The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

6 Lóa 2009

Well then. Here she comes, Lóa, my little dung flower. Like a white rose out of the morning darkness.

‘Good morning, Herra, dear. How are you today?’

‘Oh, spare me the niceties.’

The grey light of day has only just begun to break. And a grey day it’ll be, like all its brethren. Daggry, the Danes call it.

‘Have you been awake for long? Had a look at the news?’

‘Oh yes. It’s still tumbling, the rubble of the crash…’

She takes off her coat, shawl and hat. And sighs. If I were a randy lad with a sparkling soul, I’d do myself the favour of marrying this girl. For she’s goodness and gentleness personified. And her cheeks are a heavenly red. The red-cheeked ones never deceive us. I, on the other hand, was pale with deceit from the very start, and now I sit here, yellow as a corpse in a coffin-white nightshirt.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’ Lóa asks me as she turns on the light in the kitchen alcove, pecking her beak into the shelves and cupboards. They are visible on the starboard side of my bed-wide ship. ‘Porridge as usual, I suppose?’ She says this every morning when she bends down to the small refrigerator that Dóra gave me, which sometimes keeps me awake with its chilling murmur. It’s got to be said, she does have a bit of a big ass, little Lóa, and legs like forty-year-old birch trunks. That’s probably why she never gets laid, poor little thing, and still lives with her mother, childless. Who can fathom men? Letting all that goodness and beauty pass them by? And all that soft, smooth skin.

‘Well, what have you got to say for yourself? What did you do over the weekend? Any “how’s-your-father” to report?’ I ask, as I fumble on the laptop’s keyboard and take a deep breath. That’s a lot of words for an emphysema patient.

‘Huh?’ she asks, a blue-and-white milk carton in her hand, with that idiotic expression she so often has.

‘Yes, did you go out anywhere? To cheer yourself up?’ I ask without raising my eyes. I could swear I’m developing a death rattle in my voice.

‘Out on the town, you mean? No. I was just helping my mother. She’s changing the curtains in the living room. And then on Sunday – yesterday, that is – we went to visit Grandma.’

‘You’ve got to think of yourself, too, Lóa.’ I pause for breath before continuing. ‘You mustn’t waste your youth on an old hag like me. The breeding season will be over before you know it.’

I’m so fond of her that I inflict this torture on my speech organs, throat and lungs. The dizziness that follows is like a swarm of flies behind my eyes before they all kamikaze on my optic nerves, crashing against them with their leaden wings. Oh, heavens above.

‘Breeding season?’

‘Yes. No, Jesus, has he answered me?’

‘Who?’

‘My Aldon from Australia.’

‘Aldon?’

‘Yes, that’s his name. Ah, now I’ve really got him going.’

‘You’ve got so many friends,’ she says as she starts to do the washing.

‘Yes, well over seven hundred.’

‘Huh? Seven hundred?’

‘Yes. On Facebook.’

‘Are you on Facebook? I didn’t know. Can I see?’

She leans over me with all her fragrance as I summon up my page from the magic world of the net.

‘Wow. Nice picture of you. Where was it taken?’

‘In Baires. At a ball.’

‘Baires?’

‘Yes, Buenos Aires.’

‘It says here that you’ve got a hundred and forty-three friends. You said seven hundred.’

‘Yeah, that’s just me. I’ve got all kinds of identities.’

In my mischief I’ve borrowed names, including that of Linda Pétursdóttir, who was Miss World in 1988. Bóas, my male nurse, who has gone abroad to study, created the e-mail address for me: lindap-missworld88@gmail.com. That one brings me plenty of good stories that shorten my long, dark autumn nights.

‘Lots of identities on Facebook? Is that allowed?’

‘Nothing in this world isn’t allowed, in my opinion.’

‘Huh?’ she chirps before returning to the kitchen alcove. It’s funny how good it feels to be near people who are working. It brings out the aristocrat in me. Half of me came from the sea and half from a palace, and because of that I soon became a leg spreader. My aristocratic Danish paternal grandmother was a first-class slave master, although she was also pretty hardworking. Before every gala dinner she would dance around the banqueting hall from noon to night, with one cigarillo in her mouth and another in her hand, trying to remember everything and get the seating arrangements right. Nothing could be missing, nothing out of place. Otherwise our land and people might have faced ruin. A fishbone getting stuck in the American ambassador’s throat would have thrown the Marshall Plan into jeopardy. She knew perfectly well that the negotiations meant next to nothing. ‘Det hele ligger på gaffelen’! she’d say in Danish – it all hangs on the end of the fork!

Had it not been for Grandma Georgía, Grandad would never have become president – and someone should have told him that. She was the perfect lady: gave everyone, prince or pauper, a sense of well-being in her presence and treated all men equally, from the local bum to Eisenhower himself.

Three cheers for the political wisdom of those days, which chose that couple to represent the newborn republic in 1944, he an Icelander, she a Dane. It was a courteous gesture towards the old master race. Although we’d divorced the Danes, we still wore the ring.