The truth is that Isak Dinesen lived mainly at Rungstedlund, her childhood home in Denmark, and was obliged to lead a very sedentary life due to her many ailments, the most enduring of which had nothing at all to do with age but with the syphilis she had contracted after a year of marriage to Baron Bror Blixen, who, after much vacillation, she eventually divorced. This husband was the twin brother of the man she had loved from girlhood, and bonds formed through a third party are perhaps the most difficult to break.
Having syphilis obliged her, early on, to renounce sex, and seeing that there was no help to be had from God and bearing in mind how terrible it was for a young woman to be denied “the right to love”, Isak Dinesen promised her soul to the Devil, and he promised her, in return, that everything she experienced thenceforth would become a story. That, at least, is what she told a non-lover—she was twice his age and three times as intelligent—the Danish poet Thorkild Bjørnvig, with whom she made a strange pact when she was sixty-four and whom she dominated and kept in a state of complete subjugation for four years. She enjoyed frightening this non-lover with her abrupt changes of mood, her calculated surprises, her charm and her disconcerting but always persuasive views. On one occasion, she startled him with this explanation of the nature of her being: “You are better than I am, that is the problem,” she told him. “The difference between us is that you have an immortal soul and I do not. It is the same with mermaids and water sprites, they do not have one either. They live longer than those with immortal souls, but when they die, they disappear totally and without a trace. But who can entertain and please and transport people better than a water sprite when she is present, when she plays and enchants and makes people dance more wildly and love more ardently than they normally do? She will disappear and all that she will leave behind is a streak of water along the floor.”
When this poet (whom she urged to leave both wife and child in order to spend long periods “creating” in her house in Rungstedlund) proved inadequate to the task (as was nearly always the case), the Baroness would grow angry and mistreat him, as she would when he dared to express any reservations about her own writings. But Isak Dinesen was never constant and, after some enormous row, she was capable of behaving perfectly charmingly at their next meeting, as if nothing had happened, even congratulating her non-lover on his incorruptible critical sense. Such transformations were typical of her, and the poet Bjørnvig tells how, one night, for reasons that escaped even him, Isak Dinesen flew into a rage and was transformed into a decrepit, gesticulating fury, shrivelled up with anger, leaving him feeling wretched and paralysed. Afterwards, when the poet had returned to his room, the Baroness slipped in and sat down on the edge of his bed: now, however, she looked radiant, transfigured, as lovely as a seventeen-year-old. Björnvig confessed that had he not personally witnessed the transformation, he himself would not have believed it possible.
The Baroness also provided this non-lover and her friends with moments of enormous pleasure, enchantment and reverie. On one occasion, and in the middle of a delightful evening, she got up and left the room. She came back a little later carrying a revolver, which she held levelled at Björnvig for quite some time. According to him, he was not in the least taken aback by this because, in the state of perfect happiness in which he found himself, death would not have mattered. Needless to say, Bjørnvig did not publish anything during the four years that this rapture lasted.
Javier Marías, Written Lives, trans. Margaret Jull Costa
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