Neither of us had any idea how fragile it all was.
A new caress was all it took. Another kind of kiss.
I put off going home to my unmade bed on Klerkegade and went instead to the Byens Kro, where there was a surprise birthday party on the go for a stoned Swedish artist, and the painter Christian Finne was deejaying acid rock with ringing cymbals. I recognised a designer with flat hair and baggy trousers, and a former member of De Unge Vilde in workwear, but whether all the young street-looking guys were artists with a courtesy of some Valby gallery stamped on their arses, or whether they had just stepped down from a podium in Milan, I was unable to judge at the time. It was all starting to blur into one. The fashion mags were writing about art and hanging out at openings, the artists were displaying their wardrobes and sitting front row at the fashion shows, and at weekends they all celebrated each other’s weddings or met over the kids at the playground in the Østre Anlæg park in their black get-ups and Tom Ford eyewear.
I got an Urquell at the bar and a group of girls in their twenties caught my eye.
They were swarming around a tray of shots, dressed like spoiled kids, gestures all sophisticated, chain-smoking and loud. They looked like they’d seen it all but hadn’t learned a thing. I thought they were great.
1985 saw the demise of the radical feminist mouthpiece Kvinder, mainly because the older activists lacked confidence in their younger sisters and were reluctant to pass things on, and of course because apparently the struggle for women’s rights was over. Free abortion had been introduced, women were working and went to university. Journals from the Femølejren women’s camp document how the oppressed tore off their bras, took their sisters by the hand and found themselves a new life. They mended their own bikes, earned their own money and cast off their roles as sex objects. This had serious aesthetic repercussions: make-up, clingy clothes and visits to the hair-dressers were oppressive, reactionary and disloyal; women were either free and naked or else shapelessly hidden away in tent-like smocks and baggy trousers. For fifteen excruciating years, the author Suzanne Brøgger was the only one around who managed to be intelligent and feminine at the same time, but in 1986 a miracle occurred: young women wanted their bodies back. Søren T-shirt’s girlfriend Signe wouldn’t have been seen dead in woolly jumpers or crushed velour, only in short black skirts and nylon stockings; she used perfume, too, and washed her hair more than once a week, and she wasn’t the only one.
The young women of the eighties retained their mothers’ insistence on independence, but rejected their tiresome aesthetics and the two generations remained joined together as each other’s polar opposites.
It sounds pathetic now, but back in the eighties I collected misfit women. I celebrated whenever I finally ran into one who set aside the dogma and took risks. Today, interesting, humorous women have increased in numbers. The granddaughters of the radical feminists are the first generation of women to live out the liberation. These days, it’s the men who stand preening in front of the mirror for hours on end, then slouch against the walls in the ever-forlorn hope of attention, while the women snigger at the bar.
It was impossible to imagine that the group of girls I stood staring at would one day have little wrinkled mouths. On the pretext of mustering vitality I ordered another Urquell and decided on the spur of the moment to have an old Caribbean rum as well, since more than likely it was my last round.
Søren T-shirt and I had agreed to get together for two days to do some interviews after he got out of hospital. I knew the story of him and Signe, and parts of it were included in my arsenal of anecdotes, but I had yet to hear him tell it himself in its entirety and I’d prepared some questions to get him to delve further into the details.
Søren lives in a part of Østerbro I was afraid of as a child. The staircase still smelled like the seventies: cooking fat, dirty washing and filled ashtrays. He had just got out of the bath, seemed energetic and together, and the floor of his cramped living room was tidy. He mentioned he was thinking of going into rehab at some place in Nordsjælland, but apart from that we stayed off the subject, God knows we’d been there before. At one point in the nineties I realised he could drop dead any day. It’s all been bonus since then.
When Søren and Signe were together, they shone, and it would be no exaggeration to say we mirrored ourselves in their life together and forgot about our own whenever she stroked her hand over his hair.
At one end of the scale were his great, hectic strides, the eternal quest for the highs, at the other the graceful way in which she could reach for her glass. She brought him to rest in the moment, and so it seemed quite inexplicable, even to Søren himself, that his weekend speed habit escalated into smoking heroin and later to injecting the stuff. Signe was absorbed in her law studies and hadn’t learned to recognise the clues, and for a year Søren lived a double life; on the one hand a lovestruck young man enjoying the Rioja-fuelled dinner parties of coupledom, on the other a junkie traipsing the pavements of Istedgade. One day she found out, and that was it.
He hadn’t shot heroin in five years. Now he relied on methodone and excessive alcohol consumption, topped up with whatever happened to come his way in the line of Rohypnol, coke, ecstasy and MDMA, and though there was no denying his physical decline, he continued to play the hedonist with remarkable gusto. The real world could look after itself. He had never really wanted it anyway.
‘I never thought you were that stupid,’ he said when I presented this interpretation of his life to him. I’d brought fishcakes.
‘I’d be over the moon if I had a wife and kids. You know how much I love a plate of hot food.’
‘Why don’t you cook, then?’
He gave me a proud look.
‘You really want to start with Adam and Eve?’
‘Yes, I do.’
He lifted his shoulders to somewhere near his ears and began to talk, and we didn’t stop until his weary bookshelf had all but dissolved into darkness.
Later we went out. I wanted to take him to Karriere Bar, a new artist’s hangout in the meat-packing district, but Søren insisted on going to Floss first. As usual, he was received like a veteran returned home; apart from that, the place was business as usual: Peter still monitored everything from behind the bar, the Faroe Islander couldn’t get his words out right, the fifties freak was asleep on his bar stool, and Søren introduced me to a young female poet from Latvia with pockmarks on her cheeks and a pair of breasts that looked like they were on their last legs.
We touched down briefly on Istedgade, where Søren cadged his usual two hundred and scored a little lump off an African, and then we got to Karriere. It resembled a canteen with curated tables and futuristic lamps. If the artist crowd were there, they were keeping a low profile. Marketing types with bleached teeth, cutaway collars and drinks on expenses dominated the place, creating that characteristic buzz of unfinished sentences and tedious territorial behaviour.
Kreuzmann was there, and I hadn’t seen him since the disastrous evening at Noma several months ago. He was flanked by a pair of East European tarts whose eyebrows were plucked to the last hair; his face was swollen, he looked like a corpse washed up on a beach, white shirt stuck to his skin. I had known him since we started school, we were almost friends, but there was this latent mutual scepticism between us, and it had been like that ever since we first met. Søren, however, couldn’t put a foot wrong as far as Kreuzmann was concerned.
‘You’re looking good,’ said Kreuzmann. ‘Have you stopped shooting junk?’
‘I’m fit as a fiddle,’ said Søren. ‘I can do backflips.’
‘I got divorced,’ said Kreuzmann.
‘What for?’ said Søren.
‘I shagged the neighbour.’
Søren squealed with laughter.
‘A good thing, if you ask me. Getting divorced,’ I said.
‘Read a new book, have we?’ said Kreuzmann.
‘Why should anyone want to talk to the same person every nig
ht?’ I said.
‘I was never home!’ said Kreuzmann.
I swayed to the music and sensed how annoying I looked.
‘You were probably working to be away from it,’ I said.
‘You know how hard a divorce can be, Mikkel,’ said Søren.
‘Having a partner’s a lot harder,’ I said.
Kreuzmann put his glass down and scanned the room with a look of bereftness. A receptionist was entertaining the marketing guys with some zumba steps.
‘I went to see the pastor in Taarbæk last week,’ he said. ‘I wanted to say sorry.’
‘For what?’
‘I promised Claudia I’d be faithful, until death do us part.’
‘Did it help?’
‘He was out playing tennis.’
Kreuzmann stood sobbing beneath a Jeppe Hein lamp, and Søren held him tight all through the twelve-inch version of ‘Blue Monday’.
SAN CATALDO WRITERS’ RETREAT THE AMALFI COAST, APRIL 2008
‘Has anyone seen my black knickers?’
It was Inger asking, and there was every reason to take her enquiry seriously. Up until that point she had spoken only of buses she’d missed or which hadn’t come. San Cataldo is a Danish-owned former cloister dating back to the twelfth century and situated 1,670 steps above the town of Amalfi. From my sparsely furnished cell I could look out across the Valle de Dragone with its lemon groves and donkeys. The long, cool corridors smelled reassuringly of Italian detergents. The walls were thick and whitewashed.
I arrived mid-month, and since the eleven other guests had already been there a fortnight I found myself part of what was already a well-established hierarchy.
There were only two strong characters: Lea Winther Jensen was a visual artist in her early thirties, with thick, flaxen hair, prominent eyebrows, dark, finely curved lips and a pair of large, oblong front teeth that lent her a rather girlish appearance. She was quick on the uptake, analytically gifted and seemingly extremely well read, and yet there was also a certain sweetness about her that perhaps – and now I am guessing – was more down to shaky self-confidence than purity of heart.
As for Peter Borch-Jensen, there was little doubt about his confidence. Here was, in every sense, a thoroughly unpleasant man. Exemplarily stylish and costumed as if by the Brasserie Flo back in the sixties: tweed, handmade brogues, fastidiously ironed shirts and a flourish of silk scarves in bold colours. He was about sixty, but his long hair and agile physique made him seem younger. He was there working on a monograph about Holberg and was most certainly a first-class scholar. Laid back and yet ever vigilant, a sarcastic smile on his lips, and with a turn of phrase that could floor an opponent in an instant. While he was not without humour, his wit was invariably aimed at some hapless individual who suffered injury as a result.
‘I can’t find my knickers in the laundry. Has anyone seen them?’ said Inger.
Lea tried not to laugh.
‘They’re sort of nappy. What’s it called?’ said Inger.
‘Towelling,’ someone said.
‘Towelling, that’s it!’ said Inger.
Lea cracked up laughing, blushed, then cracked up again. Peter Borch-Jensen put his hand on hers and smiled indulgently. Inger immediately went livid and was suddenly speaking with an accent. Southern Jutland, Als perhaps. She was thin from too many carrots, too much pumpernickel and cheap Earl Grey.
‘Can’t you two keep your flirting to yourselves?’
She pronounced flirting as if with a d.
‘It’s quite a nice word said like that,’ said Peter Borch-Jensen. ‘Ravishingly innocent.’
We retired to the drawing room after dinner. Some of the furniture looked like it was from the time in the 1920s when the carpet and rug dealer Carl Wiinstedt placed the property at the disposal of Danish artists and scholars. An uncomfortable art deco chaise longue, a large Sigurd Swane canvas in a gold frame, the classic pieces of Danish modern, naturally. The heavy, leatherbound visitors’ books in the corner were filled with decades’ worth of finely slanting handwritten acknowledgements, watercolours depicting the cloister gardens, stirring odes to the view and the benefits of absorption. Lea and Peter Borch-Jensen danced in front of the sofa area while conversing. She was in a brown jersey dress and long purple boots and ought to have been sexy.
When they stopped she made a beeline and sat down next to me on the Børge Mogensen. She started off making some flattering comments about my stuff in the paper that she claimed to have read with pleasure, despite her lack of interest in gastronomy. I outlined my current project and she expressed admiration for my resolve. She had left the Academy of Fine Arts and confided in me that the sheer amount of discussion, the degree of verbalising, had been getting in the way of real art.
‘So what are you doing now, artistically?’ I said.
She smiled and lined up her sentences.
‘While I was there I began to investigate the interaction between conative and non-verbal communication, in particular gestures. That’s probably still my main theme.’
If I was supposed to understand fuck all, then I was getting along nicely.
‘Could you be a bit more specific?’ I said.
Apparently, she felt rather shameful about having to talk about her art.
‘The conative function of language is to make us act or refrain from acting. An order is conative, a piece of legislation is conative, adverts, prayer, a flirt. I’ve spent a lot of time investigating how our gestures input into that kind of discourse.’
‘So what sort of work is coming out of that?’
‘I’ve been very much focused on hands.’
‘You’ve been painting hands?’
‘Mostly I’ve been doing video.’
‘You mean videoing people’s hands while they were being conative?’
‘Yes, it sounds rather simple, doesn’t it?’
‘But that can’t make you a living, can it?’
‘If only you’d been there to say that at the academy.’
She buried her face in her hands.
‘Have you got a gallery?’
‘No, there’s no money in video. It has to be for walls.’
‘For walls?’
‘Yes, something you can hang up. My work’s far too geeky for galleries.’
‘So you’ve never actually sold anything?’
‘I’ve sold some stills from the videos, but not exactly at Tal R prices.’
Peter Borch-Jensen sat down with a generous grappa.
‘Have you met my good friend Peter?’ said Lea.
We shook hands, though neither of us wanted to.
‘Peter’s writing a monograph on Holberg.’
‘And now I’ve included gesture in my analyses.’
Analyses! Ar-tic-u-la-tion!
Peter Borch-Jensen took a large gulp of grappa.
‘Why do we drink?’ he said.
‘I drink to escape,’ I said. ‘How about you?’
Lea put her hand on Peter Borch-Jensen’s arm.
‘I don’t believe Inger’s lost her knickers at all,’ she said.
‘We wish Inger well,’ said Peter Borch-Jensen. ‘And not least that she may find her towelling knickers.’
‘What does Inger do exactly?’ I said.
‘She’s a painter. I thought you knew,’ said Lea.
‘She’s a pest,’ said Peter Borch-Jensen. ‘It does require a certain amount of talent, I suppose. Which brings us back to good old Holberg.’
‘Be nice, Peter Borch-Jensen,’ said Lea, and stroked his arm.
‘But I am not nice, and I should very much like to remain so.’
Lea took the glass out of Peter Borch-Jensen’s hand. ‘No more grappa for this gentleman!’
‘Whatever would I do without you, dear Lea? Work, most likely.’
When the so-called punk poet Michael Strunge jumped out of that window in 1986, he took the last of the eighties with him. The rest became a parody. The painters and the poets parte
d company to pursue careers, the squatters’ movement lost its imagination, and even Danish pop-rock, whose oddly backward rebellion had been to sing about absolutely nothing, had run out of trivialities. We looked half-heartedly for something to live for, and in the meantime we had binding, unimaginative sex in couples. Friends became boring when they were with their partners, and strange as it was, the solution seemed to be to get married, take out a mortgage and allow one’s social life to be filled with other people who had been just as stupid and for that reason had now become one’s neighbours. My friends turned into other people’s neighbours.
Lea and Peter Borch-Jensen had been on a daytrip to Salerno and came strolling in to dinner arm in arm. Judging by their buoyant mood it had been the kind of day that would be fondly recalled from the confines of some future care home.
She giggled like a Japanese schoolgirl, and we were served a rustic regional pie in a copper pan with wild spinach, pine nuts and raisins.
‘I still haven’t found my knickers,’ said Inger.
‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t laughing at you, Inger,’ said Lea. ‘It’s Peter’s new trousers. Hasn’t anyone noticed them?’
‘I thought my time in corduroy had passed,’ said Peter Borch-Jensen.
‘I noticed,’ the cloister director said. ‘They’re very swish.’
‘Well, stand up, then,’ said Inger.
Peter Borch-Jensen got to his feet and did a twirl.
‘They make his bum look good, don’t they?’ said Lea.
They were the kind with thick cord, cognac-coloured and with the additional refinement that the cord ran diagonally across the thigh.
‘He looks like a bloody rent boy,’ said Inger.
We had coffee in the drawing room, and the director asked about Salerno, thereby to receive a talk for her edification on all that was worth knowing about the region. Peter Borch-Jensen sharpened his knife: Salerno was Italy’s net curtains, the duomo was a jumble sale of a dozen different styles, and the bell tower had no idea what it was doing there.
Am I Cold Page 3