Lucca

by Jens Christian Grøndahl

  She felt like pasta al burro with grated nutmeg, the way Giorgio had taught her to make it. It was the only thing she had learned from him, her sad clown of a father, who had merely flung out his arms as if there was no more to say as he walked backwards beside the baptistery in Florence before turning and vanishing from sight. ‘In the midst of the moonlight,’ she thought, ‘surrounded by ruins on all sides.’ She looked at the torn script and began to smile. So she did remember something. But there had been no moonlight, it had been broad daylight, and the baptistery stood just as when it had been built, dazzlingly beautiful and geometric in its green and white marble. It was only that it hadn’t gone as expected, she thought, as the steaming water in the pan began to bubble and shake.

  The room was in total darkness. She could hear the cicadas behind the shutter of the small window. They kept the shutters closed all day to retain as much as possible of the night’s coolness. She pushed off the sheet and stretched out a hand. He was not there. The hands of the alarm clock shone green, floating in the dark. It was only just past seven. He couldn’t sleep late any more. He had told her with a wry, apologetic smile, as if it was one of the things he had lost. She summoned her energy and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The tiles were smooth and cool. She reached for the kimono hanging over a chair, and fumbled her way through the darkness with a finger brushing the rough, white-washed wall until she found the door.

  Daylight fell in a sharp triangle from the doorway to the roof terrace. She climbed the stairs and stopped at the top. He had not noticed her yet. His hearing was not too good, but he did not like to admit it. She stood still. He sat cross-legged under the canopy of woven bamboo. He was reading a book, his tea cup raised in his hand as if he’d forgotten the cup and left it in mid air. The bamboo wickerwork splintered the sharp sunlight into a frayed pattern on the stone table and the tiles, and splinters of light waved over his combed-back grey hair and lined brow, his face with its crooked nose and his brown torso with folds of loose skin around the stomach and below the chest cage. He was wearing the white linen trousers she had bought him in Madrid.

  She waited. He had to discover her. It had become a game she played, more with herself than with him. Coffee’s ready, he said in his hoarse voice, without looking up from his book. But he had seen her. She went and sat down opposite him. He smiled, leaning his head back to look at her through the glasses on the tip of his nose. There you are, he said. Here I am, she answered, stretching out a hand to stroke his knee. She poured herself a cup of coffee, put in plenty of sugar and sipped it as she gazed over at the range of mountains lit by the slanting sunlight, which emphasised the folds and grooves with long, blue-grey shadows among the shades of rusty red and rose.

  The houses looked alike, all white-washed with flat roofs and small barred windows, like scattered sugar lumps up the mountain-side. It sounded beautiful when you described it, and when you saw the village from a distance it did resemble a picture postcard, with orange trees and olive groves and everything you could expect, but as soon as you got up there the place had a depressing air. The cement road was broken up into craters lying in wait to trip you up, the electricity cables hung in untidy garlands, and the houses were either crumbling, on the verge of collapse, or being restored, with dreary concrete walls. During the day there was never a soul about except now and then a pale weary woman in a dressing-gown behind a kitchen window. The place seemed to be inhabited by housewives and scrawny cats lying in the dust, and the only other sign of life was the smell of frying oil and the noise of television sets churning out their advert jingles from the resounding semi-darkness of the dwellings.

  Harry’s house was the last one in that part of the village, it faced east and from the roof terrace there was a view over a dried up river-bed with steep sides. The river-bed was cracked in deep fissures where oleanders and carob trees had rooted, and on the other side of the river, a couple of kilometres away, another chain of mountains sloped down to the plain. Seen from the terrace, the coastline was just a diffuse transition from ochre to blue in the heat haze. They had gone down there shortly after the last night of The Father at the Royal Theatre. At the same time Harry had staged a première of Uncle Vanya in Oslo. In the weeks before they left they’d been together only when he flew down to Copenhagen for the weekend. She had been offered a role in a film, the first shots were to be taken soon, in early spring, but Harry had advised her to say no. He knew the director, and it was likely to be not just mediocre, but downright awful.

  It had been raining for weeks in Denmark, Lucca thought she had almost forgotten what the sky looked like. When they got out of the plane she felt a warm breath in her face, and the almond trees were flowering in white and pink against the red earth as they drove through the dry landscape. In some places the land changed into a desert with deep crevasses and crumbling rock formations like the brains of huge, prehistoric animals. Soon they would have been there two months. They were planning to spend the summer in a house he would be renting beside the Jutland coast, before rehearsals started on A Doll’s House. She was to play Nora.

  When Harry was not directing a play he spent his time in Spain reading and writing. She didn’t know what he was engaged on now. Wish lists, he had replied with a teasing smile, when she asked him. When you were young you wrote wish-lists, he went on, but he had gradually forgotten all the things he had wished for through the years. It was hard enough to remember them, all those years. She had not spoken to anyone but Harry for weeks, and all the days seemed alike, but strangely she had not felt bored. In Copenhagen there were always people to see, people of Harry’s age. He was very attentive when they went out together, but even so she often felt just like a decorative appendage, instantly left out of the game because she was not born at the time their hilarious anecdotes had been launched.

  Harry’s friends were writers, painters or film directors, and usually they were as famous as he, but had been part of the élite for so long that their laurel leaves were pretty withered by now. Behind their comfortable complacency lurked a small, bewildered disquiet at getting fewer mentions in the newspapers than twenty years ago. They could spend hours discussing it, how bad the newspapers had become, just as they worried a good deal about the young having an easy time of it, and how little it took nowadays for them to climb dangerously close to their own exalted position. Up to a point they were quite generous at including her in the conversation, some of them even took the trouble to seem not at all formidable, and yet something sly and avuncular appeared in the sudden interest of the grey old codgers after she had been left on her own for a while.

  She could feel their wives frowning at her when the men bent intimately over her while investigating what she might bring to the conversation. Most of them had known Harry’s dead wife, but she was never actually mentioned. Lucca felt like an itinerant scandal, and when she was introduced she saw how their eyes flickered between disgust and envy at the indomitably lucky old dog. She had even been spared the attentions of the gutter press once when he was careless enough to take her to a première, and when she walked around town she sometimes felt she was recognised as Harry Wiener’s talented young lady friend.

  Harry was always the centre of attention, maybe because he was one of the few whose fame had not begun to fade at the edges. But that couldn’t be the only reason, thought Lucca. People spotted him everywhere he went, and even when they had no idea who he was they were drawn to look at the elegant figure with his lined face, wavy grey hair and narrow eyes. He did not make any effort to arouse attention, on the contrary. He preferred to sit and listen while he observed the others, now and then folding the corners of his lips ironically around the colourless slit that served as his mouth. There was complete silence when he finally said something in his rusty voice and old-fashioned diction, which encompassed everything he said, even the most casual remark, with an exclusive and civilised atmosphere.

  When they were in the car driving home one evening, after
yet another dinner, she asked him why he bothered to spend so much of his time on that pack of burned-out old buggers. All they did was sit there nursing their bloodshot vanity, she said, sweating at the thought of being soon forgotten. She’d had too much to drink, because she was bored stiff. He laughed, looking at the road ahead. He was an old bugger himself . . . besides, everything was interesting to someone like him. She tugged the curls at his neck affectionately. At least he wasn’t burned out, anyway . . . He smiled but did not give a direct answer. The most banal things, and the most sophisticated as well, he went on, are often the most interesting. He gave her a brief look. She probably didn’t realise that yet, luckily. But even the utmost banality turned into a subject for sociology eventually.

  They had met with Else once only, shortly before they left for Spain. Harry invited her to lunch one Saturday after he came back from Oslo. Lucca tried to dissuade him, but he just smiled at her. He really wanted to meet her mother. If she didn’t like it, she could stay at home . . . Else had tried to hide her disapproval when Lucca finally gave in to her inquisitive questions and told her who it was she so often spent the night with. After a month she had more or less moved into the rooftop apartment with its view over the harbour.

  She was nervous as she and Harry waited at the restaurant, and once more she was taken aback by his unruffled calm when Else walked in and looked around her with an anxious gaze and too much powder on her cheeks. Harry rose, shook her hand in a friendly way and pulled out a chair for her, taking no notice of her tense, hectic manner. Lucca had not realised he was older than her mother. Her own nervousness changed into wonder when she saw how agitated Else was and how coquettishly she tried out her feminine wiles on the famous man playing the role of son-in-law. An hour later when Else kissed her cheek and said goodbye, Lucca could feel that her thunderstruck condemnation had given way to something like admiration.

  Harry worked in the afternoon while she took a siesta. When she woke up they would drive down to the sea. He thought the water was too cold, but she went in almost every day. She did not need a swimsuit, they had the beach to themselves. She felt childish as he sat watching her, but only until she came out and he stood waiting with towel and kimono, as she approached smiling, dripping and stark naked. In the evenings they sat talking or reading. He told her about people he had known, some of them names she had heard before, actors and writers, semi-mythological figures from another age. Sometimes she felt dizzy when she realised he was describing events that had taken place ten years before she was born.

  He gave her books he thought would interest her. The house was crammed with books from floor to ceiling, and she had never read so much in such a short time. He opened windows and doors for her onto ideas and notions she’d never had before, but he didn’t make her feel stupid, just very young. He did not lecture her nor did he ever use his age and experience as arguments. He contented himself with asking unexpected questions which produced equally unexpected answers from her. He guided without her noticing it, and let go of her again just as unnoticeably, so she had the feeling of having found her way on her own, she didn’t know how. He merely looked at her meanwhile with his narrow dark eyes.

  That was the way he worked, by hardly saying or doing anything. That was how he had made himself famous, the Gypsy King, as Otto had so scornfully called him. She could not understand how all those stories about his tyrannical cruelty had arisen. He had not raised his voice once during the rehearsals for The Father. Most of the time he sat in the auditorium or stood at the edge of the stage as if lost in his own thoughts, taking note of every single change of tone and each movement of the actors’ features. Just occasionally he would come up to one or other of them and talk confidentially to each, at other times he would lay a hand on a shoulder, smile or raise his eyebrows with an expectant look. He seldom spoke to them all at once, and what he said was always so specific that none of them noticed the intrinsic lines in the picture he had envisaged from the start. Slowly they found their places in the picture, as of their own volition, apparently with no help from him.

  She had sweat on her upper lip and her knees were trembling when she arrived for the audition one September afternoon. The porter was kind, he led her part of the way and pointed out a long corridor, but she still managed to get lost. When she finally found the rehearsal room the other actors were sitting at a long table watching her walk across the floor, the script pressed to her chest. She went up to Harry, who sat at the end of the table studying his hands, and apologised for being late. He waited for a moment before he took her hand without pressing it, as if indulging a childish whim on her part. He did not reply, merely smiled a little smile with his narrow lips as he regarded her out of the dark cracks of his eyes. He looked at her as if they had never met before, and it seemed inconceivable that she’d sat in his Mercedes one evening and asked if he might kiss her.

  He was wearing an olive-green silk shirt that day, hanging loosely over the sand-coloured velvet trousers and his curly, steel-grey hair was carefully combed back from his forehead and ears. If there had been something frail and unprotected about him when he absent-mindedly received her in his roof apartment a few months earlier, in worn-out espadrilles and with his ruffled hair standing out at the sides in sleepy wings, that had quite vanished now. His motionless face was like a mask of baked clay. As she walked round shaking hands he sat leaning back at the end of the table caressing the silver lighter lying on his script beside his folded spectacles.

  She knew their faces from the stage and the papers. Doubtless they were thinking that she must have lost her way. You didn’t arrive late for Harry Wiener. The actor who was to play her mother, the captain’s wife, sized her with a watchful glance over her reading glasses. For two generations of male theatre-goers the beautiful, generously bosomed diva had been the exemplar of feminine charm and mystery. There was something affected about her masculine reading glasses. Maybe she flirted with the idea that a little touch of ugly clumsiness would only add to her charming face and emphasise the mature dramatic sensuality of her eyes and lips.

  The role of the captain was allotted to her male counterpart, the rebellious punk of the acting world, a notorious, rowdy drinker and seducer, with his eternal bedroom eyes, tousled hair and a voice like the morning after. Lucca could not see him without thinking of the line whispered in his ear by a buxom blonde in a television play from her childhood, in a somewhat outrageous bedroom scene for that period, as she rummaged in his unruly chest hair. Big bad boy! He smiled his very best professional bedroom smile as he pressed her hand until she was afraid it would be left in his horny paw. The big bad boy had turned grey and he too had acquired reading glasses, on a cord to prevent them getting lost. A small pot-belly had begun to show itself behind the tight-fitting denim shirt and he seemed to be constantly suppressing a belch.

  She pulled out a chair and sat down beside the captain. He passed her a pencil. Watch out, it’s sharp! he whispered with a sly foxy glance, as if he was a schoolboy and she was the new girl. Right, let’s get going, said Harry Weiner, but he didn’t put on his glasses nor did he open his script. He sat leaning back with crossed legs while they turned to the first page. He stayed like that throughout the reading, his head bent slightly forwards, eyes half closed and fixed on a point on the floor, listening to the actors reading their parts. If one of them started to stress a sentence, already trying to make their mark on how the role should be played, only then did he raise his head slightly and smile a little, inscrutable smile. That made the reader subdue his tone again and content himself with reading the words. When they had gone through the text and closed their scripts there was a moment’s silence. Then he stood up, looked round and thanked them. They remained seated while he gathered his things and left. Again Lucca had the feeling of being in a classroom. As soon as Harry Wiener was out of the door conversation broke out all across the table.

  That’s how he was! The captain stretched out his arms backwards and smiled in
amusement at the bewildered look on her face. He rested his hands on his knees with his elbows pointing outwards. Lucca shrugged her shoulders. She had expected him to say something to them about the play and the roles. He never did that . . . the cavalry captain held his breath a moment before breathing out through his nose. But just you wait! He might well seem a bit cold to begin with, and he was never much of a chatterbox, you could get quite frightened of him, but he was a lovely person. Probably the reason for his reserve today was because of his wife. It was bloody awful, she wasn’t likely to see the new year. But he was taking it bravely . . . really there was something gentle . . . yes, gentle about him. You wouldn’t believe it, said the captain, but he makes you feel safe, even if he gives quite the opposite impression. That’s the secret, he smiled. Lucca nodded agreement, as if she was quite familiar with the situation. Harry Wiener put you at ease, but you didn’t get to be friends. He knew how to keep himself to himself! The captain held up his hands. The diva leaned forward, her breasts in the informal sweatshirt pressed flat on the table. She put her head on one side and smiled lasciviously. Well, darling, so what was it like in Borneo? The captain turned towards her. Brilliant!

  Sitting slightly apart Lucca wondered why it was that actors always talked to each other so affectedly. It was darling or sweetheart the whole time, and she secretly questioned if they were all gay. Even the women sounded gay because they seemed to mimic gay men’s parody of women. She promised herself never to start talking like that. On her way down the corridor the diva caught up with her on high, clicking heels. The high-heeled shoes seemed like a feminine comment on the blue jeans, relaxed sweatshirt and ugly, mannish spectacles. It went very well, she said with a motherly smile, as if Lucca had been up for an exam. But do take care with your consonants! People don’t learn to articulate properly any more . . . She held open the street door for her young colleague and put her head on one side again. Nice to have met you!