The Seducer

A Life of Harmony

As I said earlier, Jonas regarded his years at high school as an encounter with the hidden face of Norway. As luck would have it, for instance, he attended the nineteenth birthday party of one of his classmates, held not just anywhere, mind you, but in the Rococo Room of the Grand Hotel. In the early days at high school this classmate, who boasted four names rounded off by a ‘Jr.’, had seemed pretty ordinary — apart, that is, from a rather suspect green loden coat — but he had eventually given himself away with such remarks as ‘Can’t go into town with you, guys, I’ve got a flying lesson with Dad’ or ‘You’ll have to come home and meet these two Oriental girls we’ve got working in the house.’ It turned out that his parents were neighbours of Sir William up on Holmenkoll Heights, but they were not nouveaux riches like Sir William, they had inherited their fortune without having to lift a finger and they handled their status symbols in a casual often surprisingly devil-may-care manner.

For them, popping down to the Rococo Room was really just the urbane equivalent of a Saturday-night hop at the village hall, if not a less strenuous version of the only things that really interested them: sport and open-air pursuits. Incredible though it may seem, as much cachet was attached to a good slalom technique as to a seven-figure bank balance.

Here Jonas was brought face-to-face with Norway’s moneyed class, that one per mil of the Norwegian population who could contemplate hiring the Rococo Room at the Grand and inviting 200 people for a party at the drop of a hat in the middle of January, for example. And even though this was a formal dinner with everyone in evening dress, these people managed, by dint of a sort of innate nonchalance, to give what were for Jonas the most unreal surroundings, the appearance of an ordinary, everyday living-room. After dinner there was dancing to the music of a grand orchestra, strings and all. With something approaching disbelief Jonas, clad in a borrowed suit, watched young people of his own age, and especially the girls in their fabulous gowns, gliding around the floor as if it were the most natural thing in the world, in a room that sparkled with gilt, and with a tapestry on the back wall forming a museological backdrop to the orchestra — disbelief because these young people did not merely shuffle about, as Jonas was in the habit of doing, they glided, they floated across the floor in ballroom and Latin American dances, and they really could dance, adding nifty little variations of their own to the basic steps. Even so, they did not really seem to take it seriously, just as they did not take their wealth seriously, all but yawning as they danced, or with an affected fervour, giving Jonas an impression of something stylized, as if the whole set-up were a kind of opera, an enormous tableau. Jonas did not speak to anyone, he merely strolled about, nodding to this one or that; he really had nothing to talk to these people about, although they all seemed very nice. The plain fact was that they inhabited a totally different world. It was enough for Jonas simply to circulate and watch, to sit on red sofas and soak up the atmosphere — including, if the truth be told, a whiff of the odd joint — of a modern-day Norwegian ball, of a style that was totally vacuous. There was something about it all that was every bit as anachronistic, not to say comical, when compared to the world outside the windows, as all the rustic furniture with which these people filled their homes.

After midnight he suddenly began to feel very tired, because of the wine, he thought, although it might just as easily have been brought on by consternation. Nevertheless, he did not want to go home, he just needed to have a little nap.

And it was his search for a suitable spot to lay his head that brought him to the Mirror Restaurant, which was closed for the evening. He shut the glass door behind him and the sound of the music in the Rococo Room faded to a distant hubbub. He made a tour of the elegant restaurant, across the soft red carpet, beneath chandeliers reminiscent of huge and enigmatic glass plants; ran his eye over white-clothed tables and the mirrors that lined the walls, dim and mysterious, shades of a benighted Versailles. In one corner stood a grand piano draped with a black cover, like a misplaced Kaaba, a shrine. He lifted a corner of the cover, crawled under the piano and was instantly fast asleep.

He was woken by something falling on him, something light. It took a while for it to dawn on him what it was. Music. Music falling from above. Someone was playing the piano: quietly, gently. He turned his head and spied the hem of a dress and a foot on the soft pedal, one high-heeled shoe on its side next to it. He could hear no sound from the Rococo Room, had no idea what time it was. It was still pitch-dark at any rate. He lay quite still, wondering who this woman was who just sat there creating sounds, harmonies, on the piano: soft, muted sounds that ran together. As if it were raining notes. Because he could actually feel them on his body as if they were landing on him, or as if this were some sort of musical acupuncture, the light touch of note after note, soothing, immediately taking the edge off the beginnings of a hangover, filling him with a sense of well-being. She struck chord after chord, gradually building up into an alternative melody in which the notes were strung together in a more intricate fashion than in the main theme. She seemed to him to be making a voyage of discovery across the keys, into the unexplored realms of harmony, seeking out more and more new combinations, becoming more and more adventurous. Slowly the notes twisted into new patterns. A kaleidoscope for the ear. Original. He played the piano himself, knew that this was something else, something radical, the most bizarre sounds, making him think at one and the same time of Norway and of faraway places. Part of him wanted to see who was playing, another part simply wanted to lie there listening, enjoying. He lay there under the grand piano, surrounded by dark mirrors, beholding a sort of ribwork, four beams fanning out, like rays; he lay there, feeling the music created in the case above his head, infinitely beautiful music, making a tangible impression on his body, like vibrations, caresses. As if the piano itself were lying on top of him, making love to him.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Me.’

‘No, I mean who composed that?’

‘I did.’

‘It sounds … different somehow.’

‘That may have something to do with you.’

Her voice had a strange note to it. He heard her get up, the rustling of fabric, layers and layers of fabric, then saw a face peering in at him. It was her, he ought to have guessed: the girl from the Opera House. She had been very late getting to the party in the Rococo Room. Jonas had not seen her, but she had seen him.

This was, of course, Nina G. Yes, that Nina G., a composer who in years to come would occupy the same position in the national consciousness as Arne Nordheim with innumerable international projects and commissions to her name, compositions premièred at ISCM festivals, a regular visitor to such avant-garde strongholds as IRCAM. By the time Jonas met her she was already displaying an experimental approach to music, but even Jonas could not have guessed that this rather shy, sedately dressed girl — a girl who, during the summer months, dusted off both the dialect and the national costume of her native region and worked as a guide at the Folk Museum, among the lofts and wooden storehouses — that this girl would become an acclaimed pioneer, in international terms at that, in the field of computer-based composition with a flat full of electronic equipment and advanced software. Most listeners, of course, perceived her music as a series of stringent constructions, but Jonas for one realized that they in fact represented powerful emotions expressed in an alternative form.

But this was Nina G. as she was then, and Jonas knew nothing about her when she grabbed hold of his legs, hauled him partway out from under the piano and tugged his trousers down to his knees, pulling off her own tights and knickers as she did so, but retaining the frothy layers of underskirt and dress. Then, with not a word said, she sat astride him and guided him inside her, laid her hands on top of the piano at the curve in its side and slowly began to rock back and forth.

As you can see, this accords with what I said in my little discourse on Jonas Wergeland’s select group of women; it was they who took the initiative. Why? I have already mentioned that it was his face which they found seductive, but I suppose I ought to elaborate on this by saying that women have far more subtle reasons for finding a man attractive than is the case the other way round, so let me simply state, very generally, that when Nina G. settled herself on top of Jonas Wergeland, a boy who was a stranger to her, she was moved not so much by desire as by the knowledge, called it female intuition, that this was a unique opportunity, the sort of chance that comes along just once in a lifetime.

Jonas lay on a red carpet at the heart of the Grand Hotel, gazing up at the underside of a grand piano and listening to the rustle of dress fabric. Like lovemaking in an opera, extravagant, unreal, or so unreal that it became real. If he tilted his head back he could see a couple of the mirrors; how fine they looked in the darkness, how they seemed to live, to breathe. At one point she stopped her rocking, ducked down under the piano to him, found his ear, concentrated on it, letting her tongue caress it, running it round the auricle; she whispered something into it, laughed softly, groaned softly with pleasure at the coupling of their lower halves and to Jonas the whole world seemed to converge into just one sense, his hearing; with her tongue and the kisses to that organ she seemed to be opening his ear to new sounds as if she had removed a plug, enabling him to hear everything differently, not only the swishing of her dress and her breathing but also the sounds coming to his ears from beyond the walls, from the city, cars outside, a far-away voice, even the barely audible tinkling of her earrings. Jonas derived enormous pleasure from this; she seemed to him to make love in much the same way as she played the piano, a combination of something familiar and something new. She was sitting so high up on him and clenching her vaginal muscles so tightly around him that he felt as if she were pulling him, heaving him, towards a boundary and a little beyond, while at the same time drenching his ear in kisses, playing a carillon of sorts on those tiny bones in the labyrinth deep inside, whispering now and again or uttering sounds that were not words, but more like music emanating from her body and evoking a weird resonance inside him as if she were conducting his body, calling forth latent harmonies, making it thrum until it glowed.

The one thing which the women who made love to Jonas had in common was that they all instinctively sat astride him. This had nothing to do with a feminine urge to dominate, nor with the absurd concept of the ‘new man’. Without going into the highly individual reasons for adopting this position, let me simply say that this was the position that Jonas himself preferred far above any other. For him, the pleasure seemed twice as great when these women sat on top of him. Jonas gave a lot of thought to why this should be, and he came to the conclusion that more than any other this position opened the door to the cognitive potential inherent in lovemaking; when he lay on his back like that, in some strange way his thoughts were set free. Not for nothing did the Arabs call this position ‘the Archimedean screw’; this tallied with Jonas’s own feeling that the Earth could be moved during lovemaking, from one single, fixed point.

As now, on a red carpet at the heart of the Grand Hotel. The instant his penis came into contact with her vagina and slipped inside, he was struck by a sense of a chemical change in his body; he was filled with energy, raised onto a higher plane, as if by a hydraulic system created by the friction between his penis and her vagina. From Aunt Laura’s sketches he knew that the phallus formed a straight line running out from the curved form of the scrotum, like a tangent from a circle, and this was also how he regarded something of the potential inherent in his penis; by dint of this he could break out of the set cycles of thought and shoot off at a tangent that would lead to something quite different. Exactly as here, because as they built towards a climax, slowly, because he was doing his utmost to spin it out, holding back, he noticed that his thoughts were starting to travel along different lines than usual until they eventually flowed out into an idea, a vision almost, as to what he should do for Owl, the debating society. He had been asked to talk about the opera, but now it was quite clear in his mind: he would rather play. He knew just what he would do; he would play arias from the opera but using different harmonies, jazz chords, old refrains with new tonal variations. While Nina G. sat astride him, making gentle, rhythmic love to him, giving him greater and greater pleasure, since she was now gripping the edge of the piano case and was thus able to raise and lower herself gently and vary the depth of penetration, he strove to hold onto this dream, spin it out, postpone the climax, so that he could also hear how good it would sound. And that concert at the Owl meeting a couple of weeks later did indeed prove to be a sensation, an event that was still being talked about at the school years later: how Jonas Wergeland, wearing a Persian-lamb hat of the sort worn by Theolonius Monk, jazzed up some well-known arias — opening with the stirring, seductive habanera from Carmen, ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’, in a tempo and an arrangement that rendered it almost unrecognizable; following this up with Senta’s ballad from The Flying Dutchman, the wistful piece from Act II, ‘Doch, dass der arme Mann noch Erlösung fände auf Erden’, and adding most tellingly in the transition to ‘Ach, könntest du, bleicher Seeman, es finden’ some harmonies that sent chills up the audience’s spines. Last but not least he had played Don Giovanni’s and Zerlina’s duet, ‘Là ci darme la mano’, with a number of chords and springs from one key to another that made people gasp, partly because nobody could see how such a wealth of sound could be produced from one solitary piano. There were those who knew what they were talking about — and bear in mind that Jonas never made any effort to take this further — who believed Jonas Wergeland to be Norway’s greatest jazz talent since Jan Garbarek. It was not that Nina G. passed on this gift, by osmosis as it were or, to be more specific, by way of her moist vagina; nonetheless, it was thanks to her that he could suddenly see, or hear this potential within himself. Through Nina G. he discovered a different and unknown gear in music.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Jonas Wergeland was still lying on his back, his upper half under a grand piano in the Mirror Restaurant of the Grand Hotel, aware that Nina G. had started to tense into a tremulous, increasingly vehement rhythm, and was uttering sounds which made it quite clear to him that she was approaching a peak, or heading into something; and so eager was she, or so carried away, that just before she came, with a soft, muffled whimper like a glissando from the high to the low notes, she banged her head against the piano case, producing a sound, faint, but nonetheless audible, that swelled up among the dark mirrors and filled the room with a sort of fog of sound that Jonas was to hear again long afterwards — he would have sworn to it — built into one of her most famous pieces. And even though he did not want the pleasure to end, he too had to succumb to his orgasm, which he always dreaded slightly, or disliked because it interrupted a marvellous train of thought, snuffing it out. Jonas Wergeland could well understand why orgasm was known as ‘the little death’.