Italian Shoes

by Henning Mankell

  ‘I’ve never been in a desert. Unless the shifting sands at Skagen count as a desert?’

  ‘One of these days I really will go to bed out here. I’ll take the risk of never waking up again. We don’t only have rock musicians around here: we have jazz musicians as well. When I lie down out here and try to go to sleep, I’ll have them standing round me, playing a slow lament.’

  We set off again through the snow. An owl hooted somewhere in the distance. Stars fell out of the sky, but then seemed to be ignited again. I tried to digest what she had told me.

  It turned out to be a very strange evening.

  Louise prepared a meal in the caravan while Harriet and I sat squashed together on the narrow sofa bed. When I said Harriet and I would have to find somewhere to spend the night, Louise insisted that all three of us could sleep in her bed. I was going to protest, but decided not to. Louise produced a flagon of wine that seemed to be very strong and tasted of gooseberries. She then served up a stew which she claimed contained elk meat, and to go with it a variety of vegetables grown by one of her friends in a greenhouse, which he evidently used as a home as well. His name was Olof, he slept among his cucumbers, and was one of the men she boxed with in the spring.

  It wasn’t long before we were all drunk, especially Harriet. She kept dozing off. Louise had an amusing habit of clicking her teeth whenever she emptied a glass. I tried hard to stay sober, but failed.

  Our conversation became increasingly confused and bewildering, but I managed to glean something of the kind of relationship Louise and Harriet had. They were constantly in touch, often quarrelled and hardly ever agreed about anything at all. But they were very fond of each other. I had acquired a family that oozed anger, but was held together by deep-felt love.

  We talked for a long time about dogs – not the kind you take for walks on a lead, but the wild dogs that roam the African plains. My daughter said they reminded her of her friends living in the forest, a herd of African dogs wagging their tails at a herd of northern Swedish boxers. I told them that I had a dog of such mixed race that it was impossible to say exactly what its ancestry was. When Louise realised that the dog roamed around at will on my grandparents’ island, she very much approved. She was also interested to hear about the old cat.

  Harriet eventually fell asleep, thanks to a mixture of exhaustion, spirits and gooseberry wine. Louise gently laid a blanket over her.

  ‘She has always been a snorer. When I was a child I used to pretend that it wasn’t her snoring, but my father who came to visit every night in the form of an invisible but snoring creature. Do you snore?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Thank God for that! Here’s to my father!’

  ‘And here’s to my daughter!’

  She refilled our glasses carelessly and spilled wine on the table. She wiped it with the palm of her hand.

  ‘When I heard the car driving up, I wondered what kind of an old codger Harriet had brought with her this time.’

  ‘Does she often come visiting with different men?’

  ‘Old codgers. Not men. She always manages to find somebody willing to drive her here, and then drive her home again. She often sits in some cafe or other in Stockholm, looking tired and miserable. Somebody always turns up to ask if he can help her, perhaps give her a lift home. Once she’s in the car, with her walker stowed in the boot, she mentions that “home” is a couple of hundred miles or more north, just to the south of Hudiksvall. Surprisingly enough, hardly any of them refuse to take her. But she soon tires of the codger and ditches him for another one. My mother is very impatient. While I was growing up there would be long periods when there was always a different man in her bed on Sunday mornings. I used to love jumping up and down on them and waking them up, so that the men became aware of the unpleasant fact that I existed. But then there were times when she would go for weeks and months without so much as looking at a man.’

  I went outside for a pee. The night was sparkling. I could see through the window how Louise placed a pillow under her mother’s head. I almost burst into tears. I thought perhaps I ought to run away – take the car and get out of there. But I carried on observing her through the window, with a distinct feeling that she knew I was watching her. She suddenly turned her head towards the window and smiled.

  I left the car where it was, and went back inside.

  We sat there in the cramped caravan, drinking and conducting a tentative conversation. I don’t think either of us really knew what we wanted to say. Louise produced some photo albums from a drawer. Some were faded black-and-white snaps, but most were poor-quality coloured pictures from the early 1970s, in the days when everybody had red-eye, and gaped at the photographer like vampires. There were pictures of the woman I had abandoned, and of the daughter I would have wanted more than anything in the world. A little girl, not a fully grown adult. There was something evasive in her expression. As if she didn’t really want to be seen.

  I leafed through the album. She didn’t say much, merely answered the questions I put to her. Who had taken the picture? Where were they? The summer when my daughter was seven, she and Harriet spent some weeks with a man by the name of Richard Munter on the island of Getterön near Varberg. Munter was a powerfully built man, bald, and always had a cigarette in his mouth. I felt pangs of jealousy. This man had been together with my daughter when she was of the age I wished she still was. He had died a few years later, when his affair with Harriet was already over. A bulldozer had toppled over, and he was crushed to death. All that remained of him now were poor-quality photographs with the ever-present cigarette, and the red eyes caused by the camera flash.

  I closed the album: I didn’t have the strength to cope with any more pictures. The level of the wine left in the flagon fell lower and lower. Harriet was asleep. I asked Louise who she wrote letters to. She shook her head.

  ‘Not now. Tomorrow, when we’ve slept off the hangover. We must go to bed now. For the first time in my life I’m going to lie down between my parents.’

  ‘There’s not enough room in that bed for all three of us. I’ll sleep on the floor.’

  ‘There’s room.’

  She gently moved Harriet towards the wall, then folded away the table after first removing the cups and glasses. The bed was extendable, but it seemed obvious that it would be very cramped even so.

  ‘I’m not going to get undressed in front of my father,’ she said. ‘Go outside. I’ll bang on the wall once I’ve snuggled down under the covers.’

  I did as I was told.

  The starry sky was spinning round. I stumbled and fell down in the snow. I had acquired a daughter, and perhaps she would come to like, perhaps even to love the father she had never met before.

  My whole life flashed before my eyes.

  I’d managed to get this far. There might be a few crossroads yet to come. But not too many. My journey was nearly over.

  Louise banged on the caravan wall. She had switched off all the lights and lit a candle standing on the tiny refrigerator. I could see two faces beside each other. Harriet was furthest away, and my daughter lay next to her. There was a narrow strip of bed left for me.

  ‘Blow the candle out,’ said Louise. ‘I don’t want to use it up the first night I’ve ever slept with my parents.’

  I undressed, but kept on my vest and pants, blew the candle out and crept into bed. It was impossible to avoid touching Louise. I noticed to my horror that she was naked.

  ‘Can’t you put on a nightdress?’ I asked. ‘I can’t possibly sleep with you next to me, naked. Surely you can understand that?’

  She clambered over me and put on something that seemed to me to be a dress. Then she came back to bed.

  ‘Time to go to sleep now,’ she said. ‘At long last I’m going to hear my father snoring. I shall lie awake until you’ve gone to sleep.’

  Harriet was muttering in her sleep. Whenever she rolled over, we had to adjust as well. Louise felt warm. I only wished she had been a
little girl sleeping soundly in a nightdress. Not a fully grown woman who had suddenly entered my life.

  I don’t know when I finally fell asleep. It was a long time before the bed seemed to stop spinning round. When I eventually woke up, I was alone.

  The caravan was empty. The car was gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  I COULD SEE from the tracks in the snow how Louise had turned the car round and driven off. It occurred to me that all this had been planned in advance. Harriet had collected me, taken me to meet my unknown daughter, and then the pair of them had taken my car and vanished. I’d been dumped in the forest.

  It was a quarter to ten. The weather had changed, and the temperature was above freezing. Water was dripping from the dirty caravan. I went back inside. I had a headache, and my mouth was parched. There was no sign of a message saying where they had gone. There was a Thermos flask of coffee on the table. I took out a cracked cup advertising a chain of health stores.

  All the time the forest seemed to be creeping up on the caravan.

  The coffee was strong, my hangover painful. I took my cup of coffee out into the fresh air. A cloud of damp mist hovered over the forest. A rifle shot echoed in the distance. I held my breath. It was followed by a second one, then nothing more. It seemed that all sounds were having to queue up before being allowed into the silence – and then only tentatively, one at a time.

  I went back inside and started searching methodically through the caravan. Although it was small and cramped, there was a surprising amount of storage space. Louise kept everything in good order. Her favourite colour for clothes seemed to be chestnut brown, although some items were a shade of deep red. Most garments were in earth colours.

  In a simple wooden chest with the year 1822 painted on the lid, I was amazed to find a large sum of money – thousand-kronor and five-hundred-kronor notes amounting to 47,500 in all. Then I began investigating drawers containing documents and letters.

  The first item I found was a signed photograph of Erich Honecker. It said on the back that it dated from 1986, and had been sent by the DDR Embassy in Stockholm. There were several more photographs in the drawer, all of them signed – Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Africans I had never heard of, but presumed were statesmen. There was also a photograph of an Australian prime minister whose name I couldn’t make out.

  I moved on to the second drawer, which was full of letters. After having read five of them, I began to understand how my daughter spent her time. She wrote letters to political leaders in all parts of the world, protesting about the way in which they were treating their own citizens and also people in other countries. In every envelope was a copy of the letter she had written in her sprawling hand, and the reply she had received. She had written to Erich Honecker in passionate English to the effect that the Berlin Wall was a disgraceful scandal. In reply she had received a photograph of Honecker on a podium waving to a blurred mass of East Germans. Louise had written to Margaret Thatcher urging her to treat the striking miners decently. I couldn’t find a reply from the Iron Lady – in any case there was nothing in the envelope apart from a photograph of Thatcher clutching her handbag tightly. But where had Louise got all that money from? There was no clue here to answer that question.

  That was as far as I got. I heard the sound of a car approaching, closed the drawers and went outside. Louise was driving fast. She braked abruptly in the wet snow.

  Louise took the walker out of the boot.

  ‘We didn’t want to wake you up. I’m delighted to discover that my father is an expert in the art of snoring.’

  She helped Harriet out of the car.

  ‘We’ve been shopping,’ said Harriet with a smile. ‘I’ve bought some stockings, a skirt and a hat.’

  Louise lifted some carrier bags from the back seat.

  ‘My mother never did have any dress sense,’ she said.

  I carried the bags to the caravan while Louise helped Harriet to negotiate the slippery slope.

  ‘We’ve eaten already,’ said Louise. ‘Are you hungry?’

  I was in fact, but shook my head. I didn’t like her borrowing my car without permission.

  Harriet lay down on the bed to rest. I could see that the trip had done her good, but had exhausted her even so. She soon fell asleep. Louise produced the red hat that Harriet had bought.

  ‘It suits her,’ she said. ‘It’s a hat that could have been made specific ally for her.’

  ‘I’ve never seen her wearing a hat. When we were young, we were always bare-headed. Even when it was cold.’

  Louise put the hat back in its bag, and looked round the caravan. Had I left any traces? Would she see that I’d spent the time they were away going through her belongings? She turned to look at me, then at my shoes that were standing on a newspaper next to the door. I’d had them for many years. They were very worn, and several of the lace-holes had split. She stood up, gently placed a blanket over her mother, and put on her jacket.

  ‘Let’s go out,’ she said.

  I was only too pleased to do so. My headache was painful.

  We stood outside the caravan, breathing in the bracing air. It struck me that I had failed to write anything in my logbook for several days now. I don’t like breaking my routine.

  ‘Your car could do with a service,’ said Louise. ‘The brakes are out of balance.’

  ‘It’s good enough for me. Where are we going?’

  ‘We’re going to see a good friend of mine. I want to give you a present.’

  I turned the car round in the slush. When we came to the main road, she told me to turn left. Several lorries laden with logs whipped up clouds of snow. After a couple of miles she told me to turn right: a sign indicated that we were heading for somewhere called Motjärvsbyn. The pine trees came to the very edge of the road, which was badly ploughed. Louise was concentrating on the road ahead. She was humming a tune: I recognised it, but couldn’t remember what it was called.

  We came to a fork, and Louise pointed to the left. After half a mile or so the forest receded and the road was lined with a row of cottages: but they were empty, dead, no smoke rose from their chimneys. Only the cottage at the end of the row, a two-storey wooden building with a battered, green-painted porch, showed any signs of life. A cat was sitting on the steps. A thin wisp of smoke rose up from the chimney.

  ‘Via Salandra in Rome,’ said Louise. ‘That’s a street I’m determined to walk along one of these days. Have you ever been to Rome?’

  ‘I’ve been there several times. But I don’t know the street you mention.’

  Louise got out of the car. I followed her. The timber-built cottage must have been over a hundred years old; opera music could be heard from inside.

  ‘There’s a genius living in this house,’ said Louise. ‘Giaconelli Mateotti. He’s an old man now. But he used to work for the famous shoemaking family Gatto. As a young apprentice, he was taught his trade by the one and only Angelo Gatto, who started his workshop at the beginning of the 1900s. But now Giaconelli has brought his skills to the forest. He grew tired of all the traffic, of all the important customers who were always so impatient and refused to accept the fact that patience and time were essential for the making of good shoes.’

  Louise looked me in the eye, and smiled.

  ‘I want to give you a present,’ she said. ‘I want Giaconelli to make you a pair of shoes. The ones you are wearing are an insult to your feet. Giaconelli has told me how our feet our constructed; the bones and muscles that enable us to walk and run, to stand on tiptoe, to dance ballet even. I know of opera singers who don’t much care about directors or conductors or costumes or the high notes they have to sing – but are passionate about the shoes they wear which they believe enable them to sing properly.’

  I stared at her. This was just like listening to my father. The browbeaten waiter who had long since been banished to the grave. He had also spoken about opera singers and their shoes.

  It was a strange feeling, realising that
my father and my daughter had this in common.

  But the shoes she was offering me? I wanted to object, but she raised her hand, walked up the steps, pushed the cat to one side and opened the front door. The opera music hit us with full force. It was coming from one of the rooms further back in the house. We passed through the rooms that Mateotti lived in, and where he kept his leather and his lasts. On one of the walls was a hand-painted motto that I assumed had been written by Mateotti himself. Somebody by the name of Chuang Chou had said: ‘When the shoe fits, you don’t think about the foot.’

  One room was filled with wooden lasts, stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling. Each pair had a name label hanging from it. Louise pulled several lasts out and I was amazed when I read the names. Giaconelli had made shoes for American presidents, now dead; but their lasts were still here. There were conductors and actors, and people who’d achieved notoriety, for good reason or bad. It was a bewildering experience to make one’s way through all these famous feet. It was as if the lasts themselves had struggled through snow and swamp so that the master I still hadn’t met would be able to make his marvellous shoes.

  ‘Two hundred individual operations,’ said Louise. ‘That’s what’s needed to make just one shoe.’

  ‘They must be extremely expensive,’ I said. ‘When shoes are elevated to the level of jewels.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Giaconelli owes me a favour. He’ll be pleased to reciprocate.’

  Reciprocate.

  When had I last heard anybody use that word in a context like that? I couldn’t remember. Perhaps people who live in the depths of the forest use language in a different way? Perhaps people who live in big cities chase down words as if they were outlaws?

  We continued to make our way through the old cottage. There were lasts and tools everywhere, and one room smelled strongly of the tanned hides piled up on simple trestle tables.