I remained alone and turned towards the city again, my miserable past. Somewhere out there was the station where in the middle of the war I had ‘lost’ both my father and my mother on the same day. And somewhere inside me there was a little blond girl playing on the pavement in another city. I could still hear Blómey laughing as I entered the bar and heard the thud, which hit me like a brick in the back of my head, the most horrific sound life can produce, one that changed me into the most terrible woman who has ever lived. I heard that thud (the impact of a two-year-old skull meeting the steel bumper of an American car at twenty miles an hour on a narrow street in the capital of Argentina) inside my head every month, sometimes every day, all my life. He who loses a child loses half his reason.
And yet I had had another child, but left him with Mum so that I could run out here to kiss some other women’s boys. Now he slept in Grandma’s house, the one-year-old Haraldur I felt no connection to. Far away from both children, I missed the one who was dead more than the one who still lived. Maybe I was the one who was dying slowly. Had I abandoned the little boy out of a fear of losing another child under a car?
I pulled myself together, wiped my tears, and noticed that I was still holding an unsmoked cigarette, the one the Buddy Holly boy had given me. I rummaged through my coat pockets for matches, without result, but didn’t feel like going back inside right away, so I let the cigarette fall down to the street.
I can see, as I lie here bedridden, warming myself on that ice-cold Imagine Peace Tower, that I should have kept that cigarette from Lennon’s pack, an unsmoked reminder of what might have been. I could have sold it on eBay, along with a wet Beatles kiss, and done up the garage nicely with the proceeds, put in some furniture and wallpaper, and bought a flat-screen TV that would show nothing but films based on my life.
13
My Own Herra
2009
As a woman I was terribly lonely in my generation. While my peers sat in secondary school, I had a whole world war to contend with. I graduated from that war at fifteen, but with the life experience of a thirty-year-old woman. I was twenty by 1949 and, according to the spirit of the times, was expected to apply to finishing school in Denmark and pursue marriage plans back in Iceland, a well-bred girl from the president’s family grooming her hair for balls in the Independence Party headquarters. An up-and-coming politician would have invited me, and together we would have ended up in the presidential residence at Bessastadir (he would have won with me at his side) surrounded by children and reporters. Instead I threw myself into yet more adventures, dancing on ship decks south of the Equator, never waiting for men to ask me out but going after them myself.
To compound it all, back in those days Iceland lagged a good sixteen years behind the trends of the day, so I always found it hard to cope with the small-town life of Reykjavík. I was a war child, but not in the sense that I’d been reared in the war: the war had reared me. I was a woman of the world before I ever became a woman. I was a party girl and drank all the men under the table. I had become a practising feminist before the word had been so much as printed in an Icelandic newspaper. I had been practising ‘free love’ years before the term was invented. And, of course, I had kissed John Lennon long before ‘Beatlemania’ struck our frosty shores.
And then I was expected to behave like a ‘normal person.’
I was independent, had few scruples, and didn’t let anything hold me back – dogma, men or gossip. I travelled around and took casual jobs, looked after my own interests, had children and lost one, but didn’t let the other ones tie me down, took them with me or left them behind, just kept moving and refused to allow myself to be drawn into marriage and to be bored to death, although that was the toughest part, of course. Long before the hippie girls appeared on the scene and began to hand their children over to their mothers so they could continue their debauched lives, I had devised the concept of the long-distance mother. ‘You can’t let the fruit of your previous sex life spoil the next,’ one of the heroines of the sixties once said, or was that me? Of course, you could say I led a kind of hippie existence, but I made it up all by myself, without following the latest trends from Paris.
I suspect the uninhibited lifestyle I enjoyed has become more commonplace among Icelandic women only in recent years. I recently came across an article about Iceland in a Spanish magazine in which young Ice Ladies praised the flexibility of life in a small country where anyone can have children with anyone, since everyone already has multiple spouses, children and foster children. If the article is to be believed, Iceland is one big orgy of divorces and relationships in which children are able to choose their homes and families for themselves.
I’m still waiting for a call from these modern women and for the bouquet of flowers they’ll present me with for being their pioneer, at a short ceremony here in the garage. Just so long as they don’t bring our first woman president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, star of my generation, with them. She’s always made me feel like shit.
14
Blitz Cancer
2009
Grandma ended up in a boathouse, I in a garage. That was what fate had in store for us two old women. But at least she had company, oh yes. Even though my laptop knows about everything and is very warm, I still haven’t managed to teach it the art of laughing. But of course, I’m quite happy to be free of other people’s snoring, farting and chit-chat, so for me it is absolutely fantastic living here in the garage. And here come the drugs. Here come the wonderful drugs. Oh dear, all those things they’ve invented for us.
‘Right, then, shall we start with the Sorbitol?’ says the girl in the short-sleeved uniform, pouring the sugary goo onto the spoon. To lubricate my bowels.
The taste reminds me of Grandma Georgía. She was really into sweet liqueurs. Then came my mother’s generation: they loved port. My generation just went for vodka. Then came other groups with shots of their own. Poor Lóa says she drinks beer only on those few occasions when she bares her beaver. That’s probably beer fat I see shimmering before me.
‘Right. And then there’s the Femara, isn’t that next?’
‘Oh, I don’t remember.’
‘Yes, two of those with a drop of water… that’s it, yes.’
‘Can I touch it?’
‘Touch what?’
‘Your arm. It looks so soft…’
‘Ha-ha. Yeah? Sure. It’s just way too chubby, ha-ha.’
Now I’m the dribbling witch groping Hansel and Gretel’s arms. Come now, Lóa, dear, and let this dried-up old fish of a woman feel your soft maiden flesh. With her last real tooth. Oh how soft and soft it is.
‘I’m sure it tastes really good,’ I say. The kind of thing I say.
‘I hope you’re not going to eat me!’
‘Just you wait and see.’
These are obviously the long-term side effects: the drugs seep into me like toxins into the soil. But poison must be fought with poison, the doctors say, to establish a lifelong ceasefire in the intestines. Apart from that, I’ve no interest in this toma de medicamentos. I do it only for Lóa’s sake. She enjoys poisoning me with this stuff, she does.
It was in 1991 that I got the diagnosis that I wouldn’t survive the spring. I’d been gasping with emphysema for seven years and fuelling it unremittingly with nicotine, which almost triggered a full-scale demonstration in the health care system. But then the cancer suddenly decided to invade the hollow of my chest like a German army. ‘It’s blitz cancer,’ I explained to the doctors as soon as they admitted me.