Seducing Ingrid Bergman (9 page)

Slowly she grows aware that, within the cool, composed centre of her being, a faint splinter has appeared, a spidery crack, from which, as if from a long-dormant crater, something molten and irresistibly liquid threatens to spring. She feels again a premonitory heat suffuse her cheeks.

When it comes to lunch, she doesn’t feel hungry. Instead she’s conscious of an ache inside and out. She takes another bath. Afterwards she experiences a sudden need for chocolate. She eats five large squares one after the other, and immediately feels queasy.

Then when she sees Capa in the afternoon, any feelings of tenderness contend with an obscure sense of unease, which her nerves twist into a knot.

At the corner of rue Mouffetard, he asks for another picture. She sees his camera swing towards her, his eyes squinting as he focuses.

‘Absolutely not,’ she says. She raises a hand to cover her face.

‘Why?’ he says. ‘Afraid I’ll steal your soul?’

‘You believe in souls?’

‘I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies,’ he says, ‘but no evidence of souls.’

She tucks a piece of hair behind one ear. ‘You don’t think I have a soul?’

‘I’m willing to be convinced,’ he says.

She watches his arms drop to his sides. She notices how the camera hangs like a religious icon against his chest. He lights a cigarette.

She tries in her mind to connect how things were when she arrived in Paris – the sensation of complete liberty and ease – with the gnawing feeling she experiences now. She can’t, and within her forms an unstable mixture of tenderness and a feeling close to grief. The discomfort, though it lasts no more than a minute, seems to writhe like a living thing inside her.

He says, ‘Shall I see you tonight?’

Immediately she knows that she wants to say yes. ‘This is becoming addictive.’

‘I like being with you.’

‘Addictive isn’t good, is it?’

‘It means I don’t want to stop.’

‘Nothing addictive is good.’

They both stand motionless in silence for a few seconds. Smoke rises like the evidence of a spiritual essence from his mouth.

It is now that she realizes something new: that she likes the person she is when she’s with Capa; she likes the person he allows her to be. She senses the difference inside her, the fact that something has changed. She finds it hard to identify or locate the sensation, but then she remembers; it revives the adolescent excitement and awkward need she experienced as a girl, putting on lipstick and practising kissing. She would practise against her arm, against the mirror, pressing her lips so hard that her teeth would click against the glass.

Her brain catches up. Something squeezes inside her chest. ‘I’d better go,’ she says.

Then she sees him smile. It happens like this. He turns to go and she notices how he looks across at her one last time, and smiles. He may not believe in souls, she considers, but he is still capable of acts of grace. A woman could go through a lifetime, she thinks, and never be blessed with such a look.

She feels the muscles around her mouth rise into an uncontrollable smile of her own. The expression still hovers and must linger on her lips when she enters the hotel, prompting Joe to ask as soon as he sees her, ‘What’s the matter with you?’

6

After hearing the news of the second atom bomb, we commandeer a car and drive out of the city to the Bois de Boulogne. I remember the wine. I remember the bread and cheese, and the glasses, but I forget the corkscrew. Shit.

Irwin says, ‘You don’t even have a knife with you?’

A small laugh. ‘Do you?’

‘When was the last time you organized a picnic, Capa?’ he says, closing and folding his newspaper. ‘You’re hopeless.’

Ingrid says, ‘Maybe I should have brought Joe after all.’

The bottle of wine was expensive. Château Margaux. I’m determined not to waste it. ‘Watch this,’ I say.

When I tap the neck of the bottle with one hand smartly against a stone, nothing happens. I try again a little harder, without success. The blow – a high tinkle – echoes under the trees. I smile nervously, look up, conscious of the others looking on, watching the experiment unfold. I shift my feet, concentrate. When I strike it more fiercely at an angle, this time with both hands and a little lower down, not only does the neck break, but the whole bottle smashes, spilling gouts of red wine across the bare grass, leaving the jagged remnants of glass in my right hand and a long thin cut across my palm. I don’t believe it, the whole thing drained away. And only yesterday I was giving blood in the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, the tube springing in an instant with blood from the tender, swabbed place on my arm. It surprises me there’s enough left to spill.

Irwin groans as the wine leaks away. Ingrid laughs, and at first the blood that wells from the cut mixes indistinguishably with the red stain of the wine. Once she sees me examining the gash, though, and realizes what has happened, she leaps up from the ground. Spurred into efficiency, she takes hold of my hand. She’s quick to dab the wound clean and to make her handkerchief into a small poultice. She attends to the wound with exceptional tenderness. I watch her eyes dart in and out of shadow, notice how her eyebrows are darker than her hair; her mouth pinches at one corner as she concentrates. Lovely. The white handkerchief absorbs the worst of the cut. Soon the bleeding stops. My fingers tingle, retain the warm touch of her hands.

‘Hey, nurse, what about me?’ Irwin says.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Something much worse than that,’ he says. ‘And something only you can heal.’

Ingrid plays along, shoots a knowing glance at me. ‘Oh?’

Irwin withholds it for a moment, desolately clutches his chest. ‘I’ve got a broken heart.’

I laugh. Ingrid smiles, acknowledging the flattery involved in the joke. ‘I’m afraid my expertise only extends to cuts and grazes,’ she says.

Though we mourn the loss of the wine, at least we get to eat the bread and the cheese. Irwin and I sit still in the sun, our backs to the bole of a cedar tree. Neither of us can take our eyes off Ingrid as she lies on her front in the thin grass. We watch as she moves her legs airily in a kind of semaphore, first making a U shape, then crossing them into an X, the ankles touching lazily, then widening to make an inverted V. Her skirt has fallen above her knees to reveal the muscles in her calves and thighs, which look as though they’ve been moulded from a sculpture. There’s silence for a time while we watch, giddy with cigarettes, and absorb the peace and calm, trying to work out the message conveyed by her legs.

Irwin says how strange it seems that people can just walk around as though nothing has happened, as though everything is normal. He sniffs the air, searches around with his eyes as if looking for a hole covered-up or detecting, instead of the green leafiness, a whiff of devilry, something elemental going on.

Ingrid nods but says nothing. I look around at the blameless landscape, and see no evidence of anything nasty waiting to claim us. Not yet, anyway. Everything is still and quiet, the only movement a tiny breeze in the tops of the trees and Ingrid’s fingers as she picks a bit of grass from her hair, plays with it. She continues to exercise, though now it is just her feet striking odd angles. A group of GIs walks past. They boast noisily, saying it loud enough so we can hear, how in Berlin they sold $4 Mickey Mouse watches to Red Army soldiers for $500 apiece.

Irwin tries again. ‘You don’t think that’s odd?’

‘I never did like Physics,’ Ingrid says, without looking up. She twiddles the blade of grass in her fingers.

‘But if it puts an end to the war?’ Irwin says. ‘To all war…?’

‘Isn’t that what they said about dynamite?’ I say.

Irwin won’t give in. ‘Maybe it’s a way of saving the rest of the world.’

‘Of controlling it, you mean.’

Hostile, cocky, he says, ‘It makes perfect sense.’

Ingrid sits up, leans forward as if pushed. ‘But it feels all wrong,’ she says. She pulls her skirt down over her knees, roughly brushes some bits of dead grass from her lap. And she asks us to imagine what would have happened and how we’d feel if the bomb were dropped here. ‘Would you like that?’ she says. ‘Think of the woods obliterated, all the trees, gone. Think of Paris smashed like a matchstick city, and everyone in it – including you, me, all of us – everything, turned to dust.’ Her voice drops. ‘Where’s the sense in that?’

Irwin seems stunned by the intensity of her attack. He loudly exhales, stabs out his cigarette against the bark of the tree.

Ingrid gives her skirt one last quick sweep, brushing away nothing.

I want abruptly to feel the touch of her hand in mine again. I peel off the handkerchief, which comes away stickily from my palm. I offer it up to her like a flag bloodied in a heroic struggle. ‘I’m sorry for ruining it,’ I say.

Had I been told some weeks earlier that I’d meet a woman who would not only make me feel unutterably happy, but also make me willing to leave the bars of the city to sit here in the woods, I would have scoffed at the idea, dismissed it as so much fantasy and nonsense. But here I am now, and here she is, and after recent events, I’m not sure anything would surprise me.

‘Let me look at that again,’ Ingrid says, rising from the grass, and needing something to do. She inspects my palm like a gypsy seeing in my future something wonderful but troubling. ‘You should wash it when we get back. You don’t want it to get infected.’

Recovering himself, Irwin says, ‘I can understand it might feel wrong, but why don’t you think it makes sense?’

Ingrid traces the line of the cut on my hand with her fingers and kisses it better. She looks up, blinking into the sunlight. ‘I’m thirsty,’ she says.

*   *   *

The newspapers are full of the Japanese surrender. V-J Day. People swarm in the streets with renewed fervour, waving flags and handkerchiefs, many clustered around boards where the front pages of the newspapers are displayed.

Ingrid is with me on the back of a jeep as I take photographs. We’re driven slowly as part of an improvised victory parade through the wildly celebrating crowds.

Even though I’m snapping away like crazy, I can’t help but feel at an angle to all the rejoicing. No matter how close I get or how partisan I am, things seen through the viewfinder seem to happen at one remove.

Ingrid has no such problem. She involves herself fully, sings heartily and brandishes a large flag borrowed from an obliging GI. It’s as if something is released within her, as if she feels newly at ease. The festive energy seems to infect her, making her heady and self-forgetful.

She has to shout so I can hear. ‘It’s just like the newsreels.’

It’s probably the first time she’s come across history as other than a series of props, with generals wearing medals and talking tough on screen. But here she is involved in the moment, actively engaged as a witness and participant, and not just re-enacting it afterwards.

I re-load the camera.

She continues to wave and blow kisses to the crowd. She can hardly contain her sense of fun. It spills from her irresistibly, all her usual poise and diffidence pouring into unrestrained joy.

As if impelled to do something reckless, she turns to me suddenly. ‘Watch this.’

‘What?’

‘I’m going to kiss one of the soldiers.’

‘What about your husband?’

‘Shouldn’t I put my country first?’

‘It’s not your country.’

‘Do you have to get so technical?’

‘You have anyone in mind?’

She points at a GI in the crowd – tall, blond, Viking-jawed – and slips me a mischievous grin.

‘Isn’t he a bit young?’

She shouts for the driver to stop. He slows down enough for her to clamber off. She threads her way to the soldier with an unswervable sense of purpose.

She looks back at me to make sure that I’m watching, perhaps because she’s acting and requires an audience to see her latest role, but the spontaneity of the act argues against that. She takes the GI by both shoulders and pushes her face up towards his as if emerging through water to meet her own reflection. I see it all through the lens of the Leica. She kisses him, tilting her head, giving herself without hesitation.

I stop taking photographs for a moment and just watch through the viewfinder. The sound of the cheering seems to diminish to a dull background echo, a remote seething noise like insects, and it’s as if I’m listening with several walls in between.

Ingrid kisses him on the mouth for several seconds. The soldier looks stunned. He probably can’t believe his luck. He returns her kiss and their lips seem welded together like bits of metal after a fire.

It is Ingrid who pulls away first.

The startled look on the soldier’s face is worth a picture. Is it who he thinks it is? Surely not. But for once I don’t take a photograph.

It’s only when she scrambles back onto the jeep that I feel my face unfreeze. The walls muffling the sound dissolve, the noise of the celebrations returns to my ears and I remember what I’m supposed to be doing. The world quickens into colour again, and I do my best to catch up.

What is she trying to prove? Is she trying to provoke me? Is she telling me she wants to be free? She’s obviously very pleased with herself and clearly moved by the occasion.

Ingrid waves back at her blond GI who is calling, beckoning her to come back for more. Around him, his friends whoop wildly and whistle, their fingers in their mouths. Ingrid wags her finger as if to say, ‘Enough’. But she’s smiling widely, and her eyes have a startled look as if she’s just been plugged into an electric socket.

Now it’s my turn, I decide.

‘Here, hold these,’ I say, unfastening my cameras and handing them to her.

She seems a little bemused, wondering what to do with them, and it takes her a second to untangle the straps. She places them awkwardly around her neck. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Don’t drop them,’ I tell her.

I leave her struggling with the cameras, and jump off the jeep while it’s still moving, jog forwards towards the crowd and make a beeline for a pretty brunette with large dark eyes in the second row.