The Great Weaver From Kashmir

by Halldor Laxness

  Love, dear Diljá, is a great sacred thing, behind all the farce we women make, the core of the unspeakable, the mystery of the most blessed misfortune, the marvel that hushes all other voices, la meta profetata fuori del mondo.19

  The desire to destroy all honor and happiness, body and soul, all at one moment, that’s what it is to be in love. To sit on the steps before her lover’s door and not to get in, to ramble throughout the city in darkness like a drunken harlot in her despair, that’s what it is to be in love. To bathe her lover’s hands in her tears and look with a shudder into his eyes, as into the depths of her own destiny, that’s what it is to be in love. When a woman is no longer anything but a wretched sacrificial lamb under the cumbersome hands of the tormenter, naked, with no will, powerless, dead to herself, quaking, weeping, dizzy, burning, then she loves; and the dogs wait at the door ready to tear her to pieces when she slinks out into the silence of the night.

  22.

  My husband gave me everything: gold, green forests – everything but what I longed for and was born to enjoy. He was not a man who could take anything from me. He was a businessman, not a lover. He was distracted when he came home at night, and was gone in the mornings. His caresses were businesslike, his embraces mild and prudent as if he were reckoning his accounts. He never broke the seal placed over my heart.

  Seasons passed, and what do you think happened? I became pregnant! I had never actually thought that a person could become pregnant. I scarcely believed it when my maid told me. It started with nausea and dizziness, and one day I vomited and passed out. “Madam is surely pregnant,” said the girl. “What damned nonsense is in you?” said I. “Shame on you!”

  And when my husband came home that night he had hardly sat down to eat before he took out his pocketbook and started to jot down some numbers. I observed him in secret and realized that I despised the man. For a week I didn’t allow him to come to bed with me at night. I had determined to drag it out as long as possible before telling him that I was with child. But I was so helpless and grief-stricken, because there was no way of escape, and finally I felt that there was nothing else to do but try to love him. And one evening I sat down at his knees and whispered this impudent news to him: I was with child.

  “Is that so, my dear?” he asked.

  Could you imagine a more revolting reply?

  But at the birth of Steinn a new sun arose in my life. Feelings wakened that I could never have possibly suspected were hidden in my breast; I lost myself in motherly joy, was reborn.

  I loved my child wildly at first, and then I worshipped him. I determined to live for the boy. And I lived for him. I could scarcely tolerate anyone coming near him but me. I stayed awake for him at night, bathed him myself in the morning, looked after all his needs alone, thought of nothing but him all day. My delight was to gaze at him and serve him! I looked upon him as divinity. My beloved little boy – no one has seen a more beautiful boy; his blue eyes were deep and clear, and from his skin and golden locks beamed a dazzling light. He could speak perfectly by the age of two, and he understood everything. Nothing got past him; he asked me about everything, was amazed at everything, admired everything, and all things took on a new shape in my own eyes because I became used to looking at everything from the perspective of the boy.

  I felt as if I owned him exclusively, and that everything existed because of him. I felt as if no other child had ever been born in the world except for him, and that no child like him would ever be born again. Grímúlfur wanted us to have a girl, but I flatly refused, protected myself against becoming pregnant again and was cold and capricious toward the boy’s father. I felt as if he no longer mattered to me now that I had the boy.

  Three years passed.

  Grímúlfur set sail and planned on staying abroad for half a year. He asked me to come with him, said that we would take the boy with us, but I chose to stay at home. What did I care about wandering off to another country when I could have this little god to myself at home? Grímúlfur left; the child and I stayed.

  That was in the winter. Several months passed. I was scarcely ever up and about, hardly ever went visiting, because the boy put a spell on me. If I stayed more than two hours away from him, I was no longer myself.

  One winter night I came home from a party; there I’d been quite warm, but when I came home the house was so cold. I caught cold in the evening, and in the morning I was dangerously ill. It was pneumonia.

  I lay for weeks between life and death, because the pneumonia was followed by pleurisy, which caused chronic bronchitis. The doctors urged me to take extreme care.

  Finally spring arrived. Grímúlfur came home and had a specialist investigate me carefully, and then it came to light that I had tuberculosis.

  That day was one of the most terrifying I have ever lived. Since childhood my lungs had been weak, and I had always feared tuberculosis like a death sentence. Now I was told that I had become the prey of what I had feared most: the doctor’s diagnosis spelled out my doom!

  My first thoughts were of Steinn. I broke into convulsive sobs in the doctor’s sight, and asked through my tears if God could truly be so unmerciful as to tear me away from my child and topple me into the grave so young, leaving my angel behind, an orphan. I cursed my existence in my derangement and wished that I had never given birth, but instead had been able to enjoy life in ecstasy this fleeting moment, enjoy it like a harlot or a barren woman without having to behold the fruit of my sins, and be allowed afterward to die blissfully. Finally I rose to my feet and shouted: “No, I don’t want to die; I can’t die and leave my boy! God can demand anything else from me!”

  The doctor tried to explain to me that there was no reason for fear. He advised me to move to a more wholesome climate in the fall, said that he could assure me of an improvement by the following spring. And in the hope of my returning home in a year, fully recovered and able to serve my son, it was decided that I should set sail that summer with a Danish girl for a companion. And little Steinn wept in his father’s arms and stretched out his hands in the direction of the ship when it left shore with his mother.

  But all our hopes come to naught. My stay in Nice, the city of the sun, was a sad exile; my life of recovery was truly a prison sojourn. I was sick almost all winter, sick in body and soul, inert from homesickness. Twice in the winter I coughed up blood, the second time very badly. At that time I was convinced that I would die soon, that now my time was up, and I had no other wish than to be able to return home to see my child once more before I died. The doctors did all they could to dissuade me from such a dangerous expedition, but I refused to listen, said that I knew I was going to die and wanted to die at home. And I recovered strength at the hope of going north. I left in the middle of the summer. After an eleven-month stay abroad I finally embraced my boy again.

  23.

  Those who never fasten their hopes to one thing over another are blessed; they are deceived less than I. My boy had grown big. He was four years old, and the memory of his mother had faded from his mind. He wasn’t a whit fonder of his mother than of the housekeeper or the maid. It was no longer his delight to sit at his mother’s knees and tell her about all the wonders of the world. Now it was most fun to gather whole crowds of boys, drag them into the house, and romp around with them from room to room, or to go visit his playmates in other homes; he was away half the time. And I was sick, had to live according to strict rules, couldn’t be on my feet more than a short period of time each day, couldn’t go out except at certain times, and then had to walk slowly and calmly without thinking of anything but getting well. My boy didn’t want to go with me because I was sick: it was much more fun to harass the maids than to accompany Mother. I was no longer the only one who loved him; everyone loved him. Everyone wanted to have him near because he was so beautiful and bright. I was left in the cold because I was sick.

  You ask how Grímúlfur and I got along? Yes, he met me at the harbor and helped me climb into the car. But I found o
nly that this arid businessman was a total stranger to me, and that I actually did not understand how he could have wanted me. The last year and a half I had scarcely ever given him a thought. I neither loved nor hated him; I was sincerely indifferent about him. I even paid little heed to wifely modesty although he saw me at those times when women would rather be unseen by their husbands. When he spoke to me I answered him as I would a man in a railway car or a toilette attendant.

  And so went that year – I scraped by. Yes, although it might seem incredible, I did not become any sicker, but stayed fairly the same. I even ventured several times to attend some social affairs, which did not cause any harm.

  But in my interior being something started to stir – something that had lain dormant for months and even years; hidden fires began to blaze anew. One bright day I suddenly saw myself as I was, like a man who had forgotten who he was and what he was named. For several years I had forgotten who I was and what I was named! I discovered that in fact I was still just a little girl, even if life had bestowed on me the experience of a full-grown woman, the tribulations of a shipwrecked man. My body was delicate, my soul perhaps even more delicate, but in among the infirmities was hidden an untiring power. My desires had been pricked by a sleep-thorn,20 but now they were awake, passionate and wild, and they begged to be allowed to sing out with all the magic of life in one mighty song.

  Oh, with what sick, entrenched passion didn’t I desire at that time to meet the man who was fit to love me, to take me as I was, bound to another, hysterical, emaciated. I was eager to sacrifice my honor if I could only find someone who would be man enough to love a woman as she desires most of all: illicitly. And to be loved illicitly in return. I lived for that man, for the hope of meeting him. I dreamt about him day and night. I dressed up for him in the morning, changed clothes every three hours, preened myself for him. And I undressed for him at night, and thought thoughts that he wanted me to think, sleepless night after sleepless night. Perhaps it was this, my thirst for love, that saved me from the grave.

  Twice I thought I had found him; but both times I was deceived. Always my hopes were deceived. I trusted both of these men with my misfortune, affliction, and desire. They saw my soul in all its nakedness. But I was a child: a woman should never show a man her soul in all its nakedness. When a man has seen to the bottom of a woman’s soul he looks at her body as if it were an empty vase, and it is as if he thinks that the vase would break if he were to touch it: he pities her and leaves.

  One was a foreign consul who left the country. I haven’t seen him since, and have never wanted to. I still blush when I think of what I said to him. The other was an artist whom I met several months later. He came daily, sat alone with me and played the grand piano. Everything he said was nonsense, but there was something refreshing in his bearing that touched me the first time I saw him. I realized little by little just how deprived he was of everything that a woman actually desires to find in a man. We kissed. But one day I saw him crying. It was repulsive: he felt sorry for me or for himself or for both of us. He wasn’t man enough to bear his own passions. Nothing is more repugnant than a man who cries.

  24.

  When Steinn was seven years old I went abroad with Grímúlfur and took the boy with me. It was on that trip that we quarreled, the only quarrel we’ve had in our marriage all these years. It happened in a hotel in London one night. I still forbade him to touch me as his wife and pleaded my sickness as an excuse.

  “You’re not sick anymore,” he said. “It’s all hysteria, if not complete pretense.”

  “Of course I’m sick,” I said. “Leave me alone! I forbid you to touch me!”

  “Then you can sail your own sea,” he said. “Keeping you going doesn’t expand my bank account!”

  “You make the same demands of me as a harlot!” I said.

  “Parasite!” he answered.

  “Rapscallion, liar, villain!” I said.

  “Just fine!” he said. “I’ll remember this. And I can get five hundred harlots for a far lower price than what you alone have cost me.”

  “What are you going to do with the boy if you get rid of me?”

  “That’s none of your business!”

  “The boy is mine!”

  But after several silent minutes I calmed down a bit and said:

  “Grímúlfur, you can take as many harlots as you want, whenever you want, instead of me. I understand that and would never resent you for it. But I can’t, I can’t.”

  In the morning he gave me a hundred pounds and left, left me behind with the boy. Several days later a letter came from him, from Bilbao; he asked for my forgiveness. He met me again in Folkestone in the fall, and our life together continued as before, as if nothing had happened.

  My health always wavered, like a flickering candle flame. I participated in the vanity of everyday life like everyone else, but depression and apathy weighed on me every moment that I was alone. My only joy was that the boy’s consideration toward me grew stronger the more he learned. My stay in England alone with him linked him to me. Now Grímúlfur had to spend another half year in Bilbao. I asked if the boy and I could come with him, and that’s what we did.

  Grímúlfur had quite a few friends down south in Spain, and I suddenly found myself part of a joyful social life. I’ve actually never been happier than I was that winter, caught up in the enchanting elegance and the refinement that characterizes the social habits of those who live in the south, in which the pulse of passion throbs through everything in the form of lyric poetry and every emotion is spoken in magic spells.

  25.

  Then I met José, who pressed his lips hardest of all against mine. And it is about the memory of this alien young man that my dreams have most often played since my feelings for him first awakened. And yet I sent José away with death in his heart.

  Why did I start loving José, by all means? I have often thought about this, but it is one of the mysteries of love that anyone should love one person more than another. Because one man is in fact never more remarkable than a thousand others. Or does a woman perhaps love this one particular man because there is no way that she can ever love all the others? José certainly wasn’t any more handsome or charming than the others.

  Maybe I loved him, like the woman in L’invitation au voyage, because he was even more alien than the others, born in South America? Or did I love him because he had a broader and more pliant baritone than the others? His voice was like velvet, deep and warm, and I drowned my senses in it when he sang. Or perhaps because the fire in his flint black eyes burned even more passionately than the fire in the eyes of others? Or because he was eight years younger than I was, and seemed as if he was created to dance on embers? José, José, your name reminds me of the name of Jesus in an Irish saint’s life that I read in my childhood!

  His speciousness gave him an air of fairy-tale elfishness, something distant and dangerous, which made him exotic even among his countrymen, a foreigner when he spoke his own language. And he had a kind of wondrous way of speaking English without understanding it. Nothing was more delightful than to hear him speak so fluently a language that he couldn’t make heads or tails of.

  José’s character was from the other side of the Earth, where the sun rises in the evening and sets in the morning. Sometimes I could see him with strange mountains in the background, sometimes alone on a never-ending prairie. Thus burn the coals in the eyes of those who are raised in a land where a veiled power dwells in the mountains and bloodthirsty beasts roam the jungles. The dreaminess and depression that sometimes made his face and bearing so gloomy, like fog over the land, are seen only in a man who has looked out over endless prairie in his youth and never beheld its limit. José was neither more handsome nor more gallant than a thousand other men, but he was the man about whom I had dreamt throughout my youth, created for this alone: to love a woman who trembles before the charming power of her own dreams. And yet I sent José away with death in his heart.

 
; I had lived unforgettable days with José, evenings drunk with happiness. We danced in tea salons in the afternoons, visited the most jocund cabarets in the evenings. We drank wine; we drove up into the mountains. For a long time not a single thing happened between us, because José was a noble-minded man and respected my marriage. But the walls crumbled one by one, until finally our lips met over wine in a drawn-out kiss.

  Grímúlfur was far away. He was in the south, and several days passed. José came with his car in the morning, and we drove to a small village several kilometers away. This was on a mild Spanish winter day. We ate breakfast at a café out in the countryside; we laughed like children in love and reclined over wine that glowed in the sun. José sat by my side. The smoke from his cigarette took on marvelous shapes in the rays of the sun. We sat close to each other; I felt his arm around me and leaned up against him, and we watched the sunbeams play in the wine and the cigarette smoke in the sunbeams. Finally my name was whispered in my ear:

  “Jófí!” was whispered, and his breath played over my cheeks, filled my senses, fragrant with wine.

  “Jófí!” he whispered again. “Cuándo?”

  At first I said nothing, but red-hot currents flowed through me. Finally I straightened myself in my seat and turned toward him to look into his eyes. And we gazed for a long time into each other’s eyes in silent comprehension of everything. We knew that all of the walls had fallen down; all formalities were now in vain. The kiss broke every seal. I leaned back again in my seat and my whole being trembled. I closed my eyes; my breath fluttered. And the answer came involuntarily to my lips, from my innermost depths, like bubbles that ascend to the surface of a spring from far down below.