Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness

12

The first thing that Steinà 3/4 ór did when he came ashore in the evenings was get drunk. Usually, he would idle away the evening at one place or another in the village. When he came home, sometimes very late, he would drag his lover out of bed, spouting appalling profanities, and demand something to eat. In his drunken state, he would babble incessantly about the same thing - how he, Steinà 3/4 ór Steinsson, owned this village in his heart, blood, and lungs; how he owned the mountains, the sea, the drizzle, and the sea breeze, as well as the merchant Jóhann Bogesen and the fishing fleet named after him - besides how he had traveled the length and breadth of the world and experienced all that it had to offer, come through every sort of trial and peril, particularly involving foreigners, who fought with knives and ganged up against him alone. Had anyone ever heard of Jóhann Bogesen experiencing such a thing? Most noticeable in Steinà 3/4 ór's drunken delusions was the megalomania of the vagabond who overvalues his nationality while abroad and his experience and worldliness after returning home. His actual knowledge of "foreign lands," however, was limited to the immoral wharf areas of port towns, where life is lived in wild impulsiveness for a few riotous nights before the sea calls anew. He read neither books nor newspapers, and had never exchanged a word with an educated man. His intimation of the ways of the world was little more than a grotesque exclamation in the spectrum of his pointed personality. And his national feeling was tied exclusively to this little village at the foot of the mountain Axlartindur and the surrounding sea and countryside. But he was endowed with a trait more conspicuous in seafarers the shorter their voyages; the reverence of the land-bound for their native tongue. He had been too much of a loner among the exotic peoples of foreign seas to assimilate different customs and mentalities, and that aloneness became the starter of a particular sort of fermentation of his original nature. He was known for his witty utterances and was considered quite skilled at versifying, and in most of what he said could be heard the traditional wingbeats of poesy as it appeared in its coarsest, most boorish, most primitive form; he sensed his existence in archetypal, almost mythological symbols.