The Little Mermaid and I

For one reason or another, what could have been a mere spat between the husband and I turned into a full-blown running battle of words and nerves that went on for a full week, each one aiming for the other’s jugular.

The husband suggested that we both needed a change of scene, somewhere we’ve never been to, like Copenhagen.  While he didn’t exactly sound like the erring husband who gifts his wife with a pearl necklace or a shopping spree in New York, I took his suggestion as a peace offering and opted to do my share.  That was the time we were in Germany, when we planned to visit as many European cities as possible.  Anyhow, Germany and Denmark share a 68-kilometer border and Copenhagen is just a six-hour train ride away.

But Copenhagen is in the islands of Zealand and Amager, so we had to take a ferry, which turned out to be capable of accommodating the whole train.  A ferry is a welcome respite after an enclosed train. The passengers went out of the train to enjoy the cold breeze and the horizon of the Store Strait, where I imagined the waters of the Baltic Sea, North Sea and Norwegian Sea could mix or pass through and exchange places.

København (in Danish, as Pilipinas is to Filipino), Denmark’s capital, was a small village in the early 10th century.  It became the capital and residence of the royal family five centuries later, then expanded in the 16th century but was often sacked during Europe’s Protestant Reformation.  Wars with Sweden in 1658-1660 laid the city under siege, while fires in 1728 and 1795 gutted a good number of houses and buildings.  As if that weren’t enough, the British bombarded the city in the early 1800s.

Our brief trip to Denmark kept us from visiting Kronborg Castle, the Elsinore Castle of Shakespeare’s tragic Danish prince Hamlet, on the northeast coast of Zealand, a good distance away from Copenhagen.  But we spent hours in the city center, the Raadhuspladsen, to relish its historic buildings, among them the University of Copenhagen, founded in 1479, the Church of Our Lady, and the Petri Church.  The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, formerly the Charlottenborg Palace, is located in the city’s old center, the 17th century King’s New Square.  The country’s government center is in Castle Islet.
Its proximity to the hotel where we billeted made us spend more time at the Tivoli Park, an amusement park that does not only amuse but also gives a summary and feel of the country’s culture and history.  There I saw the most magnificent of white horses.  They seemed magically royal I felt I was the humblest of peasants when they passed by for their scheduled parade.  A guided city tour took us to Copenhagen’s most famous symbol, The Little Mermaid, on Langelinje at the city’s harbor facing Sweden across the strait called The Sound (Oeresund).

European folklore has it that mermaids or sirens, and mermen, their male version, were half-human, half-fish, long-lived but mortal marine beings who loved music, sang, and held magical powers.  The lore goes back to ancient Greek and Roman mythologies.  The god of the sea Neptune (Poseidon) and Ea the Chaldean Sea god are sometimes depicted by artists as mermen.  Homer’s The Odyssey includes sirens who sing and lure men to their death by drowning.  Such fatal charms are credited also to Germany’s own Lorelei, the mermaid of the river Rhine, and a mermaid whose image is carved on a church bench of Zennor in Cornwall, England.

But it is Denmark, specifically Copenhagen, that is most identified with The Little Mermaid.  It is home to fairy tale master Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) whose great body of literary work includes the story of The Little Mermaid. It is also home to the world-famous Carlsberg beer.

The Little Mermaid was a present to Copenhagen from Carlsberg brewer Carl Jacobsen.  Impressed by solo dancer Ellen Price who interpreted Fini Henrique’s The Little Mermaid ballet in 1909, the brewer asked her if she would pose for sculptor Edvard Erichsen.  The dancer was not interested in posing nude, so the sculptor’s wife took over. In keeping with Copenhagen’s policy that classical and historical figures adorn the city’s parks and public areas, Erichsen’s culpture of a lonely mermaid looking at the sea was placed on its permanent site on August 23, 1913, where it remains today as a beloved landmark visited by an estimated half a million tourists a year.

But where landmarks are, vandals are not far behind.  Since 1961, when vandals painted red The Little Mermaid’s hair and dressed her in white underwear, she was subjected to a total of seven defacements.  She was first decapitated in 1964.  In 1984, two drunks sawed off her right arm, then turned themselves in to the police the next day, with the arm.  In 1990 somebody sawed her neck halfway through.  Her second decapitation on January 6, 1998 was world news.  A radical Danish feminist group, said to have pointed out that men like their women without heads anyway, claimed responsibility.  But it was found out that the group only wanted to get into the news.  A photographer who passed himself off as the contact of the unknown vandal turned out to be the culprit and was charged with the crime.

Our city tour allowed us 45 minutes at Langelinje with The Little Mermaid, by then already intact with her head.  Hundreds of tourists milled about the harbor, enjoying the view and taking pictures of the famous representation of Andersen’s fairy tale sitting on a big smooth boulder at the seashore.  One can go down from the harbor and sit beside her, which I did.  Maybe the husband wasn’t prepared for my inspiration.  I wasn’t either.  Down there I figured the best pose would be the mermaid’s.  I smiled for posterity at the camera, not for the husband who I felt was still my enemy, nor for the throng of smiling tourists, mostly Caucasians, who were just as nameless as I was.

The husband’s photo shot revealed that the camera in his hands was askew.  Who knows if he was discomfited and wanted the scene over and done with, fast, such that he couldn’t bother about camera positioning.  These tourists enjoyed looking at you down there, he said laughing when I went up to join him.  There was no need to tell him that I was glad he didn’t decapitate me.

(2005)