Lucca (18 page)

She went into her room and lay down on her back in bed, feeling all her muscles relax. On a high, she felt as if her head, body and limbs drifted apart from each other so that each began floating out in different directions from an increasing vacuum without gravity. She didn't know how long she lay like that. At first it was like being brushed by a warm draught from the open window, then she felt his breath on her feet, then his lips. She hadn't heard him come into the room. To start with they merely brushed her, then he kissed her, his mouth finding its way up her legs and thighs. He clasped her buttocks and pulled her to him. She kept her eyes closed and lay completely limp as his tongue slid between her labia, totally concentrated on the pulses of sensation that streamed through her, again and again, ever stronger until she began to shudder in a long, convulsive release. The walls resounded with a hard, sharp clapping.
Bravo!
She recognised Carlo's melodious, feminine voice.

Giorgio was still on his knees by the bed, between her thighs. Carlo stood in the doorway clapping his hands demonstratively with his head on one side, smiling sarcastically. Giorgio stood up and turned towards him. Carlo took his face between his hands in a hard grip and kissed him with his tongue. Then he let go of him and sent Lucca a triumphant glance, licking his lips and walking out of the door backwards. Giorgio stood with his back to her, head bent, facing the wall. It might be best if she left them, he said. He went out and closed the door behind him.

She dressed and packed her bag. She never saw either Giorgio or Carlo again. When she opened her door the apartment was utterly silent. Only the blue cat sat in a corner regarding her, calmly waving its tail back and forth over the tiles. She cautiously eased the bolt back and slipped out of the front door, like a thief, she thought. As she walked she took off the elastic band that held her hair in a pony tail and shook her head so the hair fell around her shoulders. When she drew near the railway station she passed the bus terminal and caught sight of a bus with her name above the windscreen. Without another thought she bought a ticket
and took a seat at the very back of the bus. She still had no idea of where she was going.

As she sat looking out at the hills in the low sunlight she realised that from the beginning and up to now her journey had been directed by her name, her father's name and her own. But she had not herself chosen her name, and she had not herself decided who was to be her father. She thought of the one Giorgio Montale, of the darkness in his eyes when he had embraced her in farewell and taken a step or two backwards alongside the façade of the Baptistery, raising his hands a little to the side in a gesture of regret. And she thought of the other Giorgio Montale, who an hour before had stood with his back to her and his face locked in Carlo's hands, allowing himself to be kissed and hesitantly, with the same resigned movement, lifted his hands and placed them on Carlo's hips. She thought of what he had said about homelessness, about severing all moorings. Hadn't hers been severed long ago? Lucca was merely a name, a sound, no more. What was she going to do there? Was Lucca anything more than yet another tediously beautiful town, where she could walk around feeling sorry for herself among the flocks of Japanese tourists taking photographs of each other?

The bus stopped at a place where the road turned. A man made his way along the gangway with a suitcase and a cardboard box tied up with string. She seized her bag and got out just as the doors were closing. She stood on the roadside as the bus disappeared round the bend skirting a slope of cypresses. The man went down a path beside a high stone wall, rocking from side to side with his suitcase and his cardboard box until he disappeared among the crooked olive trees. She caught sight of a slim lizard sitting motionless on one of the rough, sunlit stones above the path. A drop of sweat crept down one eyelid and made her blink. When she opened her eyes again the lizard had vanished. She shouldered her bag and crossed over to the shade on the opposite side of the road.

S
he did not get up when the telephone rang downstairs, far away, so far it seemed nothing to do with her. It must be someone wanting to talk to Else. She had still not told anyone she had moved back to the villa. Even Miriam thought she was still staying with Else in the country, but she had only stayed at the cottage a couple of days. Perhaps it was Else phoning. She didn't want to speak to her, anyway. She couldn't stand her sympathy, constantly mixed with bitter advice and censorious analyses of Otto's blunted emotional life. They were not kindred spirits, and she had no use for her mother's comfort or that Else had known the whole time how it would end.

She had just woken up. She lay looking out of the French window that had been open through the night. It had rained and she listened to the whipping summer rain until she dozed off in a long, imperceptible transition in which the rain kept on foaming and whispering. The telephone rang again. The air was warm and damp, the sunlight filtered palely through the mist over the garden of the Agricultural College, and the wet crowns of the trees glittered softly. It kept on ringing.

How indomitable, Lucca thought and suddenly remembered walking hand in hand with Else beside the roses with their name plates, bearing their extravagant names in a neat hand. She remembered the Japanese trees with delicate, curling branches, which bloomed in spring and lost their white petals to the wind, disguised as snowflakes. In winter only the names of the roses stayed above the snow on their brave little name plates. They had laughed at that, Lucca and Else, the empty white beds where the names, undaunted, went on blooming. Whether it was summer or winter the walk always ended on the narrow path out to the lake, to the little island with an old tree which had a bench
around its great trunk. They sat there watching the ducks and the walls of the college, and she remembered feeling lost, sitting beside her mother on their desert island, where nobody knew they were.

Only Else knew she was back in her old room. It had not changed in all the years that had passed since she left home a few days after she came back from Italy. Where had she been, by the way? She remembered her mother's worried, accusing face. Luckily Ivan was on one of his business trips. Lucca described her meeting with Giorgio, and she told her about Stella, but she didn't say anything about the other Giorgio, nor did she say anything about Ivan entering her bedroom the night before she left. Else asked a few questions about Stella, what she was like. Lucca could feel she was slightly interested, and she willingly told her about Stella's hard-edged features, about her bar-tender's costume and about the bar in the suburban hotel furnished in the English style.

It probably had to happen sometime, said Else. Of course she had had to go and find her father. The words sounded strange in her mouth, your father. Else regarded her with an expression that was both tender and exhausted. So it had been a disappointment? Lucca took her hand. It doesn't matter now, she said, and as she said it she felt for the first time that she and her mother were equally adult. Else was just older, that was the only difference. She soon realised that Else knew nothing about what had happened at the cottage when she was alone with Ivan. How could she have known? She didn't even know Lucca had been there that night.

At that time one of her friends from school shared a flat with another girl, and they needed a third tenant. That was how she met Miriam. She got a job in a café and earned just enough to manage. After she moved she avoided visiting Else and Ivan for several weeks, until she could no longer make excuses without it seeming strange and perhaps in itself suspicious. Ivan behaved normally when she went to Sunday lunch, but after the first course while Else was in the kitchen he smiled in a way that
told her he did not feel threatened and even regarded her as a kind of fellow conspirator.

Miriam was taking lessons from an actor, she planned to apply for entrance to Drama School, and when she heard Lucca had been playing with the same idea she kept on urging her to go to an audition with her. Lucca was accepted, Miriam failed and was not admitted until the next year. Lucca could not understand why it had all gone so easily for her. She had only done what she was asked, but perhaps she succeeded because she was not quite so anxious to get in as her friend. She had just been herself, her teachers told her later. She had to smile. Just herself . . . who could that be, then?

She discussed it with one of the other students, a loud-voiced fellow already going bald, whom she befriended because he could always make her laugh. Herself! he giggled. How could you know yourself? If you knew yourself, you must be different from yourself. This was a linguistic misunderstanding, a logical deadlock. You could only get to know yourself if you could observe from somewhere outside yourself. But then you would no longer be yourself! On the contrary, you were always a second or a third or a fourth, all according to whom you were with. He had read philosophy for some years before deciding to become an actor, because after all everything was just one big comedy.

In reality she did not at all mind being a mystery to herself. When she was in the train on her way back from Italy she felt glad not to have been to Lucca. She pictured Giorgio, her own Giorgio, in front of the Baptistery. His gesture, at once ashamed and relieved, as he turned round and walked away without looking back. She was no longer his daughter, nor Else's for that matter. She was her own, no one else's. She thought of Ivan's pale erect cock in the semi-darkness of the cottage and his dismayed expression when she had kicked him onto the floor. She would not try to stop Else being happy. When the train arrived in Munich she tore up Giorgio's postcard. She gazed for a while at the Virgin Mary's face, the child's foot, the folds of the garments and the faded gold before throwing
the pieces into the ashtray and getting her bag down from the luggage rack.

As time went on and she learned to work at a role and build up her characters with the aid of meticulous detail, it seemed to her that she herself held something of every single role she played. The playwrights also showed her how people resemble each other more than they care to admit. She had long talks with her sparse-haired friend about
Peer Gynt
and about the comparison of selfhood with an onion whose innermost core, when one peels it, turns out to be empty. He said that was what it had been like with the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The holiest of holies, where none might enter, had been nothing but an empty room deep inside the temple. He laughed savagely so she could see his sharp canine teeth, and for a moment she wasn't sure whether it was his wolfish grin or the thought of the innermost emptiness of the onion and the temple, that made her shudder.

She thought again of the town of Lucca which at the last moment she had decided not to visit. One day she would go there. Maybe she would go with her lover. She fantasised sitting in a car approaching the curve where she had got off the bus, between the olive grove and the slope of cypresses. She could see no further than where the road made a bend, just as she could not see who was behind the wheel. She replied to her cynical friend that all his emptiness was probably nothing in itself without what was outside, whether it was rings of onion or temple courtyards. That frightful emptiness was nothing more than an opening onto what you could not know. He looked at her sluggishly, putting his head back as he drank his beer, but she thought that was actually not a bad answer. Perhaps she was no more than a frame around the secret hollow space where something would one day show its face.

The telephone was still ringing. Maybe it was Otto . . . she sat up with a start, leapt out of bed and ran naked onto the landing and downstairs, two steps at a time so she nearly stumbled. Maybe he had guessed she had moved back home. It wasn't so hard to guess. Who would call Else apart from him? Everyone knew she
went to the country on holiday and stayed there the whole time. Maybe he regretted the brutal way he had dropped her. Maybe he just regretted . . . she forbade herself to think the thought to the end. But they ought to be able to talk about it. After all, they had lived together for two years.

As she rushed through the house she thought of his lazy voice. She could hear it already, maybe he would suggest they met for a chat. The loss overwhelmed her again. She had believed they belonged together. He was still the first man who had made her feel like that, whether he wanted her or not. She had felt he saw her as she was, and she had no longer dreamed of being anyone other than the one his eyes had lit on. His hard blue eyes had penetrated into her innermost place, and it had not been empty. She had been there the whole time, invisible in the darkness as she had been when she hid in Else and Giorgio's wardrobe and spied through the keyhole's little dot of light, until the light was extinguished because he had guessed where she was. Next second the door was torn open with a thrilling creak, so the light and his merry eyes fell on her simultaneously, and it made her jump as if she could already feel his hands under her arms picking her up.

She tried to quieten her breathing before picking up the receiver. It was Harry Wiener. Did he disturb her in the middle of her morning gymnastics? She said she had been out in the garden when she heard the telephone. She thought the garden sounded better than bed. She could hear him smile as he talked to her in his old-fashioned, well-articulated voice. Had she received her script? Yes, thank you. She thought of the script bound in red card that was on the floor beside her bed. She had not opened it yet, she had not been able to concentrate. Every time she picked it up she thought of Otto and how he had seemed jealous, no doubt to make it easier for himself.

She recalled his silence the day they swam and her own misgivings because she had not told him Harry Wiener had visited the dressing room after the performance to praise her empathetic presentation so fulsomely. Would everything have looked different if she had woken him when she got home
and told him about the Gypsy King's unsuccessful efforts? Was there actually no unknown mulatto model somewhere in the background as Miriam had imagined? Did Otto really think she had started something with the old drama guru? That she had fallen for his camel-hair coat and his unruly silver-grey locks? Had she herself ruined everything?

Although rehearsals were not due to begin for another few months, Harry Wiener said, it was his habit to meet the actors in good time so they could chat for a bit. He sounded as if he had forgotten his familiarity in the car when he drove her home. Asking if he might kiss her. What did she think of the role, then? She grew hot and bothered. It was hard to talk on the telephone. Exactly, replied the Gypsy King with another invisible smile. That was why he was phoning. That is, he was phoning to suggest they met over a cup of tea. Lucca suddenly felt he sounded a touch flustered beneath the self-assured, cultivated varnish. As if after all he had not quite been able to repress how he had compromised himself. Was she doing anything that afternoon? Lucca said she would just look at her diary.

She stood with the receiver in her hand and looked down at herself. She had got a tan, the mahogany colour stopped in a curve between her hips and stomach, where her own paler colour disappeared under the tuft of curly hair. She raised the receiver again. No, she wasn't doing anything. Right, then, how about five o'clock? She thanked him. For the role, she added. He was the one to say thank you. It has been yours for a long time, he replied. It was a strange reply, she thought, when she had hung up. She was just about to pick up the receiver again and dial Otto's number, but held back, like all the other times she had been about to give in to her need to hear his voice, regardless of what it would have to say, hear he still existed. She made coffee and took it upstairs, pulled a T-shirt over her head and sat in bed with the red script.

She had spent most of the week in bed or in the garden, she didn't feel like seeing anyone. She had lain weeping or staring at
the grass and the clouds and the square of sunshine that crossed her wall in the course of the day. She kept to her room if she was not in the garden. When she walked through the downstairs rooms, Else's furniture and things seemed like silent witnesses waiting only to gossip about her. But what would they have gossiped about if they could? Her attacks of weeping? Her stony immobility when she lay prone, as if waiting for someone to come and find her?

She had eaten nothing but pot noodles and frozen pizzas for a week. She had lost weight, she had to tighten the belt of her jeans two holes more than usual. Her hair hung loose and greasy from the loose knot at the neck, she had not bothered to wash it, and she had pimples on her forehead and chin. She had not had pimples since she was fourteen, and when she pressed them out they left big pink scars. As a whole she did not look exactly ravishing as she cycled off in Else's old Faroese sweater with the script in a plastic bag on her luggage carrier. But she looked as she ought to, she thought, as she caught sight of herself in the mirror on her way through the hall. She wasn't going to make an impression on anyone and certainly not on the Gypsy King. Then she would see if she really had deserved her part.

She had collected her cycle from Otto's entrance the day after she took a taxi to Miriam's with her things. She had stood for a long time on the corner opposite the Egyptian restaurant before plucking up courage, afraid he might suddenly turn up and at the same time hoping he would. Suddenly the street seemed a strange, hostile place, the same street she had cycled along the evening before when they came back from swimming. She had looked at the golden evening sky between the buildings and felt at home. It was already in the past, another life. It took no more, a single sentence was enough. It will be best if we stop now . . . She knew she would not get him back, and yet she could not go on. It was like standing on the edge of an abyss knowing that the next step is a step out into the blue.