Breathless

by Anne Sward

  No one in my family apart from me had ever been in Lukas and Gábriel’s house. I tried to say that it was no use talking to Lukas’s papa as he couldn’t speak Swedish, but they thought I was trying to help Lukas out of fear. I was—but not because I was afraid of him. I was afraid of what was going to happen to him. Anything you say can be used against you. Lukas must have had that line in his head, because he didn’t say a single word in his defense.

  “Say something!” I whispered to him.

  “It’s better,” he mouthed and nodded in the direction of his crotch.

  “Something else. To them. Lukas . . . Please . . .”

  But he just shook his head.

  It had passed, his stubborn erection, but what help was that when one problem just led to another? To be caught red-handed, instant evidence—that was all my family was waiting for. Proof that he was anything but an innocent friend, that what had seemed fairly harmless about him when he was thirteen had grown into something dangerous now that he was sixteen. We had been eyed with suspicion the whole time, never able to relax, our games an act that took away the pleasure, took the playfulness out of playing. If neither of us let go, we would both sink. To the last breath—I recalled the phrase now. It came from a film that ended with one person betraying the other. I had never really understood why.

  —

  Gábriel stood in the doorway and watched us approach.

  “I’d like to live in Mexico. I hear it’s so lovely,” I whispered, to ease the tension. Lukas laughed. A clipped dry laugh. Erik gave him a shove, as if to emphasize that soon he wouldn’t be laughing, he could be sure of that.

  The bruises on Lukas’s body were the only testimony to his father. Otherwise he was seldom seen, sometimes on his way to or from work with his bicycle, or when he made repairs to the house, prone to rot—it was so close to the water that the floors were always damp, just like in the pearl fisher’s house. Once in a while he would sit on the wooden porch and watch the kites or turn on his radio, tuned in to wavelengths we didn’t understand.

  “I’m a real scumbag . . .” Lukas whispered out of the corner of his mouth as we slowly neared his house.

  “What does ‘scumbag’ mean?” I whispered back.

  He laughed again and received another irritated push, this time from Marina.

  “You damn well won’t laugh, do you hear?” she hissed.

  In the final scene of Breathless the man is running, shot in the back, the bloodstain spreading across his white shirt, until he collapses. She is behind him—she who has informed on him to the police, in spite of love. It is silent when he falls, just the look on her face as she bends over him, watching him die in the street. “I’m a scumbag,” he says, before closing his eyes with one hand and drawing his last breath. “What did he say?” she, bewildered, asks the policeman who has just shot him. “He said, ‘You’re a scumbag,’” says the policeman. Then—her empty gaze into the camera—“What does ‘scumbag’ mean?” before she turns away and the screen turns black.

  What the final scene was actually about, I couldn’t understand. Loyalty, guilt, but how they related to each other . . . Now at any rate I felt like her, traitor and executioner in one, as if it were I who was hauling Lukas up the steps where Gábriel had just opened the door and looked questioningly at his son. How do you measure silence? It was so quiet you could hear the clouds moving above us—until Gábriel said something in his own language. Lukas’s hand made a vain gesture toward the cigarettes in his pocket, something he often did when he felt under pressure, but he was only wearing those threadbare shorts. He looked like he was freezing, holding his arms around his body.

  “What did he say?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know. He always talks like that when he’s angry,” Lukas said under his breath so only I could hear.

  “Do you sleep with a lot of men?”

  “Not so many.”

  “How many?”

  I hold up seven fingers. “How about you?”

  “Me?” Lukas sounds surprised at being asked.

  Gestures quickly with the fingers of one hand . . . twenty-two.

  —

  The bedroom scene in Breathless was my favorite. It was best to do it with the hat and the cigarette too. We had to manage with Grandfather Björn’s old Stetson. Jean Seberg playfully tried on Jean-Paul Belmondo’s gangster hat, while he lay on the bed smoking. Lukas said that I had Jean Seberg’s dimples. Her eyebrows as well. And something about the way I looked. “Sixties rebellious youth,” it said on the video case. Without really knowing what it meant, we acted it out as faithfully as we could. Lukas’s role was an antihero, it said. This thought appealed to him, a hero who was anti-everything.

  “I’d like to live in Mexico. I hear it’s so lovely. When I was little Dad would always say, ‘We’ll go there next Saturday.’ But he’d always forget,” I mimicked.

  “I bet it’s not great at all in Mexico. People are such liars.” (Lukas’s turn.) “It’s like Stockholm.” (“Stoekkoelm”—he was imitating Jean-Paul Belmondo.) “Everyone who’s been there says: the Swedes are terrific, I had it three times a day. But I went there and it isn’t true—they’re not like they are down here—and they’re just as ugly as Parisian women.”

  “Swedish women are very pretty,” I objected.

  “No, no, perhaps a few of them, but not all. The only towns where all the girls are beautiful—without being gorgeous, but charming, like you, where fifteen out of twenty girls have something special—aren’t Rome, Paris, or Rio de Janeiro, but Lausanne and Geneva.”

  —

  Jean Seberg, Mama’s favorite actress. She was the one who had died. On a street in Paris. No blood, no audience. For real. Lukas and I had borrowed Breathless from Mama’s collection with a handful of other films and watched it on the rental set at Lukas’s house. Saw it so many times while his papa worked his shift at the factory that we could not fail to learn the lines. “Do you sleep with a lot of men?” “Not so many.” “How many?” Seven fingers . . . One time I wanted to swap and say Lukas’s lines, but he wasn’t inclined.

  Following an overdose of sleeping pills Jean Seberg was found in the backseat of her car after she had been missing from her apartment for eleven days. Eleven days. The car had been parked the whole time on a busy Paris street without anyone noticing her—how could that be possible? How can you live in a town like that? Were there even towns so big that somebody could lie dead in a parked car for nearly two weeks without anyone walking past and wondering? Had no one seen her, or did no one care?

  Mama had heard a report of her death on Swedish radio on the morning of my tenth birthday, so I hadn’t imagined the funereal atmosphere in the house.

  A son. Her farewell letter was written only to him. Not to any of her many husbands—it doesn’t matter how many of them there were—the letter was still only written to her son: Diego, my dear son, forgive me, I can’t live any longer. Understand me, I know that you can, and you know that I love you. Your mother who knows you. Jean. I knew just enough English to understand her parting words. “Forgive” and “understand me” and “I love you” were not the most important—the most important were the last words . . . “Your mother who knows you.” It was so unbearable to think of him, so sad, and at the same time—a twinge of jealousy when I considered that my mama would never have written that to me.

  —

  Almost anything at all can look like a crime if you consider it in a certain way. A dead woman on a backseat, Lukas and I in the dark cellar. They condemned him without a trial, forbade him to go near me. We didn’t see each other for two days. No one allowed me to slip out. Papa’s brother Erik declared that he was going to keep tabs on every step I took, every step Lukas took as well—somehow or other, even having forbidden Lukas to come within sight of our house. After Erik went back on the day shift he had no hope of carrying
out his mission. I would escape and Lukas would search me out again . . . However hard they pushed me, I was never going to betray him like Jean Seberg betrayed Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless.

  INNOCENCE

  Whenever I travel by train he comes to me. A haze that rises in my memory. Trickles out even if I attempt to seal it off with sleep or conversation. Perhaps a visit to the restaurant car with a glass or two of wine and a book that would usually sweep me away from this world. I don’t know how he can sense that I’m on a train, but he does and that is when he appears. The railway separated our houses, the endless night trains, the slow freight trains pounding toward morning. Every time I go by train I travel back into memories, childhood, through summers and winters, skirt lengths, hairstyles, chewing gum that has lost its taste. I shut my book—not worth trying to read now. The sky is ablaze with yellow and a color I can’t name. I am crossing from loneliness into loneliness. Loneliness is only a lack of companionship that one must grow accustomed to, until it becomes a companion in itself.

  —

  Traveling by train at night is a journey toward light, conveying so much sleep across Europe. At daybreak I go out into the narrow corridor. The compartments are in line, like airless pigeonholes for eight people. I stand there with the morning smokers and the old folk in crumpled suits and shiny synthetic dresses, who, like me, always wake in the hour before sunrise: the suits, the frumpy dresses and me—a small, sleepy, tragic troop.

  I like being alone among other people, exactly as I am in the stifling compartment with room for a large family or eight strangers. Opposite me a newly breastfed baby is sleeping. I can’t hear her breathe, but I can feel the gentle rhythm of peace surrounding her in the dimness. And the mother, slowly falling asleep, between deserted villages and sparse forests, the roe deer of dawn here and there in the mist. Hungarian, Slovak, Polish countryside, they all merge together after so many hours on a train: the child on the seat, Lukas’s face, the coral landscape, sunken ships whose hulls resemble the hollow chests of gigantic whales with ribs eaten clean by shoals of silvery krill. The skeletons radiate light even in the darkest deep. The reflection of all one has left behind, with or without regret.

  If I dip my hand into the tangled threads of memory, the first thing I come to is the fire. The fire that perhaps has spread farther in my recollection than it did in reality. The fire, and in it Lukas.

  It is a summer of extreme heat. Forest fires have broken out in eastern Europe. An electrical storm has caused hundreds of fires that are left to burn unattended. After the driest spring for over a hundred years, enormous stretches of land are now burned out. The lack of rain combined with dry thunderstorms has created a smoking inferno.

  The pediatrician I slept with last night in a room facing the busy street has still not come down for breakfast. Not that we slept much. No doubt he will spend the whole day in bed, exhausted. In positions I didn’t even know existed, I tried to relax and be compliant and not succumb to nausea when he turned and twisted me this way and that. I felt like the white foam on the dark surface of a wave heaving and swelling beneath me, my skin an almost sickly white against the blackness of his. In the background the pulsing of R&B. That’s how you like it, huh? That’s how I like it, babe. If only life could always be like this, fitted together like a supple pair of hips: Huh? Yeah . . . He was heavy, and though I typically have a weakness for the boyish sort, it’s still good to go to bed with someone you can really feel.

  “Do you often go with strange men?” he asked.

  “Not so often.”

  “How often?” I held up seven fingers. The speed of my reply made him laugh. Seven hundred . . . was what he seemed to think.

  Now, on the speaker in the dining room: Marlene Dietrich’s seductive voice that must have been left from the night before—it is not suitable breakfast music. I keep an eye on the door where guests, hungry and sated, come and go. Is he going to miss his conference today? Yes, at any rate he will miss breakfast. Should I wake him? No, I’m not his wife. He had no wife, he said. But he liked married women. Innocence made him melancholy.

  —

  Lust for men and fear—perhaps they are feelings within me that cannot be separated. It is men who have to be distinguished one from another. But how does one know? How does one see? The signs? Don’t suspect someone without cause, but making a mistake can lead to disaster. It is easier with all the other things Mama warned me about: highways are all dangerous, it’s possible to drown in every single lake, snakes can be divided into poisonous and nonpoisonous. But men . . . you simply have to live with the uncertainty. As I recall, she didn’t warn me about strange men or unprotected sex, like other mothers did. Just about love.

  I resolve to place my trust in someone, then try to see him in that light. Without trust one is dead, or might just as well be, but too much trust also carries the risk of not surviving long. Men who can’t take a no, men who have never taken a no, or men who have decided never again to take a no—they will do whatever they like with the next girl who says no.

  —

  The television reports of the fires last night made me restless. I went out after dark, the town feverish with Friday evening, hunting season, high heels, whites of the eyes glowing, smashing glasses. I don’t like this frenzy, actually, prefer daylight, normal days in normal places, chance meetings when one least expects them. But every so often I feel like being wild with rouge plastered on my cheeks. Slip into a bar convinced that someone is sitting there waiting for me.

  It was pleasant talking to an American, to be able to speak without thinking. It started with one glass that soon became two and then three. I threw caution to the wind and the barriers came down and all my secrets spilled out, unimpeded. Perhaps because he didn’t seem to be listening very carefully—he wasn’t going to correct me if I contradicted myself, demand explanations, would just listen and forget. Appeared to have heard all the stories before, from his position behind the bar in an Arizona desert, I imagined, where he stood pouring out mescal and listening to the world’s troubles. And I could see what he thought of me . . . a poor lonely lady of the night, all dressed up and nowhere to go.

  His features were sharp like a cock-of-the-rock, as if his blood were a mixture of all races, until he became everything and nothing, free. A man who can ride but can’t swim. A man who can score a bull’s-eye at any distance but can’t distinguish one woman from another under his nose. Grand Canyon, Lake Como, I thought when I saw him. Oakland, Idaho. A typical man. They don’t exist, and yet there he was, looking like someone who would get caught in a loop on the lonely, lonely roads that stretch into infinity in the American Midwest. Pediatrician, he said, in Manhattan, though now he was working for Doctors Without Borders. I could see my surprised expression in his gleaming black eyes. He had come here for an international conference on noma infection that was taking place in the town this week.

  “Noma infection?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, you don’t. Believe me.” Noma was God’s punishment for mankind, especially children. He pronounced the disease with a capital letter and God with a small letter. Perhaps you reach that point when you have witnessed enough suffering. We talked about the fires instead.

  Trust or alcohol, something made me start talking. He didn’t drink himself, refused when I offered him a glass. Normally I don’t trust men who don’t drink, especially if they’re sitting alone in a bar. But from time to time exceptions have to be made. The fact of the matter was that he was far too good-looking for me to leave.

  “I’m a doctor, I know what that stuff does to your brain.” I knew as well, but that didn’t stop me.

  “I would like to live sober and die drunk.” So would I, but how can you know when it’s time? . . . I want to be prepared.

  “Aren’t you a bit too young to be taking death so seriously?” he a
sked, lighting a cigarette.

  “Aren’t you a bit too old to be concerned about your future brain capacity?” I asked. He was handsome, but certainly over fifty.

  “You little rascal,” he exclaimed, amazed. I’m not usually good with older men. I never know how to deal with them. They are so sensitive, and I am always hurting their feelings. But I was enjoying this.

  “You black marauder,” I retorted. Heard him draw breath. It was in the balance.

  If he could call me a little rascal, I could call him a black marauder. As he was a pediatrician he must be accustomed to charming insults, and anyway he knew exactly how handsome he was. He was no doubt always gathering nurses like ripened grapes, and could do with a bit of opposition, someone who didn’t just fall into his hands.

  “What do you want?” It seemed he hadn’t made up his mind to leave, but was giving it serious consideration. I wasn’t in the habit of being quite so blunt, but because he asked me, I didn’t beat around the bush.

  “Okay,” he said, “but we can talk first.” Talk? Of course . . . I have nothing against talking. I wasn’t the one who had to get up early for a conference. He ordered a cup of green tea for himself, and I ordered a glass of slivovitz.

  “You’ll have to pay for that yourself. I never buy women alcohol.” And innocence made him melancholy? He was full of contradictions. I paid for mine and we talked about the fires. I told him what I had heard as a child, how long a fire can continue to burn underground, the smoldering roots giving no outward sign of the catastrophic damage being caused.

  UNFAMILIAR FORESTS

  I’ve been warned about unfamiliar forests, full of hidden dangers, the importance of staying close to home where the situation is known. I’ve never followed that advice. As soon as a place begins to resemble a home, I move on. Objects are so alien. People too, the more one gets to know them. The view over a strange town from a room rented for the night gives me a sense of calm. I feel most at home when I’m somewhere else. Away from my belongings, away from those I love. Could be in any town at all and feel the same loneliness. Yearn for a place that doesn’t exist. Home is where each person’s own smell merges into the smells of the others. There is no such place for me.