Our daughter does us the favor of falling asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow. She sucks her pacifier with her rabbit beside her on the cushion and, a few moments later, dozes off. The child is perfect in every area, all day long. When I come back in, once Flóra Sól is asleep, Anna slams her book closed and stands up. We pay no heed to the fact that it’s only eight o’clock and drop everything we have, books and clothes, and move to the bed without saying a word. There’s nothing to disturb us; we’ve no television, no news of wars and men slaughtering each other, and we get no visits either, so we can speed up our daughter’s dinnertime and putting her to bed; she doesn’t mind. Sometimes we’re in more of a hurry and we just leave the dishes on the table until the next day. The bed is a world of its own, where external laws don’t apply. We’re increasingly sparse in our use of words; you don’t have to be able to express everything in words either. I can hear the priest’s voice, and white subtitles appear on the ceiling, twenty feet above the bed, across the wings of the dove:
The longing in this case relates a great deal to the flesh.
Seventy-two
My daughter is having her afternoon nap and I’m standing in front of my lover who is reading at the table. She immediately puts her book down.
My intention was to tell her that I’m going up to the garden, but I surprise myself by saying something completely different:
— I was wondering if we could have a talk. About us.
— What do you mean about us?
— If we could discuss the status of our relationship.
She seems surprised.
— What status?
She says this in a low voice, averting her gaze. She’s still holding the pen. That means that she hasn’t stopped doing what she was doing before I interrupted her; she’s just going to pause briefly to answer one or two questions. In the evenings she puts her pen down as soon as I’ve put the child to sleep. But not now. She’s not ready to discuss our relationship, it’s not the time, I was too quick, I didn’t choose the right moment. Actually, I’ve very little to say about the matter myself.
— We sleep together.
There’s a vast chasm between what I’m saying and what I’m thinking.
— Yes?
I shut up.
— You mustn’t fall in love with me, she says finally, I don’t know if I could live up to it.
I don’t tell her that it’s too late for that.
— You can’t rely on feelings lasting forever, she says.
I’m trying to figure out what she means by feelings not lasting forever. To be honest, I have, in fact, started to wonder whether it might be possible to live like this for the rest of my life, and look forward to climbing into bed with the same woman every night. In fifty-five years’ time I’ll be as old as Dad is now, seventy-seven. Another fifty years would mean approximately another eighteen thousand two hundred fifty evenings and nights with the same woman. That’s provided there’s no car accident in a beautiful lava field. That means eighteen thousand two hundred fifty nights to rejoice over and look forward to. I glance at the clock and see a way of turning this situation around for me, around for us.
— Anyway I was just wondering if we should go to bed, I say, as if to wrap up a matter that can’t be settled in any other way. It’s two p.m. and our daughter has about another hour to go in her siesta.
This is where most of our attempts at conversation end, in bed precisely, although you can’t really say that we’ve settled anything. But somehow there’s never any need to discuss the matter any further after that. Physical contact manages to lay all outstanding issues to rest, and the problem evaporates like that red-blue mist over the hills after the first mass of the day.
Anna later calls me from the doorway to the bedroom so I look up. I don’t notice the camera until she’s pressed the click and the flash goes off in my face, as I’m half buried under my quilt. She winds the camera.
Up until now she hasn’t taken many pictures of Flóra Sól outdoors.
— I wanted to have a picture of you, as a memento.
— Are you leaving? I feel like she might as well be pointing a gun at me and not a camera. I briskly look death in the eye, right before the shot is fired. I could easily have said: Go ahead, shoot me then.
— No, she says. Finished.
I try to hide my mental turmoil by getting out of bed and slipping into my trousers. But I’m careful not to turn my back on Anna, my lover.
Seventy-three
I’d be willing to share my experiences with someone, and yet I’m not the type of guy to divulge what’s going on between a woman and me to someone else. When someone is frank with you and tells you something a bit personal, you can’t go around telling anyone about it. What happens between Anna and me is between her and me. But I don’t feel I’m betraying her trust by popping in to consult the expert on divine love in room seven of the guesthouse. I’m helped by the fact that I’ve acquired more experience in various areas since I last discussed issues related to this with him some ten days ago.
I sit with my daughter, wriggling on my knees in her striped stockings, while we talk together; and because I’m visiting Father Thomas on a formal matter, my daughter and I sit on one side of the desk and the priest on the other. He offers me a shot, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to be drinking when I’m with the child. I notice a porcelain doll in a blue knitted dress has been placed on the middle of the desk. I get straight to the point.
— How does a man know if a woman loves him?
— It’s difficult to be certain about anything when it comes to love, says the priest, pushing the doll toward my daughter.
— What if the woman says she’s scared you won’t come back when you go out to the shop?
— Then it could be that she is the one who actually wants to leave, alone.
I notice him observing the child playing as he’s talking to me.
— And when a woman is miles away in her thoughts, does that mean she’s not keen?
— It can both mean that and mean that she is keen.
— But if a woman tells a man that he can’t fall in love with her?
— That can mean that she loves him. It reminds me of an old Italian film that you might like to watch, which deals with similar problems. The director shows little faith in dialogue as a means of settling feelings.
— But if she says she’s not ready for a relationship?
My daughter hands me the doll; she wants me to take its knitted dress off.
— That could mean that she is ready but doesn’t know if you’re ready and is afraid you might reject her.
— But if she says she wants to go away and be alone?
— That could mean that she wants you to come with her.
The priest has stood up and is looking through his shelves.
— There’s such a thing as wise love, as verse reminds us, he says from the other side of the room with his back turned to me, but there’s no such thing as wise passion. But if life were solely to be based on wisdom, you’d miss out on the passion, as they say in here somewhere, he says, and I know he’s not quoting from the Bible.
My daughter wants me to put the knitted dress back onto the doll again. Squeezing the arms into the sleeves takes the longest.