Giorgio went to Copenhagen with her. They were married at the town hall and spent the first year or two living in an attic flat with slanting walls and a loo in the courtyard. That was something Else always had to mention, the loo in the courtyard, as if it had been a special attraction. She gave up her dream of acting and became a presenter on the radio, while Giorgio knocked on the doors of the film studios in vain. But no one could use a sound engineer who did not understand the dialogue he recorded, and Else had to feed the family on her own. Lucca had no memories of that time. The first thing she remembered was the bedroom of the villa in Frederiksberg they moved into when her grandparents died, one soon after the other. The old mahogany bed where she snuggled up between Giorgio and Else in the mornings. She would creep in under his duvet, and he would bend one knee so the duvet made a cave with a narrow opening out to Else’s soft body in the morning light. She curled up in there like a little Eskimo in her igloo, knees up to her chin so she could fit between his thigh and chest, sniffing up the safe smell of his body.
When she woke up one morning he was gone. Else sat on the edge of the bed stroking her hair, speaking calmly to her in the wonderful voice that could say anything to anyone in every radio set in the land. Lucca became accustomed to the strange friends who came to dinner. Sometimes they were still there in the morning when she had to go to school. Her father had been a dreamer, Else told her many years later, a spoiled slacker. But hadn’t they been happy? Her mother fell silent for a long time before replying. Probably you were only happy a few moments at a time.
Lucca recalled the mornings in their bed when she pressed herself close to Giorgio’s warm body, a summer day when she rode on his shoulders through the plantation and a New Year’s Eve when she had been carried around the house by one strange guest after another, dressed as an Indian princess, wrapped up in silk with a red spot of lipstick on her forehead. She remembered Giorgio and Else dancing together, slowly and clasped close in the sweet, sickly smell of the funny pipes with no mouth-pieces that were passed round, and she remembered the music they danced to, Ravi Shankar, Carole King. Of course she had been in love with him, said Else, but they had been so young, it had been a young dream. There came a moment when you woke up.
Lucca thought about the morning she had woken up with Else sitting silently on the edge of the bed stroking her cheek. Lucca was afraid of forgetting Giorgio, and gradually did come to forget him. She saw no more of him during her childhood, but it never occurred to her to reproach him for that, and she did not ask Else why he never visited them. She did not want to hear her speaking ill of him, she would rather know nothing. So he became still more remote and indistinct. When she thought back to the morning when she awoke to the news that he had left, it was as if her father had been no more than a dream.
She found it hard to call up his face. It was his body she remembered, his brown skin and black beard and the soft sound of his voice, not what he had said. She forgot the language they had spoken together. As time went on she pictured him only in isolated images. She could remember him recording sounds for her on his tape recorder. She had to guess what they were. The cooing of a pigeon, wet sheets flapping in the wind, a chamois leather rubbing a window pane or the thin tones of a guitar from an egg slicer.
He had taught her to make spaghetti with butter and grated nutmeg. She recalled the sweet scent of nutmeg and sitting in the kitchen watching him eat while they listened to Else’s cool, precise voice on the radio. Neither of them understood perfectly what she said. It was the voice itself they listened to, both familiar and strange as she spoke to all and sundry. Suddenly he wasn’t there any more. She was in class one. She had her meals by herself in the kitchen, looked after by a nanny, when Else was on the radio at night. When she grew older, she made herself pasta al burro with nutmeg while listening to her mother speaking through the transistor’s vibrating plastic trellis, far away and yet so close she could hear the saliva between the consonants in her mouth.
There had been quarrels behind closed doors, and once while she was listening to them shouting at each other, she stole into his room with its bookcase filled with tapes of the sounds of rain and thunder and crackling fire, of dogs and birds, telephones and slamming doors. She found the album with photographs of him when young, the pictures from the town of her name. Cautiously she picked off the old glue that fixed her favourite pictures to the thick cardboard page, fearful as a thief. As if she were not merely taking what belonged to her. For it was her own story which began with the black and white photographs she was hiding. The one of Else in an open Aston Martin on the way through the Tyrol, unaware that she was on the way to her meeting with Lucca’s father. The one of Giorgio on a square in his home town, rocking a café chair in front of a church wall, brushed by the arrow-shaped shadows of the swallows, waiting for Else without himself being aware of it.
9
Else’s loneliness had acquired a purposeful character. All those men, thought Lucca, only to end up sitting alone in her childhood home surrounded by the wreckage of three marriages in the shape of furniture in various styles, according to the differing taste of the men and what had been in fashion at the time. Lucca was fascinated by her mother’s transformations as they came to light in the pictures of her.
With her first husband she had been a coquettish high-heeled blonde with narrow sunglasses and projectile breasts, undulating along in one checked suit after the other. Lucca couldn’t remember his name. With Giorgio Else had become a hennaed hippie in loosely fitting Indian cotton, and when Ivan came on the scene she turned into an authoritative career woman in dark, tailored jackets. Else laughed at herself, how could she have fallen for that Jacqueline Kennedy hat or that djellaba with embroidery around the collar. She did not seem surprised at the actual transformations, times changed, she had merely gone along with them.
Ivan ran an advertising agency. He had a square, brutal face and was always tanned, but Lucca wasn’t sure whether that was sun or whisky. His voice was very deep and she could hear how he loved it. He always sounded authoritative and effective, rather like pilots when they announce the cruising height and calculated flying time, so a feeling of shaving lotion and optimism fills the cabin. When he came back from one of his numerous business trips he always brought Lucca a gigantic box of chocolates. She felt suffocated by all that chocolate and the shame of accepting his bribes.
At first she didn’t believe it when Else told her he had moved in. She could not imagine a man more different from Giorgio and the other men who had lived with them for a short or longer spell. They had all been actors, journalists or architects, and Ivan didn’t suit the vegetating jumble of shabby heirlooms, palsied cane furniture and wilting pot plants. Oceans of newspapers, magazines and books flowed everywhere, and housework was done only when strictly necessary once a month when Else made a trip through the rooms with the vacuum cleaner in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But in a trice everything was transfigured. The cane furniture was replaced by bent-wood chairs, an opulent leather sofa made its entrance in company with a sofa table made of marble, and the walls of the damp-stained hovel were painted so white they made Lucca’s eyes hurt.
Else herself underwent a gradual transformation. She started to shave her armpits and cut her long hair. She was a different woman in her new buckled shoes, lipstick and eye shadow, and pale stripes. Previously lazy and untidy, she now radiated energy when she got home from broadcasting and served up a beautifully prepared dinner in no time. Formerly she had not been slow to put her changing lovers in their place with a sharp, cynical remark. Now she smiled in a feminine way as she listened to Ivan’s boring, self-satisfied accounts of the brilliant concept he had proposed for some campaign or other for a bank or a travel firm or a new kind of toffee. She was quite simply in love.