Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘I had held the violin in my hands until the others had become uneasy. When my eyes now met the old man’s, I thought: He has noticed how much it means to me. Was that a smile that spoke from those bright eyes, from that cadaverous face? I didn’t know, but the expression made me go on bidding, more and more, the sum was now far greater than the amount in my briefcase, but the old man’s face gave me the desperate courage to keep going. He will defer the balance, I thought vaguely, as I crossed the five billion threshold. Five billion lire, about four million francs – any sum was possible now. I had arrived in a different imaginary room, the room of feather-light play money, which is worth everything and nothing. The horrendous sum was reflected in the worried faces of the others. But I became more and more relaxed. It was a hurtling roller-coaster ride. I leaned back and enjoyed the prospect of soon being carried out of the curve and far beyond to where things faded away. In the end I was the only one still bidding. Six billion lire, a good four and a half million francs. The girl looked around, then wrote down the sum.

  ‘The old man looked at me. His gaze was not as piercing as it had been earlier in the night. There was no smile in his eyes either. But there was something gentle in his eyes, a benevolence that was difficult to interpret, and above it his bright eyes suddenly looked into the world quite normally. The madness in his gaze had gone, making me think: That glint of insanity is, like the croaking, mere show. The old man may be twisted, the box of violins proves as much, but he isn’t crazy and he’s playing us all for fools.

  ‘“I violini non sono in vendita,” the violins are not for sale. The old man said it quietly and yet very clearly. After that he pursed his lips into a mocking, contemptuous grin. I don’t know why it didn’t come as a complete surprise to me. The old man seemed to me to be more and more like a gambler, a clown, a charlatan. But the others sat there as if they’d been slapped. No one said a word. I looked over at the girl: was she in on it, was she there to give the show the appearance of authenticity?

  ‘The man in the Armani suit was the first to spring to life. He was white with rage. “Che impertinenza …” he murmured, knocking over his chair as he rose to his feet and stormed out. Two others got up, stood there for a while and looked at the old man as if they wanted to wring his neck. The gentleman I had imagined in the Venetian palazzo had stayed in his seat and was struggling with his feelings. Judging by his appearance there must have been fury inside him, but there was also an attempt to see the matter humorously. In the end he, too. left, the only one who could bring himself to say Buona notte!

  ‘I had stayed on my chair, I don’t know why. Perhaps because of the way the old man had looked at me at the end. He acted as if I weren’t there any more either, rose to his feet with surprisingly elastic movements and opened the windows. Cool night air streamed in; the first ray of sunlight was visible above the rooftops. I didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t actually know what it was that I wanted. I had just made up my mind to go when the old man stepped in front of me and offered me a cigarette. “Fumi?” Not a trace of a croak now, and the familiar form of address sounded like a vague promise.

  ‘He was just an old miser who enjoyed being a miser with a heap of money. I had the impression that this was the only thing he had been able to enjoy in his life. Not that he said anything about himself. And asking him questions – that was forbidden by the field of tension that surrounded him and which, if he were handled badly, could make him dangerous. Instead he asked me why I wanted to have the Del Gesù at any price.

  ‘What was I supposed to do? Either I told him about Lea or I left. And so, in the early hours of the morning, in which I heard the steeple clock chiming, I told a twisted, stinking rich old Italian man, sitting in a shabby hole in Cremona with a case full of violins beside him, the story of my daughter’s entire misfortune.’

  Back then, in the hotel room, I didn’t notice, but I feel it now: I was jealous of the old man and disappointed that I wasn’t the only one Van Vliet had told about the terrible things that had happened to his daughter. I was glad that Signor Buio could not have heard what was still to come.

  ‘The old man pointed to the table where the girl had been writing. Only now did I see that it was also a chess table. “Do you play?” I nodded. “Let’s make a deal,” he said. “One game, only one. You win – you get the Del Gesù for nothing; you lose – you pay me mille milioni for it.” He got some pieces and set them up.

  ‘It would be the most important game of my life.

  ‘I don’t want to describe how I felt. I could pay back all the money in Thun and transfer it over and delete the password. It would be as if it had never happened. And still Lea would open her eyes at the kitchen table, pick up the violin and turn the apartment into a Guarneri cathedral. It was insane. My God, it was so insane that I had to go to the toilet every few minutes, even though nothing more was coming. The old man, on the other hand, just sat almost motionless by the board with his eyes half-closed.

  ‘He opened with the Sicilian Defence. We played nine or ten moves, then he was exhausted and had to go to bed, so we arranged to meet in the evening. Thus began three completely mad days. Days of chess trance, of euphoria and anxiety, days lived entirely for the next evening, when the game continued. I bought a board and pieces, moved to a quieter hotel, bought myself a chess manual and went through all the things that could help me to win this mad game, which the old man was playing with great finesse and control as if it were nothing at all. After the second night I took a sleeping pill and slept for twelve hours, then it started all over again.

  ‘I went to the cathedral, suddenly hungry for devotional music. I saw Marie drawing the cross on Lea’s forehead. When I closed my eyes and sensed the huge space with its bracing chill and the smell of incense, I felt as if I were sitting in the middle of the cathedral that Lea always built with her clear, warm notes the moment she put bow to string – a cathedral that offered her protection against life, and which at the same time was life.

  ‘There was a record on sale, in which the music of Bach was played on famous Cremona violins, so that one could compare. I lay on the bed and heard the different sounds: Guarneri, Amati, Stradivarius. It takes time to be able to distinguish them. Of course, I knew that not all Guarneris sound the same, and neither do all Del Gesùs. Still, with the Guarneri sound on the record, I travelled back to our kitchen and let Lea build her cathedral. The notes were sepia, that struck me as obvious, even if I couldn’t have explained it to anyone.

  ‘It was at the end of the second note that I felt: I’m going to lose. Although when I left the game, it didn’t look entirely certain. But there was something compelling about the old man’s features, which I just resisted, without being able to break the style of his attack. I analysed the game in my hotel room for hours, and later, too, I played through it again dozens of times. I could repeat it to you like a child’s rhyme, kept not only in one’s head, but in one’s whole body. I made no obvious errors, but neither did I come up with the big idea that could have turned the whole thing around. We were playing with jade figures, the only luxury to be seen anywhere around. And there was something unsettling about them: in them, ordinary green jade was mixed with rare reddish jade, reddish veins ran through the green bodies of the pieces. It was disturbing to the eyes and somehow also to the thoughts, and all the time I had the feeling that I lacked that last bit of concentration I could normally muster over a chessboard. But in fact it can’t have been that, because even over the board at the hotel I couldn’t find the solution. Eventually, I ran out of Parisiennes, and all the other cigarettes I tried threw me into a state of confusion. And even at home, with a Parisienne between my lips, it got no better. He was just too good for me.

  ‘At about four o’clock on the last night I looked at him. He read capitulation in my eyes. “Ecco!” he said and smiled languidly. He too was exhausted. He fetched two glasses and filled them with grappa. Our eyes met.

  ‘When I think that durin
g those minutes I might have been able to change his mind and persuade him to give me the violin! Spending three nights facing someone over a chessboard, the eternities of waiting for the next move, attempting to penetrate the other person’s thoughts, his plans and feints, his thoughts about his own thoughts, the other as a target for one’s own hope and anxiety – it had all created a great sense of intimacy, from which it might perhaps have been possible. A different word from me, a different stress and everything could have been different. Something in my story about Lea had touched the old man. When I think of him it’s as a man in which there were many seasoned emotions, a lot of sediment, thick layers of it, and some of that had been swirled up, perhaps because of the daughter he worshipped – who, rumour said, existed – or perhaps for no reason. Perhaps I could have persuaded him to give the violin not to me, but to Lea, so to speak. He had sat there in silence when I told him of the evening when she came back from Neuchâtel without the Amati.

  ‘But I messed it up, damn it. I messed it up. You need to open up more, Martijn, Cécile often said. You can’t expect people to go running after you to guess your feelings. You need to open up more to me, too, otherwise things will go wrong between us, she said. Particularly towards the end. When I walked down the long hospital corridor to her room on my last visit, I firmly resolved to tell her how much she meant to me. But then those words came: “You must promise me that you will look after …” Then I couldn’t go on, I just couldn’t do it. Merde. And where would I have learned it from? My mother was from the Ticino. There were outbursts of rage, but the language of emotions, the ability to say how one was feeling – no one showed me that.’

  He gave me a quizzical look. ‘Me neither,’ I said. And then I asked him why he didn’t tell the old man about the fraud. He might have been impressed.

  ‘Yes, I wondered that too, on the way back. In fact, he was exactly the right man for that. It must have been because the whole business weighed so heavily on me and pursued me into my sleep. Again and again in my dreams Ruth Adamek asked me for the password and it was clearly legible on her face: she knew everything. That was why. I considered taking the train back to Milan and going to talk to him again. But asking him to give me back the money – no, that was out of the question. The fact that he now had the money made it impossible.’

  Van Vliet took a bite from the meal that we had ordered from room service. It was clear: he was oscillating between hunger and revulsion.

  ‘Someone should write down the whole business about money. Just tell the whole story: poverty, wealth, the euphoria of gold, loss, fraud, shame, humiliation, unwritten rules – everything. In a straight line. Unadorned. The whole damned story about the poison of money. How it gnaws away at the emotions.’

  He had counted out the money for Signor Buio on the table – mille milioni – a good deal, soberly viewed. A pile of banknotes lying there on the table. The old man hadn’t greedily grabbed for it; he had left the money where it was and considered it in a posture that clearly said he didn’t care whether he had it or not, he didn’t need it.

  ‘That was the very last moment,’ Van Vliet said, ‘and I let it go by.’

  When changing trains in Milan he was haunted by the thought that someone might bump into the violin and break it. He anxiously put the case under his arm and pressed it to him. It was a shabby case, a match for the old man. He had seen Van Vliet thinking that it was shabby. ‘Il suono!’ he said mockingly. The sound is what matters.

  The other people in the train didn’t pay any particular attention to the violin or the briefcase. None the less, his shirt was drenched in sweat when he got out of the train in Thun. He paid in the remaining money, then drove to Bern and went straight to Krompholz to have the violin restrung.

  Katharina Walther looked in perplexity at the shabby case, then opened it.

  ‘I don’t think she knew straight away that she had a Guarneri in front of her. But she could tell that it was a valuable instrument. She looked at me and said nothing. Then she went to the back of the shop. When she came back, there was a strange expression on her face. “A Del Gesù,” she said, “a real Guarneri del Gesù.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “It must have cost a fortune.”

  ‘I nodded and looked at the floor. She wasn’t Ruth Adamek in the dream, she couldn’t have known. In that night’s dream, of course, she knew. And that was why there was something judgemental and menacing in her words when she said, “You shouldn’t do that, not under any circumstances.” In fact, she said something different: “To make her forget the Amati, I see that. Still … I don’t know … don’t you think it might be … let’s say … too taxing for her? That it will make her think she has to get back into that crazy orbit? I don’t want to get involved, but don’t you think she should find herself first? How long is it since you bought the little one her first violin? Twelve, thirteen years? All a bit breathless, I always thought, and then you told me about that crisis … But of course, we’ll have the violin restrung for you by this evening, it will be an honour for my colleague, he’s over the moon.”

  ‘Why didn’t I listen to her?’

  Van Vliet drove to the office and transferred the rest of the money back into the research account. Ruth Adamek walked past him in the corridor without a word. He lay down on the sofa, waking up shortly afterwards with his heart thumping. For the first time he had the feeling that his heart might give up on him one day.

  Katharina Walther brought him the violin in a new, elegant case. On the house, as she said. And she apologized for her intervention. Her colleague came over. He had been playing on it. ‘That tone,’ was all he said, ‘that sound.’

  Van Vliet drove home. Before he went upstairs, he sat down in the café on the corner. After two or three sips he left his coffee on the table. Then he went upstairs and into the apartment with one of the most valuable violins in the world, which was supposed to put everything right again.

  25

  LEA HAD BEEN SLEEPING. She slept at the most impossible times, then wandered through the apartment at night and startled the dog. Now she looked at her father in confusion, with a sleep-drunk, unsteady gaze. ‘You were away so … I didn’t know …’ she said thickly. Her father later found empty wine bottles in the kitchen.

  ‘I thought back to those nights long ago when I sat at the computer until I heard her calm breathing,’ Van Vliet said. ‘Compared with today, what a happy time that was! More than ten years had passed since then. I stood there, I saw my sleepy and slightly unkempt daughter in front of me and wished more than anything that I could turn back time. For ages after that when I lay awake at night, I bargained with the devil to make that wish come true: to be able to travel back with Lea to before the day when we heard Loyola de Colón in the station. He could have had my soul in return. I imagined that journey in time so vividly that for a few moments I managed to believe it. Then, in my half-sleep, I experienced happy moments. I wanted to have more and more of those. So I became addicted to those day-dreaming travels through time.’

  But the important thing now was to make the other daydream come true: Lea taking the Guarneri, getting up and filling the apartment with its sacred notes. She was awake now and glanced questioningly at the violin case. Van Vliet made coffee as she got dressed. When, as if instructed to do so, she sat down with her eyes closed at the kitchen table, he set down the violin in front of her, then sat facing her and gave the order.

  For a long time she didn’t say a word. She ran her fingers mutely over the contours of the instrument. When she stroked the pale patch of the chin-rest with her hand, Van Vliet hoped for a sign of recognition, a remark about Il Cannone. But Lea’s face remained expressionless, her eyes dull. He walked behind her and shone a flashlight inside. She held the violin at an angle and read the label. Her breathing grew faster. She took the flashlight from his hand and directed the beam of light inside. The longer it went on, the more hope stirred in Van Vliet: the letters with the big, holy name would penetrate inside he
r and then she would explode with surprise and joy. But it went on and on and suddenly fear welled up in him, the same fear as before, when he had listened through the crack in the door and heard her calling Nikki Niccolò. Was she already too mired in herself to be gripped once more by the magic of that enchanted name?

  In the end her silence must have become too much for Van Vliet; he went into the bedroom and closed the door. A crime and an insane journey, all for nothing. Weariness washed over him, numb disappointment and despair, and in the end he fell asleep.

  When Lea started playing in the middle of the night, he was immediately wide awake and dashed into the hallway. She had pushed all the furniture in the music room up against the wall and was standing in one of her long, black concert dresses, with her hair done and make-up on her face. She was playing Bach’s E major Partita. For a moment Van Vliet must have had a sense of doom, because that was the music that Loyola de Colón had played. It was, he thought, not good that the new start consisted of a memory, a return to the music that had first awakened her. There was something ritualistic about it, something impersonal; she was merely its vehicle, rather than being entirely herself in the choice of the new notes. But then he was overwhelmed by the warm, golden sounds that seemed to burst the walls with their power and clarity. And he was even more overwhelmed by the concentration on Lea’s face. After months in which that face had lost all its tension and had prematurely aged, it was once again the face of Lea van Vliet, the radiant violinist who filled whole auditoria.

  And yet there was also something that worried him when he sat down on a chair in the hall and watched her through the open door.