She might have just let it go, she thought later. She had never been through his pockets before, and never read his letters. She knew it was wrong, but she did it all the same. Was it intuition that made her take the envelope from his pocket, or was it ordinary, thoughtless curiosity? It was an airmail letter with a Swedish stamp, posted in Stockholm just over a week before. She could still have changed her mind as she held it in her hand. The letter bore no sender’s name, but the writing on the envelope was a woman’s, she could see, a young woman’s. Andreas’s name and address in Paris was written in felt tip and architectural capital letters, regular, very clear and with a weakness for calligraphic curlicues.
After she had read the letter three times she folded it up, put it back in the envelope and stuck it in the breast pocket of the tweed jacket, taking care to see that the stamp bearing Carl Gustav’s puppyish playboy face was on the left side of the pocket, as she had found it. She went into the bathroom, kneeled down in front of the lavatory pan and vomited until she was empty. The cold of the floor and the spasms in her stomach made her shudder. She locked the door, sat in the bath and crouched with her knees under her chin and one foot on top of the other. She turned on the hot water and held the shower against her head until the scalding water made her cry out with pain. Only then did she start to weep. She turned on the cold tap, not too much, and sat sobbing under the hot stream of water that surrounded her like a steaming cloak. She closed her eyes and pictured the house she had seen being torn down on the way into Paris. The remains of a condemned suburban building with gaping window openings, flapping remnants of wallpaper and gnawed-off storey divisions that sank soundlessly in a cloud of pulverised bricks, a grey waterfall of dust.
She was still sitting in the bath weeping when she heard the front door slam and Andreas calling. She stopped sobbing. Soon afterwards he turned the door handle and said through the door that he was going to start cooking. She turned off the water and slowly stood up, stiff from sitting in the same position for so long. The steam had misted up the mirror over the wash basin. She wiped it with her hand and looked at her tear-stained face. Her eyelids were red and swollen. She wrapped herself in a towel and went into the kitchen. He raised his eyes from the steaks frying in the pan and looked at her worriedly. She said she had been sick. It must have been something she ate on the plane. He stroked her cheeks sympathetically, first one, then the other, and concentrated on the steaks again. She opened the window to let out the odour of cooking. He told her about a Japanese chef who had committed hara-kiri when the passengers on a plane had fallen ill because he had cooked with an infected finger. He showed her both his hands, grinning. No infection! She went upstairs to dress.
She had decided not to say anything. The decision had almost made itself when she heard him come in. She would wait and see what happened. She could not get down a single mouthful of the steak he served up for her. She managed a little salad, but drank up quickly when he refilled her glass. The red wine had a calming effect and soothed the clutching feeling in her stomach. She was impressed at his cold-bloodedness. He said he wanted to go up to Belleville next day and take photographs of the Arab district. If she felt better, he added kindly. She nodded. That would be good, she felt fine now. It had helped to empty out her stomach. He even stroked her hand, which lay beside her plate of cold steak.
They watched a film on television, she went upstairs before it ended. She undressed and lay down on the bed naked. She heard him pull the cord in the bathroom and water running in the wash basin, and shortly afterwards his step on the stair. She closed her eyes. The sound of steps stopped in the doorway. She told him to cover her face with the blue scarf. He hesitated before complying. The light from the lamp on the desk penetrated the closely woven silk threads and took on their colour. She heard the sirens of an ambulance on the Rue de Rennes and someone shouting in the street. She lay like that, without a face, delivered to his gaze, with empty eye sockets and a dark slit between her lips where the silk was sucked in each time she drew breath.
When she woke up next morning Andreas was working at the dining table in what had once been a studio and was now furnished as a living room. She made coffee and placed a cup beside his computer. He caressed her thigh vaguely without looking up from the screen. She took her own coffee up on the balcony. She leaned over the railing, looking at the occasional pedestrians. It was a long way down. Would you pass out before you hit the ground? The sun was shining and if she pulled her coat round her shoulders it was warm enough to sit outside. She leaned back with closed eyes.
It probably did not occur to him that she would go through his pockets. Actually it was her own fault that everything between them was suddenly changed. But to him it might be just a harmless affair, otherwise he would mention it. She was not sure though. In the letter at least it did not sound like a digression, a single bonk to freshen things up a bit. How passionate they were, the words written in neat, architectural block letters. They were even garnished with graceful little drawings as proof of the sender’s feminine charm, here a bird, there a star and a naked lady, rather à la Matisse. She wrote that the colours around her had grown brighter since she had met him. She couldn’t sleep at night, she was afraid of going off her head. She had been living in a daze for too long, in a relationship that made her feel she was invisible. Just as he had, if she had understood him rightly. When she stood in front of the mirror it felt as if the mirror was looking at her with his gaze. As if she was seeing herself for the first time.
Lucca had sat for a long time studying her while Andreas was out shopping. She could well understand when she saw the polaroid picture that fell out of the envelope. His correspondent was pale and had blue eyes and curly, jet-black hair. A gypsy with blue eyes, of course that had been irresistible. After all, he did have a weakness for black hair. She sat on a double bed, her hair glittered in the morning sun which reached exactly to her breasts. Andreas had hardly been the one who had taken the photo, if so he would have kept it. She must have sent him a picture taken by someone else. But who had snapped her naked in an unmade bed? Andreas must have wondered about that too.
Even though the letter lacked any prosaic details as to who or what the woman was in real life, Lucca could work out that they must have met in Malmö during the rehearsals for Andreas’s play, which had been so important for him to attend several times a week. Perhaps she was an actor. A Swedish colleague! Lucca remembered his impatience in the morning, when he was leaving and had promised to drive Lauritz to nursery school first. How irritated he had been when the boy sat over his porridge half asleep. There were several references in the letter to something Andreas had said or written to her. In one place she actually quoted him. He was right, she wrote. Sometimes you did have to believe your own eyes. Otherwise you risked everything around you becoming as fleeting and unreal as a film. She too would like to meet him again. Unfortunately she could not get to Paris for the week after Easter.
Lucca shaded her eyes with a hand and gazed at the Tour de Montparnasse, rising from among the slanting zinc roofs and thronging chimney pots like a big, dumb prick of smoke-coloured glass. Did she feel shattered? She put the question in the same way as if she had leaned over the balcony rail and seen herself lying in the street in a pool of blood. She was beside herself. The expression had never seemed more apt, but it did not only cover the sorrow that kept on trickling out inside her from a gash so agonising she could hardly breathe. She was beside herself because she was observing herself like an outsider.
She recalled Andreas’s words about believing your own eyes. He had said almost the identical thing in Harry’s apartment in Copenhagen when he had gone rushing up from Rome, and later in Trastevere when she had told him she was pregnant. So those were the words he used for celebrations. But then again, why invent the wheel each time? They worked, those words. His own home-made version of love’s magic formula, which apparently created what the words suggested, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had no
t the same words brought them all the way to Paris, she on the balcony, he in the studio bent over his play, while their little son might be making a snowman out of the Easter snow at home, with his grandmother?
Of course there had been more to it than words. Ambiguous feelings and mysterious glances, a peculiar restlessness, an unexpected ease and the alluring powers of physical attraction. But the words had made the difference, encouraging her to dare give herself once more. His words about believing what you saw, instead of being sceptical and cautious because you were no longer a spring chicken and had tried all this before. And yet the words had no more weight or meaning than those glances and feeling jittery, intoxicating carnal dizziness. The words were the same, just as the glances and feelings had been, from time to time. Only the faces had changed on the way. The faith in what you saw, that Andreas had spoken of, was itself faithless. You could believe in so much and so many. He had probably been sincere when he said it.
She thought of what the dark curly-haired charmer had written in her letter, despite her romantic rapture. She could not come to Paris after Easter, unfortunately. Something was apparently more important than looking into Andreas’s wonderful eyes again. Had that made him stop for a moment and think about the one at home wielding her paint brush and mortar trowel? Did he give a thought to the fact that they had a child? She had hoped the years would gain the weight the words lacked. Lauritz was living proof that there was more than words and sensations between them. Or was he? Their child and their home had not prevented Andreas from saying those same words the years had made so precious, to someone he had known for a mere few weeks.
The weather was mild and spring-like as they walked around the Arab quarter in the afternoon. The scents of spices, the shrill music of tape recorders and the hoarse Arabian voices almost made them forget they were in Paris. They talked about it. That it was like walking through a North African town. Colourful fabrics, videos and cheap kitchen equipment were on sale. Andreas took pictures of people, all portraits. The women giggled or turned away, the men posed with hands to their sides and stomachs pushed out. She kept a little distance between them, without losing sight of him. Everywhere people were doing business, and notes were exchanged between brown or black hands. The women’s palms were painted with henna and their silver jewellery glinted palely in the misty sunlight. They wore long garments and some had tattoos on their faces. Most of the men wore European clothes. They looked at her, some of them out of the corners of their eyes, others directly, with an impudent air that made her feel she was being pawed at. She regretted putting on her short skirt. The voices, the glances, the music and crowds brought her out in a sweat, and she told Andreas she would go back to the boulevard and wait for him at a café they had passed.
She sat down on the glass-roofed terrace and ordered coffee. Only a few customers were in the café or on the pavement outside. She looked at the patchy bark of the plane trees, resembling the pattern on camouflage suits. Each breath made her feel she was encased in armour. She wanted to weep but was not sure she would be able to even if she permitted herself. A pantechnicon was parked on the other side of the street. The removal men carried furniture out of the house and into the vehicle. An entire home passed by on the pavement as if assembled at random. So that was how they had chosen to arrange things, the unknown people who had lived on one of the floors over there. Two of the men helped each other carry a large gold-framed mirror, and as they struggled with it, turning it first one way, then another, fragments of clouds, cars, trees and shutters whirled through the gold frame in quickly shifting glimpses. When the mirror caught the sun for a moment a sharp spot of light leapt jerkily over the asphalt and its dazzle forced her to close her eyes.
Twenty-four hours earlier he had been in Charles de Gaulle airport waving and smiling when she came in sight. He must have forgotten his Swedish girlfriend for a moment, it wasn’t possible for anyone to smile with such tender devotion and think of another woman at the same time. She shook the little packet of sugar, tore off the top and watched the lump of sugar settle on the beige-coloured foam of the coffee, then sink slowly through the surface. Maybe he really was able to remember and forget on command, as if he had a television set inside himself and his will was a remote control that could zap back and forth between channels that were separate from each other. Wife and child on one channel, Swedish romance on the other. Could he be the same person on both channels?
Perhaps you could really change yourself as easily as the words changed their meaning according to who said them to whom, and when they were said. You had the same face, the same body, but inside you were a different person, according to whether the woman you were with was black-haired or auburn. Now what was it his exotic princess had written in her letter? That she had lived in a daze without being seen as she was. Just as he had . . . Until she met him and felt he woke her with his gaze and reminded her of the person she was in her heart. Lucca picked up her teaspoon and stirred the small coffee cup. She went on stirring long after the sugar had dissolved. The words were not only those of his lover and himself, they were also hers, Lucca’s. She had almost said the same words to him when they were getting to know each other.
He had turned up one day as an option, although at first she didn’t see him that way. She had believed Harry was the one she was meant to be with. The Gypsy King, who had opened up a vulnerable crack in his frighteningly self-confident mask, seeing an unknown side of her and liberating it on the stage. She had imagined that what he did with her on the stage could happen in real life as well, and for a few months it did. Recalling her two years with Otto she shook her head over how naïvely she had confused her own dream images with the Otto who hauled her so painlessly into his life and then dumped her again. Harry’s cynical honesty had been a release, and although sometimes his experience and status oppressed her the imbalance was cancelled out as soon as they were alone. In bed she saw in his eyes the insecurity she had seen for the first time in his Mercedes, when he tried to seduce her, and the second time on his balcony, with lightning flashing over the harbour.
Andreas disturbed her settled life with his boyish smile, his sudden kiss on the rock and his rash arrival a few months later. She suddenly realised she must have over-interpreted her enchantment by the legendary Harry Wiener. If Andreas travelled all the way from Rome for the sole purpose of seeing her again, that in itself was a question she had to answer not just with words but with all her being. And two weeks later when she was reckless enough to fly down to join him, she had come to believe that his eyes were the only ones that could net her in after the aimless flutterings of her early youth. Just as she had believed Otto’s eyes were hard and blue enough to make their image of her more solid than a confused reflection from a mirror in the sun, flitting aimlessly around like a firefly in broad daylight.
But she herself had been little more than a mirror. A homeless mirror which two breathless removal men had been at a loss to know how to deal with. They had collected the mirror from a house in the Copenhagen suburbs without any directions for where it was to be taken. A lady had telephoned. Unfortunately she could not be there when they came, she had to make a broadcast. The key was under the mat. The removal men had set off, unsuspecting, and whenever a passer-by threw a vain or worried glance at himself in the mirror they thought they might finally get rid of their heavy, gold-framed burden. But no, each time the stranger walked on in the opposite direction, if he did not simply vanish from sight, because the weight of the mirror caused the removal men to stagger, or because the one in front thought it best to go to right or left. New faces and views constantly skimmed over the shining surface, on which no one and nothing left any lasting trace.
They discovered it was easier to carry it horizontally like a bed, and they got quite a long way like that, while the mirror only reflected the clouds in the sky. White as a sheet, said one removal man to the other. Like snow, said the other, like newly fallen snow. To pass the time they talked abou
t how lovely it was to go out of your house on a winter morning when it had snowed in the night, and how you could hardly bring yourself to tread on the snow no-one had yet walked on. They had stopped to rest and for a moment it seemed really like standing on the threshold of one’s house and watching the virginal snow. But they couldn’t go on standing like that holding the mirror, which resembled both a bed and a snow-covered landscape. The removal men began to lose heart but they did their best to cheer each other on. After all, the mirror was bound to find a home at last. They didn’t really believe that any more, but they kept on saying it.
Lucca . . .
She looked up from her coffee cup when she heard Andreas calling. He stood among the tables with his camera held up, so she could not see his eyes. Click, it went.
The plane circled in above the tangled web of Copenhagen street lights. In an hour she would be in the train on the way home. Else and Lauritz would be waiting at the station as arranged. She did not know how to get through it without cracking up. She could already hear Else’s words of consolation. Andreas was having an affair, so what? It was bound to happen to one of them sooner or later. Had she really imagined they would live together until their hair turned grey without one or the other having a fling on the side? It was quite predictable, Else would say, after you had lived together for a few years. If she was wise she would keep mum and see it through. He would soon tire of his Swedish fairy-tale.
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