The Destructive Force of Romantic Love
Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only explores just how devastating love can be when it binds the wrong people.
The nights are long and filled with disturbing dreams. What if she will be on her own for ever? The sea is stormy, she is drowning, a boat appears, she waves to it, but it sails on. Even though the man in the boat sees her, he sails on, leaving her to drown. She has a dream where she lives in a derelict house, it is in ruins. The sink has been smashed as has the lavatory.
Yet there are guests whom she must serve, converse with. It means she is letting too many people into her bedroom. She lets in too many people when she really ought to be alone, clearing up and mending. The lavatory is blocked, it overflows with waste. She is bleeding from her arm, from her groin. There are wounds to her body, boils on her face. She is drowning in stinking water and sewage. Her legs sink into the mud, she tries to keep her head above the foul-smelling sewer. She is trying to reach a temple on the shore. A woman walks between the columns,
Ida can see her back, she is tall and wearing a Greek tunic with one shoulder bared, then she starts to turn and she may well have a ruined face. All that is missing is that this woman who looks so beautiful, so elegant from behind, turns and shows Ida her ruined and terrifying face. She turns, she looks at Ida, her face is beautiful, composed. A wise, mature face. An ethereal, insightful face. She looks at Ida with turquoise, almond-shaped eyes. It is a greeting from the place where she is headed.
Sometimes at night she feels a sudden paralysing pain and hates him. He could ease her pain, her longing. He could have written an ordinary letter, but he doesn’t. He could have asked: How are you? Rather than hang up. He could have said: I love you. But I’m married. What are we going to do about our love?
But he doesn’t.
Sometimes her daughter comes to her bedroom at night. She can’t sleep and wants to get into her mother’s bed. ‘No,’ Ida says so it doesn’t become a habit, so it won’t be a problem when he arrives. It is a horrible thought. Her daughter is six years old, she comes downstairs crying and wants to sleep beside Mummy, but Mummy says no. So brutal, so foolish. She walks her back upstairs and lies next to her and leaves, with those big eyes hanging on hers. Then she doesn’t even do that. She just shakes her head when her daughter appears in the doorway at night. She says: No! Go back to bed! And the child lingers in the doorway, crying silently.
‘Go upstairs to bed,’ she says sternly and hears, after a while, little pyjama footsteps up the stairs. On one occasion she doesn’t hear them and gets up to find her daughter lying on one of the bottom steps with open, dark, wet eyes and her thumb in her mouth. It is horrible to look back on, but unless she is completely honest with herself, she won’t learn anything. Her daughter comes down at night, she knows she will be rejected and no longer comes into Ida’s bedroom. She lingers in the doorway or outside the door, her presence, her sobbing breath wakes Ida up, but she turns to the wall and ignores her. Poor child, poor child. She has asked her daughter now, long afterwards, if she remembers it, and she doesn’t remember it, it was that bad.
‘I was mad back then,’ Ida says, ‘mad from being in love.’
When the children are not with her, she works and she walks. She walks to the shops, to the swimming pool, to the library, to and from everything while she talks to herself, composing the speech she will make when they get married. How can you express the inexpressible so that those who don’t understand will understand? There is no one outside, it is dark. She is talking to herself. One word in, one word out. Things he probably doesn’t remember. That he was an external examiner when she took a German exam during her first year at university, a long time ago. He was sitting at a table outside the door when she had gone in for her oral and done well. She was the last student, and she had thought that he was attractive and wanted to tell him so, but didn’t dare.
She will say in her speech what she had thought back then, the very first time they met. And she will include the contact lens incident because it was funny. The way he had said: Mind you don’t drink it! On their first night together. And perhaps she might mention how, whether to console herself or as revenge, she had later been with a man in a hotel room in Trondheim, a man who accidentally drank the water in the glass with her contact lenses because she didn’t want to say: Mind you don’t drink it! Because it was Arnold’s remark from their first night together. Except he might think she makes a habit of it, going with men to hotel rooms, and he might get jealous and angry and make a scene on their wedding day. He must never be in any doubt. Not for a second. That her desire is directed only at him. That her love is directed only at him and that it will last, that she will be faithful and never leave him. He must be convinced, one hundred per cent, that if he gives in, gives himself to her, then he will be safe for ever.
She will make it happen.
—An edited excerpt from If Only, a novel by Vigdis Hjorth. Translated by Charlotte Barslund.
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