When Harry was not directing a play he spent his time in Spain reading and writing. She didn’t know what he was engaged on now. Wish lists, he had replied with a teasing smile, when she asked him. When you were young you wrote wish-lists, he went on, but he had gradually forgotten all the things he had wished for through the years. It was hard enough to remember them, all those years. She had not spoken to anyone but Harry for weeks, and all the days seemed alike, but strangely she had not felt bored. In Copenhagen there were always people to see, people of Harry’s age. He was very attentive when they went out together, but even so she often felt just like a decorative appendage, instantly left out of the game because she was not born at the time their hilarious anecdotes had been launched.
Harry’s friends were writers, painters or film directors, and usually they were as famous as he, but had been part of the élite for so long that their laurel leaves were pretty withered by now. Behind their comfortable complacency lurked a small, bewildered disquiet at getting fewer mentions in the newspapers than twenty years ago. They could spend hours discussing it, how bad the newspapers had become, just as they worried a good deal about the young having an easy time of it, and how little it took nowadays for them to climb dangerously close to their own exalted position. Up to a point they were quite generous at including her in the conversation, some of them even took the trouble to seem not at all formidable, and yet something sly and avuncular appeared in the sudden interest of the grey old codgers after she had been left on her own for a while.
She could feel their wives frowning at her when the men bent intimately over her while investigating what she might bring to the conversation. Most of them had known Harry’s dead wife, but she was never actually mentioned. Lucca felt like an itinerant scandal, and when she was introduced she saw how their eyes flickered between disgust and envy at the indomitably lucky old dog. She had even been spared the attentions of the gutter press once when he was careless enough to take her to a première, and when she walked around town she sometimes felt she was recognised as Harry Wiener’s talented young lady friend.
Harry was always the centre of attention, maybe because he was one of the few whose fame had not begun to fade at the edges. But that couldn’t be the only reason, thought Lucca. People spotted him everywhere he went, and even when they had no idea who he was they were drawn to look at the elegant figure with his lined face, wavy grey hair and narrow eyes. He did not make any effort to arouse attention, on the contrary. He preferred to sit and listen while he observed the others, now and then folding the corners of his lips ironically around the colourless slit that served as his mouth. There was complete silence when he finally said something in his rusty voice and old-fashioned diction, which encompassed everything he said, even the most casual remark, with an exclusive and civilised atmosphere.
When they were in the car driving home one evening, after yet another dinner, she asked him why he bothered to spend so much of his time on that pack of burned-out old buggers. All they did was sit there nursing their bloodshot vanity, she said, sweating at the thought of being soon forgotten. She’d had too much to drink, because she was bored stiff. He laughed, looking at the road ahead. He was an old bugger himself… besides, everything was interesting to someone like him. She tugged the curls at his neck affectionately. At least he wasn’t burned out, anyway… He smiled but did not give a direct answer. The most banal things, and the most sophisticated as well, he went on, are often the most interesting. He gave her a brief look. She probably didn’t realise that yet, luckily. But even the utmost banality turned into a subject for sociology eventually.
They had met with Else once only, shortly before they left for Spain. Harry invited her to lunch one Saturday after he came back from Oslo. Lucca tried to dissuade him, but he just smiled at her. He really wanted to meet her mother. If she didn’t like it, she could stay at home… Else had tried to hide her disapproval when Lucca finally gave in to her inquisitive questions and told her who it was she so often spent the night with. After a month she had more or less moved into the rooftop apartment with its view over the harbour.
She was nervous as she and Harry waited at the restaurant, and once more she was taken aback by his unruffled calm when Else walked in and looked around her with an anxious gaze and too much powder on her cheeks. Harry rose, shook her hand in a friendly way and pulled out a chair for her, taking no notice of her tense, hectic manner. Lucca had not realised he was older than her mother. Her own nervousness changed into wonder when she saw how agitated Else was and how coquettishly she tried out her feminine wiles on the famous man playing the role of son-in-law. An hour later when Else kissed her cheek and said goodbye, Lucca could feel that her thunderstruck condemnation had given way to something like admiration.
Harry worked in the afternoon while she took a siesta. When she woke up they would drive down to the sea. He thought the water was too cold, but she went in almost every day. She did not need a swimsuit, they had the beach to themselves. She felt childish as he sat watching her, but only until she came out and he stood waiting with towel and kimono, as she approached smiling, dripping and stark naked. In the evenings they sat talking or reading. He told her about people he had known, some of them names she had heard before, actors and writers, semi-mythological figures from another age. Sometimes she felt dizzy when she realised he was describing events that had taken place ten years before she was born.
He gave her books he thought would interest her. The house was crammed with books from floor to ceiling, and she had never read so much in such a short time. He opened windows and doors for her onto ideas and notions she’d never had before, but he didn’t make her feel stupid, just very young. He did not lecture her nor did he ever use his age and experience as arguments. He contented himself with asking unexpected questions which produced equally unexpected answers from her. He guided without her noticing it, and let go of her again just as unnoticeably, so she had the feeling of having found her way on her own, she didn’t know how. He merely looked at her meanwhile with his narrow dark eyes.
That was the way he worked, by hardly saying or doing anything. That was how he had made himself famous, the Gypsy King, as Otto had so scornfully called him. She could not understand how all those stories about his tyrannical cruelty had arisen. He had not raised his voice once during the rehearsals for The Father. Most of the time he sat in the auditorium or stood at the edge of the stage as if lost in his own thoughts, taking note of every single change of tone and each movement of the actors’ features. Just occasionally he would come up to one or other of them and talk confidentially to each, at other times he would lay a hand on a shoulder, smile or raise his eyebrows with an expectant look. He seldom spoke to them all at once, and what he said was always so specific that none of them noticed the intrinsic lines in the picture he had envisaged from the start. Slowly they found their places in the picture, as of their own volition, apparently with no help from him.
She had sweat on her upper lip and her knees were trembling when she arrived for the audition one September afternoon. The porter was kind, he led her part of the way and pointed out a long corridor, but she still managed to get lost. When she finally found the rehearsal room the other actors were sitting at a long table watching her walk across the floor, the script pressed to her chest. She went up to Harry, who sat at the end of the table studying his hands, and apologised for being late. He waited for a moment before he took her hand without pressing it, as if indulging a childish whim on her part. He did not reply, merely smiled a little smile with his narrow lips as he regarded her out of the dark cracks of his eyes. He looked at her as if they had never met before, and it seemed inconceivable that she’d sat in his Mercedes one evening and asked if he might kiss her.