Lucca

by Jens Christian Grøndahl

  In reality she did not at all mind being a mystery to herself. When she was in the train on her way back from Italy she felt glad not to have been to Lucca. She pictured Giorgio, her own Giorgio, in front of the Baptistery. His gesture, at once ashamed and relieved, as he turned round and walked away without looking back. She was no longer his daughter, nor Else’s for that matter. She was her own, no one else’s. She thought of Ivan’s pale erect cock in the semi-darkness of the cottage and his dismayed expression when she had kicked him onto the floor. She would not try to stop Else being happy. When the train arrived in Munich she tore up Giorgio’s postcard. She gazed for a while at the Virgin Mary’s face, the child’s foot, the folds of the garments and the faded gold before throwing the pieces into the ashtray and getting her bag down from the luggage rack.

  As time went on and she learned to work at a role and build up her characters with the aid of meticulous detail, it seemed to her that she herself held something of every single role she played. The playwrights also showed her how people resemble each other more than they care to admit. She had long talks with her sparse-haired friend about Peer Gynt and about the comparison of selfhood with an onion whose innermost core, when one peels it, turns out to be empty. He said that was what it had been like with the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The holiest of holies, where none might enter, had been nothing but an empty room deep inside the temple. He laughed savagely so she could see his sharp canine teeth, and for a moment she wasn’t sure whether it was his wolfish grin or the thought of the innermost emptiness of the onion and the temple, that made her shudder.

  She thought again of the town of Lucca which at the last moment she had decided not to visit. One day she would go there. Maybe she would go with her lover. She fantasised sitting in a car approaching the curve where she had got off the bus, between the olive grove and the slope of cypresses. She could see no further than where the road made a bend, just as she could not see who was behind the wheel. She replied to her cynical friend that all his emptiness was probably nothing in itself without what was outside, whether it was rings of onion or temple courtyards. That frightful emptiness was nothing more than an opening onto what you could not know. He looked at her sluggishly, putting his head back as he drank his beer, but she thought that was actually not a bad answer. Perhaps she was no more than a frame around the secret hollow space where something would one day show its face.

  The telephone was still ringing. Maybe it was Otto . . . she sat up with a start, leapt out of bed and ran naked onto the landing and downstairs, two steps at a time so she nearly stumbled. Maybe he had guessed she had moved back home. It wasn’t so hard to guess. Who would call Else apart from him? Everyone knew she went to the country on holiday and stayed there the whole time. Maybe he regretted the brutal way he had dropped her. Maybe he just regretted . . . she forbade herself to think the thought to the end. But they ought to be able to talk about it. After all, they had lived together for two years.

  As she rushed through the house she thought of his lazy voice. She could hear it already, maybe he would suggest they met for a chat. The loss overwhelmed her again. She had believed they belonged together. He was still the first man who had made her feel like that, whether he wanted her or not. She had felt he saw her as she was, and she had no longer dreamed of being anyone other than the one his eyes had lit on. His hard blue eyes had penetrated into her innermost place, and it had not been empty. She had been there the whole time, invisible in the darkness as she had been when she hid in Else and Giorgio’s wardrobe and spied through the keyhole’s little dot of light, until the light was extinguished because he had guessed where she was. Next second the door was torn open with a thrilling creak, so the light and his merry eyes fell on her simultaneously, and it made her jump as if she could already feel his hands under her arms picking her up.

  She tried to quieten her breathing before picking up the receiver. It was Harry Wiener. Did he disturb her in the middle of her morning gymnastics? She said she had been out in the garden when she heard the telephone. She thought the garden sounded better than bed. She could hear him smile as he talked to her in his old-fashioned, well-articulated voice. Had she received her script? Yes, thank you. She thought of the script bound in red card that was on the floor beside her bed. She had not opened it yet, she had not been able to concentrate. Every time she picked it up she thought of Otto and how he had seemed jealous, no doubt to make it easier for himself.

  She recalled his silence the day they swam and her own misgivings because she had not told him Harry Wiener had visited the dressing room after the performance to praise her empathetic presentation so fulsomely. Would everything have looked different if she had woken him when she got home and told him about the Gypsy King’s unsuccessful efforts? Was there actually no unknown mulatto model somewhere in the background as Miriam had imagined? Did Otto really think she had started something with the old drama guru? That she had fallen for his camel-hair coat and his unruly silver-grey locks? Had she herself ruined everything?

  Although rehearsals were not due to begin for another few months, Harry Wiener said, it was his habit to meet the actors in good time so they could chat for a bit. He sounded as if he had forgotten his familiarity in the car when he drove her home. Asking if he might kiss her. What did she think of the role, then? She grew hot and bothered. It was hard to talk on the telephone. Exactly, replied the Gypsy King with another invisible smile. That was why he was phoning. That is, he was phoning to suggest they met over a cup of tea. Lucca suddenly felt he sounded a touch flustered beneath the self-assured, cultivated varnish. As if after all he had not quite been able to repress how he had compromised himself. Was she doing anything that afternoon? Lucca said she would just look at her diary.

  She stood with the receiver in her hand and looked down at herself. She had got a tan, the mahogany colour stopped in a curve between her hips and stomach, where her own paler colour disappeared under the tuft of curly hair. She raised the receiver again. No, she wasn’t doing anything. Right, then, how about five o’clock? She thanked him. For the role, she added. He was the one to say thank you. It has been yours for a long time, he replied. It was a strange reply, she thought, when she had hung up. She was just about to pick up the receiver again and dial Otto’s number, but held back, like all the other times she had been about to give in to her need to hear his voice, regardless of what it would have to say, hear he still existed. She made coffee and took it upstairs, pulled a T-shirt over her head and sat in bed with the red script.

  She had spent most of the week in bed or in the garden, she didn’t feel like seeing anyone. She had lain weeping or staring at the grass and the clouds and the square of sunshine that crossed her wall in the course of the day. She kept to her room if she was not in the garden. When she walked through the downstairs rooms, Else’s furniture and things seemed like silent witnesses waiting only to gossip about her. But what would they have gossiped about if they could? Her attacks of weeping? Her stony immobility when she lay prone, as if waiting for someone to come and find her?

  She had eaten nothing but pot noodles and frozen pizzas for a week. She had lost weight, she had to tighten the belt of her jeans two holes more than usual. Her hair hung loose and greasy from the loose knot at the neck, she had not bothered to wash it, and she had pimples on her forehead and chin. She had not had pimples since she was fourteen, and when she pressed them out they left big pink scars. As a whole she did not look exactly ravishing as she cycled off in Else’s old Faroese sweater with the script in a plastic bag on her luggage carrier. But she looked as she ought to, she thought, as she caught sight of herself in the mirror on her way through the hall. She wasn’t going to make an impression on anyone and certainly not on the Gypsy King. Then she would see if she really had deserved her part.

  She had collected her cycle from Otto’s entrance the day after she took a taxi to Miriam’s with her things. She had stood for a long time on the corner opposite the Egyptian r
estaurant before plucking up courage, afraid he might suddenly turn up and at the same time hoping he would. Suddenly the street seemed a strange, hostile place, the same street she had cycled along the evening before when they came back from swimming. She had looked at the golden evening sky between the buildings and felt at home. It was already in the past, another life. It took no more, a single sentence was enough. It will be best if we stop now . . . She knew she would not get him back, and yet she could not go on. It was like standing on the edge of an abyss knowing that the next step is a step out into the blue.

  That was how it must have been for Daniel two years earlier when she stood in his apartment looking out at the rain as she said what she had to say. Daniel, with his stoop and his short sight. He had sat staring down at his black and white keys as if they could tell him what music to play now. But he had found it, obviously, when she ran into him that evening at a bar, cheerful and wearing black like a real artist and with a large-bosomed lady. Lucca asked herself whether they were real, his loving muse’s splendid breasts. She smiled at the thought of Daniel’s unhappy face. You survived, she knew that, but she didn’t want to know it. Who would be the next number in the series? What kind of face would she kiss now, fantasising about what was hidden behind the unknown eyes? Any old pleasant face with an invisible number on its forehead. It was probably never Christmas on grown-up calendars.

  She thought of Else, who had entrenched herself behind her work and her women friends, because there was more to life than love, as she said. The problem was just that she did not start to question what was really interesting until love came to an end. The something more in life, was it anything but a substitute? One evening she had called in a strange voice and said she was going to swallow all the pills in the medicine cupboard. When Lucca arrived at the villa she had filled herself with, not pills, but Ivan’s whisky. He had gone off to New York with a girl of twenty-three. He too had come out with it plainly. Well, not quite. He had said he couldn’t feel whole-hearted about her, Else brought out, with a mouth quivering with wounded pride and held-back tears. He had said they had slipped away from each other, although what he probably meant was that his new girlfriend had a tighter cunt. Lucca held her mother’s head on her lap and stroked her hair as she wept. What she could have told her there was no point in telling now. Else could have asked about it herself. It must at least have occurred to her that something like that could have happened. Not least now when Ivan had hopped off with a girl her daughter’s age. She must have noticed Ivan’s discreet glances at Lucca’s long legs. But she didn’t ask. Poor old, flabby cunt, mumbled Lucca, and Else’s weeping changed into hollow, grating laughter. The next day she ordered a removal van and had Ivan’s furniture taken to the tip. He never even complained.

  The sky had turned a hard blue and the sun glittered in the puddles after the downpour of the night. The water splashed around her spokes, it was windy and the air was full of whirling dust and flashing reflections which made it seem the wind was making the light gleam in everything that moved. As Lucca cycled through town she thought of the years which had passed since her trip to Florence. The years before she met Otto and believed that at last here was someone who saw into the depths of her, right in where she herself could not reach. She remembered the men she had known and remembered her hesitation, always the same whenever she was about to surrender, when for a fleeting second she already saw the end of the story that was just starting.

  A second which came every time, while everything was still only circling movement and significant glances. A disconnected second where it became so strange, so hazardous, this game that was always played blindly, with bodies as pawns. But then she had closed her eyes in a hurry and kissed them, amazed at her own haste. She had hastened to kiss them before she began to doubt too much. She had hurried on into a fresh beginning, for there was no point in hesitating. There had to be more beginnings, all the time, if something more was to come of it one day, and she had begun and begun, sometimes for sheer fun, at others with a secret plan to sound out luck.

  But all too soon once more it had been nothing but two bodies in a room going over the usual phrases surrounded by the usual furnishings with a view over the usual streets and days. It had turned out in the usual way. The usual slight lassitude during the same sweet assurances. The same excitement, the same brief dizzy dive from the usual feverish peaks of desire. For a time it was wildly thrilling again to meet a strange man at strange secret places and launch into new bold methods, screaming and yelling, hair unleashed. But either they grew too busy talking about the future, or they were suddenly too busy to meet, if she ventured to say something about tomorrow or next year. Some of them were married and dreamed of being divorced, while others wouldn’t dream of getting divorced even though they were bored with their spouse. Then there were those who were not married and became overwhelmed with claustrophobia at the mere thought of it, and finally those who had just split up and needed time, as they said. As if they had anything else.

  When she met Daniel she was certainly not looking for yet another love affair. She had just dropped a film cameraman who had left his wife, convinced he was going to begin on a new and completely different life with Lucca. At that time she was in love with a lawyer who had no intention of leaving his wife but who nevertheless called her at intervals of weeks and months to ask her to meet him at some hotel or other. She knew there was no future in it, but she kept seeing him even though Miriam scolded her for allowing herself to be used, as she said. He had caught sight of her without her knowledge. Craftily, discreetly, he had found out who she was, what she did and where she lived. He had kept watch on her from a distance, until finally one day he made himself known with a brief anonymous letter in which he suggested they met at a café. She gave in to her curiosity and went along. The moment when she entered the café without knowing who she was going to meet was perhaps the most intense in their whole relationship.

  She did something to him, he had said. That was the closest he came to expressing his feelings. She had been practically obsessed, she told Miriam later, by his remarkable ability to transform himself. When they met at a restaurant he was the cool arrogant solicitor in a distinguished suit, but as soon as they were in the hotel room he turned into a ferocious beast who threw himself over her with sudden violent rage. He always blindfolded her when she had undressed. That was how he wanted her. She never saw him naked and it fascinated her, when she lay in the hotel bed with her eyes covered, delivered over to his gaze and his ferocity.

  After six months he stopped calling her, and every time she phoned his office, his secretary said he was in a meeting. Lucca pondered on the expression, but meetings were obviously something you could get stuck in. She waited for weeks until one day she happened to pass him in the street, coming out of a restaurant with another suit. Her beloved gave her a blank look as he passed, as if they had never met. She was shattered, until one evening Miriam asked if she might only be in love with him because she couldn’t have him.

  She met Daniel at a party. Miriam had dragged her along, she didn’t know anyone there. She and Daniel left at the same time and walked through the town together. He suddenly started to talk about twelve-tone music, just as he had done while they were in the kitchen because neither of them felt like dancing. He was intelligent but very innocent as well, and she was charmed by his unworldly decency and suffering face. She sensed he had no idea of how to go about moving from words to action, so to speak. When he paused she kissed him and asked where he lived.

  He fell in love without reservation, and his sincerity made her feel depraved, whereas with the lawyer she felt as young as a seduced maiden, defenceless against his raging lust. For a while she rather enjoyed her own cynicism, when she went straight from an assignation with the lawyer to Daniel in his comfortless suburb, to sit on his bed and drink tea out of his grandmother’s porcelain china cups while he played his strange music. There he sat at his piano, ignorant of where sh
e had come from, and her secret made her feel free in a treacherous and homeless way. Like a double agent crossing frontiers in disguise so no-one knows who she really is, and wondering about that herself.

  Perhaps Miriam was right, perhaps her passion for the lawyer was an illusion she could only maintain because the affair was never a reality outside the anonymous hotel rooms. But with Daniel, who wanted her so much, she was never in love. She was just fascinated, especially by oscillating between the two men who knew nothing about each other, between the roles of sacrificial lamb to desire and faithless fallen woman. Until at long last she met Otto and felt all her masks fall off.

  As she cycled along to her appointment with Harry Wiener something came to mind which she had often thought of when she was with Otto. One day long before they met, she might have cycled past him, perhaps she had even seen him for a second and then forgotten him the next moment. At once she feared he might come walking across a pedestrian area with his arm round the waist of Miriam’s notorious mulatto, who had been haunting her tortured imagination for over a week. She made a detour to avoid the streets where she risked meeting him, which made her think that in a little while she might pass the man who would be able to love her. He must be somewhere, but maybe they had already crossed each other’s path. She came to think of Else, who must be sunning herself in the country in one of the deckchairs with their mouldy seats, red as a lobster, eyes closed and mouth sagging.

  It was getting cloudy again. The wind urged the ragged grey clouds so fast over the town that the roofs were lit and quickly darkened again in waves of shadow. On one side she could see the arched zinc roof of The Royal Theatre, on the other the gilded onion domes of the Russian church, and behind them the harbour, alternately blue and grey in the movement of the clouds. The sky was slate grey behind the cranes of the naval dockyard and the broad drum-shaped tanks on the fuel island further out. If she leaned over the railing she could look down into the street, a horizontal beam peopled by wood-lice and ants walking on their hind legs in the bird’s eye perspective.