Read Online The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness - Free Book Online

Runólfur Jónsson had worked on fishing-smacks, and had been on Gúmúnsen’s Store boats for more than thirty years, but now he had been put ashore once and for all because of salt-burn in his eyes; he had become what my grandfather called the retired dominie of Gúmúnsen’s Store. Most of Runólfur’s earnings while he had been at sea had gone into paying fines for turning up late for his boat. On the other hand in his latter years, as I have already said, he took it upon himself to empty people’s cess-pools in the town and its neighbourhood. From earliest times, cess-pools had always lain open and unprotected at people’s doors in Iceland, as is still the custom on farms in France; and in these open cess-pools more Icelanders have drowned than in any other sea, the ocean excepted, and therefore it fell to Runólfur’s lot to encounter more and more dangerous seas as he grew older.
    But round about this time a symptom of the new age was appearing in the future capital city, as well as out at Seltjarnarnes, in that the pioneering elements in the farming community were building concrete pits on their farms to replace the cess-pools in front of their houses. Runólfur Jónsson admired these modern receptacles more than any other piece of contemporary craftsmanship in the world; he considered a good cess-pit to be a supernatural phenomenon, or a miracle. For him it was a pleasure not to be reckoned in money, and a compensation for much thathe had had to do without during his life, to be allowed in his old age to spread manure from these matchless modern masterpieces.
    Runólfur Jónsson usually got drunk four times a year, and then always for a few weeks at a time. In between times he was sober. It was more often than not the superintendent, his bed-mate, who enabled him to “acquire a battleship”. It goes without saying that he invariably vanished from Brekkukot when The Drink called, and did not return until he had sobered up again; the spirit which prevailed at Brekkukot allowed that all people were considered human beings, not to say gentry, whether rich or poor, saint or criminal – all except drunkards. And besides, these crooked little turf cottages held up by a few rotting wooden spars would have been reduced to ruins long ago if they had housed drunkards. But no sooner had this Chief Justice’s kinsman ended his battleship expedition than he came climbing up our stair again and began sleeping beside the superintendent once again.
    I am not going to describe here Runólfur Jónsson’s condition when he returned from these expeditions, except to say that the moment he turned up, the superintendent would cut his hair and beard and begin to clean him up carefully all over with soft-soap, creosote, and brimstone; the superintendent considered this service for Runólfur as axiomatic as giving him money for liquor.
    But although Runólfur was always completely sober at home, he could never reconcile himself to the mental attitudes of those who live on this dry dung-heap they call land, and so his conversation with them was often rather weird. One of his conversational short-comings was that he could never remember the names of people or places, excepting only that of Björn of Brekkukot and that of Gúmúnsen, when he was drunk. So he had to resort to the expedient of using long circumlocutions for personal names, and even his friends could find it difficult to fathom what he was saying. I shall not go right through his vocabulary here, but it must be admitted that it resembled in some ways KonráGíslason’s Danish dictionary. He never called my grandmother anything other than “the woman who had the children”; his bed-mate he called “the man who owns the pouches”, and Captain Hogensen he naturally never called anything but “the man whocommands warships”. Unfortunately, Runólfur Jónsson could not remember what the Saviour’s name was either, and if it ever happened that he had to mention God he