As they walked along the corridor she told him the patient’s mother had visited Lucca the previous day. She had not stayed in the room for more than a couple of minutes before coming out again, visibly shaken. The nurse had offered her a cup of coffee, but she had driven back to Copenhagen at once. She had looked surprisingly young, according to the nurse, who had recognised her voice but been unable to recall where she had heard it before, this beautiful, expressive female voice. Later in the day she had remembered. Lucca Montale’s mother was a broadcaster. The nurse had asked Lucca if she was right, but the patient had been very curt and replied that she did not want visits from her mother or anyone else apart from her son.
Her decision did not need to be enforced, her mother did not come again, nor others. When Lauritz visited her, Andreas Bark waited outside the room, hunched in despair. Robert greeted him when he passed by and gave him brief reports of the patient’s condition, controlling his impatience to continue along the corridor and escape the other’s eyes. Andreas Bark must have registered his aversion and Robert was relieved to find he did not seek him out in his office again. Robert could not explain to himself what it was about the man that filled him with such revulsion. He did not try very hard to discover. There were other patients and their families to look after, and Lucca Montale took her place in the rows of prone figures in hospital gowns whose faces and sufferings changed at varying tempos, according to the seriousness of their cases and how soon they were discharged.
He only saw her for a few minutes during his daily rounds, and as a rule he was the one who spoke, when he repeated more or less what he had said to her the day before. Under the circumstances everything went on as it should do. He himself thought that sounded hypocritical, but why, in fact? If someone drank themselves senseless and drove at 150 km an hour along the wrong side of the motorway, there were limits to the miracles he could perform. She should be glad to be alive at all. Unless she had driven like a madwoman to get it over with once and for all. Get what over? Life, quite simply? Or whatever it had been in her life that had made her wish she were dead? She probably hadn’t made any distinction.
Every time he thought about her he grew more convinced that Lucca Montale must have decided to kill herself that evening she quarrelled with her husband and got into their car to drive towards the motorway. But it made no difference what he thought. His task was to get her on her feet again so she could be discharged to whatever awaited her outside. He knew no more about her, on the whole, than he knew about his other patients. Besides, he only thought of her now and then, in the intervals when he paused for a moment’s reflection in his office, dictaphone in hand, looking down on the hospital garden below. Otherwise not.
His days resembled each other. When he was at home he listened to music, Brahms, Mahler, Bruckner, Sibelius, the great symphonies that were like cathedrals, with the same shadowy heights, the same ribbed arches, and the same mysterious, coloured light divided into rays, cones and rosettes on the stone floor. Exactly like the real cathedrals in the south, which he and Monica had always visited in the days when everything was going well or at least seemed to be. She had not shared his taste in music, he had had to listen with earphones in the evenings when they were alone, and then she reproached him for isolating himself. At least it was some progress that now he could fill the empty house with one symphony orchestra after another without upsetting anyone. He did not think about anything when he listened to music. It poured through him like an impersonal energy, a huge, transforming power, and as long as it filled him it did not matter who or where he was. He watched the evening sky behind the birch trees in the garden, the grass in the wind, the children on cycles and the cars that occasionally passed along the road behind the fence, soundless as a silent film, while at the same time he felt both united and cut off from everything.
He went into Copenhagen once or twice a month and spent the afternoon and evening buying records, going to a concert or visiting some of his old friends. He had kept in touch only with friends from his life before he met Monica, and it was seldom he saw even those friends after he moved. Sometimes he went out to see his mother, she lived in a small flat in a block from the Thirties with a balcony where she could sit and look out over the harbour, the local heating station’s row of slim chimneys and the railway lines with the express trains’ shunting track.
His father had left her shortly after Robert was born and he had not seen him since; he had moved to Jutland and probably started another family there. He was a barber, thinking of him seemed quite abstract. He might already be dead. When Robert was fifteen he had decided to go in search of him. He succeeded in finding the address and telephone number. He could still remember the silence from the other end when he had told the strange man who he was. They arranged to meet in Århus, on neutral ground, as his father said in a tired voice that was hoarse and short of breath. He must be a chain-smoker. But when he was in the ferry crossing the Great Belt Robert began to lose heart, and he got off the train at Odense. What was the point of this?
Robert’s mother did not marry again. She looked after him on her own, at first by cleaning, later by working in the canteen of a large firm, where in time she was promoted to catering officer. The best time for her had been when she worked in a home for children with behavioural problems. She rarely went out. When she retired, she resorted to the world of novels. Robert was not sure how clearly she could distinguish between their fictional life and the life going on around her. She herself was a spectator, terribly modest, content to be a witness of the world seen from the humble corner she allowed herself to occupy.
She loved Dickens and the Russians, Tolstoy and Dostoievski, and she had a weakness for Mark Twain, but her favourite book was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. When Robert saw the familiar volume open on the arm of the shabby easy chair beside the balcony door where she liked to sit, he always asked if it wasn’t too sad. She smiled mysteriously, of course it was sad, but it was so entertaining too, and she said it as if in some secret way the one thing was a prerequisite for the other.
As a rule she hid her faded hair under a scarf. Time had made her stoop and she was very thin, but taller than most women of her generation, as tall as a man, and as long as he could remember she had worn the same kind of strong, mannish spectacle frames. She smoked about forty cigarettes a day, just as presumably her ex-husband had, thought Robert. That was the only thing they had in common apart from him. But they had come to a silent agreement that he should not comment on her smoking. He had almost come to the conclusion that she survived on a diet of cigarettes and novels.
She had always kept to a monotonous routine. The biggest event in her life had been the day he was admitted to university. Not when he finished but when he started, as the first one in the family. As far as he knew she had not been with a man since his father left her. But that couldn’t be true, he thought, and one day he asked her. She did not reply, merely smiled her mysterious smile in a way that prevented him from seeing whether she smiled to protect her feminine pride or to shield him from stories he did not want to hear anyway.