Moonstone (6 page)

In many cases the skin takes on a bluish tinge. Corpses turn blue-black.

There are ten thousand stricken townspeople, ten doctors, three overflowing hospitals, and one pharmacy, which is closed due to the illness of the druggist and all his dispensers.

All over town flu victims lie in a huddle, racked by coughs, aches, and dehydration, too delirious to fetch water to quench their thirst; in the more affluent homes, the medicine bottles stand within reach, untouched.

In one turf-roofed farmhouse on Brádrædisholt, in the west of town, they find the stiffened body of a man lying in the marital bed, and beside it a desperately ill woman with the corpse of an infant in the crook of each arm. Along the walls are cots, each with one or two heads peeping over the sides. The husband had died leaving five young children, and his wife had fallen ill before she could raise the alarm. Shortly afterward she gave birth to stillborn twins. A neighbor came upon her by chance.

While Dr. Garibaldi tends to the mother, Sóla and Máni shroud the bodies of the twins in pillowcases and carry them out to the car.

An hour later, on Grettisgata, they hear the death rattle of the solitary occupant at the very instant they enter the damp little basement room.

*   *   *

No matter how distressing the scenes, the boy remains impassive. Scarcely a word falls from his lips over the nine days.

Reykjavík has, for the first time, assumed a form that reflects his inner life: a fact he would not confide to anyone.

 

xx

Sóla G—! She is as magnificent up close as from afar!

On their drives around town, Máni Steinn sits beside her in the front. Behind them Dr. Garibaldi Árnason sprawls on the leather-upholstered passenger seat. Between visits he leafs through reports or writes comments in a notebook. He has strictly forbidden his driver and assistant to talk so he can concentrate on his reading and jotting and hear himself think—after all, the motor-car makes enough of a racket without the addition of young people's idle chatter.

The boy watches the girl's every move:

How she holds the steering wheel; how she changes gear; how she climbs out of the vehicle and into it; how she rests her booted right foot on the running board on the driver's side while they are waiting for the doctor; how she wedges a cigarette in her plastic holder; how she inhales the smoke; how she spits a flake of tobacco from her tongue.

What impresses him most is how unaffectedly she performs all these actions; how easy it is for her to be Sóla G—.

Now he is watching her open the door of an apartment on the first floor of a house on one of the town's more prosperous streets, on the last visit of the day.

—Hello, anybody home?

Dr. Garibaldi calls in through the door. It is dark inside; an electric lamp in the stairwell casts a faint light into the hall. When no answer is heard, the doctor nods to the boy to enter first.

—There should be a man in here …

The boy gropes his way inside in the gloom. Curtains are pulled across all the windows, and the air is thick with the stench of vomit, blood, urine, and excrement. He pauses, takes a Lysol-soaked cloth from his pocket, and holds it up to his mouth and nose before proceeding.

There is no one in the kitchen, no one in the bedroom, no one in the bathroom, no one in the sitting room. He calls to the doctor:

—There's nobody here!

But just as the boy is about to go back into the hall he notices a strip of light in the wallpaper in the corner of the room beside the stove. On closer inspection, it turns out that there is a door concealed in the wall, which would by daylight be invisible to all except those who knew it was there.

He pushes it open. There is a compartment inside.

By the dim illumination of a reading lamp on a small desk, the boy makes out a chair and bookcase, artfully fitted into the space; walls lined with tight ranks of pictures featuring timeless motifs—Adonis and Pan, satyrs and shepherds, Saint Sebastian—and, at the edge of the pool of light, a divan bed containing a shadowy figure under a thick quilt.

The boy recognizes the man. One of his first gentlemen—the kindest of all until he met the foreigner—from whom he no longer demands payment. And who, after their last meeting, had gazed deep into his eyes and said with a catch in his voice:

Had we but another world and time

Our passionate embraces were no crime.

Dr. Garibaldi and Sóla G— appear behind the boy. The shadowy form on the divan stirs. The doctor squeezes into the compartment, pauses beside the desk on which lies a pale-blue book with two poppies on the cover, and mutters the title:

—
Mikael
.

The occupant of the compartment waves a hand at him, saying hoarsely:

—Never mind that I read Herman Bang, Doctor—be my savior and restore me to life.

The boy backs out the door before the man can spot him.

Sóla G— follows him into the passage.

There in the gloom, Máni Steinn watches as the girl places a bracing hand on his shoulder. She's well acquainted with the comings and goings of Reykjavík's evening walkers on Öskjuhlíd.

He knows all about her; she knows only this about him.

 

xxi

In the course of his home visits, Dr. Garibaldi Árnason has been collecting a variety of information about the pattern of the Spanish flu, asking patients, among other things, where and how they believe they caught the disease.

A fair number think it must have been “at the pictures.”

Once the doctor is convinced of the role played by the picture houses in the spread of the disease, he arranges, through the Board of Health, for the cinemas to be specially fumigated and for a public announcement to be made:

To make people stop and think about what sort of buildings these are and what goes on inside them, and to question whether such goings-on are desirable.

For Dr. Garibaldi has long endeavored to persuade his countrymen of the dangers inherent in gawking at films.

*   *   *

One factor that renders film such an irresistible experience is the opportunity it affords the audience to observe other people without shame. From the safety of his seat in the darkened auditorium, the cinemagoer can, besides taking in the story that is being shown, subject the “men” and “women” on screen to a close scrutiny of the sort that would be unthinkable in society at large; on the streets, in places of employment, in cafés, in shops, in churches, or even in theaters, since in the latter the actor can, at any moment, turn on the audience and reprimand any person he feels is ogling him rather than attending to the fate of his character.

The distinction, in other words, lies in the fact that what is presented to the gaze of the cinema viewer is not real flesh-and-blood human beings but only moving pictures of people, “simulacra” created from light and shadow at the moment when the actor is filmed lending his body and emotions to the puppet that is then placed on view.

Anyone who has observed a child playing with a doll will know how intently the child examines it by touch as well as gaze. Fingers and eyes probe the physical form with the precision of a master surgeon who has been assigned the task of dissecting a body to the bone. Every nook and cranny is inspected; nape of neck and ear, groin and instep are caressed.

In the same fashion, the cinema audience scrutinizes the light-puppets on the silver screen, and whether it is the curve of Asta Nielsen's back, Theda Bara's naked shoulders, Pina Menichelli's sensual eyelids, Clara Kimball Young's slim ankles, Musidora's Cupid's bow, Gunnar Tolnæs's strong fingernails, Douglas Fairbanks's firm thighs, or Max Linder's soft eyes, the body part in question and its position will become the focus of the viewer's existence and etch itself into his psyche, while the size of the image and the repeated close-ups of lips, teeth, and even tongues will exacerbate the effects until few have the strength to resist them.

Film is thus immoral by its very nature, transforming the actor into a fetish and fostering perversion in the viewer, who allows himself to be seduced like a moth to the flame. The difference lies in that the cinema audience's appointment is with the cold flicker of the flame rather than the searing fire itself. The moth burns up, but the viewer can, without fear, surrender to his escalating desire and seek out the experience over and over again, as is, alas, far too often the case.

—Dr. G. Árnason, excerpt from “Cinema and Mental Disorders,”
The Nation
23 (1916)

*   *   *

On the evening of Tuesday, November 26—the day that twenty-six funerals are held at the cathedral and the coffins are interred in a single mass grave in the northeastern corner of the cemetery—Máni Steinn and Sóla G— pass through the auditoriums of the Old and New Cinemas, igniting chlorine gas on the doctor's instructions.

Dressed in black from top to toe, with black gauze over their noses and mouths and dark goggles over their eyes, they drip hydrochloric acid into ceramic jars containing a solution of calcium chloride, which they have placed at intervals between the seats.

As soon as the cloud of vapor begins to rise, they race outside into the street, closing the doors firmly behind them.

Trembling with excitement, the boy pretends to cough.

The greenish-yellow gas that had lately felled young men on the battlefields of Europe now drifts and rolls through the picture houses of Reykjavík.

 

VIII

(November 30–December 1, 1918)

 

xxii

The first film to be shown in Reykjavík when the epidemic began to abate at the end of November, and it was thought safe to gather in public again, was called
Sister Cecilia
—“the lyrically beautiful love story of a young artist,” in four parts. The proceeds of the ticket sales went to support the many children who had been left orphaned by the epidemic.

Although Máni Steinn was running a little low on cash after his busy days and nights with Sóla G— and Dr. Garibaldi Árnason—he'd had neither the energy nor the opportunity to pick up any trade—he was still sufficiently well-off to be able to invite the old lady to a show at the New Cinema.

Not that it was an easy matter to persuade her to accept the offer. First she told him it wasn't fitting for him, a child in her care, to treat her to anything. He replied that he had turned sixteen on April 23 and that it was only natural that their roles should be reversed. Such was life.

Well, then the old lady pleaded in her defense that she had already been to the
kinematograph
long ago, more than once in fact—if not three times, then at least twice—and it had always been the same damned waste of time, apart from one newsreel from Thingvellir that included a brief glimpse of Reverend Matthías Jochumsson, seated in a chair with knees spread wide, a walking stick between them and a bowler hat on his head, and that was only because the grand old man of poetry was a relative of theirs.

However, when the boy described for her the company and amenities in the more expensive seats of the New Cinema—which included an ashtray in the arm of every chair—she grudgingly agreed to accompany him.

The old lady said she had always envied the father of her landlord downstairs, who got to sit with his friends in the smoking room, wreathed in a fog of cigars, and whenever she was sent in there with soda water or a new decanter of brandy, she used to linger with them in the cloud of tobacco for as long as could be considered decent.

The film was delayed by thirty minutes while the cinemagoers offered one another their condolences, passing from row to row, neither pressing hands nor embracing but bowing their heads and repeating the same words of consolation with the variations “your daughter,” “your sister,” “your wife,” “your husband,” “your son,” “your brother”—since everybody had lost someone.

A silence fell when the last member of the audience entered the auditorium. It was the teenage girl who had been shut up for thirteen days with the bodies of her mother and brother. She was led in between a nurse and an orderly from the lunatic asylum at Kleppur. From the look in her eyes it was plain that she would not understand the words of sympathy that were burning on everyone's lips.

The lights went down.

Children appeared on the screen, escorted by an angel; holy sisters knelt before a tombstone; lovers were denied a happy ending.

The screening was accompanied by Reynir Gíslason's Orchestra, and to begin with the music managed to drown out the sighing and weeping. Thick smoke rose from the more expensive seats, where the men were chain-smoking cigars in the hope that this would stifle their sobs.

When they came out afterward, the old lady wiped a tear from her eye and extracted a promise from the boy that he would never again invite her to the cinema.

 

xxiii

The sun casts its rays over the town. The weather couldn't be finer; dry and not a cloud in the sky. Máni Steinn threads his way through the throng by the harbor like a needle through sackcloth until he reaches a good spot on the docks.

There the Danish warship
Islands Falk
is lying at berth, festooned with bunting from mast to mast, the Danish national flag taking pride of place over the Icelandic one.

Shortly after the cathedral bell has tolled half past eleven, the marines of the
Falcon
stand to attention on the deck of the ship, then march ashore with rifles at their shoulders and flashing bayonets. Thus equipped, they progress with regular steps from the docks to Government House, where they form an honor guard below the wall of the green. The brass band Harpa is already there with its leader, Reynir Gíslason, haggard from lack of sleep.

The thick press of people sets off in pursuit of the column of marines, and the boy allows himself to be carried along. Most of the spectators take up position on Lækjargata, some standing in the square, others lining up on the slope to the right of Government House. He finds himself a spot in the square.