Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

There are, of course, plenty of stories doing the rounds about Jonas Wergeland’s irresistible attraction for women. It is no exaggeration to say that, had he so desired, he could have slept with a thousand women. He chose, however, only a select few: those who set the signal bell in his spine jangling. I can reveal that over the years Jonas received a lot of very flattering offers from well-equipped, gifted women who had heard glowing reports of him in those instances where Jonas’s chosen women were unable to keep their mouths shut — not so surprising, perhaps, when one considers what an impression he made on them and the pleasure he gave them. Jonas declined all of these offers without a second thought and without regarding it as any sort of a sacrifice.

At the most felicitous point his life, in collaboration with Lorenzo da Ponte, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the opera Don Giovanni , a work which, oddly enough, has a certain role to play in Jonas Wergeland’s life — albeit only as a backdrop. In one of the opening scenes of this opera there is a very entertaining sequence in which Leporello, Don Juan’s servant, reels off to Donna Elvira a list of all the many women to whom his master has made love. The list covers women from many different countries and in the refrain Leporello makes much of the fact that in Spain alone his master has slept with one thousand and three women. Now Don Juan is, of course, more of a beau idéal than an actual historical figure, but for the record I would just like to mention that in later life the French writer Georges Simenon claimed to have bedded no less than 10,000 women, an assertion which his wife later dismissed as an idle boast: according to her he could not possibly have slept with more than twelve hundred. Mind you, twelve hundred is not bad. I mean, in suchlike cases I could well understand if anyone were to start sounding off about loose morals.

I believe a brief discourse on the difference between Don Juan as he is traditionally depicted and Jonas Wergeland would be in order here, seeing that so many have been so ready to cite this symbolic figure when speaking of that life which I have set myself the task of writing, or rather rewriting — and let me say yet again: as far as I am concerned Jonas Wergeland is nigh on the negation of Don Juan.

After all, what is Don Juan’s chief characteristic? That’s right: unmitigated lust, a desire that has about it both a demonic element and a touch of deceit. Even as Don Juan is making love to one woman, he is thinking about the next one. His lovemaking is exclusively sensual and utterly faithless; Don Juan does not love one, but all. And, that being so, he makes no demands on the object of his desire other than that it must be female — age and looks do not really come into it — and thus every act of love becomes the same as the one before, a mechanical exercise devoid of any greater substance, devoid of any variety. In other words, Don Juan possesses an enumerative superficiality or abstraction which is best expressed through music.

Jonas Wergeland’s lovemaking, on the other hand, is spiritual, if I may be permitted to use such a high-flown word; I might even use an adjective like ‘chivalrous’, with its connotations of faithfulness. Women are not, as in Don Juan’s case, everyday events; to Jonas Wergeland they are red-letter occasions, unique occurrences. With Don Juan, it is his lust in itself, that sensual energy, which women find so seductive; with Jonas Wergeland it is his face, his enigmatic expression, that draws women to him, with the result that all of these women would give different reasons for their interest in him, and not one of them would use the word ‘seduction’.

Note also that Jonas Wergeland never did anything to win his women; one could say that he made no move in their direction. It was the women who came, or were drawn, to him. We are looking, therefore, at a form of seduction that has nothing to do with desperate changes of identity or coaxing and cajoling under balconies. One might say that it was the women who took Jonas. He, for his part, remained passive.

Nor was Jonas what you would call a satyr, a man with an inordinate sex drive. When he fell, or allowed himself to fall, for these women, it was not because his libido ran away with him but because he detected something precious in all of them. For Jonas Wergeland, sexual desire had less to do with sex than with enlightenment.

Some people might feel that I am skirting the issue here. What they want to know is exactly how many women were there in Jonas Wergeland’s life? I am afraid, however, that this may come as something of an anticlimax: apart from Margrete — the first and the last — there were twenty-three women in Jonas Wergeland’s life, no more and no less. And not ‘were’ but ‘are’. They stayed with him, even after they had, in bodily form, left him. And I am not counting mothers, aunts or sisters. There were twenty-three lovers in Jonas Wergeland’s life. And since none of them were married, or involved with anyone else when Jonas met them, I believe this effectively puts paid to the notion that Jonas Wergeland was ‘a wanton libertine with no moral scruples’ as a certain woman journalist found it expedient to write on one occasion.

Jonas Wergeland never boasted about his ‘conquests’. He never once spoke of them to anyone else. And later, when he saw these women on television — sooner or later almost all of them appeared on television — he did not laugh or make fun of them or think of how the microphone into which they were speaking — or over which they were leaning — reminded him of what they had once done to his genitalia. He watched as if awestruck, adoring them and filled with gratitude for what they had meant to him. For even though he knew — he was not, after all, one for false modesty — what he had given these women, Jonas Wergeland never forgot that he was also deeply indebted to them.

What did Jonas Wergeland look for in a woman? Or, to put it another way, why did he get that tingling between his shoulder-blades on encountering a select few members of the opposite sex? Is there an explanation that goes beyond all the usual clichés concerning the randy male and basic instincts?

Thanks to my — how shall I put it? — unique position, I am able to cite an incident that offers one possible answer to this question. And again it concerns Jonas’s fateful cousin, Veronika Røed.

The year in which Jonas was born, Professor Ole Hallesby made a speech, broadcast on the radio, in which he sent the following, not exactly entertaining, thought into thousands of homes: ‘You know that if you dropped dead this instant you would go straight to Hell.’ This sparked off the much renowned ‘Hell debate’ as it was called — yet another one of those exchanges that exposes diverting sides of the Norwegian national character. I am not, however, going to succumb to the temptation to comment on this, merely to state that in due course Jonas Wergeland came to side with Hallesby; he knew there was a Hell.

Jonas always said that he was a cold-blooded creature. Even as a child he evinced an inveterate mistrust of winter and, more particularly, the Norwegian cultivation of this season; it was the cold, more than the snow, that got to him. No matter how many layers of clothes, or how thick the layers, his mother wrapped him in, even when tucked up nice and snug inside a sheepskin sleeping-bag with layer upon layer of blankets on top, he still seemed to shiver and shake. Later, Jonas would also belie the boast that all Norwegians are natural born skiers. He hated those strips of wood that the others had such a whale of a time sliding about on, not to mention all the sticky, messy business of waxing the things. All of the children at Solhaug, except Jonas, cheered when the first snowflakes began to fall; within seconds out came the skis and sledges, the skimmer-boards, the little toy ski-jumpers that you could bend at the waist and the plastic bobsleighs with lead weights in the runners. All winter long, Daniel and the other boys — and the girls for that matter — were hard at it building ingenious bottle slides; hanging onto the backs of cars (strictly illegal) rolling about in the snow and making whole hosts of snow-angels, while at the same time carrying on endless snowball fights with lethal clumps of ice as ammunition. And after all of this, they would come running in, looking like snowmen, gleefully rosy-cheeked, leaving puddles in the hallways and filling the flats with the stink of wet wool. Jonas viewed with aloof distaste all the pointless hassle of winding disgusting strips of insulating tape round ice-hockey sticks, not to mention dodging deadly pucks, all the time spent building staggeringly high ski-jump slopes, devising new waxing combinations to make jumping skis go faster, practising hazardous downhill turns, and all just to end up with broken legs and grazed faces. As they grew older Jonas looked on with growing disbelief as Daniel and his other chums wasted all of their free time on making long cross-country expeditions across Lillomarka just to obtain another stamp in their orienteering cards against some place name printed in red, green or black, thus winning themselves useless little yellow badges bearing a picture of a Birchleg, a legendary Viking skier; it wasn’t long before Daniel had an anorak covered in them, and he posed as proudly as another Oscar Mathisen for his father with the camera. Jonas rolled his eyes every time his brother barged breathlessly through the front door, drooling from the corner of his mouth and with a trail of blood-tinged snot running from his nose, yelling delightedly that he had set a new personal record out and back on the cross-country trail to Lilloseter.