She never thought of visiting Giorgio again, although now and then it did cross her mind that she was in the same country as he was, only a few hours away by train. Florence, the city where she had found him and then lost sight of him, was a different world from Rome, the city where her passion for Andreas slowly turned into something tougher, more durable, as an unknown being started to grow a nose, a mouth and eyes inside her. In the evening he read aloud what he had written during the day, and although she admired his arbitrary, stylised dialogue, she often forgot to listen. The sound of his soft voice was enough for her, feeling it like a quiver in her cheek when she rested her head against his chest. The voice spoke to her from a place she could not reach, where he had to be alone, but it was from in there that he had seen her come along and decided not to let her disappear from sight. His voice echoed within her when she walked alone in the shadows among the crumbling walls or sat in the sunshine on the Campo di Fiori. Only his voice was real, not the words, not his theatre. His voice and the unknown child filled her completely. He had believed his own eyes, and she believed in what he had seen.
The wind made the snowflakes circle in spirals over the yard. She suddenly realised it was Else she was listening to. Her mother was announcing the radio programme for the day in the cultivated voice Lucca had listened to since she was a child, alone at home with some nanny. It was the kind of voice that could say whatever you wanted it to. Every word sounded the same in Else’s mouth, as if tongue, lips and teeth were tools intended for breaking up the words and separating them from what they actually meant. Else had been sceptical when Lucca told her they were moving into the country. The poet and his mummy-nurse, she called them for almost a year, until she grew tired of smiling at her own mordant wit. She visited them occasionally in their cave, as she termed it, and Lucca was quite encouraged every time she saw her mother raise her eyebrows and suppress all the pointed comments jostling behind her tight, pinched lips. She had forgotten how to look at herself from outside and she enjoyed Else’s distaste for the dirty and chaotic building site where Lauritz tumbled around with a bare bottom and mud plastering his face.
Lucca had never imagined she would come to live out of town. When they moved in the house was barely habitable, and everyone said it was mad to settle with a child in a place which didn’t even have electricity. As if Lauritz wasn’t completely unplugged. At first they made do with paraffin lamps. They washed outdoors under a garden hose while the bathroom floor was being laid, and cooked on an open fire in the garden. In general they lived in a way the prairie settlers must have done. It was a point of no return. Everything they owned had been invested in the house and the building materials stacked up in the yard.
She had put the city behind her, the streets she had roamed, just a face among the shifting faces, always hunting for another pair of eyes to mirror her. She had put the city and the men behind her, those she had known and those she might have come to know. All the men she had doted on or left, all the grand or petty stories that had been so many blind alleys, wrecked beginnings and failed attempts to attain the life that was to be hers.
She had painted just one and a half shelves when the telephone rang. It was on the window sill. She had to stride over the piles of books on the floor, brush held aloft so it did not drip. It was Miriam, her voice thick and stifled with sobs, she had to talk to someone. Lucca asked what had happened. Miriam started to weep. While Lucca waited for her to calm down she caught sight of a grey streak of paint running down from the brush onto her hand. She held it vertically, but it kept on running like a melting, soft ice-cream. Miriam’s sobs subsided. Her partner had left her. He’d said he didn’t love her any more, and that it was a misunderstanding, the child they were to have. He’d been under pressure. She sniffed and moaned. He’d packed a bag with clothes and gone off in a taxi, she didn’t know where.
Lucca thought of the lanky jazz musician. He had always seemed feeble to her when Miriam bossed him around or plonked herself down on his lap demanding tongue kisses with everyone looking on, as if he owed her proof of his fiery passion for all the world to see. But he’d had the courage after all to back out, but why so late? Miriam had no idea. She had really believed the child would bring them closer together. He had even accompanied her to childbirth class. She began to weep again. Lucca pictured the skinny jazz lover sitting in stockinged feet on the linoleum floor with the bloated Miriam between his knees, surrounded by the other men and their wives, snorting in chorus, while he pondered on how to escape from the fix he had got himself into.
She recalled the night Otto threw her out and she sat drinking vodka at Miriam’s. She remembered her friend’s dreamy chat about having a child, and how outraged she had looked as she told her that her partner was afraid of losing his freedom. What did he want to use that for?! The way Miriam had imposed her pregnancy on him had been just as pigheaded and discordant as when she broke into his conversation and stuck her tongue down his throat. But they could not talk about that, especially not now. All Lucca could do was listen to the unhappy Miriam and explain that she was unable to go into town because she was alone with Lauritz.
After putting down the receiver she stayed by the window. The snow covered the garden and the field. It lay like white shadows along the dark ramifications of the plum branches and framed the little blue tractor Lauritz had left on the lawn. The sky was like granite. She studied the streaks of paint that had split into a branching delta over her hand and lower arm, like blood, she thought, if blood was grey. She would like to have shown more sympathy and her conscience nagged her because she had not invited Miriam to come and stay.
She laid the brush on the newspaper beside the paint pot, wiped her hand and sat down at the desk in Andreas’s study. On it were only some paper clips and the note of his address in Paris in his angular, slightly untidy handwriting. The room stank of old cigarette smoke. He smoked too much, especially when he worked, and always the same strong Gitanes. He coughed in the mornings, but paid no heed to her comments. Sometimes she could hear him trying to suppress his coughing in the bathroom so she wouldn’t notice it. She opened the window and breathed in the cold, raw air. The view was different from his room, you could just see the ends of the plum tree branches. She picked up one of the paper clips and straightened it out, gazing at the white slope of field partly hiding the roof of the neighbouring barn.
She felt she had let Miriam down on the phone, but had not known what to say, and couldn’t say what she thought. That probably what had happened was Miriam’s own fault, because she had obstinately pushed her pregnancy, deaf and blind to all warning signs. Miriam who always took what she wanted, and wore tight trousers even though her thighs were too fat. Lucca had never believed their relationship would last, and perhaps Miriam had doubted it too. Had she thought she could hold onto him by having a child? Naturally she would never admit that, not even to herself. And now a child was coming into the world, a child like all the others with the same demands for affection, the same urge to feel itself a genuine fruit of love and not merely the result of a mistake made by two confused people.
She could have said all that to Miriam if she had dared, but she had no right to say it. Who could distinguish between genuine feelings and illusions? Perhaps Miriam really did want a child, partner or no. Lucca recalled how soberly her friend had assessed her own future possibilities as an actor. A bit of cabaret here and there, as a comic. And what about herself, Lucca? She had been furious when Else comforted her by saying that Otto hadn’t been right for her anyway, and that it was a good thing they had parted. Think, if they’d had a child! Now Lucca had to admit she was right. Her passion had been blind and immature. When she looked back on herself then it was like thinking of another person. As if she had been different from the woman she had become with Andreas and Lauritz. But if she really had changed, she could do so again. The idea sickened her, the idea that changes could just go on and on. And what if she was the same, after all? How could she be so sure that her love for Andreas was more real than her love for Otto had been? Was she so sure now, because Otto and Andreas, each in their respective order, had just been the latest man in the row? Did she feel sure because it only happened to be Andreas she had a child with?