Glódís Zoëga’s stunning beauty is a divine gift, stemming from the feminine essence of Iceland’s daughters and sisters. Iceland asks no less of its female stock.
“This one won the year before,” she continues, turning the pages.
Miss Gréta Geirsdóttir was the winner and received the honorary title of Beauty Queen of Iceland. She is blonde and slim and graced with great charm. Gréta is the daughter of the couple Jódís and Geir (deceased) from the farm of Outer Lækjarkoti í Flóa. She possesses a forthright manner.
“This one got to meet the Russian astronaut Gagarin and to hand him a bouquet of flowers. According to the article, he was short and only reached the beauty queen’s shoulders. He considered her even more beautiful than Gina Lollobrigida herself,” she continues to read.
She points at other pictures.
“This one got to appear on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ and this one had two lines in a movie about the last year in Hitler’s life. The judge in the Long Island contest said that the name of the Icelandic beauty queen sounded like a cascade of pebbles tumbling into an Icelandic fjord.”
“What about her?” I say, pointing at a picture. If I’m not mistaken, there’s a glimpse of Tivoli towers in the background.
“Those who come in third get sent to the Miss Nordic competition.”
She continues to flick through the album.
“That’s me,” she says, pointing at a skinny girl. “I went for an interview.”
The caption under the photo reads: Rannveig is unattached.
“I was told to say that. It didn’t go down well with my boyfriend.”
She pulls out the interview and shows it to me.
“Is there a man in your life?”
“No.”
“Are you going to get married?”
“Hopefully.”
She takes a deep breath.
“They invited me to a meeting in the office before the contest and wanted me to try on the swimsuit and practise pacing the room in it. There were two of them. They said it was a good idea to have a dress rehearsal in the swimsuit before the contest to practise the walk and see if I had it in me. When I got into my swimsuit, one of them measured my breasts and hips with a tape measure and the other measured my height with a folding ruler. He placed a book on my head and drew the mark with a pencil. Then he measured the wall and said it was 173 centimetres, which was quite tall for a beauty queen, but that I could be a trade-show girl. Nonsense, said the other man, she can become a trade-show girl and products presenter once she’s been to Long Island.”
She pauses and looks down.
“Then the man who had measured my height left the room and I was alone with the other. He locked the door and said that I had what it takes. I would be sent to Long Island and he would be my personal tour guide. He said I would get to talk about the fire that raged under the earth and glaciers and waterfalls. To put him off, I told him I had a boyfriend even though I’d previously told him I was single, because attached girls have less of a chance of going abroad. He told me my boyfriend could wait. We were meant to have dinner together and he suggested we treat ourselves to halibut at the Naust Restaurant.”
She dabs her eyes with a serviette, blows her nose and puts the album back into her bag.
I stand up and stretch out my hand to say goodbye.
She also stands and buttons up her coat. As she slips on her gloves, she wants to know if I have a boyfriend.
I tell her I don’t.
“My granny made an embroidery of the picture that was published with my interview.
“It took her six weeks to draw the grid, count the squares and make the cross-stitch patterns.”
beauty (in small letters)
The baby bottle stands on the kitchen table, beside half a cumin bun. As my friend pours coffee, she says she has stopped throwing up and started to put on weight.
“The sandwich loaf you brought lasted me three days. When you come with canapés, I eat them for dinner and give Thorgerdur rice pudding. I started with the prawn canapé and ended with the roast beef and remoulade.”
The best news, though, is that she has started to write in her journal again.
“I felt too nauseous for it before.”
She cuts a slice of fruitcake and places it on my plate.
“This morning I sat at the kitchen table while Thorgerdur was sleeping and the fruitcake was baking in the oven and wrote.
“Lýdur is worried about me. I can’t so much as glimpse at anything beautiful, not even a glow of light in the sky at night without starting to cry. When I was hanging up nappies and sheets on the line yesterday, I noticed that Thorgerdur had gnawed a hole in her quilt and the sky could be seen through it. It was frosty, but for the first time in a month, the sky was crystal clear and, for one brief moment, eternity was in sight. I thought: Higher, my God, nearer to Thee, can you believe it, Hekla? I felt I could touch the sky with the tip of my pen. I felt as if I were standing a short distance away from myself and could understand what was happening, as if it were happening to someone else. Afterwards I went inside and wrote a poem. About the quilt. I felt I had created beauty. Not BEAUTY in capital letters like poets do, but in small letters: beauty. Then I shook my head at my own silliness. Eternity isn’t within my reach. Compared to you, Hekla, who are the daughter of a volcano and the Arctic sea, I am the daughter of hillock and heath!”
I laugh because my friend is happy.
“When I’d written the poem, I felt that life was so wonderful that I put on a dress before Lýdur
