Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

I’m so fond of her that I inflict this torture on my speech organs, throat and lungs. The dizziness that follows is like a swarm of flies behind my eyes before they all kamikaze on my optic nerves, crashing against them with their leaden wings. Oh, heavens above.

‘Breeding season?’

‘Yes. No, Jesus, has he answered me?’

‘Who?’

‘My Aldon from Australia.’

‘Aldon?’

‘Yes, that’s his name. Ah, now I’ve really got him going.’

‘You’ve got so many friends,’ she says as she starts to do the washing.

‘Yes, well over seven hundred.’

‘Huh? Seven hundred?’

‘Yes. On Facebook.’

‘Are you on Facebook? I didn’t know. Can I see?’

She leans over me with all her fragrance as I summon up my page from the magic world of the net.

‘Wow. Nice picture of you. Where was it taken?’

‘In Baires. At a ball.’

‘Baires?’

‘Yes, Buenos Aires.’

‘It says here that you’ve got a hundred and forty-three friends. You said seven hundred.’

‘Yeah, that’s just me. I’ve got all kinds of identities.’

In my mischief I’ve borrowed names, including that of Linda Pétursdóttir, who was Miss World in 1988. Bóas, my male nurse, who has gone abroad to study, created the e-mail address for me: lindap-missworld88@gmail.com. That one brings me plenty of good stories that shorten my long, dark autumn nights.

‘Lots of identities on Facebook? Is that allowed?’

‘Nothing in this world isn’t allowed, in my opinion.’

‘Huh?’ she chirps before returning to the kitchen alcove. It’s funny how good it feels to be near people who are working. It brings out the aristocrat in me. Half of me came from the sea and half from a palace, and because of that I soon became a leg spreader. My aristocratic Danish paternal grandmother was a first-class slave master, although she was also pretty hardworking. Before every gala dinner she would dance around the banqueting hall from noon to night, with one cigarillo in her mouth and another in her hand, trying to remember everything and get the seating arrangements right. Nothing could be missing, nothing out of place. Otherwise our land and people might have faced ruin. A fishbone getting stuck in the American ambassador’s throat would have thrown the Marshall Plan into jeopardy. She knew perfectly well that the negotiations meant next to nothing. ‘ Det hele ligger på gaffelen ’! she’d say in Danish – it all hangs on the end of the fork!

Had it not been for Grandma Georgía, Grandad would never have become president – and someone should have told him that. She was the perfect lady: gave everyone, prince or pauper, a sense of well-being in her presence and treated all men equally, from the local bum to Eisenhower himself.

Three cheers for the political wisdom of those days, which chose that couple to represent the newborn republic in 1944, he an Icelander, she a Dane. It was a courteous gesture towards the old master race. Although we’d divorced the Danes, we still wore the ring.

As I mentioned, I was born in Ísafjördur, on 9 September 1929. Mum had been sent away, out of public view, to give birth to the one whom nobody wanted to see and who should never have existed: me. There was a minimum time delay set on entering my father’s respectable family, so Mum and I spent the first seven years alone together in the Svefneyjar islands, where Mum worked as a maid in the home of Eysteinn, a farmer, and his wife, Lína.

Lína was the sweetest of women, sturdily built and buxom, always with some verse on her lips, but with a rather high-pitched voice. She had a soft heart but incredibly strong arms, as women did in those days, and over time she developed wooden legs from arthritis. She helmed the large house like a sea captain, with one eye on the waves and the other on the stove. To Mum, she was like a mother because, although Grandma possessed many good qualities, maternal warmth wasn’t one of them. By the will and whim of the Creator, Grandma had ended her life’s voyage in Svefneyjar, although she didn’t live in the house, but in an old boat shed along with three other women. Mum and I, on the other hand, dwelt in Lína’s fiefdom.

Eysteinn had clear-cut features, a downy beard, sea-red cheeks and eyes as calm as a tranquil bay. He had bulky hands and broad shoulders and, with the passing of the years and the swelling of his belly, he used a walking stick. He was chirpy in the mornings but pigheaded in the evenings; amiable at home but mulish when it came to contracts or anything to do with ‘foreign affairs.’ He was renowned for having kicked some Danish land surveyors off the island when they tried to move the southernmost skerry on his land three yards to the south.

He was a ‘good and good man,’ Grandma used to say. She was of Breidafjördur stock on both sides and had made hay on more than a hundred islands. She always repeated her compliments twice. ‘Oh, that one’s fine and fine,’ she would say of a boiled sweet or a labourer. Grandma was a hundred years old when I was born and a hundred years old when she died. A hundred years old for an entire century. Baptised by the sea and hardened by trawling, no man’s daughter, and married to Iceland, mother of my mother and eternal heroine of my thoughts. Verbjörg Jónsdóttir. Soon I will meet her, in age and rage, and knock at her door. ‘Oh, is that you, my darling little dung cake?’

Well, I’ll be darned if I haven’t started looking forward to dying.

Yes, I enjoyed seven blissful years in Breidafjördur until my father recovered from his amnesia and remembered he had a daughter and wife in this part of the Icelandic coast. My childhood was sprinkled with islands. Islands full of rowdy sailors and seaweed-eating cattle. Sun-bright, grass-yellow islands, sea-beaten by the gales on all sides, though in my memory it is always dead calm.

They say that he who has visited all the islands of Breidafjördur is a dead man because many of those islands are buried underwater. And it can probably be said that, even though they seem innumerable at high tide, they’re even more innumerable at low tide. This applies to so many things in life that are hard to count. How many men did I have? How many times did I fall in love? Every remembered moment is an island in the depths of time, a poet once wrote, and if Breidafjördur is my life, then these islands are the days I remember now, as I go chugging between them on my boat of a bed, with this trendy new outboard motor they call a laptop.

Chug-a-chug-a-chug.

But I’m no sailor, I’m no captain, and now I sink into the depths of my quilt, the downy-soft, ice-cold depths, deathly blue and breathless, where drowned sailors, women and the great poet go about their business on the flatfish-covered bottom. Dear bottom dwellers, look, I’m sinking now with all my load, sails and oars. With all my lies.

I squint my eyes and can hear bubbles of air coming out of me. The wig slides off my small head and turns into an unusually solid jellyfish, waving its tentacles in front of the cod and haddock, while the lanugo on my head flutters like famished plankton and the hospital pyjama bottoms swell up to my groin, exposing the horror of fleshless legs: the skin on them flutters like fish gills, and the heels are convex like ancient electrical sockets attached to my calves by cable-thin tendons, but there’s no electricity in them any more, they don’t dance the tango the way they did in Baires of old. And the sail-stiff pyjama top clings to the tubular frame that was once modelled with firm white flesh and desired by muscular seamen all over the globe. From the long, open neckline flows a condom-shaped sack of skin called a breast… Oh dear, oh dear.