The motel was furnished in sham romantic style, as if guests were supposed to imagine themselves in a hunting lodge, a casino and a solid Christian home blended into one. While they were signing the register he said she should be glad she couldn’t see how ghastly it was. She did not react, it was not very funny, but it had become a habit with them, these slightly cynical references to her handicap. She stood swaying slightly, on the verge of falling asleep. They had rooms side by side. He showed her the bed and the door into the bathroom before going to his own room and collapsing in his clothes.
He hadn’t even taken off his shoes, he must have fallen asleep at once. At first he had no idea where he was, he lay on his side with his shoes tangled up in the blanket, watching the distant lights of passing trucks. It was a long time since he had remembered a dream. As a rule his dreams faded as soon as he woke up and he only saw a few dissolving, disconnected details. But this dream he remembered absolutely clearly. He pulled the pillow under his ear and sniffed in the scent of washing powder in the cool, smooth pillow-case.
It had been a colourless dream in shades of grey, white and black. He had never been in Africa, but that was where he was, he didn’t know why nor what kind of room he was standing in. He kneeled down in front of a boy with curly, close-cropped hair. A boy of four, perhaps five, not dark brown but grey like everything else in the dream. The boy had no eyes. There was nothing in their place but thin grey skin. Someone spoke to him behind his back, he did not know who. He could not see the person who spoke, nor hear if it was a man or a woman. The voice told him what he was to do. It said he should reach out and rub the skin where the boy’s eyes should have been. He rubbed cautiously with his knuckles and felt the tense membranes breaking at the light touch. As the flaps of skin curled up, two dark boy’s eyes appeared. Then he woke up.
At first he did not know what it was, the clenching feeling in his diaphragm, which made him double up with his forehead against his knees. He could not breathe, and for a few seconds everything in his body locked in a vice-like grip, until the cramp gave way to an overpowering force that chopped through him in hard, rhythmic stabs. Then he felt sobs breaking from his lungs and throat, hollow, deep and impossible to check.
A little later his muscles slackened, the weeping stopped and he was able to sit up. He dried his eyes and looked out at the silhouettes of parked cars. His watch showed the time to be half past two. He found a cigarette and lit it. The door beside the window led out to the car park. He went outside, it had stopped raining. The cold wind went straight through his shirt, but he kept on walking up and down beside the line of trucks and trailers. There was a wood beside the motel. He had not noticed that when they arrived. The tops of the tall pine trees were faintly outlined against the night sky above the dark windows of the building.
He did not wake up until half past nine. Lucca answered at once when he knocked on her door. She sat with her coat on beside the open window. Her bag was on the bed, packed. They were silent in the restaurant. The end wall was decorated with antlers, and a subdued Viennese waltz sounded from the invisible loudspeakers. He fetched their breakfast from the sideboard. There were no other people and the car park was almost empty. He asked if she had slept well. As she turned her face towards him he could see himself and a section of the wood in her dark glasses. I heard you, she said quietly. He directed his gaze through the corridor of pine trees, their dark trunks vanishing into the dimness. Her cup clattered on the saucer, and he felt the warmth of her hand on his. I am your friend, she said. He looked at her. My friend? She nodded. Yes, she said with a wry smile. Your friend in the dark…
When they were in the car he unfolded the map over the steering wheel and traced the road south to the Swiss border and on through Zurich, St Gotthard and Milan. She put on the tape of Beethoven’s string quartets. He asked if they could hear something else. Like what? He searched out the route to Genoa and down the coast through La Spezia to Viareggio, where they would turn inland again. Whatever you like, he said, folding up the map. Tunes of the day, he added, starting up. She moved the red needle along the FM band until she found a station with good reception. He was grateful to her for not saying anything. Her silence was neither awkward nor frightened, she merely let him be. She kept quiet as you do beside someone in a state of deep concentration.
It was not that he concentrated on anything besides driving. Thoughts passed through his head like birds, and he made no attempt to hold on to them, but he was fully awake. An hour later they were on the way through the Alps. The lethargy of the previous day had been replaced by a clear, sharp feeling, like a reflection of the white light that dazzled him when they emerged from yet another tunnel, forcing him to screw up his eyes.
29
They reached Viareggio in late afternoon. The sky was overcast and there was an offshore wind. The blue-grey colour of the water changed into a lighter milky green under the frayed foam as the waves arched themselves and collapsed. She walked in front of him prodding the sand with her white stick. He stopped to tie his shoelace. The wide beach was completely deserted. A black dog ran around wildly with its tongue hanging out of its mouth and bared teeth, as if biting at the wind. Far to the north behind her solitary figure in the fluttering coat he could see the rocky island off La Spezia and the promontory that sloped upwards and merged into the Apennine Alps. The highest peak was white, not of snow but marble. He straightened himself and caught up with her. Minute drops of salt water covered her dark glasses in a fine layer. Like marble dust, he thought. They walked back and along the promenade past the imposing façades of hotels and pavilions between the promenade and the beach. Hardly anyone was about. There was only the dull rumbling of the breakers in the background, the sound of their heels and the tapping noise of her slim stick.
It was somewhere round here, said Lucca, somewhere along this stretch, she saw him for the first time. Robert tried to imagine a young version of the woman with the mature cultivated voice he had been talking to once or twice a week. A young Else in her suit standing at the edge of the curious crowd watching a film being shot featuring Marcello Mastroianni. There must have been spotlights behind the camera even though the sun was shining. They depicted the scene to each other as they walked along the row of wind-blown palms. It developed into a game in which they took turns at elaborating each other’s fancy.
Else must have been fascinated by the blend of sunlight and white spotlights enveloping the actors in a magical sphere impossible to break into, like a dream. And there, carrying a long boom as he adroitly followed the camera’s movements along the rails, she suddenly caught sight of the dark young man, who perhaps, in a pause between two shots, had already observed the elegant, Scandinavian girl on the other side of the white, the magic circle. It was no longer Mastroianni she looked at, it was Giorgio, but she did not know that. She did not yet know his name, nor could she know he would be the father of her daughter. Merely because, during a stroll along the promenade in Viareggio, she had been attracted by the artificial glare around the crowd of spectators.