Lucca Read online

  He asked if she would like to go. Obviously he too was at a loss for something to talk about. As they cycled into town she asked herself whether she had invited the Gypsy King to try it on when she met his eyes in the dressing-room mirror. Maybe she had waited too long to look away or else she had taken her eyes off him too quickly as if feeling herself seen through. She bit her under-lip in irritation. Couldn’t you look around as you liked? It might well be that she had wondered for a second what impression she had made on him, and so what? Surely her thoughts were her private property. Besides he had seemed to mean what he said about her performance. Could it all have been just a manoeuvre, a stage in the cunning strategy of seduction?

  It was her first leading role and she had been dreadfully nervous. When Otto came home the afternoon before the première she had been standing in the living room doing voice exercises. He had bought a CD of Iggy Pop and played it at once, throwing himself on the sofa and starting to roll a joint. She caught his eye and narrowed her lips. He asked with false innocence if the music worried her. She went into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. The drone of Iggy Pop’s voice penetrated through the door with its monotonous bass and throbbing drums. On the other side of the narrow back yard she could look into a kitchen lit by an unshaded light bulb behind the dirty window. An old man in a net vest stood at the stove. His back was bent, it faced her so she saw only his bony shoulders and prominent shoulder blades in the vest, which was too big for him. He was frying bacon, she could smell it.

  She took a deep breath and produced a low note that rose like a column from her diaphragm, as she had been taught. Then Iggy Pop started up again. She lay down on the bed, she couldn’t remember a single line, and in three hours she had to be on stage. She turned and in surprise regarded the little dark spot spreading over the pillowcase, as if it was not hers, the tear sucked in by the finely woven cotton.

  During the curtain calls Lucca couldn’t understand how they had pulled it off so well. She didn’t know whether she had been good or bad, she had merely followed the patterns laid down by the words and movements, mechanically like a toy train that rushes confidently around on its rails. But everybody talked of how she had lived the part, so full of genuine feeling. She was the centre of the first-night party, everyone wanted to kiss her and give her a big hug, even people she had only met once. She allowed herself to revel in it without holding back. Otto stayed in the background, he spent the evening in a corner with one of his friends. When she walked past them she could hear the sarcasm in his voice.

  When they got home he did not spare her his outspoken opinion of the play, and when he read the reviews, which all emphasised her performance, he snorted and warned her not to let herself be flattered by such a pack of fawning poodles. She asked if he was jealous, but that was showing off, she didn’t believe it herself. It was not a great success with audiences, and the flowers she had been given, gift-wrapped like the ones at the big theatres, withered after a day or two. Otto was the one who threw them out, the flat stank like a bloody brothel. He said it in his usual studiedly bragging tones, as he did when he wanted her to understand he didn’t really mean it. But why couldn’t he grant her a spot of success, when he wallowed in admiration like a happy pig in his mud?

  She thought of the contrast between Harry Wiener’s sympathetic, eloquent compliments and Otto’s scornful comments. Who was she to believe? Maybe neither of them. Obviously the Gypsy King had had his demonstrable reasons for smothering her with his wit, but why couldn’t Otto be generous about her success? Was he jealous, after all? In her scattered thoughts on the way home from swimming she confused the order of events, and saw Otto’s scorn after the première as a reaction to the Gypsy King’s erotic tricks three weeks later.

  Maybe Otto had foreseen what might happen in the wake of her first outstanding reviews and the first newspaper interview she had ever given, in which she was presented with doe eyes, long legs and high acting ideals. Maybe he even felt that all the attention she was suddenly getting was a threat to his right of possession to what lay hidden behind those very eyes and between those very legs. If she had wanted to she could easily have stayed there in the Gypsy King’s Mercedes. She could have gone up with him just like that into the legendary roof-top apartment where so many had gone before her, a little shy, a little girlish, with a coquettishly nervous hand constantly running through her hair, with her coat still on, as he mixed drinks and told stories about his meetings with Bergman and Strehler.

  Otto cycled fast, as if trying to throw her off, and she had to tramp on the pedals to keep up. Sweat stung her forehead and her cheeks and made her blouse stick. When they had to stop at a red light she rode up beside him. She held on to his shoulder for support without putting her feet down, while the crossing traffic passed in a blue mist of exhaust and dazzling reflections. She couldn’t see his eyes behind all the shining movement in his shades. He smiled as he put out a hand and moved a lock of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes and stuck to her forehead. She felt like kissing him, but the lights changed to green.

  She ought to be glad he had shown a touch of jealousy at the Gypsy King’s come-on. It must be proof that after all she meant more to him than he cared to shout about. But that wasn’t like him, it was more like Daniel. It was ironic, she hadn’t thought of him for several months. Perhaps he was still sitting with his broken heart in his lap picking at the scabs.

  She had never promised him anything. She broke it to him gently, at the same time safe-guarding herself. He sat on the piano stool staring down at the lid covering the keys. She could see herself, legs crossed, as a misty shining reflection in the curving instrument. The grand piano took up a third of the room, and his unmade mattress occupied another third. There was just room in between for the small table where he wrote out his scores. Here he spent most of his time bent over his bizarre music with its scattered, shrill notes and confused chords written for an orchestra he only heard in his own dark curly head. She had been fascinated by the invisible aura that spread around him when he played to her so that even the depressing surroundings took on a mystic air. He raised his head and looked at her through little steel spectacles. She stood up and walked to the window. He said he loved her. It was all very sad.

  At the end of his street there was a damp-stained viaduct, and on the corner a run-down discount supermarket boasted garish posters advertising special offers. From the window she could look down on the street in front of an auto-repair shop. Splotches of bird mess shaped like flames covered the skylights and the cracked asphalt was blotched with oil. A tree stood in a corner of the yard, and even its roots were black with oil where they emerged from the asphalt. It was raining, the drops struck the window with a muffled sound and speckled the view with little pearl-shaped domes in which earth and sky changed places.

  She turned round when she had taken in the scene’s inventory of details. He asked who it was. He had been badgering her for a month at all hours of the day, at the Drama School, in cafés, on the telephone. He had burst in to pester her in the middle of the night in the crazed hope that she could be persuaded to love him. As if sheer dogged persistence could serve his cause. She conjured up Otto’s secretive face, which she had been studying that very morning in bed while he was still asleep, to note each particular of it. The uneven arch of his brow beneath the long fair hair, strong eyebrows, broad nose and full lips.

  Daniel had been jealous from the start, even when he had her to himself. On the other hand he could be happy in his ignorance, when she came straight from another man to visit him in his ascetic apartment. She felt like a dazzling guest from a differently callous and profligate world, and she marvelled at how abruptly reality could change in the space of a few hours. He gave her tea in the English faience cups he had inherited from his grandmother as he described the piece he was composing. She let him talk and studied the pictures on the tea cups of romantic lovers reclining in little rowing boats, rocked by tiny waves on a l
ake in the moonlight, surrounded by mountain peaks, tall trees and reeds swaying gently in the wind.

  When they lay together on his mattress he could go into ecstasies over her high-heeled shoes and lace underclothes and the black stockings mingled with his biographies of composers and symphony scores like sexy meteorites come flying from space to land in the midst of his solitude. She had enjoyed closing her eyes and listening when he spoke of his music or read aloud to her from the Bhagavad Gita or Omar Khayyam. She had taken pleasure in playing with the idea of the oddness in the combination of him and her, but it had been only a game, an idea.

  It had never occurred to her that it would be other than what it was. That he should be the man to exclude all other men. She had certainly not anticipated much. She had deferred all anticipations to some indefinite time, completely open to what might happen. The future had been white and untouched, and she had felt about it as you do when you open the door of a house in the country one morning when snow has fallen. You hesitate on the threshold, hardly having the heart to go outside and leave tracks in the unbroken whiteness where only the blackbirds’ claws have left simple dots and dashes that end as abruptly as they begin.

  She had liked Daniel best when he sat at his piano and seemed to forget she was there. Something hard and decisive came over his mouth and eyes when he bent over the instrument, head slightly on one side. As if the music hid itself somewhere inside the black, varnished box, and he had to search for it with the keys, blindly, infinitely careful not to chase it away. There was a restrained strength in the touch of his hands on the chords, his fingers moving so swiftly and precisely. On the keys his hands displayed a disciplined confidence at odds with his clumsy, vague way of caressing her in bed.

  As soon as he looked up his expression took on a short-sighted, otherworldly look. When she embraced him she could feel a sudden urge to protect him from colliding with hard reality. But she did not listen when he moved close to her and whispered tenderly in her ear. His adoring words and humble fondling were like a sticky web spun around her, and she wanted to provoke him into forcing a more dangerous, unfathomable music out of her than her conventional sighs rewarding his efforts. She did not believe him when, breathless and blissful, he told her how wonderful she was. He hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, she didn’t deserve the words he took into his mouth.

  But she did not properly understand that until she met Otto. Strangely enough, for Otto made her feel stupid and bungling, not because of anything he said but simply by letting his expressionless blue eyes rest on her unguarded face. In her thoughts she kept on returning to the morning she rang his doorbell with his jacket over her shoulder and a churning feeling in her stomach. He had just smiled and pulled her inside in a long, astonishing kiss. He could do what he liked, she had come of her own will.

  She had been around a good deal, and men had passed through her life, young or slightly older, more or less briefly. She had been in love with some of them, until they submitted completely and reached out for her like shipwrecked sailors about to drown. Others had been more cautious, whether they were married and remorseful or just saw her as a gorgeous lay, available when the urge came over them. She had day-dreamed about them for months on end until her dreams were threadbare from being dreamed over and over again.

  Otto was different, he didn’t beg for love, and he didn’t run away either, as she gradually stopped bothering to hide her feelings behind a mask of uncommitted ease. She was tired of throwing off emotional, snivelling guys who dreamed of nothing but tying her down. But she was equally exhausted from being a fuckable doll dreaming her sweet dreams of exciting, unattainable men who lay pumping between her legs like creatures possessed. When Otto embraced her she had no wish to flee or dream.

  They had stayed in his bed that first day. She questioned him about the boy in America who had been sent a red car by post from his far away, unknown father. He didn’t mind her asking, but when he replied, in a curt and matter-of-fact way, he made it sound like a kind of technical hiccup. A child clearly belonged to life’s contingencies. All the same she couldn’t help musing over the unknown areas in him no one had infiltrated before. Maybe he himself was unaware of them. While she lay in the twilight looking into his shadowy face, she fantasised about being the one who, like a traveller on a voyage of discovery, found and charted the blank spots in his interior and one day had them named after her.

  One rainy day a few weeks later when she went to see Daniel she knew it was the last time. He played her a new piece he had just finished. She sipped the hot tea and gazed at the romantic pair on the cup in their rowing boat in moonlight. The black and white keys were reflected in his spectacles. His face was closed in concentration in a way that made her recall he was actually several years older than she was. It was only when he played that she thought of it. She hoped he would go on, that the music wouldn’t come to an end, maybe because she knew what was coming, but also because that was how she liked to see him, buried in himself and his music.

  She turned to the window again to avoid his suffering gaze and looked through the drops down at the yard of the car workshop. One of the branches swayed and spread a little silver cloud of drops around it when a bird flew up and vanished in an irregular lurching curve. A skinny tabby cat slunk along the fence with lithe steps and bent head. It stopped, lifted its head and sniffed, ears laid back. Cautiously it stretched out a paw, tested the cracked asphalt and drew the paw back again before sitting down with its tail curled round its forepaws, nonchalant and completely motionless as if it had sat there always.

  She felt Daniel’s hands on her hips and his breath against her neck. He loved her. Remorse struck her in the stomach with a hard, cold blow, but only one, immediately followed by a totally different feeling. It rushed through her with its warmth, as if guilt had released it. She visualised Otto. He could have her if he liked, whether he wanted her or not. That was how it had to be, and no one could help it. But if it hadn’t been for Daniel, she might not have felt it so simply, so clearly.

  Couldn’t they be together one last time? She turned towards him. He looked at her with a strange expression, as if nothing mattered to him. He couldn’t mean that. He blushed. Would she do that for him? He tried to kiss her, she turned her head away, he went on pestering. Then she gave in, as amazed as he was, and while it happened for the last time she looked into his ignominious, despairing face, but it was not so much contempt she felt, and in fact not pity either. Most of all it resembled gratitude.

  She could still feel the heat from asphalt and walls even though the sun had disappeared behind the houses when they rode down their street. The sky over the roofs was yellow. Otto went on round the corner to get a pizza. She couldn’t make out how the staircase could smell of wet dog when it had not rained for a fortnight. A pile of trash mail was on the floor inside the door and among it a couple of letters, one for Otto from the inspector of taxes, the other for her. The corner of the envelope bore the Royal Theatre logo. She registered that without thinking, maybe because she was tired after the cycle trip and the hours in the sun. Then she tore open the envelope, went over to the window and unfolded the letter.

  It held just a few lines, signed by a secretary. In the coming season the theatre was putting on August Strindberg’s The Father, directed by Harry Wiener. One of the women actors had fallen pregnant and would therefore not be able to play the part of Bertha, the daughter of the cavalry captain, as planned. Would Lucca consider taking her place? To further their planning, she was asked to respond within a week. She could feel she had caught the sun, her cheeks felt stretched and burning. A light was switched on behind a window on the other side of the building site and she saw a small figure walking up and down in the yellow square. She stuffed the letter back in its envelope and put it in the pocket of her jacket. She could hear Otto on the stairs.

  They ate in front of the television and drank beer. Neither of them said anything special. Otto sat with his fe
et on the sofa table among the beer bottles and the empty pizza box, lazily watching a hit man in a dirty vest empty the magazine of his submachine gun with a resentful twitch of the jaw. She picked up a magazine and leafed through the pages of pretty girls showing off the summer fashions, strolling along with head on one side in the evening sunshine, now among slim palms in a Moroccan oasis, now beneath the wet laundry and drawn blinds above the balconies of an alleyway in Lisbon.

  Later that evening they met up with some friends at a bar. Lucca fingered the folded letter in her pocket. She could have told him about it while they were at home, but Otto had been lost in his film. She felt irritated at having hidden it instead of leaving it out so he could find it for himself. As if she felt guilty. The place was packed and the crowd swayed back and forth every time someone pushed over to the bar counter. Standing beside Otto in the din of music and voices it dawned on her that she had been given the chance she had dreamed of ever since she hit on the idea of becoming an actor. Obviously Harry Wiener had meant what he said. She looked round at the clusters of faces. One day they would all know who she was. She felt a bit ashamed at the thought but couldn’t help thinking it.

  She caught sight of a tall man standing at the end of the bar bending over a beautiful girl. She was sure she had seen him before but could not remember where. He wore an elegant black jacket and his curly hair was cut short. The girl’s face was thickly powdered and her breasts looked as if at any moment they might burst out of the bulging C cups. She smiled with her red lips and nodded assent to what the man was saying. Lucca recognised his self-effacing smile and awkward gesticulations. He seemed to have overcome the worst of his shyness, but where were his spectacles? Daniel had obviously taken to contact lenses.