The Seducer

Journey to the Centre of the Night

The name of the woman to whom Sir William was referring was Dagny M., and Jonas had met her one Sunday at Katten, a popular bathing spot on the shores of Oslo Fjord, after his last dip of the year. Jonas Wergeland was, as we know, a keen swimmer. He had been sitting on the rocks, gazing out across the water, overcome by a strange melancholy, when he became conscious that someone was watching him — no, staring at him — and when he looked up she did not take her eyes off him but simply went on staring as intensely as if she were capturing him on film. The fact that she had strawberry-blond hair barely registered with Jonas, and he took no note at all of what she was wearing although that was pretty much par for the course: Jonas Wergeland seldom latched on to more than one feature of a person and in Dagny M.’s case this feature was her eyes, which is to say that piercing look. She had also made up her face in a striking manner which deliberately drew attention to her eyes, and that in itself was remarkable enough, this being the seventies and makeup not exactly what one could call a top priority with women of her age.

Jonas rose to his feet and walked up towards the road towards the bus stop and noticed nothing until she was right alongside him. He saw that she was also wearing nail polish and an unusual shade of lipstick and that her eyes were not green, as one might have thought and as the newspapers would often have it, but blue, very blue, brilliant blue eyes. ‘You’d better come with me,’ she said.

Only then, walking up the slope towards Mosseveien, did Jonas recognize that sign which he reckoned to be just about fail-safe: a shiver creeping slowly from his tail-bone to the back of his neck, to leave a tingling sensation between his shoulder blades as if a silver thread running up his spine had been gently warmed up. And so he did not hesitate to follow her. To say no would have been tantamount to refusing a very precious gift.

She took him to an old Swiss-style villa sitting on the hill above the road, with a magnificent view of the fjord. She wanted, quite simply, to paint him, have him to model for her, that is. The fact that she was an artist made no impact on Jonas, but he might have been surprised had he known how famous she would one day become. Dagny M. had a very rare gift: she was a trailblazer who would receive much acclaim in the course of her life, not to mention many international honours, for her groundbreaking works, and many people believed that she alone had saved Norwegian art from utter mediocrity and provincialism at a time when even criticism of new Norwegian art tended to be pretty poor, as was demonstrated, not least, by the embarrassingly judgemental response to her first exhibition.

‘Would you mind undressing?’ she said. So he took off his clothes, asked no questions. ‘Underpants, too,’ she said. He took off his underpants, and Dagny M. spent a long time studying his member, unashamedly, with a rapture that she made no attempt to conceal and which quite confirmed one of Aunt Laura’s favourite sayings, that the cock is a work of art.

‘Sit over there,’ she said, pointing to a chair. She worked feverishly for about an hour. Jonas had the feeling that she hardly looked at him or, if she did look at him, her glance flickered over his genitals rather than his face and the rest of his body. From the chair he could look out of the window at the scenery and the fjord. The light began to fade. He gazed down on the calm waters showing between the trees and the roofs of the houses and noted the lovely lines formed by the beach and the Nesodden peninsula farther out, an observation that gave him pause: never before had he taken pleasure in a landscape for the line of it.

‘Come back in a week’s time,’ she said with her back to him.

And Jonas came back. They exchanged no more than a word or two before he got undressed and sat down on the chair. She worked intently, glancing up now and again, glancing at his member. He came back each week for three months. She worked just as intently each time. He liked sitting there even though he did not understand how she could take so long to complete just one canvas. But he enjoyed being painted, it made him feel good, a bit like having his hair cut. He liked feeling her eye on him, liked being studied, appreciated. And he liked looking out of the window at the scenery, the trees and the rooftops, the fjord down below, the lines formed where the water met the shore. She always stopped when the light waned, when the clouds were stained red, and the water turned pure-white.

They said little to one another. She told him none of the things that would later be revealed in biographies of her life: that she had been plagued by illness, especially as a child; that she had fought a personal battle against angst, nerves; had led a footloose existence, wandering around Europe. She simply painted, feverishly, looking up now and again to feast her eyes on his penis.

The room could hardly have been described as a studio. Only the smell betrayed the presence of the paints, the tubes and bottles laid out on the little table next to the easel. Other than that, the room was neat and tidy and bore more resemblance to an office, possibly an architect’s office, what with the couple of slanted drawing boards and the filing cabinets with their shallow drawers for charts and drawings. Sometimes one had a feeling in this room of being on the bridge of a ship or in a control tower, due not least to the view and the massive and complex hi-fi system arranged on the floor under the tall windows, with its array of lights. To Jonas’s great delight Dagny M. listened to opera while she worked and during those months only once did she smile, when Jonas suddenly began to sing along, at the top of his voice, to ‘Deh vieni all finestra, o mio tesoro’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Autumn came, and the days grew darker. Outside the windows of the studio the landscape had fallen into a soft minor key as Jonas called it in his head. He was still in the habit of contemplating, with an interest as great and as freshly-aroused, the purplish hues outside, the tops of the pine trees, the winding coastline and now and again the column of moonlight on the water, as if his optic nerves underwent a change while she painted him. As the weeks progressed, more and more sketches were hung on the walls, sketches of which he could not make head nor tail, but in which he occasionally thought he recognized the shapes of airplanes, snow-castles, propellers and suchlike, sometimes just vague outlines which moved him to guess, to make associations: a scarab, a truck, a row of organ pipes, a caricature of Mao Tse Tung, penises of different shapes and sizes. Eventually these sketches came to form a frieze on the wall, a decorative feature, a sum which had nothing to do with the individual pictures.

Then, one evening, she was finished. The full moon hung outside the window, and a vibrant column of gold stretched across the waters of Oslo Fjord. She did not say that she was finished, she simply came across to him and kissed him without hesitation. She kissed him passionately, consummately, kissing him in such a way that they melted together in the dark, without faces, without lips, and he felt her kiss, her tongue, touch something at the very heart of him.

They kissed in the darkness, while she steered him around the floor as if in a dance. She stopped, took his head between her hands. Outside, the pine trees loomed dark-blue. She was as tall as he, she curved her head round, kissed the back of his neck lingeringly, wrapped him in her hair, kissed him, gently bit him.

She pulled out a mattress, unrolled it and took off her clothes before purposefully laying him down on it and, as she did so, he realized how prepared he actually was, how ready, as if in painting him she had been priming him mentally to be made love to. And Dagny M. truly intended to make love to him. She pinned up her hair with two paintbrushes, Japanese-style, and sat astride him. She was wet, had saved up three months’ worth of moist lust, and now she let it ooze down over him, began to run her vulva over his body as if it were a sponge and she were washing him. Jonas felt as if she had gone from painting on a canvas to painting him, with a damp brush, a form of body-painting, decorating him, executing quirky little strokes this way and that like a ritual almost, as if she were intent on transforming him, recreating him or getting him to remember something, something of which he had only dreamed once upon a time. Dagny M. took her vulva on a long journey across his body, took her time, left tracks, lines, let her movements describe a pattern which she repeated again and again, drew her wet pubic hair across his thighs, his stomach, up to his nipples, made circling movements with her sex, moistened his skin, from head to toe. Jonas lay there and allowed himself to be slowly rocked, brushed, into another state of mind.

Then she guided him inside her, enfolded him, and even in the heat of the moment Jonas noted that she had a classic mare yoni, a vagina so delightful that as they made love in the dark he began to see colours, dramatic pictures which were, nonetheless, nothing but colours, large planes of colour flowing past one another or blending together, colours he had never seen before. It was as if he were on a journey through colours and shapes, going in all directions at once, and he wanted only for this journey to last, for her to go on and on making love to him, every bit as passionately, while the darkness glowed with colour.

He was jolted out of this state, or perception, by the orgasm which began to shake her, first gently then with greater and greater force, and yet so infinitely removed from all the clichéd notions of orgasm, while her face exhibited surprise, disbelief almost, as if she herself could not comprehend it, such forces, such pleasure coursing through her body or as if she had suspected that it was bound to come to this, at the end of a long journey which, for once, surpassed even the most optimistic expectations, but hardly dared, even so, to embrace this experience, this overwhelming ecstasy when first it made its full force felt.

And since he, too, had in a way returned to consciousness, he let himself slide the last bit of the way into unconditional surrender, and here, in Dagny M’s house, overlooking a purple landscape with the moon dripping gold onto the fjord, Jonas Wergeland did something he had never done before: he screamed out loud as he came, a scream that set waves of different colours rippling around his body, layer upon layer of them.

Although they only made love that one time, for both of them this proved to be a momentous event. Dagny M. was struck by a desire and a passion the likes of which she would never know again, a sense of euphoria which filled her the moment she lowered herself down onto him and did not leave her until long after she had climbed off him, a thrill and a warmth which were totally new to her and which relegated her orgasm to an almost incidental part of the pleasure. There may be those who imagine that I am exaggerating, but that is how it was and that is how it would be for all of those women who lowered themselves down onto Jonas Wergeland’s — I might as well say it now — quite exceptional penis. The very memory of this act of lovemaking was enough to make these women’s hearts beat faster and render them numb with desire, even as they were filled with a huge sense of loss, as if Jonas Wergeland had established a utopia which, they knew in their heart of hearts, they would never find again.

At the tail end of that long night, in the grey light of dawn, Jonas was allowed to see the picture, a picture which surprised him because it depicted only his face and because he was struck by the magnetism of the portrait as if becoming aware for the first time of his own charisma. His face looked like a map, limned in the colours of the atlas and marked with routes, lines, tracks: a face which presented the whole intricate network of stories which went to make up his life while at the same time capturing many of the other faces he owned, colours laid one on top of the other, hidden levels, levels of which he knew nothing, had only an inkling, and thanks to his gift, the ability to know a good work of art when he saw it, Jonas realized right away that this was a fine, no, a masterly picture.

‘Why did I have to pose in the nude?’ he asked.

‘Because the face is a part of the body,’ she replied.

Only a day or so later Jonas felt an irresistible urge to draw. He had done some drawing before but only every once in a while. But as soon as he picked up the pencil he could tell that something had changed; he was aware of a facility that had not been there before, the pencil even sat better between his fingers, as if he had been doing this all his life. And when he drew the first line on the paper he could see that even this line was quite different from anything else he could remember: sure, significant, not to say creative, it went its own way, and he experienced, not least, the pleasure of executing this line, the pencil point on the grain of the paper, the infinite potential of that line to become a part of anything whatsoever. So he drew, drew for a long time, and sketches grew beneath his fingers, amazing figures which showed him that he was on the trail of a considerable and untapped innate talent, and it would be no exaggeration to say that Jonas Wergeland — at long last — realized his dream of becoming an architect thanks to his encounter with Dagny M.