Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  Van Vliet hesitated before joining in, because then they would have his address. But it was just too strong.

  What he discovered was a story from a book of fairy tales. Signor Buio was a legendary man from Cremona who had been given that name – Mr Dark – because he never appeared wearing anything other than black: shabby black suit, worn black shoes that looked like slippers, black shirt and above it the wise, wrinkled neck of a man who must have between eighty and ninety. As rich as Croesus and as tight as a miser. An apartment in a shabby house with damp walls. He’s said to keep the violins in cupboards and under the bed. One filius Andreae was supposed to have been crushed by the bedsprings.

  He trudged through Cremona with a plastic bag with holes in it, in which he brought home cheap vegetables, scraps of meat and a bottle of rotgut. No sign of a wife, but according to rumours a daughter whom he idolized, even though she denied his existence. He carried the banknotes, folded several times, in a tiny red wallet. There were a thousand hypotheses about why it was red and not black. When a waiter refused to take one of these crumpled banknotes, Signor Buio bought the café and threw him out.

  He claimed to be related to Caterina Rota, the wife of Guarneri del Gesù. And he hated all foreign companies that dealt in violins from Cremona. When he discovered that a dealer owned a Guarneri, his hatred was boundless and he dreamed of hiring someone to steal it and bring it home. No one knew why, but he nurtured a particular hatred of American dealers in Chicago, Boston and New York. He couldn’t speak English, but he knew all the swear words. According to legend there had been an Italian woman violinist whose playing he loved above all and with whom he had become besotted. He recognized every Cremona violin by its tone and could hear whose hands had produced it. So he knew that she was playing on a Guarneri filius Andreae. Hardly a day passed when he didn’t put on a record by her. One day he learned that she had bought the violin from a dealer in Boston. He shattered all her records with an axe and tore her photographs into a thousand pieces. Everyone said: he’s gone mad, but there’s no one on the planet who knows more about Cremona violins.

  Van Vliet enquired about the date and location of the auction. It was to be held in three days, and begin at midnight. The house had no number, but was recognizable by its blue front door. That Sig. Buio only accepted cash: did that mean that people came here with briefcases full of money? No one really knew, but it must have been so.

  Van Vliet felt as if he had taken a drug that both pepped him up and made him incredibly tired. He closed the office door and lay down on the sofa. The scraps of dreams were vague and faded quickly, but in the end they were always about the dark man who wanted money that he didn’t have on him. He didn’t hear the old man’s malicious giggles, but they were there.

  He woke up when Ruth Adamek knocked on the door. She gave him a curious look when he opened the door with an exhausted face and ruffled hair. Again she asked about the password. Again he refused. Now they were not only adversaries, but inches away from being enemies. He deleted the password that she might perhaps have been able to guess and replaced it with a new one that she’d never happen upon: DELGESÙ. Then he drove home.

  24

  ‘IF LEA HADN’T BEEN SITTING on the bed with that face when I got home – perhaps I wouldn’t have done it,’ Van Vliet said.

  We had booked our hotel rooms for one more night and were sitting in mine. The closer his story got to catastrophe, the more often he paused. We had sometimes walked by the lake for half an hour, without a word from him. Now and again he had taken a swig from his hip flask, but only a swig. It was impossible to drive to Bern now. He would have frozen and his story would have dried up. So I led him back to the hotel. When I gave him his key, he threw me a timid and grateful glance.

  ‘She was sitting there with her legs drawn up, surrounded by photographs of her performances,’ he now continued. ‘Some pictures of her playing, others of her taking a bow, still others in which the conductor was kissing her hand. There were so many of them and they were so densely packed together that they looked like a second blanket in which there was only a gap for a cowering body, a small gap, because she had almost stopped eating by then and was getting thinner and thinner. Her expression was empty and remote, making me think: She’s been sitting like that for hours.

  ‘She gave me a look that immediately reminded me of Caroline’s words: that you’re pleased. If only it had been a furious look! A look that could have sparked a struggle, like the ones I had had with her in the office at night. But it was a look almost entirely without reproach, only full of disappointment, a look without a future. I asked if she wanted me to cook something. She shook her head almost unnoticeably, it was little more than an echo of a shake of the head. Then, when I was standing in the kitchen, pursued by her gaze, I thought something I had never thought before, and it hurt so much that I had to get a hold of myself. What I was thinking was: She wanted a different father. Do you understand now that I had to get to Cremona? That I simply HAD TO?’

  I hadn’t given him a sign that I didn’t understand, quite the contrary. But the closer we came to the deed with which he had crossed a boundary, the more I became for him, it seemed to me, a judge, in the end a judge whose understanding could be wooed and whom one could finally win over. He sat on the edge of my bed, his hands clutching the hip flask between his knees. He barely looked at me, talking to the carpet. But every movement I made in the armchair irritated him, his concentration flickered, a hint of annoyance darted across his weary features.

  Back then, he had slowly closed the door to the apartment behind him and gone back to the institute. He locked himself in the office and with a click of the mouse transferred half of the research money to his account in Thun. ‘That one tap of the finger on the mouse key,’ he said hoarsely, ‘one tap among hundreds of thousands, indistinguishable from all the others and yet elevated from them – I will never forget it. My facial muscles as I tapped will stay in my memory for ever. They tensed. They felt hot.’

  Martijn van Vliet, who had lain on the bed as a boy and dreamed of being a forger. Martijn van Vliet, who took on all challengers in chess and could not resist the temptation to play a foolhardy gambit incomprehensible to his opponent. Now, immediately after that fateful click of the mouse, he was frightened. It must have been an infernal fear. It was still visible as a shadow in his dark gaze.

  But he drove. First to Thun and then, with a briefcase full of banknotes, to Cremona.

  I looked at him as he sat on the edge of the bed and told me about the Italian customs man who walked past the compartment without deigning to glance at him. Beneath a clear, blue sky he had driven through the Po Valley, dizzy with excitement. There was fear in it, too, the fear of the mouse click, but the further south he went, the more it gave way to the fever of the gambler.

  ‘I smoked. I held my head into the wind. I smoked and drank from the cardboard cup the lousy coffee from the drinks car.’ His hands clenched around the hip flask, his knuckles were white.

  It was strange: there was the strength, indeed the violence of his big hands, which expressed both the guilty conscience and his fury over the guilty conscience. It was there, between his knees, that the battle with the inner judge was raging. And above it, at the level of gaze and voice, all the words now came, words in which one could feel the airstream of a journey that had driven him into the craziest adventure of his whole life. I looked away from those white knuckles. I didn’t want him to lacerate himself. I wanted him to live, to live. I thought of Liliane and other opportunities when I had not lived as I might have lived and perhaps should have lived.

  ‘It was insane, completely crazy, to go at midnight with a briefcase full of embezzled money to an auction held by a twisted, morbidly avaricious old man, to bid for one of the most expensive violins in the world. In fact, my going there couldn’t possibly be true. But it was true. I heard my footsteps on the cobbles, and when I listened to their quiet echo in the deserted alley, I saw ahe
ad of me the street that Lea had walked along when she was coming from Marie’s and turned in the wrong direction. Now, once more, the endless, straight street faded away, the glow of that distant, fading image settled over the dull glimmer of the bare bulbs that meagrely illuminated the alley in Cremona in place of street lamps. And now, too, I felt once more how perfectly the unreality of my nocturnal walk matched the unreality that was spreading within Lea.’

  Van Vliet closed his eyes. Noisy guests walked past the door. He waited until it was quiet again.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t done it. It destroyed so much. It destroyed everything. And yet: I wouldn’t like to miss the moment when I walked through the blue door, climbed the stairs between damp walls and knocked on the old man’s door. It was as if I were experiencing a completely lucid dream in a state of extreme alertness, and standing weightless, supported only by absurdity, in an imaginary room, which could have been a room in a painting by Chagall, a fairy-tale room, terribly beautiful. And I wouldn’t like to miss the hours that followed either; those crazy, nonsensical hours when I threw all the others out of the running.’

  The old man lived in two rooms, separated by a sliding door. The door was open so that the seven men bidding had room on their rickety chairs. It was still so cramped that they inevitably came into contact with one another. It must have been stuffy, there were dust devils all over the place, and the sour smell of old man came from every corner. One of the men, whose nausea was plain to see, got up without a word and left.

  Signor Buio, dressed exactly as legend said, sat in a greasy-looking reclining chair in the corner. From there he had a view of everything, and could turn the gaze from his bright eyes – which seemed to bleach still further as the night wore on, assuming an increasingly crazy appearance – upon each individual. No one had been greeted as they entered; the door had been opened as if by some ghostly hand, by an inconspicuous girl who stood there as if there were no one else in the room. No one seemed to know anyone else, no one introduced themselves, they gave each other alienated, calculating and suspicious looks.

  Van Vliet related it in such a way that I thought: He enjoyed this surreal situation.

  ‘It was a bit like a gathering of bats. We didn’t really see each other, we just heard and sensed one another,’ he said. It was, I think, that absolute, ghostly strangeness that he enjoyed. Not the way one enjoys something pleasant. It was more like pouncing on something and clinging to it, even if it turns out that a raven-black, desperate conjecture corresponded to the truth.

  In his case it was the conjecture of a final, unbridgeable strangeness between people. And, in fact, it is wrong to call it a conjecture. In him it was more like a seasoned experience, the dregs of all other feelings. I never heard the word strangeness pass his lips. But if I close my eyes and listen to his story as if listening to a piece of music, it becomes clear to me that he was speaking about nothing but that strangeness. He had known it as a ragamuffin and a latchkey child. Then came the teacher who gave him the books about Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie. After that it was Jean-Louis Trintignant and Cécile. And above all, for a few years, there was Lea, whom he experienced – or wanted to experience – as a bulwark against strangeness, until she said à très bientôt to Lévy in the rose garden, and he had to hear her vulgar outbursts, before learning at last from Caroline that she misunderstood him in such an incomprehensible manner. And then that same man, with millions in stolen notes, set off on a journey in order to possess, with that Guarneri del Gesù, that object – a truly magical object – that was the only thing that could sweep away that misunderstanding and overcome the strangeness, and landed in a gathering of bats which showed him the apogee of strangeness in a raw and unmistakeable form. That – this fulminating, outrageous paradox – was what he was enjoying. It must have been a dizzying experience, a vertigo of loneliness, a rushing downward spiral of self-lacerating insight. And yes: Martijn van Vliet was the very man to enjoy such a thing.

  I asked him what it would be like if a feeling of strangeness opened up between him and me. And it would open up. I closed my eyes, listened and imagined we were driving through the Camargue, rice fields and water on either side, with the drifting clouds reflected in them beneath a tall sky. Le bout du monde. We should have stayed down there, laughing by the white wall and drinking with the light behind us, and the ending would have been like the frozen image at the end of a film.

  ‘The violins came out of a big ship’s chest that stood beside the old man’s chair,’ Van Vliet went on. ‘Anchors painted on the sides, flaking paint. A huge thing, certainly a metre high and at least twice as long. Inside that chest – and not in the cupboard or under the bed, as people said – lay the violins, and they were carefully layered, with soft cloths in between. The enormous brass clasps squeaked as the old man opened the box and took out the first violin.

  ‘It was a violin by Pietro Guarneri, Andrea’s oldest son and the uncle of del Gesù. I remembered, because he was the one I knew least about and the one least written about in the book I brought home from Milan.

  ‘“Mille milioni!” cried the old man, this was back in the days of the lira. The price was right for one of the less valuable Guarneris. But the longer the night drew on, the more clearly I understood that those words meant much more to the old man than the mere statement of a price. They were words which, of course, meant a great deal of money, but beyond that they stood for a round, glowing unit of wealth, the primal unit of wealth, the idea of money per se. Mille milioni – that was the ultimate sum of money, behind which there could be no larger one. Due mila milioni, tre mila milioni – that would, even though it was a multiple, be less.

  ‘The violin was bought by a man in a suit that must have been Armani and which was completely out of place in this shabby setting. Apart from me and a Frenchman, the men were all Italians, judging by their language at least. But then one of them, rummaging through his papers for something, dropped his passport on the floor, not far from the old man’s feet. It was an American passport. “Fuori!” he shouted. “Fuori!” The man wanted to explain, defend himself, but the old man repeated his cry, and at last the man left. The atmosphere in the room was icy, even though we were sweating.

  ‘The inconspicuous girl, who had entered silently and sat down at the table in the corner, wrote everything down. The violins passed from hand to hand, the others all had little torches in the form of fountain pens, which they shone inside the violin to see the label. These men were experienced. They weren’t about to be bamboozled. You could tell by the way their hands ran along the c-bouts and the f-holes, felt their way along the scrolls and tested the lacquer. And yet the room was filled with suspicion. Most of the men, before they bid, leaned back and studied the old man through half-closed eyes and with expressions of disdain. What was the situation regarding certificates of authenticity? one of them wanted to know. “Sono io il certificato,” I’m the certificate, the old man said. In fact, he never bought without first hearing a violin, said an elderly, elegant-looking man whom one could easily have imagined in a Venetian palazzo. No one was forced to buy, the old man replied dryly, in a tone of great finality.

  ‘The Guarneri del Gesù was the ninth or tenth to come out of the box. I borrowed a torch. JOSEPH GUARNERIUS FECIT CREMONAE ANNO 1743 †HIS, it said on the yellowing label. It must have been one of his last works, he had died in 1744, not far from here. Could one forge such a label and somehow work it into the violin retrospectively? It was a smaller format; the measuring tape did the rounds. Shallow top and bottom arching, open c-bouts, short corners, long f-holes, magnificent lacquer. The typical features. There was also a lighter patch where the chin-rest had been, as in Il Cannone, which Paganini had played.

  ‘“Mille milioni e mille milioni e mille milioni!” the old man croaked. How he loved and enjoyed those words! I was starting to like him. I was still suspicious, however. The croaking, I was sure of it by now, was show, a show for us poor lunatics who came dancing to him in
the middle of the night to satisfy our greed for Guarneris. What else was show?

  ‘Three billion lire. That was almost as much as I had on me. The most expensive Del Gesù had brought in £6 million at Sotheby’s in London. Compared to that, this was a bargain. I wanted to have it. I thought of how I had sat with Lea at the kitchen table, studying Il Cannone. At first she had been bothered by the lighter patch, then she had said: “In fact, it’s quite good. It’s somehow authentic and alive, you can almost feel the warmth of Niccolò’s chin.” I wanted to sit with her at the kitchen table again. She had to close her eyes; I laid this violin on the table in front of her, then she was allowed to open her eyes. She got to her feet and our apartment turned into a cathedral of sacred Guarneri notes. All the dullness, all the emptiness, had fled from her gleaming eyes; the bad things of recent times were forgotten; Lévy was the distant past; it was as if Marie’s “No!” had never happened; the photographed scenes on the bed had faded to shadows. I had to have that violin. From now on there would be nothing but the open, happy future of LEA VAN VLIET, which was much more radiant than the past of Mademoiselle Bach. And this new Lea van Vliet would return to the scene with a violin that far surpassed her old Amati. I had to have it, whatever the cost.’

  He darted me a timid, questioning look: did I understand? I nodded. Of course I understood, Martijn. No one who heard you speaking of it could have failed to understand. Now that I am writing it down, the tears that I held back for so long are coming at last. You were sitting once again behind the wheel of the racing car that Jean-Louis Trintignant drove from the Côte d’Azur to Paris, a man who had given everything, simply everything, as you said, and once again you searched the whole city to find the Dior perfume that Cécile had used.

  Why didn’t you call me?

  ‘I started bidding. It was the first time, so far I had only sat silently among the others, in retrospect it seems to me as if I were floating on my uncomfortable chair in an imaginary room, in a room from a Chagall painting, somewhere at mid-height, held up by nothing but the absurdity of the situation. And now I entered the real, hot room, in which you could have cut the air with a knife and the smell was enough to make you throw up.