Excerpts from
A Fighting Pig's too Tough to Eat
By Suzanne Brøgger
On a blue island stands a lady, above her head the falcon chases a duck. Between the trees the lady plays the organ while the handmaid works the bellows. The ladyīs hair is still gathered on top forming a point like on a paintbrush, but otherwise it is covered by a brown veil reaching her shoulders.
Maybe she is another lady? Maybe the same?
Her trailing blue velvet dress studded with pearls and gems hangs partly open to reveal a blue underskirt. The unicorn and the lion carry her coat of arms, while she dreamily places her fingers on the keys of the organ. One senses the look of fatigue in the handmaidīs eyes as if she were preoccupied ... in a red sea of flowers and rabbits, falcons and holly.
*
I get a lot done, yet nothing written.
What takes time is the purging of the soul and the ploughing of the soil, after the fields have lain fallow.
To lie fallow: the real work, the actual terror, the frightening abyss. Just the thought of all that work makes you sweat.
I picked rushes and lilacs and supped on snails and rum at Signeīs to celebrate their impending bathroom!
*
ltīs the blacksmith from Drosselbjerg who is building it.
The blacksmithīs neighbour has thirty-five cats as well as chickens in his house. They all share the food, white bread with milk, and they compete for a spot to sleep under the stove. When they got television, as the first folks in town, they lined up all the chairs in one straight row, like in a movie theatre, but two of the chickens preferred to perch on the floor lamp from where they let their droppings fall on Poulīs head. Poul is from Switzerland.
*
Eigild is wasting away. Is he dying or what?
*
Two things, Iīve learned, you cannot do simultaneously: boil rice pudding and speak on the phone. Still I persist in making the same error, and every time the milk runs white on the stove and the rice burns black in the pot. Itīs a dish with its own rules. Why donīt we get wiser?
*
Iīve seeded the potatoes and sowed the spinach. Warm summer wind and summer scent. Once in a while you catch yourself in taking life for granted and finding death unthinkable. Youīre so easily overwhelmed by habit!
For the first time this year I sunbathed. In the evening I wear furs and shawls.
*
Axel says: - Everything was going just fine, and then Womenīs Year comes along, and then I started to develop complexes. He is only kidding. And yet he goes on ... and on. - You say you want equality ... and then Signe is hurt, since sheīs never said anything like it. - Signe never said that! - I defend her right away seeing that she has to take the blame for my "liberation." Axel thinks freedom is contagious, that itīs spreading from the hyena across the road, after all it has already reached television and the newspapers, soon it will come .... Signe and I donīt say anything, we try perhaps to change the topic or to mention a recipe or something, Signe is not about to make her lord and master flip his lid, and yet heīs the one who carries on with gender roles this and that.
Itīs my policy to put on an artful air; words will get you nowhere. When itīs a matter of effecting change, language is finito, at least on the spur of the moment. But of course heīll take revenge. If I for instance have enjoyed myself a tad too much, heīll ramble on about a hedge that I havenīt trimmed, a flower bed I havenīt weeded, a tomato I havenīt watered, a bill I havenīt paid. And after I had turned somersaults with the Washington Post for a week, Axel just said: -Your mortgage payments are soon clue and - Why donīt you all move to Galicia, they have a system there thatīll suit you, the women work in the fields there, and the men wash floors!
*
From Suzanne Brøgger: A Fighting Pigīs Too Tough to Eat
Norvik Press, 1997
http://www.uea.ac.uk/llt/norvik_press/
Translated by Marina Allemano
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