Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘“Adieu,” Caroline said to Lea at the gate and put her arm around her shoulder. For an eight-year-old girl it was an unusual gesture: as if she were the adult sister giving the younger one protection and consolation to take with her on her way. As always, Lea kept her eyes fixed on the floor and didn’t reply. She silently put her hand in mine and walked along beside me as if wading through lead.

  ‘We had just walked past the Schweizerhof Hotel and were approaching the escalator that leads down to the station hall, when Lea froze in the middle of the stream of people. In my mind I was already in the difficult meeting that I would shortly have to chair, and I tugged impatiently on her hand. She suddenly twisted away, stood there for a few moments with her head lowered, and then ran towards the escalator. Even today I can see her running, slaloming through the hurrying crowd, the wide satchel on her narrow back catching more than once in other people’s clothes. When I caught up with her she was standing with her neck craning at the top of the escalator, heedless of the people whose way she was blocking. “Écoute!” she said as I walked over to her. She said it in the same tone as Cécile, who had always voiced the demand in French, even though we spoke German the rest of the time. To someone like me, whose throat is not made for bright French sounds, the sharp word had a commanding, dictatorial tone that intimidated me, even if it concerned something harmless. So I reined in my impatience and listened obediently to the station hall below. Now I, too, heard what had made Lea pause: the sound of a violin. Hesitantly I let her drag me on to the escalator and now we slid – against my will, in fact – down towards the hall of Bern Station.

  ‘How often have I wondered what would have become of my daughter if we hadn’t done that! If chance had not played those sounds to us. If I had given in to the strain and impatience of the impending meeting and dragged Lea on with me. Would she have yielded to the fascination of the sound of the violin on another occasion, in another form? What else would one day have freed her from her paralysing grief? Would her talent have come to light in any case? Or would she have become a very ordinary schoolgirl with a very ordinary career aspiration? And what about me? Where would I be now if I hadn’t found myself faced with the monstrous challenge of Lea’s gift, for which I was by no means a match?

  ‘When we stepped on to the escalator that afternoon, I was a forty-year-old biocyberneticist, the youngest member of the faculty and, as people said, a rising star in the firmament of this new discipline. Cécile’s last days and her early death had shocked me, more profoundly than I was willing to admit. But outwardly I had withstood that shock, and through meticulous planning had succeeded in linking my job with my role as a father who now held sole responsibility. At night, when I sat at my computer, I heard Lea tossing and turning in the next room, and I myself didn’t go to sleep until she had come to rest, regardless of how late it got. I fought the fatigue, which grew like a creeping poison, with coffee, and sometimes I was on the brink of taking up smoking again. But I didn’t want Lea growing up in a smoky apartment with an addicted father.’

  Van Vliet took the cigarettes out of his jacket and lit one. As he had done that morning in the café, he screened the flame against the wind with his big hand. Now, from closer up, I saw the nicotine on his fingers.

  ‘All in all I had the situation under control, or so it seemed to me; only the rings under my eyes were growing bigger and darker. I think everything could have turned out all right if the two of us hadn’t stepped on to the escalator. But Lea already had one foot on the sliding metal – when she was so afraid of escalators, a fear she inherited from Cécile; so much had entered her from her idolized mother, as if by osmosis. At that moment the music was stronger than her fear, that was why she had taken the first step, and now I couldn’t leave her alone and ran my hand soothingly over her hair until we had reached the bottom and plunged into the crowd of breathless people listening, enchanted, to the violinist.’

  Van Vliet threw the half-smoked cigarette into the sand and hid his face in his hands. He was standing beside his little daughter in the station. It cut me to the quick. I thought of my visit to Leslie in Avignon. Leslie had never been to me what Lea had been to Martijn van Vliet. We had had a more sober relationship. Not unloving, but more brittle. Was it because in the years after she was born I had done almost nothing but work, and often not emerged from the hospital in Boston for days at a time?

  That was how Joanne put it. As a father you’re a failure.

  We hadn’t had a single proper vacation; if I travelled, it was to conferences where new surgical techniques were being presented. Leslie was nine when we came back to Switzerland. She spoke a mixture of Joanne’s American and my Bern German. The tensions between her parents closed her off from us. She looked for friends that we didn’t know, and when Joanne went back to America for ever, Leslie went to boarding school – a good one, but still a boarding school. I don’t think she was unhappy, but she was slipping further and further away from me, and when I saw her it was more of a meeting between two good acquaintances than between father and daughter.

  Van Vliet’s story would be the story of a misfortune, that much was clear; but that misfortune had grown out of a happiness that I had never known, whatever the reason.

  ‘She wasn’t a tall woman,’ he said, interrupting my thoughts, ‘but she was standing on a pedestal and her torso loomed over the crowd. And, my God, you would have fallen in love with her on the spot! The way you can fall in love with an overwhelmingly beautiful statue, but more easily, more quickly and much, much more intensely. The first thing that had caught my eye was a torrent of gleaming black hair that seemed to flow once more from her pale, three-cornered hat and down on to the padded shoulders of her frock coat. And what a fairy-tale frock coat it was! Faded pink and washed-out yellow, the colours of a decaying palazzo. Against it there stood out many twisting dragon figures, red-gold threads and red glass splinters that shimmered like priceless rubies. There was much of the mysterious East in that jacket, which reached almost to the woman’s knees. She wore it open; you could see a pair of beige knee britches, which were held at the top by an ochre-coloured scarf, with white silk stockings in black patent shoes. Above the scarf she wore a ruched blouse of white satin that filled the wide stand-up collar with a collar of its own. She had drawn a piece of the soft white fabric over the stand-up collar, and on it her energetic chin pressed down on the violin. And to top it all, the broad hat with the three corners, its material similar to the frock coat, but heavier in effect because the edges were lined with black velvet. We made countless drawings of her together, Lea and I, and could never agree about some of the details.’ Van Vliet gulped. ‘That was in the kitchen, at the big table that Cécile had brought to our marriage.’

  He got to his feet, without an explanation, and went to the water. A wave washed over his shoes and he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘It isn’t quite right,’ he went on as he sat down beside me again, with seaweed on his shoes, ‘to say that the long wavy hair was what first thrilled me about that violinist. Even more than that it was her eyes – or rather not her eyes but the white mask that merged almost seamlessly with her white powdered face. The longer I stood there, the more I fell under the spell of the masked face. At first it was the stillness and the sheer materiality of the mask that struck me, because they contrasted so starkly with the soulful music. How could a stiff mask produce something like that? Gradually I began to sense the eyes behind the little slits, and then to see them. Usually they were closed, and then the powdered face looked sealed-off and dead. Then the sounds seemed to come almost from another world and to use her sightless body like a medium. Particularly in slow, lyrical passages, when the instrument barely moved and the arm with the bow slipped only slowly through space. It was a little as if God’s wordless voice were speaking to the breathlessly listening travellers who had set their suitcases, backpacks and bags on the floor beside them, and were absorbing the overwhelming music as a revelation. The othe
r sounds of the station seemed to lack reality compared to the music. The sounds coming out of the darkly gleaming violin had a reality of their own, which, it occurred to me, could not have been shaken even by an explosion.

  ‘Now and again the woman opened her eyes. When she did that I was reminded of films featuring masked bank robbers, which always filled me with a burning desire to know what the face belonging to the eyes might look like. Throughout all that time, in my mind I was taking off the violinist’s mask and imagining expressions and whole faces for her. I wondered what it would be like to sit facing such eyes and such a face over dinner or engage in conversation. I only learned that she was mute, this mysterious princess of the violin, from reading the newspaper. I didn’t tell Lea. Nor did she learn anything about the rumour that the woman wore a mask because her face was disfigured by burns. I only told her of the woman’s supposed name: LOYOLA DE COLÓN. After that I had to tell her all about Ignatius of Loyola and Christopher Columbus. She soon forgot it; she was only concerned with the name. Later I bought her a beautiful edition of the Complete Works of Saint Ignatius. She placed it in such a way that she could see the book from her bed. She never read it.

  ‘Loyola – that was what we called her later, as if she were an old friend – was playing Bach’s Partita in E major. I didn’t know that at the time – until then music hadn’t been something with which I had seriously engaged. Now and again Cécile had dragged me to a concert, but I behaved like the caricature of a blinkered science geek and artistic philistine. It was my little daughter who introduced me to the universe of music, and with my methodically ticking intelligence, my scientist’s intelligence, I learned all about it, without knowing whether I loved the music that she played because I liked it or whether it was just because it seemed to belong to Lea’s happiness. Today I know the Bach Partita, which she would later play with more depth and brilliance than anyone else – to my ears, at least – as well as if I had written it myself. If only I could wipe it from my memory!

  ‘I can’t remember how good Loyola’s violin was. At the time I had no idea, I became an expert in violin tones only on my insane journey to Cremona, many years later. But in my memory, which would soon be overlaid and transformed by the imagination, that fateful instrument had a warm, voluminous, intoxicating, addictive sound. That sound, which suited the aura of the masked woman so well, and her eyes, as I imagined them, had made me forget Lea for a moment, even though her hand had been in mine as always when she was surrounded by lots of people. Now I sensed her hand twisting away from mine and I was amazed at how damp it was.

  ‘Her damp hands and her concern for her hands: how they would determine the future – and for a time darken it!

  ‘I still had no idea that this would come about, when I looked down at her and saw her eyes, to which something incredible had happened. Lea held her head tilted to one side to get a better view of the violinist through a narrow gap in the crowd. The sinews in her neck were tested to breaking point. She had become her gaze. And her eyes shone!

  ‘In the long period of our hospital visits to Cécile, they had gone out and lost the gleam that we had loved so much. With eyes lowered and shoulders drooping she had stood in silence by the grave as the coffin was lowered into the ground. Back then, when I felt my breath catching and my eyes starting to sting, I couldn’t have said whether it was more because of Cécile or more because of the horribly mute grief and abandonment that spoke from Lea’s dull eyes. And now, more than a year later, their gleam had returned.

  ‘I looked again in disbelief, and again. But the new gleam was actually there, it was real, and it made it look as if the heavens had suddenly opened up for my daughter. Her body, her whole body, was tense to bursting, and her clenched knuckles stood out like little white hills against the rest of her skin. It was as if she had to summon all of her strength to resist the enchanting power of the music. In retrospect, it seems to me as if with that tension she had been preparing for her new life, which was beginning during those minutes – as if she had been tensed like a runner before a sprint, the run of her life.

  ‘And then, all of a sudden, the tension relaxed, her shoulders sank and her arms dangled at her side – forgotten, unfeeling appendages. For a moment I thought it was the extinction of her interest that was expressed in this sudden slackening, and feared that she had fallen out of her enchantment, back into the desperate jadedness of the past year. But then I saw an expression in her eyes that didn’t match it, but pointed in the other direction. It was still a gleam, but there was something mixed in with it, something that startled me even though I didn’t understand it: something in Lea’s soul had decided to take over the governance of her life. And I felt, with a mixture of apprehension and happiness, that my own life would also be drawn into the spell of that mysterious control, and would never again be as it was before.

  ‘If Lea had previously breathed, during times of tension, in irregular bursts that made one think of a fever, for which the red patches on her cheeks were a match, now she no longer seemed to be breathing at all, and her slack face was covered with an alabaster, corpse-like pallor. If her eyelids had previously twitched frantically, now they seemed paralysed. At the same time there was also concentrated intention in her motionlessness – as if Lea were reluctant to let them interrupt her gaze upon the playing goddess, even if those interruptions had lasted only a few hundredths of a second, and she wouldn’t have noticed them in any case.

  ‘In the light of what happened later, and what I know now, I would say: I lost my daughter in that station hall.

  ‘I would say it, even though over the next few years it looked as if precisely the opposite had happened: as if at that moment she had unwittingly started on a journey towards herself, and with a devotion, a fervour and energy that very few can manage. Exhaustion lay on the pale features of her childish face, and when I sometimes dreamed of that exhaustion, it was the exhaustion that lay before her on her self-sacrificing journey through the world of sounds, which she would walk along in a consuming fever.

  ‘The woman’s playing came to an end with a spirited, rather dramatic stroke of the bow. A silence that swallowed up all the noise of the station. Then thunderous applause. Her bows were deep and lasted for an unusually long time. She held her violin and bow far from her body, as if to protect it from her own impetuous movements. The hat must have been fastened on, because it stayed where it was while the surge of black hair poured forwards, burying her face beneath it. When she straightened, her hair flew back as if in a storm, the hand holding the bow brushed the strands of hair from her face, and now the white face with the mask was a real shock, even though we had had it in front of our eyes all along. We wanted to see joy on the face, or exhaustion, or at least some kind of emotional reaction; instead our gaze bounced back off the ghostly mask and the powder. Still, it seemed as if the applause would never end. Very slowly the crowd began moving and divided into those who were in a hurry and the others who were queuing up to throw something into the violin case beside the podium. Some looked in astonishment at their watches and seemed to be wondering where the time had gone.

  ‘Lea stayed where she was. Nothing about her had changed, her trance continued, and it was still as if her eyelids had ceased to function, so overwhelmed were they by what her eyes had seen. There was something infinitely touching in her refusal to believe that it was over. The desire for it to continue, to continue for ever, was so strong that she didn’t even snap out of it when jostled by a commuter in a hurry. She stayed in her new position with the unconscious certainty of a sleepwalker, her gaze still fixed on Loyola, as if she were a marionette that she could force to move simply by looking at her. This unwavering gaze of Lea’s heralded her unique and finally destructive firmness of will, which would come to light more and more clearly over the next few years.

  ‘Loyola, it turned out now, was not alone. A tall, dark-skinned man suddenly moved in. He took her violin and bow away, held out his hand as she stepp
ed down from the podium, then cleared everything away with a skill and swiftness that surprised others besides myself. Barely more than two or three minutes seemed to have passed since the last coin had fallen in the case, and Loyola was already making for the escalator with her companion. Now that she was no longer standing on a podium, she looked small, the magical violinist, and not only small, but stripped of her enchantment, almost a little shabby. She dragged one leg, and I was ashamed of my disappointment at discovering that she was real and imperfect, rather than moving through the world with the same lustre, the same fairy-tale perfection that her playing had possessed. I was glad and unhappy at once when the escalator carried them up and out of our field of vision.

  ‘I walked over to Lea and drew her gently to me, the same movement as ever when I needed to console and protect her. Then she would press her cheek to my hip, and if things were particularly bad she would bury her face in me. Now, however, it was different, and even though it was only a small movement, a mere nuance in her reaction, it still changed the world. Under the gentle pressure of my hand Lea slowly returned to reality. At first she yielded, as she normally did, to my protective gesture. But then, for a tiny moment, she paused abruptly and began to resist me.