Extracts from my mind: The beginning (1) The feeling of hope in the midstof the storm.

Extracts from my mind: The beginning (1)
Paula Robles Nettel

Henning Alexander was overwhelmed by a heart full of indecision, living in a worn down cohabitation relationship of almost two decades, two relatively young children and a date on the calendar to get married the following summer; and as if all this wasn't enough, he carried in his shoulders the weight of a newly diagnosed mental illness in his 38^th year of life. A disease that eventually would cause him a loss of credibility in his analyst/journalist career based on his passion for politics, economics and business. A man with a successful life suddenly found himself in the greatest crossroads of his life. Everything that had defined him as a man until then crumbled before him. He didn’t know where to go when everything he had achieved professionally was potentially in danger of disappearing and his private life drowned him completely. He was trapped between his and his family inability to understand his diagnosis; the sane man was about to move to a new dimension in his life, that would eventually distance him temporarily of the prudence he had carried for so many years and that would take me too far from the path of prudence and to face all my prejudices, my own morality and taboos.

There was no doubt in my mind that ours was just a friendship from afar, originally from Oslo, Henning Alexander lived in the eastern part of the country where he worked for an important company and held an important and lucrative position which had provided him with a very comfortable and promising life, both economically and with the right connections in his professional circle. During the time we shared correspondence, I marveled at his intelligence, I had never met someone so bright, so sensitiv, we exchanged pages and pages of correspondence, I was charmed by his Norwegian eloquence, words that took me into a new dimension where  I rediscovered a world known but forgotten in my own language, and at the same time an unimaginable one that for the first time in my life was revealed in Norwegian to me; a new situation, after living the past decade communicating with my ex-husband, at work and with friends in English.

His correspondences were usually complicated texts, metaphors and riddles in Norwegian, that arrived every day as a lifesaver from my daily routines; to decipher the identity of his soul and his mind had become something exciting and as satisfying as in the discovery of my own being. With the passing of the days our conversations had become essential to him  in the survival of the great storm of his life, many shared words of encouragement had made me in his eyes his" vitamin",  a place of respite and his harbor of hope as he so many times called me in those early days before we met.

 "På plassen der klokkene klinger, der havet synes og galematiassen 
fra Fagerborg". Henning Alexander 

When the opportunity to work in Stavanger arrived, it was normal to be curious about the stranger one knew so well in writing, that in an instant online, among thousands and thousands of people, had found each other in the exact moment when the soul is begging us to undress her with the truth in the search of hope and meaning. The last mails before we met were very strange for me, but I wasn’t surprised anymore, for during all this time we have used metaphors and analogies to express ourselves, and because so many other times correspondence with him had already been eccentric and puzzling but always reaching a conclusion. However, the last times his correspondence denoted something I did not fully understood, that his condition had worsened and with it my ability to sense it too. In the last emails before we met, Henning Alexander had written me a lot of what was happening around him, sentences that had no logic then for me but then with the pass of time would revealed some things about his life that otherwise he didn’t had disclosed. He wrote about the bullets that passed around his head, and how they could never killed him because he had exceptional people around him, and his brain was working in three dimension instead of two, like Karlson and Kasparow; He continued saying that he was good in mono-causal thinking but that he was done with it, preferring Carl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Habermas, because he was open-minded and not only of honest thinking and he wrote about a blog that was not his but that he knew well the people behind it, they were good people contrary to another blogger bearing the name of Fjordman (Man of the Fjord) who he despised, and that mountain and jungle men were better, and that he had the ability to exterminate with the fire of his tongue, those who needed to be exterminated, like the trolls, pigs and peacocks, but that he knew that was not his call at that time and he needed to keep a cool head, he was on the top and soon he would reach a valley, there he wanted to rest in the harbor of hope if I allowed him to do so. It was over a year after our last meeting that I understood that my moral perception of Henning Alexander had been correct and not just a result of a passionate love, after the attack and slaughter on the 22nd of July 2011 when it emerged that Fjordmann’s ideology had been one of the main triggers of the ideology of the worst murder in the history of Norway.

The time and distance of our correspondences were not enough for me not interpret his words and not even to question his sanity, perhaps it was because I was also losing it, with the weight of a decade that had no longer meaning for me, with the domestic problems that followed me after my divorce related to the threatening depression of my ex-husband that we were already dragging for more than seven years in our marriage and later in our after divorce dynamics, and how it influenced the custody of our son. So instead of understanding the lack of sanity of Henning Alexander’s words and retract myself to meet him, I gave myself without knowing permission to unleash my own folly at that time, stating to him that I was exhausted from the battles,  that I wanted to leave everything, but the love for my son was what kept me going; I continued telling him how I despised that the concept of life would have been sold to me with a pink filter and that it had taken so long to accept that it really was not; there was no magic wand or fairy tales. I didn’t even have the ability to live an empty, superfluous life and that my curse had always been to act ethically in life when the world around me did not give a fuck  about ethics. I mentioned him about the valleys and mountains where I also sometimes stood, and about my rational thought that got obfuscated with the emotional disabilities of an unfounded optimism that didn’t let me progress, and as he had a more progressive thinking than mine perhaps it was possible for him to help me ask the right questions, since the ones I had made so far, had not been good enough to find the answers to my existence.

The last riddle he sent before we met was about where we would meet for the first time:

"In the place where the bells ring, where the sea witnessed the madness of a lunatic Fagerborg, who tried to seduce lady Justice with his Norwegian cardigan, after shooting and trying to make himself a life with KASNOK money." He was referring to the Stavanger Cathedral that six years before had witnessed the largest hands armed robbery in the history of Norway, also known as the NOKAS case, where a commando of armed men led by a man from Fagerborg, had stolen about ten million dollars of the cash depot service NOKAS, in the peaceful town of Stavanger.

On that cold and starry winter night I could hear the creaking sound of the frozen and snowed ground while walking, it had been an unusual winter in the region where we would see so much snow for several months. My hands were trembling under the woolen gloves I was wearing; I tried to observe myself in the silence of the cold night to make sure I looked presentable. My heavy coat of black wool protected me from the minus ten degrees Celsius of that night,  and I wore my long brown hair hidden under my dark wool cap. I carried with me no hidden intentions and therefore had chosen a casual attire, with a discreet makeup. The Stavanger Cathedral bells chimed nine o’clock at night, the center of Stavanger was empty. Between time and myself, stood the statue of  one of his favorites authors Alexander Kielland with his eternal vigilant presence as the only faithful witness of the stories that unfold in that port and of the first epicenter of the many that would be felt in this story. 

I sat waiting on the first perpendicular bench  located across the cobbled street opposite the cathedral, to my left was the entrance of the 800 year old cathedral, the gray and austere stones had just been familiar for more than nine years but never before special enough to persuade me to visit inside more than twice in that time. Anxiously awaiting the arrival of his taxi I still didn't know why I had agreed to go to meet a stranger, but my curiosity had increased his words in Norwegian, that within a short time, had made of our friendship a glue of hope for our broken realities. I spoke with Henning about many things I didn’t have the chance to speak with someone else, and that he understood well because of his own experience: the pain of our hurting and confused hearts and lives; for me the pain of a divorce that ended my project of life with my ex-husband and losing the anchor of that love that had sustained the reason for my existence in this country; we talked about our sadness cohabiting for so long with someone who did not believe in God and realizing that in the tribulations of our respective relationships, we were the only ones kneeling down to pray, both of us understood the vacuum space of leaving faith to follow love. We spoke honestly of the years in our respective relationships, which had lost the basic sense of intimacy and in my case by the lack of interest of my former husband, who in the last three years of marriage had lost completely the interest in intimacy with me, time in which, despite the pain of my many frustrated attempts, I remained faithful but consequently after my separation and divorce, this situation drove me into a painful emotional and physical exile of two years where Henning had found me, caused mainly by the lack of validation of my femininity, and finally for I carried the guilt of leaving a marriage burdened by the depression of my ex-husband, who refused to be treated. 

There, sitting on the bench, that bench I now call my own, as part of the few physical reminders of this story that manifested in my life to make me understand that it was not as simple as I  always thought I was, there, waiting for his arrival, to my mind came details of our first mails,  of the things that we had in common, like our discussions of faith, we used the time moving arguments for and against our relationship of reasoning vs. faith, a constant dance of years that the two of us had in common between rejecting or giving us blindly to faith. Those talks were essential to understand each other, we had in a way similar background, he grew in strict Lutheran environment and I in a Catholic one. We found other similarities in our love for music, the acoustic guitar that was one of his hidden talents and for me my favorite instrument. In our passion for Beethoven symphonies, the opera, the colors of Van Gogh and having hung in our adolescence bedroom wall the same poster of  "Cafe Terrace at Night" at more than 2,000 kilometers away, the dark beer, exotic and Norwegian food, among many other things and finally in the interest of the words with meaning that had lifted us from the sadness where we met.

Back then Henning Alexander called me his Valkyrie of the South, he used to say my light was so beautiful as that of the polar aurora, and he started calling Sørlyset, meaning Aurora Australis and I returning the compliment, I started calling him Nordlyset which means northern lights in Norwegian; a simple detail that got me interested a little more in the world of Norse mythology, Northern lights and poetry in particular, which until then had forgotten how much I liked it. It was like suddenly the life I lived in this country went from being like a fixed image of one-dimension to a panoramic and constantly moving reality with every thing he told me about history, mythology, literature, philosophy, theology, etc.  he transformed the image with movement to other dimensions. Hope manifested in our daily life, in the smiles that we were giving each other in the distance of our times, with each new mail coming to our computer, we survived another day. To me, they were wonderful days of correspondence, sitting in the living room of my apartment that like many homes in Norway is on the second floor. I was surrounded by the light outside and inside, light that through those windows filled me with a positive mood from that unusual gift that nature had given Stavanger that constant cold snowed winter of three months, of days of blue skies and dazzling suns; between those days and nights a new and strange alliance started to get woven for both of us, summarizing it in a few words: the feeling of hope in the midst of the storm.