Garbo’s Faces

a Novel — Part 6: Books

When I next opened my eyes, Harriet was already in the room sitting in the Aalto chair looking at me. I could tell she had been there for some time, for she looked very comfortable, very settled in — her legs tucked under her, quite still, looking at me looking at her. She was smoking a cigarette, and the remnants of several others lay in an ashtray on the floor.

“About time,” she said.

“I must have been very tired,” I managed.

“Yes,” she said. “You were.”

I retrieved my watch from the little bedside table: it showed ten-thirty. I looked out the window. She had parted the curtains and I saw nothing but blue sky.

“A nice morning,” I said.

She turned her head and followed my gaze into the blue sky. “Yes. It’s a very nice day,” she said. Then she stirred, unfolded her legs, put her feet on the floor and her elbows on her knees, looked back at me. “What do you want to do today?” she asked.

Something I had not had a chance to consider. “I am starving,” was all I could come up with.

“It’s Sunday,” she said, and straightened. “Claire is off. But I will try not to poison you. I will make you something nice.” Then, after a second or two of what seemed like looking for the right words, she said, “Today is the darkest day of the year. The shortest day of the year. The winter solstice. Tomorrow the day will be a little longer than today. And each day a little longer still until midsummer, when the sun doesn’t even set at home.”

“Do you, I mean in Sweden, did you celebrate the Winter Solstice?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. “Not the solstice. But I think Lucia Day, which we celebrate on the 13th of December, is a celebration of the dark. Or a cure for the dark. I remember mother telling me when I was very little that Lucia Day was the darkest day of the year, at least when she was a child. Not that I think it has changed since, she must have been wrong. But for a long time, until not so long ago in fact, I still thought that the 13th of December was the shortest day, which it isn’t.”

Quite awake now and remembering wondering this when she mentioned it at Macy’s as well, I asked, “What is Lucia Day? Who was Lucia?”

“It’s Santa Lucia. She was an Italian or Sicilian saint who was burned at the stake for refusing to marry some pagan or other or something like that. But I seem to remember that no matter how hard they tried to set her on fire she wouldn’t burn, so in the end they had to cut her head off instead.

“To celebrate her courage and to ward off the night, we used to — they still do, at home, of course.” She hesitated for just a breath, “We used to select a pretty girl with long blond hair to be Santa Lucia and make a crown of candles for her hair, which we then lit. The rest of us — I was never picked as Lucia — would carry candles in our hands and sing hymns. All of this took place so early in the morning that the stars were still all out. And it was cold and snow covered the ground and I could see the two churches at each end of my street like dark giants on my way to school. And we had saffron buns and coffee, even at school, I remember. It was a grand time. No such thing here.”

I could see how her own description had transported her back to her childhood and I waited for her to return.

When she finally looked back at me, I asked, “You don’t celebrate Lucia Day here?”

“Who would be Lucia?” she asked. “Not me, I was never selected, and my hair isn’t nearly blond enough.”

“Wouldn’t Santa Lucia, if she was from Sicily, have dark hair,” I suggested, logically.

She looked at me as if I had put my foot somewhere it had no business being put.

“Lucias are blond,” she said and that was final.

I wasn’t about to argue.

Then she stood up and stretched. “You’re starving,” she said. “I’ll see what I can fix you.”

She made me crispy thin pancakes which she served with cloudberry preserves and whipped cream. It was one of the finest breakfasts I have ever had, and I said so.

“It’s a hidden talent of mine,” she said, smiling. “Please don’t tell Claire, she’d have me cook my own food if she knew.”

By the time I had finished that wonderful breakfast — Harriet only had a cup of coffee and some skorpor, which she dipped in her coffee with some relish — the sky outside the dining room window had grayed and darkened, and quickly at that. Massive clouds were racing to cover what blue patches were left: a job they had finished a minute or two later. Thoroughly.

Out of nowhere. Was this an American thing? Back in England the weather gave good and proper notice: this is where I’m heading; same in India: there were always signs about what to expect.

Not here.

“That was quick,” I said.

She didn’t understand.

“The sky,” I said, and glanced back out the window.

She did too. And nodded. “It does that here.” Then added, “They say on the radio we should have snow by this evening. And just in time for Christmas.”

“I’m not much for snow,” I said.

“A Christmas without snow is no Christmas at all,” she said. “I had so many Christmases in California that were nothing but sunshine and palm trees.” She frowned at the memory. “And parties. And shopping.” Still frowning. “I so longed for the dark and dreary of Stockholm then, crisp snow on the ground, the church bells ringing for Christmas Morning service. That’s Christmas. This, this other holiday out in California is, is, I don’t know what it is.”

She took a long look at me. Then looked down at her hands by her cup of coffee. She drew breath to say something, but didn’t. Then she tried again, it was as if what she wanted to say needed a running start.

“When we first met. On the boat. Do you remember? On the Christina.” She paused, and looked up at me. Then, “I was very nervous. Could you tell.?”

“No. No, not really. I thought you were cool as a cucumber.”

“A cucumber?”

“It’s an expression.”

“You mean cold, don’t you, not cool.”

“Well, yes, to be honest. And no. I guess both.”

“I am sorry, Nachiketa. I am. As you know, I’m not good at being a mother. You can forgive me?”

“I forgave you when you welcomed me with a hug this time.”

She smiled at that, a happy girl. “Good,” she said. “That’s settled then. Friends?”

“Why, of course.”

She cleared the table and put the dishes in the sink for Claire to do the next day. “I want to show you my books,” she said. “Then we must get some shopping done.”

Her living room — she called it her sitting room — was large and light, with many windows. It had plenty of room for bookshelves — in fact, it had a nicely built-in set of shelves by one of the windows, and below another — but they were empty of books, as was the rest of the room.

“A sitting room is for sitting,” she explained. “I read in my bedroom. So that’s where I keep my books. Besides, it’s nobody’s business what I read.”

She led me down a wide hallway to her bedroom. She entered first, then took me by the hand when I, by some inbred instinct hesitated, and led me through the door.

I gaped. I’m pretty sure I did. Should have, in any event. Library or bedroom? Good question. This was definitely where she kept her books. To be sure, one wall was so much mirror and closet, but of the remaining three, one was floor to ceiling shelves and the other two housed three large bookcases between them. Harriet looked pleased at my reaction, a little proud I think.

“My private crypt,” she announced with a little flourish. “Here is where I keep my dead friends.”

“That’s a bit macabre.”

“Well, it’s true. Pretty much, no?”

The thing about this library — about the books that filled these many shelves — was that they had been read, and yes, from what I now know, they had all been read by her. My mother had a lot of time on her hands, and she refused to buy a television. So she read.

I scanned the backs of her many dead friends. There was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and other collected poems. It looked like she had all of Emily Bronte’s novels, along with a set of Hemingway’s. I pulled out a nice copy of The Great Gatsby.

“Have to confess, I never finished that one,” she said from very close to me. “Just couldn’t make out what he was getting at.”

She had a nice collection of Conrad’s stories, and I pulled out a beat-up paperback of The Heart of Darkness. This one had been read all the way through, and more than once.

“Do you know,” she said, “that he didn’t speak a word of English until he went to sea in his late teens, or it may have been early twenties, I don’t remember which.”

“No,” I said, surprised. “I thought he was English.” Someone in college had told me that he found Conrad boring; and that, for me, meant he was English. He had said it several times: boring, boring, boring — I don’t remember the occasion, just that boring was very thoroughly the word — and it stuck with me as one of those opinions you form without looking for yourself, and those have a tendency to stick until you finally do look for yourself, if you ever do. As a result I never sought Conrad out, nor did I actually read him. Besides, in college I was somewhat partial to American writers.

“Polish,” she informed me. “He was born Konrad Korsinovski or something like that. I know I’ve got Konrad, that’s Konrad with a K, right but I could never quite figure out his last name. Later, when he became a writer, I guess, he changed his name to Joseph Conrad, that’s Conrad with a C.”

I replaced The Heart of Darkness and pulled out another Conrad: a leather-bound and much read copy of The Condition of Art. A collection of essays and comments, said the subtitle.

“What amazes me,” said Harriet, “is that you actually can learn another language, a language other than the one you’re born into. And learn it well enough to write in it. To shine in it. For this man shines.”

“I’m still amazed that he wasn’t English,” I said, and that was true.

“He must have known English before,” she said. “Earlier.”

I looked at her, “Earlier?”

“In an earlier life,” she said.

I watched her face closely to see if she was putting me on. She was not. “Yes,” I said then, “Yes. That could very well be.”

Then I looked back at the book I held. The title made such a bold promise that I had to open it. It fell open at the principal essay, and its much-read, and underlined, opening.

“Read it,” she said.

“This?” I said, showing where the book had opened.

“Yes. Aloud.”

I looked at her again; she was serious in her request. So I read:

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colors, in its lights, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential — their one illuminating and convincing quality — the very truth of their existence.

Quite a statement. I made a mental note to find and buy the book when I got home to London.

“I wish I had read that when I was a girl, before I decided to become an actress,” she said. “Then I would never have pursued it.”

“Why on Earth not?”

“Art, as Conrad says, should be enduring and essential. You tell me, Nachiketa, what is there that is enduring and essential in a face?”

It was a rhetorical question.

“Nothing,” she said after a brief while. “Nothing.” Then she looked away, out the window and up at the sky, a famous profile. “Nothing,” she said again, to the sky. Then by a force of will that struck me as tangible, she gathered herself back to my side, and smiled. A tentative smile to be sure, but a smile nonetheless. My mother was nothing if not a strong woman.

I smiled back.

“I’m not sure it was a decision to become an actress,” she said. “Not a conscious Now I will sort of a decision anyway. It was more like a dream, always present: an always dream. A wish. All I ever wished for.”

After a breath or two, she added, “And it came so horribly, horribly true.”

I was quite taken aback by her intensity, but I did understand. At least I felt I did. I did not, however, know what to answer, so I said nothing.

“Conrad’s long gone,” she said into my silence. “He’s nothing but bones now. But the beauty of what he wrote remains. It is still alive, unscarred. That’s the lesson. That’s what I have to live with.”

I read the opening passage again, silently this time, and I shivered. Yes, I must not forget to find this book when I returned to London. Conrad was someone I would have to read, and in earnest. I replaced the book, almost reverently.

Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was lying on its side, and leaning against the end of the shelf, Heine’s Book of Songs and his The Harz Journey kept each other company.

“Now, there’s one who speaks his mind,” she said.

“Heine?”

“Yes. Have you read him?”

“Yes. A little. He’s a card.”

“A card?”

“Yes. Means he’s a character, a witty and somewhat eccentric character.”

“How does that become a card?”

Now, I actually knew the answer to that. “It was Arnold Bennett’s doing. Where he got it from I don’t know, but he wrote a novel called The Card. That title referred to the main character — Edward Henry, if I’m not mistaken — who turned out to be an odd and loveable character. A real card, in other words. And I guess it stuck.”

“A card?” she said again, more to herself this time. “Perhaps it’s only an English expression?”

“I don’t know, possibly. Bennett was certainly English.”

“But you like Heine, and you think he’s a card?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said and smiled.

She had a nicely bound collection of Sappho’s poems, one of only a handful of books bound in leather (Conrad’s Condition of Art being another). From what I could tell, the bulk of her library consisted of hardbacks and paperbacks, mostly second-hand.

She followed my eyes.

“Did you know that Plato called her the tenth muse?”

“Yes,” I said. “I did know that.”

“Amazing woman,” she said.

She had an old Encyclopaedia Britannica. A 1911 Handy Edition in very nice condition. “Isn’t this encyclopedia a bit out of date?” I wondered.

“I know what’s happened to me since I was born,” she said. “I’m interested in what happened to me before I was born.”

“That’s a curious choice of words,” I said.

“Well, I don’t think I began in Stockholm in 1905, do you?”

“No, I don’t think so either,” I said, which was true.

“Well, I’m like you there,” she said. “I believe in reincarnation. The only thing that makes any sense.”

I nodded my agreement, for her thoughts certainly paralleled mine on that subject.

A large volume, Swedish, said Troll on its spine. I pulled it out.

“Trolls?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s mainly pictures. You should look at them.”

The book was large and heavy, and I looked for somewhere to sit. She noticed and said, “Here, please,” and moved a couple of pillows out of a green armchair. I sat down, sank down — the chair was very plush — while she remained standing beside me, a guide at the ready.

The first picture was of three huge and one smaller troll surrounding a fairy princess. She’s all light and they are darkness personified. “John Bauer,” she said. “The best troll painter I know.”

“They’re amazing,” I said.

“I love trolls,” she said. “They are so ugly, they are absolutely free.”

Although I heard what she said, I didn’t stop looking at the picture long enough to make sense of what she meant. But her words lingered while I flipped through to the next picture, also by John Bauer: a huge troll, an amazing nose. “They’re not ugly ugly though,” I said. It wasn’t quite what I meant to say, but then I hit on it. “They’re not evil ugly.”

“No,” she said. “Most trolls are not evil. They’re mischievous, yes, and they’ll run off with your children tucked under their arms sometimes. They may even boil and eat them on occasion, but they are not really evil. Not evil ugly, no. Not ugly ugly, as you said. Free ugly. That’s what they are.”

There it was again. What did free have to do with ugly? I looked up at her. She must have read the question on my face, for she stepped away from the chair and walked over to the window, looking up.

As if addressing the sky she said, “Can you imagine what it’s like?”

When I didn’t answer she said it again, and again to the sky. “Can you imagine what it’s like? To walk into a room full of people you have never met and see, quite clearly, that because you arrive — that because you and your famous face arrive — every man in the room has now changed, instantly; and not for the better?”

I looked at her, but did not, still could not, answer. She was still facing the sky.

“People who only a moment before — while you are still outside that door, yet to enter, still unseen by them — may have been laughers, talkers, sharers, lovers, suddenly become gawkers, gapers, whisperers, starers, fawners, grovelers, droolers, flatterers.”

I drew breath. To protest, I guess; but she continued before any sound could reach my lips.

“I once read an article that said that there are many phenomena that are impossible to truly observe because the act of observing them alters them, so what the observer sees is not what is there when nobody’s looking, only what is there when someone is looking.

“As an adult, I have yet to observe real people. I have yet to see how they behave in a Harriet-less world. I have yet to observe the world as it is without me, for whenever I look, whenever I arrive, the world changes from what it was just a moment ago, its real self, into something else: in the presence of Harriet Brown. Can you understand that, Nachiketa?”

Whatever my protest might have been, it was too feeble to resurrect, because I did see, I did understand my mother’s dilemma.

“Yes,” I said. “I do understand.”

She did not turn around. Her shoulders fell a little as she steadied herself on the window sill.

The book of trolls felt heavy in my lap.

“And trolls,” I began.

“And trolls,” she said as she turned around, “are ugly, are free to come and go, are free to look and see, are free to be. They will never harm with their beauty.”

Her eyes glistened a little, as if with tears — or it could have been a trick of the light.

© Wolfstuff