Infrared

WEDNESDAY

Freddo e caldo

I’m out for a walk with friends in the Buttes Chaumont when suddenly I see, looming up in the middle of the park, a huge white hill made of some unidentifiable substance that looks like wax or chalk. Climbing to the top, I crumble a bit of the substance between my fingers and realise it’s artificial snow. A deep crevice appears at the heart of the mountain, I grab onto the walls but they’re smooth and slippery, I lose my footing and tumble into the crevice. It’s an endless fall, like Alice’s in the rabbit hole. Even as I fall, I start worrying about the fragile parts of my body — my sex in particular — that are liable to be damaged when I land. The moment of impact is absent. When I finally catch up with my friends in the Rue Botzaris tearoom, I tell them I left my body behind in the park — it must be badly hurt — will they please come and help me find it? But they just go on with their conversation, paying no attention to me. After a while they get up to leave. ‘B-but — what about my body?’ I stammer, icy with panic. ‘I can’t leave without my body!’

How strange, comments Subra when Rena wakes up. If there’s one part of a woman’s body that can’t be damaged when she falls, it’s her sex.

Some other kind of ‘fall’, then? And why would the snow be ‘artificial’?

The snow of my childhood…Phony snow…or perhaps…a phony childhood? My lie-riddled childhood come back to haunt my adult life? Sitting there in the middle of my neighbourhood in Paris, as conspicuous as a ‘mountain’?

I remember when Simon shoved Rowan’s face into the snow. It must have been a Sunday morning, we were out skating in Mount Royal Park — was Lisa with us? probably not — suddenly I turned around and saw my brother waving his legs in the air, gasping for air, and my father laughing as he held his head firmly in the snow with both hands…What had Rowan done? Talked back to him? Refused to obey an order? Broken a skateblade? I don’t recall. Simon punished both his children, but his son more often and more harshly than his daughter…Finally he released my brother and acted as if nothing had happened, wanting to pick up our shenanigans where we’d left off — but Rowan sulked for hours, incensed at having been humiliated in front of me.

So many snow games with Rowan and his pals when we were little. Snowball fights that went on for hours…I hated the bite of the cold, like an electric saw the length of my spine, when a boy would shove a snowball down my neck — but the boys themselves I loved. Four, five, six of them — and me, always the only girl. I loved the violent mixing of our bodies when the sled would hit a bump and we’d be ejected, rolling over and over in the snow, elbow on forehead, knee in gut, head slamming nose — it hurt like hell but it warmed me up and turned me on; I wished it would never end.

First a tomboy, then an androgyne, Subra says…Forever hanging out with boys, hankering after a man’s life and a man’s death…When did that end — when Fabrice died? Or when, scarcely a month later, little Toussaint was born?

Rena stays in bed for a while, eyes closed, breathing in the Florence air and slowly intoning the words Tuscany, Renaissance, beauty.

The laughter of a small child wafts up to her from the street below, bubbling and gurgling like a brook — oh, the word gurgle was invented for that laugh.

Tell me, Subra says.

Toussaint’s laughter at age two — his mad joy to be running down the footpath between Alioune and me, left hand in his father’s right, right hand in my left — Toussaint the dwarf thrilled to have the undivided attention of two giants, two gods — one, two, three-ee-ee! — his feet would leave the ground, he’d go soaring through the air, his laughter would ring out, we’d set him down—’Again!’ he’d say — one, two, three-ee-ee! — his feet would leave the ground, he’d go soaring through the air, his laughter would ring out, we’d set him down—‘Again!’ he’d say — and we’d do it again, five, ten, twenty times — that day, another day, then another — it was infinity, eternity, we wanted it never to end and so did he—‘Again!’—the joy of it—‘Again!’—his feet leaving the ground, Mommy to his right and Daddy to his left (yes, Daddy: given that Fabrice died before Toussaint was born, Alioune has always been his father)…And then it was over. One day we stopped playing that game with Toussaint and started playing it with Thierno…and then it was over for Thierno as well. Finis. Nevermore. And no one noticed the moment of the ending. Did Simon and Lisa ever play that game with me? With Rowan? If they did, I have no memory of it. Neither, most likely, do my sons. They’ll play it with their own children, who will forget it in turn. Invisible connections…

Snow, murmurs Subra.

In infrared photography snow is black, ice cubes are black, people’s glasses (even transparent ones) are black, everything cool is black, black, black…But the dark skin of my lovers is subtly shaded, rippling with a thousand nuances of light; sometimes you can even see the veins through it. Infrared reveals what I cherish more than anything else, what I’ve always longed for, what I lacked most as a child — warmth.

When I’d lose my temper, my mother would call me a ‘fury’ and send me to my room to calm down. She meant it teasingly, but deep down I liked being called that — I thought the word suited me to a T. In my mind it was connected to fire and I liked the image of myself as flaming and flamboyant…furious, fierce, ferocious — yes, a real Fury — me!

My first memory is of being cold. Can it really have been as cold as all that in our house in Westmount? Carpets in every room, stained-glass windows, wood panelling, book-lined walls…‘Shh, your father’s working, he’s trying to write his thesis.’ ‘Your mom’s with a client. Don’t you have any homework?’ ‘Shh, can’t you see I’m reading? I need to concentrate. Please go and play, darling.’ ‘Rowan, Rena, please don’t make noise when I’m with a client, all right? They’re such unhappy women, you wouldn’t believe what they’ve been through.’

Apart from defending prostitutes, Ms Lisa Heyward’s primary concern at the time was the pro-choice movement: her phone would ring off the wall every time a doctor got arrested for having terminated an unwanted pregnancy. Henry Morgantaler, for instance, who claimed to have carried out some five thousand abortions single-handedly. The man had a lot in common with France’s Simone Veil — born the same year, both were Jewish and had lost their parents in the Nazi death camps; both, moreover, were subjected to revolting slander as they fought for abortion rights (hadn’t Jews always ritually killed and eaten Catholic babies?). In 1973, a fifteen-year prison sentence was handed down for Morgantaler, but he was released after only a few weeks, thanks to the efforts of tireless professional feminists like Ms Lisa Heyward.

For me this meant spending long hours alone with Lucille as I waited for Rowan to come home from school. It was Lucille, in fact — a vivacious young black woman from Martinique — who unwittingly introduced me to eroticism. Waking up one day from my afternoon nap (I can’t have been more than three or four), I heard strange noises coming from the far end of the apartment. I tiptoed across the kitchen and saw that Lucille’s bedroom door was ajar and that she was in there with a man. They were naked, their chocolate-coloured skin was smooth and slick and their bodies formed a sort of ebony gondola that rocked swiftly back and forth in the moving waves of blankets and sheets. The man was cupping Lucille’s head in his hands, gently holding her neck and staring into her eyes and whispering to her in Creole, I could make out a word here and there but most of them were drowned out by sounds of pure music, pure desire, pure pleasure…

Maybe that’s where you acquired your taste for the French language? suggests Subra.

Could be. Definitely it was the first time I ever saw a man’s sex erect and in action, and I’ll never forget it. As her lover penetrated her simultaneously with his gaze, his voice and his impressive tool, Lucille’s eyes sparkled like diamonds, her mouth was half-open in a smile and she kept gasping and letting out these little yelps — no, more like bits of song but always on the same note, staccato — everything about the couple palpitated and vibrated and spoke to me of ecstasy. Yes, that must be when I first realised how much you could ask of life, if only you dared…

Meanwhile there were endless hours of solitude and boredom to be got through. When Rowan finally came home from school, he taught me everything he’d learned there. Day after day — reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography. My brother gradually becoming more than a brother to me — father, mother, god, sole horizon. ‘I’m the sun, Rena, and you’re the moon.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You have no light of your own; all you do is reflect my light.’ ‘Yes. We’ll stick together forever, won’t we, Rowan?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘We’ll live together when we grow up.’ ‘Come give me a hug.’ Five and nine, at the time. My plump soft body pressed up against his wiry, knotty one. ‘I’m a nice girl, aren’t I?’ ‘Sure you’re a nice girl.’ ‘You love me, don’t you?’ ‘Sure I love you.’ ‘I love you more than anything in the world.’ ‘Damn right you do.’ My heart skipping a beat at the swearword. ‘But I’m older than you are, so you have to obey me.’ ‘I know.’ ‘I’m the master and you’re the slave, okay?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Promise?’ ‘I promise.’

Rowan was warm. And because he was warm, because he was like the sun to me, because I worshipped him, overjoyed by his trust in me and awed by his inside knowledge of the adult world, everything he said and wanted was right. So when he said, ‘You know, Rena, it’s not enough to be nice, you’ve got to learn to be bad, too,’ I nodded and promised to do my best. And when he slipped his middle fingers inside of me, one from the front and the other from the back, and tried to force them to touch, I winced and squirmed but when he said, ‘That doesn’t hurt, does it?’ I said, ‘No.’ And when he used his penknife to remove all the twigs and leaves from a thin supple willow branch, then impaled me on it, causing me to bleed, and said, ‘Don’t worry, Rena, it’s only natural, women bleed all the time, you should be grateful to me for making a woman of you,’ I said, panting against the pain, ‘Thank you, Rowan.’ Crying or complaining were out of the question — I had no one to turn to. You weren’t around then, Subra; I hadn’t invented you yet.

Rowan wept sometimes — when our father, because of the tensions in his marriage or the long hours of fruitless work in his study, would suddenly turn on him, make fun of him, needle and berate him on the pretext of hardening him up, thickening his skin. ‘A boy’s got to know how to defend himself, hey?’ he’d say, flicking the tea towel at Rowan’s arm over and over again. Yes, Rowan would weep then, collapsing on the floor in tears. His bedroom was just below my own, and I knew I’d hear him sobbing long into the night…

Basta. Enough — more than enough melancholy for one day.

Rena gets up. Within ten minutes she is washed, dressed, out of there.

Mirandola

Simon and Ingrid are waiting for her in the breakfast room — she, quietly stuffing herself, he, poring over a leaflet about Pico della Mirandola.

‘This guy was unbelievable,’ he says to her by way of a greeting.

Studying the leaflet as she drinks her coffee, Rena nods. Of course. The philosophical genius who died an untimely death in Florence in 1494 (he was only thirty-one) reminds Simon of himself as a youth.

No doubt about it, Dad. You and Pico were looking for the same thing—’the connections among all the universes, from the lives of ants to the music of the spheres and the dwelling-place of angels.’ Though Pico took the high road of religion and philosophy, and you, the low road of brain chemistry and neurology, what both of you hoped to prove was The Dignity of Man. ‘The only being,’ as Pico expressed it, ‘in whom the Creator planted the seeds of every sort of life. The only one who has the privilege of shaping himself into angel or beast according to his fancy.’ What a thrilling Mirandolian idea!

Simon Greenblatt had exactly the same intuition: that people shaped themselves, fashioned selves for themselves out of the tales they were told, and were freer than they really knew to change their identities. Now, at the breakfast table in Florence, surrounded by the clatter of dishes and the hiss of milk being frothed for cappuccino, he longs to share with his daughter what he’s just learned about the great philosopher.

His sentence begins, hesitates at length, turns a corner, goes skidding off track—’Sorry’—begins again. Advances with excruciating slowness. Comes to a halt. Starts over again, after a long pause.

Oh, Daddy, Rena thinks in desperation, you’ve lost the thread. Your brain spins dozens of threads that lead you astray, wind themselves round you, trip you up, tie you in knots, immobilise you. Poor Gulliver-on-the-Arno, how will you ever get out of this mess?

Yet your brain throbs with true wisdom and teems with countless facts. No soul could be more generous than yours, no interrogation more genuine, no quest more ardent…it never manages to jell, that’s all. What’s lacking is…lightness…alacrity…humour…the joy of choosing words, watching them file out on stage, line up, grab hands…and then, to the rhythm of pipes and tambourines, launch into a fabulous farandole!

No. I know.

What’s lacking is…self-love. Something Pico probably found at his mother’s breast…and that you didn’t find at yours?

Granny Rena was a case. You named your eldest daughter after the woman you so desperately wished you could love, so she’d forgive you…for what crime, exactly?

Tell me, Subra says.

My paternal grandparents made a narrow escape from Poland in the early thirties, settling first in France, then in Quebec…But in 1945, upon seeing the photos of the death camps in which every member of her family had perished, from her two grandmothers down to her little second cousin, Rena sank into a permanent stupor. She was thirty-five at the time, and Simon ten.

Whose photos of Dachau and Buchenwald did she see? Very possibly the ones published in Vogue and Life by that lovely blonde American photographer named Lee Miller. At the age of seven, Lee Miller was so lovely and so blonde that a ‘friend of the family’ raped her and she contracted gonorrhoea. Over a period of several months, her tiny vagina and uterus had to be subjected to acid baths — an excruciating treatment that made her scream, day after day. Despite the pain inside, her body stayed perfectly lovely and blonde on the outside, so when she was eight her father started photographing her in the nude. As she grew towards adolescence he asked her to strike more and more lascivious poses. Then she left for Paris and was photographed in the same poses, also in the nude, by Man Ray and other Montparnasse artists. Despite her loveliness and her blondeness, Miller thought she might be interested in looking rather than being looked at — so she became a photographer herself. One day, thanks to an accident in her dark room, she discovered solarisation — a technique that consists of very briefly exposing the photograph to light during development — just as she herself had been exposed to male desire during her own development. Solarisation creates weird effects — in photos, halos, and, in little girls, the ability to split off from their bodies and the imperious need to search for meaning…Only in war would Lee Miller find the meaning she was looking for — first the destruction, bombing and ruins of cities in Britain and France, then the death camps, which, in April 1945, she was among the very first journalists to visit. Yes, she must have recognised something in the insane pornography of what she saw in the camps — chaotically exposed nudity, violent effacement of individuality, naked, fragmented, broken Jewish bodies, people turned into objects, non-entities. Unlike the other photographers, Miller approached the corpses without revulsion and photographed them close-up. Instead of framing anonymous heaps, piles, mountains of corpses, she insisted on capturing them as people — one person, another, yet another, each with his and her own history, showing their beauty, their personality, their still-human features, their naked bodies, their living dying bodies, every body a potential body, still human, still so very, very human — just as women exhibited in the nude, treated as if they were interchangeable objects, are in fact human individuals. In Buchenwald, Miller finally managed to inject meaning into an existence she had hitherto found, as she puts it, ‘extraordinarily empty’…

Once she’d seen those photos and learned what they implied, Granny Rena lost her ability to participate in life. Rena Greenblatt: prostrate, inaccessible. She never talked about her mourning, but it made her indifferent to everything else. Her pain was intimidating. Most days, her room was darkened and off-limits to her two children, Simon and his older sister Deborah. She withdrew her love from them, and her being from the world.

Baruch, on the other hand, poor sweet clumsy Baruch who sold men’s suits over on Saint Lawrence Boulevard, was a good dad — present, loving, funny, even erudite in his own way. Though his head was most often up in the clouds with God, his heart was filled with concern for his family. Morning and evening he would tie an apron around his waist and start fussing in the kitchen, trying to cook for you and failing, burning even the fried eggs, forgetting to turn off the gas, tearing the bread when he tried to butter it because the butter was rock hard, straight from the fridge. Oh, your poor pa…Old before his time, forever smiling, overworked, humble and humiliated…You felt sorry for him, Simon. Throughout your teenage years, you were filled with silent rage at your mother for not being like other mothers, and for turning your father into a nebbish. No way you could invite friends over to the house: with the invalid woman and the aproned man, your house was far too strange…

A little like yours? Subra whispers.

Yeah, come to think of it, a little like mine…

When you left home at last, at age eighteen, you must have solemnly sworn never to resemble your father, a weakling you loved but pitied. A meek, submissive, altruistic, unmanly man who’d given up all hope of having a great destiny here on Earth. You, Simon, would be a real man…

Sliding the Mirandola leaflet back across the table, Rena gently pats her father’s hand.

They’ve made big plans for the day ahead: first the History of Science Museum, and then, following their afternoon siesta, the Ponte Vecchio and the Piazza della Signoria…

Haughtily ignoring the hundreds of tourists lined up at the entrance to the Uffizi, they skirt the Palazzo Vecchio and head down to the Piazza dei Giudici, the Judges’ Square.

‘This is where Savonarola was condemned to death,’ Simon solemnly announces.

‘Who’s that?’ Ingrid asks.

‘A fanatical priest. In the fifteenth century, right on this spot, he built bonfires of the vanities, burned the works of Pico della Mirandola, and was eventually hanged himself, then burned at the stake. Incredible, to think all this happened five hundred years ago, before the first white man ever set foot in Quebec. Before that part of the world was known as Quebec, in fact,’ he adds, savvier than the American lady in Dante’s house.

‘Right,’ Rena nods. ‘The Indians didn’t do bonfires of the vanities, they just did campfires.’

‘And they couldn’t burn books,’ Ingrid puts in, ‘because they were illiterate. Hitler burned books, though…’

Rena hastens to change the subject. She has nothing against Hitler, so to speak, but feels he shouldn’t be allowed to invade the whole world.

Scienza

It’s for Simon’s sake, of course, that they’ve chosen to visit the History of Science Museum.

Once they’ve whisked through the first room, however (wonders of ancient clockwork, tiny crenellated cogs from the workshops of Florence, Geneva and Vienna), Simon decides to peruse the museum pamphlet for a while. No benches — so, oblivious to stares, he sits down on the floor like a tramp, baseball cap on lap, wispy grey hair standing on end.

Ingrid and Rena move on alone — too scared of him to urge him off the floor, too scared of the museum guards to join him there. Astronomy, meteorology, mathematics…but how to discuss these things without Simon? Where to go? What to do? Everything they visit now without him will need to be revisited later with him; the present moment thus becomes absurd.

After a good half hour, they go back to the first room and timorously ask (last thing they’d want to do is offend him, harass him, give him the impression they’re bossing him around), ‘Don’t you want to come and see?’

Rising at last to join them, he strides through one room after another — prisms, magnetism, optical machinery, transmission of energy…

Hey, what’s the hurry, Dad?

You the precocious child, forever top of the class, admitted to university at age sixteen…You the brilliant, curious, gifted young thinker, light of foot and heart. You the insomniac, mad with joy, utterly possessed by your vocation: to fathom and describe the origins of consciousness, the fabulous machinery of the human brain. You who, later on, would initiate me into these rites — thrilled to see my eyes widening in amazement, the light getting passed on. And it did get passed on. Look, Daddy — I inherited all these discoveries! To measure the temperature of the invisible in 1800, Herschel needed both Galileo’s thermometer and Newton’s prism; these allowed him to demonstrate the prodigious fact that the sun emitted infrared rays. I’ve been working on that side of the spectrum for twenty years — the spectral side, yes — the ghostlike, dreamlike universe wherein light waves, so short as to be invisible to the naked eye, start turning into heat. I use my camera to slip beneath people’s skin and show their veins, the warmth of their blood, the life that pulses within them. I reveal their invisible auras, the traces left by the past on their faces, hands and bodies. In rural and urban landscapes, I explore the ethereal detail of shadows, turning foreground into background and the other way around. I set the motionless into motion as no film could ever do, and show how the different periods of our lives echo one another. Connecting past to present, here to there, young to old, dead to living, I capture the fundamental instability of our lives. I try, in every reportage, to make the acquaintance of one person and to do all I can to understand what has shaped them. Leading them away from their official identities, I accompany them home, question them and listen to their answers, play with them and their convictions, watch them change masks, study them in the flow of their existence, love them as they love themselves, leave them freer than I found them…I use infrared to disturb the hic et nunc that is the very essence of photography.

Oh, Dad, why are you walking so fast?

‘I’m mainly interested in Rooms Six and Seven,’ says Simon. ‘The ones devoted to Galileo.’

Bambini

To get to Rooms Six and Seven, though, they must first pass through Room Five — the History of Obstetrics.

Plaster moulds hanging on walls: dozens of life-sized uteruses painted in realistic colours. Nestled amidst the viscera, against the backbones or beneath the ileums: babies babies babies, single or twins, on the verge or in the process of being born, head first, rump first, foot first, arm first, sometimes with the help of forceps.

As they pass through this room, visitors tend to hasten their step.

These gaping wounds are a shock to them. A far cry indeed from the immaculate blue-and-white Virgins of the Nativities. Here, bodies teem, glisten and ooze. Flesh is garish, slippery, awful. Piles of intestines. The parturients’ legs are chopped off at the thighs, bloody steaks.

Simon, too, hastens his step.

Obscene obstetrical obstacles…It was all those naissances, wasn’t it, that prevented your own Renaissance? A giant lets out a roar. A jet of sperm shoots from his stiff cock. Year after year, each jet an embryo-clot — cells which, dividing, multiply. The babies grow, come into the world, grow, drink, grow, eat, grow. Horrified, the giant takes to his heels, pursued by his offspring. He trips and falls headlong. His children devour him.

Galileo had only three children, all with the same non-wife, Marina Gamba. The girls were placed in convents; the boy lived with his mother in Padova. No family life of any sort. It was the tradition for erudites to remain unmarried.

Right, Subra nods. Two wives, six kids — far too many, for a man who hopes to think.

Galileo

Room Six proudly exhibits a framed copy, in both Latin and Italian, of the great scientist’s retractatio.

At Ingrid’s request, Rena translates: ‘I have been judged and vehemently suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the centre of the same…I hereby abjure with sincere heart and unfeigned faith. I curse and detest the said errors and heresies.’

As she reads, Simon moves on a bit. Suddenly he comes to a halt in front of a glass display case and shouts with laughter, causing dozens of touristic heads to turn.

‘What is it?’ asks Ingrid in a worried voice.

‘Look — oh, no, just look at this!’

Obedient as usual, the two women approach the display case. Ingrid gets there first, and Rena sees her features contract in disgust.

‘A finger?’ she says.

‘And not just any finger,’ Simon chuckles.

He goes on chuckling until they get the joke. There, decked out in a lace ribbon and preserved these four centuries under a bell jar, stand the remains of the great man’s middle finger. The nail has blackened and the bones are starting to crumble, but the relic proudly declares to the Catholic powers-that-be: Eppur si muove!

Oh, Galileo Galilei! If only you and my father could have met, you would have become the best of pals! You’d have spent long hours together, discussing the law of floating bodies. ‘Ice: lighter or heavier than water?’ ‘Heavier,’ said scientists of old. ‘Why does it float, then?’ ‘Because of its shape. Large pieces of ice with flat bottoms float, just like boats. Read Aristotle.’ ‘You’re wrong,’ said brave Galileo. ‘Even if you shove a piece of ice to the bottom and hold it there, it will rise to the surface the minute you let go of it. Lighter than water, then, appearances notwithstanding.’

Yes, Galileo and Greenblatt — thick as thieves, for sure! Alike, as well, in their scorn for all those who prize jaspers and diamonds over fruit and flowers. ‘Some men really deserve,’ said Galileo, ‘to encounter a Medusa’s head which would transmute them into statues of jasper or of diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are.’

Dreadful obstacles were placed in the Italian astronomer’s path. Real persecution, real impediments. Harassment, condemnation, destruction of career. At seventy-five — five years older than you are now — he was placed under house arrest, and would remain a prisoner of the Inquisition until his death. All this afflicted him at first, yet he recovered and went back to work. Kept at it. So they wouldn’t let him speculate about the cosmos anymore? All right, then he’d cast a bell for Siena’s cathedral…take up his old treatise on movement… write a few more Mathematical Demonstrations and Discourses…In other words, despite all the obstacles, he went on discovering things all his life…because he wanted to. Because he could, and would, and had to. Because it gave him joy.

Oh! Had my father only met him! But no…So he spent long years bravely struggling with his colleagues’ pragmatism and his employers’ indifference, to say nothing of his own doubts. In Montreal circa 1965, where were the Galileos who could have joined him in exploring the farthest reaches of sky and soul?

No one persecuted him. But he used up his time, squandered his energy, and watched his dreams go floating off into the distance. Boats of ice…

Why did Simon Greenblatt never deserve any joy? Why did he let his vocation get bogged down in absurd marital quarrels?

You, of course, Subra teases, would never dream of quarrelling with your husbands.

Two subjects and only two spark quarrels between Aziz and me: mothers and God.

Aren’t you ashamed of squabbling over such trifles? smiles her Friend.

I am, but there’s nothing for it. On the subject of mothers — when I dare tell him I feel asphyxiated by Aicha’s hospitality, her endless meals of couscous and sweet pastries, her pathological demand for gratitude, he gets all worked up and yells, ‘Basically you think mothers should be unavailable, don’t you? The way your mother was with you? Or the way you are with your own kids? Come right down to it, you have no idea what motherhood is all about!’ At that point I start beating him up. I enjoy a good tussle now and then — it reminds me of wrestling-matches with Rowan when we were kids, or football games with his friends in Westmount. I adored pile-ups — a dozen male bodies thudding on top of mine as I clutched the precious ball to my stomach — sure, I got hurt, even badly sometimes, but I never cried. Aziz is stronger than I am, and when he gets tired of fending off my punches he grabs me by the wrists and starts twisting my arms; almost invariably we wind up making peace in bed…

On the subject of God, Aziz simply refuses to believe I don’t believe in him, though I’ve explained countless times that in my father’s brain there was a place for God but it was empty, whereas in my own brain the place doesn’t exist so neither does the emptiness. Those quarrels don’t lead to punching or shouting; the air between us simply roils with silence, suspicion and dark misery. Here again, though, the bad feeling usually dissipates when we start tearing off our clothes, panting, soldering our bodies together in the kitchen doorway, in the shower, on the living-room rug, on or under the dining-room table…

Our worst quarrels occur when the two themes converge, for instance when Aziz comes home from a visit to his mother in the projects and I can tell Aicha has been getting on his case again about his girlfriend’s age and atheism: ‘So you’ll never give me a grandson? You’ll never have a Muslim son, Aziz? You’ll never be a real man?’ Those nights, as during the first weeks of our love, my sweetheart’s cock stays soft and small…

Still standing next to Simon, Rena stares at Galileo’s middle finger.

‘Did the Catholic Church ever apologise for its error?’ she asks. ‘Once they were forced to acknowledge that the Earth revolved around the Sun, I mean?’

‘Yes,’ Simon replies. ‘John Paul II finally admitted Galileo was right, three and a half centuries after the great scientist’s death.’

‘Did he add that, by the same token, Urban VIII was wrong?’

‘Oh, I doubt he went that far. Don’t forget, the pope’s infallibility didn’t become dogma until the nineteenth century.’

‘I see. And it’s not retroactive?’

‘No. So Urban VIII had the right to make a mistake.’

‘Well, the museum could at least mention the fact that Galileo’s story didn’t end with his retraction.’

Simon checks to make sure Ingrid is out of earshot. ‘Yeah, you see?’ he says. ‘Only his finger protests.’

And Rena laughs. Even if he’s belabouring the point a bit, she laughs. Even if she suspects that, deep down, he’s comparing Galileo’s persecution to Timothy Leary’s, she laughs.

As they sit waiting for lunch in a nearby pizzeria, Rena leafs through the book Simon purchased at the museum gift shop.

Galileo’s Daughter. Well, well.

It would seem Virginia and her father shared a deep spiritual communion…just like you and me, hey, Dad? Except that I betrayed you. Virginia entered the convent at age fourteen and took her vows two years later under the name of Suor Maria Celeste; she fervently loved her daddy all her life long — supporting him, doing all she could to protect him from the Inquisition, writing him hundreds of letters, sewing clothes for him, turning his fruit into jams and jellies, running the convent apothecary, concocting remedies, and…dying at age thirty-four, long before he did. Sorry about that, Dad.

Feltro

Their next destination is the siesta — but naturally it would be unthinkable for them to head straight for the Hotel Guelfa and make it there without detours, hesitations, twists, turns or distractions. As they pass a hat stall in the marketplace near San Lorenzo, Simon (who needs to protect his vulnerable pate) decides this is as good a time as any to replace the absurd blue baseball cap he’s been wearing since they left Montreal.

He comes to a halt. Rena sighs inwardly.

It’s just the opposite of love, she realises in amazement. When you’re in love, time expands and boredom is unthinkable; every second is as round, full and juicy as a ripe grape. Your lover needs a pack of Pall Malls? Ah! A thrilling adventure, to spend twenty minutes waiting in line with him in a stinking tobacco shop while fifteen depressing individuals in slow succession scratch their heads over which Lotto ticket to buy. Everything is exciting, simply because the two of you are sharing it. Your love infuses every particle of the universe, even the most trivial and unsightly, with meaning — no, with music…

Simon removes his cap and tries on several hats in front of a cheap hand mirror dangling from a nail. Meanwhile, Ingrid strikes up a conversation with the stallholder. Three minutes later, he opens his wallet to show her a snapshot of his daughter in Sri Lanka.

‘Oh, isn’t she cute?’ Ingrid coos.

‘Thank you, madam. Soon I have another child.’

‘Really? That’s wonderful!’

‘God willing, I go to visit them next summer…’

This is October. Rena studies the young hat seller, searching his features for signs of anxiety over his future — money problems, the children not recognising him when he comes home on his annual visit…Objectively, his life seems grim indeed, and yet his face shines with hope.

After trying on some two dozen hats, Simon finally selects a brown fedora almost identical to Rena’s.

Ingrid frowns. ‘That’s not your style,’ she says dubiously.

‘It can become my style,’ Simon retorts. And he begins to haggle over the price. But even haggling is something Simon can’t do the way other people do.

The young salesman, who had instantly knocked the price down from twenty-five to twenty euros because his merchandise was overpriced to begin with, wants to knock it down some more. ‘I’ll let you have it for eighteen,’ he says, touched by their admiration of his daughter.

‘No,’ says Simon, digging coins out of his change-purse and laboriously counting them out. ‘You said twenty, I’ll pay you twenty.’

‘No, really, I insist,’ says the young man. ‘Fifteen, come now, fifteen. You’ve been so kind.’

‘Twenty-three,’ Simon says.

This goes on for another five minutes. When at last they move away from the stall, Simon has paid twenty-five euros for his hat and everyone is beaming.

Vietato

A moment of peace.

Rena showers, puts on fresh clothes and smokes a cigarette, sitting next to the window in her room’s only armchair. Down below, the garden is no longer empty: a bare-chested young man stands next to the white plastic picnic table, shouting into a mobile phone.

He looks about twenty — Thierno’s age. His authoritarian tone contrasts comically with his fragile body — narrow shoulders, almost hairless chest and tummy. Physically, he reminds her of Khim — the slender, gracious Cambodian she married to do him a favour, shortly after Fabrice’s death…

Tell me, murmurs Subra.

Khim was forty at the time but looked twenty. He was a gastro-enterologist and had received his medical degree in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge came to power. After the five years of the genocide, during which he’d been ‘re-educated’ in the rice fields, he’d managed to leave Cambodia following the Vietnamese invasion, thanks to a patient of his who was in the Viet Cong. Once in Paris, Khim discovered that, unless he acquired French nationality, he’d have to start his education all over again, so he set about looking for a French wife. I’d been naturalised thanks to my marriage with Fabrice — who, though Haitian-born, had himself acquired French nationality thanks to his first marriage with a woman from Madagascar, who in turn had been previously married to a Basque. That sort of daisy-chain of mutual assistance was easier to bring off in the eighties than it is nowadays…

Subra snickers obligingly.

Anyway, I was happy to be able to help Khim — a lovely, feminine, traumatised, delicate man, Buddhist into the bargain — by wedding him. Our marriage was as light and ephemeral as a butterfly. We lived together for a year, not making love (he was gay) but taking acute pleasure in each other’s company. By the time we divorced by mutual consent, I’d taken a thousand photos of him and he’d told me a thousand stories…

Returning to Inferno, Rena stumbles on a passage that makes her sit up straight:

Per l’argine sinistro volta dienno; ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta coi denti, verso lor duca, per cenno; ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

Incredulous, she checks the English translation. Yes, that’s really what it says.

Along the left-hand dike they wheeled about; But first had each one thrust his tongue between His teeth towards their leader for a signal; And he had made a trumpet of his rump.

She laughs out loud at the seven-hundred-year-old fart. At that very second there’s a knock on her door and she jumps out of her skin — as if she herself had been caught farting.

Revived by their nap, Simon and Ingrid have come to see her room. Not much to see, but…Simon finds it a pity that she doesn’t have a balcony. He goes back out into the hallway, sees a door with the universal no-entry symbol on it — a red circle with a white horizontal line — and opens it at once. Rena represses a flare of anger.

He can’t help it, Subra reminds her. That’s just the way he is.

I know, sighs Rena. As an adolescent, following Leonard Cohen’s example, Simon rebelled against his father Baruch, the sweetest pious Jew who ever lived, and all the restrictions of their milieu. ‘Jews are born bargainers, my little Rena,’ he told me one day. ‘More than anything else, they love to bargain with God. “Listen, YHWH, you don’t want us to do this, but you don’t mind if we do a little of that, do you? Will you spare the city of Sodom if we can find fifty good people there? How about if we can only find thirty? How about ten? Hmm, let’s see…If there’s only one good person, will you spare the city then?”…Or else: “All right, you don’t want us to use electricity on the Sabbath, but you know how it is in modern-day cities, it’s no fun walking up eleven flights of stairs, so listen, YHWH, let’s make a deal. Next to the Goy elevator we’ll build a Jewish elevator — it’ll stop automatically on every floor without our having to press a single button — that all right with you? You won’t notice a thing, will you?”… Or again: “You told us not to move stuff from one house to another on the Sabbath, but the fact is that in this Goys’ world Saturday’s the most convenient day for moving. So we’ll just put an Eruv around the neighbourhood — very discreetly running an almost invisible plastic or metal wire through the trees and bushes — that way the whole neighbourhood can be thought of as a single ‘house’ and we can move as much stuff as we like from one ‘room’ to another — all right, will you go along with that? You won’t notice a thing, will you?” People set limits where they need them, my little Rena. As for my own limits, God and I came to an understanding long ago: I tell him I don’t believe in Him, and He says that’s fine with Him. That way I can study brain synapses without having to worry about blasphemy.’

Simon thus allowed himself to be carried away by the radical ideas he gleaned from Leary’s books (Start Your Own Religion, The Politics of Ecstasy, Your Brain is God, and so forth), and was hypnotised by his endlessly repeated order to ‘Question authority’. As a result, the minute someone forbids him to do something, he feels compelled to do it — apparently not noticing that this implies unquestioning submission to the authority of Timothy Leary.

The forbidden door opens onto a fire escape, and Simon promptly sits down on it. ‘Isn’t this terrific?’ he says proudly. ‘It’s almost as good as a balcony.’

The young man in the garden looks up and glowers at them. ‘Proprietà privata,’ he says in his booming voice.

‘Scusi, signor,’ says Rena.

She drags her father back inside — gently but firmly, as if he were one of her sons — and shuts the door.

What Simon neglected to explain to me that day, she goes on, mentally addressing Subra, was that there were in fact two ways of being Jewish in Montreal—on the mountain and behind the mountain (to say nothing of the many nuances in between). Our own family was emphatically on the mountain — the affluent, secular neighbourhood of Westmount, inhabited mostly by male Jewish professionals who had married Goys and chosen, among their people’s motley and contradictory traditions, to perpetuate only scintillating intelligence and self-irony. Outremont, behind the mountain, was another kettle of fish, and the Saturday morning I first went there with my mother was a real shock to me. I must have been twelve or thirteen, and when I saw the frowning, hard-featured, bearded men striding down the street dressed in black coats and tall, stiff, often sable-trimmed black hats, long ringlets dangling from their temples…and the bewigged women with no make-up, thick black stockings, shapeless skirts hanging to mid-calf, my eyes popped out of my head.

‘Who are they?’ I asked my mother. ‘They’re Hasidim,’ Lisa answered absent-mindedly, which didn’t enlighten me much. ‘Hasidim means the very-pious,’ she added. ‘They’re Lubavitches. Orthodox Jews.’ Now she’d lost me completely. ‘Jews? You mean like Daddy?’ ‘Yes, but not like him. Daddy’s a Jew too, but not an Orthodox Jew.’ ‘What kind of a Jew is he, then?’ ‘Well, you see, large groups of people tend to split up into smaller groups, each with its own customs, its own ways of eating and dressing and celebrating feast days…’ ‘So what are our customs?’ ‘Oh…nothing special.’ ‘Why do those men look so angry?’ ‘They’re not angry — they’re just not supposed to look at us, that’s all.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because we’re women.’ ‘So what?’ ‘So nothing. So they want to concentrate.’ ‘On what?’ ‘How should I know? On what they consider important. The Torah, for example. Especially today, because Saturday’s the sacred day they call the Sabbath.’ ‘What about us? Have we got a Sabbath?’ ‘No. Yes. Well, not exactly. We rest up a bit on Sunday, which is the Christian Sabbath, but only if we feel like it. Sometimes we work Sundays, too, whereas Orthodox Jews never work Saturdays; they have to obey a whole slew of rules from sunup to sundown. I thought Simon explained it to you.’ ‘Yeah, he did, a bit, but…but I didn’t know what they looked like.’

Impressed by the sullen, scowling faces of the Lubavitches, I conceived the plan of forcing one of them to desire me.

Forbidden? Let’s do it, Subra chuckles. Red light? Go for it. Barrier? Plough right through.

I’m not blind, Rena nods. I can see I’m caught in the same double bind as Simon. Not easy to challenge the authority of someone who has ordered you to challenge authority. The more I rebel against my father, the more I resemble him.

Since my parents paid scant attention to my comings and goings, it was no problem for me to jump on my bike the following Saturday and pedal all the way to Outremont. I hid behind a tree on Durocher Street to wait for the ideal victim. The Hasidim men strode past me in their great black fluttering coats, looking for all the world like sinister crows. Finally I saw a young man approaching — mid-twenties or so, tall, thin, angular and nervous-looking, wearing a hat that was too big for him. I made up my mind on the spot: he’d be the one. Carefully concealed behind my tree, I let him go by, then leapt on my bike and zoomed past him, hitting him just hard enough to knock off his hat. As the man was picking up his rolling hat and clamping it back on his head, I braked and turned at the same time, let out a yell and tumbled painlessly to the ground. There I was at the poor man’s feet, spread-eagled on the footpath with my skirt awry. ‘Ow, ow, I’m sorry, sir,’ I moaned. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but a bee stung me…and now I think I must have sprained my ankle. Oh, it hurts, it hurts…’

Torn between the instinct to help a fellow human being and the impulse to flee, the man froze. Taking advantage of his momentary paralysis, I caught his gaze and hung on to it. That was when I first learned the technique of breaking and entering a man’s soul through his eyes, swimming in deeper and deeper until I could tell he was mesmerised by my green gaze…Ah. Yes.

I was inside. I’d captured and captivated him. He was at my mercy.

The man knelt by my side, glancing nervously left and right to make sure no one was watching us. I noticed he was wearing a thin gold wedding band. In tears, I reached up and flung my pretty arms around his neck, so that he had no choice but to rise to his feet with me in his embrace, his body and ringlets fairly trembling with desire. ‘Thank you, sir,’ I whispered into his ear. ‘I’m so sorry…I just need to rest for a few minutes, I’m sure I’ll be all right…It’s probably not even a real sprain. I’m just a bit shaken up, that’s all…’

Clutching me to him, convulsively now, the way a thief clutches a just-stolen wallet or a tiger its prey, he carried me to his home in a blind trance of desire. I could tell that laws were toppling like dominos in his heart, and that he was firmly convinced he had some important things to reveal to me…but I decided to leave it at that. I’d achieved my goal and that was enough; I didn’t want to plunge the poor man into the throes of eternal guilt. And so, after a few delicate caresses, as light as they were intoxicating, after the delight of watching the young man’s lips part in a joyful smile, his eyes shine with gratitude, his hands run over my naked thighs, and his tongue play with my nipples — I tore myself out of his arms, thanked him profusely and saved us both.

I’m a sin for him, I said to myself as I moved away from his house, heart pounding.

It’s weird to be a sin for someone, comments Subra.

Yes. I was to discover this on countless occasions in my adult life, always with the same incredulity — whether in Gaza, Istanbul, the Vatican, Mount Athos, or at the entrance to an ordinary café in one of Paris’s impoverished suburbs. I, Rena Greenblatt, without moving or speaking or misbehaving or taking off my clothes or baring my bottom or sticking out my tongue or brandishing a gun or selling Kalashnikovs or heroin or child porn, just by standing here, calm, smiling, motionless, with my face visible and my genitals invisible — am a sin for the men who are looking at me right now.

It’s not their fault they get hard-ons, the poor guys. Since Cro-Magnon days, their pecker has been programmed to stiffen whenever they set eyes on a shtuppable lady; their gonads are plugged directly into their retinas. Actually, they’d just as soon dispense with this reflex because it’s painful to them. I’ll never forget the day Alioune taught me that, during a Fela Kuti concert in Dijon in 1993. As Fela’s sublime dancers filed out on stage (to avoid jealousy amongst them he’d married them all, so there were no fewer than twenty-seven gorgeous young Madame Kutis; later on, as punishment for the singer’s virulent political lyrics, the Nigerian government would arrange to have all his sweet wives raped and his elderly mother tossed out of a window, but on the night of the Dijon concert none of that had happened yet), Alioune leaned over to me and moaned softly into my ear, ‘It hurts,’—I’ve never forgotten it. Seen from the front, the dancers hardly seemed to be moving at all, their hips and shoulders barely undulating — but when they spun around you saw their bead-fringed rear ends jouncing wildly up and down in synch with the wild Afro beat. Of course men find this painful. They can control the world but they can’t control that crucial part of their anatomy. It has this maddening way of standing to attention when they don’t want it to and refusing to budge when they most desperately need it to perform. Whence their tendency to cling to things whose firmness is reliable — guns, medals, briefcases, honours, doctrines…They can’t stand the fact that females hold the remote control to their cocks. It scares them, their fear makes them angry, and the effects of that anger are apparent everywhere. Since they can’t control their own bodies, they control ours by declaring them taboo…

‘Shall we hit the old bridge?’ asks Ingrid. ‘An excellent idea,’ Simon says.

Ponte Vecchio

Unfortunately, dozens of tourists have had the same excellent idea at the same moment — to stand on the Ponte alla Carraia and take each other’s pictures with the Ponte Vecchio in the background, tinged blood-colour by the dying sun.

We no doubt look grotesque to the Florentines, thinks Rena. ‘What a cliché…’ Yet each of us integrates this cliché into a specific history. That young Asian man, for instance, clambering over the parapet of the Ponte alla Carraia to set his Nikon up on one of the pylons, then dangerously backing up to be in the frame and smiling as he takes his own picture with the famous bridge behind him — where’s he from? Who is he?

How sad, Subra nods, to have such a sophisticated camera and no one to smile at…

They walk back to the Lungo Corsini and begin to wend their way along the river. The temperature is delightfully mild, and an all-but-full moon is rising beyond the Ponte Vecchio. Impossible, however, to savour the instant: no boardwalk to stroll along, no bench to sit down on, no way to be together. Squashed between the flow of cars and the flow of pedestrians, they’re forced to advance in Indian file.

‘Hey!’ Simon suddenly exclaims. ‘Doesn’t that look like a satyr’s knees?’

Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…

Rena stops, turns, looks at what he’s pointing to — the wrought-iron balustrade is studded with a decorative motif. ‘I suppose so,’ she nods vaguely. ‘Very stylised, though.’ She sets off again.

‘And if those are his knees,’ her father insists, ‘what’s this, in your opinion?’

Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…

Stopping, turning, looking again, Rena sees a protuberance between the ‘knees’.

‘Dad!’ Ingrid protests.

What does he want them to say?

‘Wow.’

All right? That make you happy? You got one, too?

Rena turns away. Sets off again, jaws clenched. Stares up, beyond the sunset-gilded bridge, at the moon. Almost full, yes, almost pure.

They reach the Ponte Vecchio at last—’the only one of Florence’s bridges,’ the Guide bleu informs Rena, ‘to have escaped destruction by the Germans.’

Having no wish to get Ingrid started on the subject of the Second World War, Rena refrains from translating this passage for them.

‘Isn’t it magnificent, Dad?’ Ingrid exclaims.

‘The ancient neighbourhoods on either side of the river,’ the Guide bleu goes on, ‘were destroyed by landmines. Though reconstructed, they delude no one.’

Oh, yes, they do. They delude us just fine, thanks.

The elderly couple stands there, entranced.

Delusion is a many-splendoured thing…right, Dante?

Piazza della Signoria

Simon is impressed.

‘Incredible. To think Savonarola held sway on this very spot.’

‘Who?’ Ingrid asks.

‘You know, the fanatical monk we talked about this morning.’

‘Oh, yes, right…’

It’s nearly time for dinner. Why not have a real meal this time, in a real restaurant?

They find a place. White tablecloths, ancient wood panelling, grey-haired waiters.

‘Do you prefer red wine or white?’

‘I don’t drink anymore,’ Simon says.

‘Oh? You mean not at all?’

‘Not at all.’

Rather than leaving it at that, he launches into an explanation. Alcohol, Rena learns, is incompatible with the drugs he now takes to steady his heartbeat, soothe his soul, calm his nerves and keep despair at bay. With Ingrid’s assistance, he runs through the list of his current medications, counting them off on his fingers, explaining dosages and proportions, chemical interactions and adjustments, experimentations and side effects (drowsiness versus insomnia; stupor versus restlessness; blinding light versus darkness; vertigo, palpitations, panic attacks).

‘I see,’ Rena says. ‘Just water, then?’

‘Just water.’

She orders a bottle of Valpolicella for Ingrid and herself.

Can this really be the man who used to drop acid with me when I was seventeen or eighteen, ostensibly to cure me of my migraine headaches?

Tell me, Subra says.

‘You’ll see, it’s pretty amazing,’ he’d say, putting Bach’s Sonatas for Solo Violin on my record player, carefully extracting from his wallet the tiny squares of blotter paper he called Timothy Leary tickets and slipping them under our tongues, then calmly sitting down next to me on the couch to await the first effects. After about forty minutes, the patterns in my wallpaper would start to swirl gently in time to the music.

Now, three decades later, only a few scattered memories remain of our trips together. How excited we were, for instance, to discover — familiar, yet exponentially enhanced — the miraculous combination of tastes, colours and textures that went into the making of a ham sandwich. Ham…butter…bread…mustard…lettuce…Each ingredient a quintessence, an absolute. Explosion of saliva. ‘How is it possible,’ we’d say to each other, ‘that we usually gobble this down without noticing, after muttering, Hm, I’m feeling a bit hungry, why don’t I slap together a ham sandwich?’ Yes…’slap together’… Following which we’d spend another twenty minutes admiring — as if it were a precious gem — the various facets of the expression ‘to slap together’.

Once, I recall, as I stood at the window marvelling at the beauty of the sky, Simon came up to me and announced, ‘Blue does not exist.’ ‘What?’ ‘The colour blue. It doesn’t exist objectively in the universe. Only in the brains of certain mammals whose retina happens to capture a particular wavelength of light emitted by the sun.’ ‘Wow!’ I answered. ‘For something that doesn’t exist, the colour of that there sky sure is gorgeous.’

We laughed and laughed.

The expression I’m feeling blue was suddenly imbued with tragedy.

‘Maybe the same goes for God?’ I suggested a while later. ‘Huh?’ ‘Maybe God’s like blue — He exists only in the eye of the beholder.’ ‘Magnificent!’ Simon said, applauding in delight, and pleasure flooded through me.

Und so weiter. Every detail of the world, whether sensory or mental, would get blown up out of all proportion the minute we brought our attention to it, and we’d tumble into it head over heels, losing ourselves in its contemplation and exhausting ourselves in its commentary. When a silence came, each of us would wander through it separately, heading off on a solitary path through the forest of our own thoughts and memories, often winding up in dark thickets rife with danger. Sometimes my father would come upon me huddled in a corner of the room, convulsed with sobs and shaking in fear — in which case he’d take me by the hand, help me up, lead me over to some image, smell or sound into which I could plunge with delight. Other times, I’d come over and sit down next to him, lay his dark curly head gently on my thighs, dry his tears, stroke his forehead and sing him a lullaby to calm him down…

The bottle of Valpolicella is empty, and Ingrid has drunk only one glass.

Lurching over to the cash register to pay the bill, Rena realises her mind is a blur.

They emerge into the white floating ineffable beauty of the square by moonlight — ancient façades, Arnolfo Tower, giant statues of David, Perseus, Hercules. All is still. Perfection petrified as in a dream. They stand there staring at it in silence.

‘Takes your breath away,’ murmurs Simon.

Rena glances at him. Which of us is better able to receive this beauty, she wonders — Simon drugged, or me drunk? Which of us is happier, right now?

Davide

Ruthlessly, she whips out her Guide bleu. She can tell her stepmother resents it.

Why can’t Rena just experience the beauty? Subra says, mimicking Ingrid again. Why does she have to obfuscate it with facts and dates, darken it with ancient wars, smother it under dusty erudition?

But she does have to.

Come on, wake up, get a hold of yourself — do you realise we’re standing in front of Michelangelo’s David? Genius, great man, amazing feats of courage, are you listening? Remember David, thirty centuries ago — the little Jewboy who felled Goliath the giant with nothing but a slingshot? The young musician who appeased King Saul’s melancholy with nothing but a harp? The young warrior who defeated the Philistines and took over the city of Jerusalem with nothing but an army? O, intrepid hero! Artist and soldier, king and composer, peerless creator and destroyer! Admire him! And then… Buonarotti, at age thirty (he, too, a genius) received a block of marble another sculptor had damaged and turned it into a sheer masterpiece. The young, perfect, muscular naked body: symbol of the soul, in the loftiest neo-Platonic tradition. Stunned by the statue’s beauty, Florence’s greatest artists met to decide where it should be erected. It took four days, forty men and fourteen wooden cylinders to move the cage from the Duomo workshops to the Palazzo de la Signoria — and here it stands, before our very eyes, its perfection intact these four centuries! The acme, nay, the very epitome of the Renaissance! Twelve feet high, the kid with the slingshot! Admire him!

She doesn’t tell them this statue is in fact a copy. Who knows if they’ll have the time and energy to visit the original at the Accademia?

A young man goes by, selling postcards. One is a close-up of David’s genitals.

Ingrid giggles. ‘I promised to buy a postcard of this statue for our friend David in Montreal,’ she says. ‘But being a minister, he probably wouldn’t appreciate this one, tee, hee, hee! Right, Dad? Oh, no, I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t bring this card home to our David, aren’t you, Dad?’

Finding her own joke irresistible, she repeats it several times. Inwardly, Rena rolls her eyes heavenward.

Then she finds herself tormented by questions again. How do I know my approach to David is right and Ingrid’s wrong? Who has the ability to judge? Based on what criteria?

One thing’s for sure, Subra says. Ingrid’s having more fun in Florence than you are.

Il Duce

They drift back through the Centro Storico in silence. Approaching the Piazza della Repubblica, they hear festive noises — drum roll, circus music, salvos of laughter — what’s going on?

They decide to check it out.

It’s a clown. A clown who, though imitating Charlie Chaplin, is missing Chaplin’s humility, self-irony and truculence (missing Chaplin, in other words).

With imperious gestures—’You! Come here!’—the clown picks a young boy out of the crowd.

The boy shakes his head, trying to resist, but his mother gives him a little shove. ‘Go ahead, little one. Don’t be shy.’ Reluctantly, the child enters the arena.

The clown gives him orders, punctuated by deafening blows of his whistle. By obeying every time, the child makes a fool of himself.

‘Come here!’ the clown says, again and again, his tone of voice more furious by the minute. ‘Sit down! No, stand up! Turn around!’

The boy does his desperate best to comply.

‘Go away, I told you — are you deaf or what? Come back here!’

The child reels. ‘Fine, son,’ his mother beams. ‘You did just fine.’

The clown struts and swaggers. Ingrid joins the crowd in applauding him.

Rena is nauseous. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she says.

‘What’s wrong?’ asks Ingrid.

‘I never liked Mussolini.’

‘Come off it, Rena. This has nothing to do with fascism.’

‘It does so.’

‘It’s getting late, maybe we should be on our way?’ says Simon, who can’t bear any form of conflict between his daughter and his wife.

The true source of Rena’s nausea, though, is in her brain, her distant memories, much too close for comfort.

‘Do you remember Matthew Varick?’ she asks her father as they head for the Hotel Guelfa.

‘Sure,’ he replies. ‘What reminded you of him?’

‘No, nothing, he just flitted through my brain, I don’t know why.’

You do, though, Subra says. Tell me…

Dr Varick was a colleague of my father’s at the university. He had an autistic son named Matthew; the boy’s mother had either died or flown the coop, in any case she wasn’t in the picture. Dr Varick had been offered a sabbatical in Europe, and since hospitality was one of the values of Simon’s Jewish upbringing he cared about preserving, he suggested Matthew come and live with us for a few months, under his scientific observation and Lucille’s care.

How did the rest of the family feel about the idea? Well, Ms Lisa Heyward gave her consent, provided that it didn’t keep her from putting in her seventy-hour week at court; my brother was already off at boarding-school and didn’t care a whit; as for me…no one asked my opinion. And so it was that in September 1973, Matthew Varick moved in with us. I hated his guts from the minute I saw him. He was twelve, just a year younger than I was. He was a plump albino with ginger-coloured hair and eyelashes. Unnaturally pale beneath a thick sprinkle of freckles, his face and neck flamed crimson whenever he blushed, which was often. For no good reason I could see, he walked on tiptoe. Matthew was an unusually gifted autistic child, virtually an extraterrestrial — he had an IQ of 180, was obsessed with astronomy, and did mathematical calculations at lightning speed. He spoke incessantly in a high, thin voice, making the same exclamations over and over again, blinking his pale lashes, waving and flicking his fingers in the air — especially when he was scared, which was often. Over breakfast, the only meal the Greenblatt family took together, his excitement and volubility made conversation next to impossible, but Lisa’s mind was elsewhere and Simon found Matthew’s behaviour fascinating. I was the one who had to put up with him day after day, from after school till bedtime. Since his room was directly beneath mine, I’d hear him chattering to himself as I tried to concentrate on my homework and it would drive me up the wall.

One evening when everyone else was out, I strode into Matthew’s bedroom, grabbed him by the collar and dragged him up to my room. Fuming with rage, I brandished my skipping rope under his nose, pointed to a roll of Scotch tape on my desk, and said, ‘If you don’t shut up right this minute, I’ll bind you hand and foot and tape your mouth shut. Do you hear me?’ Matthew blushed and gulped and started shaking like a leaf.

Never had my words had such a powerful effect on another person. I found it thrilling. I wanted more. ‘S.T.A.R.,’ I went on. ‘Scotch Tape And Rope. That’s what’s in store for you if you don’t shut up. Now get out of here!’—and, so saying, I shoved him out into the hallway. He stood there gesticulating and blushing, so frightened he couldn’t budge. Then he peed his pants. The piss puddled around his feet on the hardwood floor and I told him to clean it up…But just as he was filling a basin with water at the kitchen sink, Lucille burst in and gave him the dressing-down of his life.

In the course of the ensuing months, I whispered the word S.T.A.R. to Matthew on an almost daily basis and it never failed to scare him out of his wits. I got a huge kick out of watching his cheeks go from white to red in the space of a…

Rena retches.

Remembering this story in detail between the Piazza della Repubblica and the Via Guelfa has brought her to the verge of vomiting.

Piccoli problemi

Alone at last in Room 25, she listens to the messages that have accumulated on her mobile since the day before — a good dozen of them, including two from Patrice Schroeder, her employer at On the Fringe, and three (the only ones she cares about) from Aziz.

‘Call me back.’ ‘Rena, please call me back.’ ‘Rena, what the hell is going on? Will you call me back, please? Make it snappy.’

She puts the call through, undressing as she does so. ‘My love.’

‘About time!’

There’s something odd about Aziz’s voice, a tone she’s never heard before. Inwardly, she steels herself to hear bad news.

‘Is anything wrong? You’re shaking, love.’

Often, as he approaches orgasm, Aziz’s whole body starts to shake. But she can tell that right now he’s trembling not with pleasure but with rage, reactivating the stammer that had plagued him throughout childhood.

‘All hell is b-b-b-breaking loose here, Rena. Have you been following what’s going on?’

‘No, I haven’t had a second to watch the news.’

Spluttering and stuttering, Aziz quotes to her the French government’s latest outrageous remarks about the projects north of Paris, a neighbourhood they both know well since Aziz was born there, his mother and sisters still live there, and Rena has done numerous reportages in the area. Rena listens closely, but finds it hard to connect his words with what she’s currently enduring in Florence.

‘Don’t they have TV in Italy?’ Aziz says at last. ‘Everybody’s talking about it.’

‘Of course they’ve got TV! But the Italians don’t care about France’s little problems.’

‘Little problems? You think this is a little problem?’

‘No, I think it’s a big problem, but that’s because I’m French. Maybe they’ll mention it on the news tomorrow morning — I’ll look out for it. Meanwhile, how’s my man doing?’

‘He’s eating his heart away.’

‘Hey, love, why is that?’ (She doesn’t tell Aziz you can’t eat your heart away, only out.)

‘’Cause his lady’s a thousand miles away and his heart is wasted.’

‘So why doesn’t he play his lady a song on the guitar?’

‘Oh, Rena, this week will last a year! I can’t help imagining things…’

‘Seriously…get your guitar and sing me a lullaby. I need it.’

‘Why? Are the old folks giving you a hard time of it?’ ‘Not exactly, but…Oh, please, Aziz…Sing to me.’ ‘All right, hold on…’

Before long she hears chords being strummed, before long she hears her beloved Aziz singing songs that revive and enhance the folktales his mother Aicha told him as a child, in Arabic, a language that to Rena’s ears is as sensuous as it is opaque, before long her cheeks are bathed in tears, before long she thanks Aziz in a low voice and before long she is sound asleep.