Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘Lea walked to the stairs, lifted her long dress so as not to stumble, and stopped on the third step – yes, it was the third, exactly the third. She turned around and turned to her audience, so to speak. But she didn’t look at us, her eyes were lowered, dark and distracted, it seemed to me. There was no reason for her not to start playing straight away. No discernible reason. A lighter clicked beside me. I turned violently around and peremptorily gestured to the man not to light his cigarette. Lea was looking straight ahead, like a soulless statue. It must have been prepared during those few seconds.

  ‘At last she took the violin and began to play. It was the first few bars of the evening’s Mozart Concerto. Suddenly she stopped, apparently mid-note. The interruption was so abrupt that the silence that followed was almost painful. For one brief moment I thought that was it, she’d had enough and wanted to go to bed. Or did I really think that? Even for a brief taster of her playing the interruption was too bizarre and abrupt, without any feeling for musical form. And the alienation in it was matched by the expression on Lea’s face. Even on the way to the concert I had thought she had put on very pale make-up. She sometimes did that; we could never agree on that. And now, when she began to play again, that pale powder became the white mask of Loyola de Colón.

  ‘Because Lea was playing, as she had done some time ago at home in the stairway, the music we had heard back then in Bern railway station. She played it as I had never heard her play before: furiously, with strokes of the bow that were so violent they scratched, one bow-hair after another tore, the white horsehairs whipped her face, it was a vision of defiance, despair and neglect, trickles of mascara ran down from behind her closed eyelids; now we could see the tears as well. Lea fought against them, one last fight. She was still a violinist who defended herself against the inner onslaught, with her fingers firmly on the strings, she pressed her lids against her eyeballs, pressed and pressed, the bow started sliding, the notes slid about, a woman beside me gasped, and then Lea, with her eyes full of tears, lowered the violin.

  ‘It had hurt, and even now it hurts to see her standing there on the stairs, exhausted, defeated, destroyed. But it wasn’t yet a disaster. A very few people had seen it and would put it down to exhaustion. ¡Pobrecita! Someone behind me whispered.

  ‘It was only when Lea lowered her bow and gripped the violin by the neck with both hands that I knew: It’s over.’

  Van Vliet stood up and walked to the window. He raised his arms, leaned forward and pressed his open palms against the glass. In that strange posture, supporting himself and yet looking as if he was trying to plunge through the glass into the depths below, in a rough and halting voice he described the event that he had wanted with all his strength to remove from his head.

  ‘She pulled the violin high over her head, swung it backwards slightly to get a better run-up, and then she brought the back of it down on the metal point of the newel post. I wished she had at least closed her eyes as a sign that it hurt her somewhere deep within. But her gaze accompanied it all, the swing and the splintering, a gaze from eyes wide open and disturbed. And that was only the beginning. The back of the violin had burst open, the metal point had caught on the splintered edge of the opening, Lea tugged and levered; there were sounds of crunching and splintering; helpless rage transformed her features into a grimace. Now the violin was free again, then she pulled it up once more, and now she brought the bridge down on the metal point, the strings whirred and hummed, the bridge was shattered, the metal had drilled through one of the f-holes and torn it open.

  ‘A man in a waiter’s jacket stepped towards her and tried to stop her. He was the first one to overcome the general paralysis. I can’t forgive myself for not getting to her first. She had managed to free the violin and swung it at the man like a weapon. He recoiled and let his arms dangle. Then Lea continued with her work of destruction: again and again she brought the smashed violin down on the metal, from in front and from behind, her hair stood up in a tangle from her head – no, she no longer looked like a Fury, that had only been for a moment; more and more she was a desperate little girl, breaking her toy out of rage and grief, shaken by sobs that were impossible to listen to, so that the people eventually walked away.

  ‘The violin was stuck on the metal when Lea collapsed at last, slipped down a step and reached weakly for the newel post. It was only now that I managed to get to her, embraced her and ran my hand over her hair. The sobbing stopped. I hoped she might have at least a few moments of relaxed exhaustion. But her body had already stiffened again. I felt her already beginning to suffocate on what had happened, a suffocation that ate its way further and further inside her. When I saw her behind the woodpile in Saint-Rémy – and also when she appeared in the binoculars – I felt that stiffening, suffocating body in my arms.’

  Meant for me and not for me. He didn’t say it, but the silence in the room was full of it. Only now did I really understand how it must have felt for him when the doctor said: C’est de votre fille qu’il s’agit, and: You’re not moving to Saint-Rémy.

  During the night I tried to recreate part of the drama in my head. Leslie had painted for a while, quite well, and I had brought her painting materials at boarding school, and an easel too. When she grew slack I urged her to keep going and asked her on the telephone. I imagined what it would have been like if she had picked up the kitchen knife one day and shredded her paintings, above all the ones that I liked and had hung up in the office at the clinic. It was only fantasy, only a shadow, a breath compared to the paintings that Van Vliet had taken with him from the hotel in Stockholm. And yet it gave me gooseflesh.

  ‘No more alcohol,’ I said to him, and later gave him a sleeping pill. Like the Swedish doctor who gave Lea a tranquillizing injection. Van Vliet had sat by her bed all night. This is the end. Again and again that one thought, that internal rhythm, that sound of finality. The end of Lea’s life with music. The end of his professional life, because now he had no way of paying back the embezzled money. The end of freedom, because eventually it would come to light. Was it also the end of her affection for him?

  They were sitting at Marie’s apartment on the sofa with the chintz cushion. He was sitting with her at the kitchen table and heard her asking if she could go to Genoa and look at Paganini’s violin. He held her in his arms before she went to her school leaving exam. He also thought about how they hadn’t been able to draw up a list of guests when they wanted to celebrate her first full-size violin with a party. I’d rather practise. He also produced that sentence, which he later wanted to thrust into the dark gaze of the Maghrebi, along with Lea’s tears of joy at the fair when she drew the gold ring. What had he done wrong? What did he have to reproach himself with? The wrong actions? The wrong feelings? Did such a thing even exist: right and wrong feeling? Feelings – weren’t they just the way they were, full stop?

  He had rented a car in Stockholm and driven home with Lea. She took some pills and slept a lot. When she was awake and their eyes met, that smile appeared on her face.

  ‘The way you smile at someone towards whom you feel guilty, a guilt that can never be eradicated, a guilt that buries everything beneath it, and in that smile you reveal that you know as much. A smile that starts where all pleading for forgiveness stops. A smile as the only solution for not turning to stone.’

  Sometimes he thought they were travelling in the wrong direction; a better choice would have been the north, Lapland, darkness, flight. Then again he wanted to forget that Scandinavia even existed. Putting the ruined fragments of the violin back together, splinter by splinter, and when the last one was reinserted into the old, immaculate form and covered with the magical lacquer whose composition must surely be well known: forget everything to do with that newel post and its snaky tip. Forget, just forget. They had come back to the hotel and calmly climbed the stairs. Bonne nuit, Lea had said. She always said that when they were travelling.

  The boy with the ridiculous head and the ugly glasses had, they t
old him, spent hours creeping around on the floor searching for every splinter, even the smallest ones that had disappeared among the threads of the carpet. He hadn’t been able to bear the thought that a violin by Guarneri del Gesù had been irrevocably destroyed.

  Every now and again Van Vliet glanced at the back seat: the fragments hadn’t fit properly into the violin case, and lay in a big plastic bag beside it. At rest stops his eye fell regularly on the dustbins. The bag bore the name of a Stockholm supermarket. That clue had to disappear. But it was impossible. Signor Buio had run his bony, liver-spotted hand over the violin before closing the lid and handing Van Vliet the shabby case.

  ‘Le violon,’ Lea sometimes murmured, half in her sleep. Then he ran his hand mutely over her shoulder and her arm. Since the disaster he hadn’t managed to embrace her; he hadn’t even stroked her hair. But at the same time he yearned to do so and was in despair about the paralysis forbidding it. When he had wiped the sweat from her forehead during the night, it had been the gesture of a nurse. Sometimes he had bent down to her to kiss her on the forehead. He hadn’t managed to do it.

  When he dozed off towards morning he was haunted by an image from a dream that he hadn’t shaken off even now: the boy from hotel reception was trying in vain to free the skewered violin from the newel post. He pulled and tugged and twisted, it crunched and groaned and splintered. He couldn’t do it. He simply couldn’t do it.

  He had stood for a long time by the railing on the ferry, looking into the night, before reaching for the phone and calling his sister Agnetha. We had been together for three days now, three long days of storytelling, during which we had slipped through thirteen years and he had never once mentioned his sister. It had always sounded as if he were an only child.

  ‘Why, damn it all, must she have that Swedish name of all names? People always said: ABBA! And ABBA didn’t even exist in 1955. It was some fashion model in a magazine that made my mother think of it. She was addicted to the gossip in the glossy magazines. “Imagine: not Agnes and not Agatha, no: Agnetha!” she said.

  ‘That was before their marriage broke down and love plunged from the stars into the dust. When my father later related the episode, he took my mother’s hand, deformed by gout, and then you could sense that the stars had once existed. And that was why there was always a shimmer of starlight on Agnetha, a bit of gold dust, as if she had a fine, invisible strand of gold in her hair. But there’s nothing radiant about her. She has always been a sound, unimaginative, hard-working girl who didn’t like my anarchism and immoderation. “You’re a steamroller,” she would say. Of course, she thought I was an inadequate father, so that I wanted to prove the opposite to her.

  ‘That was why it was hard to call her now. I didn’t mention the violin. Breakdown – that was enough.

  ‘“Dr Meridjen,” she said immediately. “We need to get Lea out of the country, away from the press. He’s good, very good, and the clinic has an excellent reputation, and she’ll also be in the French language, Cécile’s language, I think that’s important.”

  ‘She’s a clinical psychologist and has worked with the Maghrebi in Montpellier. She’s always admired him, and maybe even more than that.

  ‘She had herself well under control when she saw Lea, but she was shocked. She asked to see the pills that the Swedish doctor had given her, and shook her head irritably. I hadn’t seen my sister for years and was amazed at the maturity and competence expressed by everything about her. She wanted to know everything. I just said it had been a valuable violin.

  ‘Lea slept. We were sitting in the kitchen. Agnetha saw how exhausted I was after the long journey. A few hours in a motel was all I’d had.

  ‘“What do we know about these things!” I said.

  ‘“Yes,” she said. Then she stepped behind me, her brother, who crushed everything in his path with his arrogance, and put her arms around my neck.

  ‘“Martijn,” she said. Afterwards she was the only one who stood by me.’

  What do we know? Before, as part of the narrative, those words had been stressed with the controlled detachment of the storyteller. Now they exploded from him roughly and impetuously.

  ‘What, damn it all, do we know? They all act as if they know what’s happened. Agnetha, the Maghrebi. I’ve even heard this nonsense from my colleagues. We know nothing about these things! Nothing!’

  He was sitting in an armchair. Now he leaned forwards, rested his elbows on his knees and let his head dangle as if into the void. He was shaken by a dry sob; sometimes it sounded like coughing. His despair discharged itself in an uncontrollable, animal quivering and twitching. I wanted to do what Agnetha had done, when she stepped behind him. But it was impossible not to do anything. In the end I knelt on the floor in front of him and drew his head into my arms. It took a few minutes for the shaking to calm down and finally ebb away. I pulled him up by the shoulders until he was sitting straight in his chair. I have seen a lot of sick and exhausted people. But this – this was something else. I wish I could erase the image of his head falling against the back of the armchair.

  27

  I LEFT THE CONNECTING DOOR ajar and the light on. Then I went down to the hotel library as I had done the previous night. I have been one acquainted with the night. / … I have outwalked the furthest city light. / I have looked down the saddest city lane. Apart from Whitman and Auden, Robert Frost was the third poet that Liliane had shown me. And miles to go before I sleep. She had been furious that all these lines, when spoken, sounded like hackneyed phrases from a pop song. ‘Poetry,’ she had said, ‘is a strictly solitary affair; solipsistic, even. I ought not to talk to you about it. But … well …’

  A nurse who knew the word solipsistic. Why, Liliane, did you have to die in that accident? You could have wiped the sweat from my brow even in India. I tried to walk with her through the winter dawn of Boston and hear her saying grand, her Irish accent. It didn’t work. Everything was pallid, lifeless, far away. Instead I felt Martijn van Vliet’s head in my arms and smelled the bitter odour of his ruffled hair.

  I was afraid of what was to come. Afterwards she was the only one who stood by me. When they brought him up before the judge, it couldn’t mean anything else.

  And then Lea’s death. Wasn’t Stockholm already enough? More than anyone could bear? That was my last trip to Saint-Rémy … Yes, I think it was the last trip. Was the interpretation still open?

  I had to prevent it. Did I have to? Could I, even? Where incurable illnesses were concerned – there I had a clear and unshakeable opinion. A matter of dignity. But how did that apply here?

  It was nearly midnight. I still called Paul. ‘If someone simply can’t go on,’ I said, ‘simply can’t go on …’ I was speaking in riddles, he thought. Was everything all right?

  Why did I have no friends? People who could slip without guidance into the world of my thoughts and understood without explanation? What had Liliane said? I hate patronizing. But it wasn’t about patronizing anyone. What exactly was it about?

  I called Leslie. She had been sleeping and wanted to have a coffee first. She had sounded tense and I had thought it was annoyance. But when she called back she sounded composed and for a moment I thought she was happy that I had called.

  If someone simply can’t go on, she said, you have to let them do what they must, and even help them. She was talking about patients and I was glad that we had reached the same opinion independently. But this was about something else. Tragedy … Well, yes, she said, you could help someone to overcome it … but of course I knew that myself …

  How could I have expected anyone to say anything beyond platitudes? Anyone who hadn’t held Van Vliet’s head in his hands?

  Leslie was unhappy when she sensed my disappointment. ‘The day before yesterday, questions about boarding schools and instruments, and now … ’

  I was glad we were talking to each other more often, I said.

  28

  WITHOUT LEA the apartment was empty, and that e
mptiness sometimes came towards Van Vliet on the stairs. Then he turned around and went to eat. And drink.

  He could barely endure the silence either. None the less he didn’t hear a single note of music for a whole year. Films were also impossible, there was music in them. He usually watched television with the sound off. The emptiness and the silence – he sensed it, even though he couldn’t have explained it – were related to the bleaching that had afflicted Lea on her last visit to Marie, and which he had seen before him once again when walking to Signor Buio’s at night. Sometimes his office bleached out, too, usually at nightfall. The light meant that it was impossible, but it was still the case. If someone had come in at such moments, he might have shot them. That was only one of many things that estranged him from himself. Cross-country skiing in the Oberland did him good. But he went there only when he was sure: he wouldn’t do it. There was no question of leaving Lea in the lurch. In spite of the Maghrebi. Partly because of him.

  Over breakfast Van Vliet showed no sign of what had happened in the night. He was freshly shaven. He was wearing a dark blue fisherman’s pullover and looked healthy and athletic, like a vacationer, slightly tanned. Not at all like someone who preferred to let someone else take the tiller. He had the relaxed face of someone who had been able to flee his worries in a deep sleep. I didn’t know if the sleeping pill had washed away the memory of the collapse. Whether he remembered me holding him.