Lime's Photograph by Leif Davidsen

Author:Leif Davidsen [Davidsen, Leif]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446483404
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

12

I spent a couple of days in the hotel room with my mobile phone switched off. One day thinking exclusively about myself. One self-centred day when I took myself back to my childhood with my affectionate parents, which hadn’t been at all problematic, and then on to my very difficult adolescence. I often wondered whether my own restlessness was due to my parents’ stability. They were born, fell in love and died in a little village on the island of Fyn, and I think they met their deaths happy and contented with the quiet, bourgeois lives they had lived. Of course I can remember them, but the memories lose focus and become hazy. There’s a slightly remote father who goes to work. And a perpetually kind mother who stays at home and is there for you when you need her. It’s as if they were always old and yet ageless, and for a short period before they died very quickly, one after the other, it was as if they suddenly aged in front of my eyes and withered away within a couple of weeks, so that I no longer saw them with the eyes of a child.

It was two days spent delving into myself, trying to rediscover the crucial events of my life. Going to the depths of my subconscious, where I was the prosecutor, defence counsel and judge. I slammed on the brakes when the pain became too intense, but for the first time in my 50 years, I spent hours trying to find out who I was and why I was that person. I didn’t find as many answers as I might have, but I found an understanding of my life, and came out of the process a more whole person. I went right in to the heart of my grief and while I couldn’t extinguish the despair, I managed to isolate it somehow, get it more under control.

I was alone. I could laugh and cry without being seen. A good, low-key hotel is the most anonymous place in the world. I could pace up and down. I could sit cross-legged on the floor or on the bed. I could eat and drink when I wanted. I didn’t have to shower, I didn’t need to shave. I could sit in the heat of Madrid naked as a baby or just in my underwear. The only thing I couldn’t do was shout. The hotel didn’t have air conditioning, and if I had bellowed out my pain, the police would have turned up. I could hear sounds from the street, but the people walking along Calle Echégaray couldn’t hear me. My conversations with myself were mumbled under my breath, a dialogue between two parts of my mind trying to speak of the wordless.

I ordered food a couple of times, but barely touched it, although I soon began emptying the bottles in the minibar. I didn’t get completely drunk, just mellow and sentimental as I delved into the suitcase and into my past.

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