Excerpts from
Winter's Tales
By Karen Blixen
"I have heard a story, Rosa, you know," he said, "of a skipper who named his ship after his wife. He had the figurehead of it beautifully carved, just like her, and the hair of it gilt. But his wife was jealous of the ship. "You think more of the figurehead than of me," she said to him. "No," he answered, "I think so highly of her because she is like you, yes, because she is you yourself. Is she not gallant, fullbosomed, does she not dance in the waves, like you at our wedding? In a way she is really even kinder to me than you are, she gallops along where I tell her to go, and she lets her long hair hang down freely, while you put yours up under a cap. But she turns her back to me, so that when I want a kiss I come home to Elsinore."
"Now once, when this skipper was trading to Trankebar, he chanced to help an old native King to flee from traitors in his own country. As they parted the King gave him two big blue, precious stones, and these he had set into the face of his figurehead, like a pair of eyes to it. When he came home he told his wife of his adventure, and said: "Now she has your blue eyes too." "You had better give me the stones for a pair of earrings," said she. "No," he said again, "I cannot do that, and you would not ask me to if you understood." Still the wife could not stop fretting about the blue stones, and one day, when her husband was with the skipperīs corporation, she had a glazier of the town take them out, and put two bits of glass into the figurehead instead, and the skipper did not find out, but sailed off to Portugal."
"But after some time the skipperīs wife found that her eyesight was growing bad, and that she could not see to thread a needle. She went to a wise woman, who gave her oinment and waters, but they did not help her, and in the end the old woman shook her head, and told her that this was a rare and incurable disease, and that she was going blind. "Oh God," the wife then cried, "that the ship was back in the harbour of Elsinore! Then I should have the glass taken out, and the jewels put back. For did he not say that they were my eyes?" But the ship did not come back. Instead the skipperīs wife had a letter from the consul of Portugal, who informed her that she had been wrecked, and gone to the bottom with all her hands. And it was a very strange thing, the consul wrote, that in broad daylight she had run straight into a tall rock, rising out of the sea."
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen): Winters's Tales
Penguin Books 1983
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