A Stranger at My Table. Ivo de Figueiredo
kind of guests the locals were accustomed to seeing in the small coastal town of my childhood, despite it having been dependant on international shipping and shipbuilding from time immemorial.
In the photograph on the next page taken in the early seventies, two of my aunts can be seen standing in front of the shipyard in Langesund. Mum is behind the camera and the photograph is taken for a newspaper article in the Telemark Arbeiderblad, where she worked as a journalist. A pair of sari-clad beauties was newsworthy in the area back then; something the local coffee-colored kid who had wandered into shot, was not. I don’t recall this photo session, but my memory of the excitement that accompanied the arrival of these people is palpable. Especially my aunts, with their bright laughter and black sunglasses. To me they were like American film stars, whom fate had magically transported to Langesund. And I fell in love with each in turn as they appeared in our kitchen doorway. Occasionally Dad’s youngest brother would arrive with a guitar and play “Jambalaya” and “Guantanamera” for us, and once Dad came home with an elderly man with chalk-white mane, a white mustache and dark eyes. This man stayed with us for a few months; Grandfather had done the rounds in the States, living with each of his children in turn, now it was our turn to take care of him. Grandfather made me feel on edge; it was as if he was used to being in command, despite that no longer being the case; he pottered about the house, smiled and patted us on the head, as though bestowing his approval upon us.
When I was a little older, a letter arrived from Grandfather to Mum, my brothers and me. In it, he gave us all advice on which line of study each of us ought to pursue. I seem to remember that I was to be an engineer and that my two brothers should be a doctor and lawyer respectively, while my mother should train to be a nurse. These were, I am sure, meant as instructions, not suggestions.
Like most youngsters, I never stopped to ask why the world was as it was. Nobody we knew ate curry, nobody went to London. Yet it never occurred to me that we were very different than anybody else. I knew that my skin made me stand out, but never felt it had bearing on who I was, or that this difference might have an actual name. But when my brothers and I heard that the townsfolk of Porsgrunn poked fun at the people from the rural hamlet of Bamble, calling them Bamble-Indians, it gave us pause. We knew Mum had been born in Bamble, so we reasoned that if anybody could be true Bamble-Indians, it must be us. What was the alternative? Half-Indian? Was there such a word? And to add to the confusion, Dad had told us that we weren’t actually Indian, we were Goan. And from Africa. And that we were British. And Portuguese. And Norwegian. It was all too much for us to grasp, so Bamble-Indian seemed as good as anything.
The truth was, I wasn’t too bothered about my skin color as a child. Nor do I remember it bothering anyone else. The only exception being the time I got into a playground fight with Bønna. In the tense moment of silence when the last swearword had been spent and the fists were about to come out, he suddenly blurted out:
“Negro!”
Everybody froze. Looks darted across the circle that had gathered around us. Even Bønna looked shocked at his own flash of creativity. A split second later the first blow was struck. I believe it was mine.
Although the Norway in which I grew up was almost exclusively white, it wasn’t my color that troubled me, nor was it my weird first name or even weirder surname. No, the cross I had to bear was my middle name, Bjarne, given to me in honor of my Norwegian grandfather. Sadly, you’d be wrong to think I took the least pride in this name. It was embarrassingly old-fashioned. Whenever the teacher took the register I waited in terror for the sniggers to rise from the desks around me the moment the B-word was uttered. People do not fear the unknown, as we imagine, they fear what they think they know. My exotic otherness must have effected my classmate’s perception of me, but it was just that; vaguely exotic, indefinable. The name Bjarne, on the other hand, stood out like a sore thumb.
I can see all this now, but back then it hardly entered my mind. I was Norwegian. I was who I was. Why should there be any contradiction between my dark curls and the fact that I was called Bjarne?
What I understand now too, of course, is that even though Dad was Norwegian in my eyes, in his own eyes he was not. And thinking back now, I did have a sense of this even then. For example, when we went down to Steinvika for a swim. Dad didn’t behave like the other grown-ups. He didn’t walk calmly out to the water like Mum, he didn’t dive in with quiet dignity. Instead, he’d charge through the kids standing at the water’s edge, wade in and then plunge out onto his belly making the water splash over the shivering bodies all around him. I didn’t know then, and still don’t for sure, whether or not he could dive. He certainly hadn’t learned to swim until he was an adult, nor indeed had his siblings. They came from a paradise with warm beaches and crystal clear water. But swimming wasn’t something one did in Dad’s family. Grandmother didn’t allow it. She was determined to protect her kids from any danger.
The beach at Steinvika was just ten minutes away from our house in Langesund. It was generally only the four of us, Mum and we three boys, who would go there. Mum with a large, floral cool-bag containing her special ice-cold milk, made with a dash of vanilla essence and pink or green food coloring. Steinvika was our paradise, and the occasional times that Dad came with us were accompanied by a sense of embarrassment.
What is embarrassment? The painful feeling of something being exposed which ought to remain hidden. A tight knot that expands and unfurls as soon as it comes under other people’s gaze. Like a Chinese paper flower in water. Like my father on the shore, taking off his shirt and revealing his hairy chest. I don’t know how old I was when this sense of embarrassment was first triggered, but it must have been when I started to think that Dad wasn’t quite like other dads. Partly, I think it came from my growing awareness of his visibility. I pitied him simply for being who he was, a handsome man with brown skin and black, curly hair, among all those pasty nineteen-seventies Norwegian bodies. But it came perhaps even more from my being troubled by, yes, ashamed of him. Because if Dad felt his own differentness, he wasn’t the sort to hide away. On the contrary, it was as though he had to draw attention to himself; the way he took off his clothes, the way he turned the beach into his own personal stage, the path from the rug and cool-bag to the water’s edge into a victory run. It was I who wanted to hide him away. Only when he was submerged under water, could I exhale.
Dad took up a great deal of space. At home he filled the rooms with his presence, with his loud voice. Yet I have remarkably few memories of him. When I try to picture Dad and I together, playing a game, or rolling a ball between us, or him pulling a duvet over me, I generally have to give up. There are several photographs in the family album of me sitting on his lap laughing, with his arms around me. I look relaxed and safe, but I have no memory of the moment. Rather my memories of Dad are like physical sensations, impressions left on my body. And what my body remembers is at odds with what these pictures say.
The strong hands never gave; they took. Grandma once told me something strange she’d observed when she watched Dad play-fighting with us. “He never let you win”, she said. The game always ended with him pulling you down onto the floor, then going off to do grown-up things.” I can’t remember this, but as I try to picture the scene, the physical sensation of losing immediately hits me. Equally I relive the sense of unease that filled us whenever he entered a room; if he was happy, we had to be happy, if he was angry, we felt we’d done something wrong, although we rarely knew what.
“The weather’s so beautiful today,” he might suddenly declare at Sunday breakfast. “Let’s go to the park, and take the guitar. Oh, I’m happy, so happy!”
When we refused or suggested we had other plans, his mood would turn. What was wrong with us? Why did we want to ruin his day? It was as though he continually wanted something from us that we couldn’t quite grasp. And since we never got things right, and were never good enough, he was never satisfied. Whatever the case, his reproach and anger are what I remember most. The roars that issued from the living room; the fist slamming down on the table; the dancing milk glasses, the streams of milk running over the tablecloth. Why did he break things when he was crying?
Only as I got older did