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.