The Seducer

The Magic Penis

One limb which, fortunately for Jonas Wergeland, came to no harm either that time on Hvaler or later in life, was the one between his legs. Apparently there is a local museum, somewhere in France, where Napoleon’s testicles are preserved for posterity in a glass jar, and I seriously believe that plans ought to be made now for doing the same with Jonas Wergeland’s golden balls so that some day their secret may be disclosed, much as the brains of certain geniuses have been examined in order to see whether they are folded differently from the norm. I have already given some hint of what I am getting at here, so I might as well come right out with it: Jonas Wergeland had a magic penis.

Jonas must have had some notion of his amazing good fortune after that confirmation act of fellatio — and his subsequent clearing of the high-jump bar backwards — but the true 24-carat quality of his balls was not brought home to him until he came into contact with girls who were prepared to wrap themselves around him in other, more radical, ways. So when he found himself lying in a daze on the floor of the old library in Oslo Cathedral School, with the aforementioned member throbbingly erect, he was in no doubt whatsoever; he knew that he was in possession of a wonderful gift: in other words, that anything could happen when Christine A. completed the manoeuvre on which she had begun, lowering herself down onto him or, as Jonas thought to himself, slowly burying his lingam in her warm, smooth yoni.

Is that possible — I mean, for a penis to have quite exceptional qualities? I know that I am touching here on a subject most people find more fascinating than they care to admit. You need only look at those inane, yet nonetheless increasingly popular newspaper columns dispensing advice on sexual matters; all those useless experts, so devoid of fantasy — and ‘devoid of fantasy’ is, in this instance, a well-considered term of abuse — who imagine themselves to be divine authorities in this sphere. I apologize for allowing my inherent sang-froid and forbearance to desert me, but if these people had the gumption, just now and again, to raise their blinkered eyes and look at the answers they come up with from … oh, just a couple of decades into the future, ten to one they would choose their words with much more care and humility, not to mention irony. I would like to set at rest the minds of all those who have had their doubts as to the substance of such dogmatic utterances — all credit to you — on losing one’s virginity, on impotence, on jealousy and vaginal orgasms by stating that they are for the most part a load of inconsequential claptrap churned out at a random point in time in some quite specific part of the world. Swallow rubbish like that and you will certainly have no difficulty in accepting the notion of a magic penis.

Over the years Jonas would often wonder what it was about his organ that put him in this, in two senses, fortunate position, and since it could not possibly have anything to do with size or staying power, he thought it must be down to its form. When he inspected his member, particularly during the transition from limp to erect state — an activity in which all boys regularly indulge — he began to suspect that it had something to do with a bit of a curve, possibly in conjunction with the hint of a spiral form, not unlike the horn of a kudu for anyone who has ever seen one of those: that it was this which drove women wild, not least when they sat astride him, in which position they claimed to experience ‘an utterly divine pleasure’ as one woman put it — although, for the record, I feel bound to object to that adjective — or that he ‘hit the G-spot dead-on’ as another, more feminist-minded girl breathlessly informed him back in the days when there was a lot of talk about this particular phenomenon: a pure fiction, of course, if that is of any comfort to those women who have hunted for it in vain. As it happens, it was these comments on the source of the magic which gave Jonas Wergeland his first inkling of form as the be-all and end-all.

Early in the spring of his second year at high school Jonas became better acquainted with a girl in the class above him: Christine A., a girl with a delicate tracery of blue veins at her temples who was notorious for having an almost daunting gift for mathematics, a gift she would go on to develop, after graduating from high school, at various foreign universities, among them the world-renowned Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where she was a protégé of the pioneering Norwegian mathematician Atle Selberg — in fact, in the mid-eighties the Norwegian television network NRK did a programme on her which Jonas watched with an interest that spoke to his colleagues of something more than mere professional curiosity.

Jonas, on the other hand, had no head for maths. Quite frankly, he hated maths, mainly because this subject persisted in remaining a closed book to him. There are two types of people in this world: those who understand the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise and those who do not. Jonas belonged most definitely to the latter group. He simply could not grasp why Achilles could never catch up with the tortoise, let alone understand such totally senseless conceptions as incommensurable quantities, irrational numbers and periodic decimal fractions. Geometry he could cope with, set theory too, at a pinch, but algebra … as far as Jonas was concerned algebra made about as much sense as ‘abracadabra’. His little red book was of no use when it came to mathematics, not even James Clerk Maxwell’s pithy warning as to the dangers of limited knowledge. That his marks reflected this shortcoming was the result not of laziness but sheer incomprehension.

Christina A. was not one of those razor-sharp minds who can add up quicker in their head than anyone else could with a slide-rule, or who laughed at their teacher’s pathetic blackboard antics; she was a deep thinker, her strength lay in posing unexpected questions, perceiving connections between different sets of problems, turning things on their head in the style of one of her heroes, the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer. Nor was she an out-and-out pragmatist, as a type, I mean. She took just as great an interest in other subjects, not least Norwegian. The school magazine ran a colourful portrait of her in which she was pictured against a blackboard covered in transcendent and elliptical functions, while the best part of the interview was taken up with her talking about authors such as Julio Cortázar and Iris Murdoch, names quite unknown to Jonas.

Christine A. was also a monitor in the reading room in which Jonas could be found dutifully dashing off his homework before class. More than once he had felt her eyes on him when she thought he wasn’t looking, and he had long since been alerted to her indubitably high calibre by that little, aesthetic lightning bolt between his shoulder blades. Once, on walking past her and noticing that the sheet of paper in front of her was covered in figures and letters, he was tempted to say: ‘Beats me how you can be bothered with anything so abstract.’

‘What makes you think it’s so abstract?’ she asked.

‘Algebra’s all Greek to me,’ said Jonas.

‘Well, I could start by telling you that the word itself actually comes from the Arabic,’ she said. ‘And see here …’ She drew a six. ‘Six is a perfect number. D’you think that’s abstract?’ Jonas thought it looked like a hard-on. ‘If it weren’t for numbers, for mathematics, mankind would still be stuck in the Stone Age,’ said Christine A., and when the school bell chose just that moment to ring she coolly asked him to wait behind.

When everyone, even the keenest chess players, had gone off to their classrooms she ushered him out of the room and led him, by the hand almost, up the stairs, past the gilt-lettered memorial plaques and the portraits of famous pupils, which always gave Jonas the feeling of being in a mausoleum, to the second floor where she let them in to room thirty-seven — one number that would come to hold some relevance for Jonas — where the school’s collection of antiquarian books was housed. Books for borrowing were also kept here, hence the reason that Christina A. had a key. Having little or no knowledge of these all-but secret chambers, Jonas stood for a moment running his eye around a room in which every available inch of wall space was taken up by bookshelves containing thousands of what looked like very old books indeed, with hide bindings in every shade of brown and spines of dull gold with patches of scuffed red showing here and there. Jonas could take books or leave them, but this quite took his breath away. The general impression, induced mainly by the galleries running round the three sides not overlooking the playground, with their stairs and iron railings, combined with the dust and the stuffy atmosphere, was of a set for a Gothic horror movie.

Christine A. pulled out an old book bound in parchment. ‘Feel this,’ she said. ‘Arithmetica Universalis,” Jonas read. Written by one Isaac Newton. An edition from 1732, if he read the Roman numerals aright. ‘Take a look inside,’ she said. Jonas leafed through the book, running his eye over words in Latin and rows of numbers with the odd set of brackets here and there; he could not help but find it beautiful. Christine A. produced another heavy volume bound in pale calfskin from a safe. Jonas opened it. ‘Ionnis Keppleri, Harmonices Mundi,’ he read, fingering the thick rag paper. ‘Kepler’s Third Law,’ she said. ‘A first edition from 1619.’ He pored over the text, the profusion of beautiful illustrations, the geometric drawings; ran his fingers over the letters, the indentations in the paper. ‘This must be worth a fair bit,’ said Jonas. ‘A quarter of a million kroner,” said Christine A. ‘Still think it’s abstract?’

Jonas could hardly believe it. Here he was, in his own school, in a room he had never entered before, surrounded by books worth twenty-five to thirty million kroner: smouldering gold lettering on every side. Then, with consummate self-assurance, Christine A. wrapped her arms around him and kissed him long, until his body was red-hot and it struck him that this was not only a storehouse for books but also the storehouse of a power station producing an unknown form of energy.

‘Would you like me to show you something even more valuable?’ she asked and drew him up the stairs to the gallery where another, internal, stairway led up to the third floor and another store of books, through the wall from the music room where an indomitable singing teacher was endeavouring, yet again, to make dozy pupils sing ‘Stabat Mater’ in four-part harmony. The room lay in semi-darkness. Christine A. moved right up close to him, stood there with those translucent temples making him feel that the brain must be the body’s most erogenous zone, before resolutely pulling him down onto the floor among piles of old books and making love to him far into the next period — and, I might say, beyond that into the realms of mathematics. While his form was in a maths class, struggling with digital roots and potency, he was lying on the third floor, under a roof that sloped down to meet the windows, being tutored, in much more cogent fashion, in digital roots and potency. So it is no exaggeration to say that it was Christine A. who finally set mathematics into the right context for Jonas Wergeland, who showed him the relationship between mathematics and life.

The moment she lowered herself down onto him, Jonas could tell that she had what he would have called a mathematical yoni: for one thing, because she gave him a sense of being in close touch with an equation, full of unknowns, and — even more so — because she promptly began to execute geometric figures over his pelvis, using his penis as a sort of compass point, as if from that spot she were attempting to shift the Earth. After a while she turned to concentrating on figures of eight, the most incredibly delightful rotations that put Jonas in mind of a book he owned in which it said: ‘This position can only be mastered by dint of much practice.’ She sat astride him, executing these figures of eight with such virtuosity and for so long that Jonas caught a glimpse of himself from the outside; of himself there, in that room, among the dull gold of the book spines, an image which reminded him of the pictures on his grandfather’s biscuit boxes depicting a man holding a biscuit box bearing the same picture of a man holding a biscuit box and so on, further and further in. Not only that, she also seemed to be screwing him upwards towards some lofty lookout point from which, just before she stopped in order to take pleasure in her own orgasm, he had a fleeting impression of gazing upon infinity itself.

I ought perhaps to mention that Jonas Wergeland was one of only a handful to obtain an A in his final maths exam, something which no one would have bet on the year before. It was as if, after that period with Christine A. in a storehouse full of learned tomes, Jonas suddenly got the picture, saw the point in looking for known or unknown quantities. All at once everything seemed so clear, even Achilles and the tortoise, which was, of course, a variant of the problem of infinity. The whole of this ‘aha’ experience was something akin to a key that simply needed to be given an extra little turn for the lock to click open.

This incident provided Jonas with quite unmistakeable proof of his penis’s magic properties. For while he could always explain away other such occurrences — convince himself that he had a latent talent for drawing, for example, or athletics — in his heart of hearts he knew that if there was one thing he was not, it was a mathematician.