Lucca (9 page)

And maybe she was right. Maybe he had grown short-sighted and a bit deafened by easy-going mundane daily life. Had he come to live permanently under a local anaesthetic? Suddenly colours seemed faded, and he caught sight of the worn shiny spots, the insidious wear and tear and the battered, peeling
corners of his relationship with Monica. He felt disheartened and inert at the thought of everything that had previously been so attractive about her, and he dreamed vague dreams of major changes.

But the dreams faded again just as fast, everything in him was just temporary and changeable. Like the weather, he thought, unsure of how he would feel in an hour or a week. It worried him. If he could fuck his wife's half-sister in his new home, and feel it meant so little, how much did it mean when he was together with Monica? But what was it he was questioning? After all, life was more than sex! Sonia must have infected him with her youthful fad for life philosophy, there was no need to make such a song and dance. He made light of it and the question stayed unanswered. Before long he thought no more about it. He quickly forgot her after she left, and when he did remember her he was amazed at how wild he had been about her. He recalled her childish way of talking and her school-girlish way of pulling her top down over her knees when she sat on the floor while he painted.

He was irritated with himself for having listened so devoutly, still sweaty after their amorous rigours, as she pretentiously analysed his emotional life. Not until afterwards did it strike him that he must have merely played the available supporting role in a domestic drama that had nothing to do with him. He felt ashamed on Monica's account, she who did not know why her little sister had become so affectionate when they sat on the beach and Sonia dreamily put her curly head on Monica's shoulder as they looked across at the blue strip of coast on the other side of the Sound.

He took his walkman with him when he visited Lucca on his round next morning. He put it on the duvet and placed the earphones outside the bandages on her head. She smiled expectantly. He carefully lifted the fingers sticking out from the plaster on her arms and showed her how to start and switch off the tape and move it forward or back. She was a quick learner. Thank you, she said, and again he noticed how she
could accentuate the little words so they sounded either light or heavy. The nurse watched him, but he could not work out whether she was touched or merely surprised at his idea.

He saw her again in the afternoon before going home, as he had done the day before. She still had the earphones in place on her gauze turban. He could distinguish the faint, trembling sound of piano. He sat on the chair beside the bed, opened the window and lit a cigarette. Yes, please, she said. He placed the cigarette between her lips and she sucked at it greedily. Half past four, she said, and let the smoke trickle out between her lips. Half past four? Yes, it must be that time. How did she know? The sun, she said.

One of the strips of sunlight shining through the gaps in the blind sent a warm trail over the lower part of her face. Just like the previous day. She asked what she was listening to. He bent down to her face and put one ear to the earphone. Ravel, he said,
Tombeau de Couperin
. She smiled again. Paco Rabanne, she said. Is that right? Yes, he said, wondering if she was as knowledgeable about after-shave as she was ignorant of music. He felt his chin. The little tuft had fallen off during the day. There was only a rough spot of dried blood where he had cut himself shaving.

She switched off the tape and pushed out her lips. He gave her another drag at the cigarette and took one himself. She blew out the smoke with a long sigh. He put the hand holding the cigarette out of the window and tapped off the ash. The flakes of ash floated upwards and spread out. Her voice was little more than a whisper. Perhaps I did really love him, she said. He looked at her again. She turned her face towards him. Now she did not feel anything. Now it was merely a word. As if she had used up the words. He stubbed out the cigarette and threw it out the window. Used up, how? It was not just Andreas, she went on. Perhaps they had begun to run out long before she met him. Her fingers slid over the buttons on his walkman. They were the same old words, always the same. And every time she had thought that at last she understood what they meant.

When he rose to leave, the sun had disappeared behind the
opposite wing of the hospital. He said he would come again tomorrow afternoon. She asked if he was wearing his white coat. He looked down at himself as if uncertain. Yes, he said, slightly surprised. Would he mind taking it off before he came? He didn't come before he had finished work, did he? She smiled apologetically. He still stood at the foot of her bed. She didn't know what he looked like, she went on. She only knew he wore a white coat, but she'd rather not know anything at all. Okay, he said. No white coat. She smiled again. Half past four? Yes, half past four.

For once he didn't listen to music when he got home. He left the door to the terrace open and lay down on the sofa. He closed his eyes and recalled the picture of Lucca sitting at a pavement café in Paris looking into the camera with a surprised expression as if she wasn't expecting to be photographed or had a sudden flash of realisation.

He thought of what she had said and what Andreas had told him. He tried to envisage the story they had been involved in, from the scattered sentences he could call to mind. They were still as fleeting and disconnected as the sounds that reached him from outside and left their marks and traces in the silence, the blackbirds and the leaves of the trees, a passing car, children's shouts, a ball striking the asphalt. He lay like that for a long time, eyes closed. A bluebottle flew around the room hitting the panes with soft thuds until it finally found its way out through the open door and was gone. The second hand on his watch ticked faintly under its glass, close to his ear.

Part Two

L
ucca hovered over the ribbed sand for a moment. She felt pressure in her ear drums and her head was buzzing. She let herself rise upwards and shot through the unresisting silver mirror gasping for breath. The sunlight flashed in the drops caught in her eyelashes and the little waves glittered as she swam towards the light. On shore, against the white sky, she could see the towers and high-rise blocks of the city, the slim chimneys of the heating station and the harbour gantries, all of them black and in miniature. She started to swim back. It was a Thursday afternoon at the beginning of June and there were only a few people on the swimming jetty. Otto sat leaning against the green wooden wall with his legs stretched out in front of him and a towel over his lap. He was too far away for her to see his face as anything but a blind spot. It looked as if he was watching her, but she couldn't be sure yet. She swam nearer. He watched her as she approached.

She swayed for a moment with exhaustion and a sudden feeling of lightness as she climbed out of the water. Otto was reading the paper. She sat down on the towel beside him and asked for a cigarette. He went on reading as he passed her the pack and the lighter. She enjoyed the slight dizziness when she inhaled. He asked if it was cold. She looked at him through the blue plastic of the lighter, it distorted his profile. Not once you're in. She rolled her swimsuit down to her navel, lay down and closed her eyes so the sun was dulled to an orange fog behind her eyelids.

The drops shrivelled up on her skin which tingled as they evaporated. She licked her under-lip to remove a shred of tobacco, and the taste of salt blended with the taste of smoke. The sun bit into her skin but the slight puffs of wind felt cooling.
She let her fingertips slide languidly along his flank under the edge of the towel and on down his thigh. Her fingers recognised his muscular contours and she imagined the faint tickling it gave him, the sensation of her nails among the tiny curled hairs. She smiled at the thought of what might be going on underneath the towel, as she went on casually caressing him.

Someone had seen her the other evening . . . his voice penetrated through the orange fog, the other voices and the cars further away, and the waves lapped around the stakes beneath them. The stakes she held onto, with slight distaste because they were slimy to the touch, as she let herself be rocked up and down by the waves. Yes? She visualised the stakes, they were black and covered with shells and green fringes of seaweed, which alternately stuck to them and streamed out in the water like loosened hair.

One of his friends had seen her with Harry Wiener, getting into his car. Otto's voice was as firm and supple as his body. It was at home with facts, everything that was firm and essential. It was a voice that handled words with the same matter-of-factness as when his broad hands took hold of objects or of her, opened a jar of capers with a single snap of compressed air or closed round her wrist when he bent over her in bed. He didn't know they knew each other, she and Wiener.

She pushed the stub between two planks. Nor did they. She saw it fall through the shade and hit the water with a brief hiss. Honestly, she said . . . that old poseur! She shaded her eyes with her hand, he leafed through the paper and bent over as he read a headline, as if he was short-sighted. Did he really think . . . ?

He didn't know what to think. The sun shone on the page and made her screw up her eyes. She couldn't see what it said. He turned towards her, she smiled. He lay down and closed his eyes. She turned onto her stomach and leaned over him, so that damp ends of hair brushed his chest. He put his hands round her neck and with his thumbs rubbed between the vertebrae of her neck. He just wondered why she hadn't said anything about it . . . that she had met him. She studied her fingers, they were still crinkled like the sand on the seabed. Otto's voice sounded
different when he lay down, flatter, she thought and, putting on her sunglasses, she lay down beside him so his shoulder was against hers. She must have forgotten to.

She had almost forgotten. At least, until Otto reminded her, she had not thought about it for several days. Nothing had happened anyway, not like that. It was one of the last evenings of the run, and the theatre was half empty. The reviews had been positive, and she had been singled out for mention in several of them. But the weather was too good that spring, there were too many evenings when people just wanted to drift around town and sit in the twilight feeling summer was on the way. Only very few would feel like spending such evenings in a dusty cinema converted into an underground theatre, on a gloomy street away from the city centre. Besides, none of them was really well known, certainly not the dramatist, a big-headed Swede of their own age, in his mid-twenties, always in black, of course. They had spent all their time imitating his arrogant Stockholm accent.

She knew she had been good that night, better than ever before. The words had come of their own volition, as if they had formulated themselves, and they had left her mouth with no effort, without need of thought. She had forgotten herself and merely followed the movements of the role, yielded to them, given over to them, totally attentive. He talked about that, Harry Wiener, her presence on stage. She had caught sight of him during the performance, but strangely enough that had not made her nervous. She knew she could not do it any other way, and the feeling of exposing herself was not at all unnerving. It was like admitting something painful, while thinking that now one has nothing more to lose. The same strange calm.

She had never spoken to him before, only seen him in pictures and in the distance at a first night. His grey hair, combed back from his tanned forehead, was long and curly at the neck. There was something resigned about his face with its vertical lines and narrow lips, as if he looked upon the world through the bitter wisdom of a hard-won experience of life. But perhaps this was just how people came to look with the years, whether
or not they grew wiser or more stupid. He was always elegant, wearing a camel-hair coat and Italian suit or letting himself be photographed during a rehearsal in a T-shirt and baggy chinos, with his spectacles on a cord round his neck and his narrow eyes on the stage. He was on his fourth marriage, but that did not prevent him from playing the part of seducer left and right. For a few months each year he retired to his house on a mountain in Andalucia, where he was said to be writing his memoirs.

The Gypsy King. It was Otto who had come up with that, and since then he had been called nothing else. It was not kindly meant, but king he certainly was. No one could surpass Harry Wiener. Otto had had a part in one of his Ibsen productions and could raise a laugh with his stories of brutal humiliations and hysterical attacks of weeping when the Gypsy King cracked his invisible whip. The actors feared him and dreamed of nothing else but getting a part with him. To be directed by Harry Wiener was like dipping your toes in eternity.

Otto was not impressed, it seemed as if he was determined not to be. In his opinion the Gypsy King's productions were no more than mundane theatrical gastronomy for the culturally hungry bourgeois, weighted with psychophile symbolism. That was yet another expression he had coined,
psychophile
. And why was it, in fact, that the Gypsy King only put on gilt-edged classics? When had he last stuck his neck out with a piece of new drama, where he could not automatically rely on his audience flocking in with reverently folded hands? Otto would much rather make films, he had already won several leading parts and come close to winning a Bodil award.

Lucca wasn't sure. She could see what he meant, yes, and she had once sprayed a whole mouthful of red wine over him laughing when he parodied the Gypsy King giving a demonstration of how to play Shylock. With all the drawers open at once, juggling with the whole of Judaism, as Otto had said. All the same, she had been gripped, almost secretly, when she and Otto had been to see one of the Gypsy King's shows. She was thinking of that on the spring evening when, after the performance, she was sitting at her mirror taking off her
make-up, and caught sight of Harry Wiener in the dressing-room doorway.

He was different, that was the first thing she had thought, different from the person she had imagined. He seemed almost shy as he stood hesitantly on the threshold. He looked like an apology for himself and his colourful reputation. Might he interrupt? The other actors gaped like shepherds who had caught sight of their guiding star, and it had been Lucca who pulled herself together first, smiling and unconcerned, to offer him a chair. He just wanted to come and tell them how outstanding they had been. The word he used was
superb
. Lucca's cheeks burned when he looked at her and said a few things about her interpretation, words of a kind she had never heard anyone use before.

They sat listening in a semi-circle around Harry Wiener while he commented on their performance. Lucca thought it was only now she understood what she had been doing on stage during the past few weeks. He had a good deal of criticism of the text itself, but their production had not merely released the best aspects of it, they had managed to imbue a deeper psychological resonance into it as well. Harry Wiener's words sounded old-fashioned and stately, like old silver fish knives lying each in their perfectly demarcated space, wrapped in moss green baize. He had not taken off his camel-hair coat, perhaps because no one had asked him to. Underneath it he wore a dark blue T-shirt and black jeans, but he sported real crocodile moccasins. The right mix of elegance and something informal, now he had come to see what the young actors had to offer. She could just hear Otto.

She looked round at her colleagues. They were all ears. They barely managed to keep their mouths shut, and she was glad Otto was not there. He would have derided them for feeling so honoured by a visit from this illustrious guest and being the recipients of his gracious words of praise. Like a cub scout pack given an audience with Baden Powell himself. But what about Otto? How could it be that he was so horrified and sarcastic as soon as the conversation took on an emotional tone? Was he actually a bit ashamed of being an actor? Maybe that was
why he always had to make a laughing stock of the old theatre chiefs and their silk scarves and gas lamp diction, which he could mimic to make you fall about with streaming eyes. In his heart he probably dreamed of appearing with a bare torso in some action-packed American gun-slinging film.

At a certain point Harry Wiener caught her eye in one of the mirrors, and she smiled a little ironic smile which was both lightly conspiratorial and sexily challenging in an aloof way. As if she wished to keep a certain distance and yet make herself known. Possibly she noticed a particular interest in his brief glance, which seemed to read her in a flash before he looked away again. Perhaps she was flirting a little. It was too fleeting to reflect on more closely, it was just a glance, and he removed it so quickly. There was something modest about him, and she tightened the belt of her dressing gown, suddenly conscious of having nothing on underneath. She had just come out of the shower when he turned up, but then he must be used to that.

He was downright clumsy, she discovered, when he looked around for an ashtray and happened to upset a box of powder over his elegant coat. He smiled and talked on while brushing it off with the back of his hand. There was not much of the gypsy king about him there in that messy dressing room. He spoke quietly and seriously in his deep, hoarse voice about the stage as a mental space in which we keep a tryst with our inner demons. Lucca took pleasure in listening to his voice and looking at him as he spoke. He sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about, someone who had paid for every single one of his insights.

Now she understood why all the actors he had worked with spoke about him as they did. With the exception of Otto. When Harry Wiener now and then looked at her she felt he saw something she was not aware of herself, as if there was more in her than she realised. He spoke meticulously and hesitantly, searching for words, almost as if he were thinking aloud, while he looked down at the toes of his shoes or the cigarette between his tanned fingers. His hands were surprisingly delicate. He interrupted himself in the middle of
a sentence and smiled apologetically as he asked if they were thirsty.

They went to a nearby café, he ordered champagne, the exaggerated gesture embarrassed them. He regaled them with anecdotes about well-known actors, both living and dead. He made them laugh and was even ironic without seeming affected. He listened too, when they dared voice their own reflections and feelings, and gave good advice without being didactic, as if he just wanted to share his experiences with them and his wonder at all the questions for which even he had not found answers. The next day they asked each other why he had bothered to spend a whole evening with them. Maybe he had simply been relaxing, taking a break from the role of peripatetic myth. Maybe he took pleasure in their enthusiasm because it reminded him of the deeper reasons he himself had had for going on, year after year, instead of resting on his laurels.

When the café closed only Lucca, her friend Miriam and Harry Wiener were left. They stood for a few moments on the pavement talking, while a waiter piled chairs on tables. Miriam unlocked her bicycle and kissed Lucca on the cheek, fairly demonstratively, she thought, as her friend waved and disappeared round the corner. But suddenly she was standing with the Gypsy King in front of a closed café after midnight, in a square on the edge of the city centre. He turned up his coat collar and offered her a cigarette. She accepted it without considering whether she wanted to smoke or not, and he lit his silver lighter, looking curiously at her, as if now the initiative rested with her alone.

Later she had to admit to herself that his simple and direct way of handling things was impressive. There was no longer any constraint about him. He asked if she was hungry. He had a flat he used for work in town, they could go along there and have a snack. He said this with suitable innocence and yet with a droll look she couldn't help smiling at. She was tired, she said. But then the least he could do was drive her home! His car was a street or two away.