Thinking about how unalike Egill and Gunnar are, Sturla Jón imagines Gunnar coming into the kitchen while Egill, Hulda, and Puri are sitting there with their coffees, talking about music or movies. Gunnar takes stock of the kitchen table: this and that much remain of the two boxes of cookies his mother has put out on the table, so there’s no need to order more yet — orders should be made as close as possible to the moment supplies run out. And having made his decision, he disappears from the kitchen with a milky coffee drink in a water glass, without anyone who is seated at the table under the ceiling lights having spoken to him.
The youngest son, Grettir, is currently on the next floor of the house, in his room. He is studying (this strikes Sturla as very plausible). Grettir had begun studying at the Grammar School in Reykjavík, where his younger sister Hallgerður had recently started her second year, but before he finished the first year — after badly breaking his leg and ankle on the steps in front of the school, an injury that confined him to bed rest for a month and a half — he decided he wanted to continue his studies at the Grammar School in Egilsstaðir.
Grettir, who is nineteen, has always been the most sensitive of the siblings, not only physically but also to the words and glances of other people, as Sturla describes it to himself. But though the boy is clearly fascinated by art, especially music (like his brother Egill) and the visual arts, he had never shown any inclination towards creating art: he is happy just enjoying it. This interest keeps him so occupied that little else, his studies included, has any place in his head.
Though nothing directly indicated that Grettir was physically attracted to his own sex — nor to the other sex, for that matter — it seemed, on the other hand, that nearly all his enthusiasm for artists was directed at those artists who were openly homosexual or else radiated something more delicate than their colleagues. Among visual artists, for example, he highly prized David Hockney, Egon Schiele, Giacometti, Modigliani, and Gustav Klimt, and, for some reason, Francis Bacon, who according to what his mother said stares down at anyone who enters Grettir’s room from a huge framed photograph on the wall above his bed. Hulda hadn’t told Sturla this because she found it funny but because it aroused her alarm — more even than Bacon’s self-portraits did.
Although the description of his youngest son’s room had come from his mother, Sturla got regular updates about Grettir’s private world — his tiny bedroom — from his daughter Hallgerður. Shortly after hearing about the picture of Francis Bacon, he’d tried to wheedle out of his son what he was listening to these days and what had recently caught his attention in the other arts, but when he had little success — it was as if Grettir didn’t want to share his private world with anyone, not even his father — Sturla asked Hallgerður if she could tell him what Grettir’s room looked like; if she could “spy a little for him.” And when she found out how happy her description of Grettir’s room made her father, she began to explain her brother’s unusual and sophisticated tastes, and by and by she came to enjoy telling her father about Grettir’s newest acquisitions, the things he’d ordered on the internet or brought home from the library.
The conversations between father and daughter, Sturla and Hallgerður, often turned to what was at the top of Grettir’s CD pile, or what he had recently discovered in the world of visual art. Sturla thought it was especially funny to hear how a poster of Picasso’s Three Dancers was hanging on the bedroom wall, a picture which, it so happened, Sturla remembered well because of the shadowy figure who looked eyelessly to the left, an open-mouthed profile in the balcony window, midway between two dancers on the right side of the picture. To Sturla’s eyes, that figure was his uncle Hallmundur rather than Picasso’s friend who had died while the picture was being painted.
Among the musicians Grettir liked, according to Hallgerður, he listened most to David Bowie, Mark Almond, Morrissey, George Michael, and Scott Walker, but when Hallgerður gave Sturla the news over the phone that she’d seen a CD bearing the name Gérard Souzay, Sturla almost couldn’t stop himself from bursting out laughing. He thought it was both endlessly funny and delightful that his nineteen-year-old son at Egilsstaðir had found his way to lieder and opera songs. But, of course, he had to refrain from laughing because, despite the fact that he and Hallgerður liked to smile at Grettir’s tastes in arts, Sturla hoped that his daughter would perhaps be a little infected by him.
During the weeks and months after the French baritone singer was discovered in Grettir’s room, he added CDs from the library with names like Hans Hotter, Nicolai Gedda, and Benjamin Gigli, and after them came French chamber music — French only. On the other hand, in the last eighteen months Grettir had, according to Hallgerður, completely fallen for singers and lyricists like Antony and the Johnsons, CocoRosie, and the Canadian Rufus Wainwright — names Sturla recognized from the music section of the newspaper but hadn’t paid much attention to, except for the last one, which he connected more to his own musical tastes than those of his son, since Rufus was the son of a musician Sturla had prized for thirty years, Loudon Wainwright. This fact had made Sturla want to hear how the young Rufus sounded but after having listened to a few tracks in a record store on Laugavegur he realized that he would be happy enough with the father of the family.
But even though he seemed to have great enthusiasm for, and a strong feeling for, the delicate — feminine, even — when it came to music and the visual arts, Grettir had given his father’s poetry no more thought than courtesy required; even Gunnar had expressed himself more fully about Sturla’s poetry.
The reason why Sturla thinks about his sons first is not so much because they are sons — nor because of the sequence of their ages — but more because he has unconsciously saved his daughters for last, in the same way, he thinks, that a man keeps the best of the assorted chocolates until last.
He has reached his hotel room by the time he lets his thoughts rest on Hildigunnur, his older daughter, the child he admits to himself he feels the most affection for (though it’s forbidden, of course, for a father of five children to have such thoughts; children ought to be — according to what the books say — equal in the eyes of their parents). But more than once — not just twice, but a few hundred times, if not a thousand — Sturla has been amazed at the fact that his eldest daughter, who is certainly a poet’s daughter, has chosen to do things which Sturla considers diametrically opposed to lyrical thinking and to delight in the beauty of life, things like weight-lifting, fitness training, and trying to make herself darker than when she was born. Hildigunnur’s friend, a very promising swimmer who died at just sixteen years old from an overdose of steroids, had managed to interest her in sports and strength-training shortly before her death. Hildigunnur’s newfound enthusiasm had actually increased after her friend’s passing and had led, over the course of several years, to a behavior Sturla couldn’t think about as anything other than an unconditional worship of appearances and surfaces — a behavior Sturla (and, indeed, Hulda as well) considered unnatural and false, and, even more than that, dangerous to her health, especially her mental health. But the uncompromising program which his older daughter had trapped herself in — and which it wasn’t easy to pull her out of — naturally changed nothing in Sturla’s feelings for Hildigunnur: she is still the child who he has the most respect for. He can’t exactly explain this to himself; it is often the case that what a person experiences most strongly is also the hardest to articulate in words.