Lucca (17 page)

He rose, put a reel of film on the other machine and told her by signs to look out of the little window. Lucca viewed the distant picture floating in the dark. A man and a woman lay in a four-poster bed making love in the golden light of an open fire, and suddenly she saw a little white flash in the right hand corner of the picture. Immediately Giorgio set the other projector going and the next moment the couple in bed were succeeded by a group of riders in fluttering cloaks galloping beside a wood at dawn. He stopped the first projector, took the reel off and carried it over to a table with two steel plates on which he rewound the film. He went to the window and absent-mindedly watched what was happening on the screen.

When they were in the street after the show he took her arm and led her to a bus stop. Fishing a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of his breast pocket he offered her one. She accepted it, although she didn't feel like smoking. There was hardly any traffic. Long rows of cars were parked beside the closed shutters of the shops. A little further on they heard the shrill yelp of a burglar alarm. Giorgio stooped slightly, one hand in his pocket, now and then taking a drag at his cigarette. He looked at her and shook his head as if he still couldn't believe his eyes. Lucca . . . he said softly. She smiled back, but it was a slow smile, her mouth felt sluggish and stiff.

There were only a few people on the bus. A girl of her own age sat looking blankly out at the shuttered façades. The thick layer of powder on her cheeks made her look like a doll in the dull light. She cautiously pulled at the nylon stocking on one knee where a stitch had run and moved her head from side to side, she must have had a stiff neck from sitting on an office chair all day. Behind her sat a young man in soldier's uniform with a rucksack between his legs. He had his earphones on and sat with closed eyes, nodding mechanically. Lucca could hear a faintly pulsing whisper from his ears.

Giorgio patted her arm and pointed at the window pane reflecting their transparent faces. He straightened her profile
like any street photographer and rearranged his own face in profile, alternately pointing at her nose and his own, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye in a way that made her laugh. He laughed himself. It was true, she had his nose. He looked down at the hands on her lap, laughed again and let his shoulders drop as he shook his head wonderingly. Lucca, he mumbled, Lucca . . . she laid a cautious hand over his and stroked the prominent veins on its back. He regarded her fingers attentively.

They left the bus in front of a big modern hotel. The porter glanced disapprovingly at Giorgio's crumpled shirt hanging outside the faded jeans. When they had passed him Giorgio turned and put out his tongue at the figure, back turned, in top hat and tails. He winked at Lucca with a cheeky expression that made him look like a schoolboy, soliciting her admiration for his pranks. She followed him into the empty bar. It was furnished like an English club with dark panels and deep leather sofas. A tall woman in a white shirt with a bow tie stood behind the bar. Stella looked neither surprised nor glad when she caught sight of them. Giorgio went to introduce them to each other, but she interrupted him with a quick remark. He flung out his arms and sat on a bar stool. Stella asked what she would like to drink. Lucca asked for orange juice, Giorgio had a beer.

Stella translated what he said in a neutral tone, like a professional interpreter, but Lucca could hear she did not translate everything, and not precisely as it was said. He had been very surprised. If he had known she was coming he would have taken time off so they could go out to eat. He was very glad to see her. Lucca replied to the questions Stella translated, and watched Giorgio as he listened intently to Stella's rendering of her replies. He asked about ordinary things, whether she was still at school and what plans she had for further education. She told him she might be going to act. He looked at her seriously, it was an insecure way of life.

She asked why he did not work in films any more. Stella hesitated a moment before translating. He smiled and gesticulated with fingertips together. He did still work with films! Then he
cast a long look into the mirror behind the bar. It wasn't so easy. Besides, they didn't make real films any more. They only made stories of car chases and bare breasts! Stella gave a crooked smile as she translated. And he didn't want to do it just for the money. He looked at her like a teacher. You had to believe in what you did or it wouldn't be any good. There was always a way to survive. He wagged his chin rebelliously. He survived . . . Lucca nodded, he looked at her warmly. Maybe she would become a great actress. Maybe one day she would play the leading part in one of the films he showed at the cinema! He laughed at the thought.

They sat in silence for a while. Stella served a German couple who came to sit at the end of the bar. For the first time Lucca was aware of the synthetic music for strings that seemed to come from all around them. Giorgio put his head on one side with a dreaming air as he played on an invisible violin. Stella came back. Lucca cleared her throat. Why had he never been to visit them? Stella gave her a brief glance before translating. He looked away and took the last cigarette in the pack and patted his pockets, he couldn't find his lighter. Stella handed him a box of matches. He burned his fingers when he lit the match and sucked greedily at the cigarette. It was a long story. He didn't know how much her mother had told her. They had been so different . . . he sent her an appealing look. He had once suggested coming, but her mother had thought it wasn't a good idea. Lucca couldn't tell whether he was lying. He slid off the bar stool and looked at her apologetically as he nodded in the direction of the toilet.

Stella removed the ashtray by his place and put down a fresh one. When he was out of sight she looked at Lucca and held her eyes with her own narrow ones. She seemed very tired suddenly, her cheeks drooped around the corners of her mouth. Lucca didn't know whether it was fear or anger she saw in the other woman's gaze. Stella spoke in such a low voice that it was hard to hear what she said.
Leave him alone . . .
she whispered . . .
please . . .
Lucca turned her face away. The German made a sign to Stella, holding out a note in his fingers. Giorgio came back. He clapped his hands together and said something loudly
to Stella, who turned round and threw him a stern glance, as the astonished German picked up his change from the counter. Giorgio looked at Lucca with raised eyebrows and an expression that seemed to say something like: What a right shrew he had to live with.

When the Germans had left he repeated what he had said. Stella translated in a weary voice. He would take her out to see the town tomorrow, if she could come. Did she know where the cathedral was? They could meet there. Twelve o'clock? Giorgio nodded questioningly. Lucca nodded back. Stella asked how long she was staying. She didn't translate that. Lucca replied that she hadn't decided yet. She said she wanted to go back to her pensione. Giorgio offered to walk back with her, but she said she would take a taxi. Stella went to ring for one. He walked out of the hotel with her, neither of them said anything while they waited. When at last the taxi came he smiled brightly, almost as if relieved, she thought, as he hugged her close.

She hesitated when she saw him waiting outside the Baptistery next day, behind the dense traffic. He had on a brown velvet suit, even though it was very hot, and a white, newly ironed shirt. She had wept in the taxi on the way back to the
pensione
, soundlessly so the driver wouldn't notice. She had lain awake a long time, listening to the sounds of the town that reached into the courtyard. But what had she expected, in fact? He had changed into someone else after all these years, his life was different now. To him she was a distant, painful memory.

Had Else prevented him from seeing her? She didn't believe that. She would like to, but she couldn't. Neither could she decide whether he looked touching or simply pitiful as he stood in front of the Baptistery's green and white-striped marble façade in his best suit, nervously watching out for her. She hesitated as he caught sight of her and waved exaggeratedly, as if she was ashamed, either of him or of herself. He looked quite good with his pronounced features and unruly, grizzled hair, but his stooping shoulders and perpetual clowning left the impression
of a man life had cowed. A man who had resigned himself to its blindly banal necessities.

He showed her the cathedral and the Galleria dell'Accademia with Michelangelo's David and the slaves fighting to release themselves from the marble they have only half escaped from. He led her through the Uffizi galleries and she walked beside him among the Japanese and American tourists and only caught disconnected glimpses of faces, bodies and landscapes in the old paintings. He talked incessantly as if believing she would understand in the end if he just kept on, as he had done when she was little. He was tireless, but the sights of Florence were all they had to keep them there together. Luckily there was plenty to see. She recalled Stella's timid, threatening face when she asked her to leave him alone.

They ate at a restaurant in a side street, a simple place with sawdust on the floor, frequented by workmen. He was obviously a regular customer. The owner smiled at her and shook his head in acknowledgement of life's singularity when Giorgio introduced his grown-up daughter from Denmark. No, she didn't speak Italian. What a shame! She understood that much. After lunch, as they were having their espresso, Giorgio pulled a photograph out of his pocket with a secretive look on his face. Was it a picture of them together? Maybe there was still a trace of the years when he had after all been there. A fleeting impression of a New Year's Eve when she sat in his arms dressed as an Indian princess. A proof that it was true that he had once run with her on his shoulders among the spruce trees of the plantation, with laughter bubbling and rising inside her like waves.

She looked at the black and white photograph and recognised the young Giorgio. He stood with a boom in one hand, the other resting on the shoulder of a man she also thought she had seen before. A handsome man, more handsome than Giorgio, with tired, screwed up eyes and a prominent chin. He placed a finger on the picture and she remembered the witch in Milan and her portrait of her son and daughter-in-law with red eyes. He looked at her in triumph.
Mastroianni!
he said, smiling nostalgically as he emptied his coffee cup. She gave him back the picture.
He looked out at the street through the coloured fly curtain. Suddenly he pointed at his watch, as he had done the previous day. She visualised the projecting room where they had sat eating chicken and smiled, embarrassed.

They went back to the cathedral. Now it was time to say goodbye. She knew it, and she could see he knew it too. They embraced. She had decided to leave him alone, but only now did she realise what it meant. He stood looking at her, hands at his sides, for a moment without the clown's conciliatory grimaces, which swore by laughter because the last freedom in the world was obviously that of being voluntarily comical, ridiculous at one's own expense. But she did not think of that until long afterwards, many years later. She would remember his face framed by the Baptistery's limpid uncluttered Renaissance geometry, his face devoid of waggishness. He too knew their parting was behind them, that it was only a matter of seconds, and so he could allow himself to stay a little longer.

She noted his untidy grey hair, the furrows on his forehead and cheeks, his mouth's natural expression of mute regret and the eyes with the smile lines deeply scored into the thin skin. He must have smiled so much in his life. He raised his hand, hesitated a second and gently brushed the tip of her nose with the knuckle of his index finger. His nose. The only trace of himself he had left apart from her name and a few blurred pictures. Then he slowly took a step backwards, and another. His eyes turned dark as tunnels and he raised his arms a little way, hands open, as he turned and walked away with quick steps.

Everything inside her clenched into a hard breathless knot, and for a moment she clung to the iron railing between the traffic and the marble wall of the Baptistery, until the knot loosened and the cobbles beneath her melted and flowed out of sight. She let the tears run at will down her cheeks, indifferent to the worried or curious glances of passers-by. It was easier to breathe when she walked with long steps and a salty smarting at the corners of her mouth. When she reached the station her eyes had dried. Only the dried-up traces of tears made her cheeks feel slightly taut.

T
he sky above the walls encircling the courtyard had taken on a deeper blue when she was woken by a knock on her door. She got up and opened it. The pregnant woman in the apron signed for Lucca to follow her. When they came to the desk at the end of the corridor she caught sight of a tall man dressed entirely in white. He was probably in his mid-thirties, his long, chestnut-brown hair fell over his forehead and his green eyes looked straight into hers as he stretched out his hand with a smile. He spoke fluent English, his name was Giorgio Montale.

He had got her message. She looked at him, uncomprehending. He showed her the note with her name and that of the boarding-house and she recognised her own handwriting. She explained that she had thought he might be her father. He looked at her attentively, apparently he understood everything straight away. He had no children. He smiled again, more carefully now. He had thought she might be one of his unknown cousins. He had come back to Italy a year or two ago, had been living in England. But had she found her father, then? She nodded. The pregnant woman observed them curiously from the kitchen, stirring her eternal pot. Couldn't he at least offer her a drink? Now they had established the fact that they had absolutely no connection with each other . . . she smiled. Why not?

His car was parked at the door, a black Ferrari. As she leaned back in the soft leather seat she came to think of the little white dot, like a visual disturbance in a corner of the picture, which had told her father to start the second projector so that the cinema audience did not notice the reel-change. But this was not just another reel, it was quite a different film. The white-clad Giorgio drove along the narrow streets completely at home. He taught English at the university, he had studied at Cambridge.

She told him about her journey, about the reunion with Giorgio and about Stella, surprised that she could talk so easily to him. It was like hearing someone else telling the story. It had been an illusion, she said, astonished at the word. She had believed the reunion would be a revelation, but he was nothing more than the man who happened to be her father. How could they have anything to say to each other after all those years? Giorgio contemplated her with his green eyes, and his serious face made her feel she was discovering something about life as she spoke, something hard and adult.

They had a glass of white wine on a terrace from where they could look over the town's misty silhouette with the irregular tiled roofs and the dome of the cathedral in the evening light among the gentle wooded slopes of the mountains. During a pause he suddenly smiled. Listen, he said, and she heard the bells, some faint and distant, others closer, linked in a pealing perspective of high and low resonant strokes. He asked if she had any plans for the evening. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head with a smile. He rose and went inside to telephone. She saw him standing at the pay phone, a fabulous white figure in the semi-darkness of the bar. Soon he returned. Did she like lobster? Carlo had gone out shopping.

The whole property belonged to Carlo's family, it was a seventeenth-century
palazzo
. He was not boastful about it, rather apologetic as he led the way through the gateway with its large, iron-framed lantern. The gateway led to a courtyard garden which had a little fountain surrounded by dark foliage. The bleached Carlo met them at the door, in a kimono as before, of dark red shiny silk. Later she thought Carlo must have at least as many kimonos as there were rooms in Giorgio's apartment. She was not sure she got to see all of them, either the rooms or the kimonos. The apartment seemed endless and all the rooms were high-ceilinged and square, with chess-board marble floors, heavy velvet curtains and imposing, formal antiques.

It all happened without noticeable transition, in one gentle movement that resembled Carlo's way of moving in his smooth kimonos, as muscular and lithe as the big blue cat that followed
him everywhere. While they ate Lucca kept laughing at his exaggerated theatrical attitudes and melodious voice, which lingered over the words. He didn't mind her laughing, almost caricatured himself to amuse her, and meanwhile Giorgio observed them slyly with his shining eyes. He translated what Carlo said and talked of the English writers he was writing a thesis on. Gays, the lot of them, as he said with one of his unexpected smiles.

Lucca had never heard of Forster or Isherwood, but she enjoyed listening to his Cambridge accent and being looked at by his green eyes. Giorgio talked at length of the homeless Isherwood, who had cast off the chains of his bourgeois English childhood in favour of the decadent Berlin of the Twenties and later, when the Nazis took power, had fled to California where he flirted with Hinduism. His identity had no solid foundation, said Giorgio, because he had cut off one anchorage after the other, as he gradually realised in his life the sentence which commenced his Berlin novel:
I am a Camera
.

When he spoke to her it was as if an ancient eccentric world had bred this charming, grown-up boy to open itself to her through his words and his wise eyes. He spoke to her as you speak to someone you have known for a long time. He listened attentively to her account of the course of her young life, and gently, so that she should not be embarrassed, he showed her how to eat a lobster without cracking it into a thousand orange pieces. She felt she had found a friend. She had never felt like this with a man, certainly not with the boys of her own age, but she felt safe, for Carlo was always there to remind her that Giorgio could not possibly intend anything but simply sitting together chatting and listening and laughing.

Why didn't she stay the night? They were all lounging on separate sofas drinking green tea, which Carlo prepared on a charcoal pan on the huge stove. Yes, why not? Carlo showed her the way to a room with a four-poster bed similar to the one she had seen in the film the previous afternoon, in the suburban cinema where her father worked. A towel, a toothbrush and a kimono were laid out, as if it had always been intended that she should stay. When he waved goodnight she laughed at the
affected waving movement he made with his fingers, and he smiled back companionably and closed the door behind him.

She slept until late into the morning. When she opened the shutters she looked out over a jumble of tiled roofs, a sea of stiff, terracotta waves. Her bag was on a stool beside the window. She heard a faint chinking behind her back and turned round in a fright, as Carlo put a tray with a cup of coffee on the bedside table. Today his kimono was mint green with yellow flowers. The blue cat jumped onto the bed. He picked it up by the scruff of the neck and carried it out. She found Giorgio in the kitchen. He had been to fetch her bag in the morning and paid for her room at the boarding-house. She asked if he had kidnapped her. He smiled. Had he? The green eyes looked at her inquiringly.

That day they took her with them to the Uffizi. She didn't like to say she had been there the previous day. And it was completely different from when she visited the museum with her father. She had felt almost choked by all the pictures she hadn't looked at properly. Giorgio reassured her, they would only do one floor. You could spend a lifetime at the Uffizi, he said. So you had to choose what to miss, he went on with a smile, art or life outside. He was dressed in white again, and Carlo wore black silk pyjamas. She took pleasure in noticing how the tourists stared at the tall slim girl laughing with the white-clad aristocrat and their bleached muscular friend.

Giorgio wanted to show her one of the rooms with altar pieces from the early Renaissance. He spoke of the pure, stylised severity in the presentation of the faces, the figures and the folds of the clothing, and he told her of the Byzantine influence. Carlo went on ahead. She stopped before one of the numerous paintings of the Madonna and Child. She was not sure but she felt she recognised the picture from the postcard she had been staring at in the train, the only clue she had in the search for her father. She gazed for a long time at the pale young woman's face with its faintly blue tinge, introspectively dreaming as if she had forgotten the child in her arms, surrounded by the faded and
mottled gilding that was cracked into finely branching lines. The gold melted before her eyes and flowed over the woman's face. She made haste to dry her eyes with the back of her hand, but Giorgio had seen. He laid a hand lightly on her shoulder and smiled, fixing her eyes with his. It's nothing, she said.

He took her arm and led her out into the gallery that ran the whole length of the building. She caught sight of Carlo at the end, in silhouette against a high window, he stopped and turned towards them. Giorgio let go of her arm. It's strange, he said, as they went on. He looked up from the tiled floor and lowered his voice. You look like my sister . . . When they came up to Carlo she noticed he avoided her eyes. He put his head on one side and said something in a querulous voice that made Giorgio laugh. The poor man is about to pass out with hunger, he said. But they had probably had enough pre-Renaissance for one day.

They went into an expensive restaurant, an old-fashioned, formal place where the white cloths swam like ice floes in the quiet semi-darkness. When they had ordered Carlo got up and left the table with a remark that sounded ironical, almost taunting. Lucca asked what he had said. He says he's jealous, smiled Giorgio. But she wasn't to believe it. Carlo was wild about her, and he feigned jealousy purely for his own enjoyment. He gave her a long look and suddenly stretched out a hand, stroked her loose hair back from her forehead and gathered it into a knot in his hand at her neck. There really was a faint likeness, even though she was fairer. He shook his head in wonder and let go of her hair. Of course it was just an idea, but he couldn't help thinking she might have grown to resemble Lucca.

She asked him to tell her about his sister. He fidgeted with the heavy cutlery. There had only been a couple of years between them, they had been like twins. They had always been together and told each other all their thoughts. When they were in the country they found hiding places in the trees so the grown-ups could not find them, and at night they crept into each other's rooms. The first to wake up had to wake the other one so they were not found out. The wine waiter brought them a bottle. Giorgio looked dubiously at the label and asked the
waiter a question or two, then with a resigned expression let him open it.

It had been like being cut in two, he went on, when their parents sent him to England. Carlo came back. He put his head on one side, rested his elbows on the table and laid his fingertips together as if he was listening with interest, but Lucca could see he did not understand anything Giorgio said. Giorgio took no notice of him. He had not only lost part of himself, he had also torn his sister apart and gone away with one half of her. He paused and pushed the foot of the wine-glass back and forth on the cloth. She had drowned during a holiday on Elba when she was fourteen. If only he had been there . . . It was an accident, but he had never forgiven their parents. After the funeral he went back to England and stayed there. He interrupted himself as he raised his glass and smiled at them.

It really was like being kidnapped, a fairy-tale flight from everything she knew. Every day they went out in the black Ferrari, driving along winding roads between terraces of vines and olive trees up to mountain villages surrounded by high walls. She was shown round medieval monasteries with cool vaulted ceilings, where water dripped in the gloom, and they sat over lunch for hours on sun-dappled terraces with views over the mountains. She drew her hair back from her forehead and tied it in a pony-tail. She had not worn a pony-tail since she was a child, she usually let it hang free. She could see Giorgio noticed it, but he made no comment.

She thought about what he had said when he lifted the hair from her face, that she resembled his little sister, his idea of what his sister might have looked like. If she had lived she would have been about Giorgio's age now, a grown woman. Lucca could not visualise her own face in ten or twenty years. As a child she had often asked Else what she would look like when she was grown up, but Else had merely shrugged her shoulders. Time would tell, but she would probably look like herself. Lucca hadn't believed her. After all, Else had changed over the years, since she was young, driving through Italy in an open sports car unaware of what the future would bring.
Was it just age that made the difference, or was it something else?

When they drove home in the evening from yet another excursion she sat curled up under a rug on the back seat, listening to Giorgio and Carlo chatting casually to each other. Like a married couple, it occurred to her, a couple who had lived together a long time. But she still couldn't understand how Giorgio lived with Carlo as if he were a woman. In contrast to Carlo there was nothing in the least feminine about Giorgio, and when she met his exploring gaze she had to remind herself that he did not look at her as other men did.

He did not mention his sister again, but she was sure he thought about her. She played with the idea that she was a living memory for him, or rather, a living reflection of his fantasy about the face and the figure his dead sister had never been able to develop. A smiling ghost walking beside him through the quiet villages with the unaccustomed tight feeling of her hair, which she had combed back and tied with an elastic band. When they walked beside the ruined ramparts facing the mountain slopes, surrounded by invisible cicadas, she fancied he was her brother, who had brought her back to the future she had been denied.

One hot afternoon they all lay on the big Persian carpet in front of the fireplace smoking a joint, lazily passing it around to each other. Sunlight smouldered through the cracks in the closed shutters and diffused a golden light through the semi-darkness. They had come home early and lay slouched in their kimonos, as if they had sought refuge from the midday heat in a shady oriental garden. Lucca had had a bath, her hair was still wet and the kimono stuck to her damp skin. Carlo was lying on his side with his head resting on his bent arm and half-open mouth. He had fallen asleep. She rose and the carpet's wine-red and moss-green arabesques twisted and turned around her. She stood still for a moment, waiting for the rocking feeling beneath her feet to pass off. Giorgio sent her a muzzy smile and threw the end of the joint into the stove. A spidery wisp of smoke wavered upwards in the darkness there. She smiled
back. She knew he was watching her as she walked across the cool marble floor.