss of contemplating God. Inscribed on the base of the pedestal are the words Incipit Vita Nova; Here begins the new life.
Kerrigan crosses to the opposite side of H. C. Andersens Boulevard, wondering if he is lost in a dark wood of his life, far from the right road, if his life will ever find a place for the true bliss of theological contemplation, if he even desires or believes in that. Where is he now in truth? Back amid the song of Augustine’s cauldron of unholy loves in the Carthage of Copenhagen? Or in the proper place of mankind, the temporal joys of the carnal world, for the joy of the senses is also consolation while one lives, competing with the donna gentile of philosophy. How could he still be so lost in his fifties?
Perhaps, in truth, the mere desire for love, the yearning for God, is all we can achieve on earth, the highest place. The question then is how to celebrate that desire, that yearning. Through rituals of blood and death and strife? Or through the enactment of ecstasy?
But in his ecstasy with his Associate in the dark of her bedroom that last night they spent together, he heard, or thought he heard, or maybe only thought or heard an echo in his mind of a phrase that terrifies him and sets the demons of his Licia hell at his heels again. And whether he heard it or thought he heard, or maybe only thought it, he needs advice from Dr. Ylajali.
As he approaches the tall front gates of the Tivoli Gardens, he digs into his pocket to pay, pushes through the turnstile, and feels his heart straining to be released to the innocent worldly pleasures of this place—its gardens and amusements, its concerts and fine restaurants and snack bars and bars and shooting galleries and lake and rides—all places he never had the pleasure of taking Gabrielle.
Kerrigan flees to the Ditch, Grøften, and the company of his favorite headshrinker, Thea Ylajali of Oslo, whom he met in Vigeland Park some years ago, strolling through the long sculpted esplanade of naked bronzes by Gustav Vigeland.
Now she sits across the table from him reading aloud the poetry of Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933)—specifically, a poem written 105 years before, “The City,” about places and seas that will never be found, for the city will follow you …
Kerrigan responds with a quote of his own that has been singing in his mind since he saw the Charity Fountain earlier: “Blessed are the paps which you have sucked.”
“Vhat is this?” she asks. “Henry Miller?”
“It’s Luke the apostle. Chapter nine, verse twenty-seven. ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the paps which you have sucked.’ ”
“Really? It says this in the Bible? Well, here is another,” she says, turning back to her Cavafy to read a poem about erotic visions that must be kept alive, be it night or brilliant noon.
It is brilliant noon, and Thea is six feet two inches tall, and she is in Copenhagen for only a few hours. He wishes to know whether she thinks he is mentally ill. He also wishes to know her carnally, to explore the heights and depths of her. She has the longest legs and shortest miniskirts he has ever witnessed, but there is no time for that now. She will board the boat back to Oslo in four hours and just as well.
He remembers an earlier adventure with her on the Oslo boat, sailing across a storm-tossed Skagerrak back toward Copenhagen. They danced in the discotheque, gliding in a knot of people across the dance floor like some number choreographed by the pitching sea. It was to have been their night of carnal introduction—implicit in the fact of their agreeing to share a cabin on the crossing. They danced slow, close, and a young drunken Norwegian kept tapping him on the shoulder to cut in, saying grandly, “I vant to dance vith thee voman,” finally grabbed two heaping handfuls of Thea’s butt, whereupon Kerrigan sent him away with a sharp word, but the lad only came back a few minutes later to apologize for his brother’s bad behavior, so they retired to their sea-view cabin. The pitching, however, soon had them taking turns talking to God on the big white telephone on the wall above which was printed:
IT IS FORBIDDEN
TO THROW FOREIGN PARTICLES
IN THE VC BOWL
as Kerrigan heaved into it everything he had inside him.
Somehow the crossing annulled all progress toward carnality in their friendship. Now he only wants to talk to her, yet what he hears himself say when he opens his mouth is, “Thea, have you ever considered the advantages of love with an older, shorter man?”
She blinks and smiles, unspeaking, over the edge of her modern Greek poetry and plate of smoked eel.
“Not a chance, I guess,” he says.
“Do not give up so qvickly,” she tells him. “Hass anyone ever told you that you are a sexy?” And the mouthful of smoked peppered eel he chews goes straight to his brain with a jolt of optimisms. He lifts his glass, says, “Multatuli, Ylajali.”
“There is nothing wrong with you,” she tells him. “You are … how shall I say it … groovy. Do they still say that? I could not bear a man who iss not groovy.”
He has been telling her about his life, his project, his Associate, how last time they were together, following a hefty bout of love, clamped between her smooth sinewy legs, beneath her burning eyes and glinting teeth, he heard her whisper in the dark—or did he dream it?—the same words that Licia had drunkenly uttered to him that summer night: You are so blind.
Or did she say, “I am so blind”? Or did he just think it. Or maybe she said, “You are so kind.” But why would she say that? He had not been particularly kind to her. And he could not remember, when he had told her about Licia that night, whether he included the detail of what she had said to him that summer night in the garden.
Whatever she might have said, whether he told her or not, or if he only thought it, it unnerved him—even if it was at the height of passion, even if she had reached to the stand beside her bed into a little round straw-colored basket where she kept a supply of condoms and removed a tiny flask encased in glossy yellow paper with a label that identif
ied it as Room Incense. She unscrewed the cap and held the mouth of the flask to his nostril, and he breathed it in and ascended immediately to a peak of sensory ecstasy. Then she sniffed it herself and leaned back her head and hissed an open-mouthed, slow, serpentlike breath as he went down on her. Then, just as he was touching earth again, the flask was at his nostril once more, then at hers, and they were delirious with ecstasy. And then she said it, her lips whispered at his ear, and one of the words was blind or kind, but why would she say kind at just that moment? No, she said, “You’re so blind,” and why would she say that? Or he thought it, but why would he think it in her voice?
Whether or whatever she said or he thought, Kerrigan found himself not phoning again, or phoning with excuses (visitors, projects, business), fleeing in fear for his heart but retreating to a perimeter from which he looked back, fearing the more he wants of the same.
You’re so blind, she said as they were blind with the ecstasy of a popper. Although he is not unaware of the possibility that it might have emanated from the shadowy regions of his own mind.
“There are two pos-si-bi-li-ties,” Thea tells him. “Either she has said this. Or not. If the latter case, then perhaps you were hearing echoes from your memory stirred up by your passion. If the former case, perhaps it iss an ecstatic conicedence of thought stirred up by the coniceding of your climaxes. You had climax together?”
“Yes, we did.”
“In that case, I vould not vorry. Give it chance. And Dr. Kerrigan, you are as sane as I am,” Thea tells him, then adds bemusedly, “I wonder if we shall become lovers today,” a forkful of eel hovering at her lips before she bites.
The sun shines through the branches of the overhanging trees across her lippy face, and he both desires and fears her, there where they sit beneath an open-air display of miniature aviation balloons.
“This restaurant is groovy,” she tells him, and flips a page in her Cavafy.
“It was opened in 1874,” he tells her. “The balloon decor is in commemoration of its second manager, Lauritz Johansen, a famous balloon pilot.”
“Fascinating,” she says, and he wonders if it is meant ironically.
Kerrigan finishes the last heavenly morsel of his eel, convinced that it is nourishing mythological Celtic sectors of his soul as well as his body, and goes for the aged cheese he has ordered, embellished with chopped onion, jelled meat drippings, radishes bathed in a shot of Hansen’s rum, a favorite among sailors. Cheese so old and strong it makes his gums ache.
“This requires a snaps,” he says, and signals the waitress.
They toast with iced Norwegian Linje snaps. Linje is Scandinavian for “equator”, every drop of it is, by tradition, shipped across the equator in oak sherry kegs before bottling. It gives the aquavit a tawny tint and flavor at once spicy and mellow.
“Skål,” says Kerrigan, and Thea reads a Cavafy poem about a young man dazed, mesmerized by the forbidden pleasure that he has just experienced, his blood fresh and hot.
Kerrigan finds himself wondering whether she really listened when he told her what Licia did to him and what she said to him—sufficiently so to make judgment on his mental state. Easy enough for her to pronounce him sane if she didn’t really listen. She pronounced him sane so quickly. And, anyway, perhaps she herself is mad.
“Tell me your fantasies,” she says.
“I don’t have any.”
She laughs at his fear, producing in him an involuntary fantasy of himself naked and at her mercy as she prepares figuratively to tear open his heart to release myriad small red perversions to go running about the room.
“I find it hard to relax,” he says.
“Relaxation is a wery much overrated state,” she tells him, and looks at her watch. “By the way, a rhetorical question: How long does it take to get to your apartment from here?” she asks, smiling, blinking like a cat.
Afterward he drifts in sweat-cooled sleep, her long naked body close beside him on his narrow electric bed, her voice hushed as she seeks to arouse him for yet another bout by telling him some of the fantasies reported to her by her patients.
“Isn’t that unethical?” he asks.
“Not if I do not tell you the patient’s name. Anon-ee-mous da-ta.”
Kerrigan tries not to listen as she speaks, watching a red spider hanging in an invisible web on the other side of the windowpane, twitching in the flow of air, limned in sunlight. He wonders whether this could be considered a breach of faith to his Associate and remains silent when Thea asks again about his own fantasies. He is thinking how it felt to have her sitting on him, her pillowy lips on his, his face between her long white thighs. What better fantasy than that? Smother me in the gentle way. But he is also thinking about his Associate. How good it was to go down on her, all poppered up. But then she said it. Perhaps, after all, he can live with the memory of her saying that. If she said it at all. If he didn’t just think it. And if he thought it so vividly, what does that say about his mental state?
Her own favored fantasy, Thea tells him now, is of sitting at her work table naked. It is very hot and she spreads her legs wide to air herself while unbeknownst to her a naked man creeps in the door on all fours, crawling silently across the room, beneath her desk …
Kerrigan’s blood begins to stir. He goes to the refrigerator for a bottle of champagne, returns to her to drown his worry in it and in her, thinking of Karen Blixen’s advice always to have a little bubbly with one’s predicament.
At the gangway to the Oslo boat, he kisses her. She has to lean down to his mouth. He says, “My fantasy is to crawl up out of the water and climb the long blonde legs of a giant beautiful blonde Nordic goddess …”
She laughs. “You are as sane as I,” she tells him, and is off up the sloping ramp, canvas overnighter on her shoulder, to return to her husband, a violin maker who keeps two pet wolves.
“Aren’t wolves dangerous?” he asks her.
“So too are wiolins,” she says.
At the top of the ramp she turns, waves, blows a kiss from her pillowy lips. You are as sane as I, he thinks. And You’re so blind. And IT IS FORBIDDEN TO THROW FOREIGN PARTICLES IN THE VC BOWL. And I vant to dance vith thee voman! And You are a sexy.
Kerrigan stands in the center of the King’s New Square, Kongens Nytorv, which is in fact a circle within a square, and wonders if he is pleased with himself. He thinks of Thea, tall and golden as the monolith of naked bodies at the heart of Vigeland Park in Oslo, The Wheel of Life, Gustav Vigeland’s monument to existence. But his thoughts drift toward Gustav’s brother, Emanuel Vigeland, and his monument to death, Tomba Emmanuelle, at Grimelundsveien 8 in the Slemdal area of Oslo. Emanuel spent twenty years constructing his own mausoleum there, a vaulted churchlike structure, bricked-in windows, dark and echoing, black, dimly illuminated walls painted with figures of copulating skeletons, women giving birth, skeletons giving birth, copulating sculptures barely visible in the dim corners.
He shivers.
Yet above the entry way is printed the Latin inscription: Quicquid Deus creavit purum est. “All that God has created is pure.” God who brings flowers and death. Sex and destruction.
At such a moment, despite his apostasy, he might visit St. Ansgar’s Church on Bredgade, the Catholic cathedral in Copenhagen—a small and, Kerrigan once thought, holy place. But St. Ansgar’s, like most churches, is rarely open when he visits, and when a man needs to visit a church he does not need to find a door that he cannot pull open. Neither can Kerrigan forget that a part of the actual right arm of St. Ansgar, Apostle of the North, is embedded in a golden shrine in the church’s sacristy or that mounted on the wall to the left of the left front subaltar, dedicated to Our Lady, is a gold-coated bust of Pope Lucius I, beheaded in Rome in A.D. 254. Within the bust is Lucius’s actual skull, sent to the then still papist Denmark from Rome in the 1100s. Whenever Kerrigan is in the church he does his best to not meet the gaze of the skullish bust, although he feels the thing regarding him through emp
ty sockets from beneath its jeweled crown.
He wanders underneath a drift of clouds toward Kongens Nytorv. He thinks, Green shadows on a damp afternoon in spring, and about the green shadows of his Associate’s eyes and about the fact that he has not washed away the remnants of the first two acts of love shared with Thea Ylajali. Coitus. Copulation. You are as sane as I, he thinks, wondering precisely how sane that might be, or how blind he might be, as he turns up Ny Adelsgade and enters the Palæ Bar beneath the sign of the mermaid sipping a cocktail through a straw.
Years before, this was a dive greasy-spoon coffee shop called Selandia, named for the island on which Copenhagen is situated. Since 1984, however, it has been a noble establishment, worthy of the name of the street on which it stands, New Nobility Street, host to jazz and poetry readings. It also awards, on the first day of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival in July, an annual prize of not inconsiderable prestige to a jazz artist who has distinguished him-or herself by virtue of a contribution to the genre.
The bar is already well populated when Kerrigan enters. He orders a beer and finds an empty chair at a table facing the massive painting of a long, reclining nude—Goya-inspired—that reminds him of Thea, whose secreta has dried on him. It occurs to him that people carry many manners of secret around with them. And depression descends upon him as the voice of John Lennon warns him over the sound system that instant karma is going to do a job on him if he doesn’t do a job on himself.
Kerrigan in Copenhagen Page 15