Lucca (6 page)

It was many years since as a young doctor he had had fixed duties but, because of staff shortages, Robert and his colleagues were sometimes obliged to take a night shift. He rather liked the nocturnal silence broken by sporadic sounds, when a telephone rang or a nurse walked along the corridor in her clogs. It was a different silence from the one at home, when he had eaten and sat alone in his sitting room, and it did not make him feel isolated in the same way. Alone, yes, but not isolated. When he was on night duty he sometimes let himself imagine he was on the bridge of a great passenger liner. The gigantic oil-burning boiler in the basement was the ship's engine room, the sleeping patients were passengers in their bunks, and the darkness outside was the darkness over an invisible sea. For some it was a journey to new adventures, for others the last voyage, but that did not alter the speed or the course of the ship.

He sat chatting to the night nurse, a slight woman in her late fifties. She talked about her son, who was travelling across the USA by car with a friend. Last time he called he had been in Las Vegas. She looked worried. She had two watches, one on each wrist. One showed what the time was in America. She had calculated how many miles her son covered every day, and synchronised the time on the American watch, at intervals putting the hour hand back one. She had never been to America, but could describe in detail what her son had experienced on his journey. As a rule he called home in the afternoon, local time, when it was night in Denmark and she was at work. He called collect. The nurse gave Robert a slightly scared look. He wouldn't tell anyone, would he?

Robert smiled and gave her a friendly caress on the back between the prominent shoulder blades, thinking of Jacob who was no doubt in his car now, heart beating, on the way to his tryst with the gym teacher. They were often on duty together. She had lived alone since her husband died of stomach cancer
ten years ago. He had been a builder, she nursed him herself for his last months. It had not been a happy marriage, but she spoke of it without bitterness, as you speak of chance misfortune. She had merely been unlucky in the great lottery. But her children were doing well, her daughter was a doctor in Greenland, and the youngest was a student at the Veterinary and Agricultural High School in Copenhagen, when he was not hurtling across the USA.

When she was young she had worked as a volunteer in a children's clinic in the Sudan. He sometimes encouraged her to talk of her time in Africa, how she had been on the point of marrying an African when she discovered he had two wives already. She had believed she had met the real thing in the figure of a tall handsome Sudanese. Every time she told the story she smiled the same surprised, self-ironical smile, and Robert could suddenly see what she must have looked like as a young woman. A graceful, surprised young woman in the midst of black Africa. At other times she asked about Lea and gave advice on child-rearing in a slightly lecturing tone, but Robert listened without argument.

When she was called away to a patient he got out his walkman and played a tape of Haydn string quartets. He wound forward to the slow movement, misused as a national anthem long after Haydn's death. He hummed the introductory bars,
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
, and smiled. Once again he had to admire the way the musicians, even as they played the first, lingering bars shrugged off the dead shell of ugly associations and liberated the music. He leaned back as Haydn whispered his civilised commentary through the earphones with the warm, crisp vibrato from instruments almost as old as the composer.

Jacob must have arrived by now. Robert pictured to himself how Jacob the naughty schoolboy with red cheeks lay in a strange house between a strange woman's legs groping her boobs. The house would no doubt have been a family home like his own, and the woman would not have differed so much from his own well-shaped wife. A woman's body like any other, in a bedroom probably furnished like most with pine and chipboard
furniture covered with white laminate. And yet it was a drama that was nevertheless played out between them, forbidden in a completely irresistible way.

While the gym teacher spread her legs for Jacob, did he perhaps pause for a moment, on his knees as if in a sort of reverence, at the sight of her cunt. No doubt it resembled all other cunts, both the real ones and those in all the porno magazines and coloured diagrams in anatomical textbooks the world over. When he had been no more than a child Robert had felt there was something brutally prosaic about the female sexual organs compared with his vague daydreams of what awaited him when he grew up. On the other hand it was precisely their rather frightening reality that had made them so exciting to think about, the folds of the labia and their colour range of reddish brown and rose.

When he pictured Jacob gazing at the gym teacher's cunt, lying open to him surrounded by the functional, easy-care furnishings, the organic folds of its form were as anachronistic to think of as an antique would have been, a quaint art décor casket lined with red velvet. Oddly striking in the orderly, mass-produced common sense in low-cost materials of the suburban house. If you lived the regular life of a doctor or gym teacher in a medium-sized provincial town, the female sexual orifice was the last romantic cavern, the last refuge for your debilitated imagination.

Earlier, when Robert had gone to bed with a woman for the first time, he had not only desired her body but also its strangeness. When they lay together, he and a total stranger, it seemed as he touched her that he was fumbling his way into another, different world. Or rather, he found reality at last as his hands explored the warm unknown body beside him. As if he had been living in a dream from which he had finally woken. Until it was over and he sat on the edge of the bed gazing at his affectionate unknown lover asking himself if that was all. If it was the same body he was looking at now reality had resumed a depressing likeness to itself.

In a few hours Jacob would get up and dress in the strange
but not in the least exotic bedroom, before the beauty who lay regarding him tenderly, pink and sweaty. Perhaps she had been like a mystery he had tried to solve as he penetrated her, as far in as he could get. But afterwards she was again merely a gym teacher lying there with her big boobs asking when they could meet again. Perhaps Jacob was not the sort to let himself be worried by the fickleness of life, perhaps he would just lean back in his seat with a little smile, his body satisfied, and drive home to his sweet unsuspecting wife. Or would he too, like Robert, trawl through his memory to rediscover the precious reasons for his tension and dizzy expectation as he drove in the opposite direction?

You couldn't tell, and anyway what did it matter, thought Robert, as Haydn's emotional strings vibrated through his head. Desire was like music, just as abstract, just as meaningless and just as overwhelming. As soon as the old instruments were played again the music woke anew and made its impact on her. Far away in the darkness he could see a shining yellow ribbon which doubled up and disappeared behind the opposite wing of the hospital. It was the motorway to Copenhagen. The red and white pairs of lights passed each other along the bright curve, just as they did every night and had done on the night when Lucca Montale tried to take her life. Unless, being the worse for drink, she had merely made an error and by pure chance had gone down on to the wrong lane. In that case, where had she thought she was going? He heard the telephone through the graceful intricacies of the strings, switched off Haydn and picked up the receiver.

A woman's voice asked in English whether he would accept the call. She had an American accent. Robert assented and a moment later he heard a young man at the other end. Robert asked where he was. Arizona. What was it like there? The young man laughed, slightly delayed by the satellite connection. What it was like? He was calling from a truck-stop. There was a petrol station and a cafeteria, and outside were tall cactus and sharp red rock formations and a long straight road. Just like a film! Robert smiled. He could hear voices in the background, sounding as if
their mouths were full of potatoes. He caught sight of the slight figure of the night nurse at the end of the corridor. He held up the phone and waved at her with it. She took off her clogs and ran holding them, eager as a girl. He felt a warm sensation in his stomach. Arizona, he said, grabbing one clog as he passed her the phone.

He put it on the floor, she smiled shyly and turned her back. He went out into the foyer and sat down on the sofa Andreas used. He lit a cigarette, and as he knocked his ash into the cement bowl he caught sight of some without filters among the stubs sticking out of the sand, they had dark shreds of tobacco on the ends. Andreas had probably gone to Stockholm to start a new life since his old one was now in ruins.

He glanced at his watch, it was a quarter past two. Jacob was quite likely not going home before night duty was ended as the gym teacher's husband had so conveniently gone on a course. Maybe they were sleeping in each other's arms as if in a trial marriage. Maybe he lay awake, maybe she snored. But would he stay in love with the gym teacher for her boobs' sake or out of sheer enthusiasm at the thought of starting again from the beginning? Robert pictured Jacob announcing the sad news to his wife, one evening on the terrace while the glow of the grill died down, after they had kissed the children goodnight. How he would, weighed down with guilt, but also with enjoyable reverence, bow to the laws of emotion and move from one family home to the other.

It was not very probable, though Jacob did not have the bent for drama of an Andreas, nor did Robert believe that his practical sporty wife had the imagination to drive herself to destruction on the wrong side of the Copenhagen motorway. Perhaps she too had her little secrets. Robert brushed ash from his white coat. The windows at the end of the foyer stretched from floor to ceiling, and a long way into the pallid mirror of the linoleum flooring, along the empty ranks of sofas where he dimly glimpsed his white figure and crossed legs. He could be any doctor on night duty, sitting enjoying a fag. What was that, Jacob had said? It probably didn't have to be one thing or the other. Again he visualised one particular face. It was a long time ago.

T
hey had just bought a bigger apartment, where they lived until that winter day three years later when he came home too early. It had actually been somewhat beyond their means. It was large and needed a lot of decorating, but they could not afford to get it done professionally. It was in an old property just outside the city centre, near the harbour. There was a playground in the courtyard where some space had been made. Monica took Lea for a holiday with her parents while he did the painting. He joined them at weekends. Lea was to start in the first class at school after the summer holidays. He had installed himself in what was to be her room, with her mattress, a lamp, the stereo and a selection of tapes. The furniture and crates had been packed into one of the other rooms under plastic sheeting.

Monica called him every day. She had a bad conscience about lying in the sun while he was left in town slogging away, but in fact he enjoyed being alone. Most of the neighbouring flat dwellers were out travelling, and he could play music as loudly as he liked. He forgot the time, absorbed in the monotonous work while Verdi's
Requiem
blew through the empty rooms. Lying on Lea's mattress in the evenings reading the paper he felt like a nomad who had temporarily pitched camp in a chance spot. The feeling of a state of emergency had a cheering effect on him, and there were moments when he even wished it could go on, this pause between the daily life that had been packed up, and the one that would begin when he had finished painting.

Sometimes he said jokingly to Monica that when Lea had grown up they could leave the flat to her and move into a hotel. It was an old daydream, to live in a hotel room with only the most essential possessions, ready to move at a moment's warning, and while he was painting it was like bringing the dream to life. He
ate at a restaurant every evening, alone or with a friend, and afterwards cycled through the town as he had done in student days. The nights were light, the walls and asphalt still held a little of the sun's warmth, and he sat in pavement cafés observing the passers-by, sunburned and lightly dressed, as if in a southern city.

One night, with one of his old student friends, he strayed into a discotheque. It was a long time since he had been in such a place, the music had changed, now it was even more fatuous and deafening, he thought. The girls wore the same kind of clothes as the big girls had at the beginning of the Seventies when he himself was still an adolescent schoolboy. Those fashions had become smart again but that only made him feel still more out of place. A new generation had taken over the town and he enjoyed standing at the bar wistfully thinking of the time he had lurched around himself with some unknown beauty, sweating and tipsy in the flickering lights, to Fleetwood Mac or The Eagles. He smiled, ‘Hotel California', it was there, in the stupefied and weightless morning hours, that he had fantasised about moving in some day.

When the girls looked at him he could feel that in their eyes he was an oldish, slightly foozling guy on the wrong track. They were just as unapproachable and insecure, just as ingenuous and at the same time imperious as pretty girls always had been. They only had their dreams, their bright faces and their young bodies, but as long as the music played the lack of qualifications was a strength rather than a weakness. He threw them silent glances as he sat over his beer and soothed himself by thinking that luckily he no longer had anything to prove. He had never been unfaithful to Monica, the very thought seemed absurd.

He got together with her in his late twenties, while they were students. Up to then he had had four, perhaps five girlfriends, according to how strictly you interpret that definition, and apart from those there had been a handful of other episodes with no after-effects whatsoever. He could barely remember their names or distinguish one face from another. He had been shy when young, he had found it difficult to play the game, and he found
it particularly hard to talk to completely strange girls when it was abundantly clear, at least to himself, that a conversation was the last thing he was trying to instigate. So he was all the more astonished when one of them offered her favours just like that and the Devil suddenly grabbed him as if he had never before done anything other than putting ladies down on their backs.

When he and Monica became an item they had already known each other for some years. They had been in the same circle of friends, and had themselves become friends, neither had believed they would ever be anything else. Maybe it was the reticent attitude in both that made them feel good in each other's company and at the same time stopped them falling in love. But it was also the dry sense of humour they shared. They were known as the ironic observers in the group, amusing themselves over the excesses of the others. Otherwise they were very different, Robert with his modesty and his eccentric penchant for classical music, Monica with her cool, sharp-edged manner and tough way of expressing things, with no mollifying circumlocutions.

Her contours were so clear and sharp that she was almost mysterious. In a discussion her arguments were as penetrating as chain-saws, she swam like a fish and at tennis served harder than the most formidable guys. No-one had ever seen her dance and she always went to parties or dinners alone. She left alone too, and rumour had it that she might be lesbian. She never used make-up and dressed like a boy in jeans and roll necks all the year round, but she was actually rather good-looking. She was blonde and her profile was almost classical with a prominent nose and small, square jaw. It just didn't occur to anyone to notice she was rather beautiful. You didn't think that far because her energetic, masculine movements and challenging grey-blue eyes stopped you observing her in peace.

Robert had been afraid of her until he discovered he could make her laugh. Since then they had been inseparable at parties in summer villas in the north of Sealand, late into the night when people began to filter in pairs into bedrooms or down on the beach. They were always the last ones to sit over the half-empty bottles and flickering garden lights, but they both brought such
consideration or animation to their repartee that the idea of so much as touching each other would have seemed plain comic. Even though several people had in fact asked him whether anything was brewing. He himself didn't give it a thought.

At that time he was in a relationship with an architecture student who always dressed in black with make-up pale as a doll and blood-red lips. He never found out whether they were really a couple, she was unpredictable and disliked being shown off, as she called it. She insisted on his putting her in handcuffs when they made love, he hadn't tried that before. Otherwise she was hard to pin down, but although she was so elusive she could just as suddenly take it into her head to surrender to him. He went on putting up with her whims merely to hear her scream like a madwoman and feel her bore her long red nails into his shoulders once more when she came. He had grown dependent on her nervous, frail body and her need for ritual subjection, and when he heard the handcuffs clink around her delicate wrists he couldn't be sure who fettered whom. As a whole he was not sure of anything where she was concerned. He suspected her of continuing to see her former lover, an architect who in the end did not have the courage to leave his wife and children, but he never managed to find out for certain before she finally vanished from his life.

That had a depressing effect on him and he did not feel inclined to join the group of friends on their annual skiing trip to France. His relationship with the temperamental slave-girl had been so intense and hectic that he never had time to ask himself whether he felt anything for her beyond a passionate and confused desire. But after she had disappeared he plunged into melancholy and suddenly felt certain that the woman with her handcuffs held something profoundly inscrutable which he had not been man enough to elicit. Besides, he couldn't ski at all, though finally he let Monica persuade him, after he had entertained her with his disappointed ruminations, grateful to her for listening to him. She undertook to teach him and after a day or two he braved the ski lift with her. A few hours later he was in the local casualty department with a broken ankle.

Monica had thought he would learn to ski quite easily, and to begin with he thought it was just a bad conscience that made her devote so much time to him. She went skiing only in the mornings, and spent the afternoons with him at the holiday flat in the ugly concrete block where their friends slept in sleeping bags all over the place and wet ski socks steamed on every radiator. She rustled up lunches and made
vin chaud
, and he was surprised at her gentleness when she asked if he was in pain, or supported him when he hobbled out to the bathroom. He had noticed this gentleness when she sat beside him in hospital while his foot was put in plaster. She looked at him and smiled, and suddenly she put out a hand and stroked the hair from his forehead with a brief, easy movement.

She lit candles when it grew dark. They sat with their red wine, wrapped in blankets looking out at the snow-clad mountaintops between the concrete blocks of the skiing hotels. They talked about everything imaginable between heaven and earth, exchanged childhood memories and described the books they had read. They were not particularly profound but for once they dropped the safe ironical distance that had brought them together but held them in check. One afternoon, after a long pause during which neither had spoken, she asked if he would hate her to kiss him.

It was different, it was a world away from handcuffs and screaming and sharp red nails. The transitions were milder and less noticeable, from words to pauses, from pauses to caresses, and from their hands' indolent playful exchanges to the first time she straddled him and sank her blushing face to his under the blanket she pulled over them like a woollen Bedouin tent, with slightly narrowed eyes and a shy smile that he hadn't seen before.

To begin with they didn't let on, the others were too close and it was too delicate, too new. They gave nothing away, and he marvelled at the different faces she put on, and how good she was at keeping them separate. He went on wondering about it in the years that followed. When she showed him one face, the cool and distanced one, he was all the more attracted
because he thought of the other one, and when she revealed her gentle, vulnerable side to him his tenderness increased at the thought that it was a face which showed itself only secretly, under cover, like that first time under the woollen blanket in the French Alps.

One warm Saturday morning he took a train north. The compartment was full of lightly dressed children and adults looking out impatiently at the glinting water and the little white triangles of pleasure boats leaning into the wind behind all the greenery racing past the windows. Monica had the car, she was meeting him at the station. She was in shorts and a bathing suit, leaning against the bonnet, absent-mindedly rattling the car keys. When he caught sight of her he realised he had been missing her. They were used to being together, a week was a long time. She smiled grimly and sent him an ominous glance as she started the car. He had something to look forward to, her father was in top form. But her little sister was home from New York, that should ease the situation. They got on so well together, said Monica with emphasis as if she was not quite sure. Robert had only met Sonia a couple of times.

Monica's father was a barrister, and she had inherited his hawk nose and jutting chin, although to a lesser degree. She had also inherited his cool, spiky sarcasm and a touch of his aristocratic diction. In town he always wore a grey suit and bow tie, but he was as distrait as he was elegant, and more than once he had appeared in the Supreme Court with bicycle clips on his trousers. When he was on holiday he reluctantly conformed to the rules of holiday wear and put on a pair of khaki shorts, but his white legs ended in a pair of brown leather shoes with a dazzling shine, and his shirt always looked newly ironed.

He could be extremely cantankerous and every day over lunch in the garden he made sarcastic comments on the undesirable sweetness of the herrings. Year after year they grew noticeably sweeter, as if they were turning into children's sweets! Apart from the sweet herrings he saw communists everywhere, and the fall of the Berlin wall had not cured his phobia. On the contrary,
he ceaselessly complained about the reunification of Germany and the outrageous chaos apparent in his world picture. It almost sounded as if according to his view the Iron Curtain had existed to keep out the Asiatic hordes rather than fence them in. Robert had given up arguing with him, to his obvious disappointment.

Monica's mother was a plump but comely woman, always in pleated or tartan skirts and a silk blouse buttoned up to the neck. She was a shadow, every single movement and each word she spoke corresponded to what the barrister did or said. She put up with his malicious arrogance and choleric attacks, she anticipated his slightest wish with a sweet smile and calming, motherly tone, and her only defiance seemed to show itself in attacks of migraine that forced her to spend whole afternoons in her bedroom behind closed curtains. According to Monica she had taken her revenge by having an affair for years with a psychiatric consultant. Everyone knew about it but no one mentioned it, said Monica. A bit of a mystery, thought Robert. Surely someone must have whispered, at least. Moreover the consultant was the living image of her father, she told him, with silver-grey hair and unyielding opinions, only he wore a silk scarf round his neck instead of a bow tie.

When she heard the car in the drive Lea came running. She was only in underpants, with gawky sunburned arms and legs, and her navel protruded from her belly. She leaped into Robert's arms, almost knocking him over. The lunch table was laid under a parasol in the garden which sloped up to an undulating terrain covered with heather and juniper bushes. They sat down, and Monica's mother called several times in vain to the younger sister, carping and impatient, as you call to a child who will not break off her game. She did not appear until the barrister shouted her name in his deep voice with his head half-turned towards the house, bent over and expectant, with restrained irritation.