Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘Why had she needed to do herself up as if she were standing in the concert hall? She had cut her nails; it was a great relief to see that. It is terrible, a message of pure despair, when a violinist lets her nails grow until she can’t play any more. But the dress, the face powder, the lipstick – and all of that in the middle of the night?

  ‘For months she had lived cowering away, inwardly and often outwardly as well. Now she had pulled herself together and connected once more with the layer of herself that she had previously shown to the world. When I looked at her and listened to her back then, worried about the ghostly character of the nocturnal scene, that thought took shape in me: My daughter, she is a creature of layers; she consists of spiritual layers, she lives on various plateaux that she can enter and leave, and now she has found her way back to the plateaux that had long lain empty and unlit, a little like the platform of an abandoned railway station.

  ‘I studied the play of expressions on her face, no longer as fluid as before, and which, with its occasional faltering pauses, bore within it the traces of her earlier torpor. And then for the first time I thought yet another thought, which I would think often over the next while and which would startle me afresh each time: She has no control over that switch of layers; she isn’t the director of this drama; if she steps on to her inner plateau or if she leaves it, it’s a pure happening, comparable to a geological shift for which no one is responsible.

  ‘Perhaps you will think – and I myself sometimes thought it too: That’s how it is for all of us. And that is also true. But in the internal drama that was now unfolding within Lea, there were breaks and abrupt, jerky changes that cast a particularly harsh light on the fact that the soul was far more of a place where things happened than one where things were done.’

  Van Vliet was silent for a while, and then said something that has remained particularly clearly in my memory, because it expressed a fearlessness in his thinking that was part of his being: ‘The experience of inner seamlessness – it is down to the mercurial fluidity of change and virtuosity with which we immediately retouch all the cracks until they can’t be seen. And that virtuosity is all the greater in that it knows nothing of itself.’

  I consider the picture of him leaning against the lamp, a drinking man against the light. The snot-nosed street urchin and the devious chess player had become someone who knew how fragile the life of the mind really is, and how many stopgaps and deceptions we must go through before we somehow come to terms with ourselves. A man who, on the basis of this insight, felt great solidarity with everyone else – even though I never heard that word from him and he would have rejected it outright. Yes, I think he would have rejected it; it would have struck him as too fussy. None the less, it is the right word for the thing he felt growing inside him that night, and which from now on, beyond all affection and admiration, bound him with his daughter, who enchanted the whole house with her notes played on the Guarneri that night.

  First of all the man who lived above them had furiously rung the doorbell. He had moved in only recently and knew nothing about Lea. Van Vliet did something disarming: he pulled him in and offered him a chair from which he could see Lea. He sat there in his pyjamas and grew quieter and quieter. Through the open door the music filled the whole staircase, and when Van Vliet looked out, the other tenants who knew about Lea were sitting on the steps, putting their fingers to their lips if anyone made an annoying noise. The applause filled the staircase. ‘Encore!’ someone called.

  Van Vliet hesitated. Was it all right to disturb Lea in her imaginary concert hall? Was whatever had built up inside her not far too fragile? But Lea had heard the clapping and now stepped into the stairway with her rustling dress. She bowed, started playing, and didn’t stop until another hour had passed. Meantime her facial expressions were as lively and fluid as before; one could see and hear her becoming more and more familiar with the instrument from one minute to the next. She chose pieces of a rising level of difficulty, the old virtuosity was back, and even though people were beginning to shiver, they sat where they were.

  ‘It was the first concert after the breakdown,’ Van Vliet said. ‘In a way the most beautiful. My daughter was stepping out of the darkness and into the light.’

  MADEMOISELLE BACH IS BACK! read the newspaper headlines. Agents scrambled for her. Lea could hardly move for offers. Was that what Van Vliet had wanted?

  He had thought about that. Soon, however, he noticed that he had not won back his daughter as he had hoped. She was celebrating her moments of success, that wasn’t the issue. But she didn’t seem to be quite herself. Porcelain – that was the world that he used over and over again when he talked about that time. She and her actions seemed to consist of translucent porcelain: filigree, precious and very fragile. He nurtured the hope that there might be a solid core behind it, which would remain if the porcelain shattered. But increasingly the hope made way for fear that there was nothing behind it but an opening void, a void into which his daughter was disappearing for ever.

  Lea’s skin, which had always been very white, became still paler, almost transparent, and at the temple, more and more often, a bluish vein appeared, throbbing, with strange irregularity, a rhapsodic twitch, the harbinger of an event in which all order would be lost. And even though her new notes were praised to the skies: there was something wrong with them, her father felt. At last he worked out what it was: ‘Now that the music was no longer framed by the love of Marie and Lévy, now that it was no longer carried and supported by that love, to my ears it sounded impersonal, glassy and cold. Sometimes I thought: It sounds as if Lea were standing in front of a pale, dry wall of hard, cold slate. There was nothing even Joseph Guarneri could do about it. It wasn’t to do with the violin. It was to do with her.’

  There were exceptions. Evenings when everything sounded as it had done before, played from within. But then there was something else that troubled Van Vliet: it seemed to him as if, in her mind, Lea were playing Lévy’s Amati – as if the Guarneri had become the crystallization point of the delusion that everything was fine with Lévy again. The new violin, which was supposed to have been a liberating counterweight to the past, had – he thought at such moments – become a new centre of gravity for the old fantasies.

  Even though he had been given instructions to the contrary, her agent revealed to the press what kind of violin it was. Van Vliet’s colleagues read it and in their eyes he could read the question of where he had got the money. Through the open door of Aaron’s office he saw that she was studying the whole web page from which he had found his information about the violins made by the Guarneri family. During the night he changed the password for the file containing his research money. He turned DELGESÙ into ÙSEGLED and later ÙSEDGL.

  He could feel it: it was a time bomb. He could cover up the gap in the finances for a few months, perhaps a year, not more than that. He thought of bills from a dummy corporation. He started playing the lottery. A kind of bank phobia settled in and became apparent in the fact that he had mental blocks about internet banking and made mistakes when performing the simplest of operations. The name THUN often flickered through his dreams.

  If the worst came to the worst, he said to himself, he could still sell the violin. In fact, the idea of taking it away from Lea again was unthinkable, and when he thought of the words he would have to say, he grew dizzy. But it was worth millions and the thought of that managed to calm him down in spite of everything.

  There were concerts abroad. Paris, Milan, Rome. The organizers and agents didn’t like the fact that the father was there. Not that they said anything. But their handshakes were cool and reserved and they pointedly addressed only the daughter. It didn’t let up: now Lea seemed grateful for his presence, now she made him feel she would rather have been travelling without him. There were happy moments when she laid her head upon his shoulder. There were humiliating moments when she just left him there, chatting to the conductor.

  In Rome he would have
liked to go with her to the church on the little piazza from which he had heard the music that had broken the ice and realigned his feelings towards Marie. That was ten years ago.

  ‘I would have liked to go and sit on the bench with her and talk to her about all the things that had happened in the meantime,’ he said. ‘I didn’t notice that that was the wish of a man in his fifties, who must have been strange to a young girl. It was only when I was sitting there on my own that it dawned on me. It still hurt, though; she would have had time. And the music in the church hurt as well, so that I fled and sat down in a bar in a part of town where we weren’t staying. I was too drunk to go to the concert. I just felt like spending the evening on my own, I said over breakfast. Now she was the one who looked sad.’

  26

  AND THEN CAME the trip to Stockholm, a trip that would wipe out the whole of Scandinavia on Van Vliet’s internal map.

  It began with Lea’s fear of flying, a fear she hadn’t known before. She was pale, she was shaking and she needed to go to the lavatory.

  ‘Afterwards it struck me as a particularly intelligent fear,’ Van Vliet said. ‘Gravity was her ally in the battle against her inner centrifugal forces. If she were raised from the ground there was a danger that Lea would shatter into pieces, that she would lose her inner centre, the scraps of her soul would go whirling in all directions and she would experience it as annihilation.

  ‘That was my thought when we were sitting on the deck of the ferry on the way back. When Helsingborg sank back into the gloom, I wished the sun would never rise there again.

  ‘“And if I suddenly can’t remember how to go on?” Lea asked on the plane. And then she did something she had never done before: she told me about a conversation she had had with David Lévy.’ She must have talked to him about her anxiety that her memory might leave her in the lurch. Van Vliet flinched when he heard that. He thought back to that moment that he had never forgotten: in the school hall, at Lea’s first performance, when Lea had put the bow to the string and he had, for no reason, found himself wondering whether her memory would stand the strain. Lévy had looked mutely at Lea, before getting up and pacing back and forth in the music room. And then he had told her about the feelings that had assailed him in the most terrible moment of his life, when he had forgotten how to go on playing in the middle of the Oistrakh cadenza of Beethoven’s violin concerto. Panic had flowed through him like an ice-cold, paralysing poison, he must have said. And even hours afterwards that poison had destroyed all other sensations. He couldn’t remember having fled from the stage or how he had done it; all those movements – if he had even been aware of them – had been immediately expunged from his memory. He had looked at the Amati in the cloakroom and known: never again.

  Up there above the clouds, Van Vliet had suddenly understood that the fear had connected his daughter with Lévy in a way that had made his own jealousy look shabby and ridiculous. It had been the solidarity of those who know that the loss of memory and self-confidence can – suddenly and without warning – leap out at you under the harsh spotlights, out of the darkness within. Now, all of a sudden, the father also understood how significant the gift of the Amati had been: Lévy had given Lea the violin to seal that dangerous darkness up within her for ever; and also so that she could continue, from within that sealed certainty, in inviolable, indestructible certainty, go on spinning his – Lévy’s – notes, which had been simply interrupted and swallowed up by the inner void, and thus contribute to the healing of his old wound. And then she had wanted to smash that instrument, which contained within it such pain and hope, right in front of his eyes.

  For the first time in ages, Van Vliet took her cold, moist hands in his. As he did so he thought of the fearful days and nights that had followed the outbreak of eczema. It was all far too much for them, just too much. When they stepped out into the arrivals hall, he wanted to suggest that she call off the concert and go home by ship and rail. But the chauffeur was already standing there.

  ‘Why didn’t I just send him away?’ said Van Vliet. ‘Just send him away!’

  Dusk was falling. ‘Shall I turn the light on?’ I asked. Van Vliet shook his head. He didn’t want to have any light on his face if he was going to talk about the disaster which seemed to me, when I finally heard it, like the climax of a tragedy towards which everything that had gone before was running with stern and unbending inevitability.

  ‘When I was sitting in the darkness of the auditorium, I wished Lea hadn’t talked about the collapse of Lévy’s memory on the aeroplane. Because now at every moment I was waiting for her own. My gaze was fixed on her features, her eyes, always ready to recognize the first signs. It was a Mozart violin concerto; she wanted to get away from the identification with Bach. By now she had developed such a feeling for the Guarneri that the notes sounded a whole category fuller and more compelling than they had in the stairway. The newspapers had written about the Del Gesù; one of them had published a whole essay about it, also mentioning Paganini and Il Cannone. I think the respectful silence of the audience was a little greater than usual, and the applause was endless.

  ‘As always, I was unsettled by the predictable, by-numbers quality of the way Lea took her ovations. But there was something else as well, and I think it shocked me to the core even though I didn’t fully realize it at the time: Lea’s movements when coming on and going off stage lacked her usual fluidity, they didn’t flow at all the way human movements normally flow. Neither were they merely sluggish and prolonged. Instead there was something jerky about them, something pushed; a staccato, interrupted by tiny motionless hiatuses. It reminded me of the problems of motion in robots, which I knew from research that some colleagues had done. But it was my daughter!’

  It was as if the silent horror that he hadn’t really noticed before were only unfolding now, at a delay of several years. Van Vliet’s voice changed and revealed the lava of emotions seething beneath. And if I think about the narrative of the next few hours, then I hear that roughness which expressed the pain that had scorched his soul better than any tears could.

  ‘As regards the party after the concert, I don’t remember much. Lea’s movements were normal again, so that I almost forgot my earlier shock. Until I saw the splayed little finger when she took the cup. I don’t know how to explain it, but it wasn’t the affected splayed pinkie that one sees in an elegant, middle-class drawing room over afternoon tea. It was more of a misguided, pointless movement, a misrouted message from the nerve endings. I went to the lavatory and splashed cold water in my face. But instead of washing away the observation, I found myself remembering a failed trill during the concert. Trills had always been Lea’s weak spot, and in one of those there had been a moment when it was as if her finger were making weird and incomprehensible movements. I pressed my forehead to the wall until it hurt. I had to rid myself of that damned hysteria!’

  Van Vliet sank in on himself, the roughness vanished from his voice. ‘If only it had been hysteria! A senseless, unfounded agitation!’ he said quietly.

  Something else had occurred to him over dinner: Lea’s irritability. Recently she had often been irritable, particularly in the time after the break with Lévy. ‘But what I now saw and sensed was different, more all-encompassing and physically urgent: as if she were burning.’ Even in the car that took her to the hotel he could feel that burning, that suppressed fury that exuded from her like sweat.

  ‘She was against me and also not. Do you understand? Do you?’ he said.

  The two last words came like a rough cry. I felt as if he were trying, years late, to pass on a part of Lea’s fury to me, so that it would stop choking him. At the same time, that you was like the last, hoarse cry of help from someone being driven irrevocably out to sea by the ruthless current.

  Against me and also not – that was the formula for his deepest despair, for guilt and loneliness, which had entered into a deadly, terrible bond with each other. And also not – you could feel him fighting with logic a
nd illogic; a big, heavy Buster Keaton who wasn’t making anyone laugh any more. He came out with the formula only once, but I heard and still hear the echo, that thousand-fold echo, that the words had within him. They were the melody that had drowned out everything else, simply everything, since Stockholm. A thought that never fell silent, not by day and not by night, either. An emotion that held within it everything that would happen next.

  ‘The clerk at the hotel reception asked if she would play for him, just a few bars; unfortunately, he couldn’t be at the concert. The top of his skull was unnecessarily flat and he wore a pair of glasses with an ugly fame; an awkward young man who had probably been preparing all day for this request. Perhaps, if he hadn’t … But no, I’ve got to stop pretending. Otherwise it would have happened later anyway. It was inside her – whatever it was, yes, whatever it was. If I think about how it might have happened during the concert … How often I have dreamed about it since then! The dream raged within me, it consumed and toppled everything, it’s as if I’ve been hollowed out.

  ‘What I always feel in that dream: the chill of the cast-iron tip of the post at the bottom end of the banisters. When we had arrived, I had touched the grainy metal and thought: Like the top of a flight of steps in the Paris Metro. Now my eye fell once more on the metal tip, which grew like a snake’s head from a conical construction of bulging metal. And from now on, you understand, I can no longer distinguish between genuine memory and internal images, which are manipulated and distorted by who knows what forces. If I close my eyes that metal point comes towards me with the violence of a fast zoom. And at the same time I have the feeling that I saw the approaching doom when Lea, hesitantly and with a surly expression, opened the violin case to comply with the young man’s request. He walked timidly over to her, to get a closer look at the famous violin. Lea didn’t let go of it, but he was allowed to run his hands over the lacquer. By now other employees had turned up and a few guests were standing expectantly in the lobby. Lea did a bit of quick tuning, but her movements were negligent, a careless routine. I thought she would start playing there, in the middle of the lobby. But that wasn’t what happened, and the minutes that followed have stayed within me like a stretched film, stretched to tearing point. Once I dreamed I was cutting that film out of my head. If I lost my head in the process – it would still be better than having to watch that film over and over again.