The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen

Author:Madame Nielsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940953717
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2018-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

But all this—the jelly slab’s lightning and life’s unfurling as destiny and tale—is as of yet inconceivable. In this present he is still part of “the endless summer,” and one day it isn’t the Portuguese artist, but the slender and far-too-sensitive boy who accompanies the lanky Odense lad into town to spend a couple of days, staying with him in the room that used to be his too. One morning the girl rings from the farm and insists on speaking with her boyfriend. When he is handed the phone, she tells him that something has happened. What has happened? asks the slender young boy. She can’t say. But is it something serious, has grandmother died? No no, she says, that’s not it. So what is it? If something’s happened, can’t she just say what it is? She’s not crying, she doesn’t sound distraught, more like shocked, agitated. He asks if she’s pregnant? Or perhaps he specifically doesn’t ask that, he just thinks it, or tries not to think it. Is it something serious? he asks. But she doesn’t answer that question. Then he realizes she really can’t say it, she can’t even think it. It’s to do with Mom, she says, Mom and . . . In the evening, when he returns to the farm, he can sense it, from the moment he steps in through the doorway and stands in the entrance hall. Everything looks like it usually does, the same slightly dusty, elegant disarray (shadows and light), but the whole house is charged, quivering. Everything goes on as it usually does, the mother makes an omelet with various leftovers, and they eat it with slices of sourdough rye bread in the glow of the candlelight at the round table in the kitchen. Afterward, the mother puts the two little brothers to bed, and the girl and the slender boy and the handsome Lars and the tall, curly-fair-haired “Vikingo” stay at the table while the younger of the two Portuguese, the dark one, rolls a cigarette, and stands up and paces a little back and forth in the periphery of the candlelight glow, comes to a halt by the kitchen table, looks out into the darkness, lights the cigarette and goes outside to take an evening walk, returns half an hour later and sits at the table, turned slightly away, and writes something in the tiniest writing in a notebook or makes some sketches on a sheet of paper. At night, it proves impossible to sleep, as so often before the sensitive slender boy lies awake, but whereas he usually listens to the silence in the sleeping house, he can now sense that all the others are awake too, listening. Next morning, when the girl and the slender boy and the tall curly-fair-haired Portuguese are sitting at the kitchen table in the morning sun, each cradling a cup of milky galão coffee and maybe chatting a little or not really saying anything and waiting for lazy, apparently so life-loving,

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