From the Mouth of the Whale Page 5

  ‘There he goes again!’ she says, turning away as if I have produced a stream of piss. I make no attempt to respond. Yet what ensues is inevitable:

  ‘That’s the sort of nonsense that landed us here in the first place.’

  What she says is true, though she should know better than to call it nonsense; it would be more correct to say that it was my intellectual gifts that marooned us here. Or rather, exiled me here; it was her decision to make them row her over to share my fate. Poor woman. But it is probably the lesser of two evils to be the wife of Jónas and share a barren rock with him than to live among strangers. Or so I gathered from the way people spoke to her on the mainland. The saddest thing for me is that her loyalty is misplaced. I have done this woman nothing but harm. She was opposed to my heeding the summons of Wizard-Láfi Thórdarson, alias the specialist and poet Thórólfur, when he asked me to go out west with him and exorcise the troublesome ghost. For that was the beginning of my misfortunes. That is how we came to lose everything. How did our paths cross? It was during the eclipse of the sun, if I remember right. I do not dare ask her; women think men ought to remember that sort of thing. Last time she was scolding me for my madcap ideas, I asked her why she had come back to me if not to take up the thread where we left off when I had to crawl alone into hiding due to the persecution by the Nightwolf and Sheriff Ari of myself Jónas the Learned and my son Reverend Pálmi. Indeed, why was she here if not to assist me in my investigations into the workings of the universe? For that is how it used to be. Now it is as if my enemies have given her the task of ‘bringing me to my senses’, as more than one, indeed several, of my tormentors call it. Yet that is not fair, for when I hinted as much the other day, she responded:

  ‘If anyone knows there’s no chance of bringing you to your senses by now, Jónas Pálmason, it’s me.’

  Sigga was the bonniest lass I had ever met. I first heard of her when a visitor told my grand father Hákon and me that they were having problems with a girl down at Bakki in Steingrímsfjord. She was moonstruck, but not like those familiar crazed fools who are best off begging. No, her lunacy rendered her calm and sensible, while at the same time obsessed with the light of the moon and its path across the firmament, its size and phases. When found to be missing from her bed, she was tracked down at last by the cowshed wall, thumb in the air, calculating how the moon’s shadow had grown from the day before. And if she could lay hands on paper and writing materials, she would begin at once to scribble down numbers and lines. Indeed, the minister who was called to examine her said she seemed to possess a sound knowledge of arithmetic. However, she could not be persuaded to tell where she had acquired this learning, for she can hardly have got the hang of it alone and unaided, and the people of the house were pretty sure that some vagabond must have passed on the knowledge to her: ‘In return for goodness knows what payment.’ But her girlish head had been unable to cope with the arithmetic and she had lost her wits, as was proven by the fact that she had become enamoured of that work of nature, the moon, which invariably attracts an ailing mind. The perpetrator of this wicked deed was never found, though people suspected a failed student from Hólar, who had been expelled for striking the bishop with the Easter sacrament: one Thórólfur Thórdarson, known to all as ‘Wizard-Láfi’. This was the first occasion on which Láfi was to play a fateful role in my life. For had he not so inadvertently led me and Sigga together, and had we not had him to thank for our meeting, she would never have been persuaded to allow me to go north to the Snjáfjöll coast to help him lay the ghost. In truth I had until now had little time for the female of the species, regarding the entire tribe as tedious and irksome company. No doubt the feeling was mutual: they were bored by my philosophising and I was bored by their talk of housekeeping, provisions, child-rearing and whatever they call all that futile business around which their lives revolve. Naturally people whispered that I was impotent with regard to women. What of it? The other bachelors need have no fear that I would compete with them for the wenches. Yet this did not prevent them from commissioning me to write poems ablaze with ardent feelings for the opposite sex. The girl from Bakki was not only of marriageable age but also rumoured to be interested in the heavenly bodies. That sounded promising. Well, I would not give up until I had set eyes on this paragon. It was in the spring of 1598, on the seventh of March. How do I remember? It was the spring when the eclipse sent both man and beast mad. When I arrived at Bakki I pretended to be passing through on my way to Hólar to present the bishop with a book that had long ago been removed from the episcopal seat, ex libris of that decapitated martyr of the True Faith, Bishop Jón Arason. It contained a handful of Greek fables by the wise author Aesop, translated into Latin and illustrated with comical pictures of witless beasts going about human business. A frivolous book from pagan Asia but a valid passport for my sightseeing trip to Bakki. I certainly had the book with me, in case anyone asked, and could show it to trustworthy types if required. I was received with generous hospitality, though the farm was in a state of mourning as the father of the householder had recently departed this life and his body was still lying in state upstairs. I behaved like any other visitor who merely happened to be passing along the fjord on the aforementioned business and had not at all come to catch a glimpse of the moonstruck girl. I was well provided for with food and drink. The good people found me entertaining and listened in silent pleasure to my poems and discursions on natural history, for I adapted my material as befitted a house where a corpse was lying in the parlour. And no one thought it odd that I should have business with the women in the kitchen as in former times. Nothing had changed in there; indeed, kings may come and kings may go but the kitchen hearth remains unchanged, with its fire, food and gossip. I assumed the moonstruck girl would have an errand there sooner or later, and while I was waiting I took a look up the skirts of a couple of old biddies, and fumbled another three, for they allowed me access again, never suspecting that I would be aroused by that touch – however much they themselves might enjoy it. I also pulled a rotten molar out of the eldest of them, who, to my astonishment, was none other than the woman who had teased me with her dirty talk a whole decade before. Alas, why does God allow the candle of worthless old hags to flicker, year in year out, for nine times nine years, while abruptly and without apparent mercy blowing out the newly kindled flames of one’s own children? It is an ugly thought which everyone who has ever lost anyone has entertained, demanding in their despair, why him? Why her? Why not that one or that one, or that other? But I cannot help it. And I would not be surprised if the old crone is still alive now, a hundred and forty years old and convinced there is nothing more natural, though she is of no use to anyone and hardly a source of pleasure even to herself. Anyway, her tooth had no sooner been extracted than there was a great hubbub of raised voices and people began to pour out of the buildings. The old women and I were just scrambling to our feet when a farmhand burst into the kitchen and flung himself on all fours, screeching without pause as he pushed his way through the bundle of skirts:

  ‘It’s going out, I tell you, it’s going out!’

  OLEANDER: a poisonous plant which grows by the Lagarfljót River, between Grænamó and Jórvíkurrimi. If livestock graze on it, they die instantly and their bodies swell up. If rubbed, oleander turns yellowish green in colour and feels somewhat moist to the touch.

  I first glimpsed my future wife by the will o’ the wisp light of the eclipse. At the very moment when the sun was halved, Sigrídur captured my gaze with her eyes – eyes that were a haven of peace amidst the storm of madness that raged on the farm. For I was as bewildered as the dogs that howled, the cats that hissed, the ravens that crawled along the ground, the cows that wandered dazed in the fields. I was as unfortunate as the rest, as unmanned by dread of what catastrophe this eclipse might bring, what terrible tidings it might portend, what loss of life, what pestilence would now wash up from the sea on to our rock, what heresies, what insanity; indeed, I was as confound
ed as those who ran weeping round the yard or pressed their faces to the muddy paving slabs, tore off their clothes and any hair they could grab hold of, many vomiting in mid-prayer. Yes, I was so terrified that even the marrow of my smallest bones quivered like the wings of a hoverfly – for mankind was helpless, trapped in the midst of the scene that the Apostle Mark had painted in words and the ministers in their Good Friday sermons had branded on our minds as if with a red hot poker; the last hour of the Saviour’s life, the ninth hour when darkness fell at noon, when in his torment he doubted the existence of the merciful Father. If even His favourite, ever-blessed son was filled with dread, how could we poor sinful humans fail to lose our minds with fear? And lose them we did, all except Sigrídur. From inside the farm came a shriek:

  ‘A miracle! A miracle! He is risen again!’

  Shortly afterwards three men burst out of the front door carrying the old man’s body between them. They swung the corpse’s mottled limbs back and forth until it appeared to be raising its wizened arms to heaven, its head thrown back, the jaw falling slackly open to reveal the swollen blue tongue for all to see. It did not take a great physician to realise that the old man was as thoroughly dead as he had been but a short time before. People now began to crowd around the threesome with their pathetic puppet. One held its neck and left arm, the second its waist and right arm, the third and strongest stood behind the corpse, throwing both his arms round the bloated belly and lifting it so that it appeared to be proceeding in little hops to the intended destination, which was the roof of the living quarters. Here is another manifestation of insanity: people are united in actions which they would neither have known how to do nor dreamt of doing until seized by madness. And afterwards they are none the wiser about how to perform those deeds that madness rendered easy. While the servants were forcing their way on to the roof with the old man’s body, Sigrídur took me aside. She had already taken precautions to save me from being caught up in the pandemonium. Without taking her eyes off me she stepped forward and took my hand, and when my gaze seemed about to falter and return to the compellingly infectious behaviour of the others, she followed me, taking another small side-step so that I was looking at her, not them. Thus she lured me step by step into her state of serenity, until she could lead me away. Once we were a good distance from the farm, she told me that she had known a solar eclipse was due, not precisely when, of course, but that one was in the offing. I froze in my tracks, my mouth felt dry and a cold sweat broke out all over my body. Smiling at me, she told me to follow her and we passed out of sight of the farm buildings where the herd of lunatics was trampling the fallow winter turf of the gable, raising the cadaver aloft in silhouette against the grey sky. Once sheltered from view, she sat me down and took a seat facing me across a flat piece of ground. Having gathered some pebbles in her hand, she began to arrange them into a planetary model, laying the largest stone in the middle and calling it Earth, then placing next to it the moon and sun and five planets in a straight line away from them. After this, she began to move the heavenly bodies round the Earth according to their familiar orbits until the sun and moon stood face to face.

  ‘Here there will be an eclipse of the moon.’

  Using a slender heather stalk she drew rays extending from the sun to Earth, then showed how the Earth in this position must cast its shadow on the moon. Next she counted several times on her fingers, muttering the names of the months and diverse numbers. She was calculating when the next lunar eclipse would take place and told me the date.

  ‘You’ll see; wherever you are in the country you’ll discover it’s true – weather permitting.’

  Now Sigrídur moved the pebbles once again, saying meanwhile in her bright girlish voice:

  ‘On the other hand it’s impossible to predict solar eclipses accurately, though we can assume one will take place after a certain period, more or less. I’ve been waiting a long time for this one.’

  By this stage I was not so much listening to the words that fell from her lips as staring at the lips themselves, at their ever-changing shape. I moved closer to examine them better. Sigrídur stopped talking and, taking a piece of blue glass from her apron pocket, raised it to her eye and looked at the sun. The chirping of small birds was stilled, the baying of the dogs was silenced, the people on the turf roof ceased shaking the corpse, a hush descended on the countryside and I felt suddenly cold. High above the Earth the disc of the moon completed its shape on the orb of the sun and in the same instant something was completed inside me. Neither Sigrídur nor I looked up when the gable gave way with a loud crack beneath the weight of the corpse-bearers. Our courtship was one uninterrupted conversation about the origin of the stars, the nature of land and sea, the behaviour of beasts great and small, and although it was not conducted in Hebrew or in the angelic tongue as it was with Adam and Eve, it was nevertheless our hymn to Creation. We sat together into the early hours, investigating the delightful puzzles of light and shadow, such as what happens to the shadow of your hand when the shadow of mine falls upon it? Have they become one? Or has yours disappeared temporarily? And if so, where to? We could talk like this for days, but no more. She fell silent when my enemies, no longer content with abusing me, began their persecution of our son, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur. The boy was stripped of his habit and his calling. He is now forced to wander from farm to farm like a beggar, his wife constantly with child, like his father – alas. It grieves me just as much as it does Sigrídur to know how little my resistance achieved.

  DIACODUS: this stone has many useful properties. If it is placed in water, a host of spirits appear in it, apparelled like men, and one may ask it to foretell the future. The stone has been found in Iceland. Exemplum: when we lived at Uppsandar my wife Sigrídur happened to be walking beside the sea at the place where the mountainous shore is known as Fellshraun. On a certain flat rock over which the waves broke, she spied something round floating in a pool. When she picked it up, she thought it looked like a stone with magic properties. There was a pink dot high up in the middle and it was girded about with crimson, while the part under water looked green. She took it over to another smaller pool and dropped it in. All at once she saw countless human shapes appear in the water. Seeming to remember that I had read of such a stone, she reacted quickly, intending to put it in her glove and bring it home to me. But before the diacodus could find its way into her mitten, it fell on the shingle with a sharp crack and instantly vanished from sight. Sigrídur would never tell me what she learnt from the spirits but I assume she must have asked them her fortune.

  Alas, how Sigga implored me not to go west to meet Thórólfur. Oh, how right she was when she said it was the demon of vanity that summoned me to do the deed. I wanted to enhance my renown, I said, so that more people would avail themselves of my services. Self-taught as I was, I had to prove myself by my actions. And the man who succeeds in laying a ghost so malevolent that it tans the hide of every person who goes near it, that man will be prized when the twilight portents get out of hand and call down the wrath of God on the libertine herd. I seem to remember saying something to this effect, to which she replied:

  ‘But aren’t the rams you’re going to perform the deed for the very same that the Lord will strike down?’

  And yet … That must have been later. She let me go anyway, since we owed our meeting to Sorcery-Láfi. It was on that journey west along the Snjáfjöll coast that the catalogue of images etched itself on my mind – the traveller’s album that always stands open before my eyes when I compare the world of piety and good works evoked by my grandfather Hákon in his stories to that other world into which I was born: the world where good deeds count for nothing, while conceited bragging of one’s own virtues is enough to purchase tyrants notorious throughout the land a seat at the footstool of the risen Christ. Their busy tongues labour in their jaws while the fruit withers on the vine. On my way west I followed the highway, the road trodden by the common populace on their comings and goings along th
e shores of this island, which, in common with other circles, has no beginning and no end. And the business that draws the ragged mob from one corner of the country to the other? To beg a bite to eat, of course. Or rags to wear. To feel the warmth of something other than their own hand. To experience compassion. To be a guest rather than a nuisance. To receive a small share of the gifts of the Earth. To have all this. Yes, to be a Christian among Christians, even if only for the brief duration of the major Church holidays. My journey took place shortly after Easter – a holiday that had lost its meaning now that Lent had been scorned and people ate whatever they could shovel into their mouths. Rotting shreds of meat festooned their teeth like Christmas decorations when they yawned during the Good Friday sermon, their gums swollen an angry red where they had begun to fester, yet they could not be bothered to pick their teeth, instead sucking and licking with the tips of their tongues, worrying at the nagging pain in the swollen lumps, sighing when the pus was forced out between their molars, bringing the piece of meat with it into the mouth where it became the gravy for their putrid banquet. But not everyone was fortunate enough to spend Easter with their mouths full of this kind of sweet-meat. God’s lambs, Christ’s lambs, Peter’s lambs: once upon a time the bands of itinerant beggars knew where these sweetly named lambs were kept and what time of the year they might be visited. These poor hungry wretches moved right round the country, like the stars of heaven on a metal arc around a model of the Earth; ah yes, when Spitting-Sveinn shaded his eyes and looked in the direction of Gaulverjabær in the Flói district, or Peg-leg Sigurgeira stood in Eyjafjord, squinting to assure herself that it was not far to Laufás. Marked out by God as Easter fare or Christmas roast, the ceremoniously named lambs walked out to meet the needy, out of the barn, out of their fleeces, out of their skins, frolicsome, fat and juicy, and kept on walking though their flesh changed colour as it roasted, walked across the yard, lathered in their own melted fat, to await the guests at the crossroads, positioning themselves and rotating so that the guests could see for themselves the browned, muscular rump under its glaze of fat and the shoulder where the blood burst forth and ran down the spine. Then the lambs would skip off home to the farm, chased by the starving rabble with gaping mouths and bared teeth. In the yard the lambs would halt and look back over their shoulders at the wretched throng before shaking themselves as if they had just returned from a swim and spraying a great arc of fat which cascaded over the faces of the needy, who stuck out their tongues as they ran, like children chasing fat snowflakes as they fall, lapping up the rain of suet, scraping the film of grease from their eyes and cheeks. Once home the lambs were driven back inside the kitchen by the farmhands and cooks, and there they paced back and forth on the red-glowing grids which the fire licked merrily, and from their roasting throats came forth smoke and crackling bleats announcing that soon their happy task would be accomplished, soon their procession would be over and they would tread the boards of the long trestle table in the hall which housed the vagabonds, beggar women and their urchin spawn, and there the lambs would reach the end of their journey, there they would reach their final goal, there their duty to the Lord would be completed, for they would walk to the gaping mouths of the guests and shake themselves by their teeth until the golden-brown flesh loosed from their bones and the grease cascaded from the tongue down the throat. But this would not happen until Easter Day. Until then, Spitting-Sveinn and Peg-leg Sigurgeira would willingly fast with their Redeemer and eat dried fish with butter. There was happiness in that too: worship, participation in the earthly incarnation of the divinity. But by the time I went on my journey to Snjáfjöll those days were long gone. The barefoot brigade were no longer offered any victuals, whether it was a juicy leg of lamb dedicated to a saint or the skin of a dried haddock, or a roof over their heads or gloves for their chapped hands. Far from it. Now the libertine life was all, and everything a man acquired belonged to him and his kin alone. The rest could eat dirt. And they did. As I began to near the manor farm which used to be governed by God’s almanac, I was met by an abominable sight: the bodies of beggars lying beside the road, weathered sacks of skin stretched over the bones of adults and children. Ravens and foxes had gnawed at their heads and hands, clawed and torn off their rags and dined on their meagre pauper’s flesh. Yes, there you have it, whether you are high-born or lowly, a stout figure or a whip-thin emaciated wretch, when your time on Earth is over you will be nothing but a sack of skin, emptied of its contents: the soul will have departed and without it you will be nothing but a leather bag of bones.