We put in at the Marina Grande and took in the smells. The taxis of Capri are all convertibles, and as we drove past the white villas from the twenties with succulent purple bouganvilleas cascading over their walls, I began quite unconsciously to hum ‘Against All Odds’.
‘Oh, I love that one,’ she exclaimed, and began to sing out the words as we negotiated the hairpin bends.
The town of Capri is hardly bigger than a fishing village in Denmark, but the mindset is a different thing altogether. Every prominent fashion house you can think of has grabbed itself a share of the island’s precious square metres: Gucci, Prada, Zegna, Roberto Cavalli, Dolce & Gabbana, Moschino. We went down to the Piazzetta, the very heart of the island, animated by the Chiesa di Santo Stefano and its domes, corrupted by the life that is played out around it.
The Gran Caffé is the finest and most azure blue of the establishments, and we ordered Campari and soda, served in thick, chunky glasses with ice and lemon.
A woman with white-wine legs in a pair of leopardskin trousers passed by. Her breasts were large and immovable, her lips inflated into a beak.
‘Here they stood and recited their poetry a hundred years ago,’ I said. ‘Now it’s for rubber ducks.’
‘First come the artists, then comes the money,’ said Diana.
‘And then we come and yearn for what went before.’
‘I don’t,’ said Diana.
We strolled along the Via Cammerelle, and I noticed a little poster in the window of a sandal-maker’s shop. There was an opening for a photo exhibition taking place at five o’clock.
‘I know where we can stay,’ said Diana.
She stopped in front of the Hotel Quisisana. Three elderly well-heeled couples were sitting on the terrace, each staring dolefully at a point on the horizon.
‘I don’t think I can afford it,’ I said.
‘I’ve got money,’ she said.
A waiter paused to adjust a sumptuous floral decoration in the hall.
‘Can you tell me which room the author Norman Douglas used to stay in?’ Diana said in English.
How on earth did she know about Norman Douglas?
The receptionist looked at her in bewilderment.
‘Author? Just a moment.’
A great leather sofa of a gentleman came out from the back room. He was in no hurry.
‘So, you are an admirer of the late Norman Douglas?’
Diana nodded and leaned her arm on the counter.
‘Room 41,’ he said. ‘I will make you a fair prize.’
He turned and barked out an order. Room 41 was a suite.
‘Norman Douglas must have sat writing there,’ she said, indicating the mahogany desk.
I opened the bottle of Moët et Chandon that had been placed in an ice bucket on the meticulously carved bureau.
‘How come you know about Norman Douglas?’
‘Your article made me read him. South Wind is an amazing novel.’
I poured champagne into her glass.
‘You read my article on Capri?’
She nodded and smiled.
‘Let’s go to the bar,’ she said.
The interior was a shock of black and white, and after lengthy discussion with the bartender she ordered a Krug Vintage 1995 and asked to have it served by the pool.
‘Why did you come to San Cataldo?’ I asked.
She took her trousers off and lounged in her polo shirt and white knickers.
‘I’ve got an exhibition in October.’
‘Do you know what you’re going to put in it?’
‘I might tomorrow.’
The champagne tasted quite singularly of rye bread and befuddled rodent.
She took off her polo, and until then I hadn’t even thought about her age.
‘Let’s have a swim,’ she said, pulled off her knickers and loped off towards the pool. I kept my underpants on.
The bells of Chiesa di Santa Stefano wouldn’t stop ringing.
The exhibition was in a former fruit warehouse and consisted of photographs of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Men in drag, gangsters, alluring children with grown-up eyes. Pain and tragedy all done up in the aesthetics of monochrome.
A short, stocky man wearing expensive glasses, short hair and an untucked pale blue shirt came towards us with two glasses of spumante. Maurizio the host was an antique dealer from Rome, but he and his partner Salvatore, the photographer whose exhibition it was, loved their outlet on Capri, and as soon as autumn came they took off to New York and their little apartment on Bleeker Street.
Diana was shown round by Salvatore. Maurizio looked up at me.
‘She has that striking aura of beauty and disaster that makes a real diva,’ he said. Diana was in a pigeon-blue suit.
I felt uncomfortably ordinary in my white shirt.
‘Where do people eat here?’ I asked.
‘For a real romantic dinner you have to visit the Hotel Punta Tragara.’
He flipped open his mobile and booked us a table.
We walked along the cliff edge outside and I was too absorbed by it all to notice anything other than that the air was heavy with the scent of flowers, and the tiny lanterns of the ships that bobbed two hundred metres below us. We were received by the owner himself, who showed us to a table right at the edge. There was a pianist and we had grilled swordfish and a Pinot Bianco.
I Faraglioni rose up out of the sea, three jagged rocks from the postcards.
‘What got you to Copenhagen anyway?’
‘Bjarne Riis,’ she said.
‘Bjarne Riis?’
‘When I was fifteen I happened to see the Tour de France stage to Hautacam when Bjarne Riis left them for dead on the mountain. I didn’t know anything about cycling then, but I did realise that a man from a small, flat country had conquered the entire world.’
‘That day changed the way the Danes look at themselves,’ I said.
Diana told me how her fascination with Bjarne Riis made her take up cycling. She trained hard with the discipline of a professional and won a silver medal in the Hungarian road-racing championships. At the same time, she took lessons in Danish language and culture from a Danish violinist living in Budapest, and in 2002 she got on a train to Copenhagen.
‘Did you know anyone?’
‘The very first evening I met Ida-Marie at Bang & Jensen Bar.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘She’s a visual artist. We still share a studio together.’
‘Are you a couple?’
‘I’m not in couples.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d rather be doing other things.’
We drank coffee and grappa on the piazzetta and watched and listened in as an English writer with long grey hair tried to win the attention of two spoiled daughters of wealthy Italian parentage. I tried to envisage Diana’s record collection. With most people I could do this very easily. I knew for instance that Lea would at best have a bit of B52s, some mouldy trip hop, Portishead most likely, maybe an early Talking Heads, but the rest would almost certainly be cerebral and mood-oriented white music: Cocteau Twins, Jeff Buckley, Mazzy Star, Mozart’s Requiem out of obligation, and everything by David Sylvian, including Japan. After you’d sussed someone’s record collection, figuring out the rest of their life was easy: the minimalist furniture with arty undertones, the big industrial lighting, the books in well-ordered stacks on the floor, the futon, the poster of Before’s LP cover, the black Arne Jacobsen Series 7 chairs at the little kitchen table, the sachets of miso soup, the green tea with the intrusive lemon, Red-Green Alliance, Swedish literature and shoes outside the door.
Helene’s record collection was what you would call honest when I met her: En underlig fisk by Gnags was there still, Helmig’s Kære maskine, a small selection of Tom Waits after she was taken in by the feel of Down by Law, the Beatmasters’ ‘Who’s in the House’, the twelve-inch maxi, Anne Linnet’s Kvindesind, nicked off her mum, a decent Best of Disco containing a nev
er-ending twelve-inch version of ‘You Can Do It’, Bach’s Goldberg Variations played by Glenn Gould, the obligatory Satie and Keith Jarrett. A gigantic mahogany bookcase stuffed with volumes: Marcel Proust, the Russians, Mann, the Alexandria Quartet, poetry and an extensive selection of modern American, all books she had actually read, otherwise a bit of old teak marred by candle wax, black leather sofa aspiring to be design, IKEA bed with stains on the mattress, rice-paper lampshades, half-decent muesli, brown beans she never got round to soaking, blue Irma coffee, Socialist People’s Party, and then, pretty much dovetailing with her becoming publicity director, the Social Liberal Party. You could keep your shoes on.
But in Diana’s case I was completely blank.
‘What sort of music are you listening to at the moment?’ I asked.
‘Do you know “Borderline”?’ she said.
‘You mean Madonna?’
‘Yes, doesn’t it put you in a very special mood?’
I sat with my grappa glass resting between my fingers, wondering whether she was stupid or simply insistent on pretending to be. I wondered in all seriousness whether the success she had achieved might merely be attributed to her being in a better mood than everyone else and attacking life as a hungry boar might take on a lunch buffet.
Diana had produced a little sketchpad, and the owner came with Campari and soda on the house, for she was so truly delightful, the way she sat there keeping the island’s artistic myth alive. She had a diminutively underhung jaw and might have spoken with a lisp as a child. As such, she confirmed my theory that women displaying even a suggestion of underhung jaw very often possess extremely lively breasts.
She was twenty-seven, and I was fifteen years her senior.
I wondered whether Diana saw me as easy prey, that in six months’ time she would be able to introduce her young artist friends to me, the man with the lined face and the silk cravat, and to be given an authentic little talk about life back in the day when the tables of the Byens Kro had been covered with brown-and-white checked tablecloths and Pat Boone ruled the jukebox.
She was flirty in a natural way, and possessed the kind of optimistic outlook that led her to believe everyone she met had only the best of intentions. By contrast, when she was working she took on a rather stern appearance.
‘What are you drawing?’ I asked.
‘It’s for you.’
She tore off the page and handed it to me. It was me. Leaping across a mountain range, arms outstretched.
‘It looks like a women’s poster my mother had on the wall. Was there anything else? That was the caption.’
We kissed in front of the sandal-maker’s on the Via Camarelle, and it was not like any kiss I had ever received before.
I live to forget myself. When I watch a good film I don’t think about whether the dialogue is strained or whether it was filmed on location. Music can have the same effect, but it’s one thing to shed your ego, quite another to do so in the company of others, which is why musicians load their gear into old Hanomags to drive to Aalborg and come home again the next day with a miserable four hundred kroner in their pockets. They play for that briefest of moments in which togetherness lifts them up out of their egos and into something that is indefinably greater.
Sex is the most intimate and intense way in which to forget oneself in the company of others, and I don’t know whether it was because of Diana’s own singular ability to transcend reality, or whether it was a state of mind we managed to attain together, but I was absolutely out of myself from the word go.
I woke up as she was stepping out of her bath, and I had difficulty connecting the sight of her with my own life. The way she swung her hips. Her waist, her long calves and muscular thighs. If it hadn’t been for the smell I would have been completely gone. We smelled of meat together. Of open muscle and blood.
Two waiters knocked on the door and rolled in a trolley. They got our breakfast ready – grapefruit juice, a variety of hams, omelette, fresh-baked bread, fruit and great crimson tomatoes, machiatto with thick brown foam. Diana bit off half a tomato and kissed me with her mouth full; the other half she pressed down on my bell-end. With a cool slice of mozzarella on each side of my cock, she began to wank me off, her soft breasts brushing against my balls, and I came so intensely my legs lost all feeling. The sun shone down on to the bed, and we lay naked for half an hour, eating and talking about whatever came to mind.
‘I need to check and see if Peter e-mailed me those photos,’ she said.
She was allowed to use the manager’s computer, and there were six e-mails with photos from Peter Borch-Jensen. Diana popped her head out of the door to make sure we were on our own before clicking on the first image.
A close-up of her cunt appeared on the screen. It was so proximate and so sharply in focus you could see every fold. She opened one of the final images, and the setting was the same, but whereas in the first photo her cunt had been closed and chaste, in the second it was open and wet.
She leaned back in the expensive leather swivel chair, looked at me and laughed until tears came out of her eyes.
We met Maurizio and Salvatore down at the Marina Grande at one o’clock.
The boat was relatively small and oblong with a chugging engine, and the deck was one big towelling mattress. We put out of the harbour and sailed for a quarter of an hour or so. Maurizio dropped anchor at a lagoon. I put my head against Diana and she stroked my hair gently.
Maurizio unpacked the cooler box.
Fresh mozzarella, white wine, bread, olives, ham and tomatoes.
‘This is Capri,’ he said. ‘Do whatever you want. Swim! Eat! Sleep!’
The water was still, clear and deep. I jumped, and all sound disappeared.
COPENHAGEN, MAY 2008
‘Why do people build bridges?’
Diana’s flatmate, Ida-Marie, slouched in the chair in her black Ramones T-shirt, her long legs in skinny jeans. She had grown up in the so-called White Houses in the Frederiksberg district, a neighbourhood populated by Volvo-driving child psychologists and professors, and since she was too lazy to embark on any serious course of education, she took the easy way out and became an artist. She painted, so they said, souls: portraits of her friends’ ethereal substance.
The apartment was a former plumber’s depot. The place consisted of two rooms and Ida-Marie’s space was off limits. She locked her door behind her when she came home. Diana’s area was about a hundred and fifty square metres. The rows of steel shelving on the walls had once been home to pumps, thermostats and taps of stainless steel, but Diana had transformed them into a kind of mantelpiece gone mad, a display of scowling elves, champagne glasses, leather masks, books, disturbing photographs, little superheroes of plastic, and chunky candles. When the candles were lit you didn’t see the tired grey-green lino on the floor, the crumbling plaster on the walls or the accumulated junk in the corners; an ugly teddy bear cut out of plywood, some rusty iron piping, a bright green bass drum, crap salvaged from skips. In the midst of it all was a square pillar with faces on it. Forty-one Polaroids of all her buyers. Minna Lund was there eleven times over, the same unrelenting gaze.
Along the big windows facing the rear courtyard of Lyrskovgade she had set up an industrial kitchen with steel counters and two enormous gas burners. At the far end, a thick velvet drape in midnight blue hung down from the ceiling and served as a partition behind which was her double bed and the racks containing her suits and shirts, arranged according to colour. The focal point of the room was the six-metre-long table with a laminated grey surface; the chairs had been salvaged from a school, and her handmade mint-green racing bike stood in a frame by the door.
Diana worked from the moment she woke up, consuming an apple or the odd carrot along the way, but never putting down her stick of charcoal. Peter Borch-Jensen’s sharp photos were transformed into pitch-black drawings that lay smouldering on the table, until she decided the day was over, arranged them in order and placed them in folders. I wrot
e while lying in bed with the computer in my lap; the sounds from the street didn’t bother me, and whenever I went over to the table to butter a hunk of bread I would look across at her and dwell upon the expressiveness of her neck.
‘What’s so attractive about the other side of the bridge?’ Ida-Marie continued.
‘What bridge?’ said Diana.
‘Any bridge. That’s what I don’t get. Why can’t people just stay where they are?’
‘Let’s leave that for another day,’ said Diana, getting to her feet and starting to clear the table. She took Ida-Marie’s teacup too.
‘I’ve got to present my new work to Moritz in an hour.’
She picked up the pile of drawings.
‘Mind if I have a look?’ said Ida-Marie.
Diana thought for a second, then handed her two off the top of the pile.
‘Ah, the cunt,’ said Ida-Marie.
‘I’ve thought about keeping the tapestries black and white,’ said Diana.
‘Are you pleased with them?’
‘I’ve always had confidence in my work,’ said Diana.
‘I’m not sure this time.’
They exchanged glances for about half a minute, then kissed each other goodbye on the mouth. Ida-Marie turned in the doorway.
‘Make sure Moritz pays you money up front. I can’t afford to keep laying out.’
‘How much do I owe?’
‘For three months. Twenty-four thousand nine hundred.’
‘You’ll have it tomorrow, darling.’
Diana selected nine drawings and placed them carefully on the table.
As she bent forward, her light blue shirt rode up, and that was all it took. My dick was red and deformed from all our shagging and so chronically being kept on alert. Of course it was animating with all that soft, elastic skin, but the way the darkness enveloped us was the most important thing. The rush of it.
With Diana I didn’t have to behave. I’d never understood the parties Helene and I went to every other weekend. Twenty couples either heading for divorce, or else caring so little they could no longer be bothered to argue. All that talk about timber decking and food; women whispering about their problems after dinner or discussing the price of kids’ clothing while their perspiring, alcohol-steeped men sneaked themselves another beer.
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