The Great Weaver From Kashmir (11 page)

You ask how Grímúlfur and I got along? Yes, he met me at the harbor and helped me climb into the car. But I found only that this arid businessman was a total stranger to me, and that I actually did not understand how he could have wanted me. The last year and a half I had scarcely ever given him a thought. I neither loved nor hated him; I was sincerely indifferent about him. I even paid little heed to wifely modesty although he saw me at those times when women would rather be unseen by their husbands. When he spoke to me I answered him as I would a man in a railway car or a toilette attendant.

And so went that year – I scraped by. Yes, although it might seem incredible, I did not become any sicker, but stayed fairly the same. I even ventured several times to attend some social affairs, which did not cause any harm.

But in my interior being something started to stir – something that had lain dormant for months and even years; hidden fires began to blaze anew. One bright day I suddenly saw myself as I was, like a man who had forgotten who he was and what he was named. For several years I had forgotten who I was and what I was named! I discovered that in fact I was still just a little girl, even if life had bestowed on me the experience of a full-grown woman, the tribulations of a shipwrecked man. My body was delicate, my soul perhaps even more delicate, but in among the infirmities was hidden an untiring power. My desires had been pricked by a sleep-thorn,
²⁰
but now they were awake, passionate and wild, and they begged
to be allowed to sing out with all the magic of life in one mighty song.

Oh, with what sick, entrenched passion didn't I desire at that time to meet the man who was fit to love me, to take me as I was, bound to another, hysterical, emaciated. I was eager to sacrifice my honor if I could only find someone who would be man enough to love a woman as she desires most of all: illicitly. And to be loved illicitly in return. I lived for that man, for the hope of meeting him. I dreamt about him day and night. I dressed up for him in the morning, changed clothes every three hours, preened myself for him. And I undressed for him at night, and thought thoughts that he wanted me to think, sleepless night after sleepless night. Perhaps it was this, my thirst for love, that saved me from the grave.

Twice I thought I had found him; but both times I was deceived. Always my hopes were deceived. I trusted both of these men with my misfortune, affliction, and desire. They saw my soul in all its nakedness. But I was a child: a woman should never show a man her soul in all its nakedness. When a man has seen to the bottom of a woman's soul he looks at her body as if it were an empty vase, and it is as if he thinks that the vase would break if he were to touch it: he pities her and leaves.

One was a foreign consul who left the country. I haven't seen him since, and have never wanted to. I still blush when I think of what I said to him. The other was an artist whom I met several months later. He came daily, sat alone with me and played the grand piano. Everything he said was nonsense, but there was something refreshing in his bearing that touched me the first time I saw him. I realized
little by little just how deprived he was of everything that a woman actually desires to find in a man. We kissed. But one day I saw him crying. It was repulsive: he felt sorry for me or for himself or for both of us. He wasn't man enough to bear his own passions. Nothing is more repugnant than a man who cries.

When Steinn was seven years old I went abroad with Grímúlfur and took the boy with me. It was on that trip that we quarreled, the only quarrel we've had in our marriage all these years. It happened in a hotel in London one night. I still forbade him to touch me as his wife and pleaded my sickness as an excuse.

“You're not sick anymore,” he said. “It's all hysteria, if not complete pretense.”

“Of course I'm sick,” I said. “Leave me alone! I forbid you to touch me!”

“Then you can sail your own sea,” he said. “Keeping you going doesn't expand my bank account!”

“You make the same demands of me as a harlot!” I said.

“Parasite!” he answered.

“Rapscallion, liar, villain!” I said.

“Just fine!” he said. “I'll remember this. And I can get five hundred harlots for a far lower price than what you alone have cost me.”

“What are you going to do with the boy if you get rid of me?”

“That's none of your business!”

“The boy is mine!”

But after several silent minutes I calmed down a bit and said:

“Grímúlfur, you can take as many harlots as you want, whenever you want, instead of me. I understand that and would never resent you for it. But I can't, I can't.”

In the morning he gave me a hundred pounds and left, left me behind with the boy. Several days later a letter came from him, from Bilbao; he asked for my forgiveness. He met me again in Folkestone in the fall, and our life together continued as before, as if nothing had happened.

My health always wavered, like a flickering candle flame. I participated in the vanity of everyday life like everyone else, but depression and apathy weighed on me every moment that I was alone. My only joy was that the boy's consideration toward me grew stronger the more he learned. My stay in England alone with him linked him to me. Now Grímúlfur had to spend another half year in Bilbao. I asked if the boy and I could come with him, and that's what we did.

Grímúlfur had quite a few friends down south in Spain, and I suddenly found myself part of a joyful social life. I've actually never been happier than I was that winter, caught up in the enchanting elegance and the refinement that characterizes the social habits of those who live in the south, in which the pulse of passion throbs through everything in the form of lyric poetry and every emotion is spoken in magic spells.

Then I met José, who pressed his lips hardest of all against mine. And it is about the memory of this alien young man that my dreams have most often played since my feelings for him first awakened. And yet I sent José away with death in his heart.

Why did I start loving José, by all means? I have often thought about this, but it is one of the mysteries of love that anyone should love one person more than another. Because one man is in fact never more remarkable than a thousand others. Or does a woman perhaps love this one particular man because there is no way that she can ever love all the others? José certainly wasn't any more handsome or charming than the others.

Maybe I loved him, like the woman in
L'invitation au voyage,
because he was even more alien than the others, born in South America? Or did I love him because he had a broader and more pliant baritone than the others? His voice was like velvet, deep and warm, and I drowned my senses in it when he sang. Or perhaps because the fire in his flint black eyes burned even more passionately than the fire in the eyes of others? Or because he was eight years younger than I was, and seemed as if he was created to dance on embers? José, José, your name reminds me of the name of Jesus in an Irish saint's life that I read in my childhood!

His speciousness gave him an air of fairy-tale elfishness, something distant and dangerous, which made him exotic even among his countrymen, a foreigner when he spoke his own language. And
he had a kind of wondrous way of speaking English without understanding it. Nothing was more delightful than to hear him speak so fluently a language that he couldn't make heads or tails of.

José's character was from the other side of the Earth, where the sun rises in the evening and sets in the morning. Sometimes I could see him with strange mountains in the background, sometimes alone on a never-ending prairie. Thus burn the coals in the eyes of those who are raised in a land where a veiled power dwells in the mountains and bloodthirsty beasts roam the jungles. The dreaminess and depression that sometimes made his face and bearing so gloomy, like fog over the land, are seen only in a man who has looked out over endless prairie in his youth and never beheld its limit. José was neither more handsome nor more gallant than a thousand other men, but he was the man about whom I had dreamt throughout my youth, created for this alone: to love a woman who trembles before the charming power of her own dreams. And yet I sent José away with death in his heart.

I had lived unforgettable days with José, evenings drunk with happiness. We danced in tea salons in the afternoons, visited the most jocund cabarets in the evenings. We drank wine; we drove up into the mountains. For a long time not a single thing happened between us, because José was a noble-minded man and respected my marriage. But the walls crumbled one by one, until finally our lips met over wine in a drawn-out kiss.

Grímúlfur was far away. He was in the south, and several days passed. José came with his car in the morning, and we drove to a small village several kilometers away. This was on a mild Spanish
winter day. We ate breakfast at a café out in the countryside; we laughed like children in love and reclined over wine that glowed in the sun. José sat by my side. The smoke from his cigarette took on marvelous shapes in the rays of the sun. We sat close to each other; I felt his arm around me and leaned up against him, and we watched the sunbeams play in the wine and the cigarette smoke in the sunbeams. Finally my name was whispered in my ear:

“Jófí!” was whispered, and his breath played over my cheeks, filled my senses, fragrant with wine.

“Jófí!” he whispered again.
“Cuándo?”

At first I said nothing, but red-hot currents flowed through me. Finally I straightened myself in my seat and turned toward him to look into his eyes. And we gazed for a long time into each other's eyes in silent comprehension of everything. We knew that all of the walls had fallen down; all formalities were now in vain. The kiss broke every seal. I leaned back again in my seat and my whole being trembled. I closed my eyes; my breath fluttered. And the answer came involuntarily to my lips, from my innermost depths, like bubbles that ascend to the surface of a spring from far down below.

“José, come to me, tonight, late.”

We got to our feet and drove to town without saying another word, then parted with a silent handshake. I knew that his eyes were burning when we parted, but I did not look up. I showed him only my eyelids and fled in the next instant into the hotel.

I had done everything to gratify the whims of my soul; perfumed the cushions on the sofa; burned incense in a little brazier on the mantelpiece. Wine stood on the table in cold, clammy bottles with faded labels and dusty necks: this wine had waited for eager lips for a hundred years, and in a hundred years its spirit, its magic, and its fire had intensified in the dark cellar. Tonight the consecration was imminent.

I had finished my perfumed bath and dressed myself in my softest silk, both outerwear and undergarments. I had put the boy to bed an hour earlier and instructed the maid to leave me alone. The clock struck ten; I threw myself down onto the soft sofa and waited. I listened motionless and silent to every sound that could be heard out in the hall, my senses as delicate and keen as an animal's. Sometimes I tiptoed to the door and listened. But there was still no José.

Was everything still safe?

I peeked out into the hotel hallway, but no one was about. My maid was sleeping somewhere on the top floor. My guests usually rang at my apartment's front door without the intercession of the staff, so everything should have been safe.

But then I started thinking about the boy. Would he sleep through it? I thought. My goodness, what if the boy should wake up! This thought struck me immediately with terrible fear. The boy slept in my room, farther down the hall, and when I considered how sensitive he was to everything that happened around him I thought that there was nothing more likely than that he would wake when
I least expected it. Our whispering would wake him; the slightest tinkling of a glass or creaking of a chair would be enough to startle him awake. Maybe he would suddenly be standing between the portieres to check on his mother out in the parlor, standing there in his white nightgown, his eyes deep and blue, wide and inquisitive, like the sky itself, his golden locks a mess. He runs his eyes around the room and spies his mother; yes, spies his mother. No, my dear God, that must never happen! Never, never could the boy know that his mother was – that she was – no, never!

I've got to double-lock the bedroom door, I thought, and stole into the bedroom to make sure that he was asleep. At his bedside burned a dull night-light, which cast a faint gleam on his innocent and beautiful face as he slept there with one palm under his cheek. My beloved little boy! His locks fell over his little hand; his sleep was deep and tranquil. I stood for several moments over his bed and lost myself in gazing at this angel face-to-face, this holy untouched being who was flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, this, my little god, with which my womb had been graced. And when I forced myself to look back into the parlor where everything was prepared, like a chapel where I had planned to offer my body as a sacrament, I was suddenly seized by ice-cold terror. It was as if my heart frosted over in my breast; I thought that I would faint. My dear God, what had I been planning to do?

How could I have ever thought to commit this crime against my child? What sort of excuse could I ever make to this unsuspecting, unstained, innocent child after such defilement? Because what I planned to do was the same as dishonoring the child itself, my own flesh and blood! How could an adulterous female ever be so audacious
as to lay a fingertip on her child's body, embrace such a holy angel, even if he had once been the flesh of her flesh? In the morning I would be neither a mother nor a woman anymore; I would be an abominable beast, smitten with filth, a soulless animal, a sow that has rolled itself over in the chaff!

And with what feelings would I look into my husband's eyes when he came home next? What a crime against him! All these years he has surrounded me with luxury, me, more ungrateful, more selfish than any harlot, and I have actually intentionally refused to fulfill the most basic obligations of the wife despite all of his benefactions. I've been demanding and wasteful all these years without once extending him a hand, or anything else for that matter, for his gifts. Whenever he wanted he could have shown me out the door of his house like a parasite that had no rights at all! But his patience and benevolence have been untiring. And in these rooms, which he paid for with his money, where every single thing around me was a gift from him, yes, every thread in my clothing, where his child slept safe and sound in his innocence, I did not hesitate to use the first chance that presented itself to drink from the cup of the whore. No, God Almighty, save me from this sin!