“When did you first get to know him?”
“His father brought him to me. The family lived in Hamarfiordur then, and still do, I think. The mother died a little while later and he brought the children up entirely by himself: Gudlaugur and a girl who was some years older. The father knew that I’d just got back from studying music abroad. I taught music, private lessons and other things. I was appointed choirmaster when I managed to round up enough children to form a choir. It was mostly girls, as always, but we advertised specially for boys and Gudlaugur’s father brought him to my house one day. He was ten at the time and had a wonderful voice. That wonderful voice. And he knew how to sing. I could tell straight away that his father made great demands on the boy and was strict with him. He said he’d taught him everything he knew about singing. I later found out that he was hard on the boy, punished him, kept him indoors when he wanted to go out and play. I don’t think you could call it a good upbringing because so much was expected of him and he wasn’t allowed to hang around with friends much. He was a classic example of parents taking control of their children and trying to turn them into what they want. I don’t think Gudlaugur had a particularly happy childhood.”
Gabriel stopped.
“You’ve wondered about this quite a lot, haven’t you?” Erlendur said.
“I just saw it happening.”
“What?”
“Strict discipline and unwavering demands can have an awful effect on children. I’m not talking about discipline when children are naughty and need restraint or guidance, that’s a completely different matter. Of course children need discipline. I’m talking about when children aren’t allowed to be children. When they’re not allowed to enjoy being what they are and what they want to be, but are shaped and even broken to make them something different. Gudlaugur had this beautiful boy soprano and his father intended a big role for him in life. I’m not saying that he treated him badly in a conscious, calculated way, he just deprived him of his life. Robbed him of his childhood.”
Erlendur diought about his own father who did nothing but teach him good manners and show him affection. The single demand he made was to behave well and treat other people kindly. His father had never tried to turn him into anything he was not. Erlendur thought about the father who was awaiting sentence for a brutal assault on his own son, and he imagined Gudlaugur continually trying to live up to his father’s expectations.
“Maybe we see this most clearly with religion,” Gabriel continued. “Children who find themselves in certain religions are made to adopt their parents” faith and in effect live their parent’s lives much more than their own. They never have the opportunity to be free, to step outside the world they’re born into, to make independent decisions about their lives. Of course the children don’t realise until much later, and some never do. But often when they are adolescents or grown-up, they say: “I don’t want this any more”, and conflicts can arise. Suddenly the child doesn’t want to live its parents” life, and that can lead to great tragedy. You see it everywhere: the doctor who wants his child to be a doctor. The lawyer. The company director. The pilot. There are people all over the place who make impossible demands of their children.”
“Did that happen in Gudlaugur’s case? Did he say, “This is where I draw the line”? Did he rebel?”
Gabriel waited before replying.
“Have you met Gudlaugur’s father?” he asked.
“I spoke to him this morning,” Erlendur said. “Him and his daughter. They’re full of some kind of anger and antipathy and they clearly didn’t have any warm feelings for Gudlaugur. They didn’t shed a tear for him.”
“And was he in a wheelchair? The father?”
“Yes.”
“That happened several years afterwards,” Gabriel said.
“After what?”
“Several years after the performance. That dreadful performance just before the boy was due to tour Scandinavia. It had never happened before, a boy leaving Iceland to sing solo with choirs in Scandinavia. His father sent his first record to Norway, a record company there became interested and organised a concert tour with the aim of releasing his records in Scandinavia. His father once told me that his dream, nota bene his dream, not necessarily Gudlaugur’s, was for the lad to sing with the Vienna Boys” Choir. And he could have, no question about it”
“So what happened?”
“What always happens sooner or later with boy sopranos; nature intervened,” Gabriel said. “At the worst imaginable time in the boy’s life. It could have happened at a rehearsal, could have happened while he was alone at home. But it happened there and the poor child …”
Gabriel looked at Erlendur.
“I was with him backstage. The children’s choir was supposed to sing some songs and a crowd of local children were there, leading musicians from Reykjavik, even a couple of critics from the papers. The concert was widely advertised and his father was sitting in the middle of the front row, of course. The boy came to see me later, much later, when he’d left home, and told me how he felt on that fateful night, and since then I’ve often thought how a single incident can mark a person for life.”
Every seat in Hafnarfjordur cinema was occupied and the audience was buzzing. He’d been to that charming building twice before to watch films and was enchanted by everything he saw: the beautiful lighting in the auditorium and the raised stage where plays were performed. His mother had taken him to Gone with the Wind and he had been with his father and sister to see a Walt Disney cartoon.
But these people had come not to watch the heroes of the silver screen, but to listen to him. Him singing with the voice that had already featured on two records. Instead of shyness, he was beset by uncertainty now. He had sung in public before, in the church in Hafnarfjordur and at school, in front of large audiences. Often he was shy and downright scared. Later he came to realise that he was sought-after by others, which helped him overcome his reticence. There was a reason that people came to hear him sing, a reason that people wanted to hear him, and it was nothing to be shy about. The reason was his voice and his singing. Nothing else. He was the star.
His father had shown him the advertisement in the newspaper: Iceland’s best boy soprano is performing tonight. There was no one better. His father was beside himself with joy and much more excited than the boy himself. Talked about it for days on end. If only your mother could have lived to see you singing at that place, he said. That would have pleased her so much. It would have pleased her indescribably.
People in other countries were impressed with his singing and wanted him to perform there too. They wanted to release his records there. I knew it, his father said over and again. I knew it. He had worked hard on preparing the trip. The concert in Hafnarfjordur was the finishing touch to that work.
The stage manager showed him how to peep through into the auditorium to watch the audience taking then-seats. He listened to the murmurings and saw people he knew he would never meet. He saw the choirmaster’s wife sit down with their three children at the end of the third row. He saw several of his classmates with their parents, even some who had teased him, and he saw his father take his place in the middle of the front row, with his big sister beside him, staring up at the ceiling. His mother’s family were there too, aunts he hardly knew, men holding their hats in their hands waiting for the curtain to open.
He wanted to make his father proud. He knew how much his father had sacrificed to make a successful singer of him, and now the fruits of that toil were going to be seen. It had cost relentless training. Complaining was futile. He had tried that and it made his father angry.