The Fish Can Sing (48 page)

“We here in the Store have sent you out, my dear opera singer Gar
ar Hólm, to preach Icelandic culture abroad …”

“Eh?” said the old man. “That’s a lie. To the best of my knowledge we sacked him, to put it bluntly, because he was negligent, unpunctual, and impertinent, and caused nothing but trouble in the Store.”

Merchant Gú
múnsen went on as if nothing had happened.

“Ahem,” he said. “I admit that we didn’t have the good fortune to understand the opera singer to begin with. Who has the courage to acknowledge a singer here in Iceland? Begging your pardon, but who knows the front from the back end of singing here in Iceland? On the other hand, I was the first person to acknowledge his recognition immediately it was achieved in Denmark.

“I shall never forget how dumbfounded I was the year after Georg was sacked; I was on a visit to Copenhagen as the guest of my faithful old friend, Jensen the butcher, and also the hard-tack bakery manager from Aalborg. You see, as you no doubt remember well, Herr opera singer, we had sent you to a slaughterhouse in Copenhagen when it became quite obvious that you could not be of any use in our liquor shop; we had your welfare at heart, despite everything, my dear compatriot.

“Anyway, Jensen now said to me, ‘The story of Herold has repeated itself: the Icelander you sent me has a bigger voice than anyone else in the slaughterhouse. I had him into my office along with my brother-in-law Sörensen, the manager, who plays the tuba at Aalborg. There’s always a terrific din in slaughterhouses, as everyone knows,’ Jensen the butcher said to me, ‘especially when you are slaughtering eleven hundred pigs a day. The number of times I have said to my brother-in-law Sörensen, Sörensen, there is only one slaughterhouse in Denmark which can drown the orchestra at Aalborg, and that’s my slaughterhouse. But when we had heard the Icelander bawling all those songs about the trolls, outlaws, and ghosts that you have in Iceland, we were absolutely flabbergasted; we sent the man straight to a professor. Next day he came back with a certificate’.

“ ‘Bring him in here,’ I said, ‘as my name is Gu
mundur de la Gú
múnsen!’

“And what do you think my fine friends in Denmark had pulled out of the hat? None other than our little Georg Hansson here from Hríngjarabær, whom my father had sacked from his liquor shop the year before! And the certificate was as genuine as any royal official certificate in Denmark can be, with a proper stamp and everything from the Conservo-lavatory: ‘This man is a world’s wonder, he only needs some German and Italian schooling to become world-famous’.

“Or was it from the Lotterio-observatory? I won’t go into any details, except to say that I put my hand into my pocket without a word, pulled out my wallet, and said to Denmark’s manager, ‘Here you are, how much do I pay?’

“To this little story I just want to add that I had an inkling that my friends in Denmark had already arranged among themselves to send this Icelander to Germany and Italy. I thought this rather a poor show, and so did my dear respected father, despite the fact that he has never been considered exactly extravagant and has always lived in more straitened circumstances than any other man in Iceland of his time and has tasted nothing except porridge for a whole generation and worn only clothes which our shop-assistants have discarded; we both thought it would be the crowning disgrace for the nation if a young good-for-nothing, whom Gú
múnsen’s Store could not even find a use for in the liquor shop, should be exalted by Danish butchers to become world-famous, perhaps even to become a genius, as the Danes had done for Albert Thorvaldsen and Niels Finsen. We are Independence men, my father and I, we want separation from Denmark, and so does our newspaper, the
Ísafold
. I asked, and father asked, and the whole Store asked: is it not now time that we Icelanders, who are busy moving out of the rowing-boat age into the machinery age, began to acquire something ourselves to prove that Iceland is no longer inhabited by the same seals that lived here before the year 874 when that first merchant, Ingólfur Arnarson, set up shop here in this very place where we are now? Since the leaders of reputable Danish enterprises took their oath on it, and there was a certificate available from first-rate Danish professors, that here was an Icelander who could sing louder
than a slaughterhouse in which eleven hundred pigs were being slaughtered a day, not to mention the tuba at Aalborg, was it not obvious that we here at home, who until then had only hauled in silent fish, should pull ourselves together and spit in the pisspot and stop merely being damned salt-fish barons as the Danes say, and start making the fish open its mouth to some purpose?

“And with that I gave orders that this man was to be given a new frock-coat and a tile-hat and made into a full-size genius, all at the Store’s expense, and sent out into the wide world in order to make Iceland famous. The time has come to stop talking about Egill Skallagrímsson who vomited in people’s faces. The time has come to realize an ambitious Icelandic paradox, like the one I referred to earlier:

“I say, and have always said, and will always say: the fish that does not sing throughout the whole world is a dead fish. It is high time that we here in Iceland started to have singing fish with a ribbon and bow. Welcome home, my dear compatriot, to your old and new table here in Löngustétt! We believe in you! You are this nation’s singing fish, even though it is I, de la Gu
mundur, who says so! Your health!”

Merchant Gú
múnsen had scarcely finished his speech nor begun to reap his due applause, nor even had time to peer at his wife’s face to see how she had liked it, before Gar
ar Hólm the opera singer was on his feet and had started his reply.

“I have the honour,” said the opera singer, “of being present at one of the most magnificent banquets and sumptuous outpourings of hospitality that has ever been given for gold-braided people in Europe in our time – in this new age which has started in the almanac, even though we have no proof at all, far from it, that time moves forward. Anyway, the day has come, whether time moves forwards or backwards, that I must say the few words I owe to this house, this fine house that not only ties ribbons
and bows round the cat and the canary but has bought fame for fish and has refuted the old saying: ‘livestock dies’.