Lucca (35 page)

Lucca shaded her eyes with a hand and gazed at the Tour de Montparnasse, rising from among the slanting zinc roofs and thronging chimney pots like a big, dumb prick of smoke-coloured glass. Did she feel shattered? She put the question in the same way as if she had leaned over the balcony rail and seen herself lying in the street in a pool of blood. She was beside herself. The expression had never seemed more apt, but it did not only cover the sorrow that kept on trickling out inside her from a gash so agonising she could hardly breathe. She was beside herself because she was observing herself like an outsider.

She recalled Andreas's words about believing your own eyes. He had said almost the identical thing in Harry's apartment in Copenhagen when he had gone rushing up from Rome, and later in Trastevere when she had told him she was pregnant. So those were the words he used for celebrations. But then again, why invent the wheel each time? They worked, those words. His own home-made version of love's magic formula, which apparently created what the words suggested, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had not the same words brought them all the way to Paris, she on the balcony, he in the studio bent over his play, while their little son might be making a snowman out of the Easter snow at home, with his grandmother?

Of course there had been more to it than words. Ambiguous feelings and mysterious glances, a peculiar restlessness, an unexpected ease and the alluring powers of physical attraction. But the words had made the difference, encouraging her to dare give herself once more. His words about believing what you saw, instead of being sceptical and cautious because you were no longer a spring chicken and had tried all this before. And yet the words had no more weight or meaning than those glances
and feeling jittery, intoxicating carnal dizziness. The words were the same, just as the glances and feelings had been, from time to time. Only the faces had changed on the way. The faith in what you saw, that Andreas had spoken of, was itself faithless. You could believe in so much and so many. He had probably been sincere when he said it.

She thought of what the dark curly-haired charmer had written in her letter, despite her romantic rapture. She could not come to Paris after Easter, unfortunately. Something was apparently more important than looking into Andreas's wonderful eyes again. Had that made him stop for a moment and think about the one at home wielding her paint brush and mortar trowel? Did he give a thought to the fact that they had a child? She had hoped the years would gain the weight the words lacked. Lauritz was living proof that there was more than words and sensations between them. Or was he? Their child and their home had not prevented Andreas from saying those same words the years had made so precious, to someone he had known for a mere few weeks.

The weather was mild and spring-like as they walked around the Arab quarter in the afternoon. The scents of spices, the shrill music of tape recorders and the hoarse Arabian voices almost made them forget they were in Paris. They talked about it. That it was like walking through a North African town. Colourful fabrics, videos and cheap kitchen equipment were on sale. Andreas took pictures of people, all portraits. The women giggled or turned away, the men posed with hands to their sides and stomachs pushed out. She kept a little distance between them, without losing sight of him. Everywhere people were doing business, and notes were exchanged between brown or black hands. The women's palms were painted with henna and their silver jewellery glinted palely in the misty sunlight. They wore long garments and some had tattoos on their faces. Most of the men wore European clothes. They looked at her, some of them out of the corners of their eyes, others directly, with an impudent air that made her feel she was being pawed at.
She regretted putting on her short skirt. The voices, the glances, the music and crowds brought her out in a sweat, and she told Andreas she would go back to the boulevard and wait for him at a café they had passed.

She sat down on the glass-roofed terrace and ordered coffee. Only a few customers were in the café or on the pavement outside. She looked at the patchy bark of the plane trees, resembling the pattern on camouflage suits. Each breath made her feel she was encased in armour. She wanted to weep but was not sure she would be able to even if she permitted herself. A pantechnicon was parked on the other side of the street. The removal men carried furniture out of the house and into the vehicle. An entire home passed by on the pavement as if assembled at random. So that was how they had chosen to arrange things, the unknown people who had lived on one of the floors over there. Two of the men helped each other carry a large gold-framed mirror, and as they struggled with it, turning it first one way, then another, fragments of clouds, cars, trees and shutters whirled through the gold frame in quickly shifting glimpses. When the mirror caught the sun for a moment a sharp spot of light leapt jerkily over the asphalt and its dazzle forced her to close her eyes.

Twenty-four hours earlier he had been in Charles de Gaulle airport waving and smiling when she came in sight. He must have forgotten his Swedish girlfriend for a moment, it wasn't possible for anyone to smile with such tender devotion and think of another woman at the same time. She shook the little packet of sugar, tore off the top and watched the lump of sugar settle on the beige-coloured foam of the coffee, then sink slowly through the surface. Maybe he really was able to remember and forget on command, as if he had a television set inside himself and his will was a remote control that could zap back and forth between channels that were separate from each other. Wife and child on one channel, Swedish romance on the other. Could he be the same person on both channels?

Perhaps you could really change yourself as easily as the words changed their meaning according to who said them to
whom, and when they were said. You had the same face, the same body, but inside you were a different person, according to whether the woman you were with was black-haired or auburn. Now what was it his exotic princess had written in her letter? That she had lived in a daze without being seen as she was. Just as he had . . . Until she met him and felt he woke her with his gaze and reminded her of the person she was in her heart. Lucca picked up her teaspoon and stirred the small coffee cup. She went on stirring long after the sugar had dissolved. The words were not only those of his lover and himself, they were also hers, Lucca's. She had almost said the same words to him when they were getting to know each other.

He had turned up one day as an option, although at first she didn't see him that way. She had believed Harry was the one she was meant to be with. The Gypsy King, who had opened up a vulnerable crack in his frighteningly self-confident mask, seeing an unknown side of her and liberating it on the stage. She had imagined that what he did with her on the stage could happen in real life as well, and for a few months it did. Recalling her two years with Otto she shook her head over how naïvely she had confused her own dream images with the Otto who hauled her so painlessly into his life and then dumped her again. Harry's cynical honesty had been a release, and although sometimes his experience and status oppressed her the imbalance was cancelled out as soon as they were alone. In bed she saw in his eyes the insecurity she had seen for the first time in his Mercedes, when he tried to seduce her, and the second time on his balcony, with lightning flashing over the harbour.

Andreas disturbed her settled life with his boyish smile, his sudden kiss on the rock and his rash arrival a few months later. She suddenly realised she must have over-interpreted her enchantment by the legendary Harry Wiener. If Andreas travelled all the way from Rome for the sole purpose of seeing her again, that in itself was a question she had to answer not just with words but with all her being. And two weeks later when she was reckless enough to fly down to join him, she had come to believe that his eyes were the only ones that could net
her in after the aimless flutterings of her early youth. Just as she had believed Otto's eyes were hard and blue enough to make their image of her more solid than a confused reflection from a mirror in the sun, flitting aimlessly around like a firefly in broad daylight.

But she herself had been little more than a mirror. A homeless mirror which two breathless removal men had been at a loss to know how to deal with. They had collected the mirror from a house in the Copenhagen suburbs without any directions for where it was to be taken. A lady had telephoned. Unfortunately she could not be there when they came, she had to make a broadcast. The key was under the mat. The removal men had set off, unsuspecting, and whenever a passer-by threw a vain or worried glance at himself in the mirror they thought they might finally get rid of their heavy, gold-framed burden. But no, each time the stranger walked on in the opposite direction, if he did not simply vanish from sight, because the weight of the mirror caused the removal men to stagger, or because the one in front thought it best to go to right or left. New faces and views constantly skimmed over the shining surface, on which no one and nothing left any lasting trace.

They discovered it was easier to carry it horizontally like a bed, and they got quite a long way like that, while the mirror only reflected the clouds in the sky. White as a sheet, said one removal man to the other. Like snow, said the other, like newly fallen snow. To pass the time they talked about how lovely it was to go out of your house on a winter morning when it had snowed in the night, and how you could hardly bring yourself to tread on the snow no-one had yet walked on. They had stopped to rest and for a moment it seemed really like standing on the threshold of one's house and watching the virginal snow. But they couldn't go on standing like that holding the mirror, which resembled both a bed and a snow-covered landscape. The removal men began to lose heart but they did their best to cheer each other on. After all, the mirror was bound to find a home at last. They didn't really believe that any more, but they kept on saying it.

Lucca . . .

She looked up from her coffee cup when she heard Andreas calling. He stood among the tables with his camera held up, so she could not see his eyes. Click, it went.

The plane circled in above the tangled web of Copenhagen street lights. In an hour she would be in the train on the way home. Else and Lauritz would be waiting at the station as arranged. She did not know how to get through it without cracking up. She could already hear Else's words of consolation. Andreas was having an affair, so what? It was bound to happen to one of them sooner or later. Had she really imagined they would live together until their hair turned grey without one or the other having a fling on the side? It was quite predictable, Else would say, after you had lived together for a few years. If she was wise she would keep mum and see it through. He would soon tire of his Swedish fairy-tale.

Lucca wouldn't be able to explain to her mother what she was feeling behind the pain and the outrage and her wounded vanity over Andreas falling in love with someone else. She could not even explain to herself what she felt beneath the emotions everyone would anticipate. Through the general, inevitable pain she glimpsed a black abyss whose depths she could not contemplate, nor could she see what lay at the bottom of it, if it had a bottom. For a moment she imagined that the darkness among the threads of lights beneath her did not hide buildings but a bottomless chasm into which you could keep on falling. How was she to make her mother understand that it was not merely Andreas she feared to lose?

They had strolled around in the Marais quarter looking at the Jewish shops and had spent a few hours at the Picasso museum. In the evening they went to the cinema and afterwards ate at a Vietnamese restaurant. It rained the following day, he worked, she read. She was sure he did not suspect anything. She had behaved as usual and imagined she would have done if she had not felt the need of a cigarette and searched in the pocket of his tweed jacket for a lighter. It was not hard to picture. The hard
thing was to play the part completely, so he did not glimpse as much as a crack into the void where she was beside herself with pain and bitterness, dizzy at suddenly seeing everything at a distance. A distance she felt simultaneously with the suffering, and which made her suffer still more, not on account of Andreas, but of herself.

She went to Charles de Gaulle on her own. She wasn't sure she could go through with an emotional parting scene in the same place where three days earlier all her worries had paled when she saw him smiling and waving. He insisted on seeing her to the airport bus at L'Etoile. He kept asking whether he should go with her, but it did not alleviate her pain at all to see how guilt tore at him and made him exaggeratedly considerate. She looked at him as if he was no-one in particular as she waved a final time. As he turned and walked back towards the Arch of Triumph she looked at him just as she had done at Almeria airport when she held up a placard with his name on. He had appeared smiling among the crowd of passengers, as unknown and strange as they were.

She had a long wait in baggage reclaim at Kastrup. Her stomach ached at the thought of arriving home, putting down her suitcase in the kitchen and sitting down to eat with Lauritz and Else. She considered calling home and saying she had been delayed. But what would she do with herself? She did not want to go to Miriam's and take it in turns to weep. She smoked a cigarette while waiting. I loved him so much, she said to herself. It was not out of revenge that she put it in the past tense. She had been happy without thinking about it, without having to pursue her own thoughts and feelings all the time.

The letter from Stockholm had made her wake up, as if her years with Andreas had been only a dream. When people had asked her whether she really was as happy as she sounded, the question had taken her by surprise. It told her she had long since been released from herself. But that was all in the past. Now she was back again, locked up in her own head, puzzled over where she had been all this time.