When they drove home in the evening from yet another excursion she sat curled up under a rug on the back seat, listening to Giorgio and Carlo chatting casually to each other. Like a married couple, it occurred to her, a couple who had lived together a long time. But she still couldn’t understand how Giorgio lived with Carlo as if he were a woman. In contrast to Carlo there was nothing in the least feminine about Giorgio, and when she met his exploring gaze she had to remind herself that he did not look at her as other men did.
He did not mention his sister again, but she was sure he thought about her. She played with the idea that she was a living memory for him, or rather, a living reflection of his fantasy about the face and the figure his dead sister had never been able to develop. A smiling ghost walking beside him through the quiet villages with the unaccustomed tight feeling of her hair, which she had combed back and tied with an elastic band. When they walked beside the ruined ramparts facing the mountain slopes, surrounded by invisible cicadas, she fancied he was her brother, who had brought her back to the future she had been denied.
One hot afternoon they all lay on the big Persian carpet in front of the fireplace smoking a joint, lazily passing it around to each other. Sunlight smouldered through the cracks in the closed shutters and diffused a golden light through the semi-darkness. They had come home early and lay slouched in their kimonos, as if they had sought refuge from the midday heat in a shady oriental garden. Lucca had had a bath, her hair was still wet and the kimono stuck to her damp skin. Carlo was lying on his side with his head resting on his bent arm and half-open mouth. He had fallen asleep. She rose and the carpet’s wine-red and moss-green arabesques twisted and turned around her. She stood still for a moment, waiting for the rocking feeling beneath her feet to pass off. Giorgio sent her a muzzy smile and threw the end of the joint into the stove. A spidery wisp of smoke wavered upwards in the darkness there. She smiled back. She knew he was watching her as she walked across the cool marble floor.
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.
13
She 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.