The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

82 Iceland 1974

The summer of ’74. What a time to be alive. It was a jubilee summer, and the sun shone every day, every night. God, how beautiful Iceland was back then. And it was so good to be back home.

I’d had enough of partner switching and my endless globetrotting. After I’d called a taxi for Post-Jón, I got it into my head to move to Paris with the three boys, aged eleven, six and one. I hired a deathly pale babysitter and got myself a job at the Icelandic embassy. Boulevard Haussmann, bonjour. My family wasn’t happy about the move, but still my dear paternal uncle Henrik got me the job because in those days he was the Icelandic ambassador in Paris with a jurisdiction that stretched from the Tuileries Garden to Tunis.

I still had France on my list. No one can consider herself a woman of the world without putting herself through the ordeal of Paris first. The older boys, Haraldur and Ólafur, went to a fine school and blabbed in French there with Pierre and Maurice, but Magnús was put into a crèche. They were pretty primitive in those days, crèches, and for a whole winter the child was fed on nothing but bread. Prince Potato still carries that baguette fat around with him to this day. We lived in the fifteenth arrondissement, nice and clean, all the streets lined with food. I knocked over ten melons on my sprint to the metro that ran over the district on stilts.

Life was good in Paris.

The city is so beautiful that every tramp feels he lives in Versailles, and the language so lyrical that every solicitor thinks he’s a poet. But this creates arrogance. No other city I know has produced such an obscene number of snobs as Paris. It took me a long time to get used to that. But I wasn’t totally immune to it myself and was classically starstruck when I strolled past Helmut Newton at the Deux Magots or met his majesty Sartre in a seedy bar.

The job suited me fine, being the polyglot-toasting creature that I was, and it did me no harm to be a member of the Björnsson family in the Icelandic foreign service, the very own niece of l’ambassadeur lui-même. A poet friend nicknamed me the Ambassadame, and of course I should have been that instead of a mere secretary, but I was a woman, used to taking care of children, so it was easy for me to add another. Because Uncle Henrik was soon transferred to Moscow, only to be replaced by a stale old politician, one of those men who only ever lifted a finger to salute himself and who in Paris was like a seagull in a puffin colony, alone and speechless, his only mission seemed to be to keep the chauffeur occupied. Almost every morning when I traipsed into the gentleman’s office with the paperwork, he was on the phone to Iceland with his cronies back home, who had to blow off steam about their Lefty government. Men have always looked on their chatter as work, whereas we women postpone all that chin-wagging until the evening.

Back home my decision to move abroad with my children was deemed so significant that I ended up on the cover of an Icelandic gossip mag: alone with kids in paris. A lot of Icelandic women went to France in those days, but few of them had children before they got locked into castles by counts and marquis. Many a jewel had been stolen from the crown of Iceland.

I lived in relative poverty, of course, but what money I had I splashed out on the au pair, perfume and Jean Marc. He was the worst squanderer I’d met in those days, one of those wizards who always managed to fill his glass after showing his empty pockets a few moments before. My children were so well acquainted with my catalogue of Jóns by then that they themselves nicknamed the Frenchman the ‘Ah oui Jón’ because Jean Marc was from Avignon. He was a decade older than me. At first he was charmant, but three months into the relationship I realised he was actually nothing more than a pauper with a university degree, more of a moocher than a smoocher, as he sat there sponging off us for eighteen months.

I had to content myself with being called Erra because when the language god gave the French an alphabet, the letter h got locked up in the library and the French have suffered from its loss ever since. To them, hair is air and a heel is an eel.

I finally got into the Palais Garnier, and every month I strode up the stairs and corridors of the Louvre to see The Raft of the Medusa, The Wedding Feast at Cana, and my favourite, the Sun King himself, by Rigaud. I inhaled that metro odour and dined my way from one neighbourhood to the next, into the darkest impasses and passages, where I sometimes had encounters beyond the pale of biographical licence and then felt I had landed in a not so overly boring art-house film. In my memory, Paris lingers like an immovable feast in my soul. The years I spent there were a holiday from life, three wonderful winters in the company of pixies, because they’re so different, those French monsieurs, minuscule, with their pretty profiles, smooth talking and elfin in all their seriousness. Humour isn’t easily found in them, no more than any other word beginning with h, but their sense of poetry is second to none, and this they have chiselled into stone and cobble: it’s not bad to enter a city that offers two ways towards the rue du Paradis – the rue de la Fidélité, on one hand, and the passage du Désir on the other.

But by the spring of ’74, I’d had enough. I was forty-five years old and I hadn’t settled down anywhere. I’d seen enough countries in my life. And enough men. Enough etiquette and diplomacy. I decided to go home before my soul got numbed by champagne and French menus. I’d had a belly full of three-course colon pampering and was starting to desperately long for crappy Icelandic food: a bad hotdog and lukewarm Coke out in the glacial rain underneath the light yellow gable of a sports centre in some ugly village out east. After spending half my life abroad, I yearned for my country in all its crassness. All its women’s-club coffee, cake mania, cola binges and cold sauce orgies. All its wind and rain and bitter, grumpy men. All its myopic culture and Worst German architecture with its endless parking fields and petrol temples.

It was actually so strange that in the beauty of Paris, which never meets you without her makeup, it was the rudeness of Reykjavík I missed the most, the ugliness and its rough weather. I couldn’t stand all those flowery balconies any more, baroque palaces and quaint, arty squares, not to mention the frigging fountains. This lava longing must have had something to do with the ugliness of our land, because Iceland obviously isn’t all beautiful. Many parts of the highlands and around Snæfellsjökull are very ugly, for example, not to mention the Reykjanes Peninsula and Mount Hellisheidi, that uncooked gruel of gales and lava. No wonder tourists seek out these barren, desolate places, far from the standard EU beauty of stone cathedrals, vineyards and the apple-seller lady in a green bodice. I wanted to go home to the miserable drizzle of the lava fields.

Most of all, though, I missed my dear people, that collection of idiots at the far end of the ocean. I missed the raw communication and informal, febrile nature of Icelanders; the adolescent lives that are lived on this immature island that doesn’t know how to behave any more than its inhabitants do. I was sick and tired of continental good manners, all those bitteschön and seal-voo-plays, and those tight-assed French gentlemen who opened car doors for you while their minds slid up your uterus. I’d even started to think fondly of Icelanders’ pushiness in lines and traffic. I was dying to go home to jostle around stores and spit in flower beds.

I dragged the boys home and dumped them on my friend Gútta, while I toured my country, warming and breaking hearts. I literally gulped down the country and the nation, which, as it happened, was celebrating an anniversary under the sunny skies of Thingvellir that July: it had been 1,100 years since the First Settlement. The Parisian lady traded in her tailored coat for an Icelandic jumper, the woman of the world was just as much at ease in the West Fjords as she was in Versailles. At a country ball I sat smoking a Viceroy with a bulldozer driver while they showered us with soda and schnapps, and the band played the Viking version of a Beatles song. I’d never felt better. I was simply happy.

And I’d already thrown up twice when a new wave of schnapps washed up a middle-aged sailor on my drunken shore – a brute with sideburns and broken teeth and fingers so thick they could barely fit in his hands, even though he’d sliced one off. The man was so drunk he couldn’t even utter his own name and kept on repeating the same phrase: ‘Have you ever seen a sea goat?’ as he swayed on his chair like a sailor in stormy waters. ‘Are you my sea goat?’ But finally the waves subsided, the man steadied in his chair and, staring into his glass, he suddenly started to sing:

His voice was like a rum-and-aftershave cocktail. The band lost its thread, and some people turned their heads; a middle-aged woman smiled. At the end of the performance, the man slowly slid to one side, like a felled tree. I managed to grab him before he hit the soda-sticky floor. He recovered his senses, laid his head on my shoulder, enveloped my skinny yellow fingers in his sailor’s paw, and refused to let go.