Carnality, p.1
Carnality, page 1
ALSO BY LINA WOLFF
Many People Die Like You
The Polyglot Lovers
Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs
First published in the Swedish language as Köttets tid in 2019 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden Copyright © Lina Wolff 2019
Translation copyright © Frank Perry 2022
The cost of this translation was defrayed by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged.
Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Wolff, Lina, 1973- author. | Perry, Frank (Translator), translator.
Title: Carnality / Lina Wolff; translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry.
Other titles: Köttets tid. English
Description: New York : Other Press, [2022] | “First published in the Swedish language as Köttets tid in 2019 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden”
Identifiers: LCCN 2021058994 (print) | LCCN 2021058995 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635420746 (paperback) | ISBN 9781635420753 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PT9877.33.O54 K6813 2022 (print) | LCC PT9877.33.O54 (ebook) | DDC 839.73/8—dc23/eng/20211203
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058994
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058995
Ebook ISBN 9781635420753
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
btb__140374769_c0_r1
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
— Gnostic Gospel of Thomas
Contents
Cover
Also by Lina Wolff
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Mercuro
Lucia
About the Authors
As the plane dips toward the hinterland, she can look across at sand-colored high-rises and hills that are as dry and barren as the surface of the moon. This is not her first visit to the city. Some time ago she lived here long enough to learn something of its soul. The place is like a wild animal that has been tamed, or an ember still smoldering. You have to be on your guard, and if you sleep, you should do so with one eye permanently open. It occurs to her that the sum she was awarded as a travel grant could have been spent in Barcelona, San Sebastian, or Valencia, where closeness to the sea would have made the summer months more bearable. Then again you’re not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. Besides, the thing about awards is that when you get one, the award also seems to get you.
Over the loudspeaker the steward is announcing they will soon be landing and the temperature in Madrid is currently twenty-nine degrees Celsius. She fastens her seat belt, leans back in her chair, and waits with her eyes closed for the plane to grip the runway.
* * *
—
The two-bedroom apartment she will be living in is on calle Goya. Its rooms are lined up in a row, and the first, which could be a guest room if she ever has any guests, is followed by the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and, at the far end, the bedroom that will be hers. She enters the apartment carrying her suitcase and then walks around on a tour of inspection while the owner remains at the door, drumming her fingers testily against the frame. The owner tells her that the neighbors can be touchy so she’d be grateful if things don’t get too out of hand, because previous recipients of the award have held parties into the early hours. She tells her not to worry. She’s forty-five and stopped partying like that a long time ago. Once all the practical matters have been sorted, she walks over to El Corte Inglés and buys a bottle of wine. That is the first thing she does when she arrives in Spain. A lot of people go down to the beach, or to a bar or a restaurant if you are in Madrid, to unwind and absorb the atmosphere of their new surroundings; they order a mojito and jot things down in a Moleskine notebook, but she drinks wine and watches television. Glass in hand, she arranges herself among the soft cushions on the sofa. She remains like that for the rest of the evening: bloated and reclining in the steady stream of overexcited voices pouring from the news, Venezuelan series, and rowdy talk shows.
A little after midnight she is woken by a cool current of air entering through the open window. She is still clutching the wineglass in her hand, and the hard tap water she drank earlier in the evening has left the taste of old plumbing in her mouth. The buzz from the square and the pubs has got louder. She gets up, moves over to the window, and looks out onto the square. It’s down there, she thinks. Life. She decides to go out, and the nighttime pulse of Madrid starts pounding away at her once she’s on the street. She remembers what it was like when she was a student here almost twenty years ago, immersed in a daily rhythm in which you never ate dinner before ten and always went out afterward. When did we sleep? She can’t remember ever having slept in Madrid, or ever feeling tired for that matter.
* * *
—
She goes into a place with windows of tinted glass and furnishings in dark wood, sits at the bar, and orders a glass of cava. After a while she becomes aware of a man on the other side of the room. Several things make him stand out. He is sitting alone and keeps darting glances at the people around him; he appears to be sweating, even though the air-conditioning is going full blast and it isn’t that hot inside. She must have been watching him for just a bit too long, because his eyes suddenly stop roving and look straight at her. She looks down at the counter. She isn’t the sort of person who picks someone up in a bar, and even if she were, it wouldn’t be anyone like him. But the ball has apparently been set rolling, because the man in question gets to his feet, grabs his glass, and starts moving toward her. She realizes she won’t have time to get up and leave in a way that would seem natural before he reaches her. Once at her side, he asks her, in a voice that sounds muffled the way it can in people who don’t talk much, if he can have a seat. When she fails to respond he pulls out a chair and sits. Then he turns to her and offers his hand.
“Mercuro Cano,” he says.
She tells him her name. And that is where things stay. After a while she feels it’s time for her to find another bar, as the man has failed to say anything more. She makes an attempt to get up.
“You leaving already?” he says in response. “We haven’t even started talking.”
There is something about the incomprehension in his tone, which sounds both genuinely confused and profoundly human, that makes her sit down again. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches him extract a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his forehead.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
“No,” he replies. “To tell you the truth, I’m not feeling well at all.”
While he says this he runs a finger under his nose as if he were wiping away lather, or the traces of some powder he had sniffed.
“I could really do with a chat,” he says. “Just to feel something in my life was normal. A little bit of normality, even if it’s only for a moment.”
Why not, she thinks. The point of this trip is to meet people as well, which isn’t going to happen if you shy away the moment someone approaches you.
“Okay,” she says.
The man nods, relieved.
“What do you do?” he asks.
“I write,” she replies.
“Oh,” he says. “You write. What do you write?”
“Articles and columns for a local paper,” she tells him.
“Do you live here, in Madrid?”
“I’ve been awarded a travel grant,” she replies. “Three months with everything covered, apart from pocket money and food.”
“Congratulations,” he says.
She tells him it’s hardly worth congratulations. And if they had asked her, she would have told them she’d rather spend the grant somewhere else than in Madrid. She’s lived here before and knows that arriving any time between May and August is madness. Someone told her that in some place in the interior, it might have been Granada, the mercury had reached forty-two degrees. Sheer hell. She talks quickly, as she used to when she lived here, and is delighted to discover she can still carry that off in Spanish.
“So where do you come from?” the man asks.
“Sweden.”
He takes a swig of his drink.
“Sweden,” he says. “The man-hating country.”
“How do you mean?” she asks.
“The country you come from is supposed to be full of man-haters.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I read—” he begins, but she cuts him off with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“Look, I came out for a glass of wine and to relax,” she says. “So if you don’t mind.”
She empties her glass.
“Are you a feminist?”
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“I want to know.”
“Why?”
“To understand why you hate your men up there.”
“Frankly…”
“All that hate and bitterness,” he says. “Those outbursts of rage. Why?”
He looks her defiantly in the eye. She stares back. A peculiar contrast to the defiance in his eyes becomes evident when his hand starts to shake. He is still holding his glass, and she can see bits of ice jostling each other in the amber-colored liquid.
“What’s the matter?” she asks. “Why are you shaking?”
He looks down at his hand and, to judge by the way the fingers are turning white, he must be squeezing the glass against his palm with all his strength. Once the ice cubes have stopped moving, he stares vacantly ahead for so long she starts to think he has forgotten her. But just as she is about to get up and go, he looks up from his glass, grabs her around her upper arm, and says, “Sorry.”
“What for?” she asks.
“For what I just said.”
She shrugs and pulls her arm away from him.
“Do you forgive me?” he asks.
“What do you mean?” she replies. “I don’t care. You’ll be going home any minute now and so will I and we’ll never meet again. That’s all there is to it.”
“That’s the problem right there,” he says. “Because I wish it wasn’t like that.”
“Now you’ve lost me,” she says. “Just a moment ago it seemed like you hated me. And now it almost sounds like you’re going to say you’re in love with me.”
“In love with you?” he says with a laugh. “You’ve nothing to worry about there. I’ve only been in love with one woman my whole life and that’s my wife. Soledad Ocampo, the one and only. What I wouldn’t give to have her here beside me.”
“Oh really. So why are you chatting to a stranger instead of being with her?”
“Long story. Nothing out of the ordinary to begin with. A bit of boredom, a bit of infidelity. Same old. Only then her illness got worse and we started going to therapy.”
“Illness?”
“She’s got a congenital heart defect.”
“Did it help?”
“What?”
“The therapy?”
“Did the therapy help?” he asks and looks at her in puzzlement. “No it didn’t. It didn’t help at all.”
“I’m sorry. Sometimes it can be a solution.”
“You don’t understand,” he says shaking his head. “This wasn’t just ordinary couples therapy; this was marriage counseling straight from hell.”
“Marriage counseling from hell?”
Her interest has been piqued. She likes listening to this sort of thing. Hearing what other people have done, how they’ve dealt with situations she has failed at, and, in a few rare instances, realizing she has dealt successfully with something others have failed at. She would like to know more, but the man is back to staring vacantly at his glass again. She senses that the conversation may have come to an end after all. She gets to her feet again.
“Goodbye,” she says. “I really hope you sort things out with your wife. Good luck.”
“Hang on,” he says, and he grabs her arm once more. “Please don’t go.”
“What is it?” she says coolly.
“I need help.”
“What kind of help?”
“A roof over my head for a few days.”
“A roof over your head for a few days? In my apartment? You’ve got to be kidding?”
She can’t help laughing. He wets his lips with his tongue and wipes his forehead again.
“How about this?” he says. “So what if…you let me stay at yours for a few days. And I’ll tell you about the marriage counseling and the woman who ruined my life. We might as well call her the feminist. That could be interesting for someone like you.”
She’s got no idea what he means by that.
“Who is this woman,” she asks, “the one you’re calling the feminist?”
“Sor Lucia.”
“Sor Lucia? That sounds like a nun.”
“A nun!” he exclaims. “Dead right. Imagine a cross between the strength of a Belgian Blue bull and the evil of Hitler. Throw in a couple of armfuls of hatred for men and the concentrated essence of embittered womanhood, and that’s her to a tee.”
She is attempting to picture what he just said.
“Tiny and ever so slight,” he continues. “Like a child. Only utterly ancient at the same time. Someone who’s seen it all, done it all, and knows exactly how to…She’s got a maimed hand as well. They say it was bitten off by a pig.”
She is staring at him. The portrait he has been painting is too bizarre for her to visualize. Though it also occurs to her that anyone who writes knows the cliché “Truth is stranger than fiction” contains a great deal of wisdom. The image of the hate-filled nun with the maimed hand is intriguing.
“Hide me,” the man implores her. “Just for a few days. You won’t regret it.”
Her spontaneous reaction is to dismiss the idea as absurd. On the other hand, an absurd idea is still an idea, and maybe she can write a column based on whatever he tells her. She says she is going to sleep on it and will let him know the following day. She gets his phone number from him. Then she goes home and falls asleep in front of the open windows in her bedroom. The night is out there. She dreams long incoherent dreams about strange men in bars and nuns in low-heeled shoes with rubber soles prowling the streets of Madrid in the hour before dawn, hunting something that never becomes clear in the dream.
* * *
—
She is woken by the light the following morning. She had forgotten to close the shutters, and the apartment does not have air-conditioning, so the sheets are damp from sweat. She gets up and has a cold shower. She realizes that spending time indoors during the day will be unbearable. She will have to find somewhere she can lie in the shade, maybe even beside a pool. Not that she would normally do anything of the sort. But everything is different in Spain. She finds a jar of coffee and a stove-top coffee maker in the kitchen, and when she has a cup in her hand a little while later she finds herself thinking about the previous evening. Daylight puts a different slant on everything, makes it seem unreal. Was she actually in a bar with a man who said he was being pursued by a nun? She shakes her head. Spain, she thinks, Spain. Things tend to get distorted; it’s the heat. She packs her beach bag and sets off toward a club social in the Arturo Soria district. She has to pay twenty euros for a sun lounger in the shade and then lies there waiting for some kind of joy to appear. Any kind of joy at all: just to prove that her heart hadn’t withered away during the long winter back home. The joy of the new. The joy of sunshine. Maybe even the joy of writing. The feeling you get in a new place, the sounds of a new language around you, the aromas from the restaurant kitchen or the sound of water in motion—anything at all. But she doesn’t feel any sense of joy lying on the lounger; it’s more as if her insides are a large wet ball of yarn that is refusing to dry out even in the sunshine.
* * *
—
After a while she can hear someone dragging loungers across the paving. Various people are rearranging things alongside her to make room for a wheelchair. A woman, who looks to be just over sixty, keeps hovering, issuing instructions while two brawny men who look like bodybuilders carry out her orders. In the wheelchair is a man about the same age as the woman. He appears to be completely unresponsive and just sits there staring straight ahead with his mouth open. Drool is running out of one corner and dripping down toward his chest, and every so often the woman turns toward him and wipes it away. The gesture seems automatic, as if the woman had done it over and over again for many years. Set the table straight and lift his feet, turn around and wipe away the saliva, tell her helpers what to do, turn around and wipe away the saliva…Finally the bodybuilders lift the man out of the wheelchair and put him on the lounger. The woman asks them to place the wheelchair a little way off and then go and get a cup of coffee for her and Santiago. So Santiago is the man’s name. When both the bodybuilders have gone the woman gets out a container of sunscreen and starts spreading it over herself and the man. The smell of coconut oil mixes with the inland breeze that is wafting across the pool area. The woman keeps chatting away to the man, and when the bodybuilders return with the coffee she helps him drink it by tilting the cup and holding a paper towel under his chin. That movement appears to be practiced as well, because not a single drop gets spilled, and the white napkin that has been draped across the man’s upper body remains spotless. The woman continues to arrange matters for a while longer.
