Monika Fagerholm - The Glitter Scene

Carmen in one room. A room of love, where she has shut herself in. With the bullfighter who was with her, who was in other places, who had his bulls, his fights, his… everything. Carmen in the room of love (maybe in a hotel), jubilation at first, but at the same time a destiny, she was trapped, had locked herself in.

A bird in my hand . The rose that you threw at me. A body of water reveals itself in the woods. A moment, closed in the fog, imperceptible.

It becomes New Year’s, clingclang the clock at city hall rings in the town center, New Year, a new decade, they drink nonalcoholic wine from plastic champagne glasses that the Manager conjures up at midnight. One glass of wine per person, cheers, Maj-Gun laughs, the bubbles rush to her head. And are cast in metal; Maj-Gun’s “happiness” is a weak clump with knobbles that are money and when you hold the Manager’s up against the wall in the kitchen in the light the shadow of a pretzel stands out against the yellow wallpaper, which means: even more loneliness—and suddenly, pain in her stomach, it hurts so damn much, all of it, everything. But she does not say so, she says “sugar pretzel,” tastes, stretches out her red tongue. Hamba hamba . The Long Afternoon of Desire, dancing in the kitchen. The Manager laughs, maybe a bit insecurely, The Long Afternoon of Desire , one should look it up in The Family Book whatever it was that faun was now called. But he does not walk over to any bookshelf, there is no time—says afterward, when they are lying naked, entangled like streamers on the sofa bed in the room, as the District’s mainstay, which he also is, grade school teacher and mixed school teacher and pedagogue all sorts of things, with that voice in other words, that he has a little weakness for Cookies certainly, even if it they contain, as it were, pinching Maj-Gun’s naked bum, “quite a lot of carbohydrates.”

Maj-Gun sits up in the sofa, laughs, the docklands in Borneo, the Happy Harlot, gathers her hair in her hand at the nape of her neck and lets it fall, so to speak, shakes her head, her hair flies, stupid angels, the TV, straddles the Manager, on all fours above him, hisses, Starling, darling, ready to be kissed, like she once had in the newsstand.

“Come.” The Manager pulls her down on the sofa and they do a little more of that and later when they are lying in the darkness taking a breather the Manager asks Maj-Gun how she ended up at the newsstand anyway.

“The newsstand?” Maj-Gun asks, dazed with sleep, does not really know how she should relate to the question, if she even likes it. The newsstand, the last decade, this is new, and now. But in order to say something she starts talking about her godmother Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa and all of those years that maybe in the big picture were not so many: a miserable childhood, youth for example, which she was never really able to get away from. In contrast to her brother Tom Maalamaa who had shared the misery with her for a while, without the siblings still being able to, or maybe exactly because of that, have this misery in common. Which was not exactly unhappiness, just a type of restlessness, out of place. Her brother left it behind but she personally, in some way, remained behind with it. But is that how it should be said? In any case, the godmother, Aunt Liz, who became a widow early on, “husband drank himself to death on the Sweden–Finland ferry,” and she and her aunt on the Sweden–Finland ferry later, life as a cruise —as an image of it.

The aunt who retired and had not really known what she should do with her time at first. But the freedom she had spoken about loftily, “I am so happy and free!” But she was sad in the very beginning, turnedupsidedown. And during that period she had been busy spending time with her only goddaughter, Maj-Gun Maalamaa, whom she invited along for company on the cruise, to rewrite a marriage with an, in and of itself, appallingly wealthy but violent and alcoholic husband who was not exactly someone to write home about, to a story about belonging despite everything and the love that never died. Dick and Duck, two swans among other swans; “climb into a story, Manager, you need it.” Maj-Gun interposes as a moral here, seems to fit, but otherwise she does not know. And as mentioned, it had of course been a passing phase in her aunt’s life: she took her maiden name back later and bought a house in Portugal where she spent the winters because of the hereditary varicose veins that Maj-Gun personally also suffers from. “Cottaage,” the aunt has a habit of saying about the place in Portugal in order not to sound rustic; the reason is due to her “country origin,” on the farm in the north that her husband’s good family from the higher burghers of society indirectly heckled her for in the city where she and her husband lived while he was still alive; it has never truly left her. But it certainly is no cottaage but a château. Has sent pictures: the house, the dog, Liz, and the sunglasses.

She had a dog for a while, a real pet dog, an ittybittydog under her blouse. Handsome, Ransome: from the beginning they were two but one of them died as a puppy from some sort of canine disease while the other one died in its sleep of old age after ten years of happiness with its master. “That kind of little dog, Manager, they don’t get very old.” Handsome: named after some movie star, whom the aunt had loved in her distant youth, who had a dog of the same breed with almost the same name. “Come and see my gallery,” in other words, she sent these pictures to her goddaughter from Portugal. Liz and the dog on a patio, the sea behind them, the horizon.

Come and see my gallery . Written cards and letters. “But I didn’t go, didn’t answer either.” Had been busy with, well, all sorts of things: admission exams, compendiums, a book that needed to be written, The story of my own life… cutting rags. Rug rags… which she still does not have time to delve deeper into because suddenly the Manager is paying attention, truly alert: “You write? That’s what I thought. Maybe you’re going to be a writer? You have so much, life, all of your clever wordings—”

“Come and see my gallery, Manager,” Maj-Gun reiterates because if there is something she does not want to talk about then it is that. And besides, for once, to remain in that other right now, which is just as important. About her godmother, her aunt, who is still as alive as could be. That she had thought get old now old hag and die and she had that and she stills feels bad about it—maybe it will improve if she says it, but it does not help very much. “But, Manager, Aunt Liz, she’s okay, even if she has her quirks…” Dreams from her childhood of being a missionary, which she has nagged about more and more as she gets older, walking in the jungle in comfortable shoes, searching for heathens to save… “But, quirks, Manager,” Maj-Gun adds, so to speak, philosophically, “don’t we all have them?” And isn’t that the delightful thing about us? Everyone? Everything we have that is not written in the family chronicles and the magazines and in Everything about the world, you can say anything here as long as it sounds like something … not very much has been written about it anywhere at all, and maybe there won’t be either. Because a lot of it doesn’t make you feel good, you just become cuckoo, from being written down in pretty formulations.

And well, later, the whole time, she was, so to speak, in the newsstand and the moss was growing over her head, living with Susette Packlén’s mother for a while as a boarder while Susette was away and her mother was, during the final years, not really right either. “Rug rags, Manager, she collected them. Crehp crehp . Had to be cut, cut—