We waited while the doctor, who was about my age, performed the examination. He said afterwards that he would keep her in overnight for observation. He couldn’t find anything specific that might have caused her reaction: it was presumably due to a deterioration in her general condition.
Harriet had fallen asleep again when we left her and emerged once more into the dark night. It was gone two by now; the sky was still cloudless. Louise suddenly stopped.
‘Is she going to die now?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think she’s ready to die yet. She’s a tough lady. If she has the strength to walk over the ice with her walker, I reckon she has a lot of strength left. I think she’ll tell us when the time comes.’
‘I always get hungry when I’m scared,’ said Louise. ‘Some people feel ill, but I simply have to eat.’
We got into the freezing cold car.
I had noticed an all-night hamburger restaurant on the edge of town, so we drove there. Several shaven-headed and overweight youths looking like Teddy boys from the distant fifties were sitting round one of the tables. All of them were drunk, apart from one – there was always one who stayed sober, and did the driving. A big, highly polished Chevrolet was parked outside. There was a smell of hair cream as we passed by their table.
To my astonishment, I heard them talking about Jussi Björling. Louise had also noticed their loud-voiced, drunken conversation. She pointed discreetly at one of the four men, with gold earrings, a beer belly falling out of his jeans and salad dressing smeared round his mouth.
‘Bror Olofsson,’ she said in a half-whisper. ‘The gang call themselves the Bror Brothers. Bror has a lovely singing voice. When he was a young lad he used to sing solos in the church choir. But he stopped all that when he became a teenager and a tearaway. There are those who are convinced he could have gone far – he might even have made it to the opera stage.’
‘Why are there no normal people up here?’ I asked as I studied the menu. ‘Why are all the people we meet so unusual? Italians who make shoes, or a retro Teddy boy who talks about Jussi Björling?’
‘There’s no such thing as normal people,’ she said. ‘That’s a twisted view of the world that politicians want us to believe. That we are all a part of an endless mass of normality, with no possibility, never mind desire to claim that we are different. I’ve often thought that I ought to write to Swedish politicians. To the secret team.’
‘What team is that?’
‘That’s what I call them. The ones with the power. The ones who receive my letters but never answer them – they just send pin-up photos. The secret team with all the power.’
She ordered something called the King’s Platter, while I made do with a large coffee, a small bag of crisps and a hamburger. She really was hungry. She gave the impression of wanting to stuff everything on her tray into her mouth at one go.
It was not a pretty sight. Her table manners embarrassed me.
She’s like an impoverished child, I thought. I remembered a trip I’d made to Sudan with a group of orthopaedists, in order to find out the best way of setting up clinics for landmine casualties requiring artificial limbs. I had watched those penniless children attacking their food in extreme desperation – a few grains of rice, a single vegetable, and perhaps a biscuit sent from some well-meaning country dedicated to assisting the Third World.
In addition to the four Teddy boys who had crept out from under a stone from another age, there were a few lorry drivers dotted around the restaurant. They were hunched over their empty trays, as if they were either asleep, or contemplating their mortality. There was also a couple of young girls, very young – they couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. They sat there whispering to each other, occasionally erupting into laughter before reverting to whispers. I could remember that atmosphere, all those confidential certainties one could pass on and feel informed about as a teenager. We all gave promises but broke them almost immediately, promised to keep secrets but spread them as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, they were far too young to be sitting there in the middle of the night. I was shocked. Shouldn’t they be in bed? Louise noticed what I was looking at. She had gobbled her slap-up meal before I had even taken the lid off my plastic beaker of coffee.
‘I’ve never seen them before,’ she said. ‘They’re not from these parts.’
‘Are you saying you know everybody who lives in this town?’
‘I just know.’
I tried to drink the coffee, but it was too bitter. It seemed to me we ought to go back to the caravan and try to get a few hours’ sleep before we needed to return to the hospital. But we stayed put until dawn. The Teddy boys had gone by then. So had the two girls. It hadn’t registered with me when the lorry drivers left: suddenly they were no longer there. Louise hadn’t noticed when they left either.
‘Some people are like migratory birds,’ she said. ‘Those vast distances they fly are always covered during the night. They just flew away without our noticing them.’
Louise ordered a cup of tea. The two dark-skinned men behind the counter spoke Swedish in a way that was difficult to understand, then lapsed into a language that was very melodic but filled me with melancholy. Louise occasionally asked if we ought to go back to the hospital.
‘They have your mobile number if anything should happen,’ I said. ‘We might just as well stay here.’
What we had in prospect was boundless conversation – a chronicle embracing almost forty years. Perhaps this hamburger joint, with its neon lights and the smell of deep-frying, was the framework we required?
Louise continued telling me about her life. At one point she had dreamt about becoming a mountaineer. When I asked her why, she said it was because she was afraid of heights.
‘Was that really such a good idea? Hanging from ropes on a sheer cliff face when you are scared stiff of climbing a ladder?’
‘I thought I’d get more out of it than people who aren’t scared of heights. I tried it once, up in Lappland. It wasn’t a very steep cliff, but my arms weren’t strong enough. I buried my mountaineering dreams in the heather up there in the far north. By the time I’d got as far south as Sundsvall – which wasn’t all that far, let’s face it – I’d stopped crying over my abandoned dream, and decided to become a juggler instead.’
‘And how did that go?’
‘I can still keep three balls in the air for quite a long time. Or three bottles. But I was never as good as I wanted to be.’
I waited for what was coming next. Somebody opened the squeaky outside door, and there was a blast of cold air before it closed again.
‘I thought I would never find what I was looking for. Especially as I didn’t know what it was. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I knew what I wanted, but didn’t think I’d ever get it.’
‘A father?’
She nodded.
‘I tried to find you in the games I played. Every eleventh man I passed in the street was my father. At midsummer, every Swedish girl picks seven different wild flowers and places them under her pillow in order to dream about the man she’s going to marry: I picked lots and lots of flowers in order to see you. But you never appeared. I remember once being in a church. There was an altarpiece, Jesus soaring up in a beam of light that seemed to be coming from underneath him. Two Roman soldiers were on their knees, terrified of what they had done when they nailed him to the cross. All at once, I was certain that one of those soldiers was you. His face was identical to yours. The first time I saw you, you had a helmet on your head.’
‘Didn’t Harriet have any photos?’
‘I asked her. I searched through all her belongings. There weren’t any.’
‘We took lots of pictures of each other. She was always the one who kept and looked after our snaps.’
‘She told me there weren’t any. If she’s burnt them all, you are the one she’ll have to answer to.’
She went to refill her cup of tea. One of the men wor
king in the kitchen was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall – fast asleep. His jaw had dropped.
I wondered what he was dreaming about.
Now the story of her life featured horses and riders.
‘We never had enough money to pay for me to have riding lessons. Not even when Harriet had been promoted to manageress of a shoe shop, with a better salary. Sometimes I still get angry when I remember how mean she was. I used to turn up for the riding lessons, but I was on the wrong side of the fence: I had to stand outside and watch as the other girls rode around like little female warriors. I had the feeling of being forced to act as both horse and rider. I divided myself up into two parts: part of me was the horse and the other part the rider. When I was feeling good, and found it easy to get up in the morning, I would sit on the horse and there would be no split in my life. But when I didn’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning, it was as if I was the horse – as if I’d retired to a corner of the paddock and refused to respond, no matter how much they whipped me. I tried to feel that I and the horse were one and the same. I think that doing that helped me to survive all the difficulties I experienced as a child. Perhaps later as well. I sit on my horse, and my horse carries me – except when I jump off of my own accord.’
She stopped abruptly, as if she regretted saying what she had said.
Five o’clock came round. We were the only customers. The man leaning against the wall was still asleep. The other one was slowly and laboriously filling the half-empty sugar bowls.
Out of the blue, Louise suddenly exclaimed: ‘Caravaggio! I’ve no idea why I just started thinking about him, and his furious outbursts and his life-threatening knives. Perhaps because if he’d lived in our time, he might well have painted this hamburger bar, and people like you and me.’
Caravaggio the artist? I couldn’t see any paintings in my mind’s eye, but I recognised the name. A vague impression of dark colours, always with dramatic motifs, edged its way into my tired brain.
‘I don’t know anything about art.’
‘Nor do I. But I once saw a painting of a man holding a decapitated head in his hand. When I realised that the artist had depicted his own head, I felt I really had to find out more about him. I made up my mind to visit every single place where his pictures were hung. It was not enough to look at reproductions in books. Instead of making a pilgrimage to monasteries or churches, I started following in Caravaggio’s tracks. As soon as I had managed to save up enough money, I set off for Madrid and other places where his paintings could be seen. I lived as cheaply as possible, sometimes even sleeping rough on park benches. But I have seen his pictures, I’ve got to know the people he painted and turned them into my companions. I have a long way to go yet though. You’re welcome to pay for the journeys I still have to make.’
‘I’m not a rich man.’
‘I thought doctors were paid pretty well?’
‘It’s many years since I worked as a doctor. I’m a pensioner.’
‘With no money in the bank?’
Didn’t she believe me? I decided that it was the time of day (or night) and the stuffy atmosphere making me suspicious. The neon tubes on the ceiling were not illuminating us, they were staring down at our heads, keeping watch over us.
She continued talking about Caravaggio, and eventually I began to understand some of the passion that filled her. She was a museum, slowly developing each room with her own interpretation of the great painter’s life’s work. As far as she was concerned, he wasn’t somebody who had lived more than four hundred years ago, but was ensconced in a deserted house in the forests surrounding her caravan.
The occasional early bird started drifting into the bar and stood at the counter, reading the menu. ‘Monster Meal, Mega-Monster, Mini-Monster, Night Owl’s Menu.’ It occurred to me that there were important stories to be told even in scruffy restaurants like this one. Just for a moment, this unpleasant, smelly place was transformed into an art gallery.
My daughter talked about Caravaggio as if he had been a close relative, a brother, or a man she was in love with and dreamed of living with.
He was born Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. His father, Fermi, had died when he was six years old. He barely remembered him; his father was just another of the shadows in his life, an unfinished portrait in one of his big inner galleries. His mother lived rather longer, until he was nineteen. But all she inspired was silence, a rancorous, soundless fury.
Louise talked about a portrait of Caravaggio made by an artist called Leoni using red and black chalk. It was like an ancient police ‘Wanted’ notice posted on a house wall. Red and black, charcoal and blood. He peers at us from out of the picture, attentive, evasive. Do we really exist, or are we merely figments of his imagination? He has dark hair, a beard, a powerful nose, eyes with highly arched brows – a handsome man, some would say. Others maintained that he was nothing remarkable, a criminal type, filled with violence and hatred, despite his enormous ability to depict people and movement.
As if reciting a verse of a hymn she had learned off by heart, she quoted a cardinal whose name might have been Borromeo – I’m not sure I heard it properly. He wrote that ‘I became aware of an artist in Rome who behaved badly, had disgusting habits, was always dressed in ragged and filthy clothes. This painter, who was notorious for his cantankerous ways and his brutality, produced no art of significance. He used his paintbrushes to produce only taverns, drunkards, sly prophetesses and actors. Hard though it may be to understand, he took pleasure in portraying these wretched people.’
Caravaggio was a supremely gifted artist, but also a very dangerous man. He had a violent temperament, and was always looking for trouble. He fought with his fists and sometimes with knives, and once murdered a man as a result of a quarrel over a point in a tennis game. But above all else, he was dangerous because in his paintings he confessed that he was afraid. The fact that he didn’t conceal his fear in the shadows made – and still makes – him dangerous.
Louise talked about Caravaggio, and she also talked about death. It is visible in all his paintings, in the hole made by a maggot in an apple on top of a basket of fruit, or in the eyes of someone who is about to be decapitated.
She said that Caravaggio never found what he was looking for. He always settled for something else. Such as the horses he painted, their frothing mouths an expression of the fury he had inside himself.
He painted everything. But he never painted the sea.
Louise said that she was so deeply moved by his work because it offered her proximity. There was always a space in his pictures where she could place herself. She could be one of the people in his canvases, and she didn’t need to be afraid that they might chase her away. She had often sought consolation in his paintings, in the lovingly drawn details, where his brushstrokes had become fingertips stroking the faces he conjured up in his dark colours.
Louise transformed the foul-smelling hamburger bar into a beach on the Italian coast on 16 July 1609. The heat is oppressive. Caravaggio is walking on the sands somewhere to the north of Rome, washed ashore in the form of human jetsam. A little felucca (whatever that might be – Louise never explained) has sailed away. On board the ship are his paintings and paintbrushes, his oils and a kitbag with his ragged and filthy clothes and shoes. He is alone on the sands, the Roman summer is stiflingly hot, perhaps a gentle breeze cools him out there at the water’s edge, but there are also mosquitoes swarming around, mosquitoes that bite him, injecting poison into his bloodstream. As he lies exhausted and curled up on the beach during the hot, humid nights, they bite him over and over again and the malaria parasites begin to multiply in his liver. The first attack of fever catches him unaware. He doesn’t know he’s going to die, but the paintings he hasn’t yet completed but that he carries inside him will soon become petrified in his brain. ‘Life is a dream impossible to pin down,’ he had once said. Or perhaps it was Louise who had invented this poetic truth.
I listened in asto
nished admiration. Only now had I seen who she really was. I had a daughter who knew something about what it means to be a human being.
I no longer needed to doubt whether the long-dead Caravaggio was one of her closest friends. She could communicate with the dead just as well as with the living. Perhaps even better?
She carried on talking until she suddenly fell silent. The man behind the counter had woken up. He yawned as he opened a plastic bag of chips that he tipped into the deep-fryer.
We sat there for a long time without speaking. Then she stood up and went to refill her cup.
When she came back I told her how I had amputated the wrong arm of a patient. I hadn’t thought about what to say, it simply tumbled out, as if it were inevitable that I should now describe the incident that I had hitherto thought was the most significant happening in my life. At first she didn’t seem to understand that what I was telling her had actually happened to me. But the penny dropped in the end. That fatal mistake had happened twelve years ago. I was given a warning. That would hardly have been the end of my career if I had accepted it, but I thought it was unjust. I defended myself by insisting that I had been placed in an impossible situation. Waiting lists were growing longer and longer, but at the same time cutbacks were being enforced. All I did was work, day in and day out. And one day the safety net failed. During an operation shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, a young woman lost her healthy right arm, just above her elbow. It was not a complicated operation – not that an amputation is ever a routine matter, but there was nothing to make me aware that I had made a fatal mistake.
‘How is it possible?’ Louise asked when I had finished talking.
‘It just is possible,’ I said. ‘If you live long enough, you’ll realise that nothing is impossible.’
‘I’m intending to live for a long time,’ she said. ‘Why do you sound so angry? Why do you become so unpleasant?’
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