The Seducer

The Great White Whale

And so, and here I am thinking of the discovery of the planet Pluto, in every life there are stories which are not immediately apparent but which you know are there due to their unseen effect on other people and the known stories. I fumbled about in the dark for a long time before coming upon the story I am now about to tell, one that ought to be told at this particular juncture, while we are on the subject of astronomy and molecular biology, since it was hardly a coincidence that the moon, La Luna, should have been the focus of world attention during the summer when Jonas Wergeland first shot his genetic package at a girl’s womb, or, as it is so grandly termed, made his sexual debut.

The house on Hvaler had stood empty since his grandfather’s death, and Jonas was not sure how he would take being back on the island again when he set foot on it in the middle of July, after several tedious weeks of sorting mail for the Post Office. But the minute he dumped his rucksack down in the yard between the nasturtium-covered rockeries, he began to feel that this summer might spell the beginning of a new era. This was Jonas Wergeland’s first summer as the Duke, and by a stroke of good luck he had two whole weeks to himself, before his mother and Buddha came down from Grorud. And, as if to physically mark the passing of a very difficult phase in his life, Marie F. appeared on, or floated onto, the scene.

Jonas was down on the jetty, seeing to a mooring line when she slid, suddenly and soundlessly, into his line of sight in a slender white kayak, an older model. She backed water, held still, smiled up at him. The oars glinted. She was not brown like the other girls: if anything she was pure-white. And pretty well built. Or voluptuous, Jonas decided later. She had fair hair and blue eyes and Jonas, standing there with the rope in his hand, in the middle of tying a half-hitch, felt that tingle starting all the way down at his tail-bone and slowly working its way up to the back of his neck as if his spine had turned into some kind of thermometer.

He stretched out on the jetty, on his stomach. She held the kayak still. They talked, while minnows and jellyfish glided past in the perfectly clear water, transparent as an aquarium. She came from Sandefjord but was studying at the College of Commerce in Oslo. She was visiting an aunt on the other side of the island. Jonas told her about his grandfather. They talked half the day away, while dapples of sunlight danced on the hull of the kayak, leaving rippling patterns on the sandy bed when the odd crab sidled past.

It was a two-man kayak and the next day, after she had got rid of the ballast, she took him out in it. The weather had been quite beautiful for weeks, the sea like a millpond most of the time. They paddled all the way out to Tisler. Jonas was surprised by just how fast they could move if they put a bit of effort into it; he loved the nice sound the slender vessel made as it sliced through the water, liked paddling in time, in sync, sitting behind her, copying her movements, watching the play of the muscles across her back, bare apart from the straps of her bikini, white skin and a faint tang of sweat from her armpits. ‘I prefer a kayak,’ she said, ‘because you sit so close to the water, almost become part of it.’ They had the sea pretty much to themselves, this being before the waters around the skerries were transformed into something akin to a motorway, trafficked by a constant stream of whining motor boats — a fleet whose numbers and aggregate value increased in inverse ratio to the general grousing about hard times and the size of the national deficit.

On the way back they took it a bit easier, partly because they had for some time been surrounded by the rolling backs of porpoises, like wheels in the water, accompanied by a lot of snorting; Jonas found it a bit frightening, while Marie F. was almost beside herself with excitement. Once the porpoises had swum off, she laid her paddle across the kayak and leaned back against his knees. He carried on paddling gently, far too gently to explain the pounding of his heart, and propped up against him like that, with her fingers trailing in the water, she told him about her love of the sea. ‘Just think, seven tenths of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean and yet we know next to nothing about it,’ she said. Jonas paddled in long slow strokes across the smooth water, black and pale-blue, aware of the scent of her hair, the soft body against his shins. ‘If we don’t start learning to understand the sea soon we’ll never survive,’ she said, straightening up, then she turned and looked at Jonas, a long look, before picking up her oar and sending the kayak shooting forward. Jonas always had the feeling that she was talking about herself.

Sometimes they went out fishing in the rowboat in the evening. No one was catching anything those days. Folk said the weather was too good. But Marie pulled in fish. Always. She kissed the bait before she let out the line and the fish would bite before the sinker reached the bottom, all kinds of fish: whiting, codling, even flounder. Marie F. fished for mackerel with a ground-line. She could have caught a whole boatful had it been necessary.

Jonas never caught a thing, he simply sat on the thwart, opening mussels and admiring her. Or sometimes he might take out his mouth organ and give her Duke Ellington’s ‘Isfahan’ as music to work by. Rowing them home, he watched her cleaning the fish, swiftly and expertly, while a flock of gulls gorged themselves on the guts that she tossed overboard.

She was an expert at cooking the fish, too. It was not just that she had the same magic touch as his grandfather for fried mackerel with the crispest golden skin, she also served Jonas such surprising dishes as, for example, fish roulade with slices of apple, Chinese fish soup, trout with bacon, red peppers and tomatoes, and, as if that were not enough, she showed him, to his astonishment, that you could actually eat fish raw. On one occasion she had succeeded, thanks to her magical kissing of the bait, in hauling in a catfish — a terrifying monster that made great show with its horrible teeth and jaws in the bailer before she managed to kill it — then later, when she was filleting the catfish, neatly and beautifully, she sliced off a chunk and offered it to him, and for the first time Jonas discovered, to his delight, how fish really tasted. In other words, Marie F. pre-empted Jonas’s introduction to the later so popular Japanese sushi by at least ten years.

I might as well tell you right here and now that Marie F. is none other than a woman who can now boast of a dazzling career in the Norwegian business world, regularly cited and featured in the media as one of the very few women to reach the top. After graduating from college, she joined the frozen-foods concern Frionor but soon left to set up her own company, which she ran with such rare flair and inventiveness that it rose to become the very flagship of all companies exporting Norwegian fish, and not only salmon; she was, it goes without saying, smart enough to avoid becoming reliant on the vagaries of the one fish-farming venture.

But as I say, on this particular summer the focus was on La Luna; it was the summer of the lunar landing, on one of those very nights when everyone was sitting at home, eyes glued to the television screen, to watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon. Jonas, on the other hand, was filled with a longing for something much more down-to-earth: not a white planet but a voluptuous white body. Given the choice of being on board the lunar landing vehicle or sinking into the depths of Marie F., he did not have to think twice. That summer Neil was overshadowed by Louis Armstrong: What a wonderful world.

They often paddled out to the islets to swim. Sometimes Marie F. read a book, Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. She was reading it in French. She was good at languages. One day she swam naked. Her skin was only a little whiter in the parts the bikini had covered. She looked magnificent, with a body that would have had a seventeenth-century painter scrabbling for his brush, the breasts of a fertility goddess. She gambolled about in the water. Jonas had to lie flat on his stomach to hide his erection. She dived, displaying an ample rear end, as if in triumph, before going under. Jonas was put in mind of a great white whale, one into which he would gladly — more than gladly — have stuck his harpoon. She turned onto her back in the water. Her blonde pubic hair shimmered, a golden fleece, enticing.

‘Come on in,’ she shouted. Bent double, he made his way down to the rock, and executed a swallow dive perfected at the Torggata Baths. She swam to meet him, gently wrapped her arms around him and let herself sink. He sank with her, down into the water, it seemed to him that they went deep down; she stopped, they were several metres underwater when she said something, bubbles rising to the surface, before putting her lips to his mouth and kissing him, kissing him long, as long as she had breath, and she could hold her breath for a long time, longer than Jonas who, despite the almost unbearable pleasure, the contact with her naked body, finally had to kick off with his feet and float to the surface.

‘What did you say?’ he gasped when she too broke the surface just afterwards.

‘Mon petit prince,’ she said.

On other occasions they dived together, put on masks and swam through corridors of red weed and sea anemone: a swaying, alien world. Marie F. shot fish with a simple homemade harpoon — all in all she was unfailingly inventive. Back at the house she poked around in the boathouse, checking out lobster pots and grapnels, lines and hooks, sorting and fixing, mending and splicing, lashing this and binding that. And all the time this whiteness, her skin, among the nets and ropes, her great body which Jonas’s eyes could not get enough of, which he longed for with something akin to anguish.

One afternoon when they were lazing on one of the islets, on a smooth rounded rock that oozed heat, Marie F. suggested that they should have a fishing competition. The one who caught the most fish in an hour could ask whatever they wanted of the other. Jonas had nothing against that, absolutely nothing against it. They positioned themselves one on either side of the islet, Jonas with his old rod and Abu reel, desperate to catch some fish — so eager that he actually kissed the spoon-bait before casting.

Jonas did not get a bite, only succeeded in reeling in the odd clump of weed when the hook became stuck. Marie F. came strolling up to him carrying six fine frying cod. They paddled back to the jetty. Up at the yard, before she left, she turned to him: ‘Meet me down at the boathouse tonight at eight,’ she said. It was July 29th, St Olaf’s Day, although that was the last thing on Jonas’s mind. On the western horizon, where the sun was setting, the sky was aflame — red, orange, violet — but he had no eyes for that, he was waiting for Marie F. down by the boathouse, and she came. ‘There’s a full moon tonight,’ she said, pointing to the beach, the tide. ‘The sea’s flexing its muscles,’ she said, smiling, in shorts and a sweater, white thighs, nothing under the sweater but swelling breasts. She nipped into the boathouse and brought out a sail, shook it, took him by the hand. ‘Remember, I can ask for anything I want,’ she said and led him by the hand to an old peter-boat that lay on the shore belly up; it had lain like that for years. They crawled underneath it, there was plenty of room, a vaulted space, she spread the sail out on the grass, asked him to undress and lie on his back, he did so, she did the same, gleaming white in the dim light; she took his penis in her hand, not smiling, very solemn, the air was filled with all sorts of smells: grass, salt, oil, tar, seaweed; she ran her eye over his penis, a different look on her face, ardent, a sort of a glow to her cheeks, an urgency, he never forgot the sight of her, her voluptuous white body as she raised herself slightly, then proceeded to ease herself down on to him, one hand to her vulva, opening the way, or the wonderful, almost explosive, feeling when, for the first time, he felt a woman’s labia against the tip of his penis, the moistness, the surprising warmth, and the nigh-on stupefying sensation of sexual excitement when she lowered herself right down on to him, burying him in her smooth, soft, warm vagina, or as Jonas himself would have put it: wrapped her yoni around his lingam. Never, not even in his wildest dreams, not even during his best wanking sessions, had Jonas imagined that it could be so indescribably, itchingly, staggeringly delightful.

And this is worth noting, because even though Jonas had been prepared for the unique potential of lovemaking by his parents’ fine demonstration, he could not help but be affected by all the murky rumours and fantasies that did the rounds among the lads, in which the monomaniacal lust after the female genitals also gave rise to an undying myth as to how dangerous it was: that sticking your dick into a woman’s vagina was like sticking it between two millstones, not to mention into the maw of a catfish, with the result that sex was not only bound up with longing, but also with a certain dread. Nevertheless, most of them agreed, perhaps as a consolation for having had to wait so long, that it came as a disappointment to all, that sex was highly overrated.

Not so for Jonas Wergeland. There, on St Olaf’s Night, under the belly of a peter-boat, with a sail under his back, he knew that he had never experienced anything more wonderful than the feel of Marie F.’s great, white body and most especially her smooth, velvety, warm vagina. It far surpassed all of his greatest hopes and dreams. And he was given plenty of opportunity to fix this moment in his memory, his first time, because they were in no hurry, lying there under the vault of the boat surrounded by the scents of seaweed, tar, oil, grass; Marie F. bent over him and let him kiss her breasts, let him lick the coating of salt on her skin while she gyrated, growing wetter, slicker, her juices running down over his thighs; he had entered a chamber full of precious oil, fragrant oil, warm oil, gurgling sounds, little splashes, like the sound of the waves when he lay in the bottom of the rowboat; she reared over him, large, white, moving gently and slowly, massaging him with oil, again he was reminded of a ball-bearing, had the feeling of being at the hub of something, in touch with a warm, intelligent being; her movements became more intense, his cock was awash, sloshing about in a springtide of warm oil, a wildly mounting pleasure, a thrill beyond anything he could ever have imagined, such softness, such smoothness, such whiteness; he had visions of diving, sinking down into warm water, and just before he came, just before he shot his own little drop of fluid into that deep mysterious ocean of female oils, he turned his eyes up to the timbers of the peter-boat’s hull and it occurred to him that they looked like ribs, that he was inside the belly of a whale.

They lay there for ages, on the old sail, under a vaulted roof bathed in the light of the full moon, while the sea showed its muscles in the slow run of the tide. They made love three times. At no time did Jonas feel lethargic or sleepy or depressed, as some people say can happen. He felt wide-awake, felt as if their lovemaking had opened his eyes: as if, rather than squirting something out, he had been filled up.

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone to learn that from that day on, Jonas Wergeland was blessed with the most amazing fisherman’s luck; and this luck was to stay with him all his life, ensuring that he could get a bite anywhere, all he had to do was put out his hook — he even caught catfish. At first he thought it was simply that the fish had at long last returned. A couple of years were to go by before he perceived the connection.

Even so, when he crawled out from under the peter-boat, he knew that something must have happened, something to do with his imagination, because when he looked at the full moon, his first thought was that it resembled the head of a white whale suddenly rising up out of the dark-blue sea of the cosmos. Until then, he had always thought the full moon looked like a fuzzy old tennis-ball.