Seducing Ingrid Bergman (30 page)

As if willed, as though I’d projected it from within, a hole opens up in front of me. Brilliantly revealed for an instant is a massive crevasse, a sheer precipice like a white mouth that swallows everything ahead of it.

A lightning calculation takes place in my brain. The angle of descent is vertical. There’s nothing to deflect me, and I’m going so fast now, have built up such a momentum, that I’m not going to be able to stop in time.

A blue light seems to illuminate the snow. I see my body as from above, the clouds lifted like a lid – my fingers limp, my mouth a dark triangle, my mind an empty room. The snow closes over me, a white sheet drawn across my face.

There’s a long moment of falling as in a dream. I think of Ingrid, all the things I long to say to her, all the things left unsaid. Then I feel my insides swerve.

Something hits me hard and without warning from the side. The impact slams inside my head. I feel myself hurled off at an angle. I fall awkwardly, my skis flying off, the poles released like spears from my hand. I tumble headlong for several seconds, snow exploding in a powder like glass.

The world around me comes to a stop. At rest, my insides feel as if they’re still being flung on. My face is motionless, cold against the snow, my fingers numb inside their gloves.

It takes a second before my brain reconnects with my body, before I re-establish where I am. The wind stings my eyes. Everything is in negative. The universe shrinks to a vivid point of pain.

What struck me? Did I hit a tree, unseen in the blizzard? Did another skier cross my path? Was I pushed by some benign hand?

Above me, the sky slides back into place.

Bewildered I look up, squinting. And amid the swarm of snowflakes, resolving from the blue-white shadows, I make out a grey form, a tall figure, ghostly in the gloom. The shadow of a man.

He must have seen me careering towards the edge, swung across at speed and by some miracle of collision knocked me clear. He stands over me, his wind-burnt face expressionless, sticks pressed like totems in the snow. A hat covers his head; goggles hide his eyes.

Slowly I reach out a hand.

He remains upright, solemn, gigantic for a moment. His breath forms a shapeless cloud in front of him. A badge on his jacket catches the light and flashes. He stabs the snow with both poles and with a fierce push he is off, sending a spray of powder over my boots. Within seconds, he’s beyond me.

I watch his figure recede, grow small in the distance – a furious blur, a crazed dot, a smudge on the otherwise immaculate whiteness.

*   *   *

My bag is packed. I’m waiting for a taxi. Through the window, there are wet shadows and orange spots like rust where the snow has been. Slivers of ice linger. Stretched tight against the glass, they extend to a feeling of tautness in me. Outside someone drives a shovel in a series of low gravelly slurps. The sound scrapes across the floor of my mind.

There’s a knock on the door.

It’s Ingrid.

Her eyes are moist, her lips bloodless. She flattens herself against the wall, her hands behind her back.

Neither of us speaks.

Bits of ice melt, drops of water falling from the gutter and smashing like atoms onto a metal drum below. Beyond the rooftops, the sun holds a steady golden chord. Like the snow, Ingrid becomes part of the hushed glory.

Slowly her eyes take in the single packed bag on the floor, the room emptied of my things. She looks at me, says something. At the same time, loudly, a crow squawks outside. Clearing her throat, she tries again. ‘So,’ she says. ‘You got lucky again.’

I don’t feel lucky.

The thin, high sound of a car arrives below. Neither of us smiles. ‘He left you alone?’

She looks down at the floor, nods, painfully lovely. I move towards her, put my hand to her cheek. It is hot. In the mirror a few lilies duplicate themselves. The reflection of a clock hand advances the wrong way round.

‘He wants you back?’

She laughs bitterly. ‘He wants me to suffer.’

‘Don’t be a martyr.’

‘You have no idea how obstinate he can be.’ She picks up one of the fallen petals, feels its softness, touched with wilt. ‘He says he’d never let me see Pia again.’

‘He’s bluffing.’

‘You don’t know him.’

‘And me?’

She says nothing.

‘He wants to beat me up. Is that it?’

‘He leaves that kind of thing to his lawyer.’

Slices of sunlight slide around the room. Slabs of shadow follow.

She folds her arms across her chest. Petter is prepared, she says, to give her time to think things through, time to make a decision, to come to a judgement as to what’s best for everyone.

I understand immediately what he means by this. He’s relying upon her weighing up the financial consequences of separation and divorce, the emotional upheaval for Pia, the social stigma Ingrid will endure, the incalculable harm to her career, knowing that she’ll come to the conclusion that it’s not worth it after all.

But what about the cry of pain within her, I want to say, the pull of love, the feeling that her inner life needs completion? ‘Can you be happy with him?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘More than anything, I would have thought.’

‘Not everyone can be happy.’

‘Maybe some people need it more.’

Her eyes darken as if dipped in shadow. ‘Maybe some deserve it more.’

I reach forward, so slowly that it can’t frighten her, and cup the back of her neck with my hand. Her skin is warm. I motion her to lean back and settle her head against my palm, which she does for a few seconds. The gesture has something baptismal about it, something solemn and sacred. For a moment, I hold her skull as if it’s the most precious thing in the world. I take in her scent, feel the tiny pulse in her neck. And as she allows her face to slide from my fingers I feel her lips – not quite accidentally – brush my palm.

Her voice, low and coarsened by crying, seems to travel a vast distance. ‘I would have followed you anywhere. You know that.’

‘You still can.’

‘I don’t want to be your mistress.’

Desire twists in me. I want to sink into her coolness. One last wild chance. I summon up everything in me and offer it to her in a smile. ‘Then marry me.’ The words sound right in my ears, as if I’d rehearsed them.

Her eyes sweep my face with a mixture of amusement and disapproval. ‘Why?’ she asks.

‘I love you.’

‘No other reason?’

‘What other reason is there?’

Her face dissolves, her mouth becomes blurry.

Having started inside me, the feeling won’t let go. ‘We could get a house, with a big bed and a large fire, books and wine and cigarettes. We’d have champagne glasses next to the bath, and the house will always be there so we can meet up when we’ve been away.’

‘Why are you saying this now?’

Because, I think, it’s only now that I’ve come to understand that life has a point to it when she’s around. When everyone else has gone, when the dark descends at night and the streets grow quiet, when I’m up in my room and my mind is empty, she alone stays in my thoughts. I realize that she gives me a reason for getting up in the morning, for being alive.

‘It’s too late,’ she says.

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘You’re asking too much.’

‘I won’t fail you.’

There are two, perhaps three seconds before she says, ‘Capa, you already have.’ Her speaking my name possesses an act of finality.

‘You’re still afraid?’

She doesn’t answer.

The surge of love I feel inside has nowhere left to go. ‘I guess you have everything you need, then.’

‘And nothing I want,’ she says.

There’s a silence. The look in her eyes seems far away. Nothing moves, except for my hands, a little tug of the fingers as though trying to pull her back towards me.

‘You’ll call me?’

‘Soon.’

‘You mean later?’

‘I mean soon.’

The space around her starts to re-arrange itself, subtly adjusting to the fact of my absence.

‘You know,’ I say, ‘it’s only now I feel ready to love again.’ And as I say it, I recognize that this is true. But my words, having tested the emptiness, come back with nothing. Already she seems beyond me, any claim I had on her gone.

She tries to smile but her face is tense with sadness.

Is she asking me to forgive her? If so, there’s nothing to forgive.

I feel no anger. Instead I feel lost, like that time as a boy playing hide-and-seek when I hid so long my friends forgot to come and find me.

A lamp next to the bed makes a low buzzing sound. The noise hovers with the energy of a conscience.

‘Where will you go?’ she says.

I look across at my Contax on the table. Its dark lens looks in this instant like a hole.

‘Oh, Capa.’

I close my eyes and everything is red suddenly. My heart lurches. An ache opens up in my gut. I feel a sense of endless falling like the snow.

*   *   *

A hotel porter knocks on the door of Ingrid’s room. She’s lying on the bed, reading a script. It’s late. She’s just made herself comfortable, and now this knocking.

Petter is still in the bathroom. ‘Get that, will you?’ he says.

With visible reluctance, Ingrid sets the typescript down, pulls herself up from the bed and makes her way to the door, just as there’s a second, more determined knock.

A young man wearing a small round hat at an angle nods. ‘A delivery for you, Miss Bergman.’

Ingrid takes possession of a package and remembers just in time to tip the porter, retrieving a dollar bill from her purse on the dresser.

‘Here,’ she says.

‘Thank you,’ he says, and retires, closing the door behind him.

The package is addressed to her. Intrigued, she opens it and pulls out a long rectangular box from inside. A shoe box.

Her stomach clenches. She removes the lid, sets aside the layers of tissue paper to reveal a pair of beautiful red shoes.

There is no name, just a note that says simply, ‘Sorry they’re not perfect.’

Ingrid experiences a painful sweetness, feels the tears held inside her head.

‘What is it?’ Petter calls from the bathroom.

‘Nothing,’ she says.

*   *   *

Ingrid wakes with a sensation of falling.

When she opens her eyes, she’s surprised to see the windows on the other side of the room to where she remembered them. She appears to occupy a different place, twisted, unfamiliar.

She can’t sleep at night or get up in the morning. She can’t bear the daylight so she turns her face to the wall. Everything seems heavy. A band of tightness spreads across her chest. She finds it hard to breathe, starts wheezing like an asthmatic, needing to gulp little cups of air. It seems impossible that Capa has gone.

Worse still, she finds that as the days and months go by, she starts to forget what he looks like. She tries to conjure his features, the colour of his eyes and hair, the shape of his face. This is terrible. She can’t remember. Her body has forgotten him. All that’s left is a blur, like an image seen through crazed glass.

She turns over on the bed, presses her face into the pillow and keeps it there for a long time. She inhales through her nose and mouth and prays for the faint, achingly sweet scent of him somehow to rise from the fabric. But although she breathes in deeply, all that comes is an echo, the memory of his smell, a vanished magic; and to remember it is to feel it again, to name it, to know that it is lost.

What happens, she wonders, to all the love that’s left now that he’s gone? Does it remain inside her? Will it leak away without her noticing? Will it ever come back?

Everything she knows about love, she learnt from Capa, and now he has taught her everything about loss. The great humming nullity of it, like a void. First the shock of love like cold water, and now this sorrow.

She thinks of the months and years to come without him. Grief like a fifth season grips the earth around her. She feels it, a solid physical thing, palpable as a landscape where people like the trees retreat into themselves and rain is squeezed from a thin grey sky.

As long as he was with her, she never thought she could die. Or if she did, then somehow it would be all right, and she wouldn’t be afraid because he’d be there to hold her hand.

She recalls a conversation they had just before he left.

‘Promise me something,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘That if anything happens, you’ll forget me.’

‘How can I promise that?’

‘Not for my sake.’

‘Whose then?’

She remembers it took him several seconds to reply.

‘For the sake of being alive.’

19

It’s extraordinary, but some days I can be walking down the road – the sun will be shining, I’ll be feeling happy – when without warning, I’ll think of her and immediately start to feel rotten. And it’s not because the place is terrible, it’s the fact that she’s not here with me.

We sit in a café on the boulevard Saint-Michel. Her hair is tied up and she wears no lipstick. The light and shadows compose her into something wonderful. The radio plays ‘Exactly Like You’. Outside, the sugar in the leaves turns the trees a vivid colour. Pollen drifts diagonally – tiny white bits of fluff gliding like little parachutes across the window. Ingrid holds a spoon in her hand. The smell of vanilla rises from her bowl.

We haven’t met or spoken for months, but still I recognize every gesture, every pore of her skin, the tiny changes of colour in her eyes like the bands of light in water.

Then we’re in her room.

We don’t eat or sleep.

Behind her the sky warms from grey to pink, graduating finally to light blue. We sit on the floor arm-in-arm, surrounded by empty bottles, flutes half full of flat champagne.

We’ve made love several times already. She looks beautiful, sad and tired.

I tell her I love her, and that she has nothing in the world to fear.

I hear her whisper, and though I can barely make out the words, I know she’s repeating the sweetest things.

Then while I’m in the bathroom, the telephone rings.

When I come out, a towel wrapped around my waist, something has changed. Her eyes have grown hard and dark, her face closed, out of reach. Her skin gives off a nameless scent. Something flowery, but coarse too, fills the room. Already she’s dressed and ready to leave, wearing her scarf and dark glasses.