Lucca (28 page)

It had taken longer than expected, and sometimes they had been about to give up, but she was stubborn, and now only details needed seeing to here and there. That might have been why she was already missing Andreas. She had forgotten herself while there was still enough to do, and the days passed like hours whether he was away or at his computer. When she was acting she had forgotten herself too, but only to become someone else. While she slogged away in her dirty overalls with the cement mixer and trowel she was no more than a hard-working body, and that was a release.

To start with it had been a mere dream, finding a house in the country. They had both grown up in the city. They started to talk about it in Rome, during the six months they lived in Andreas's cramped apartment. She suggested it mostly for fun. It was the kind of thing you cooked up crazy stories about when you had fallen in love, a place in the country. She came out with it one late summer morning when they had stayed in bed because it was too hot to do anything but lie in the shade behind the shutters and caress each other very slowly. He took her at her word just as he did a few months later when she told him she was pregnant. How could he be so sure? He ran his hand lightly over her stomach, which would soon swell up and weigh her down to earth, making her break out in a sweat at the least exertion. Sometimes you must believe your own eyes, he said. Otherwise it would all come to dust and blow away while you looked at it. No one had talked to her before like that.

The apartment in Trastevere had only one room, and when he was working she went out walking. He worked a lot, and after a few months she knew every single street in that part of the city. She admired his gift for concentrating and keeping at it
for hours on end. Apparently he could always write if he wanted to. At that time he used a portable typewriter, and when she went upstairs late in the afternoon and heard the keys still tapping on the keyboard she went down to the bar around the corner and waited another half hour. It was almost like sitting in a living room, and she started to talk a bit of Italian. It seemed there was still something left in her of the language she had spoken with her father, hidden away in a fold of her brain or rolled up at the bottom of her spine. Soon she could talk to people in the street, in contrast to Andreas who never learned more than the most necessary phrases and was completely uninterested in talking to anyone but her.

She never thought of visiting Giorgio again, although now and then it did cross her mind that she was in the same country as he was, only a few hours away by train. Florence, the city where she had found him and then lost sight of him, was a different world from Rome, the city where her passion for Andreas slowly turned into something tougher, more durable, as an unknown being started to grow a nose, a mouth and eyes inside her. In the evening he read aloud what he had written during the day, and although she admired his arbitrary, stylised dialogue, she often forgot to listen. The sound of his soft voice was enough for her, feeling it like a quiver in her cheek when she rested her head against his chest. The voice spoke to her from a place she could not reach, where he had to be alone, but it was from in there that he had seen her come along and decided not to let her disappear from sight. His voice echoed within her when she walked alone in the shadows among the crumbling walls or sat in the sunshine on the Campo di Fiori. Only his voice was real, not the words, not his theatre. His voice and the unknown child filled her completely. He had believed his own eyes, and she believed in what he had seen.

The wind made the snowflakes circle in spirals over the yard. She suddenly realised it was Else she was listening to. Her mother was announcing the radio programme for the day in the cultivated voice Lucca had listened to since she was a child, alone at home with some nanny. It was the kind of voice that could
say whatever you wanted it to. Every word sounded the same in Else's mouth, as if tongue, lips and teeth were tools intended for breaking up the words and separating them from what they actually meant. Else had been sceptical when Lucca told her they were moving into the country. The poet and his mummy-nurse, she called them for almost a year, until she grew tired of smiling at her own mordant wit. She visited them occasionally in their cave, as she termed it, and Lucca was quite encouraged every time she saw her mother raise her eyebrows and suppress all the pointed comments jostling behind her tight, pinched lips. She had forgotten how to look at herself from outside and she enjoyed Else's distaste for the dirty and chaotic building site where Lauritz tumbled around with a bare bottom and mud plastering his face.

Lucca had never imagined she would come to live out of town. When they moved in the house was barely habitable, and everyone said it was mad to settle with a child in a place which didn't even have electricity. As if Lauritz wasn't completely unplugged. At first they made do with paraffin lamps. They washed outdoors under a garden hose while the bathroom floor was being laid, and cooked on an open fire in the garden. In general they lived in a way the prairie settlers must have done. It was a point of no return. Everything they owned had been invested in the house and the building materials stacked up in the yard.

She had put the city behind her, the streets she had roamed, just a face among the shifting faces, always hunting for another pair of eyes to mirror her. She had put the city and the men behind her, those she had known and those she might have come to know. All the men she had doted on or left, all the grand or petty stories that had been so many blind alleys, wrecked beginnings and failed attempts to attain the life that was to be hers.

She had painted just one and a half shelves when the telephone rang. It was on the window sill. She had to stride over the piles of books on the floor, brush held aloft so it did not drip. It was
Miriam, her voice thick and stifled with sobs, she had to talk to someone. Lucca asked what had happened. Miriam started to weep. While Lucca waited for her to calm down she caught sight of a grey streak of paint running down from the brush onto her hand. She held it vertically, but it kept on running like a melting, soft ice-cream. Miriam's sobs subsided. Her partner had left her. He'd said he didn't love her any more, and that it was a misunderstanding, the child they were to have. He'd been under pressure. She sniffed and moaned. He'd packed a bag with clothes and gone off in a taxi, she didn't know where.

Lucca thought of the lanky jazz musician. He had always seemed feeble to her when Miriam bossed him around or plonked herself down on his lap demanding tongue kisses with everyone looking on, as if he owed her proof of his fiery passion for all the world to see. But he'd had the courage after all to back out, but why so late? Miriam had no idea. She had really believed the child would bring them closer together. He had even accompanied her to childbirth class. She began to weep again. Lucca pictured the skinny jazz lover sitting in stockinged feet on the linoleum floor with the bloated Miriam between his knees, surrounded by the other men and their wives, snorting in chorus, while he pondered on how to escape from the fix he had got himself into.

She recalled the night Otto threw her out and she sat drinking vodka at Miriam's. She remembered her friend's dreamy chat about having a child, and how outraged she had looked as she told her that her partner was afraid of losing his freedom. What did he want to use that for?! The way Miriam had imposed her pregnancy on him had been just as pigheaded and discordant as when she broke into his conversation and stuck her tongue down his throat. But they could not talk about that, especially not now. All Lucca could do was listen to the unhappy Miriam and explain that she was unable to go into town because she was alone with Lauritz.

After putting down the receiver she stayed by the window. The snow covered the garden and the field. It lay like white shadows along the dark ramifications of the plum branches and framed
the little blue tractor Lauritz had left on the lawn. The sky was like granite. She studied the streaks of paint that had split into a branching delta over her hand and lower arm, like blood, she thought, if blood was grey. She would like to have shown more sympathy and her conscience nagged her because she had not invited Miriam to come and stay.

She laid the brush on the newspaper beside the paint pot, wiped her hand and sat down at the desk in Andreas's study. On it were only some paper clips and the note of his address in Paris in his angular, slightly untidy handwriting. The room stank of old cigarette smoke. He smoked too much, especially when he worked, and always the same strong Gitanes. He coughed in the mornings, but paid no heed to her comments. Sometimes she could hear him trying to suppress his coughing in the bathroom so she wouldn't notice it. She opened the window and breathed in the cold, raw air. The view was different from his room, you could just see the ends of the plum tree branches. She picked up one of the paper clips and straightened it out, gazing at the white slope of field partly hiding the roof of the neighbouring barn.

She felt she had let Miriam down on the phone, but had not known what to say, and couldn't say what she thought. That probably what had happened was Miriam's own fault, because she had obstinately pushed her pregnancy, deaf and blind to all warning signs. Miriam who always took what she wanted, and wore tight trousers even though her thighs were too fat. Lucca had never believed their relationship would last, and perhaps Miriam had doubted it too. Had she thought she could hold onto him by having a child? Naturally she would never admit that, not even to herself. And now a child was coming into the world, a child like all the others with the same demands for affection, the same urge to feel itself a genuine fruit of love and not merely the result of a mistake made by two confused people.

She could have said all that to Miriam if she had dared, but she had no right to say it. Who could distinguish between genuine feelings and illusions? Perhaps Miriam really did want a child, partner or no. Lucca recalled how soberly her friend had assessed
her own future possibilities as an actor. A bit of cabaret here and there, as a comic. And what about herself, Lucca? She had been furious when Else comforted her by saying that Otto hadn't been right for her anyway, and that it was a good thing they had parted. Think, if they'd had a child! Now Lucca had to admit she was right. Her passion had been blind and immature. When she looked back on herself then it was like thinking of another person. As if she had been different from the woman she had become with Andreas and Lauritz. But if she really had changed, she could do so again. The idea sickened her, the idea that changes could just go on and on. And what if she was the same, after all? How could she be so sure that her love for Andreas was more real than her love for Otto had been? Was she so sure now, because Otto and Andreas, each in their respective order, had just been the latest man in the row? Did she feel sure because it only happened to be Andreas she had a child with?

She looked at the note with the address and telephone number in Paris. She felt the urge to call him, just to hear his voice, but it was too early. He would not arrive until late afternoon. It was a long time since they'd had a proper talk, she felt. There was always something in the way. She had so much to do, and he was always working. Besides, for the past two weeks he had been away most of the time, in Malmö. It worried her if they grew distant from each other for a while, on friendly terms but busy and slightly conventional when they kissed good morning or goodnight. She felt he had been distant recently. In Paris it would be different, surely. She longed for Easter.

She leaned over the table and closed the window. Suddenly she was hungry and decided to make some lunch before continuing to paint. As she negotiated the piles of books again on her way through the living room her eyes fell on a bundle of old scripts. The top one was bound in red card. The title was printed on it,
The Father
, by August Strindberg. She picked it up and leafed through the dog-eared pages with pencilled notes half obliterated. She took the script into the kitchen and put it beside the cooker while she heated water for pasta. Indirectly, Strindberg had been the beginning of her relationship
with Andreas, but of course she had not known that then. Not even when they passed each other, he in the lift on his way up, she on her way down the stairs after she'd had tea with Harry and looked out at the thunderstorm over the town.

She felt like
pasta al burro
with grated nutmeg, the way Giorgio had taught her to make it. It was the only thing she had learned from him, her sad clown of a father, who had merely flung out his arms as if there was no more to say as he walked backwards beside the baptistery in Florence before turning and vanishing from sight. ‘In the midst of the moonlight,' she thought, ‘surrounded by ruins on all sides.' She looked at the torn script and began to smile. So she did remember something. But there had been no moonlight, it had been broad daylight, and the baptistery stood just as when it had been built, dazzlingly beautiful and geometric in its green and white marble. It was only that it hadn't gone as expected, she thought, as the steaming water in the pan began to bubble and shake.

T
he room was in total darkness. She could hear the cicadas behind the shutter of the small window. They kept the shutters closed all day to retain as much as possible of the night's coolness. She pushed off the sheet and stretched out a hand. He was not there. The hands of the alarm clock shone green, floating in the dark. It was only just past seven. He couldn't sleep late any more. He had told her with a wry, apologetic smile, as if it was one of the things he had lost. She summoned her energy and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The tiles were smooth and cool. She reached for the kimono hanging over a chair, and fumbled her way through the darkness with a finger brushing the rough, white-washed wall until she found the door.

Daylight fell in a sharp triangle from the doorway to the roof terrace. She climbed the stairs and stopped at the top. He had not noticed her yet. His hearing was not too good, but he did not like to admit it. She stood still. He sat cross-legged under the canopy of woven bamboo. He was reading a book, his tea cup raised in his hand as if he'd forgotten the cup and left it in mid air. The bamboo wickerwork splintered the sharp sunlight into a frayed pattern on the stone table and the tiles, and splinters of light waved over his combed-back grey hair and lined brow, his face with its crooked nose and his brown torso with folds of loose skin around the stomach and below the chest cage. He was wearing the white linen trousers she had bought him in Madrid.

She waited. He had to discover her. It had become a game she played, more with herself than with him. Coffee's ready, he said in his hoarse voice, without looking up from his book. But he had seen her. She went and sat down opposite him. He smiled,
leaning his head back to look at her through the glasses on the tip of his nose. There you are, he said. Here I am, she answered, stretching out a hand to stroke his knee. She poured herself a cup of coffee, put in plenty of sugar and sipped it as she gazed over at the range of mountains lit by the slanting sunlight, which emphasised the folds and grooves with long, blue-grey shadows among the shades of rusty red and rose.

The houses looked alike, all white-washed with flat roofs and small barred windows, like scattered sugar lumps up the mountain-side. It sounded beautiful when you described it, and when you saw the village from a distance it did resemble a picture postcard, with orange trees and olive groves and everything you could expect, but as soon as you got up there the place had a depressing air. The cement road was broken up into craters lying in wait to trip you up, the electricity cables hung in untidy garlands, and the houses were either crumbling, on the verge of collapse, or being restored, with dreary concrete walls. During the day there was never a soul about except now and then a pale weary woman in a dressing-gown behind a kitchen window. The place seemed to be inhabited by housewives and scrawny cats lying in the dust, and the only other sign of life was the smell of frying oil and the noise of television sets churning out their advert jingles from the resounding semi-darkness of the dwellings.

Harry's house was the last one in that part of the village, it faced east and from the roof terrace there was a view over a dried up river-bed with steep sides. The river-bed was cracked in deep fissures where oleanders and carob trees had rooted, and on the other side of the river, a couple of kilometres away, another chain of mountains sloped down to the plain. Seen from the terrace, the coastline was just a diffuse transition from ochre to blue in the heat haze. They had gone down there shortly after the last night of
The Father
at the Royal Theatre. At the same time Harry had staged a première of
Uncle Vanya
in Oslo. In the weeks before they left they'd been together only when he flew down to Copenhagen for the weekend. She had been offered a role in a film, the first shots were to be taken soon, in early spring, but Harry had advised her to say no. He
knew the director, and it was likely to be not just mediocre, but downright awful.

It had been raining for weeks in Denmark, Lucca thought she had almost forgotten what the sky looked like. When they got out of the plane she felt a warm breath in her face, and the almond trees were flowering in white and pink against the red earth as they drove through the dry landscape. In some places the land changed into a desert with deep crevasses and crumbling rock formations like the brains of huge, prehistoric animals. Soon they would have been there two months. They were planning to spend the summer in a house he would be renting beside the Jutland coast, before rehearsals started on
A Doll's House
. She was to play Nora.

When Harry was not directing a play he spent his time in Spain reading and writing. She didn't know what he was engaged on now. Wish lists, he had replied with a teasing smile, when she asked him. When you were young you wrote wish-lists, he went on, but he had gradually forgotten all the things he had wished for through the years. It was hard enough to remember them, all those years. She had not spoken to anyone but Harry for weeks, and all the days seemed alike, but strangely she had not felt bored. In Copenhagen there were always people to see, people of Harry's age. He was very attentive when they went out together, but even so she often felt just like a decorative appendage, instantly left out of the game because she was not born at the time their hilarious anecdotes had been launched.

Harry's friends were writers, painters or film directors, and usually they were as famous as he, but had been part of the élite for so long that their laurel leaves were pretty withered by now. Behind their comfortable complacency lurked a small, bewildered disquiet at getting fewer mentions in the newspapers than twenty years ago. They could spend hours discussing it, how bad the newspapers had become, just as they worried a good deal about the young having an easy time of it, and how little it took nowadays for them to climb dangerously close to their own exalted position. Up to a point they were quite generous at including her in the conversation, some of them even took
the trouble to seem not at all formidable, and yet something sly and avuncular appeared in the sudden interest of the grey old codgers after she had been left on her own for a while.

She could feel their wives frowning at her when the men bent intimately over her while investigating what she might bring to the conversation. Most of them had known Harry's dead wife, but she was never actually mentioned. Lucca felt like an itinerant scandal, and when she was introduced she saw how their eyes flickered between disgust and envy at the indomitably lucky old dog. She had even been spared the attentions of the gutter press once when he was careless enough to take her to a première, and when she walked around town she sometimes felt she was recognised as Harry Wiener's talented young
lady friend
.

Harry was always the centre of attention, maybe because he was one of the few whose fame had not begun to fade at the edges. But that couldn't be the only reason, thought Lucca. People spotted him everywhere he went, and even when they had no idea who he was they were drawn to look at the elegant figure with his lined face, wavy grey hair and narrow eyes. He did not make any effort to arouse attention, on the contrary. He preferred to sit and listen while he observed the others, now and then folding the corners of his lips ironically around the colourless slit that served as his mouth. There was complete silence when he finally said something in his rusty voice and old-fashioned diction, which encompassed everything he said, even the most casual remark, with an exclusive and civilised atmosphere.

When they were in the car driving home one evening, after yet another dinner, she asked him why he bothered to spend so much of his time on that pack of burned-out old buggers. All they did was sit there nursing their bloodshot vanity, she said, sweating at the thought of being soon forgotten. She'd had too much to drink, because she was bored stiff. He laughed, looking at the road ahead. He was an old bugger himself . . . besides, everything was interesting to someone like him. She tugged the curls at his neck affectionately. At least he wasn't burned out, anyway . . . He smiled but did not give a direct answer. The
most banal things, and the most sophisticated as well, he went on, are often the most interesting. He gave her a brief look. She probably didn't realise that yet, luckily. But even the utmost banality turned into a subject for sociology eventually.

They had met with Else once only, shortly before they left for Spain. Harry invited her to lunch one Saturday after he came back from Oslo. Lucca tried to dissuade him, but he just smiled at her. He really wanted to meet her mother. If she didn't like it, she could stay at home . . . Else had tried to hide her disapproval when Lucca finally gave in to her inquisitive questions and told her who it was she so often spent the night with. After a month she had more or less moved into the rooftop apartment with its view over the harbour.

She was nervous as she and Harry waited at the restaurant, and once more she was taken aback by his unruffled calm when Else walked in and looked around her with an anxious gaze and too much powder on her cheeks. Harry rose, shook her hand in a friendly way and pulled out a chair for her, taking no notice of her tense, hectic manner. Lucca had not realised he was older than her mother. Her own nervousness changed into wonder when she saw how agitated Else was and how coquettishly she tried out her feminine wiles on the famous man playing the role of son-in-law. An hour later when Else kissed her cheek and said goodbye, Lucca could feel that her thunderstruck condemnation had given way to something like admiration.

Harry worked in the afternoon while she took a siesta. When she woke up they would drive down to the sea. He thought the water was too cold, but she went in almost every day. She did not need a swimsuit, they had the beach to themselves. She felt childish as he sat watching her, but only until she came out and he stood waiting with towel and kimono, as she approached smiling, dripping and stark naked. In the evenings they sat talking or reading. He told her about people he had known, some of them names she had heard before, actors and writers, semi-mythological figures from another age. Sometimes she felt dizzy when she realised he was describing events that had taken place ten years before she was born.

He gave her books he thought would interest her. The house was crammed with books from floor to ceiling, and she had never read so much in such a short time. He opened windows and doors for her onto ideas and notions she'd never had before, but he didn't make her feel stupid, just very young. He did not lecture her nor did he ever use his age and experience as arguments. He contented himself with asking unexpected questions which produced equally unexpected answers from her. He guided without her noticing it, and let go of her again just as unnoticeably, so she had the feeling of having found her way on her own, she didn't know how. He merely looked at her meanwhile with his narrow dark eyes.

That was the way he worked, by hardly saying or doing anything. That was how he had made himself famous, the Gypsy King, as Otto had so scornfully called him. She could not understand how all those stories about his tyrannical cruelty had arisen. He had not raised his voice once during the rehearsals for
The Father
. Most of the time he sat in the auditorium or stood at the edge of the stage as if lost in his own thoughts, taking note of every single change of tone and each movement of the actors' features. Just occasionally he would come up to one or other of them and talk confidentially to each, at other times he would lay a hand on a shoulder, smile or raise his eyebrows with an expectant look. He seldom spoke to them all at once, and what he said was always so specific that none of them noticed the intrinsic lines in the picture he had envisaged from the start. Slowly they found their places in the picture, as of their own volition, apparently with no help from him.

She had sweat on her upper lip and her knees were trembling when she arrived for the audition one September afternoon. The porter was kind, he led her part of the way and pointed out a long corridor, but she still managed to get lost. When she finally found the rehearsal room the other actors were sitting at a long table watching her walk across the floor, the script pressed to her chest. She went up to Harry, who sat at the end of the table studying his hands, and apologised for being late. He
waited for a moment before he took her hand without pressing it, as if indulging a childish whim on her part. He did not reply, merely smiled a little smile with his narrow lips as he regarded her out of the dark cracks of his eyes. He looked at her as if they had never met before, and it seemed inconceivable that she'd sat in his Mercedes one evening and asked if he might kiss her.

He was wearing an olive-green silk shirt that day, hanging loosely over the sand-coloured velvet trousers and his curly, steel-grey hair was carefully combed back from his forehead and ears. If there had been something frail and unprotected about him when he absent-mindedly received her in his roof apartment a few months earlier, in worn-out espadrilles and with his ruffled hair standing out at the sides in sleepy wings, that had quite vanished now. His motionless face was like a mask of baked clay. As she walked round shaking hands he sat leaning back at the end of the table caressing the silver lighter lying on his script beside his folded spectacles.

She knew their faces from the stage and the papers. Doubtless they were thinking that she must have lost her way. You didn't arrive late for Harry Wiener. The actor who was to play her mother, the captain's wife, sized her with a watchful glance over her reading glasses. For two generations of male theatre-goers the beautiful, generously bosomed diva had been the exemplar of feminine charm and mystery. There was something affected about her masculine reading glasses. Maybe she flirted with the idea that a little touch of ugly clumsiness would only add to her charming face and emphasise the mature dramatic sensuality of her eyes and lips.

The role of the captain was allotted to her male counterpart, the rebellious punk of the acting world, a notorious, rowdy drinker and seducer, with his eternal bedroom eyes, tousled hair and a voice like the morning after. Lucca could not see him without thinking of the line whispered in his ear by a buxom blonde in a television play from her childhood, in a somewhat outrageous bedroom scene for that period, as she rummaged in his unruly chest hair.
Big bad boy!
He smiled his very best professional bedroom smile as he pressed her hand until she
was afraid it would be left in his horny paw. The big bad boy had turned grey and he too had acquired reading glasses, on a cord to prevent them getting lost. A small pot-belly had begun to show itself behind the tight-fitting denim shirt and he seemed to be constantly suppressing a belch.