Poly Martínez

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. You may have read my letter yesterday. A great many people did, which is its own small Norwegian tragedy, because we are a people raised under Janteloven, the unwritten law that says you are not to think you are anything special, and now I have been noticed, and my sister has sent me a text with an exclamation mark in it, and I have had to lie down with a cold cloth. It is the next morning. The rain has not improved. Same tram, same wet shoes, failing the same daily inspection the sky conducts on all of us. No bun today. I ate the bun. Under Janteloven I am required to add that it was not a very good bun and I did not enjoy it, which is a lie, but a patriotic one. I have been watching the television, because today, it turns out, is an anniversary. One year ago, on this exact wet day, the man across the ocean stood on a stage in Egypt in front of a green folder and asked, out loud, into a live microphone, “Can we get the documents, please?”, as though the peace he had come to sign might have wandered off to get a coffee. One year ago he announced it had taken three thousand years to reach that moment, a figure he revised, in the same breath, to somewhere between five hundred and six thousand, settling nothing, insulting all of the intervening millennia equally. And a year ago, twenty people came home. Children’s fathers. Somebody’s son, walking into his mother’s arms on a hospital floor. I said it then and the law of my land will have to forgive me for saying it plainly again: that part was good. That part was the only part a dead Swede’s will was ever about. And here is the thing I have learned in thirty years of this, the thing that separates my committee from every excitable capital on earth: we do not grade the homework on the day it is handed in, glowing, for the cameras. We grade it a year later. In the cold. When the folder is in a drawer and the crowd has gone home and we can finally see whether the thing was a peace or a press release with a long enough shelf life to reach the next awards season. So. One year later. The verdict. It mostly held. I want you to understand what it costs a Norwegian to say even that much. “It mostly held” is, in my dialect, delirious praise. It is the most enthusiasm the climate permits before November. There were strikes. There were violations, theirs and his and everyone’s. It wobbled, it cracked, it was patched, it is still, this morning, more or less a peace, and twenty people who were in the dark are, a year on, still in the light. By the standards of the thing we actually measure, that is not nothing. We noted it. We are, despite the rumors, not made entirely of frost. But I was watching for the other thing, because I am built to watch the thing beside the thing, and the thing beside the thing has not stopped for one single day in twelve months. The campaign. He did not, you see, end a war and then move on with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has done a good turn. He ended a war and immediately entered it into evidence. For a year he has been submitting it. Re-signing it. Re-announcing it. Holding it up to the light at every available podium like a child who has brought the same drawing back to the refrigerator three hundred times. And I know exactly what it is, because it is addressed to me. To the five of us. It is an appeal, lodged the morning after we told him no, against a verdict he received four days ago when the prize went instead to an eighty-five-year-old woman who never once asked for it. We call this, in Norwegian, when something becomes loud and chaotic and completely out of proportion, helt Texas. Totally Texas. It is real slang, I promise you, we say it about blizzards and traffic and weddings that got out of hand. And I sat on my tram this morning, watching a year of footage from a man who is, himself, quite near Texas, and I thought: there is no more precise word in my language. The whole performance is helt Texas. A year of it. An anniversary of it. Now, honesty, because it is apparently the only product I am now known for. It might still work. That is the sentence the audience cannot bear from me, and it is the only one worth your time. We are not pure. We handed the medal once to a man nine months into a presidency for things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly nauseous about it for fifteen years; his portrait situation is, let us say, under review. We are five vain, wrong, weather-beaten pensioners administering a dead dynamite salesman’s guilty conscience out of a building on a street named after Henrik Ibsen, who wrote almost exclusively about respectable men discovering they are frauds, and who would have found all of this unbearably funny and then written a four-hour play about it. So I will not tell you the man can never win it. I will tell you what my entire nation says instead, the most devastating phrase in the Norwegian language, deployed at the end of a long cold silence: vi får se. We’ll see. Because the trouble, the genuine trouble, is that this year he did not merely want it. He learned. He learned to chase the medal with his hands full, and a man chasing it with twenty freed hostages in his arms is much harder to look away from than a man merely phoning to say he deserves it. It is, I will grant him, and it costs me to grant it, cleverer than anything we have had to ignore in a hundred and twenty-five years. But he has broken the one law older than ours. Not Janteloven, though he breaks that one so completely that Norwegian schoolchildren could study him as the photographic negative of a well-raised person. The older law. The only rule the medal has never once gotten wrong in its whole history: it finds the ones who do not chase it, and it flees the ones who do. He has spent a year running after it, at the top of his lungs, holding up the drawing. And every day he runs, he proves the one thing that disqualifies him, which is that he does not understand what it is for. The old woman in Nuremberg understood. She sat in courtroom 600, the actual room, and did not phone anyone, and the medal walked across the water and found her. That is not a system we designed. It is just the only pattern that has survived a century of our mistakes. The tram is slowing. My stop. The rain is still hanging there, auditing me, and I have failed again, and somewhere across the ocean a year-old green folder is being photographed, for the thousandth time, for a submission that closed in January and reopens, in his mind, every morning of his life. Vi får se. We’ll see. Kristin thinks he gets it next year. She didn’t say so. She said “well,” on a falling tone, while looking out the window, which is how a Norwegian screams a prediction. I have learned to read her the way sailors read the sky, and that particular “well” meant: brace yourself, it’s coming, and we’re going to have to live with it. I hope she’s wrong. Under Janteloven I’m not permitted to think my hope matters more than hers. I have to change trams.