Lucca wouldn’t be able to explain to her mother what she was feeling behind the pain and the outrage and her wounded vanity over Andreas falling in love with someone else. She could not even explain to herself what she felt beneath the emotions everyone would anticipate. Through the general, inevitable pain she glimpsed a black abyss whose depths she could not contemplate, nor could she see what lay at the bottom of it, if it had a bottom. For a moment she imagined that the darkness among the threads of lights beneath her did not hide buildings but a bottomless chasm into which you could keep on falling. How was she to make her mother understand that it was not merely Andreas she feared to lose?
They had strolled around in the Marais quarter looking at the Jewish shops and had spent a few hours at the Picasso museum. In the evening they went to the cinema and afterwards ate at a Vietnamese restaurant. It rained the following day, he worked, she read. She was sure he did not suspect anything. She had behaved as usual and imagined she would have done if she had not felt the need of a cigarette and searched in the pocket of his tweed jacket for a lighter. It was not hard to picture. The hard thing was to play the part completely, so he did not glimpse as much as a crack into the void where she was beside herself with pain and bitterness, dizzy at suddenly seeing everything at a distance. A distance she felt simultaneously with the suffering, and which made her suffer still more, not on account of Andreas, but of herself.
She went to Charles de Gaulle on her own. She wasn’t sure she could go through with an emotional parting scene in the same place where three days earlier all her worries had paled when she saw him smiling and waving. He insisted on seeing her to the airport bus at L’Etoile. He kept asking whether he should go with her, but it did not alleviate her pain at all to see how guilt tore at him and made him exaggeratedly considerate. She looked at him as if he was no-one in particular as she waved a final time. As he turned and walked back towards the Arch of Triumph she looked at him just as she had done at Almeria airport when she held up a placard with his name on. He had appeared smiling among the crowd of passengers, as unknown and strange as they were.
She had a long wait in baggage reclaim at Kastrup. Her stomach ached at the thought of arriving home, putting down her suitcase in the kitchen and sitting down to eat with Lauritz and Else. She considered calling home and saying she had been delayed. But what would she do with herself? She did not want to go to Miriam’s and take it in turns to weep. She smoked a cigarette while waiting. I loved him so much, she said to herself. It was not out of revenge that she put it in the past tense. She had been happy without thinking about it, without having to pursue her own thoughts and feelings all the time.
The letter from Stockholm had made her wake up, as if her years with Andreas had been only a dream. When people had asked her whether she really was as happy as she sounded, the question had taken her by surprise. It told her she had long since been released from herself. But that was all in the past. Now she was back again, locked up in her own head, puzzled over where she had been all this time.
Lucca…
She turned. She did not recognise him at once, the man who had spoken her name.
26
He had changed. He had grown a full beard, his hairline was receding and there were touches of grey in his beard and curly hair, but he was just as stooping and thin as before, and he wore spectacles again, oval and unframed. She noticed that in the taxi. You’ve stopped wearing your contact lenses, she said. He smiled, shy at her commenting on his appearance. Barbara had made him wear contact lenses. He said it in a way that told her they were no longer together, but she asked all the same. He met her eyes as he shrugged his shoulders and tried to smile like someone who has overcome the blows he had received. She leaned back and looked ahead.
He had just come back from Reykjavik. One of his compositions had been performed at a festival for new Scandinavian music. Although I don’t feel so young any more, he added. He might have been right there, sitting with his well-trimmed beard and unframed glasses, grizzled and in a herring-bone coat. Was it Daniel? The short-sighted, unworldly Daniel she had once made so unhappy. She pictured him at the piano in his little apartment, as she stood at the window and made an end of it.
She told him about Andreas and Lauritz, about the house they had renovated, and how relieved she had been to move out of town and forget all the brooding over her career, totally absorbed in watching her son grow, seeing their home taking shape… Well, it must sound boring… He shook his head. He didn’t think so. Incidentally, he had seen her on stage, in The Father. He had followed her progress. She borrowed his mobile and called Else to say she would be delayed. They walked beside the canal, he insisted on carrying her case. The reflections from the old street lamps trembled on the restless black water. The wind had got up, the boats rocked beside the quay and tugged at their mooring ropes, making them creak.
She watched the cobblestones sliding to meet her through the lamps’ circles of light. I wasn’t very nice to you, she said. He made light of it, it was so long ago. They walked for a while in silence. How strange it is, he said, that we should meet, out of the blue! Yes, she replied, I meet you every time I am deserted. It leaped out of her. He looked at her in a way that made her lower her eyes. She told him how Otto had dropped her a few hours after she ran into him and Barbara one evening in a bar. He had thought she was the kind who did the dropping. She shrugged her shoulders. She had thought so too. He smiled ironically. If only he had met her the next day instead! She smiled back. Well, he was not free then. The cold made him shiver. Every time… he said cautiously. Did that mean?… He looked at her inquiringly. She told him briefly about Paris and the letter. What kind of daft shit had she married? She looked at him. Sorry, he just felt…
Daniel’s houseboat was at the end of the quay. He crossed the gangway first, put the cases down on the deck and gallantly took her hand. It was an old barge. There’s no electricity, he said on the way down the stairs. She stood still while he lit the oil lamps and a gas stove in the middle of the floor. The piano was on a dais at one end of what had once been the hold. At the other end there was a galley and a door into the cabin where he slept. She recognised his grandmother’s teacups on a shelf above the kitchen table, with a rowing boat in moonlight and a romantic couple. The handle was missing from one of the cups. The place was covered with varnished boards that shone in the glow from the lamps and candles, and there were small portholes in the walls from which you could look out over the canal and the quay. He uncorked a bottle of wine, they sat on safari chairs. A chest between them functioned as a table.
He was quite frank. He had had one or two brief relationships since Barbara left him, but they had never turned into anything permanent, he was probably not fit for that. He poured out the wine. Gradually he had grown used to living alone. It had its advantages, he could do as he pleased. She told him how surprised she had been when she met him with Barbara. Just imagine how surprised he had been himself! She took off her shoes and pulled her feet up in the chair. The red wine and the slight rocking beneath her had a calming effect.
Barbara had found herself a stockbroker. He smiled, but without bitterness. That probably suited her better… But he did not regret their relationship, she had been rather sweet, and she had helped him to get on. She had made him believe he was not entirely impossible. But he had been impossible back then, he could see that quite well… Lucca smiled. He raised his eyes and she regretted her smile when she saw the expression in his eyes. Now he had to smile himself. It’s like a disease, he said, being hopelessly in love. And you almost go crazy, he went on, because you can’t get it into your head that your disease isn’t infectious.