Lucca (22 page)

It was still raining in the morning, and it went on raining until midday. When Robert went into Lucca's single room on his rounds, an old man was in there. Everything was as usual, apart from the old man the patients were the same as the day before, but he suddenly realised he felt bored. Since Lucca was brought into hospital he had grown used to seeing her twice a day, on his morning rounds and in the afternoon before going home, when he sat by the window listening to her story. Sometimes she did not say anything special, or she asked questions about the music he had recorded. At other times he stayed just for a quarter of an hour silently sharing a cigarette with her until she fell asleep.

To start with she had been an interesting interruption in his orderly life. When she had gone he discovered he had grown accustomed to her being there. Something was lacking without her, although her bed was quickly filled by another patient. He had not felt this with any other patient, and it disturbed him a little, although not until now. He suddenly saw that his afternoons with Lucca had been a breach of his medical professionalism. He had not given a thought to the possibility of his colleagues and the nursing staff finding it strange, but when he was on his rounds on Monday morning he felt he was being watched. He took pains to behave as if everything was normal, which in fact it was. That was the boring thing about that Monday. Everything was normal again after an interruption that had been so long that he had forgotten the everyday routine that had been broken.

It cleared up a little at midday and the sun shone cautiously on the wet grass of the lawns. He was in his office when Jacob put his head round the door. He smiled boyishly. It looked as if they might be able to play after all. If it didn't start to rain again the court would have time to dry. Robert had forgotten they had arranged to play tennis that day, but Jacob didn't seem to notice his confused expression. He smiled secretively. His wife had been away visiting her parents all Sunday. With the children. He made a fist and moved it to and fro beside his hip before closing the door behind him.

Several times Jacob had entertained him in the canteen with stories of his breathless trysts with the gym teacher, until one day Robert cut him short by snapping at him that he should be more discreet. Jacob looked quite scared and he was himself taken aback at his snarling tone. One evening when the weather was reasonable he had been persuaded to come over for dinner. While Jacob in his apron stood at the barbecue grilling steaks his wife walked past him, and he suddenly grabbed her round the waist, making her squeal, throwing a laddish glance at Robert. The man-to-man signal seemed repellent to Robert, but he was amazed at Jacob's cold-bloodedness. Had he himself been as cold-blooded? He must have been.

A few years after their affair Sonia had married a young Danish solicitor she had met in New York. The barrister and his wife were extremely pleased. The young couple were married in Holmens Church in Copenhagen, and the wedding breakfast was held at the Langelinie Pavilion restaurant on the Lakes. Robert had not seen Sonia since he had gone to the airport with her and kissed her goodbye with assumed intensity, as if their shared afternoons had really meant a lot to him. He had to admit that she looked disturbingly good in the fussy wedding gown, her hair artificially piled. Her coltish air had gone, and although she still talked like a child with strongly voiced s's and a lazy, clumsily articulated diction, nothing was left of the Bohemian slut he had allowed to seduce him.

It was a wearing feast, and the speeches were too long, full of jokes meant to give a thorough or moving portrayal of the bride or bridegroom. In between he conversed with his neighbour at table without paying attention to his own words. She was a stewardess and interested in tarot cards. Meanwhile he kept his eye on Sonia, pluming herself like a beautiful bird in a nest of white. He fantasised that at any moment she might take off from the table and fly away over the heads of the amazed, well-behaved guests, out the window and on over the harbour until she was only a white fluttering spot that could be taken for any roving seagull.

During the meal he drank a good deal to relieve his boredom as the stewardess explained the significance of the tarot cards to him. When he glanced now and again at Sonia he felt surprised over having tumbled around with his wife's half-sister on his daughter's mattress. As she sat there beside her husband, radiant and feminine in a completely grown-up manner, she was certainly very attractive, rather like the beautiful women in fashion magazines you offer a fleeting glance before leafing on, because they are after all only pictures.

He had been relieved when she went back to New York and he was just as relieved to see her married. Everything that took her further out of reach seemed to affirm that their affair had been a misunderstanding. They had had nothing to say to each
other, all they had in common was their familial relationship, and even if their meeting had been a chance encounter, it still resembled a kind of traffic accident. The wrong woman in the wrong arms, that was the sort of thing that happened when the head lost control of the body. How was it to know the difference of its own accord?

He came on her after coffee in the cloakroom in front of the lavatories. She was alone. He said he was glad to see her. She said she had missed him. He didn't believe that, but he smiled, nevertheless. She took a step forward, her white skirt meeting the creases of his trousers, and put a hand on his shoulder. It was an obvious invitation, and he kissed her, wondering how to escape. She took his hand and led him through the door of the women's toilet. Luckily no one was in there. She pulled him into one of the cubicles, locked the door behind them and laughed softly as she half closed her eyes. He kissed the bride, what else could he do when they were standing there in the cramped cubicle? She unbuttoned her dress and pulled out her breasts, smiling and looking at him earnestly. They were bigger and more taut than he remembered them. I'm pregnant, she whispered. He could not decide whether her tone was triumphant or sarcastic. He kissed her breasts, she sighed. Her wide skirt whispered drily against the walls. He heard someone come into the toilet and the lock turned in one of the other cubicles. They stood quite still, as Sonia, with a hand on the hard bulge behind his fly, held his gaze.

H
e walked out to the point. The sand crackled in thin flakes beneath his feet. On it there were still traces of the rain, myriads of small craters. There was a smell of rotting seaweed. The cloud masses shifted slowly as they swelled and bulged, grey-blue with white edges where the sun touched them. The sea was blue-black under the horizon, closer to land the surface turned into a pale, milky blue. It resembled a bare wide floor, dull and granulated with small ruffles except where a current change left its smooth trace. Big seagulls landed on the beach and stalked off with arrogant, black eyes. Chief gulls, he thought, feeling intrusive when he obliged them to take off with indolent wing beats as he approached.

He looked at his watch. Jacob would be waiting in the changing room. There would not be any tennis that day. Robert couldn't stand the challenging, self-satisfied expression when his eyebrows spoke meaningfully, merely waiting for Robert to pump him, duly impressed, about the passionate gym teacher with big boobs. This was the first time he had stood him up. In general it was a long time since he had stood anyone up. He was always there, ready and willing in his sparkling white coat, prepared to deal with the functional break-downs of his fellow beings when they were wheeled in, anxious or mistrustful. Mostly they came to trust him, patient, professional Robert with his cultured weakness for romantic symphonies. He stopped to light a cigarette, bent his head and shielded the lighter flame with his jacket. Like a sleeping bird, it occurred to him, with its beak buried in its wing.

Had he quite simply been unlucky? A player among players, who place their bets, win or lose? Was that how he had ended up on his siding, on a deserted shore, in a white coat at a provincial
hospital, on a sofa in front of a panorama window looking out on his designed plot of landscaped, hedged-in nature? Was it merely one of the unpredictable results of love, a fortuitous outcome of its meaningless and inevitable power to change bodies and faces about and distribute them further. Once more he meditated on how far, how immeasurably far he was from Monica's blushing tenderness under the blanket in the Alps when she called him about Lea's arrangements in a practical, measured tone. As if Lea was not their daughter but merely a mutual task to be undertaken with suitable care and efficiency. It was clearly of no importance that she was their joint flesh and blood, as they say. It was just a trick their bodies had played on them, his microscopic tadpole that had turned into a little folded frog in her womb, a complete little person in embryo.

Once they had been close. They had known each other so well, but with the passage of time he had come to confuse his knowledge of her, crystallised by habit, with the particular moments when he felt her face loosen up and reveal what she was like inside. He knew more about her than anyone else, but it had still not been her, he thought now, walking by himself on the heavy sand, heading for the point. She had shown herself to him in the way she had grown to be, but it was not really herself he had seen and heard. Only the outward echo of her being, the reflections in her tone of voice and her manner, all the little quirks and habits of behaviour. Only rarely had he caught a glimpse of the person she was behind everything she had become.

He visualised her standing on the beach in his bath robe, her back to the low sun, gazing at the waves' shining foam. Or at home by the window, pausing with the hot iron raised over a flat blouse sleeve with sharp folds, looking at something outside. That was how he remembered her, halted in her movement on her way through the days, self-forgetful, as if he had suddenly become invisible and free to spy. He had almost had to sneak up on her at unguarded moments to track down what had originally aroused his feelings.

He also watched her when they were with other people. Her
laughter or attentive gaze suddenly showed him a different Monica, one he imagined as truer than the woman he knew, whether it was her laughter that sounded more inviting, or her expression that was warmer than he was used to. It made him jealous, but it was not so much the man she happened to be talking to who aroused his jealousy. It was the unknown, non-existent person he himself should have been to call out this bold, almost frivolous smile which he did not seem to have seen before. This moist, lingering glance he could not remember she had ever bestowed on him.

At other times he felt he saw her in a more authentic, genuine form, rather as she must have been when a child. He recalled one summer morning when he awoke in her parents' house in the country. It was early, but she was not lying beside him. Lea was still asleep in her cot at the foot of the bed. He opened the window to let in fresh air and heard her subdued voice down in the garden. She was sitting with her father at the table where they had their meals when the weather was fine. They did not sit opposite each other as usual, she was beside him pouring out tea. Robert could not hear what they said.

The barrister was wearing only shorts. He sat with head bent, looking down in his tea cup as he spoke, resting his elbows on his knees with hands folded in front of him. Although the skin of his torso hung flabbily around his chest and stomach there was something youthful in the way he sat. Now and then he stopped talking and screwed up his eyes as if pondering over his own narrative. Monica sat in the same pose, bent forward with her elbows on her knees, supporting her cheeks in her hands and glancing at him. Suddenly he looked at her and laughed, jerking his chin slightly upwards, as Robert had so often seen her do.

It was the same movement, a cheerful, arrogant little salute to the irony of fate, as if to put himself on eye level with the unpredictability of life. She laughed too, and as they laughed they leaned against each other. Her eyes turned into two narrowed cracks and her face arranged itself into rays of smile lines. For a moment Robert saw precisely how she must have looked when she was a little girl. He felt like going down and joining them to
hear what they were laughing at, but he didn't. Most probably he would not have understood what was so funny.

He felt that Monica was the one he had known best of all. She had told him things about herself she had not told anyone before. Now he did not know her any more, now it was Jan she confided in. When they talked on the phone or occasionally met he could not understand they had once been nearest and dearest to each other. So fleeting was closeness, vanishing without trace, he thought, going on between the calm sea and the pine trees of the plantation. He turned towards land, the windswept trees were replaced by scrub and marram grass. On the other side the beach gave way to a flat expanse of lakes and strips of ground.

When she had let him into her confidence, her words had been like telegrams from a distant place, about remote events he had to try and picture to himself at random. There she lay in bed before him talking about her childhood and the men she had known, about the times she had been in despair or happy, what she feared and what she hoped for, but he could not get at the story itself, just as he could not see behind her face. She had probably not told him everything. She must have deliberately withheld some things, while other things just didn't sit with her words, and he did not know what questions to ask. In time they stopped asking most questions.

The sky grew lighter above the rushes and the inundated meadowland. The grass blades resembled hatchings thinning out where the hand had tired of drawing, the last strokes of the pen resembled hesitant commas in the void of air and reflections. The ground squelched beneath his feet as he went out on to the isthmus between the meadows and the lake. Out there the beach was merely a narrow sand bank fronting the sea. Only the tall reeds rose above the surface as he approached the wooden shed and its tarred planks with cracks the light shone through.

When he came to the reeds he caught sight of something blue among the pale yellow stems, a small flat piece of light blue cardboard. He went closer and recognised the silhouette
of the mettlesome gypsy dancer with her raised tambourine. Had Andreas thrown away his empty cigarette pack? There couldn't be many people in the small town, or among the visiting ornithologists, who smoked Gitanes. Perhaps he had taken the same route as Robert before he packed his suitcase one day, took his little boy's hand and went to Stockholm to try his luck with the black-haired production designer's astonishing blue eyes. The wisps of smoke around the gypsy girl's curvaceous waist had blended with the blue colour, faded by sun and rain so there was no longer twilight around her but broad daylight. She had gone on dancing all night with undiminished fervour, long after the invisible guitars had been put away in the invisible guitar cases and the invisible chairs piled up on the invisible tables. She had danced till dawn, long after the invisible cigarette smokers had gone home, hoarse with fatigue, tobacco and unrequited desire.

He seated himself on his usual worm-eaten post among the reeds, hidden from the world, he thought and again visualised Jacob. Now he must be waiting with his racket on the tennis court, rocking impatiently on his feet because he had to hold back all the erotic titbits he had intended Robert to drag out of him one by one. He studied the faded Gitanes pack. A voluptuous female silhouette like that probably danced in the mind's eye of every man, without the light ever falling on her face. You might call her anything that appealed, but there would always be the same provocative hand on her hip, the same sway of the waist, the same dizzy swishing of skirt and hair and the same jingling tambourine above her head.

It was banal, of course, but all the more effective. The darker the silhouette was, the more it came to resemble a key-hole in the shape of a woman, which made the observer believe he was the key to her mystery and she the door that would eventually open on to an unknown world. But the black outline of the dancing beauty did not indicate a particular woman. The artist had omitted individual features and all that was left were the titillating basic forms of femininity, the wasp waist, swelling skirt and billowing hair. The silhouette of the beautiful gypsy lass
was a darkened hole, carefully cut out, into which any attractive woman might fit, lay a hand on her hip, bang the tambourine and play the role of a dream on the verge of fulfilment.

That was how the gym teacher twirled around in Jacob's thoughts, how she showed off her fabulous breasts in the dark corners of his daily life as husband and father. That was how Sonia, scented with summer rain, showed herself to him in the empty apartment smelling of paint. And that was how the Jewish designer lured Andreas to puncture the idyllic soap bubble that had surrounded the refurbished house by the wood. Robert dropped the cigarette pack among the reeds. There she would lie, the unknown gypsy, among the birds' nests and rustling stems, until she rotted away in the brackish water. An increasingly blurred silhouette dancing bravely on day and night, forgotten by all, with upheld tambourine and swaying hips.

She too probably had her dreams as she danced for everyone and no one. Like the other lonely dancers she must dream that someone would catch sight of her. A strange guest in the smoky tavern, who would come in one evening and direct his gaze on her like a sudden projector lighting up her face. For each dancing silhouette there would be a masculine silhouette in the doorway of the tavern, and just as she danced in men's thoughts, so the figure on the threshold lingered in her thoughts as she shook her hair and called to him with her tambourine. Had he finally come?

Perhaps she had already visualised his outline, sure that she would be able to recognise it through the rolling fog of cigarette smoke, for it was the outline of someone she had once known. And maybe the stranger in the doorway felt the same way. Maybe he had been going from tavern to tavern all night, standing in the doorway watching one gypsy after another in the hope of finally recognising the contours of his first love, or the genesis of his love, which perhaps, perhaps not, was one and the same thing.