Sjon - The Whispering Muse

I have mentioned before that I live in a flat consisting of two rooms, one of which performs a threefold role as kitchen, dining room and sitting room, with a bedroom opening off it (I share a lavatory with others on my floor and the showers are in the basement). When the widow comes round for dinner I leave the bedroom door ajar and turn the kitchen table sideways on so that one or other of us has a view inside.

We make it a rule that if Madame Lauritzen is ‘not in the mood’she will sit in the chair nearer the kitchen while I sit with my back to the bedroom door, but when she is ‘in the mood’ she sits on the bedroom side and I sit facing her. From there I can see both the lady and the door half open behind her and beyond it the bed that awaits us. So we need never discuss whether the lady is ‘in the mood’ or not. I, on the other hand, am always ‘in the mood’ and this is the most significant change that has taken place in me since the voyage with Captain Alfredson and his crew.

I have placed a decent desk under the bedroom window and spend my days sitting on the edge of my bed, writing these memoirs or else articles for fishing periodicals in Iceland. On the top right-hand corner of the desk there is a small bundle that at first sight might appear to be nothing more than a folded napkin from the Kronos shipping line. The company’s logo is embroidered on it in wine-red thread:

A winged hourglass hovers over the sea with two crossed sledgehammers beneath, both pointing to the right.

But inside this innocent-looking napkin I keep the object that, with its odour and unusual properties, has reinvigorated my potency in the sexual arena. Yes, the night I stayed in Caeneus’s cabin I discovered the splinter from the bowsprit of the Argo in the inside pocket of his officer’s jacket, which was hanging over the back of a chair. And I spirited it away with me when I left the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen on Easter morning last spring. It was some compensation for my luggage, which never turned up.

Yesterday evening when I took out the splinter of the Argo and began to toy with it, as I always do before burrowing under the bedclothes with Widow Lauritzen, there was a tap on the bedroom window. We were both startled as I live on the third floor; the drainpipe is next to the sitting-room window, and it is unthinkable that any human being could climb so high. There was another tap, louder than the first. I drew back the curtains.

A herring gull was perched on the sill outside. It struck its yellow beak against the windowpane, flapped its wings and squawked:

‘ARRK! ARRK!’

To the lady’s great amusement I mimicked it:

‘ARRK! ARRK!’

And drew the curtains again.

Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes

Medea by Euripides

Hypsipyle by Euripides

Innan lands og utan (Home and Abroad) by Matthías Thórdarson frá Móum

Fiskneysla og menning (Fish Consumption and Culture) by Matthías Thórdarson frá Móum

Ég sigli minn sjó (Life on the Ocean Wave), the memoirs of Hrafn Valdimarsson

Enn sigli ég sjóinn (More Life on the Ocean Wave), the memoirs of Hrafn Valdimarsson

Metamorphoses by Ovid

Trójumannasaga in forna (The Ancient Saga of the Men of Troy)