Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was

xix

From morning to evening, from evening to night and through to the early hours, for nine days running, the boy accompanies Dr. Garibaldi Árnason and Sóla G— on visits to the sick.

They do the rounds in a vehicle borrowed from the Reykjavík Automobile Association, which the boy recognized immediately from the engine sound as belonging to the man who had winked at him in the garage yard. The man had died early that month, and when no driver was left at the station to take his place in the Ford, Sóla G— was called in and put behind the wheel, though she had no license: her skill at riding the red Indian was well known, and it did no harm either that Dr. Garibaldi had been at school with her father.

Every day the boy presents himself at the garage, where Sóla G— awaits him with a full tank and the engine growling in the gray dawn. They pick up the doctor, and then their first port of call is the health station, where Dr. Garibaldi fetches the list of the day’s home visits, arranged according to the severity of the emergency.

The symptoms of the Spanish flu are as follows:

A raging fever (rising to 109), headache, earache, soreness in the throat and chest; a dry cough producing slimy mucus, either yellow or streaked with blood; pains in the muscles and joints; and diarrhea. Nosebleeds are common, especially among adolescents, and almost impossible to stanch. The blood gushes not only from the nostrils but from the ears and gums as well, coming up from the lungs and stomach, or down from the intestines and out through the urethra. And on top of this, the most lethal complications of all: acute bronchitis and pneumonia, even when people have made every effort to take care and stay in their beds.

The majority of the afflicted lie in a daze; the rest are unable to sleep. Men can run amok in their delirium — a danger to themselves and other members of their household — and cannot be restrained by any means other than an injection of scopolamine. All pregnant women fall ill and many go on to miscarry.

Often, once the pneumonia has abated and the fever has dropped, or even gone away altogether, the heart begins to race, and in no time at all the victim is finished off by a cardiac arrest, or else the face and limbs swell up and death comes about by suffocation.

In many cases the skin takes on a bluish tinge. Corpses turn blue-black.

There are ten thousand stricken townspeople, ten doctors, three overflowing hospitals, and one pharmacy, which is closed due to the illness of the druggist and all his dispensers.

All over town flu victims lie in a huddle, racked by coughs, aches, and dehydration, too delirious to fetch water to quench their thirst; in the more affluent homes, the medicine bottles stand within reach, untouched.

In one turf-roofed farmhouse on Brádrædisholt, in the west of town, they find the stiffened body of a man lying in the marital bed, and beside it a desperately ill woman with the corpse of an infant in the crook of each arm. Along the walls are cots, each with one or two heads peeping over the sides. The husband had died leaving five young children, and his wife had fallen ill before she could raise the alarm. Shortly afterward she gave birth to stillborn twins. A neighbor came upon her by chance.

While Dr. Garibaldi tends to the mother, Sóla and Máni shroud the bodies of the twins in pillowcases and carry them out to the car.

An hour later, on Grettisgata, they hear the death rattle of the solitary occupant at the very instant they enter the damp little basement room.

* * *

No matter how distressing the scenes, the boy remains impassive. Scarcely a word falls from his lips over the nine days.

Reykjavík has, for the first time, assumed a form that reflects his inner life: a fact he would not confide to anyone.

xx

Sóla G—! She is as magnificent up close as from afar!

On their drives around town, Máni Steinn sits beside her in the front. Behind them Dr. Garibaldi Árnason sprawls on the leather-upholstered passenger seat. Between visits he leafs through reports or writes comments in a notebook. He has strictly forbidden his driver and assistant to talk so he can concentrate on his reading and jotting and hear himself think — after all, the motor-car makes enough of a racket without the addition of young people’s idle chatter.

The boy watches the girl’s every move:

How she holds the steering wheel; how she changes gear; how she climbs out of the vehicle and into it; how she rests her booted right foot on the running board on the driver’s side while they are waiting for the doctor; how she wedges a cigarette in her plastic holder; how she inhales the smoke; how she spits a flake of tobacco from her tongue.

What impresses him most is how unaffectedly she performs all these actions; how easy it is for her to be Sóla G—.

Now he is watching her open the door of an apartment on the first floor of a house on one of the town’s more prosperous streets, on the last visit of the day.

— Hello, anybody home?

Dr. Garibaldi calls in through the door. It is dark inside; an electric lamp in the stairwell casts a faint light into the hall. When no answer is heard, the doctor nods to the boy to enter first.

— There should be a man in here …

The boy gropes his way inside in the gloom. Curtains are pulled across all the windows, and the air is thick with the stench of vomit, blood, urine, and excrement. He pauses, takes a Lysol-soaked cloth from his pocket, and holds it up to his mouth and nose before proceeding.

There is no one in the kitchen, no one in the bedroom, no one in the bathroom, no one in the sitting room. He calls to the doctor:

— There’s nobody here!

But just as the boy is about to go back into the hall he notices a strip of light in the wallpaper in the corner of the room beside the stove. On closer inspection, it turns out that there is a door concealed in the wall, which would by daylight be invisible to all except those who knew it was there.

He pushes it open. There is a compartment inside.

By the dim illumination of a reading lamp on a small desk, the boy makes out a chair and bookcase, artfully fitted into the space; walls lined with tight ranks of pictures featuring timeless motifs — Adonis and Pan, satyrs and shepherds, Saint Sebastian — and, at the edge of the pool of light, a divan bed containing a shadowy figure under a thick quilt.

The boy recognizes the man. One of his first gentlemen — the kindest of all until he met the foreigner — from whom he no longer demands payment. And who, after their last meeting, had gazed deep into his eyes and said with a catch in his voice:

Had we but another world and time

Our passionate embraces were no crime.

Dr. Garibaldi and Sóla G— appear behind the boy. The shadowy form on the divan stirs. The doctor squeezes into the compartment, pauses beside the desk on which lies a pale-blue book with two poppies on the cover, and mutters the title:

— Mikael.

The occupant of the compartment waves a hand at him, saying hoarsely:

— Never mind that I read Herman Bang, Doctor — be my savior and restore me to life.

The boy backs out the door before the man can spot him.

Sóla G— follows him into the passage.

There in the gloom, Máni Steinn watches as the girl places a bracing hand on his shoulder. She’s well acquainted with the comings and goings of Reykjavík’s evening walkers on Öskjuhlíd.

He knows all about her; she knows only this about him.

xxi

In the course of his home visits, Dr. Garibaldi Árnason has been collecting a variety of information about the pattern of the Spanish flu, asking patients, among other things, where and how they believe they caught the disease.

A fair number think it must have been “at the pictures.”

Once the doctor is convinced of the role played by the picture houses in the spread of the disease, he arranges, through the Board of Health, for the cinemas to be specially fumigated and for a public announcement to be made:

To make people stop and think about what sort of buildings these are and what goes on inside them, and to question whether such goings-on are desirable.

For Dr. Garibaldi has long endeavored to persuade his countrymen of the dangers inherent in gawking at films.

* * *

One factor that renders film such an irresistible experience is the opportunity it affords the audience to observe other people without shame. From the safety of his seat in the darkened auditorium, the cinemagoer can, besides taking in the story that is being shown, subject the “men” and “women” on screen to a close scrutiny of the sort that would be unthinkable in society at large; on the streets, in places of employment, in cafés, in shops, in churches, or even in theaters, since in the latter the actor can, at any moment, turn on the audience and reprimand any person he feels is ogling him rather than attending to the fate of his character.

The distinction, in other words, lies in the fact that what is presented to the gaze of the cinema viewer is not real flesh-and-blood human beings but only moving pictures of people, “simulacra” created from light and shadow at the moment when the actor is filmed lending his body and emotions to the puppet that is then placed on view.

Anyone who has observed a child playing with a doll will know how intently the child examines it by touch as well as gaze. Fingers and eyes probe the physical form with the precision of a master surgeon who has been assigned the task of dissecting a body to the bone. Every nook and cranny is inspected; nape of neck and ear, groin and instep are caressed.

In the same fashion, the cinema audience scrutinizes the light-puppets on the silver screen, and whether it is the curve of Asta Nielsen’s back, Theda Bara’s naked shoulders, Pina Menichelli’s sensual eyelids, Clara Kimball Young’s slim ankles, Musidora’s Cupid’s bow, Gunnar Tolnæs’s strong fingernails, Douglas Fairbanks’s firm thighs, or Max Linder’s soft eyes, the body part in question and its position will become the focus of the viewer’s existence and etch itself into his psyche, while the size of the image and the repeated close-ups of lips, teeth, and even tongues will exacerbate the effects until few have the strength to resist them.

Film is thus immoral by its very nature, transforming the actor into a fetish and fostering perversion in the viewer, who allows himself to be seduced like a moth to the flame. The difference lies in that the cinema audience’s appointment is with the cold flicker of the flame rather than the searing fire itself. The moth burns up, but the viewer can, without fear, surrender to his escalating desire and seek out the experience over and over again, as is, alas, far too often the case.

— Dr. G. Árnason, excerpt from “Cinema and Mental Disorders,” The Nation 23 (1916)

* * *

On the evening of Tuesday, November 26—the day that twenty-six funerals are held at the cathedral and the coffins are interred in a single mass grave in the northeastern corner of the cemetery — Máni Steinn and Sóla G— pass through the auditoriums of the Old and New Cinemas, igniting chlorine gas on the doctor’s instructions.

Dressed in black from top to toe, with black gauze over their noses and mouths and dark goggles over their eyes, they drip hydrochloric acid into ceramic jars containing a solution of calcium chloride, which they have placed at intervals between the seats.

As soon as the cloud of vapor begins to rise, they race outside into the street, closing the doors firmly behind them.

Trembling with excitement, the boy pretends to cough.

The greenish-yellow gas that had lately felled young men on the battlefields of Europe now drifts and rolls through the picture houses of Reykjavík.