In Peter Frauchen‘s story „From Thule to Rio“ there is a transient photo kept by two whale hunters that have been left to oversee equipment and housing. At the world’s coldest nook they share a single memory of mercy and beauty. The portrait of Dolores Del Rios that reaches just below her thin shoulders.

Printed on a label of canned fruits she never gets cold during hibernation at 73° North at Mosquito Bay. The almond shaped eyes and the high cheekbones of the goddess is the last memory from the world her custodians were never to see.    

The glacier made its demands, it received Dolores the goddess like it acquired everything else with its incessant presumptuousness. No one got to know of the passions and desires of the custodians of Dolares Del Rios; no one got to know of the childish envy of them who loved the portrait of the goddess and both wanted to keep it to themselves.

And if the glacier knew their story it had long time ago swept it away into the deep sea without any regret. Because the glacier doesn’t have any time for human details and their temporal longings.   

For me Dolores Del Rios lives in every photo I see taken from Greenland. In her high cheekbones on the photo that reaches just below shoulders lies the opposite of the local conditions of where she gets lost. I saw how the goddess doesn’t disappear with her almond shaped eyes, erratically looking for her lovers, how she puckers her eyes in the white brightness of snow and how the slick of fat and the saltiness have harmed her slender neck and cheek. In the search for her fans she dies each time as a fracture of the glacier grinds the rock and pushes out to the sea.

But Dolores isn’t mine, I know it just as well as I know the cruelty of the detention in the glacier. Dolores is of the cold and the surf, the current that damages the slick of fat and bilge, she is the offspring of tropical fruits that are reborn in their search for her lovers in a country that forgets everything.

(Daníel Þorkell Magnússon)