107 Up, Up, My Soul 1951

In the end my father and I parted ways. He’d had enough of me. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t live together. He couldn’t look at the child without seeing its father. What I had considered a brilliant idea was abhorrent to him.

‘It’s totally out of the question that I would exploit… that… to secure my future in this land. Herra, I don’t understand you… How could something like this even have occurred to you?’

‘Things like this have happened before,’ was the obvious reply, but the only answer he could give was a deadly silent stare.

He would understand this once we had withdrawn our winnings from this little blond lottery ticket, whether it was in a year’s time or in ten. In the meantime we’d go our separate ways.

Shortly afterwards I met a gangly boy who became my ‘Ur-Jón,’ and I moved in with him. Juan Calderón was a Spaniard from head to toe and good at everything except drinking, which was what he devoted most of his time to, however. He worked in a slaughterhouse and tried to provide for his little family, a fellow with elegant fingers and eyes full of loss.

We lived in a corrugated iron shack in La Boca, a Genovese slum close to the harbour. The shanty was also inhabited by cats and mice and stood in the port like an uninvited guest in a courtyard that belonged to a three-storey stone house. I was a housebound mother, since nurseries were still an unknown concept in the Southern Hemisphere in those days, and I killed the time by watching the people from the stone building stroll past my window, heading for the outhouse that stood in the corner of the garden. I could never get away from the feeling that our house was inside another one. In the mornings, when the fog chilled me to the marrow and my little one had spent the night waxing lyrical about her earaches and my Calderón was crawling home from one of his binges, bearing the scratches of men’s fists and women’s nails, I sometimes wandered over to the little mirror that hung on the rotten wall and asked myself whether my grandfather could really be one of the presidents of this world.

I was having trouble breastfeeding and was pointed to a wet nurse who lived in the neighbourhood. Twice a day I would take my little sunshine to her and join the end of the line. There were always another two or three mothers with their babies there. The milk cow, who kept a giant cask of red wine beside her, sat on a wicker chair in the middle of a garden under a shrivelled tree, wearing a perennial smile – a buxom Audumla, the primeval cow from Norse mythology. She sometimes had a baby on both breasts, but generally only one so that she could stretch out for sips of wine with her free arm. The milk squirting out of her must have had a high alcohol content because she was always quite intoxicated. The broad smile never faded from her lips, and she frequently broke into song. I had my worries about this but was assured that few things are better for a baby than a cocktail of mother’s milk and wine. At least my little one slept soundly every night during that period. But I could barely stomach the sight of my child sucking the callous wart that had been chewed on by dozens of other babies that week, and I remembered what they said back home: ‘One’s mother tongue is passed on through the mother’s milk.’

I therefore asked them to send me stories and poems from Iceland, which I constantly read into her little ears. No Icelandic child had ever received such an intense literary upbringing straight from the cradle. The first words that came out of her were, ‘Up, up!’ I had recited the opening of the Passion Psalms to her so often: ‘Up, up, my soul and all my heart.’

Even though I was finally living in a metropolis and there was plenty of joy around Ur-Jón and his friends, I treasured my nights. I had found a purpose in life. Calderón could go on as many binges as he wanted, I didn’t care. In my daughter, Blómey, I had found the most fun soulmate I’d ever known. The cohabitation between us two women was the best I’d ever experienced. Despite the poverty, cold and hunger and a whole autumn of solitude, I had found some hint of happiness.

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