Sölvi Sigurdsson - The Last Days of My Mother

On Saturdays I went to the market on Waterlooplein to rummage through endless stacks of vinyl, amazed at finding albums I thought were unobtainable, but were actually hidden like buried gold among all the junk. There was the New Wave and Indie Pop that Zola had collected on her numerous trips to Ireland and which she insisted I take after we broke up. The Stone Roses, New Order, Sonic Youth. I’d adopted her musical tastes in the first months of our relationship. We’d lie on her sofa and listen to the records that I felt spoke to me in the same way that Zola did, like an exotic, irresistible voice from a world that seemed to only grow and expand. When Zola left and told me to keep the records because she had no room for them, I took it as one more nail in this cruel and incomprehensible coffin of rejection: that even the memories of the past, the most beautiful thing we had, was a dimension she no longer wanted to know. Had Zola disappeared into the void? I was warped by bitterness that instantly melted into sorrow, like a rag in an over-sized tumble-dryer. Or was this maybe her way of communicating what she couldn’t say: that she was sorry how things turned out, despite her incomprehensible behavior? And that maybe, one of these nights when I was looking through my records and time had sanded down all the things that went wrong, she would pick up the phone and say: Sorry, Trooper, I understand what happened, I understand now that I was wrong . She would fly to me from wherever she was and bittersweet music would fill the cosmos, the soft down on Zola’s body. .

“You buying those?” The record dealer whisked me back to the present and I realized how low I had sunk. I suppose there was no denying that I’d missed Zola terribly after the breakup and wanted to gut that French dentist of hers, but the fact of the matter was that she’d irritated me in so many ways while we were together. Peculiar interests like Gaelic funeral songs and ballet could drive the happiest of fools to suicidal thoughts. I had to remind myself that I was responsible in part for our dwindling sex life, choosing to spend my weekends with Dave, an annoying friend of ours on Grafton Street, drinking crème de menthe over soccer games. After I handed the record dealer 5 euros I imagined the Frenchman puking at the ballet, with a migraine due to Zola’s incessant nagging about folk music. I longed for some sort of Iberian ham I’d tasted at a tapas bar in Galicia a long time ago. As I absentmindedly took up my crossword puzzle in a nearby pub I heard someone address me by name. Right next to me sat a woman who was looked exactly like Gloria the matchmaker, and it took me a second to realize it was in fact her.

“Trooper?” she asked and planted a motherly kiss on my lips. She was wearing a green tunic over tight, black pants, with a judo belt tied around her waist, and I simultaneously wanted to run away and to have passionate sex with her. “We’re engaged,” she said, glancing over at Steven, who I now noticed sitting at the table. “It’s insane, of course, we know. But Trooper, neither one of us has done anything this fun , ever.”

They kissed and we ordered a bottle of champagne, talked about the Euro Cup in Soccer, Rastafarism, and the upcoming wedding. Steven wanted to have a Jamaican reggae band called Satiricon. I was sure that the union of this unlikely couple had to be the best thing that had come out of my ramblings around Amsterdam. Aside from Helena, these two were the only people I could, without dramatic polarization, call my friends here in the city. Steven was so saturated by agoramanic innocence that Gloria hugged him in her delight. Until now I had always equated positivity of this scale with stupidity, but now I put that idea to rest. Meeting them by chance was a sign that there was something more than ethanol and oxygen encompassing my and Mother’s existence here. After two hours of slurred happiness I said good-bye at the corner of Herengrach and walked back to the hotel with an ounce of tar-black hashish in my pocket.

“You smoking half-naked out there? It’s not even noon!” Mother had seen me go out on the balcony and stood calamus-content in the doorway.

“It’s actually past three,” I said, “and I’ve been out and about since this morning. I met Steven, who gave me this as a parting gift.”

“Well, then you might as well give it to me,” she said and took the pipe, inhaled, and sat down opposite me. Her little trip to the Hash-Jazz, along with a few dedicated practice sessions in the various coffee shops, had given her a tolerance for the drug that was even greater than her superior stamina for drink. She chattered on about cousin Matti’s hopeless experiments in growing tomatoes, and the degenerate indulgences of Caligula. She asked me if I’d read I, Claudius .

“Sorry?”

“ I, Claudius . You know the book. Come on, are you completely dense, Trooper?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The book! An incredible story about the Roman Empire. I’m seriously amazed sometimes by your ignorance. And you’re supposed to be my son.”

“Supposed to be? Are you going to denounce me because I haven’t read a book?”

“Hardly. We just have to accept that there is a certain injustice of the given.”

Incidents like this were proof that Willy Nellyson and his big cock had not necessarily provided me with the intellect that ran in her side of the family. The fact that I had a magnetic memory that stubbornly held on to every little bit of information within its force field was of no significance. If I didn’t know something she knew, she took it as a sign of the decline of civilization, the dumbing down of the generations raised on Beverly - Hills -something and ER . Time and again she would fish for some a random quote from the labyrinth of her mind and ask me: “You must know Britten. Don’t you know who Cornelis Vreeswijk is? Goodness, you are ignorant.” It was like being on Jeopardy twenty-four-seven.

I stood up, went inside, and turned on the TV. There was a program on young models in the United States. The girls were goddesses and their proclamations perfect for convincing Mother that there actually were people dumber than me.

“I think I would do anything to get ahead in the model business,” Alice said and I translated for Mother: I don’t mind whoring and doing coke . Francis had this to say about Alice: “She’s charming, but she needs to work on her legs.” She’s not just boring, she also walks like a duck . “It’s fantastic working with Damien,” Dorothy said, “He’s really good at bringing out the best in me!” I’m so sexy! Everyone wants to fuck me!

Mother wasn’t interested so I changed the channel and found Ten Years Younger , a monstrous show about lost youth and beauty. Janine, a beige housewife from Essex, England, had aged more than ten years due to obsessive dieting and numerous pregnancies; now she’d had a thigh-tuck to prop up her ass, her teeth swapped out for a set of porcelains, and every strand of pubic hair burned off with a laser.

“It’s such a blessing to be naturally beautiful,” Mother said, “just think of all the trouble and pain people go through for looks. Just to look normal, really. Or would you say that woman is beautiful now? If you compare her to me, for instance?”

“Compared to you, Eva, Janine hasn’t got a chance. . but there’s nothing normal about plastic dolls in their fifties. It’s all hemorrhoids and smoker’s cough.”

Mother told me I was being vulgar and probably overdosing; she tended to outlast me anyway. She would sit there on the hotel balcony like the Sphinx of the desert and recite some irresistible wisdom from the depths of her soul while I whittled away into the matrix of cosmic fantasies or collapsed by the toilet bowl, dead pale and paranoid. I made the same mistake over and over again: thinking I could keep up with her. She claimed that the cannabis calmed her and made her lighter, like Oprah Winfred. It was plain to see that it had a very different effect on me.