Woman at 1,000 Degrees

by Hallgrimur Helgason

Genres: Literary Fiction; Family Life

Synopsis

"I live here alone in a garage, together with a laptop computer and a hand grenade. It's pretty cozy." And . . . she's off. Eighty-year-old Herra Bjornsson, one of the most original narrators in literary history, takes readers along with her on a dazzling ride of a novel that spans the events and locales of the twentieth century. As she lies alone in that garage in the heart of Reykjavik, waiting to die, Herra reflects--in a voice by turns darkly funny, bawdy, poignant, and always, always smart--on the mishaps, tragedies, and turns of luck that took her from Iceland to Nazi Germany, from the United States to Argentina and back to a post-crash, high-tech, modern Iceland. Born to a prominent political family, Herra's childhood begins in the idyllic islands of western Iceland. But when her father makes the foolish decision to cast his lot with a Hitler on the rise, she soon finds herself abandoned and alone in war-torn Europe, relying on only her wits and occasional good fortune to survive. For Herra is, ultimately, a fierce survivor, a modern woman ahead of her time who is utterly without self-pity despite the horrors she has endured. With death approaching, she remembers the husbands and children she has loved and lost, and tries, for the first time, to control her own fate by defying her family's wishes and setting a date for her cremation--at a toasty temperature of 1,000 degrees. Each chapter of Herra's story is a piece of a haunting puzzle that comes together beautifully in the book's final pages. Originally published in Icelandic and based on a real person whom author Hallgrimur Helgason encountered by chance, Woman at 1,000 Degrees was a bestseller in Germany, France, and Denmark, and has been compared to "John Irving on speed." But it is deeply moving as well, the story of a woman swept up by the forces of history. With echoes of All the Light We Cannot See and The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, as well as European tours de force such as The Tin Drum, Woman at 1,000 Degrees is, ultimately, original, introducing a fresh new voice to American audiences. Author bio: Hallgrimur Helgason was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1959. He started out as an artist and debuted as a novelist in 1990, gaining international attention with his third novel, 101 Reykjavik, which was translated into fourteen languages and made into a film. He has thrice been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, including for his novel Woman at 1,000 Degrees. Also a columnist and a father of three, he now divides his time between Reykjavik and Hrisey Island.

Release date: January 8, 2019

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

1

1929 Model

2009

I live here alone in a garage, together with a laptop computer and an old hand grenade. It’s pretty cozy. My bed is a hospital bed and I don’t need any other furniture except for the toilet, which is a real drag to use. It’s such a long way to travel, all along the bed and then the same distance again over to the corner. I call it my Via Dolorosa and I have to totter across it three times a day, like any other rheumatic ghost. My dream is to be hooked up to a catheter and a bedpan, but my application got stuck in the system. There’s constipation everywhere.

There aren’t many windows here, but the world appears to me through my computer screen. E-mails come and go, and good old Facebook just keeps on going, like life itself. Glaciers melt, presidents darken, and people lament the loss of cars and houses. But the future awaits at the end of the baggage claim carousel, slant eyed and smirking. Oh yes, I follow it all from my old white bed, where I languish like a useless corpse, waiting to die or to be given a life-prolonging injection. They look in on me twice a day, the girls from the Reykjavík Home Care Services. The morning shift is a real darling, but the afternoon hag has cold hands and bad breath and empties the ashtray with a vacant air.

But if I shut my eye to the world, switch off the lamp above me, and allow the autumn darkness to fill the garage, I can make out the famous Imagine Peace Tower through a narrow window high up on the wall. Because the late John Lennon has now been turned into a pillar of light up here in Iceland, lighting up the black strait on long nights. His widow was kind enough to place him vertically in my line of vision. Yes, it’s good to doze off to an old flame.

Of course, you could say I’m just vegetating in this garage like any other old vintage clunker that has run its course. I mentioned this to Gudjón one day. He and Dóra are the couple who rent me the garage at 65,000 kronur a month. Good Gudjón laughed and declared I was an Oldsmobile. I surfed the net and found a photo of an Oldsmobile Viking, 1929 model. To be honest, I hadn’t realized I’d grown so darn old. It looked like a slightly revamped horse carriage.

I’ve been lying alone in this garage for eight years now, bedridden because of the emphysema that’s plagued me for three times that long. The slightest movement cuts my breath away until I’m on the point of choking—not a pleasant feeling, the discomfort of the unburied, they used to call it in the old days. The result of decades of smoking. I’ve been sucking on cigarettes since the spring of 1945, when a warty Swede first introduced me to these wonders. And their glow still makes me glow. They offered me a mask with nasal tubes that was supposed to make it easier for me to breathe, but to get the oxygen cylinder they told me I’d have to give up smoking “because of the fire hazard.” So I was forced to choose between two gentlemen: Nicotine, the Russian Count, and Oxygen, the British Lord. It was an easy choice. Consequently, I draw my breath like a steam engine, and my voyages to the toilet remain my daily penance. But little Lóa likes going in there and I enjoy the tinkling music of her maiden’s piddle. She’s my help.

Oh, I’m rambling. When you’ve lived through a whole Internet of events, a whole shipload of days, it’s hard to distinguish one thing from another. It all flows into one big muddle of time. Either I suddenly remember everything at once or I remember nothing at all.

Oh yeah, and then our nation collapsed, been a year now. But it’s all relative, of course. Dóra and the nurses assure me that the city is still standing. There are no visible signs of the crash in Reykjavík, unlike in Berlin when I roamed through it as a silly young lass, after its fall at the end of the war. And I don’t know which is better—an overt crash or a covert one.

Personally, I reveled in the crash. Throughout the boom years I’d lain bedridden while the greed around me was devouring all my savings, so it didn’t upset me to see them disappear into the bonfire, since by then I’d developed a slight indifference to money. We spend our entire lives trying to put something away for old age, but then old age arrives with no dreams of luxury beyond the ambition of being able to pee lying down. I won’t deny that it would have been nice to shop around for some German boy toy and have him stand here, half-naked in the candlelight, declaiming Schiller to his old pillow hag, but apparently they’ve banned the flesh trade in our country now, so there’s no point in bemoaning that. I’ve nothing left except a few weeks of life, two cartons of Pall Malls, a laptop, and a hand grenade, and I’ve never felt better.

2

Feu de Cologne

2009

The hand grenade is an old Hitler’s egg that I acquired in the last war. It’s accompanied me over the rivers and fjords of my life, through all my marriages, thick and thin. And now, at last, would be the time to use it, had not the seal broken off many years ago, on a bad day in my life. But it’s an uncomfortable way to die, of course, to embrace a firestorm like that and allow it to blow your head off. And to tell the truth, I’ve grown quite fond of my blessed little bomb after all these years. It would be sad if my grandchildren weren’t able to enjoy it, in a silver bowl inside an heirloom cabinet.

Meine geliebte Handgranate is beautiful in its deceit, fits nicely in one’s hand, and cools a sweaty palm with its cold iron shell crammed with peace. That’s the really remarkable thing about weapons: although they can be unpleasant for those who get in their way, they provide their holders with a great deal of comfort. Once, many cities ago, I left my golden egg in a cab and couldn’t put my mind to rest until I’d recovered it again, after countless frantic calls to the cab station. The cabby hovered awkwardly on the stairs, trying to figure it out.

“That’s an old hand grenade, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s a piece of jewelry. Have you never heard of the Imperial Fabergé eggs?”

At any rate, for a long time I kept it in my jewelry box.

“What’s that?” my charming sea bear Bæring once asked me, as we were about to set off for a ball.

“It’s a perfume, Feu de Cologne.”

“Really?” the old sailor gasped in astonishment.

Men have their uses, but quick witted they sure ain’t.

And it never hurt to know that the hand grenade was there in my handbag when the night was over and some jerk wanted to take me home.

Now I keep it either in my bedside table or between my rotting legs, lying on the German steel egg like some postwar hen, in the hope of hatching some fire—something that is so sorely missed in this dreary thing that society has become, totally devoid of violence. It can do people only good to lose the roof over their head or see their loved ones shot in the back. I’ve always had problems with people who’ve never had to clamber over dead bodies.

But maybe if I throw it on the floor it’ll go off? Hand grenades love stone floors, I once heard. Yes, of course, it would be wonderful to exit with a bang and leave them to pick through the dust and debris in the hope of finding some morsels of my flesh. But before I explode, permit me to review my life.

3

Herra Björnsson

1929

I was born in the autumn of 1929, in a tin can of a house in Ísafjördur. And got saddled with the peculiar name Herbjörg María, which never suited me, nor itself for that matter. A blend of pagan and Christian strands that mixed like oil and water, and those sister elements still wrestle inside me.

Mom wanted to name me Verbjörg, after her mother, but Grandma wouldn’t hear of it. It was too close to verbúd, the Icelandic word for “fisherman’s hut,” where she claimed people led wet, cold, and miserable lives, and she cursed her own mother for naming her after such a shameful thing. Grandma Vera rowed seventeen fishing seasons between the little islands of Bjarneyjar and Oddbjarnarsker, winter, spring, and autumn, “in the rat-pissing rain they’ve invented in that briny hell of theirs, and it was even worse on land.”

My father suggested Herbjörg instead, and apparently my mother didn’t hate him enough to disagree. Personally, I would have chosen the name of my maternal great-grandmother, the great Blómey Efemía Bergsveinsdóttir. She was the only woman to bear that name in the history of Iceland until the twentieth century, when, after lying in the island’s soil for fifty years, she finally acquired two namesakes. One was a textile artist who lived in a dilapidated shack, while the other Blómey, my little Blómey, who departed from us very young but still lives on in the dearest realms of my soul and appears to me now and then in that strip of grass that separates dream from reality.

We should be baptized for death, just as we’re baptized for life, and allowed to choose the name that will appear on our gravestone for all eternity. I see it before me now: Blómey Hansdóttir (1929–2009).

In those days no one had two first names. But just before I was born, my dear and gifted mother had a vision: the Virgin Mary appeared to her in a valley on the other side of the fjord and sat there on a rock, about four hundred feet tall. For this reason her name was added to mine, and of course it must have brought some blessings with it. At any rate, I have endured all the way to this peak of my now bedridden existence.

“María” softens the harshness of “Herbjörg,” but I doubt that two more different women have ever shared the same life. One sacrificed her snatch to God, while the other devoted hers to a whole army of men.

I was not permitted to be called dóttir (daughter), even though it is the right and privilege of all Icelandic women. Instead, I became a “son.” My father’s kin, sprinkled fore and aft with ministers and ambassadors, had made their careers abroad, where no one uses anything but surnames. And so the entire family was nailed to the head of one man, forced to carry the surname of Granddad Sveinn Björnsson (who became Iceland’s ambassador to Denmark and eventually our first president). No other member of the family was able to make a name for himself, and that was why we failed to produce any more ministers or presidents. Grandfather had reached the summit, and the role of his children and grandchildren was to go slithering down the slope. It’s hard to preserve any ambition when one is constantly on the way down. But naturally, at some point, we’ll reach the bottom, and then the only way forward for the Björnsson tribe will be back up again.

At home I was always called Hera, but when, at the age of seven, I visited my father’s family in Copenhagen with my parents, their maid had trouble pronouncing “Hera” and called me either Herre (the Danish word for “Mister”) or Den Lille Herre (the Little Gentleman). My cousin Puti found this highly amusing and from then on never called me anything but Herra, the Icelandic word for “Mister.” At first this teasing hurt me because I really did look a bit like a boy, but the nickname stuck, and I gradually became used to it. So that’s how a miss became a mister.

In small-town Reykjavík I received considerable attention when I arrived back in the 1950s after a long stay abroad, a radiant young lady with lipstick and worldly ways, and the sobriquet was almost akin to a stage name: “Other guests included Miss Herra Björnsson, granddaughter of Iceland’s president, who draws attention wherever she goes on account of her open and cosmopolitan demeanor—Herra has just returned home to Iceland after a long stay in New York and South America.” So the unfortunate name produced some good fortune.

4

Hotel Iceland

1928

My father, Hans Henrik, was the firstborn of Sveinn Björnsson and his Danish wife, Georgía. He was born in 1908 and was therefore four years younger than my mother. She was the daughter of the aforementioned Verbjörg Jónsdóttir and a one-night stand named Salómon, who died in the storm of 1927.

Mom was always called Massa, although her name was actually Gudrún Marsibil Salbjörg Salómonsdóttir. She had been given the names of the three women who had helped Grandma the most. As Grandma liked to say, “Since I’d been such a miser with my eggs, I had to give all the names to my Massa.” And it paid off. The three women had obviously fused in Mom to produce one good one. A triply good one. If Grandma Vera had been “good and good,” as she would often say about things, then Mom was good and good and good. Then I came along and I wasn’t even plain good. Somehow I was totally devoid of that gentle, tireless spirit, kindness, and innate sense of sacrifice associated with the Svefneyjar islands of Breidafjördur, where I spent my first seven years. I was a rotten mother and an even worse granny.

Mom and Dad met in Reykjavík, at a ball in the Hotel Iceland, or so the story goes. Maybe they’d met dead drunk up some blind alley and ripped each other’s clothes off behind a trash can. What do we know of our conception? Barely more than “God” about the creation of the universe.

Massa was a lively girl from the West Fjords, who lodged at Mrs. Höpfner’s, at Hafnarstræti 5. Dad had yet to finish high school, a pale, intelligent boy with timid eyes, a privileged child who lived south of the Reykjavík lake, in the second-nicest house in town. Granddad Sveinn and Grandma Georgía had become an ambassadorial couple in Copenhagen by then, so Dad lived alone in the big house with the cook and a paternal aunt who was entrusted with the care of the boy and later blamed herself for how things had turned out. Dad’s best friend was Benni Thors, who lived next door in the finest house in the country. Benni’s father was the wealthiest man in the land, and his brother Ólafur later became prime minister.

How could a boy with a background like my father’s have fallen for a maid from the west who’d been conceived in a rowboat under a glacier and, worse still, came with a past and was a whole four years older than he was? It was obviously no small feat to bring me into this world. But the Almighty Farmer Above, as my grandma used to call the Creator, had cast his nets and hooks over the town and lured my future father into a drinking binge with the Thors brothers that night, and they dragged him to the Hotel Iceland, chucking pebbles at the ducks on the way and chanting the latest hit song at the cops they passed—“I scream for ice cream!”—while Mom was doing up her face in her Hafnarstræti loft and giggling herself into the mood with her friend Berta, the broad-faced daughter of a teacher.

As soon as they got into the place, Dad, of course, had to pee and got delayed in the toilets, cornered by a dead-drunk employee of the Icelandic Steamship Company, who immediately had something to say about Dad’s father, who had founded the company: “A great man, your father, great man. But how’s it going? Doesn’t he get bored there in the embassy?”

It unfolded as follows: when Dad finally stumbled out of the men’s room, the first thing he saw was a girl who had just sat down at a table with her friend—a thick-armed beauty from the Svefneyjar islands with bushy eyebrows, three men under her belt, and one at the bar.

Through the hubbub of the dance a blond cupid whispered her destiny into her ears, and she turned her head as Dad walked by. Her dark red lipstick singed itself into his soul, along with her black eyebrows and sea-pebble blue eyes. Her skin white, all so evenly white, like a calm white sea between those enchanted islands. He was clueless when it came to girls and always remained so, but he felt a comforting security as a kind of paralysis took hold of his heart, and a heavy blow from that Breidafjördur gaze struck his forehead.

Mom rolled her eyes at her friend, and they smirked: a typical Reykjavík lad.

Two glasses later he came staggering across the dance floor, like a small salmon elbowing his way through a shoal of herring, and stopped in front of her table. He planted himself there in a swaying position and started acting stupid: pressing his arms against his sides and gesticulating with his right hand as he lifted his right leg and cackled, as if he were trying to mimic a goose trying to piss like a dog. He repeated this act at least three times, playing a goose trying to piss like a dog. Mom endured my father’s idiocy with that uniquely Icelandic forbearance and rewarded him three out of five possible smiles. (No woman can resist a man who is willing to make a fool out of himself for her. It’s an unequivocal declaration of love.) She shifted back one seat just before an invisible hand struck the back of my father’s neck and pushed him down on the chair she had just freed.

“What’s your name?” he asked with moist lips.

“Huh?” (The band was playing a lively polka.)

“What’s your name?”

“Gudrún Marsibil.”

Mom exchanged a glance with Berta, who sat at the other end of the table with her broad face and curly black hair.

“What?”

“Gudrún Marsibil.”

Mom threw another glance at Berta, who seemed amused, with her big chin and small eyes so wide apart.

“Gudrún Marsibil . . . ,” he parroted, releasing a drink-laden gasp, like a marathon runner who has finally crossed the finish line and hears his time, which he repeats to himself, before collapsing from fatigue: “Gudrún Marsibil . . .”

“And you?”

“Huh?”

“What’s your name?” (A smirk in her voice.)

“Me? I’m Jan Flemming. Jan Flemming Pedersen Havtroj.”

“Huh? Are you Danish?”

“Yes, I’ve got bloody Danish skin and I can’t get rid of it!”

He pulled on the skin of his right wrist with the fingers of his left hand and let go of it, like an elastic. He repeated this and then attacked his arm and skull and finally slapped himself across the cheek: “Just can’t! Oh! Damned, damned Dane.”

“But you speak very good Icelandic.”

“Are you with someone?”

“Yeah.”

“And where is he?”

“He’s over there.”

“Where?”

“There.”

She pointed at a short man with a big head who was approaching the table with a bottle of wine and three glasses and a deadly serious air.

“That guy with the forehead?”

“Yeah.” (Laughter.)

“What’s his name?”

“Alli.”

“Alli?”

“Yeah, Adalsteinn.”

“Adalsteinn?”

“Yeah. Or just Steinn.”

“Or just Steinn? Can’t he make his mind up? If I were your boyfriend . . . Your eyes are like stones. Two stones.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Can I have them?”

Everything that came out of him was unclear. He was totally hammered, with his fringe toppling over his forehead and shaking incessantly.

“Have them?”

“Yeah. Can I have them?”

And then something odd happened, something that can only be explained as a key stroke in the weaving of destiny.

“Well then.”

The short man with the big head had reached the table, where he put down the three glasses and bottle of wine. He muttered something that no one heard and sat in front of Mom. The stern eyes under his swollen forehead were like two fishermen’s huts under a steep cliff. He filled the glasses. Not very well, as if he had never offered anyone else a drink before.

“Alli, this is . . . Jan . . . er . . . Flemming, didn’t you say? Is your name really Jan? Your name isn’t Jan. You’re Icelandic.”

“That’s Björnsson. A bourgeois bastard,” said the forehead man in a voice that was strangely strong and deep. It flowed out of his frail body like a tow cable from a dinghy.

“Huh? Do you know him?” Mom asked.

“I thought you ducklings weren’t allowed to drink.”

It was like the voice of a mountain piercing through a colony of screeching birds.

“Huh?” Dad exclaimed in his alcoholic haze, smiling internally at the two sea stones that Mom had just given him. Adalsteinn ignored him and raised his glass: “Cheers!” Mom and Berta crashed glasses with him.

“Ah, there you are, man!” Benni Thors and his brother had reached the table and stood over them with smug airs. “You obviously don’t know how to drink, man. You’ve got to drink yourself UP, not DOWN, as my brother says. C’mon. We’re leaving.”

“I didn’t know that the Danish princes of the fishing industry were allowed out of the palace gardens,” Adalsteinn quipped.

Benni Thors felt an urge to punch the man with the forehead, but his brother managed to halt his fist. Adalsteinn turned to Dad and proclaimed in his thunderous voice, “A plague on both your houses!”

It was a curse we would long have to contend with, placed as it was by Steinn Steinarr, who would become the greatest Icelandic poet of the twentieth century, and who, if I remember correctly, was quoting Mercutio’s dying words from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The Thors brothers hoisted Dad from his chair and dragged him away. On the floor the dance was still in full swing; the tables were bustling with chatter and flirtations. Men hung at the bar, cheap paintings on the walls. Everything here bore the marks of the present, everyone sported the look demanded by the times—October 1928—and no one knew what awaited them outside those walls, sunny times, depression, or war.

Dad followed his companions through the streets. Someone had mentioned a late-night party in Bergstadastræti, which turned out to be in a loft apartment that was obviously very small because the line stretched down the stairway and out onto the street. A snake of hat-clad boys loitered on the veranda on top of the steps, gulping down the night, as men are wont to do. It was a still and mild autumn night and the voices echoed across the treeless gardens. The Thors brothers joined in the medley, but Dad hung out on the street with his hands in his pocket, drunk as a skunk and as awkward as any Reykjavík kid throughout the ages, pondering on the Breidafjördur lass who had given him the two beautiful sea pebbles of her eyes.

The die had been cast. Yes, that much was sure. Mom preferred Dad to Steinn Steinarr, chose the ambassador’s son instead of a Voyage without Promise, a choice she was severely punished for, thus proving the old saying that he who forsakes a poet brings bad luck.

5

The Suspenders of Iceland

1929

For the Christmas of 1928, Hans went to Copenhagen, to stay with his parents and siblings. Granted a welcome break from the Reykjavík night life (which was no less wild back then than it was to become and will remain for centuries), the firstborn could fall asleep at midnight undisturbed and wake up at noon to the smell of hot chocolate, which Helle, good Helle, the Danish cook for the Icelandic ambassador and his wife, had the pleasure of making for the Björnsson boys. Dad’s younger brothers, Puti and Henni, still lived with their parents and went to a Danish high school. They whiled away the time playing endless pranks on each other, but the carefree spirit in the gaze of the oldest had been glazed by the first autumn of his careless youth. A woman’s pregnancy weighs heavily on a man.

In addition to the Christmas food sent from Iceland, Dad had received a letter written in an attic at Hafnarstræti 5. And after New Year’s, the twenty-year-old blond with the dark eyebrows walked into his father’s office (in those days all men of stature also kept offices at home, though they looked more like small paneled chapels, where numbers and phone calls were venerated) to inform him of a certain incident that had occurred in Iceland earlier that winter, a certain incident, yes, mishap even, a certain thing that carried a certain weight, which could only grow heavier with time. He muttered the girl’s name and then ended his speech by making a vague rotating gesture with the index finger of his right hand, presumably to symbolize the future course of events. Granddad Sveinn removed his glasses and slipped his thumb behind his suspenders, just above the waistline of his trousers. These were Iceland’s suspenders on foreign soil.

“I see. And who is her family?”

Damn it, although this was the first question that all Icelandic fathers had asked their offspring about their children-in-law since the First Settlement, it took Dad completely off-guard. In fact he’d never thought about it. And it proved the classic aphorism that a young man never thinks further than the jet of his sperm. He just about remembered that the girl was some Salómon’s daughter and that her mother was some old woman from some island somewhere. He wasn’t even sure she was altogether human; she could have been the offspring of some obscure tribe that dwelled on a remote Icelandic skerry, a cross between elves, seals, and flatfish.

“Ehm . . . I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Er . . . no.”

And now the ambassador was silent. Silent long enough for the son to realize what he’d done; it was as if he’d invited his father to a wild Charleston dance in his very own office, in broad daylight, just like the wild one that he himself had danced with that bloody island girl on the night I was conceived, a girl who on top of everything was called Massa. She might just as well have been called Massive! So low class! God forbid that the old man should ever find out her name. And to think his father had gone all the way to Copenhagen to find a wife, who bore the dignified name of Georgía, and now he was sitting here as the country’s primary representative in a sumptuous residence under a twelve-foot ceiling, with an extra six feet in case the ambassador of Iceland suddenly needed to jump higher than his own height, like Gunnar of the Sagas. The sordid island girl had obviously been raised in a pathetic single-room chimneyed tussock that could probably have fitted into their front dining room without even having to raise the crystal chandelier. No. Yes. No. This was disgraceful. My father burst into a sweat as he sat in front of his father, who was still silent. Except for a sigh, a solemn snort. The ambassador remained silent for a whole seven seconds until he said, “Well, my dear son . . .”

No, my good father. Just forget it. This is just . . . It’s nothing, this is just a child, just one little life that no one needs to know about, that . . .

Dad stood up and walked through the wrong door into his father’s closet, only to be confronted by pressed shirts with stiff collars, Iceland white, and behind them the famous uniform, the gold-lined jacket that my aunt had designed for Granddad Sveinn so that he could stroll past the king of England. Hans Henrik turned crimson and said agitatedly, “No, it’s . . . it’s nothing,” before he found the right door.

“It’s nothing.” That’s how I was ushered into this world.

This was followed by difficult months in the young man’s life. He headed back to Reykjavík, where he lived a double life, peppered with small lies, until the moment of farewells came in the spring, the moment of betrayal, when it was Dad’s turn to be silent until Mom understood.

She boarded the mail boat with a drooping head, while Dad traveled south across the moorlands into the straits. The evening sun shone on the young man’s tears as he followed the coast from the Raudará River back to town. Across the sun-bathed bay he spotted the slowly shrinking boat, and beyond the mountain range a few clouds hovered, like smoke signals from the islands that slept beyond them.

Mom never spoke of her nervous breakdown, not to me at any rate, but as the five-month-old tenant inside her womb, I wasn’t spared the consequences and have been in therapy ever since as a result. No, I’m lying now, what a cow I am.

Shortly afterward she appeared like all her foremothers before her, pregnant on the home pier, and carried me under her apron for the whole of that summer until she was packed off on a boat to the west to give birth to me. But I’m not lying when I say that I came enraged into this world in the house of her father’s parents, screeching at all the misery I had caused and announcing a world depression, a prophecy that proved accurate twenty days later, when the famous crash occurred on Wall Street. That same autumn my father was admitted to the law faculty of the university like any other incurable love hen. The summer after that, he was dispatched to Vejle, Denmark, for further healing, to Grandma Georgía’s paternal uncle, who owned a small pharmacy there with thousands of tiny drawers, and was supposed to teach Dad Danish bookkeeping and the art of courting well-bred girls.

6

Lóa

2009

Well then. Here she comes, Lóa, my little dung flower. Like a white rose out of the morning darkness.

“Good morning, Herra, dear. How are you today?”

“Oh, spare me the niceties.”

The gray light of day has only just begun to break. And a gray day it’ll be, like all its brethren. Daggry, the Danes call it.

“Have you been awake for long? Had a look at the news?”

“Oh yes. It’s still tumbling, the rubble of the crash . . .”

She takes off her coat, shawl, and hat. And sighs. If I were a randy lad with a sparkling soul, I’d do myself the favor of marrying this girl. For she’s goodness and gentleness personified. And her cheeks are a heavenly red. The red-cheeked ones never deceive us. I, on the other hand, was pale with deceit from the very start, and now I sit here, yellow as a corpse in a coffin-white nightshirt.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Lóa asks me as she turns on the light in the kitchen alcove, peckin