Lucca Read online

  On the way back from Rome the young couple spent a few days in Viareggio, where one evening the invisible photographer ate some oysters he should not have eaten. Who knows, thought Lucca. If his bourgeois upbringing had not equipped him with this fateful weakness for oysters, the world might have been different. It would have been a world without her, in other words a completely unthinkable world, since she was the one thinking about it. But no less real for that reason.

  While Else’s husband was lying ill she went for walks in the town and along the promenade. One afternoon a film was being shot, and she stood at the edge of the crowd of spectators behind the camera and the lamps shining whitely in the sun on a pale beautiful woman in sunglasses and a suit almost the same as Else’s. The lovely woman walked along the promenade again and again with quick steps wearing a contemplative air. Else recognised Marcello Mastroianni as the anxious man in a black suit with a white shirt and tie who followed the woman, trying in vain to persuade her to stop. Only after the fourth or fifth shot did Else notice the young man in a striped sailing shirt walking alongside the camera rails with the boom held high above his sunburned head. He himself had been keeping an eye on the tall Nordic woman among the spectators for some time.

  It turned out that the film crew were staying at the same hotel as Else and her husband, and the very next day Else got out of the lift on the wrong floor, astounded and delighted at her own faithlessness, while the invisible photographer sat chained to a lavatory pan on the floor below. She allowed him to recover a bit before she informed him of what she had decided in the meantime. He must drive home without her. She didn’t love him any more, and she was bound to obey her feelings, she told him, and so the white Aston Martin had driven north with its lonely, rejected driver, out of the story. He left no more than a handful of holiday snaps of his lost beloved, which he sent her later without a covering letter, enclosed with the divorce papers so she could ponder whether it was a desperate or aloof, condoning gesture.

  After he left, Else moved into the young sound engineer’s room, but she soon grew tired of watching the filming. Instead she lay on the beach all day long, alone for the first time in weeks. For once in her life, she thought rebelliously. Later she went with Giorgio to his home town to be introduced to his mother, a black-clad grey-haired woman who lent them her bedroom and gave them breakfast in bed, secretly crossing herself. There, in a Tuscan widow’s creaking bed, far too short and far too soft, Lucca had been conceived, according to her mother. In Lucca, with a view over the flat, tiled roofs and the hills with their olive groves and cypresses. It was Else’s idea to give her that name, to remember the view from their room each time she uttered it. Giorgio had told her Lucca was a boy’s name. What if it was a girl? Else didn’t care. Boy or girl, the view over the roofs of Lucca was the same.

  Later on she said that had been the happiest time of her life. They cavorted around Italy for three months. There was so much he wanted to show her, and in every place there were people he knew. To start with she didn’t understand a word he said, but that didn’t matter. His eyes and his hands and his laughter were expressive enough. It was a never-ending party, one long chain of light, shining hours and endless warm nights of hunting for yet another riotous moment’s surrender to laughter and the craziest whims.

  Giorgio went to Copenhagen with her. They were married at the town hall and spent the first year or two living in an attic flat with slanting walls and a loo in the courtyard. That was something Else always had to mention, the loo in the courtyard, as if it had been a special attraction. She gave up her dream of acting and became a presenter on the radio, while Giorgio knocked on the doors of the film studios in vain. But no one could use a sound engineer who did not understand the dialogue he recorded, and Else had to feed the family on her own. Lucca had no memories of that time. The first thing she remembered was the bedroom of the villa in Frederiksberg they moved into when her grandparents died, one soon after the other. The old mahogany bed where she snuggled up between Giorgio and Else in the mornings. She would creep in under his duvet, and he would bend one knee so the duvet made a cave with a narrow opening out to Else’s soft body in the morning light. She curled up in there like a little Eskimo in her igloo, knees up to her chin so she could fit between his thigh and chest, sniffing up the safe smell of his body.

  When she woke up one morning he was gone. Else sat on the edge of the bed stroking her hair, speaking calmly to her in the wonderful voice that could say anything to anyone in every radio set in the land. Lucca became accustomed to the strange friends who came to dinner. Sometimes they were still there in the morning when she had to go to school. Her father had been a dreamer, Else told her many years later, a spoiled slacker. But hadn’t they been happy? Her mother fell silent for a long time before replying. Probably you were only happy a few moments at a time.

  Lucca recalled the mornings in their bed when she pressed herself close to Giorgio’s warm body, a summer day when she rode on his shoulders through the plantation and a New Year’s Eve when she had been carried around the house by one strange guest after another, dressed as an Indian princess, wrapped up in silk with a red spot of lipstick on her forehead. She remembered Giorgio and Else dancing together, slowly and clasped close in the sweet, sickly smell of the funny pipes with no mouth-pieces that were passed round, and she remembered the music they danced to, Ravi Shankar, Carole King. Of course she had been in love with him, said Else, but they had been so young, it had been a young dream. There came a moment when you woke up.

  Lucca thought about the morning she had woken up with Else sitting silently on the edge of the bed stroking her cheek. Lucca was afraid of forgetting Giorgio, and gradually did come to forget him. She saw no more of him during her childhood, but it never occurred to her to reproach him for that, and she did not ask Else why he never visited them. She did not want to hear her speaking ill of him, she would rather know nothing. So he became still more remote and indistinct. When she thought back to the morning when she awoke to the news that he had left, it was as if her father had been no more than a dream.

  She found it hard to call up his face. It was his body she remembered, his brown skin and black beard and the soft sound of his voice, not what he had said. She forgot the language they had spoken together. As time went on she pictured him only in isolated images. She could remember him recording sounds for her on his tape recorder. She had to guess what they were. The cooing of a pigeon, wet sheets flapping in the wind, a chamois leather rubbing a window pane or the thin tones of a guitar from an egg slicer.

  He had taught her to make spaghetti with butter and grated nutmeg. She recalled the sweet scent of nutmeg and sitting in the kitchen watching him eat while they listened to Else’s cool, precise voice on the radio. Neither of them understood perfectly what she said. It was the voice itself they listened to, both familiar and strange as she spoke to all and sundry. Suddenly he wasn’t there any more. She was in class one. She had her meals by herself in the kitchen, looked after by a nanny, when Else was on the radio at night. When she grew older, she made herself pasta al burro with nutmeg while listening to her mother speaking through the transistor’s vibrating plastic trellis, far away and yet so close she could hear the saliva between the consonants in her mouth.

  There had been quarrels behind closed doors, and once while she was listening to them shouting at each other, she stole into his room with its bookcase filled with tapes of the sounds of rain and thunder and crackling fire, of dogs and birds, telephones and slamming doors. She found the album with photographs of him when young, the pictures from the town of her name. Cautiously she picked off the old glue that fixed her favourite pictures to the thick cardboard page, fearful as a thief. As if she were not merely taking what belonged to her. For it was her own story which began with the black and white photographs she was hiding. The one of Else in an open Aston Martin on the way through the Tyrol, unaware that she was on the way to her meeting with Lucca’s father. The one
of Giorgio on a square in his home town, rocking a café chair in front of a church wall, brushed by the arrow-shaped shadows of the swallows, waiting for Else without himself being aware of it.

  Else’s loneliness had acquired a purposeful character. All those men, thought Lucca, only to end up sitting alone in her childhood home surrounded by the wreckage of three marriages in the shape of furniture in various styles, according to the differing taste of the men and what had been in fashion at the time. Lucca was fascinated by her mother’s transformations as they came to light in the pictures of her.

  With her first husband she had been a coquettish high-heeled blonde with narrow sunglasses and projectile breasts, undulating along in one checked suit after the other. Lucca couldn’t remember his name. With Giorgio Else had become a hennaed hippie in loosely fitting Indian cotton, and when Ivan came on the scene she turned into an authoritative career woman in dark, tailored jackets. Else laughed at herself, how could she have fallen for that Jacqueline Kennedy hat or that djellaba with embroidery around the collar. She did not seem surprised at the actual transformations, times changed, she had merely gone along with them.

  Ivan ran an advertising agency. He had a square, brutal face and was always tanned, but Lucca wasn’t sure whether that was sun or whisky. His voice was very deep and she could hear how he loved it. He always sounded authoritative and effective, rather like pilots when they announce the cruising height and calculated flying time, so a feeling of shaving lotion and optimism fills the cabin. When he came back from one of his numerous business trips he always brought Lucca a gigantic box of chocolates. She felt suffocated by all that chocolate and the shame of accepting his bribes.

  At first she didn’t believe it when Else told her he had moved in. She could not imagine a man more different from Giorgio and the other men who had lived with them for a short or longer spell. They had all been actors, journalists or architects, and Ivan didn’t suit the vegetating jumble of shabby heirlooms, palsied cane furniture and wilting pot plants. Oceans of newspapers, magazines and books flowed everywhere, and housework was done only when strictly necessary once a month when Else made a trip through the rooms with the vacuum cleaner in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But in a trice everything was transfigured. The cane furniture was replaced by bent-wood chairs, an opulent leather sofa made its entrance in company with a sofa table made of marble, and the walls of the damp-stained hovel were painted so white they made Lucca’s eyes hurt.

  Else herself underwent a gradual transformation. She started to shave her armpits and cut her long hair. She was a different woman in her new buckled shoes, lipstick and eye shadow, and pale stripes. Previously lazy and untidy, she now radiated energy when she got home from broadcasting and served up a beautifully prepared dinner in no time. Formerly she had not been slow to put her changing lovers in their place with a sharp, cynical remark. Now she smiled in a feminine way as she listened to Ivan’s boring, self-satisfied accounts of the brilliant concept he had proposed for some campaign or other for a bank or a travel firm or a new kind of toffee. She was quite simply in love.

  Lucca had to ask herself how this same woman could have fallen in love with her father. At dinner she mentioned Giorgio several times, but Ivan did not allow himself to be affected. He questioned them with interest about his predecessor, and although his cold-bloodedness irritated Lucca, she managed to enjoy seeing Else squirm as she answered his questions in subdued tones. No, they had no contact with him apart from an occasional postcard and a present every few years when he remembered Lucca’s birthday. That’s very strange, Ivan thought, giving Lucca a sympathetic glance that infuriated her.

  Else laughed a lot when she was with Ivan, and it was no longer the ironical, at times scornful laughter as when she and her women friends sat in the kitchen drinking white wine and telling stories about the stupidity of men. It was open, unrestrained laughter, as if above all she was laughing at herself. Her laughter often left her smiling unconsciously, lost in wonder at what had happened to her. Ivan made her laugh, as Lucca faintly remembered her laughing when Giorgio picked her up and carried her out into the cold waves, kicking and flinging out her arms and legs.

  She was thoughtful when she came down to the kitchen in the mornings. Previously she had talked like a machine-gun. Now she was the one who, distrait and delayed, looked up from her mug of coffee and asked Lucca to repeat what she had just said. Lucca thought that perhaps it didn’t matter who made her mother happy, and the thought confused her. Over the years Else had known so many men, one face had succeeded another like the numbers on a wheel of fortune clicking past the little peg that always reminded Lucca of the fuse on a huge firecracker. As if the whole tombola and its contents of gigantic teddy bears would explode in crackling fireworks if the wheel of fortune revolved too fast and started to shoot out sparks. But the wheel didn’t bolt, it stopped at Ivan. He was to be the lucky teddy bear Else could hug at night.

  They were married, in church, the year after Lucca’s matriculation. She felt that she had landed up in the middle of a film under production and was forced to stay in the pew because the camera kept running. Incredulously she watched her mother in the low-cut, slit wedding dress of cream Thai silk as she walked alone up the aisle, with Ivan waiting at the altar, shining with sweat in his dress-suit. In the past, when she sat in the kitchen with her hennaed friends, Else always had a ruthless comment at the ready on bourgeois marriage as disguised prostitution. Now she herself had taken to it like another prize cunt in gift-wrap.

  At the reception Lucca was surprised to find she knew so few of the guests. Most of them were Ivan’s friends, but many seemed more like business contacts than what one understands as friends. At Lucca’s table the talk was of segments and communications strategy. She slipped away during the bridal waltz and didn’t come home until late. Else sat on the kitchen table with a cigarette in one hand and a sausage sandwich in the other, in her white corsage and white silk stockings and suspender belt. Her thighs bulged out in the bare patch above the stockings and her bra was so tight it looked as if she had four breasts. Laughter bubbled up in Lucca’s throat, she could not stop it. Else looked stiffly at her for a moment, deathly pale, then she put the sandwich down on the worktop, jumped off the table and slapped her.

  Lucca couldn’t remember ever having been beaten. Wordlessly she left the kitchen and went up to her room. Her cheek still burned and she regretted her cruel laughter. The next morning she apologised to Else. Ivan had gone to work and they sat over their coffee mugs as usual. Else stroked her cheek, the same cheek. She must try to understand, even if it might be hard. Else looked at her with tired, sorrowful eyes. She wanted this. She was going to try for happiness, and no-one, not even Lucca, would stop her.

  That summer Lucca stayed at the villa as little as possible, she often slept with a girlfriend. She took a job as an assistant at a nursery school. None of her friends were in town, she was on her own, Else and Ivan spent most of the time at the holiday cottage. They drove into town together every day and Ivan fetched her from Radio House in the evening. Lucca hardly ever saw them. The school holidays had begun and there were only a few children left at the nursery school. It was an easy job, she spent most of the time at the playground sitting in the sun smoking with the teaching staff, while the children took care of themselves.

  One afternoon it was her turn to lock up. One of the children was still waiting to be fetched, a boy of three. He anxiously asked where his father was. She took out a puzzle for him. In the end he started to cry. She sat cuddling the sniffing child until finally his father turned up, red in the face and full of excuses. He had been at an important meeting.

  She had not seen him before. Usually the mother fetched the boy. He might be any age between thirty and forty, his short hair was grizzled, but his face looked young. He picked up the boy and stretched out his free hand. Apparently he thought they should say goodbye properly now he had let her wait so long. He fetched the boy on the
following days as well, and every time he went out of his way to ask if it had been a good day, smiling shyly.

  He was good-looking, broad-shouldered with a narrow waist, and there was something lithe about his movements, but she did not give much thought to that before she met him one Saturday afternoon, cycling. His hair was wet and stood on end and he wore a sleeveless vest so you could see his brown, sinewy upper arms. A badminton racket stuck out of a bag on his luggage carrier. He had been playing, he said needlessly, awkward because of the unexpected meeting, then plucked up courage and invited her for a beer.

  His shyness reassured her, although he was twice as old as she was. He seemed like a contemporary who had happened to be born much earlier. He turned out to be easy to talk to, and he smiled boyishly at nothing. Later on she remembered him for his restrained strength, as if he was afraid of hurting her. It was the first time she had had an affair with a man who was so much older than herself.

  It lasted a month. He visited her in the evening once or twice a week, and he always remembered to have a shower before cycling home. They had the villa to themselves, but the risk of Else or Ivan happening to turn up only made her nervous and still more impatient when she was waiting for him. They used the mahogany bed in Else and Ivan’s room, where Else and Giorgio had slept in their time and where she had crept into her father’s warmth under the duvet on Sunday mornings. She liked thinking of that when she looked at herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door, infatuated and marvelling as she sat there astride a strange, married man in the selfsame bed.