At times he felt like a living fortress against what she must feel was a siege. Andreas kept on insinuating himself with his eager guilt, impatient for her to relieve him by at least meeting him and hearing how fluently he could talk about his error. She made no comment when Robert passed on what he had been asked to tell her. She never asked what he knew about Andreas’s trip to Stockholm. Nor did she ask him to respond to the messages her mother and Miriam got him to deliver.
Robert had long telephone conversations with Else when she called to hear how things were going, and to ask if Lucca wouldn’t at least come to the phone. He had to smile when this woman with the cultivated voice tried out her mature charm on him in the hope that he might happen to reveal the nature of his relationship with her daughter by his tone of voice or some unconsidered word. He also spoke to Miriam and heard her baby wailing in the background. Still less could she comprehend why her friend had no use for her now that everything in her life had fallen apart. Else hinted darkly that they’d had a kind of row, but that it was of no importance now. He pretended not to know what she was talking about. Robert also concealed his knowledge from Andreas, although he sometimes almost interrupted his grief-stricken monologue when he went out to the house in the woods to fetch Lauritz or take him home again.
They would sit in the kitchen where the pictures of Lucca still hung on the notice-board. The sighted Lucca, building the house or swinging her son around or sitting at a Parisian café and smiling, her eyes surprised and yet aware. Andreas could be so full of remorse and self-pity that Robert found it hard to keep quiet. He remembered the shame he had heard in her voice and read on her face when she told him what had happened on Daniel’s houseboat. He could see and hear that her shame related not merely to Andreas, to whom she had been unfaithful, or Daniel whom she had misused. Something had been shattered that night, a week before she had driven herself into disaster, and Robert was the only one who had any inkling of it. He was relieved each time he drove home without having betrayed her confidence, even though he had seen Andreas in all his misery, sincere but also hollow.
One evening it was Daniel on the phone. He presented himself as an old friend and said he had been given Robert’s number by Else. He asked how she was. He did not say Lucca, but she. His intimate tone surprised Robert, seeing they had never talked to each other before. How many times had he phoned the house in the woods and slammed the receiver down because Andreas answered? Or waited until the connection was broken off because no one answered? Daniel paused. Are you . . . he asked and interrupted himself before trying again. I mean . . . you and Lucca . . . Robert almost sympathised with the irrepressible need for clarity beneath the other man’s heavy-hearted stammer.
Lucca sat in an easy-chair wearing headphones. He went over to her and laid a cautious hand on her shoulder. She was alarmed, for once she had not heard him, she who otherwise heard everything. He could faintly hear the crescendo in the last movement of Brahms’s third symphony. He said it was Daniel, and as he spoke he wondered at himself for not telling the caller as usual that Lucca did not want to speak to anyone. She hesitated a moment before rising and walking over to the telephone, orientating herself as was now her habit by brushing the furniture with her hand en route. He took care not to change the position of anything when he did the housework. She waited to pick up the receiver until he had gone out of the room and closed the door behind him.
He went into the kitchen and started clearing up the dinner things. One of the plates clattered as he put it into the dishwasher, and at the same moment he heard a corresponding clatter from the other end of the house, like an echo. She squatted in the middle of the room surrounded by tulips, water and fragments of glass. She used one hand to search for the pieces and collected them in the other, curving it like a cup. Two of her fingers were bleeding, he led her into the bathroom. She had a deep cut on one fingertip. I’m sorry, she said. I just needed to smash something . . . When he had bandaged the cut finger and put a plaster on another, she collapsed onto the lid of the lavatory seat. What was I thinking of? she mumbled. What could I have been thinking of? She bent forwards and began to weep. He looked at her for a moment before going into the scullery to get a dustpan and brush.
He stood waking up under the shower for a long time. It felt as if the hot water slowly made his fatigue crackle and fall away from him in invisible flakes. His own life was the same, almost. He went to the hospital every morning and came home in the late afternoon, but whereas previously he had spent his leisure hours vegetating and listening to music, now he helped Lucca get accustomed to her new existence. He had stopped playing tennis, and not only because he had no time. His friendship with Jacob had cooled after he had let him wait in vain at the tennis courts one summer day, and after Jacob had stood in his garden an hour later and seen him through the window talking to Lucca on the telephone. One day when they were together in a queue in the hospital canteen Jacob asked Robert what he was up to with his former patient. Someone must have seen them together in town, although Lucca seldom went out, for fear of meeting Andreas.
To spare her pride he tried to help her as little as possible. He cleared up discreetly after her small accidents and behaved as if he had not noticed them. Now and again, before she was familiar with the house, he took her arm cautiously when she was about to run into a door or crack her head on the open door of a cupboard, and the episode with the flower vase was not the only time he had to put a plaster on her, like a clumsy child. She said that herself. That it was like learning everything over again, just like a child. At first he’d had to help her in the bathroom in the morning. He guided her under the shower and took her hand to show her how to regulate the water. Her nakedness made them shy and very correct.
He turned off the shower and opened the window to let out the steam. It resembled the smoke from a fire as it billowed up and blew away into the cold damp murkiness. It had been dark when they arrived at his house for the first time. He asked her to wait in the hall while he went in and switched on the lights. She asked him to show her the house. He took her arm and led her round. She wanted to know what each room looked like, and he described the furniture, the pictures on the walls and the other things. She smiled when he got to the ping pong table in what should have been the dining room. As he described it in detail, he suddenly felt he was seeing his home like a stranger.
Later in the evening she grew hungry, and he suddenly realised he had not done any shopping. He offered to make an omelette. She insisted on breaking the eggs and beating them. She needed to cook again after months of insipid hospital food. He set a bowl and a tray of eggs on the kitchen table and put a whisk into her hand. When she knocked the first egg on the edge of the bowl, the yolk slid down onto the table, and so it went on. In the end she had broken almost all the eggs in the tray and half the shells lay in the bowl with the yolks that had been lucky enough not to land on the table. She broke down, convulsed with sobbing as she bent forwards, the tips of her hair dipping into the pool of egg yolk on the table top. He cleared up after her, washed the bowl and suggested she start again. This time she succeeded. She whisked the eggs, he fried the omelettes. Don’t worry, he said. I’m not sorry for you. She turned her dark spectacles towards him. That’s good, she said in a muted voice.
He did not know how she passed the time when she was alone in the house. He asked her when he got home one afternoon and found her sitting on the threshold of the terrace. I’m remembering, she said. He taught her to work the stereo, and she sorted his extensive record collection into piles on the floor, which she memorised, as she tried them all out to find the music she liked. She kept returning to Chopin, but one day when he arrived back in the afternoon, the passionate voice and crisp guitar of José Feliciano reached him out in the drive. He had forgotten that one. It was filled with childhood memories, she told him. Her mother had been mad about José Feliciano, and now he had become a kind of colleague as well. When she had played Che serà serà for the f
ifth time he suggested that she might like to try what it sounded like listening through his earphones for a change.
He sometimes called her when he was on night duty. They did not talk about anything special, but he lowered his voice nevertheless if the night nurse walked past. He asked what she was doing, and said whatever came into his head. Perhaps that was the biggest change. Someone being in the house when he was not there. The fact that he could call home. He mostly thought about the change during their nocturnal telephone conversations. Things had become quite natural by now, when they were in the house together. When they came to an end of their conversation she always thanked him for phoning. Her politeness made him feel sad. As if he had only called because he knew she was sitting there alone.
Every time after he had driven her to the training session at the Institute for the Blind he would walk around the centre of Copenhagen, browse in music shops or sit in a café. Sometimes he went to see his mother, at others he waited for Lea outside her school. She had given him a teasing look when he fetched her from the station for the first time after the summer holidays and explained in the car that he no longer lived on his own. To start with she wouldn’t believe that Lucca wasn’t his new girlfriend. She only began to believe it when she found one of Lucca’s elastic hair-bands on her bedside table. When Lea came, Lucca slept in an empty room previously used as a store-room. He had tidied away the junk, piled the packing cases at one end and made up a mattress at the other.
Lea felt uncertain about Lucca when they were introduced. She had never before been with a blind person and was shy about her dark glasses and searching manner of turning her face in the direction of anyone speaking. She made an effort to seem natural and behave nicely, but it did not help that she was handicapped, this strange woman who had moved in with her father, even though they were not lovers. As if that wasn’t odd enough anyway. Conversation at the dinner table languished. Lea’s replies were only monosyllables, and Lucca withdrew into herself. Robert felt like an unsuccessful clown desperately rushing around the ring trying in vain to elicit a smile from the audience.
It helped when he fetched Lauritz the next day. The boy’s joy over the reunion made an impression on Lea and she began to relax with Lucca. Lea and Lauritz played blind man’s buff with her in the garden. Standing inside he wondered at her cynical ease as he heard them laugh and saw her reeling around after the children. She was touched, he could see, to sense how Lea treated the boy as if he were her little brother. She succeeded in winning Lea’s confidence, he didn’t know how, and when he saw them sitting on the lawn together, he did not disturb them.
It was one of the last warm days of August, and after lunch they went to the beach. Lea took Lucca’s hand and led her out to the other side of the reef where it was deep enough to swim. He stayed on the edge of the sea with Lauritz. While the boy tumbled around in the waves he watched Lucca, standing with her arms crossed, in water up to her waist. Lea kept encouraging her and finally she gave way and stretched out her arms, lifting her feet off the bottom. They swam slowly side by side towards the posts. Robert admired her courage. She laughed, at once nervous and released. He wasn’t sure he would have dared entrust himself to the water without sight.
The sky was visible now, but it probably would not get much brighter. An October day with low-lying clouds and sticky withered leaves on the damp asphalt. When Robert had dressed he went into the kitchen and switched on the coffee-maker. Lucca must have fallen asleep again, she liked to sleep late. He put out bread and cheese and went to wake her up. The door of Lea’s room was ajar. He opened it cautiously, without a sound. The grey daylight met the wall and shone on the glazed poster above the bed, blurring all but Michael Jackson’s small, arrogant face in a milky haze. Lucca’s hair was spread out on the pillow-case with its pattern of swallows and cheerful stylised clouds. Her eyelids were closed and her lips lightly parted, she was breathing peacefully.
She had put on a little weight while staying with him, her face was no longer as bony and drawn and still showed a touch of summer colour. It was a long time since he had seen her without her dark glasses. A long, white scar above her left eyebrow seemed to be the only trace left by the accident. Her serious expression reminded him of the photograph Andreas had taken of her at the pavement café in Paris, when she knew their relationship had ended. Her lips were parted in the same way, as if she had been surprised in the middle of a word, not by the photographer but by sleep.
The corners of her mouth curved. I’m not asleep, she said. I woke up when you came in. He protested. He had no shoes on and the door had opened without a sound. It wasn’t you, I heard, she said, it was the coffee-maker. Listen . . . Now he too could hear the faint snorting and gurgling sound. He went down the drive to fetch the newspaper from the letterbox. When he came in again he heard water splashing on the tiles in the bathroom. He had a cup of coffee and read the paper, but when he put it down he had forgotten what was in it.
She came into the kitchen and sat down opposite him. She had buttoned her blouse crookedly, but he did not remark on it. She let her hand roam over the table until she found the bread basket and the butter dish. She asked when they would be in Italy. Her damp towelled hair fell in front of the dark glasses. Tomorrow afternoon, he replied, and noticed how accurately she scraped up butter with her knife and spread it on the bread. Anyway, we should be in Milan by tomorrow afternoon, he went on. She searched with her hand again, found a slice of cheese, put it on the bread and brushed her hair away from one cheek before taking a bite. Milan, she murmured, chewing.
How about Lucca? she asked as he locked the front door. Maybe late the next morning, he said, carrying their luggage to the boot. Maybe late in the evening . . . He had suggested going to Lucca merely because it occurred to him and so as not just to suggest a trip into the blue. Perhaps that was why she had acquiesced to his suggestion without hesitation. When he hit on the idea he had thought she might find it easier to reflect on her future if she got away. At least she would not have to use so much energy on defending herself. But he too felt the urge to go, exhausted as he was with shielding her isolation. He explained to Andreas that she needed to get out of his reach before she could think of him without feeling under pressure. Had she said that? No, said Robert. It was something he had thought out for himself. Andreas agreed he was right.
Neither of them said anything when he started the car. He drove through the industrial district, past the hospital and further on to the viaduct with slip-roads down to the motorway’s north- and south-facing lanes. I never saw Lucca, she said finally. She said it in a matter-of-fact way. He replied that they didn’t need to go there if she didn’t want to. She let down her seat so she could lean back. No, she said, I need to know I have been there.
It began to rain again a few kilometres south. The rainwater whistled under the tyres and the red rear lights of the cars glistened on the wet asphalt. I’m not nervous, she said. He smiled. Then why did she say that? She pondered for a while. Because I ought to be, she replied. To drive that far, and to drive for so long with someone I hardly know, in a way. He turned into the fast lane. It’s strange, she said, to know such a lot about someone I have never seen. He replied that he had only told her so much about himself because she couldn’t see him. She nodded. That was why she had dared to talk about herself. Because she couldn’t see him. It precluded her from forming an impression of how he looked at her.
It had occurred to her a little while earlier, when he opened the door of Lea’s room to wake her up. When he stood looking at her because he thought she was asleep. Had she felt spied on? No, it wasn’t that. On the contrary, she had realised that it no longer affected her if she was looked at. Her face had become irrelevant, something separate from herself. That’s probably why I am not nervous, she laughed. Because of that and because you are not in love with me. If I thought you were I would never have told you my story, and if you were, you would certainly not have told me yours. She paused. Storie
s, she went on, stories give out too much light. You can’t hide from them. He smiled. She often made him smile, and each time it struck him that he was alone with his smile. You’re right, he said, in the end they always catch you up. Yes, she replied after a pause. They have no escape routes . . . even if my own story is about one long flight.
After she fell silent he sat for a long time thinking over what she had said. They had grown used to keeping silent in each other’s company, when one of them paused in the narrative. It no longer worried them, but there was something significant in the silence between them now, in the car. They were outside everything, sitting here among the other cars on the motorway, where the towns they passed were no more than white names on blue signboards. It was the right place to be, he thought, in a car on a motorway, for they had met the same way, as unknown to each other as the cars on the road, beyond all relationship. Perhaps she was right, perhaps they had no need to feel nervous. Gradually they had immersed themselves more deeply into each other’s life than one normally does, but at the same time he had felt as if they were conversing by satellite, across an enormous distance. They were close to each other and yet apart, and maybe they could only become so close because they were restricted to words alone.
Each knew more about the other than many other people did, but her blindness protected both of them. Particularly when the details grew so intimate that they would never have believed they would tell them to anyone. She was spared seeing how he reacted to her story, and he could speak freely about himself without the surveillance of a searching, sympathetic or reproachful glance. They felt free because they could speak without worrying or having any hopes about the impacts of their narratives. And yet they went on behaving like two people who have just got to know each other, considerate and cautious. She behaved modestly like the guest she was, modestly because she felt he didn’t want her to express her gratitude too fervently. And he restrained his way of helping her, afraid of exaggerating and making her feel indebted.
Lucca Page 38