Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

During Fanný and Jón’s separation, it was her habit to make up theories, theories that Jón believed later came to poison every single moment of their relationship. That habit culminated in her idea that one day during their time together, in June 1957, she had had a son who came to nothing — that is, he died — while Jón was on an all-night bender with his friends, celebrating the completion of the very exams she’d never allowed herself to take because of her children, “the most idiotic stupidity a person can get mixed up in,” as Sturla later heard his mother say when Hulda, his ex-wife and the mother of his five children, was pregnant with their last child, Hallgerður.

Fanný had been placed in a psychiatric ward three times, due to what Jón called “chronic daily confusion”—once while she lived with Jón, and twice during the three years she lived with another man — but since she had decided to live alone, and had moved into a little basement apartment on Nýlendugata where she still lived, she had managed to maintain a mental balance “with the help of the liquor which I never touched during the twenty years I lived with Jón Magnússon,” as she described it to her son. It was, however, a balance that anyone who didn’t know Fanný’s past would be more likely to call a chronic imbalance.

Wasn’t it somewhat unusual, Sturla thinks, as he and his father sit facing each other in Jón’s living room and Sturla runs his eyes over the bookshelves, that at nearly seventy years old his father is occupied by the relatively new art form of the cinema — with all the enthusiasm of a childlike quest for learning — while it could easily be said that Sturla is overburdened by old-fashioned literary interests, which his father maintains need reinventing in the spirit of that young man who famously gave up poetry one-and-a-half centuries ago. Among the books on Jón’s shelves is the newest edition of the Time Out Film Guide, a thick-spined book about the 1001 movies the reader ought to see before he dies; a biography of Billy Wilder; and a long row of black paperback screenplays from Faber and Faber. However, most of the space on the shelf is taken up by videocassettes and DVDs. On the coffee table lie a few oversized books about the movies of Pasolini and Milos Forman, and two smaller books by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Sturla has no doubt that his father consciously chose to put these particular books on display as a demonstration of his antipathy to what one always sees in architecture magazines: the handsome coffee-table books in people’s living rooms — books which are meant to suggest highly-refined taste.

One of the photographs in the second Nobuyoshi Araki book was a black and white image of a hooker in Tokyo; she sat, wearing a depressed expression, her thighs wide open, her hands bound at her feet, her eyes staring despondently at an electric dildo which someone else — perhaps Nobuyoshi, imagined Sturla — had placed in her vagina. Another picture was of a huge, steaming pool of piss on the floor of a train station; others variously depicted distressed female sex-workers (usually naked) and their fully clothed customers; or tired-looking office-workers on board the express train. A few pictures were images of the photographer’s wife; in one she was alive; in another she was lying in her coffin, her final resting place. Sturla had flicked through the book the last time he visited the house at Skólavörðustígur 46. This time, he satisfies himself with placing it on the table and contemplating the color photograph on the back cover, an image of a younger Japanese woman in a kimono sticking a blood-red slice of watermelon between her lips, a slice shaped — or so Sturla Jón thinks — like an erect penis.

His thoughts turn to the Mother. With a capital M. And for a moment the word myrkur , darkness, occupies his mind. Although thirty years have passed since the publication of Sturla’s first book, The Flip Side of Words , he is still troubled by his decision to use capital letters at the beginnings of poems and after periods; in some of the poems he’d gone so far as to imitate that peculiar custom by which English poets put capital letters at the start of lines. Except for the title of the book, Sturla still considered his first collection a worthy part of his oeuvre — although some of the poems were juvenilia, on the whole there was nothing to be ashamed of — and for that reason he was disturbed that the orthography of the book — his use of capitalization, etc. — hadn’t been in keeping with the rest of his publications. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to change that, even if this first book of his was one day reprinted. Long ago he had set himself the rule that he wouldn’t change anything in his work once it left his hands. Only a few weeks after the publication of The Flip Side of Words Sturla had found out that, to put it baldly, using capital letters in poetic verse was wrong, as every word — two letter conjunctions as much as nouns or verbs — had equal weight and one shouldn’t visually isolate words from their neighbors with these larger characters.

But now, when he thinks about the mother — his own mother and the one who stood by the window and stood for darkness and stood in the shadows — he discovers that the shape of the words calls for capitals, contrary to his assertions , and when he goes over in his mind the conversation he’s just had with his father about poetry, the following imaginary exchange takes place, which he finds just as important and just as worthless as his life’s work at this very moment:

Sturla: There are no more than forty-two people in this country interested in poetry. And not many more in other places.

Jón: Are you sure? Only forty-two?

Sturla: Forty-two or forty-three, the difference isn’t important.

Jón: Then why are you stubbornly writing what you call poetry? Why not trick these works of yours into other kinds of text? I mean texts that call themselves something other than poetry.

Sturla: I am no longer stubbornly fixated on one or the other. I let others do the verse writing for me these days.

Jón: But why don’t you just quit?

Sturla: I have quit.

But Jón would be totally unaffected by Sturla’s declaration. He wouldn’t hear it. If you were to compare the two things, then Bezdomny’s decision to stop writing poetry, in Bulgakov’s novel, would doubtlessly affect Jón more deeply than his own son’s decision to do the same; the latter was not a character in a novel by a Russian writer; he was not even a character in a novel. And to avoid irritating himself further over his father’s lack of interest, Sturla thinks about the new overcoat he has hung on the chair in front of the oven in the kitchen. He imagines how the color of the overcoat will look against the color of the apartment building he lives in on Skúlagata when, or if, a photographer from a newspaper makes him stand in front of the white building and shoots at him like a madman, as photographers tend to, snapping photos as if this is the last subject they’ll ever get to shoot in their careers. These wouldn’t be snaps of just one more poet staring at the camera, like someone with absolutely no interest in being photographed or talked about on the pages of some rag. But when Sturla measures the beige-colored overcoat against the white walls of the apartment building, he feels like cream has been splashed on caramel pudding, a splashing that’s accompanied by some splurting sounds which remind him of something — he isn’t sure exactly what — from the kitchen, or from the cowshed of the farm he’d lived on one summer when he was a child. Sturla hates all metaphors from the world of food for their bad taste, especially when someone describes a work of art as being hard to swallow or digest. Sturla always ends up picturing the process of digestion, and more than once had been prevented from enjoying a work of art because someone had smudged it with a metaphor from the digestive system.