Lucca

by Jens Christian Grøndahl

  Better take care, said Harry Wiener as he came out on the balcony with teapot and cups on a tray. The sugar bowl was missing and he went inside again. As she waited, lightning made a crack in the cloud cover over the airport. It’s going to be a great show, he said, smiling cheerfully as he came back with the sugar bowl in one hand and his script in the other. He bent his head a little and looked at the thunder cloud over the spectacles on the tip of his curved, sun-tanned nose. His checked shirt hung half out of his trousers, his long grey locks curled around his ears like wings, and his feet were bare in the worn-down espadrilles.

  It was obvious he had forgotten she was coming, when he opened the door and looked at her in confusion, as if with no idea of who she was. He admitted it at once and apologised politely. He had fallen asleep on the sofa. That calmed her as she stepped inside the rectangular room, the only one in the apartment apart from the kitchen-diner and the bedroom, which she glimpsed before he closed the sliding doors. A glass door between two wide panorama windows opened on to the balcony, the three other walls were occupied by bookcases from floor to ceiling. The place was smaller than she had imagined, more intimate, furnished with design pieces from the Sixties with worn, beige leather covers, faded Kelim carpets and the inevitable Poul Henningsen lamps.

  When she was in the lift staring at herself in the narrow mirror she regretted not having done something about her appearance. She couldn’t decide whether she looked like a hanged cat or something the cat had dragged in, as Else used to say about herself when she stood in front of the hall mirror. Maybe she looked like something in between. A half-strangled cat dragging itself up to the renowned and awe-inspiring Gypsy King. In her melancholy state she had forgotten what it meant to her to be going to tea with Harry Wiener. She had forgotten to look forward to it and fear it, and when she sat in bed with the duvet around her reading The Father, she quite forgot why she was reading the play at all, completely engrossed in the story. Only in the lift did it strike her that the step onto the top floor would also be a decisive step in her career. That word usually made her smile ironically.

  Harry Wiener poured out the tea and asked if she took sugar. No, thank you, she replied politely, but maybe a spot of milk. He beat his brow with an exaggerated gesture and rose again. It doesn’t matter, she hastened to say. He stopped and looked at her over his spectacles. Why did she say that when she had just said she liked milk in her tea? He smiled amiably as he said it and she smiled too. If you want milk you shall have it, he said, going inside. She looked at his script, it was already tattered and dog-eared even though rehearsals would not start for another three months.

  He made her relax, she didn’t know how, and she couldn’t understand this was the very same feared and admired Harry Wiener she had heard so many stories about. The same Harry Wiener who had made a pass at her in his Mercedes. Good, now we’re about there, he said, placing a small silver jug on the tray. He really seemed to have forgotten everything that evening, but she was glad she had put on Else’s Faroese sweater. It had turned cooler, too. They sat silently listening to the distant rumbling and watching the purple flashes and white forks of lightning over the harbour. Lucca did not know what to say and she was surprised it was not difficult to sit, each in their bamboo chair, saying nothing. Harry Wiener slurped when he drank. That surprised her, considering how cultivated he was. He was at home in himself, and she almost thought he had forgotten her.

  I went to see my wife today, he said suddenly in a low voice. She is in hospital, he added. Lucca looked at him expectantly. He looked over at the harbour entrance. I hope she’s awake, he said. She loves thunderstorms . . . He lit a cigarette. She is dying, he went on. Lucca looked at the script in her lap. It has spread, he added, there’s nothing to be done. Lucca said she was sorry. He looked at her. He hadn’t told her to appeal to her sympathy. He just thought she should know, now they were going to work together. If he should seem distrait. He regarded her for a moment before going on. She asked me to sell the house, he said. He had not thought of doing that before she died. It was a house north of town, he hadn’t been there for months. Yes, it is strange, he said, as if replying to something she had asked him. He looked at his cigarette. But enough of that. What did she think of the play?

  She hesitated, then said Strindberg must have had problems with women. He smiled, but not patronisingly. That was true enough, but it was not true to say he hated them. He was afraid of them, which was something else. If anything it was a particularly virulent case of unhappy love, he smiled. Strindberg was a deserted child who as an adult cursed the mother’s womb that had exiled him. Incidentally, all artists were deserted children. He looked at her. ‘Your mother was your friend, but the woman was your enemy . . .’ he said slowly, as if to emphasise every word. He smiled again. Yes, it was banal, of course, but that’s how it was. That was why the Captain was so bewitched by the power of motherhood. And that is why, said Harry Wiener, he breaks down, because he doesn’t know for certain that he is your father.

  Lucca jumped. She had forgotten she was sitting on his balcony only because she was going to play the cavalry captain’s daughter. Harry Wiener took a mouthful of tea. This time he did not slurp. Doubt over paternity is the oppressed woman’s only possible revenge in a patriarchal universe, he said, putting down his cup. But it was not the only cause of the captain’s suffering. He also suffered because, in Strindberg’s universe, life and the ability to pass it on belonged to the women and to them alone. Why do you think he paraphrases Shylock? he asked. For a moment she forgot who Shylock was, but he did not expect her to answer.

  ‘Hath not a man eyes?’ He leaned forwards in his chair, the bamboo creaked as he stretched out his hands in an appealing gesture. ‘Is he not warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a woman? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?’ He let his hands drop into his lap and leaned back. Shylock had to argue for his humanity because he was a Jew, an outcast, and the Captain had to do likewise. You could go so far as to say that to Strindberg men were biology’s Jews, its wandering homeless. ‘In the midst of the moonlight . . .’ he added softly, holding her eyes, ‘. . . surrounded by ruins on all sides.’

  A drop fell on the balcony floor, followed by another. The next moment the whole balcony was spotted with raindrops. The gilding on the Russian church’s onion dome sent a mysterious light on the background of the dark grey sky. Harry Wiener rose and picked up the tray, she carried in the cups, he let her enter before him. She sat down on the sofa, he settled in an armchair. The low lamps in the corners of the room surrounded them with a warm, subdued light. The view was already dim in the misty rain. He had left the door to the balcony open, and Lucca felt the rain like a cool breath in the warm damp air.

  While the thunderstorm passed over the city he questioned her about the roles she had played and how she had interpreted them, and he listened to her with the same intensity he had shown in the dressing room after the performance a few weeks previously. While she had been paralysed with shyness when she arrived, now she suddenly noticed she had plenty to say, and heard herself voicing ideas she had never shared with anyone before. She told him how working on the roles had made her feel that the innermost core of her personality was a hollow space in which she could be anyone at all, and how the feeling sometimes terrified her and at other times overwhelmed her with its freedom. Harry Wiener smiled, almost wistfully, she thought. Yes, he said, we are separate, but not so different. That is why we both understand and misunderstand each other.

  Again they were silent, looking out at the white vapour of rain above the glinting rooftops. He glanced at his watch and dispelled the enchantment when he rose and said he would have to ask her to leave. She was struck by how direct he could be without seeming rude. Maybe it was simply because he was used to getting his own way. He had an appointment soon with a young dramatist, they were going to discuss his manuscript. But perhaps she knew him? He must be about her age, perhaps sli
ghtly older. Andreas Bark was his name. Very promising, one of the really big talents. She had heard of him. Did she have a car? She said she was cycling. Oh, well, we must get hold of a taxi. Of course he would pay. She said that was too much. There you go again, he smiled and handed her a hundred kroner note. He really couldn’t have her catching a cold from sheer modesty.

  The bell rang while he was phoning, and he motioned to her to press the door button. Then he came into the hall and shook hands with her. See you in the autumn, he said, and closed the door behind her. She walked down the stairs that wound around the bars of the lift shaft. The lift passed her when she was one floor down and through the window in the door she saw a dark, averted figure slide past.

  Part Three

  So far it had been a miserable summer. Every time you thought it was getting warm at last, it began to rain and blow again. Monica and Jan had had the right idea, to book a holiday in Lanzarote as early as April, but Robert still felt disappointed over not spending time with Lea when he was on holiday. She said nothing about it on her visits to him, not even when the end of term was approaching, and he suspected she was avoiding the subject to spare his feelings. That made him more dispirited than the thought of being without her. When she came they worked together on the kitchen garden, and one Sunday afternoon, when the sun shone for a change and the temperature climbed to a tolerable minimum of summertime, they went out to the beach to swim.

  The water was icy cold and he only took a quick dip. Lea was a good swimmer now. He stood at the water’s edge shivering and watching her swim along the sandbank with sure, regular strokes. She swam over to one of the fishing stakes which were set in a straight row at right angles to the shore, forming an interrupted perspective against the calm expanses of sea and sky. As she held onto the post with one arm and waved to him with the other he felt both happy and sad, and when she came out of the water and waded towards him, tall and shining in her swimsuit, he realised why. It would not be long before he had to part with her, not because she would be catching the train as usual and going back to her mother, but because she would have no more use for either mother or father. It was only a question of a few years before she began to live her own life. They would still see each other, but she would be a guest, when she came. It would no longer be her second home, if in fact it ever had been, his overlarge house in the suburb on the edge of the quiet provincial town in which he had ended up after the divorce, by chance as it seemed to him now.

  If there had been a meaning in his life during the many years that had passed it had existed in this girl coming towards him, wading through the cold water and wiping her eyes with her knuckles as she pulled down the corners of her mouth in a comical, troubled grimace. She had been the meaning of it all, anything else had come to seem pale and complicated compared with her. He stood waiting, holding her towel and then wrapping it round her and rubbing her back. She teased him for only having a dip and saucily grabbed at the loose skin on his hips. Hadn’t he better do something about those handles? He put out a hand to tickle her. She leaped away and ran off. He ran after her, but her legs had grown too long for him to catch up with her, and suddenly he felt a stabbing pain in one foot as he tripped and fell. He heard her laugh. She couldn’t go on being the meaning in his life, she would soon be busy enough with her own.

  His heel was bleeding and he caught sight of a rotten plank with a bent rusty nail in it. A siding, he thought, as she came towards him. He had driven himself onto a siding. He thought of the quiet house where he sat listening to music every night the whole year round when he got home from the hospital. Should it be Brahms or Bruckner tonight, after he had driven Lea to the station, or Bartók for once? She put a supporting hand under his arm as they went back to the car. He asked her to fetch the first aid box from the boot. She insisted on helping him, and he let her clean the wound with iodine and showed her how to put on a bandage, secretly enjoying her sympathy.

  They had brought her bag so they could drive straight from the beach to the station. His heel smarted and throbbed. She sat beside him looking out at the fields and the clouds. The weather was worsening, the light was grey and metallic over the restless corn. Silence fell between them, as it usually did before they parted. The first drops appeared on the windscreen followed by more until he had to switch on the wipers. When he stopped in front of the station she said he didn’t need to go in with her. She sat on for a moment. See you after the holidays, then, she said. Yes, he said, smiling. Take good care of Mum and Jan! She looked at him. Take good care of yourself, she said seriously and kissed his cheek. He watched her as she ran through the rain with her bag over her shoulder. She turned and waved, and he signalled with his headlights. Then she was gone. He could hear the train approaching and started the car again.

  He had been to see Lucca every afternoon before going home, and he had remembered to take off his white coat before going into her room, as she had asked him to. What was it she had said? It seemed a strange notion. That she would rather be completely ignorant of what he looked like than have to content herself with knowing he had a white coat on. But she did ask when he went in to her the day after he had lent her his walkman. She asked what he was wearing, and he replied, slightly flurried. Blue shirt, beige trousers. But what kind of blue? He had to think about that. Twilight blue, he said finally, surprising himself at the comparison. Twilight blue, she repeated and smiled. He had made a new tape for her. He had enjoyed choosing the pieces of music and deciding on their order, and it had given him the chance of hearing music he had not listened to in years. Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, he kept to French music and Chopin. She had asked for more Chopin. He spent most of the evening on it.

  He always came at the agreed time, when the ray of sunlight shone on her face through the blinds outside the window. He did not switch on the light when it began to rain, she asked him not to, as if it made a difference to her. Then she lay in the semi-darkness listening to the whipping of the drops on the aluminium blinds. He sat down on a chair beside the bed. Her arms and legs were still encapsulated in plaster, but her head was no longer bound up in bandages. It looked almost normal, apart from the stitches in her forehead and the yellow-green bruising that was wearing off, and her glass eyes. He recognised her from the photographs he had seen in the kitchen the day he drove Andreas and Lauritz home in the rain, but she had lost weight, her features had grown sharper.

  She seldom mentioned Andreas and Lauritz. He did not ask why she stuck to her decision not to let Andreas visit her, but he could feel she missed her son and suffered because of her own obstinacy. The weeks went by with no word from Andreas, but she did not ask if he had called. Robert assumed he was still in Copenhagen, unless he had gone to Stockholm to try his luck with the exotic designer. He considered asking Lucca if he should contact Andreas, but never got around to it. Something about her silence held him back. She was remarkably silent about the drama that had ended when, drunk and beside herself, she had got into their car to drive to Copenhagen on the wrong side of the motorway.

  She did not talk about the life she had lived with Andreas in the house by the woods, which they had transformed from a ruin into the home that now, in a different and more comprehensive sense, lay in ruins. It seemed as if she had completely repressed the fact that she was married and had a child, totally engrossed in the years that had gone before. Robert thought of old people who cannot recollect the immediate past and instead remember details and events from their early years which they thought they had forgotten. But he was not witnessing a loss of memory. She just no longer knew precisely where she was, surrounded by sounds and voices, an indeterminate space where hearing was the only sense by which she could distinguish what was close from what was far off.

  She had suddenly been thrown into herself, without her eyes’ firm grip on reality, delivered over to the evasive images of memory. She seemed like someone who is obliged to tell the story from the beginning, try to describe herself as she had once been, ign
orant of what awaited her later. Someone who attempts to return to the start and from there follows her own steps, as you do when you have dropped something on a walk and retrace your steps with your eyes fixed on the ground. Without her explaining it he understood, at first with only a vague apprehension, that this was how she had to approach the night when everything in her life crashed into sudden darkness.

  Perhaps it helped to tell her story to a stranger who knew only the ending but had no idea how she had arrived there. He knew what it was she was slowly trying to isolate, this event which wrenched the words out of her mouth with its irresistible force. She approached it day by day, the thing she still could not talk about, but she held back, dwelling on each stage of her story and losing herself in tortuous digressions. Only by detours could she approach what she still did not understand. She took her time. Her words were like her hands, hesitantly reading the objects passed to her. With the words she touched each face that entered her story and traced the physiognomy of events, as if she could find the sudden turn, the unexpected gulf into which she had fallen.

  She had just about got to Andreas, although she had not yet met him, when she was discharged and transferred to a rehabilitation centre. Her plaster had been removed a few days before. Robert and a nurse supported her when she attempted her first steps on the floor in front of her bed. Her long legs seemed even longer, thin and white after the lengthy confinement to bed, with protruding kneecaps. She was dizzy and her legs gave way, so he had to carry her back to bed. She wept and asked to be left alone. When he visited her in the afternoon she was asleep with the earphones on. The tape was still playing. He bent down with his head close to hers and heard Chopin’s Nocturne No. 4, the peaceful yet rhythmically changing chords, the strangely reckless melancholy. Twilight blue, he thought and smiled involuntarily as he crept towards the door and closed it carefully so as not to wake her.