Lucca (19 page)

That was how it must have been for Daniel two years earlier when she stood in his apartment looking out at the rain as she said what she had to say. Daniel, with his stoop and his short
sight. He had sat staring down at his black and white keys as if they could tell him what music to play now. But he had found it, obviously, when she ran into him that evening at a bar, cheerful and wearing black like a real artist and with a large-bosomed lady. Lucca asked herself whether they were real, his loving muse's splendid breasts. She smiled at the thought of Daniel's unhappy face. You survived, she knew that, but she didn't want to know it. Who would be the next number in the series? What kind of face would she kiss now, fantasising about what was hidden behind the unknown eyes? Any old pleasant face with an invisible number on its forehead. It was probably never Christmas on grown-up calendars.

She thought of Else, who had entrenched herself behind her work and her women friends, because there was more to life than love, as she said. The problem was just that she did not start to question what was really interesting until love came to an end. The something more in life, was it anything but a substitute? One evening she had called in a strange voice and said she was going to swallow all the pills in the medicine cupboard. When Lucca arrived at the villa she had filled herself with, not pills, but Ivan's whisky. He had gone off to New York with a girl of twenty-three. He too had come out with it plainly. Well, not quite. He had said he couldn't feel whole-hearted about her, Else brought out, with a mouth quivering with wounded pride and held-back tears. He had said they had slipped away from each other, although what he probably meant was that his new girlfriend had a tighter cunt. Lucca held her mother's head on her lap and stroked her hair as she wept. What she could have told her there was no point in telling now. Else could have asked about it herself. It must at least have occurred to her that something like that could have happened. Not least now when Ivan had hopped off with a girl her daughter's age. She must have noticed Ivan's discreet glances at Lucca's long legs. But she didn't ask. Poor old, flabby cunt, mumbled Lucca, and Else's weeping changed into hollow, grating laughter. The next day she ordered a removal van and had Ivan's furniture taken to the tip. He never even complained.

The sky had turned a hard blue and the sun glittered in the puddles after the downpour of the night. The water splashed around her spokes, it was windy and the air was full of whirling dust and flashing reflections which made it seem the wind was making the light gleam in everything that moved. As Lucca cycled through town she thought of the years which had passed since her trip to Florence. The years before she met Otto and believed that at last here was someone who saw into the depths of her, right in where she herself could not reach. She remembered the men she had known and remembered her hesitation, always the same whenever she was about to surrender, when for a fleeting second she already saw the end of the story that was just starting.

A second which came every time, while everything was still only circling movement and significant glances. A disconnected second where it became so strange, so hazardous, this game that was always played blindly, with bodies as pawns. But then she had closed her eyes in a hurry and kissed them, amazed at her own haste. She had hastened to kiss them before she began to doubt too much. She had hurried on into a fresh beginning, for there was no point in hesitating. There had to be more beginnings, all the time, if something more was to come of it one day, and she had begun and begun, sometimes for sheer fun, at others with a secret plan to sound out luck.

But all too soon once more it had been nothing but two bodies in a room going over the usual phrases surrounded by the usual furnishings with a view over the usual streets and days. It had turned out in the usual way. The usual slight lassitude during the same sweet assurances. The same excitement, the same brief dizzy dive from the usual feverish peaks of desire. For a time it was wildly thrilling again to meet a strange man at strange secret places and launch into new bold methods, screaming and yelling, hair unleashed. But either they grew too busy talking about the future, or they were suddenly too busy to meet, if she ventured to say something about tomorrow or next year. Some of them were married and dreamed of being divorced, while others wouldn't dream of getting divorced even though they were bored with
their spouse. Then there were those who were not married and became overwhelmed with claustrophobia at the mere thought of it, and finally those who had just split up and needed time, as they said. As if they had anything else.

When she met Daniel she was certainly not looking for yet another love affair. She had just dropped a film cameraman who had left his wife, convinced he was going to begin on a new and completely different life with Lucca. At that time she was in love with a lawyer who had no intention of leaving his wife but who nevertheless called her at intervals of weeks and months to ask her to meet him at some hotel or other. She knew there was no future in it, but she kept seeing him even though Miriam scolded her for allowing herself to be used, as she said. He had caught sight of her without her knowledge. Craftily, discreetly, he had found out who she was, what she did and where she lived. He had kept watch on her from a distance, until finally one day he made himself known with a brief anonymous letter in which he suggested they met at a café. She gave in to her curiosity and went along. The moment when she entered the café without knowing who she was going to meet was perhaps the most intense in their whole relationship.

She did something to him, he had said. That was the closest he came to expressing his feelings. She had been practically obsessed, she told Miriam later, by his remarkable ability to transform himself. When they met at a restaurant he was the cool arrogant solicitor in a distinguished suit, but as soon as they were in the hotel room he turned into a ferocious beast who threw himself over her with sudden violent rage. He always blindfolded her when she had undressed. That was how he wanted her. She never saw him naked and it fascinated her, when she lay in the hotel bed with her eyes covered, delivered over to his gaze and his ferocity.

After six months he stopped calling her, and every time she phoned his office, his secretary said he was in a meeting. Lucca pondered on the expression, but meetings were obviously something you could get stuck in. She waited for weeks until one day she happened to pass him in the street, coming out of a
restaurant with another suit. Her beloved gave her a blank look as he passed, as if they had never met. She was shattered, until one evening Miriam asked if she might only be in love with him because she couldn't have him.

She met Daniel at a party. Miriam had dragged her along, she didn't know anyone there. She and Daniel left at the same time and walked through the town together. He suddenly started to talk about twelve-tone music, just as he had done while they were in the kitchen because neither of them felt like dancing. He was intelligent but very innocent as well, and she was charmed by his unworldly decency and suffering face. She sensed he had no idea of how to go about moving from words to action, so to speak. When he paused she kissed him and asked where he lived.

He fell in love without reservation, and his sincerity made her feel depraved, whereas with the lawyer she felt as young as a seduced maiden, defenceless against his raging lust. For a while she rather enjoyed her own cynicism, when she went straight from an assignation with the lawyer to Daniel in his comfortless suburb, to sit on his bed and drink tea out of his grandmother's porcelain china cups while he played his strange music. There he sat at his piano, ignorant of where she had come from, and her secret made her feel free in a treacherous and homeless way. Like a double agent crossing frontiers in disguise so no-one knows who she really is, and wondering about that herself.

Perhaps Miriam was right, perhaps her passion for the lawyer was an illusion she could only maintain because the affair was never a reality outside the anonymous hotel rooms. But with Daniel, who wanted her so much, she was never in love. She was just fascinated, especially by oscillating between the two men who knew nothing about each other, between the roles of sacrificial lamb to desire and faithless fallen woman. Until at long last she met Otto and felt all her masks fall off.

As she cycled along to her appointment with Harry Wiener something came to mind which she had often thought of when she was with Otto. One day long before they met, she might have cycled past him, perhaps she had even seen him for a second and then forgotten him the next moment. At once she
feared he might come walking across a pedestrian area with his arm round the waist of Miriam's notorious mulatto, who had been haunting her tortured imagination for over a week. She made a detour to avoid the streets where she risked meeting him, which made her think that in a little while she might pass the man who would be able to love her. He must be somewhere, but maybe they had already crossed each other's path. She came to think of Else, who must be sunning herself in the country in one of the deckchairs with their mouldy seats, red as a lobster, eyes closed and mouth sagging.

It was getting cloudy again. The wind urged the ragged grey clouds so fast over the town that the roofs were lit and quickly darkened again in waves of shadow. On one side she could see the arched zinc roof of The Royal Theatre, on the other the gilded onion domes of the Russian church, and behind them the harbour, alternately blue and grey in the movement of the clouds. The sky was slate grey behind the cranes of the naval dockyard and the broad drum-shaped tanks on the fuel island further out. If she leaned over the railing she could look down into the street, a horizontal beam peopled by wood-lice and ants walking on their hind legs in the bird's eye perspective.

Better take care, said Harry Wiener as he came out on the balcony with teapot and cups on a tray. The sugar bowl was missing and he went inside again. As she waited, lightning made a crack in the cloud cover over the airport. It's going to be a great show, he said, smiling cheerfully as he came back with the sugar bowl in one hand and his script in the other. He bent his head a little and looked at the thunder cloud over the spectacles on the tip of his curved, sun-tanned nose. His checked shirt hung half out of his trousers, his long grey locks curled around his ears like wings, and his feet were bare in the worn-down espadrilles.

It was obvious he had forgotten she was coming, when he opened the door and looked at her in confusion, as if with no idea of who she was. He admitted it at once and apologised politely. He had fallen asleep on the sofa. That calmed her
as she stepped inside the rectangular room, the only one in the apartment apart from the kitchen-diner and the bedroom, which she glimpsed before he closed the sliding doors. A glass door between two wide panorama windows opened on to the balcony, the three other walls were occupied by bookcases from floor to ceiling. The place was smaller than she had imagined, more intimate, furnished with design pieces from the Sixties with worn, beige leather covers, faded Kelim carpets and the inevitable Poul Henningsen lamps.

When she was in the lift staring at herself in the narrow mirror she regretted not having done something about her appearance. She couldn't decide whether she looked like a hanged cat or something the cat had dragged in, as Else used to say about herself when she stood in front of the hall mirror. Maybe she looked like something in between. A half-strangled cat dragging itself up to the renowned and awe-inspiring Gypsy King. In her melancholy state she had forgotten what it meant to her to be going to tea with Harry Wiener. She had forgotten to look forward to it and fear it, and when she sat in bed with the duvet around her reading
The Father
, she quite forgot why she was reading the play at all, completely engrossed in the story. Only in the lift did it strike her that the step onto the top floor would also be a decisive step in her career. That word usually made her smile ironically.

Harry Wiener poured out the tea and asked if she took sugar. No, thank you, she replied politely, but maybe a spot of milk. He beat his brow with an exaggerated gesture and rose again. It doesn't matter, she hastened to say. He stopped and looked at her over his spectacles. Why did she say that when she had just said she liked milk in her tea? He smiled amiably as he said it and she smiled too. If you want milk you shall have it, he said, going inside. She looked at his script, it was already tattered and dog-eared even though rehearsals would not start for another three months.

He made her relax, she didn't know how, and she couldn't understand this was the very same feared and admired Harry Wiener she had heard so many stories about. The same Harry
Wiener who had made a pass at her in his Mercedes. Good, now we're about there, he said, placing a small silver jug on the tray. He really seemed to have forgotten everything that evening, but she was glad she had put on Else's Faroese sweater. It had turned cooler, too. They sat silently listening to the distant rumbling and watching the purple flashes and white forks of lightning over the harbour. Lucca did not know what to say and she was surprised it was not difficult to sit, each in their bamboo chair, saying nothing. Harry Wiener slurped when he drank. That surprised her, considering how cultivated he was. He was at home in himself, and she almost thought he had forgotten her.

I went to see my wife today, he said suddenly in a low voice. She is in hospital, he added. Lucca looked at him expectantly. He looked over at the harbour entrance. I hope she's awake, he said. She loves thunderstorms . . . He lit a cigarette. She is dying, he went on. Lucca looked at the script in her lap. It has spread, he added, there's nothing to be done. Lucca said she was sorry. He looked at her. He hadn't told her to appeal to her sympathy. He just thought she should know, now they were going to work together. If he should seem distrait. He regarded her for a moment before going on. She asked me to sell the house, he said. He had not thought of doing that before she died. It was a house north of town, he hadn't been there for months. Yes, it is strange, he said, as if replying to something she had asked him. He looked at his cigarette. But enough of that. What did she think of the play?