The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

24 Fire Organ 1953

She called it ‘the fire organ,’ my German friend in Argentina, while others call it ‘twat’ or ‘snatch,’ but Mum always called it ‘the date.’ This was in the days when dates were never seen in Iceland.

Sex was never a taboo subject here in Iceland; we just never spoke about it. But we’ve never been prudes, we women of ice and vice, fish workers and fancy queens.

I was slow to awaken to my body, not for the lack of cock-a-doodle-doos, but it took me a long time to master my instrument. It wasn’t until seven years after my first rape that I finally reached carnal nirvana, after lengthy fumbling. It was in Buenos Aires after the war. I lived there for a while with a German girl from a major Nazi family, who taught me a lot, but in particular one invaluable thing.

I can still hear her cries of feminist liberation in that zealous, exuberant Bavarian Nazi tone of hers. Hildegard was her name, although she called herself Heidi, pretended to be Swiss, and wore a cross instead of a swastika around her neck.

‘The spark lives in every woman. Who doesn’t want to kindle it into a flame? That’s why we’ve got die Werkzeuge. And this is something we can do on our own; men don’t know how to handle our fire organs,’ said the curly blonde carnal creature, adjusting her breasts in the high, narrow kitchen of our boulevard apartment in Baires, where we sat at length in front of the oven, our only source of heat, smoking like chimneys and baring our secrets. Then she lifted her middle finger and asked what it was called in Icelandic.

‘We call it langatöng, which literally means “long poker,”’ I answered, explaining it to her in German.

‘Long poker! You see! Fire organ!’ she exclaimed, screwing up her eyes as she burst into a joyous laugh that reshuffled the freckles on her face. She had beautiful golden-brown skin, which almost seemed artificial it was so perfect. She had chosen far too banal an alias. For a girl like her, Heidi was just a joke like everything else. And we could certainly joke and laugh, God, how we laughed, two blond girls in their prime.

Outside the tall kitchen windows our male contemporaries sounded their horns and yelled from their cars, the impatient and badly shaven sons of the twentieth century who never learned the art of unlocking a woman.

Heidi possessed this knowledge. And passed it on to other women. She’d acquired her bed skills from a Colombian cowgirl in a ranch at the foot of the Andes, a true finger master with a clitoris the size of a nipple. She herself had most probably learned it at a young age from a half-Dutch mulatto girl on a river ferry. Heidi taught me the science, and I in turn taught it to others. I remember two students at least, a Norwegian nun on the ship back from my American exile, and then Lilja, my Bæring’s daughter, a colossal hulk from Bolungarvík who later converted to lesbianism.

Bob, the Yank, was the only male I managed to some extent to guide along the tortuous path of feminine pleasure. My Icelandic Jóns were more interested in male genealogy than in female sexuality. The Kansas man was also the only man in my life who knew and wanted more than I did. He opened up new frontiers of pleasure that an Icelandic maiden had hardly even read about. He gave me a vibrator, a wondrous tool, and then wanted to photograph me in full action, but I told him that Icelandic presidential protocol prevented me from doing so.

The Americas therefore provided my schooling in eroticism, so to speak, north and south. Up until then I’d lain under men without thinking of my own needs and assumed those physical exertions had more to do with vanity than with pleasure. Although there was little satisfaction to be drawn from it, one could pride oneself on having done it. For me it was just an interlude of tedious pumping or a ‘boink,’ as Bæring used to call it much later in that unbearable way of his. I’ve always said it takes the average woman twenty years to fully master her bed tools. That’s why I’m so insistent on my Lóa getting started as soon as possible; she’s over twenty now and her face is starting to show signs of LDP: lust deficiency paralysis. A person’s facial muscles are a clear indicator of how active they’ve been on the mattress and how much electro-cock treatment they’re getting. That woman who reads the news on TV looks pretty frigid.

Heidi’s parents were famous Nazis who had managed to flee and had lived on the banks of the Silver River, Río de la Plata, where they are now buried in Catholic soil under Swiss names. Of course, I could have denounced them since I had once seen the couple’s address on the back of a letter addressed to Heidi, but I was a miserable coward and, what’s more, grateful for the gift she’d given me: with all the intransigence of her father, the commander of a concentration camp, she spurred me on towards achieving the megaorgasm, Großorgasmus.

‘You can never give up! Never!’ she yelled at me after I’d been slaving away at it in my room for days.

But after several arduous training sessions, a triumphant cheer echoed down the corridor as she heard me hit the target. Up until then I’d only felt a hint of satisfaction produced by friction against door frames, saddles and broom handles, but with her dictatorial powers Heidi had opened up a bottomless drilling hole to me, which is somewhat lime-encrusted today. Finally I understood sex.

But this demonstrates the peculiar meanness of the Almighty Farmer Above towards us women: the fact that we have to rub ourselves to the bone to reach the core of rapture, while all a man has to do is touch his wand with a stick. To be a woman, one has to be a Nazi.