Lucca (26 page)

The boy fell asleep on the sofa where Robert's mother had lain reading every evening for decades. They sat on her little balcony looking out over the railway lines and the marina further away, beneath the heating station's red-brick colossus. Did he usually drive his patients' children around? He smiled wryly. The sky was violet blue over the Sound, and the remains of daylight glowed pale on the rails and the forest of masts and tall thin chimneys. She asked about Lea. When he replied, she fell silent. She had never said what she really thought about the divorce. She had liked Monica, they had had good talks, but she had not been all that sympathetic when he told her Monica wanted a divorce. Nor had she condemned her daughter-in-law when he told her about the morning he arrived back too early from his trip to Oslo and almost surprised her in Jan's arms. In her opinion the episode belonged to those chance misfortunes which should not in themselves be given too much weight, and she was probably right. But her silence had had the effect of a reproach. Did she think it was all his fault? She couldn't possibly know about his affair with Sonia. What had she seen? He had never asked her.

She looked old now, her face hung from her cheekbones and her chin in wrinkled bags, and the masculine spectacle frames seemed larger than ever. She picked up her coffee cup with a slow, slightly shaky hand and steadied the edge with her upper
lip while she drank. Her eternal coffee. He had made coffee for her every morning from the time he was ten until he left home. On Sunday he had even brought it to her in bed, black as tar with masses of sugar. It was her only extravagance apart from her insatiable consumption of nineteenth-century novels. I don't feel human until I get a cup of coffee, she would groan when she went into the kitchen in the morning, drunk with sleep she towered in the doorway, rubbing her face with her big red hands. A man's hands, cracked, with short nails and prominent veins.

He had to make his sandwiches himself, and from early on he learned to do his own washing. She was too tired when she got home from the canteen. They shared the housework on Sunday afternoons when the others were playing football in the courtyard. She frequently sighed but otherwise she did not complain. He did what he could to avoid being a nuisance, and he never complained about the clothes she bought him once or twice a year when the sales were on. She bought summer clothes for him in the autumn and winter clothes when summer was approaching, always the cheapest you could get, they were really ghastly, of course. He was ashamed of his clothes and he was ashamed of her, and he was ashamed of being ashamed.

When he grew tired of lying in bed in the afternoons grieving over the loss of Ana, he gradually began to realise that it was not only love that had made him suffer so, but self-disgust as well. And still later, after he had married Monica, it struck him that there had been an almost tangible connection between the two emotions. With her aristocratic airs and exotic beauty Ana had made him feel a pariah. He who had writhed when he had to go to school wearing the wrong kind of trousers. It had been as clear as it was futile that she was the very one to deliver him from the curse.

But her eastern European home had not only been the gloomy background that emphasised her aristocratic and wonderful pallor when finally, one evening with snow falling outside, he was permitted to hold her face between his hands. He had continued going there long after he should have realised it was hopeless. One afternoon after another he had tea with the
clarinettist while he waited for her. He accepted the humiliation merely for the sake of listening to classical records with the kind man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a quaint accent. It had been a more inviting place to be, and he had preferred it to his mother's two-and-a-half room apartment with its view of the heating station and passing trains.

A train glided through the twilight in an arc. He looked at his mother. Neither of them had said anything for a while. They had never talked to each other a lot, not even when he lived at home. They mostly spoke of practical things and in the evenings both sat reading. Now and then she would laugh and read a snatch aloud to him, which he listened to with only half an ear. Not until he grew up did he realise that she had never really known how to get in touch with him, exhausted and remote from the world as she was. He had misunderstood her awkwardness and taken it as coldness.

The row of lit carriage windows passed across her thick, curved lenses and hid her eyes. She put a hand on the parapet and stroked the painted cement with her palm. It's still warm, she said, smiling. From the sun . . . He touched it for himself. She was right, the cement was still quite warm. It left a fine layer of grey dust in his palm. He wiped it off on his trousers. She would have called him one of these days if he hadn't come. Perhaps it didn't mean so much to him to hear it, but his father was dead, she had seen the announcement in the newspaper. Again that phrase,
your father
, as if she herself had had nothing to do with him.

She had never mentioned him in any other way. She had hardly ever mentioned him at all, the gentlemen's hairdresser in a distant provincial town he had once been on the point of visiting. He didn't know what to say. He tried to realise it but could not feel anything. She tried to read his silence. She did not feel upset about it, she said, it was all so long ago. Her tone was unusually hard, almost blunt. The death announcement had been signed by the children. So he had had more than one since he left them. The funeral had taken place. She smiled briefly and looked at him as if to catch him feeling moved. Still, it was strange, he finally got out.

The strange thing was that she had ever married the man. But of course, she went on, if I hadn't, you wouldn't have been born. He lowered his eyes and lit a cigarette. Now he mustn't think she had gone around snivelling over his father all these years. It had been a misunderstanding that they had ever got together, and it had only been an instance of the irony of fate that he was the one to take his leave . . . She stopped and drank the rest of her coffee. For a moment her face was nothing but spectacles and cup. She probably hadn't ever told him about it. Her voice was different now, softer.

She had been the cloakroom attendant at a restaurant where there was dancing. A musician who played the bass worked there. She'd been secretly in love with him for months, and finally he caught sight of her. One early morning when the restaurant closed he went home with her to her room. The landlady was always asleep when she got home from work, but all the same she asked him to take his shoes off on the stairs. He still had his orchestra dinner jacket on, a sparkly one, and patent shoes. When he took off the shoes she saw he had a hole in one sock. His big toe stuck out. She smiled at the thought and pushed at the handle of her coffee cup so the cup turned half round.

When she saw his pale big toe poking out of the sock and his expression when he realised she had seen it she knew she loved him. She smiled again and looked into the empty cup. If he hadn't had that hole in his sock she probably wouldn't have let him. Everything else about him had been perfect. He had been so well groomed it made her frightened, but that morning she was no longer frightened. She had always hated being so tall and broad-shouldered, she had felt like a lighthouse, but he was just as tall and he made her feel they matched each other. He had had such a nice voice, and he had said some nice things to her. No one had spoken to her like that before.

She stopped and looked up. He should have been your father, she said. They had been together for a couple of months, she and the handsome bass player. She had been in seventh heaven until summer arrived and he met someone else. She looked out over
the parapet towards the brick mass of the heating station that still kept a faint reddish glow in the midst of all the blue. Then she had come across the gentlemen's hairdresser. Robert gave her a long look. She felt it and met his eyes. But he was not to sit there feeling sorry for her, it was long ago. She had been so young. Things didn't always come up to expectations, he knew that himself, it was nothing to snivel over. She rose and piled up the cups to carry them out. Hadn't he better call those people?

He rang and again heard the well-modulated woman's voice. Still no contact with the mobile. He had already come to a decision. Carefully he picked Lauritz up and put his pine cones in his pocket. The boy raised his head, half asleep, and then laid it back against Robert's shoulder. His mother stroked him kindly on the back when they said goodbye in the doorway. She didn't usually do that, she had never been very demonstrative. On the way downstairs the light went out. He went slowly down the stairs towards the little glowing orange point where the switch was, afraid of stumbling with the sleeping child in his arms.

He laid him on the back seat, covered him with his jacket and drove through the town and southwards along the motorway. As the blue road signs approached and rushed past, he thought of the unknown bass player with the nice voice, who should have been his father. Who would he have been then? Had his mother occasionally put the same question to herself when she sat on her balcony or lay on the sofa and looked up from her book for a moment? Had he been a reminder that just grew and grew all through his childhood, that nothing turned out according to plan? It wasn't anything to snivel over, she had said, and instead of snivelling she had stuck to her job and sacrificed herself for her son. She had sought flight in novels and, compared with their more dramatic and tragic fates, she had doubtless thought her own was too trivial and average ever to be called a fate. It had just turned out as it had. Nothing to write home about.

There were a lot of lorries on the motorway, German, Italian, Spanish lorries, and Dutch ones. He stayed in the inside lane although that made him slower. He felt like listening to music but did not switch on for fear of waking Lauritz. It was really
a kind of kidnapping, but what could he do? It was a real mess. He had stumbled straight into the chaos and confusion of perfect strangers as if they were his concern. He recalled an expression he had often heard his mother use when she commented on something she had witnessed or heard about. As if it was anything special. That was her judgement when someone complained of their troubles or protested at life's injustice. Only war, natural catastrophes and mortal illness could produce a sympathetic remark. Was it her own privations that had made her so scornful towards others' woes? He did not believe that, for she had never seemed bitter, only extremely remote. It was more likely that her contempt for her own pain had made her unfeeling about others', until she stopped distinguishing.

When she sighed it was not because she was sorry for herself. Her nose and throat had just developed into a kind of ventilator from which disappointment, regret and sorrow were ejected now and then, quietly and without fuss. That was all she allowed herself, a minor character, as in her own opinion she was, in the great novel of the world, whose chief action in any case took place somewhere else, far out of range. Her frugality was not only dictated by her scant means, she practised it on principle and maybe it was a way of compensating for her unusual height, which had embarrassed her so when she was young. She apparently thought she took up more space than was right, and so ought to restrict her existence in every way possible. She had never thought of herself and as a whole had spent everything she earned on her son. Once she had bought a bicycle for his birthday, a shining, brand-new blue cycle with white tyres. He had wished for one for a whole year without ever really believing he would get it, but when he woke in the morning and saw it standing beside his bed, his rejoicing was dulled by the thought of what it had cost.

While Robert drove down the motorway with the sleeping Lauritz on the back seat he asked himself whether his mother with her pinching and scraping had actually wanted to punish herself because she had a child with the wrong man, when the right one had thrown her over. It was nothing special, nor did
she feel that she herself was, and looking back he suspected that in her heart, with all her frugality she had intended to economise herself into extinction. Her total lack of egoism had not prevented her becoming slightly misanthropic. In her view no human being was anything very special. But she had also found a strange, anonymous freedom when she sat on her balcony and now and then raised her eyes from one of her novels to watch the trains go by.

L
uckily Lea had left some cornflakes at the bottom of the packet. There were enough for one portion, and the boy looked on approvingly as Robert gave him breakfast on the terrace. He had slept in Lea's room. When Robert went to wake him in the morning he was lying with an arm around one of her old teddy bears, kept for sentimental reasons. Could he remember being here before? Lauritz looked around and thought. He could remember playing table tennis with Lea and digging in the garden. He asked when he was going home. Later on today, Robert replied without knowing what he was talking about. He went to get Lea's Tintin books and brought one of the white plastic chairs onto the lawn where the sun was shining. He took off his bath robe, his body was quite white. Lea was right, he ought to do something about those handles. The problem was he couldn't really be bothered. He sipped his coffee, looking at the strange boy bending over the table, absorbed in interpreting the little pictures where Tintin and Captain Haddock escaped from one scrape after another with a mixture of chance, optimism and adroitness.

He closed his eyes. It was hot already and he enjoyed feeling the grass under his bare feet and the sunrays warming his pale skin. He really should go in and call the woman with dyed hair and the muscle man to tell them where Lauritz was, but he didn't feel like moving. It was so long since he had sat in the sun, and he defended his laziness by working up some indignation over their irresponsibility and the recklessness Andreas had shown in leaving his son with such superficial friends. He was sure he had told them when he would bring the boy back.

Andreas called later in the morning. He would come and fetch Lauritz. Robert was about to say something about the woman
with dyed hair having forgotten their arrangement, but didn't, amazed the other man apparently took it for granted that he had taken the boy home with him. Andreas would come at once. Where was he calling from? The house, he replied curtly. He had arrived yesterday evening on the last train, he hadn't wanted to call so late. How considerate, thought Robert, and offered to drive. He had a car, after all.

When they turned off the main road and drove beside the meadow towards the wood they saw the horse in the same place as it had been two months earlier, on the rainy day when Robert took Lauritz and Andreas home. The sun shone on its flanks, which quivered as if from a shock when the flies pestered it. Andreas came out into the yard and squatted down with open arms as Lauritz ran towards him. They sat in the garden on a bench by the house wall. Lauritz was on a swing hanging from a big plum tree. Andreas had set a bowl of plums between them on the bench, violet blue, with a matt skin like dew. The grass had not been mown for a long time and was almost as long as the corn in the field at the end of the garden. The wind made the cobs rock from side to side in snaking tracks, and poppies glowed restlessly, scattered amidst the corn. Andreas offered him a cigarette, they smoked and ate plums. Robert tried to think of something to talk about.

How had the première in Malmö gone? Andreas squinted in the sunshine. It had come off very well, the Swedish reviewers had been quite over the moon. But that didn't matter now. Pensively, he lowered his eyes and dug his nail into the circle of loose tobacco at the end of his cigarette, then abruptly started to talk. Robert was surprised they seemed to be on such familiar terms. On the telephone Andreas had been very short, almost formal, maybe because he thought Robert might be cross. Look at me! called Lauritz. They looked. He was standing up, his hands on the ropes, swinging high. They waved, the boy laughed.

Andreas had come back from Stockholm the previous day. He was no longer quite sure what he had been thinking on his way up there. When he had read the scenographer's letters or
written to her he had felt that here at last was someone who touched his innermost soul, more than anyone had done before. Now he didn't know. They had arranged to meet at an outdoor café on Strandvägen. He was surprised she had asked him to meet her there and not at her home in Söder. He was given the explanation when she arrived, twenty minutes late, as beautiful as he remembered, pale, black-haired and with blue eyes. She did not live alone. It sounded complicated. For about six months she had been about to leave the man she lived with, but she had not yet brought herself to do it. They sat silently watching the glinting water and the ferries plying up and down. Neither of them could find anything to say, strangely enough after all the letters, all the confidences and tender words that had gone to his heart so deeply.

When she finally came walking towards him smiling in the sunshine it had seemed as if all his hopes were coming with her, no longer in the form of vague thoughts hard to pin down, about how his life could change and take on a new direction, but in the shape of a living body appearing to hold all possibilities in store for him, stepping lightly among the café tables. She went to his hotel with him, now he had come, after all. That was how it seemed, precisely as dispiriting and dull as that, when they lay side by side on the hotel bed afterwards. It had not been exactly passionate. He was not even sure she had had an orgasm. He called her in the evening. She was not alone, she said, it was difficult to talk properly. He called again the next day in the morning. Her husband had just gone. Were they actually married? She laughed down the telephone. No, not exactly.

She had read the new play he had sent her. She made some comments, and again he felt it was there, the special understanding between them. She had hit on things in the play no one else had understood. He said he was coming round to see her. She didn't think that was such a good idea. He took a taxi. She seemed different when he saw her in her own surroundings, somehow more ordinary. They drank herb tea and she showed him her sketches for an exhibition she was working on. She resisted when he went to kiss her. He threw her down on a sofa,
she twisted free. She couldn't do it here, she said and asked him to leave.

Maybe there had been something hyped up, something rather too stilted about those letters, both hers and his own. They had been scaffolding for each other's castles in the air, he said, smiling bitterly, as he sank his teeth into a plum and wiped juice off his chin with the back of his hand. Lauritz was lying in the tall grass, the swing swayed back and forth under the tree. Andreas had kept on phoning her. The more he doubted his precious and all-consuming passion, the more he persisted, until one afternoon a man's voice answered from the apartment in Söder. He slammed down the receiver. In the morning a letter awaited him at the hotel reception. She had gone to Gotland with her husband. It was no good. She hoped he would understand.

He had not told the scenographer what had happened to Lucca, and he hardly thought of her at all during his stay in Stockholm. When she did cross his mind it was in the guise of an evil spirit who had constantly threatened his attempts to release his innermost self. At first in the form of her all too unconditional, indeed her frankly parasitic love, later with the deadly, bourgeois daily routine and finally his own bad conscience. Robert recalled what Andreas had said when he called on him one evening and drank his Calvados, tortured by guilt and the urge to rebel. How he had long been in doubt about his relationship with Lucca, and how he had felt a lack of challenge when she turned her back on the theatre and had Lauritz, then focused all her energies on the boy and on creating their home. But in the plane from Stockholm he saw it in quite a different light. She was his victim, he thought, as the pine forests and blue lakes passed beneath him, and he had almost killed her. Although she was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. She and the boy. To think it was only now he realised that . . .

He lit a fresh cigarette and looked at Lauritz, who was trying to make a ladybird crawl up his hand. Robert cleared his throat. What if the scenographer left her husband? Andreas turned to him, apparently floored by the idea. He shook his head, she
would never do that. In reality they were too alike, they were equally introspective, it would never work. That was probably why he had once fallen in love with Lucca. Because she was so different from him. No, as he said, he had deceived both himself and the set designer in Stockholm. Besides, she was too young, too immature, the illusion of one of them had nourished the other, it had been a dream that could not stand the light of day. Yes, it seemed rather like waking from a dream. As if he had slept through all those years with Lucca and Lauritz right in front of him, the only people who had ever seriously meant anything. The only ones he might ever mean something to, something real. He owed her that . . . he owed it to all three of them, he corrected himself. He rose, went over to Lauritz and kneeled beside him in the grass, stroking his cheek. The boy seemed not to notice him, totally absorbed in the ladybird. Andreas walked slowly back to the bench.

When something goes up the spout, we call it a mistake, thought Robert, because it is hard to get your head round the thought that it is not only ourselves but just as much luck and circumstance which form our lives. Then it's better to admit we were foolish. He thought of his mother and his father, the deceased gentlemen's hairdresser he had never known. If the barber had stayed with her, wouldn't he perhaps not have been a mistake? He might even have turned out to be a nice man.

What had Lucca told him? Robert looked at him. Told him? Andreas sat down beside him again. Yes, surely she had said something, given a message or request. He faltered. How was she? Robert said he could not tell. He met Andreas's eyes. He didn't know her well enough, he went on, to know, but in the circumstances she seemed to be managing. Andreas sat looking in front of him, either at Lauritz or the poppies in the swaying corn or the swing hanging motionless beneath the plum tree's crown. Of course it would be different, he said quietly, now she was blind. But it was a question of will. He had realised that. One must exert will on one's life, it would not live itself. And was there any life other than the one to be lived every day? The intimate things he had despised so much, daily life,
the child . . . you had to take them on, stand up and face them . . .

Robert asked what he meant. Andreas looked at him in surprise. Lauritz called from inside the house, Robert had not seen him go in. Andreas shouted that he must wait. Lauritz called again. We're talking! shouted Andreas, half turning towards the open door. Lauritz went on calling. His father rose with an irritated expression and went inside. Robert walked round the house. Andreas caught him up in the drive. If he saw her . . . well, he didn't know. Was he going to see her? Robert replied that so far they had not arranged anything. Andreas looked down at his shoes and nudged a small stone with one toe. If he saw her would he tell her what they had talked about? Robert promised he would. He went over to his car. As he got into the driving seat the other man was still standing there. He started the engine and moved off. Andreas raised his hand, but Robert did not manage to wave.

He was in a bad mood when he turned into the suburban road. The sun was high in the sky. It shone whitely on the asphalt and the polished cars in the drives and the leaves of the dense shrubberies along the pavements. He sat on in the car when he had parked in the entrance and switched off the engine. He thought of the picture of Lucca he had seen on the notice-board in their kitchen, sitting at a pavement café in Paris, elegantly dressed in a grey jacket, with her hair in a pony tail. Lucca looking into the camera as if she had just turned round, apparently surprised at being snapped. He visualised the picture clearly, the plane trees in the background, her green eyes, painted lips slightly parted, possibly because she had been about to say something. Her gaze seemed to pierce the shining membrane of the photograph. It reminded him of something, he didn't know what. Something forgotten, something never quite understood or completed, a missed opportunity perhaps.

It was quiet around him. He could hear the whispering, pinging sound of a sprinkler in one of the adjoining gardens. He looked at the lath fencing alongside the drive. In some places the bark was peeling off the laths and hung in loose slivers. The
gate was open. He could see a portion of the newly mown lawn and the terrace with its white plastic chairs and their transparent reflections in the panorama window's repetition of everything within range. Chairs, grass and small white clouds. He turned the key again, put the car into gear and backed out onto the road. Soon afterwards he reached the outskirts of town. He drove through the industrial district, passed the hospital and came to the viaduct leading to the motorway.

It didn't matter what he thought about Andreas. They had a son, the fool was still her husband, after all, and it didn't matter if his newly won and rather tacky insight into life's true values had been induced by being forced to leave Stockholm with shattered hopes. Something or other had to induce it and one cause could be as good as another. His sudden piety was of course merely an attitude, but he was clearly unable to explain things without sounding pathetic and pompous. You had to ignore that, as you considerately ignore people's handicap or speech impediment, an embarrassing limp or lisp. His sticky chatter about the important things and standing up for them sounded like another of his splendidly illuminating self-deceits, but in the long run it didn't make a lot of difference what you thought. Maybe illusions had roughly the same function as your skin. You could breathe through them. If they were stripped off, the contact with reality would doubtless be too raw. They should be allowed to dry and crackle and peel off in their own good time allowing new, fresh layers of illusion to form in their place.

The only thing that mattered was whether you were together or not, whether you were alone or had someone to be with. Whether there was a scrap of kindness and sympathy, a scrap of patience with your weak, unaccomplished sides. Then you could always think your own thoughts, tinker with your self-portrait and dream great or modest dreams. On the whole life lasted longer than your dreams, thought Robert, and when they stopped it ought to be bearable. Lucca would never regain her sight, but maybe some sort of life did await her, even if everything had crashed into darkness and solitude. Perhaps the months and years could do for them what they themselves could
not envisage just now, and if he was the one who could give her the chance of considering a future with the repentant Andreas, he might well afford the time to play the role of messenger.