“We who are in the know and do nothing are the guilty ones.”
There is a swarm of small birds in the garden, they fly off the roof, under the drainpipe, and vanish in an instant. I stand up and he then tells me there’s an American chocolate cake in the oven and he’s wondering if I’d like to pop in.
“Betty Crocker,” he adds. And after a moment’s hesitation: “Aurora is on a gluten-free diet.”
So Svanur bakes.
He says that he just stuck the cake into the oven and that it should be ready in a short while.
I think it over. I have yet to borrow the hunting rifle from him.
“It’s good for men to have someone to confide in,” I hear him saying.
I tell him I’ll be over soon.
I first need to pop into my apartment to check on something.
I am a watercolor.
I wash off
This morning half a mountain is visible through the kitchen window, as well as a stretch of the cold green sea; the mountain vanishes as yet another floor is added to the high-rise that is being built.
I turn on the computer and Google famous writers who have killed themselves. The number of pages on this subject surprises me. I would never have imagined there was such a large group of famous men and women who decided at some point to put an end to their lives. My recollection was correct: the author of The Sun Also Rises and To Have and Have Not had used his favourite rifle. Nor do I need much time to confirm my suspicion that most men shoot themselves, although it is more prevalent in countries where gun ownership is more widespread. I scroll down a page and see that a short story writer shot himself with a shotgun in the middle of a ski slope and painted it red, and a thirty-year-old poet first shot his young mistress and then himself; when he was discovered in his hotel room in Paris, his toenails were painted red and a cross was tattooed on one of his soles. Few leap out of windows, although several leap off bridges into rivers, and some rivers are more popular than others, such as the Seine, for example. I see that one of the people who drowned in the Seine was Paul Celan, the author of the collection of poetry on my mother’s shelf, which I still have in my jacket pocket. The Roman poet Petronius slit his wrists and then bandaged them again in order to delay his death so that he could listen to his friend reciting poems about life. Sleeping pills also feature as a way of enabling people to sleep longer than usual in hotel rooms, for eternity you might say.
I note with interest that women apply other methods, focusing more on gas ovens in the kitchen or exhaust fumes in sealed garages after a few shots of vodka.
I also notice that it’s the women who are more prone to leaving farewell notes, they write a few lines: For my lover, returning to his wife and say of themselves: As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off. Virginia Woolf left a love letter to her husband before she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. I don’t think two people could have been happier, she wrote. Other farewells were simple, such as the poet who jumped off a boat in the Gulf of Mexico exclaiming: Goodbye, everybody!
What strikes me is the fact that these men and women were generally younger than me, by as much as two decades. The years before or after thirty are the most difficult. One decides to end it at the age of thirty-two and another at thirty-three, both novelists; there is also a thirty-four-year-old painter; Mayakovsky reaches the age of thirty-six; Pavese was forty-one. Turning thirty-seven is difficult for an artist and not everyone overcomes that hurdle. Musicians are even younger: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and Jim Morrison were all twenty-seven years old. I’ve passed the dying age of artists.
Other laws apply when you’re just ordinary.
About to turn forty-nine
Male
Divorced
Heterosexual
Powerless
With no sex life
A handyman*
A scar is an abnormal skin formation that has grown around a wound or lesion
Svanur stands on the chequered kitchen floor in his socks and his “Shit Happens” T-shirt and ties his apron.
I watch him slip on red oven mitts, open the oven, cautiously pull out the rack with the baking mould, and stick a needle thermometer into the cake.
“Another seven minutes,” he says, before pouring cream into a bowl and plugging in the mixer. He turns his back to me as he concentrates on the task. Once he has whipped the cream, he rinses the whisks and sticks them into the dishwasher.
I consider the right moment to raise the issue of the rifle.
While he is scooping the cream out of the bowl with a spatula, he says he has noticed a certain restlessness in Aurora’s soul.
He still has his back turned to me.
“You never know what a woman is thinking. They betray nothing on the surface, then suddenly they make a decision and tell you they don’t love you anymore. Like they’ve secretly been changing.”
He takes the cake out of the oven, frees it from the mould, cuts a slice, and then meticulously examines the wound to ensure it is fully baked. Once that’s done, he cautiously places the slice on my plate with the pastry server, propped up by his stubby fingers.
He seems anxious and wants to know if there were any signs in the air before Gudrún left me.
I give this some thought.
“She told me I repeated everything she said.”
He is flabbergasted.
“Repeated, how do you mean?”
“Yeah, she told me that when she said something to me, I would answer by repeating
