Lucca Read Free Page B

to her. A thoughtless gesture, thought Robert. What use were flowers to her? Weren’t they rather a signal to the people around her that others were thinking of her? The nurse asked how she was. She wrenched her mouth sideways in somethingmeant to be a sarcastic smile. She really did look like a mummy, swathed as she was in plaster and bandages, reduced to a pale mouth that uttered brief answers when she was spoken to. Her condition had stabilised, now it was just a question of waiting.
    For what? The nurse looked at him, perplexed, as he considered how to reply. He sat down on the edge of the bed and cautiously put a hand on her right shoulder, the only visible part of her body apart from her jaw which was not bandaged or plastered. Well, he couldn’t say, he said, surprised at the gentleness in his voice. She made no answer, her mouth lay still in its folds, as if she were asleep. The nurse told her Lauritz would be coming in the afternoon. She spoke in an earnest, entreating voice. It was probably the best answer to give her. Lucca Montale asked her to take the flowers away, the stench was choking her. Robert and the nurse looked at each other.
    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 otherpatients 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