The night before St Lucy’s Day

A translation of Chapter Six of Stig Larsson's The Autists (1979)

St Lucy's Day, on the 13th of December, is a popular feast day in Sweden celebrated with a procession of young girls in white robes singing Christmas carols, bringing the Light of Christ into the dark northern winter. The story below, from chapter six of Stig Larsson's The Autists (1979), a book of which I had previously translated a chapter in July, is set on the eve of this feast. As I wrote back then, Larsson is considered by some the best living Swedish author, ‘an uncompromising artist, much maligned in recent years, with a cult following. His book Autisterna (1979) is considered to be a modern Swedish classic, but has not been previously translated into English as far as I’m aware. A better English title than “The Autists” might be “The Schizos” since the sixteen chapters that make up the book appear to follow a fragmented rhizomatic self (or selves) through unsettling and abject adventures.’ Larsson doesn't exactly usher in the Light of Christ in this tale, but conjures up a dark wintry atmosphere of postmodern European malaise.

THE AUTISTS

by STIG LARSSON

Translated by Alexander

Six

The bread was hard, I wiped off the fat from the carving knife, sliced it up, and pressed the core to my nose, well, it should be OK. Old bread was the worst thing I knew, the mould constituted, only in its colour, a threat against the idea of food, not even the pigeons on the square ate mouldy bread, they picked on it carefully, but left it eventually to the rain; I spread some of the exquisite pâté which one could buy in the little shop below the church, and went out of the room which lay in darkness. I didn’t turn on the light, but lay on the bed and looked at the figures the incoming light threw on the walls and ceiling, far down from the street came laughter or screams, it was the night before St Lucy’s Day 1974, I had a flat in the central parts of Brussels, the autumn and the early winter had been unusually mild in the Western parts of the European continent. When I had taken the last bite of the sandwich I tried to follow its path through me, but lost contact when it reached the stomach, here my acids would intervene.

By an alcove, in which I would sit and look down on the market square, stood a piano, which once was black but for some reason had been repainted a horrible dark green colour. I went and sat next to it, let my fingers move, as if free, and tried to understand their mood. I couldn’t actually play the piano, not in the usual sense, when I first tried to learn I had decided to proceed in a radically unorthodox way: I played and played, without any melody at all, because I thought that I would comprehend the pitches in the end, in the same way that a child first learns a language, without rules, without grammar. Then I would master the pitches in their true and precise moment, without the abstraction of scales and melody, I would be able to weigh them against the silence like the woman weighs fish in the market. The pitches would be mine. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t reach their essence, when I thought I carried one, it transformed immediately into another, hour after hour they would fool me like that. I rose, took an apple that had been lying on the piano, and looked through the window, the moon crescent was cut by a chimney.

The bitter apple cores always put up resistance, as if the apple said: you can eat me to a certain limit, the rest I keep to myself, not even God got to know everything from the girl who went to confession for the first time. I lay on the floor and looked at the table from below, it was made from jacaranda, someone had tried to write a telephone number with a roller-point pen, faintly, suggestively, the last numbers could be seen. Suddenly a car horn was heard, down on the street by the square stood three cars honking together, after a minute one saw people on the lower floors open their windows and shout at them with clenched fists. I went in to the kitchen, poured a glass of milk, put on a pot of water to heat my face, I used to do that before going to bed, my dreams would take place in warmer countries as a consequence. When it started to boil I turned off the stove, put the pot on a paper on the table, and drew my face over it.

These were the hours when everything could come back, as if in a lunatic fear one thought one would die; the baby formulas of childhood and the heavy wines of youth. The light on the ceiling stood completely still, as if time didn’t move. I lit a cigarette and sat myself down in the alcove, below on the street lay a woman, completely still as if dead. After a minute she rose, she was evidently very drunk. I opened the window and threw out the butt, I think it landed in the middle of a puddle, from a window by the square came dixie-music. I sat myself down by the piano again, now the aimless pigeons circling in the air would hear my hissing sounds, I dedicated my piece to St Lucy, who spread her light in nightly alleyways, she who gouged her eyes out for her lover’s sake, she who was blonde despite an island in the West Indies being named after her.

Later I went to a drawer where I kept trinkets I had collected for various reasons, the drawer was locked and it took me almost a minute before I recalled where I had put the key. In the drawer was everything from tobacco to wound-dressings, porcelain kittens and foreign coins, the mess everything was in was a kind of refugee for me, it was a zone which I knew down to the minutest detail. I took out a small piece of toilet roll that I had folded in a grey plastic box with a transparent lid. I put the wad of paper and the little box on the table. From the box I picked up short bunches of hair. The hair came from a girl I slept with several years ago, it was the hair that had got stuck on my penis the morning after. The wad of paper I had used to wipe myself of another girl’s come a few months later. I brought matches that lay on the piano, it began to be lighter outside, I sat on the sofa and smelled the wad, but neither it nor the hair smelled of anything. I set the hair in the box on fire, and the plastic started to burn with a faint flame, I pushed the paper to it which slowly became black, after a minute a strange, vibrating smoke lay over the table. I locked the drawer again, and felt the box with my little finger, it was warm and soft.

Outside a drizzle had begun to fall, I lay on the bed and pretended to sleep, I mimicked a sleep, tried to make the movements one makes when one sleeps, as if someone was watching me, someone who forced me to sleep. When I closed my eyes it was absolutely dark, I could imagine that I was blind, I could even cry from despair, so I opened my eyes, quickly at first, so that if someone was watching they wouldn’t notice I wasn’t asleep. I tried to recreate the picture I saw until it became completely blurry, then I looked again, got a new picture, I messed around like this for a while. It was pretty bright in the room now, and I had to press a pillow over my head for it to get really dark. The phone rang, I got frightened and rushed to it, when I lifted the receiver I heard the customary signal, perhaps it was a wrong number. I emptied an ashtray, picked up the apple-core which had been thrown on the floor, and began to undress so that I could go to bed for real.

I needed to take a shit, it was the sandwich that wanted out, I sat on the toilet, the pipes were sparkling, I needed to wipe myself seven times before I was clean, I washed my hands afterwards, dropped my trousers and threw them on a chair, the houses began to wake. I sat on the couch in nothing but my pants, felt the structure of the violet fabric, lay down with my head pushed against the edge. I began to bite the fabric, I hacked and tore at it, the light filling started to appear, I really attacked the sofa, I began to scream, I rose, took a run-up and thudded down on it. A half-hour later the filling was ripped up in four places.