Lucca (25 page)

He had not forgotten her face in the warm, slanting light of the lamp, surrounded by her fan of hair on the wine-red and withered green vine leaves. It stayed with him even after it ceased to make him heavy at heart. Her face was still clearer than a photograph after he had grown up and other women had succeeded her. It kept on breathing. He remembered not only her broad cheekbones and the distance between her dark eyes, but also the feeling of being wide open, the second before he bent down and his own shadow covered what he had seen.
It was the same feeling many years later when Monica pulled a woollen blanket over her head to guard their first kiss against the cold and the raw winter light and the ugliness of the holiday flat. And perhaps he had just been waiting, it occurred to him that afternoon in the French Alps, for a face with the same almost painful gentleness to sink down over him and wipe out the image of Ana.

But he had been mistaken, his last love had not eclipsed the first one. Instead, his relationship with Monica had made him doubt his capacity to love. If there was a hidden connection between Ana and Monica it seemed more likely that his first delusion had been pregnant with all the succeeding ones. But he did not think like that in the Alps, and later when he was with Sonia in his and Monica's newly painted home, he sometimes pictured Ana afresh, her expectant face framed in flowing hair, and he felt she signified a promise that had never been fulfilled.

They lay rolling about among the threadbare arabesques of the carpet, their hands under each other's clothes, tongues enmeshed, until she tore herself free. He looked at her, crestfallen, thinking she did not want it after all. She wiped saliva from her mouth and started to unbutton her blouse. Take off your clothes, she said quietly. He obeyed. Everything suddenly took on a very practical tone. He kissed her neck as her fingers searched for the hooks of her bra. How skinny you are, she said and made him feel like a skeleton. Her breasts were smaller than he had imagined and her hips broader, thighs stronger. This is what I look like, she said, as if she had read a slight hesitation in his eyes, and he kissed her passionately and frenetically like a drunkard afraid of getting sober. She fell backwards and started to laugh. His hands went roving all over her. He didn't like her laughter. Not so fast, she whispered and showed him how, with a light hold of his wrist. She seemed a little too expert.

He had a condom in his pocket. It had been there a long time. He took it out, bashful, and broke the seal. She didn't say anything but he could see what she was thinking. He was prepared all right. Licentiously considerate. She watched him
roll it on, curious. This was it, then. The smell of rubber made him feel coarse and still more undressed. She guided him and after a couple of attempts he made his way in. She smiled and squeezed up her eyes, her hair stuck to her damp forehead, she groaned. He ejaculated almost at once. He could see that was a disappointment, but she was sweet. They lay close to each other, listening to Brahms. She gave him a far away look and stroked from his forehead down over his nose with one finger. He said he loved her. She made no reply.

For a week or two he really thought they were a couple. He thought of it with ecstasy when he waited for her outside the school. They strolled together in the snow-white parks and went skating when the ice on the lake grew thick enough. He took her home and introduced her to his mother. He wondered nervously what Ana would see in her, and on the way upstairs in the modest block he puffed up his mother's love of Tolstoy and Dostoievski. Afterwards he felt foolish for having been over-enthusiastic in crediting his mannish mother and her red, cracked hands with a love of the arts. When they were alone in his room Ana said that his mother seemed a fine person. It sounded far too studied. They lay on his bed, he kissed her and pressed a hand between her nylon thighs. She pushed it away.

She seemed to have got over her rapture for Jewishness, and he never saw the star of David again. All that was left was poetry, but she did not talk about it as enthusiastically as before, and he soon grew bored when they adjudicated between what was pop and what was art. He wanted to talk about
them
. They often just lay on his bed or hers, when they were alone at home, without saying anything as they caressed each other, she slightly absentminded, he insistent and expectant. After they had made love she always covered herself with the duvet. She didn't like him looking at her body. Sometimes she fell asleep. When he realised they were not sweethearts any longer and maybe never had been, it was not her broad hips and small breasts he visualised when he lay sleepless at night cultivating his broken heart. It was always her face beneath him on the carpet the moment the whole thing began.

It did not end, it ebbed out, until with one blow it became clear to him that it had been over for some time already. She started to have things to do in the afternoon, and when he arrived at her home unexpectedly it was quite often her father who opened the door. He had tea with the clarinettist as the thawing snow slid off the roofs outside. They listened to records and talked about music. Robert learned a lot about music that winter, and in the midst of his unease he discovered that he liked sitting in the gloomy apartment talking to the bald man.

The clarinettist never seemed surprised when Robert rang the doorbell. Nor when he turned up one afternoon even though Ana had said she would not be home until late that night. There was a music stand by the living room window, the clarinet lay on a chair beside it. Robert asked if he was interrupting. Not at all, but now he was there he might as well make himself useful and get them a pot of tea. He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, and as he waited for it to boil he listened to the cool, melancholy notes from the living room. Ana's father went on playing when Robert carefully put the tray on the sofa table and sat down in his usual place. The man by the window seemed not to notice him. He played as if he was alone, lightly rocking to and fro in time to the melody with his small, short-sighted eyes glued to the score and his mouth locked in a downward curving, somehow regretful grimace around the mouthpiece of the clarinet.

He continued to play when the front door banged. Robert turned round, and through the half open door he saw Ana in the passage with a man. They had their backs to him and didn't see him. They hung up their coats on the row of hooks and disappeared out of sight along the corridor to her room. Robert sat on until the clarinettist put his instrument down on his lap and looked at him over his horn-rimmed spectacles. Bartók, he smiled and took off his glasses. He held them up to the window, lowered them again and polished the lenses on his shirt. His eyes were brown like Ana's and bigger than usual. He put on his glasses and looked out of the window. There was a rubber plant on the window-sill. He stretched out a hand and picked at
the outside, withered edge of one of the leathery leaves. Brown dust fell on the sill. Bartók, Béla, he said slowly, looking out at the wintry light.

R
obert was at the kitchen sink when he heard a car in the drive. The engine stopped, a car door slammed, and soon afterwards the doorbell rang. He hesitated for a moment before going out to open the door. No one was there, but he recognised Jacob's car behind his own. The telephone rang in the living room. He stopped on the threshold. Jacob was out on the lawn looking in at the panorama window. It was dim in the room, presumably he could only see his reflection and the clouds and trees by the fence at the end of the garden. Robert had forgotten to switch off the answering machine when he came in. The telephone was beside the window. If Robert answered it Jacob would see him. If he ignored it, it would still look as if he had just gone for a walk.

He heard his own voice saying he was not in and asking the caller to leave a message after the tone. The volume was turned up so high that Jacob must be able to hear it. He stayed on the grass. Robert was almost certain he had not seen him, but still it seemed as if their eyes met through the wide window. After the tone there was silence, and in the silence he heard someone breathing. When he recognised Lucca's voice he could not decide whether he felt a bad conscience or annoyance at the idea of not talking to her. He went over and picked up the receiver, turning his back on the window. When he looked out into the garden a few moments later, Jacob had vanished. He heard the car start and drive away.

Her voice was muted, almost confidential, but maybe she only lowered it because there were other people in the room she was calling from. She had learned to dial for herself. Wasn't she clever? He apologised for not having been to see her yet, and asked how she was doing. It sounded tame. She replied with a question. Had he spoken to Andreas? Robert thought
of Stockholm. No, Andreas had not contacted him. Why didn't she just call him? Surely she must have an idea where he was. She said nothing. Robert asked if he should try to call Andreas for her and at once felt cross with himself for voluntarily allowing himself to get entangled in their private complications. He had only asked to break her silence. She hesitated. Would he do it? He said yes. She wanted to see Lauritz. Maybe, if it was not asking too much, could he take the boy to see her? On a Saturday or Sunday, when he was not working? He must promise to say no if it didn't suit him. He smiled at the small hypocrisy.

She gave him the name and address of some friends Andreas used to stay with when he was in Copenhagen. He would have to find out their number, she couldn't remember it. He got the number from directory enquiries and called. It was engaged. He pushed open the sliding door and went outside. The sun shone through the busy clouds and made the white plastic chairs on the terrace shine so he had to narrow his eyes. He went to stand in the middle of the lawn where Jacob had been. The shining reflections of the chairs swam in the panorama window in front of the dimness of the room and the more distant, indistinct picture of his lone figure on the grass. How had he ended up here? Even if he strained his memory to the utmost, and really succeeded in tracing the order of events down to their smallest links, he had a suspicion that it would not bring him closer to an answer.

The following days were warm, the clouds dispersed, and the high pressure transformed the sky into a pale blue desert stretching all the way into town. The heat made the air quiver over the asphalt of the motorway. The wind blew in through the open windows and pulled at his shirt sleeves, and he felt light and empty-headed as the road signs increased in perspective and abruptly flew over the windscreen. He listened to
The Magic Flute
and quite forgot why he had set off. It was a long time since he had been in Copenhagen, and when he passed the south harbour he recalled all the times in the past when he had returned after a trip in the country, relieved to see the city
towers again, the sparkling water of the harbour and the cranes above the goods trains' marshalling yard. He could leave his job, sell the house and move back into town. He could do whatever he liked. What was he waiting for?

Noisy pop music issued from behind the door. He knocked loudly. She was as brown as cocoa and unnaturally blonde, the woman in the black slip who opened the door. Her dyed hair was short and stuck out untidily around her pinched, sun-tanned face. She looked at him enquiringly as she squeezed up her eyes to avoid the smoke from the cigarette between her lips. She had a small artificial pearl on one nostril. The apartment was at the rear of a block in the city centre and consisted of one large room with vertical wooden beams in the centre. Piles of clothes were scattered on the furniture and the unmade double bed, and the confusion of fashion garments, empty pizza boxes, used coffee cups and randomly dropped objects seemed to go with the drumming rhythm pumping out of the loudspeakers. She must have been the same age as Lucca. The bangles on her wrists jingled when she removed the cigarette and threw out a hand to show the way. She apologised for the mess and shouted to Lauritz, who was on the sofa watching television. It didn't occur to her to turn down the music. A sun-tanned man stood at one of the windows wearing nothing but briefs, talking on a mobile. He threw a glance at Robert and nodded curtly before turning his back on them. He was athletically built and absent-mindedly caressed the muscles on one upper arm as he spoke.

Lauritz did not react, totally hypnotised by Tom and Jerry chasing each other across the screen. The woman with dyed hair looked Robert over as she called the boy. On the telephone he had introduced himself as a friend, but he could feel she was wondering if he was something else and more, this respectable substitute uncle from the provinces in his checked shirt and moccasins. He had asked for Andreas when he phoned. The woman had said he was away travelling. At last Lauritz raised his head and caught sight of them. Robert was not sure the boy recognised him, but on the other hand he did not seem shy, rather
resigned, as he slid off the sofa and came to shake his hand. The woman with dyed hair walked in front of them back to the door. The man in briefs was still talking with his back turned. Robert said he would bring Lauritz back in the early evening. She turned round in the open doorway. Was it true that Lucca would never see again? How dreadful . . . She smiled at the boy and ruffled his hair before closing the door after them. Lauritz smoothed his hair as they walked downstairs.

Robert asked him if he could remember the day he and his father had driven home from the supermarket in Robert's car. The day it rained. Lauritz thought about it. Then he asked where his father was. Hadn't his father told him where he had gone? He couldn't remember. As Robert drove north he glanced at the boy now and then in the rear mirror. He could only see his forehead and eyes watching him expectantly. He wished Lea had been there. He remembered how she had led the boy round the garden as if he was her little brother, when Andreas had come to deliver the leg of lamb that had been left in the car.

She had called the previous day. He was mowing the lawn and the noise of the mower almost drowned out the telephone. She laughed at his breathless voice when he answered at last. She was calling from the airport on the way to Lanzarote. He was sweating, his T-shirt stuck to his shoulder blades. Her laugh was the same as the week before when he ran after her on the beach and stumbled. He looked down at his trainers as he listened to her voice. The toes were covered with grass clippings. He wanted to say something to her but couldn't think what. He asked her to send a postcard. She said she would and kissed the mouthpiece at the other end. It sounded funny.

Lauritz had fallen asleep when they drove into the parking place in front of the orthopaedic hospital. Robert called to him softly until he woke with a start and looked around him, rosy-cheeked and confused. As they walked towards the entrance he let go of Robert's hand and started gathering pine cones from under the pine trees. Lucca smiled when he gave her the hard, prickly cones. Robert stood where he had stopped at the end of the terrace a nurse had directed them to. She sat in the sun
on one of the deckchairs. Seen from a distance she might have been any woman smiling at her son, looking at him through her sunglasses. Lauritz climbed onto her lap and pushed his head under her chin. Robert walked up to them and the sound of his steps on the terrace floor made her lift her face. The boy looked at him watchfully. Thank you, she said. It was kind of you. She was suddenly formal, she had not been like that on the telephone. It was nothing, he said. No, was all she replied. He said he would go for a walk on the beach.

There were a lot of people there, and he felt much too dressed up and conspicuous among the anonymous bodies lying in rows in the sun. He sat down some way up the beach and took off his shoes and socks. The shrill cries of children rang out and then were swallowed by the deep sound of the breakers. The light dazzled him, reflected in the water that ran back before another wave gathered itself and slumped down on the wet sand. Kullen's low cliffs were blue and misty, and now and again he saw a little flash over the Sound when the sun struck a passing car window in Sweden.

Robert lit a cigarette. He had not been here since Monica and he were divorced. This was the view she had stood gazing at as she smoked, one late afternoon when the other beach visitors had gone home. Yet it seemed quite a different place. There was nothing left but disconnected impressions, and he was not even sure he remembered them precisely, those fleeting moments of closeness, like coming suddenly out of the shade and meeting the sunlight. He had believed you could build on that kind of thing, and now they were in Lanzarote.

He sat there for half an hour. Occasionally he looked at the hospital's white functionalist building, formerly a fashionable seaside hotel. He recalled the story Monica's mother had always told when she'd had something to drink, about how the barrister had proposed to her one evening there on the dance floor, between two dances, poised and romantic in his white dinner jacket. Might he have chosen her for her dress? And if so, why not? Just as love had its consequences, so love itself was a consequence of every possible and impossible thing, small or
large. He brushed the sand from his feet and stood up, put on his shoes and pushed his socks into his pocket. Small things holding some mysterious transformative power often proved surprisingly influential on one's imagination. The luxurious way a skirt swung around a girl's legs in time to the tunes of the age. A modestly blushing smile beneath a woollen blanket in the Alps. A white hand lazily pushing the button on an old radio and a dreamy gaze at the snow under the lamps. No more was needed.

Lucca was still on the terrace. Lauritz lay on the floor rolling his pine cones. Her long face with its high cheek-bones and straight nose seemed both melancholy and arrogant, as if shaped by an old, indomitable yet never satisfied hunger. She sat with her face lifted to the sun and a faint smile around her mouth. He did not know if the heat was making her smile or the sound of his step and the deck chair giving way beneath him.

They were silent, you could hear the sea, but only as a muted soughing beneath the staccato, clicking sound of the bristly scales on the cones Lauritz was rolling over the terrace floor. One of them landed at her feet, she bent forward and picked it up. Her fingertips investigated the hard shells along the edges. What had Andreas had to say? He has gone away, said Robert and paused. I think he is in Stockholm, he went on. Stockholm, she repeated. Yes, he probably was . . . Lauritz came up to her, she passed him the cone. He asked when she was coming home. She brushed the hair back from her forehead and pushed the unruly lock behind her ear. I don't know, she said, stretching out her hand. The boy bent his face so her fingers could brush his cheek. He kneeled on the floor again and threw down the pine cones one after the other.

Had he got a cigarette? He offered her one and noticed how surely her hand, after a moment's fumbling, found the pack and coaxed out a cigarette. She took hold of his wrist when she heard him ignite his lighter and bent her face so her hair fell in front of her forehead again and came dangerously close to the flame. He lifted up the lock with his free hand as she lit her cigarette. She leaned back quickly and blew out smoke, and he noticed
her cheeks were slightly flushed, but that might be owing to the sun. It had reached the tops of the pine trees around the parking place, and the shadow of the terrace parapet formed a bluish triangle on the blinding white end wall. The wind made the needles of the pine trees sway in unison and moved the ash from the cigarettes over the floor tiles so it spread and took off in whirls of grey flakes. She didn't really know where she was, he thought. Lauritz had climbed into a deckchair a little way off. He had a pine cone in his hand and looked out in front of him, it wasn't clear what he was watching.

You haven't told me anything about yourself, she said. I am always the one who talks. Always, he thought. Had they spent so much time together already? He brushed ash from his knee. Where should he begin? She turned towards him. Wherever he liked . . . He looked into her dark lenses, duplicating two identical twins each in his check shirt, both bent forwards, each with a cigarette in his fingers.

He knocked several times, but no one came. He knocked again, harder. There was complete silence from behind the door. Lauritz had sat down on the top step. One by one he let his pine cones tumble down the stairs. Robert tried to remember what he had said to the woman with dyed hair. He was sure he had arranged to bring the boy back in the early evening, but as the minutes went by he began to doubt. He sat down on the step beside Lauritz. Maybe she had forgotten, maybe the music had drowned out his voice. Lauritz dug him in the side with a finger. He said he was hungry. Robert looked at him. The boy's eyes seemed older than their soft, downy surroundings. They waited patiently to know what he was planning.

They went to an Indian restaurant in the same street. Lauritz only wanted rice. As he ate he gazed around him, fascinated by the gold-painted, oriental arches of the interior, cut out of plywood and lit with mauve bulbs. Did India look like that? More or less, replied Robert and to pass the time began to tell him Kipling's story about the civet cat. When Lauritz had finished with his rice it looked as if it had snowed on the
cloth around his plate. Robert went out to call the woman with dyed hair and the muscle man. A well-educated woman's voice answered. No contact with the mobile at present. It was nearly half past eight. He thought of what he had told Lucca about himself, about Monica and Lea. He felt he had said too much. He stood gazing blankly at the mosaic of numbers on the telephone, considering what to do with Lauritz. Then he lifted the receiver again and called his mother. She sounded surprised, he had not spoken to her for several weeks. He asked if he might call in and explained the situation to her as briefly as he could. It sounded muddled to him. When they were in the car Lauritz asked where the big girl was. Robert told him she was his daughter. Were there any civet cats in Lanzarote? Robert didn't think there were.