What if they had had a child? He would definitely not have wanted that. She thought of the American boy who had been given a red car for his birthday. Otto never spoke of him, apparently he had said all there was to say. The boy existed, but they did not know each other and that’s how it was. Otto didn’t even have a picture of him. A letter from Lester enclosing a drawing had arrived in the autumn. The only sign of the mother’s life was the neat, formal handwriting on the envelope. Lucca fixed the drawing to the fridge door with sticky tape. Otto accepted that, but when it fell down one windy day he left it on the floor. She got him to send the boy an advent calendar. She bought it herself. He looked at her as if he thought she was crazy, but he sent it.
She hadn’t even contemplated the possibility of their having a child. Only now did she calculate how many potential children had spurted out of him every time to no purpose. A whole class, a whole school, a whole city of unborn babies. She had never seriously imagined them walking down the street one day with a buggy, on a Saturday morning shopping trip. Maybe because she hadn’t dared. She visualised Otto’s blue eyes. She didn’t even know what they had seen, those eyes. Probably just a girl among so many others, a face in the line of faces blotting each other out on his sheet like transparencies projected on a screen. Click, and the world changed. But that can’t have been how he saw it. His world was probably always the same, only it was full of girls.
Lucca turned to look at the woods. The shadows had grown thicker among the straight columns of spruce. She tried to recall the men she had been with, either for a night, a few months or longer. There were twenty-four altogether, if she counted her first sweethearts. She recalled the advent calendar she had bought for Otto’s son. It pictured a crowd of children sledging and building snowmen and having snowball fights, all of them rosy-cheeked. She tried to reconstruct the sequence of the men she had known and visualised them with excited red cheeks and a number on their foreheads. When she kissed a new, strange face it had been like opening yet another lid, thrilled as a child with what might be hidden behind it. Had she really believed that Otto’s face was the last one? Was she so naïve? Had she imagined it would be Christmas every night for ever?
It was still light when she went to bed, having told Else she had a headache. She closed the blind to darken the room, light nights had never appealed to her. As a child she had been afraid night would not come, she didn’t know why, and she had been just as scared when Else drew down the black blind. She had insisted on keeping the bedside light on until she fell asleep. Else had draped one of her Indian scarves over the lamp and she had lain looking at the grey woollen petals and stems spreading over the ceiling and walls, where the embroidered flowers on the scarf threw their enlarged shadows. Now she lay open-eyed in the thick darkness of the room.
In the spring of 1965 Else and her first husband toured Italy by car. They were young and had only been married four years. She had married a successful young man, at least his parents were well-off, and Else’s mother and father were more than pleased. She had played with the idea of being an actor and studied with one for a few months, but nothing came of it. In one of the photographs from that trip she sits smiling in a white open-top Aston Martin. She wears sunglasses and a light-coloured silk scarf tied under her chin, and the road snakes behind her through rows of black pines on the Tyrolean mountainsides. Else’s first husband doesn’t appear in any of the pictures. He was the one who took them.
In Lucca’s opinion it was quite appropriate for him not to be in a single one of the snapshots. He was nothing but an eye in the camera he directed towards her mother, who did not yet know she was to be a mother the next year, standing in St Mark’s Square and beneath the arches of the Colosseum, smiling the same delighted smile. Lucca smiled when she looked at those pictures. They made her feel she was the surprise itself in her own person. If Else had had a child with the invisible photographer, Lucca would never have been born.
On the way back from Rome the young couple spent a few days in Viareggio, where one evening the invisible photographer ate some oysters he should not have eaten. Who knows, thought Lucca. If his bourgeois upbringing had not equipped him with this fateful weakness for oysters, the world might have been different. It would have been a world without her, in other words a completely unthinkable world, since she was the one thinking about it. But no less real for that reason.
While Else’s husband was lying ill she went for walks in the town and along the promenade. One afternoon a film was being shot, and she stood at the edge of the crowd of spectators behind the camera and the lamps shining whitely in the sun on a pale beautiful woman in sunglasses and a suit almost the same as Else’s. The lovely woman walked along the promenade again and again with quick steps wearing a contemplative air. Else recognised Marcello Mastroianni as the anxious man in a black suit with a white shirt and tie who followed the woman, trying in vain to persuade her to stop. Only after the fourth or fifth shot did Else notice the young man in a striped sailing shirt walking alongside the camera rails with the boom held high above his sunburned head. He himself had been keeping an eye on the tall Nordic woman among the spectators for some time.
It turned out that the film crew were staying at the same hotel as Else and her husband, and the very next day Else got out of the lift on the wrong floor, astounded and delighted at her own faithlessness, while the invisible photographer sat chained to a lavatory pan on the floor below. She allowed him to recover a bit before she informed him of what she had decided in the meantime. He must drive home without her. She didn’t love him any more, and she was bound to obey her feelings, she told him, and so the white Aston Martin had driven north with its lonely, rejected driver, out of the story. He left no more than a handful of holiday snaps of his lost beloved, which he sent her later without a covering letter, enclosed with the divorce papers so she could ponder whether it was a desperate or aloof, condoning gesture.
After he left, Else moved into the young sound engineer’s room, but she soon grew tired of watching the filming. Instead she lay on the beach all day long, alone for the first time in weeks. For once in her life, she thought rebelliously. Later she went with Giorgio to his home town to be introduced to his mother, a black-clad grey-haired woman who lent them her bedroom and gave them breakfast in bed, secretly crossing herself. There, in a Tuscan widow’s creaking bed, far too short and far too soft, Lucca had been conceived, according to her mother. In Lucca, with a view over the flat, tiled roofs and the hills with their olive groves and cypresses. It was Else’s idea to give her that name, to remember the view from their room each time she uttered it. Giorgio had told her Lucca was a boy’s name. What if it was a girl? Else didn’t care. Boy or girl, the view over the roofs of Lucca was the same.
Later on she said that had been the happiest time of her life. They cavorted around Italy for three months. There was so much he wanted to show her, and in every place there were people he knew. To start with she didn’t understand a word he said, but that didn’t matter. His eyes and his hands and his laughter were expressive enough. It was a never-ending party, one long chain of light, shining hours and endless warm nights of hunting for yet another riotous moment’s surrender to laughter and the craziest whims.