Infrared

THURSDAY

Pietà

Two young adults, a brother and a sister. They’re in some foreign country — Israel, perhaps — where the political tension is palpable and intimidating. Two circles have been drawn on the ground, one for believers, the other for non-believers. Saying he’s a believer, the boy walks over to stand inside that circle. The girl announces that she believes only in her love for her brother. To punish her, the authorities give her a gun and order her to kill him. As he slumps lifeless to the ground, her brother falls into the circle of non-believers.

No idea why my brain would suggest that version of my relationship with Rowan.

Still in bed, Rena grabs the remote control and surfs channels for a while — but there are only half a dozen of them, all in Italian, and she learns nothing of what’s been going on in the projects around Paris.

When she knocks at the door to Room 23, Ingrid, still in her nightgown, sticks out her head and whispers to her that Simon spent most of the night reading Galileo’s Daughter and didn’t get to sleep until about an hour ago. It would probably be best for Rena to do some visiting by herself, and for them to meet up at noon. Where? The Ponte Vecchio? Right.

Filled with evil delight at this new prospect of freedom, Rena runs all the way to the Piazza del Duomo, enters the Museum of the Works of Santa Maria dei Fiori, buys a ticket and draws up short, heart thumping, in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà.

A sign explains that this actually isn’t a Pietà but a Descent from the Cross, and that the old man standing behind Christ’s body — bearded, hooded, his face twisted in pain — is actually not Nicodemus but the artist himself. ‘Aged eighty at the time,’ the sign goes on, ‘suffering from increasingly acute bouts of depression, Michelangelo was obsessed with death; the statue was meant to decorate his tomb.’

Oh, all these moping, miserable men, Rena sighs. Jesus, Nicodemus, Michelangelo, my dad…If only I could pick them up and bounce them on my knees! ‘Come to me, one and all!’ Rocking them and singing to them…Lullaby and good-night, With old age bedight…La, la, la, I’d hum and croon to them, time is but a lullaby…Mary knew this well, having held her son on her lap first as a baby, then as a corpse…But men insist on pursuing lofty goals. Each wants to make his mark — God by creating the world, Jesus by saving it, Nicodemus by carrying Christ’s dead body, Michelangelo by sculpting the whole mess, my father by understanding it. They all try so hard! None will achieve his goal. Instead of complying with their wishes, reality resists. Buonarotti worked on this statue for eight years and winded up hating it. The poor-quality marble gave off sparks when his chisel bit into it. Furious, Buonarotti struck out at his creation, mutilated it, and turned away. God, too — strikes out, mutilates, turns away. My father too — strikes out, mutilates, turns away.

Subra laughs in appreciation.

Seriously, insists Rena. Michelangelo and Simon Greenblatt have all sorts of things in common. Grand ambitions, high hopes, woefully inadequate accomplishments, self-castigation. Indifference towards food, sleep, and clothing. Refusal to take care of their bodies. Fits of anger and despair. Unstinting generosity. My father could have echoed each and every word of the artist’s poem:

Woe! Woe is me!

In all my past I can find Not a day that belongs to me!

Oh! Above all, I pray Not to return to myself!

Before he died, Buonarotti burned all the drawings, sketches, cartoons and poems that betrayed his fumbling and uncertainty; my father will probably do the same with his own ‘scribblings’. Only difference: however much he wept and lamented (‘Painting and sculpture have been my downfall’) Buonarotti was sufficiently arrogant — or vulgar? — to leave a few rough drafts lying around for terrestrial judgment. Pietà, Moses, David, Sistine Chapel, Capitol Square, Night, Day, Slaves, Last Judgment, Dome of Saint Paul, and so forth. Not my Dad. Oh, no, not that! Either wait for the right moment — the ripening, the glorious culmination, or…nothing.

So…nothing, echoes Subra with a sigh.

‘After Michelangelo’s death,’ the sign concludes, ‘this statue was completed by a certain Tiberio Calcagni. He added a Mary Magdalene to conceal the mutilation.’ Who — oh, who will come to complete my father’s absence-of-works?

Never have I been impressed by great men, or considered they were a species unto themselves.

Maybe, whispers Subra, because so many men who were powerful in the outside world turned out to be powerless in your bed?

True, Rena agrees. Yes — a fact to be stated without the least mockery or bitterness. In fact it’s rather moving when a man wants to make love to you and can’t. The child is there at once. And I don’t mean only older men — no, I mean men in their prime, who block, stress, seize up, freak out and freeze. It happens all the time. I’ve known at least as many too slow to start as too fast to end.

Tell me, Subra says.

Kerstin and I were talking about it just the other day. ‘Men have so much less fun in bed than they claim,’ I said. ‘It’s tough for them,’ she nodded. ‘They’ve got so much responsibility in love-making — the whole thing rests on their…’ ‘Shoulders,’ I put in. ‘Ah, yes, those poor shoulders of theirs — so exposed, so vulnerable. They have to keep proving they’re up to par, and if they’re not…’ ‘If they’re not,’ Kerstin said, ‘they feel pathetic, ridiculous, unmanly…And if their lover takes advantage of their weakness to make fun of them, all they yearn for is the void.’ ‘Yeah,’ I nodded. ‘Times like that, there’s not much difference between homicide and suicide.’

Aziz, too, at first. It took him months to learn to give himself up to my caresses. His mother had done everything in her power to keep him from reaching manhood, including taking him to the Turkish baths with her until he was fourteen. ‘But madame,’ the cashier finally protested, ‘he’s not a child anymore. At fourteen, he should be going with the men.’ ‘Not at all, not at all,’ Aicha replied, pressing and squeezing him against her body, squashing his face between her breasts, ‘what are you talking about? He’s my baby — look, he’s still a little boy, my darling son!’ And so, week after week, Aziz found himself surrounded by frightening mountains of female flesh — blue-veined breasts with giant nipples that looked like repulsive brown suns, quivering marbled thighs and buttocks, stomachs whose rills and ripples jiggled at every step, bloated backs and necks dripping with henna…an experience all the more traumatising that these same bodies were ferociously concealed the rest of the time, hidden scalp to sole behind long dresses, scarves and veils, so that no one could glimpse as much as an ankle or a strand of hair…

I know what I’m talking about because Aicha once dragged me along with her to the Turkish baths. It was an unusual gesture of inclusion on her part — proof of the huge effort she was making to accept this new daughter-in-law of hers, whose age (fifteen years older than Aziz), appearance (androgynous), origins (Judeo-Christian), and morals (loose to say the least) made her the antithesis of the wife Aicha had always dreamed of for her next-to-eldest son…even if she still secretly hoped I’d magically vanish some day soon and Aziz would go to find himself a sweet, submissive virgin in Algeria. Anyway, one Sunday when we were over at her place for lunch, Aicha announced that she planned to go to the baths, then added, turning to me, ‘Would you like to come along?’ And how could I refuse how could I refuse how could I refuse?

What an expedition! Worse than an outing to Disneyworld with a group of preschoolers. Just making preparations took us nearly an hour: Aicha filled three huge plastic bags to overflowing with towels, robes, hijabs, thongs, horsehair washcloths, leather slippers, boxes of henna, combs, brushes, creams, shampoo, nail files, pumice stones…’Okay, are we all set?’ ‘No.’ We needed oranges, for our after-hammam snack. ‘Really, Aicha, we can dispense with oranges…’ ‘Out of the question…’ So, as we drove to the baths (yes, yes, she has her licence), she stopped in front of a fruit stand. I saw her hesitate, make as if to get out of the car, then decide against it. ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked. Aicha told me she couldn’t purchase the oranges herself because there was ‘a whole tableful of Arabs’ on the café terrace across from the fruit stand. I was floored. ‘She’s a widow,’ Aziz explained to me later, ‘and widows mustn’t allow men to look at them.’ I managed not to retort: Listen, what kind of bullshit is it that turns a man’s eyes into a man’s cock and a fully-dressed woman into a naked woman, so that the gaze of any man on any woman, even from a distance, even if she’s clothed from head to foot, is tantamount to rape? What kind of bullshit is it that makes women lower their eyes, avert their eyes, abdicate their vision, pretend they can’t and don’t see anything, so men can go on thinking they’re the only ones with eyes in their heads? Just what are men afraid we might see? I, for one, refuse to lower my gaze. I insist on looking. It was the first decision I ever took on my own — to steal a camera and learn to frame, zoom, print, study, reprint…

In the end, Aicha sent me to buy the oranges (given that I was already an infidel, id est practically a whore) — but with her money, of course; after all, I was her guest. We got to the baths at last, and to me it was a foray into hell. The hot steam clogged up my nose and throat until I could hardly breathe; even more stifling was the sight of so many women endlessly rubbing and scrubbing their bodies, working themselves over with soaps and creams — how can you spend four hours just getting clean? As always happens when I can’t take photographs, I gradually felt myself being overcome by nausea. I kept thinking about the odalisques, all those nineteenth- and twentieth-century images depicting the voluptuous mysteries of women in the baths…Why do we never see men in the baths? I wondered. Why has no painter or photographer ever deemed it worthwhile to show us what male bodies look like as they lie around sweating and chatting? Hmm, that’s what I should do — disguise myself as a man, put some infrared film in my camera and do a series of photos in the Turkish baths on men’s day.

A hitch, Subra puts in. Not easy to disguise yourself as a naked man…

Even now, on women’s day, I wasn’t exactly blending in. Abnormally white and skinny in this context, my body elicited an embarrassing number of stares. Despite my polite refusals—’No, thanks. Really, there’s no need.’ ‘Yes, yes,’—Aicha plastered henna all over my hair because she had some left over and didn’t want to waste it. Then, still under the pretext that I was her guest and that hospitality is sacred, she made me the gift of a peeling. So it was that I found myself in the fleshy claws of another ogress — who slammed me down on my back and scrubbed me sadistically with a bar of rough black soap, literally tearing the skin off my poor little breasts, back, thighs and ass…When she released me some ten minutes later, I was flayed, scarlet, and incensed. Realising I’d go berserk if I stayed there one more minute, I told Aicha I was late for an appointment, skipped the last two stages of the inexorable ritual — donning djellabas and eating oranges — and went back to the foyer.

There, a group of young women were chattering up a storm in a mixture of French and Arabic, indulging all the while in mutual eyebrow-plucking, cream-rubbing, back-massaging, make-up-apply-ing, hair-brushing and toenail-painting. A pert young mom in her early twenties tugged at her four- or five-year-old son. ‘Hey, you! Come over here.’ The boy stiffened, refusing to cuddle up against her body. ‘Oh, so you’re a big boy, now, is that it? You’re acting proud? Well, then I won’t be your friend anymore…What? What did you say? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ She amplified her son’s whisper for her friends’ benefit: ‘I tell him I won’t be his friend anymore, and he says that’s fine with him!’ Cascades of shrill laughter. Glancing down at her son’s crotch, the young mother giggled. ‘Look! He loves me in spite of himself!’ And she started fooling around with his penis, setting off fresh gales of laughter. That’ll make one more macho for the crop of 2020, I said to myself. Yet another young man who’ll be incapable of making love to women…

Subra nods gravely.

‘It’s the old story of Achilles’ heel,’ I remember saying to Aziz, after our second or third fiasco in bed. ‘Whose heel?’ ‘In the Iliad. When Achilles was a baby, his mother grabbed him by the heel and dipped him in a bath of immortality. His whole body was immersed except the heel, and he ended up dying when an arrow struck him there. Moral of the story: all men are vulnerable where their mother once held them — in your case, by the weenie.’ ‘Weird place for a heel,’ laughed Aziz. ‘Oh, it’s much more common than you think,’ I told him as I went about covering the said heel with all sorts of naughty kisses and caresses. ‘Plenty of men have heels between their legs.’ Still, it was months before Aziz was finally able to enter me, stay inside me, bloom and blossom there.

Turning away from the pseudo-Pietà, Rena finds herself face to face with Donatello’s Maria Maddalena.

Maddalena

Pretty piece of wood, this wild woman, her voluptuous naked body concealed behind a rippling curtain of long hair.

Clasping her hands, Mary Magdalene weeps and supplicates. Tears stream down her face. She regrets her former life, no doubt about that. She falls to her knees and weeps. She washes Christ’s feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. Her tears gush forth, splashing all over the handsome young Jew’s feet. Hair on feet, tears on feet, lips on feet, perfume on feet. ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven,’ Jesus says, ‘for she loved much.’

My favourite quote by that cute bearded guy who died young, Subra murmurs.

I’ve always preferred Mary Magdalene to the Virgin Mary. In fact I’m allergic to adult virgins in general — from the goddess Athena to Mother Theresa, and from Joan of Arc to the Pope. Every time I think of the innumerable streets, buildings, neighbourhoods, towns and cities all over the world that have been named after Christian saints, id est virgins, id est individuals who deemed physical love to be dirty and vile, who dirtied and vilified physical love — every time I think of the millions of children including my brother who’ve been diddled or worse by priests who were starved for tenderness, and the millions of deaths inflicted by chaste and gallant knights of all persuasions, I pale and tremble with rage. That Saint Paul was a real catastrophe!

All my friends crack up when I tell them the apartment Aziz and I moved into last summer is on the Rue des Envierges, Envirgins Street. So far, I haven’t been able to find out where the name comes from. ‘You can devirginate people, but can you envirginate them?’ I asked Aziz on the day we signed the lease, and he reminded me that such a medical specialty indeed exists in Europe today — certain doctors skilfully sew up the ruptured hymens of young Muslim girls to make them marriageable.

Really? Subra says, feigning surprise. I didn’t know Aziz co-signed the lease for the Rue des Envierges.

He will, don’t worry, Rena replies. And she hastens to pursue her train of thought.

‘Tell me, Aziz,’ I crooned to my sweetheart one evening as he went about covering my face with droll little kisses and gently rolling my clitoris between his fingers as he’s learned to do so well, ‘faithful Muslims who die as martyrs are supposed to be rewarded with ninety-two virgins when they get to heaven…But what do women get? What’s heaven like for Muslim women?’ ‘When a woman gets to heaven,’ Aziz murmured between kisses, ‘she can’t see her husband’s other wives anymore. That’s it — no more jealousy.’ ‘Oh, I see. That’s a woman’s paradise: no more jealousy. You mean she can’t even see the ninety-two virgins?’ ‘Especially not them.’ That made me laugh so hard I was unable to come.

Being a whore, Mary Magdalene reminds me of my mother.

Not that my mother was a whore, no, but people called her that because she frequently invited prostitutes into our home and defended them in court. Little wonder that, thirty years later, I did the reportage called Whore Sons and Daughters—visiting two dozen different countries, using hundreds of rolls of film, asking thousands of questions…What the hookers emphasised more than anything else was…their clients’ vulnerability and need to talk. Eventually I came to see prostitution as akin to psychoanalysis. Short but repeatable encounters whose terms were fixed in advance — one person paying the other not to talk, the horizontal position relaxing inhibitions… ‘Basically,’ a gorgeous African-American call-girl once told me in New York, ‘the john pays you for the right to be a little boy again. A little tyrant is more like it. Talking without listening, taking without giving…But afterwards, if he’s not in too much of a hurry, he’ll sometimes tell you things he tells no one else…You’d be surprised. It can be very moving. Sometimes they start to cry and you can sense the kid they used to be…Can’t get too close, though, or they’ll switch back to scorn.’

The whole tentacular, wildly lucrative prostitution and pornography industry, which makes billions of dollars by portraying fertile young females as being sterile and infinitely cooperative, reflects not men’s irrepressible desire for women but just the opposite: their need to keep them at bay. Whether the anonymous woman is in a luxury hotel room, a sordid dive or on screen, the message is the same: Do as I say. Desire me, adore me and admire me but don’t threaten to devour me, don’t bleed, above all, don’t make babies.

Asked how they chose their profession, few hookers mentioned anything vaguely synonymous with desire or pleasure; all, on the other hand, mentioned money. That’s why so many of my photos included close-ups of cash — bills changing hands, being slipped into pockets and wallets, stashed, checked and rechecked, even kissed. Yes, whether for good reasons or bad, prostitutes care deeply about money; nine times out of ten that’s what they think about when they squander their intimacy, when the client is on them and in them, seeking oblivion. The stranger’s congested face is almost invariably replaced by the faces of their parents, their children, or else the sweetheart they hope to return to once they’ve earned enough money. For some women, cash gets caught up in a vicious circle between pimp and coke and fuck; the coke helps them survive the fuck that brings in the cash that pays the pimp that keeps them in coke — those women are really lost.

My project was more than a challenge, it was a contradiction in terms: to use photography, the art of the present moment, to activate the women’s pasts and futures. That’s why I took photos of them with their kids. Virtually all of them carry around snapshots of the person they love more than anything in the world, the child for whose future’s sake they initially agreed to rent out its former home, their bodies. First I’d photograph the women, then I’d photograph the snapshot of their child, blowing it up and framing the two faces together — the same size, but one rendered blurry and ghostlike by the enlargement.

Throughout my childhood I had seen whores go traipsing through our home with one or several kids in tow, so when I heard about the antinomy between mother and whore, in an Introduction to Psychology lecture my first year at Concordia, I burst out laughing in the middle of the auditorium.

Tearing herself away from Magdalene, Rena moves on to the next room.

Cantoria

Luckily there aren’t too many visitors in the museum and she can stare at the next wonder to her heart’s content — Della Robbia’s Cantoria, stone made music. A group of choirboys in high relief, some singing, others playing instruments. They’re neither angels nor cherubim but real teenagers, with individualised features. This one has a protuberant Adam’s apple, that one’s eyes are glittering, the other one’s nose is too long, and look over here — this one’s trying to grow a moustache…

The violinist reminds her of her brother Rowan.

The words they’re singing may be pure, but Della Robbia gives us to understand that their voices have already broken and that their balls are thrilling to the first thralls of pleasure. They praise the Lord on High while fantasising about the baker-lady’s buttocks — what could be more normal at their age? Looking down at them from the pulpit, the priest swallows hard. Though he, too, is aroused, he’s compelled to hide it. Same goes for God, who’s following the scene by satellite.

Right, Subra chuckles. Ball-less: God for priest, priest for choirboys, father for daughter. Tell me…

It all began with a commendable solicitude. Worried to see his adolescent daughter increasingly introverted and withdrawn, Simon Greenblatt set up an appointment for her with his friend Dr Joshua Walters, the great gangly manitou of the psychiatry wing in one of Montreal’s most prestigious hospitals. Though chronically overbooked, Walters agreed to see Greenblatt’s neurotic daughter in therapy, at least until a diagnosis could be made. The daughter presented — I presented, that is — with the following symptoms: nervousness, kleptomania, insomnia, agoraphilia, and episodes of derealisation.

Agoraphilia? Subra queries.

Yes. I felt comfortable only outside the home, in crowded places.

I took an instant liking to Dr Walters. He was my dad’s age, forty or so. He had big hands and feet, wheat-coloured hair, and an excellent sense of humour. Also he was a man, with a man’s body; no way around it. At the first session he complimented me on my intelligence, and at the second expressed his admiration of my beauty, and at the third took me in his arms and stroked my back, shoulders and forehead, gluing his trembling lips to mine by way of a farewell, and at the fourth, taking advantage of the fact that I was already supine on his couch, stretched out on top of me and rubbed his body against mine, moaning, his face red and congested with desire, and at the fifth removed a sufficient amount of my clothing so that, using our hands and mouths — for, such is the naiveté of great scientists, Dr Walters was convinced I was a virgin and didn’t want to end up desperately scrubbing bloodstains off the light beige upholstery of the couch in his hospital office — we could bring each other to bliss. Following which, running his hands again and again through his bristly, wheat-coloured hair, he explained to me that he no longer loved his wife (she bored him now, he said; she never talked to him about anything but the value of their stocks and bonds and their children’s progress at school), that he’d never done anything like this in his life before but had simply been unable to resist my charms, that he’d been obsessed with me since I’d first floated ‘wraithlike’ into his office (yes, such is the picayune vocabulary of certain scientists), that he sincerely hoped I wouldn’t hold it against him but he was obliged to ask me not to come in again — no, never — I’d have to find myself another therapist, preferably a woman, for he was sure that no man in his right mind would be able resist feverishly tearing off every piece of my clothing. ‘Can you forgive me, Rena, my angel, my marvel? I have nothing to say in my defence except that I got carried away. I’m just a poor, defenceless male animal and you, as I’m sure you know, are an irresistibly sensuous young woman.’

Any fifteen-year-old girl, Subra murmurs, would be flattered to hear herself called a woman, to say nothing of a sensuous woman.

‘I shouldn’t have touched you — oh, you naughty hands!’ And he started slapping his own hands, making me laugh and leap to stop him—’No, don’t do that. I forbid you to hurt the hands that just gave me so much pleasure!’ I thought the doctor looked cute as hell, all deprofessionalised like that, with his hair tousled, his jacket off, his tie askew, his shirt wrinkled, his cheeks fairly flaming with embarrassment and arousal. I was still lying on the couch, and he was on his knees between my thighs. ‘Well, if I can’t come to any more appointments with you,’ I added, gently running my index finger along the three parallel lines on his forehead, ‘I hope I can at least see you outside of the office now and then.’

A silence ensued. The good doctor’s eyes were riveted to mine. ‘Do you mean that seriously?’ he asked me. ‘Do you really want to see me again?’ ‘My father holds you in high esteem,’ I told him disarmingly, in a clever reversal of roles. ‘So I mean, maybe we could just get together downtown every once in a while and chat over coffee?’ ‘Maybe we could, little one,’ said Dr Walters. ‘Just maybe I’d be able to handle myself a little better in a coffee shop. But I’m not making any promises.’ ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want you to handle yourself too well,’ I said, pouting up at him sweetly. And so, laughing, elated, in cahoots, the great specialist of neurosis and the little madwoman buttoned and zipped themselves up, kissed each other on the lips, and parted ways.

Thus ended my first experience with psychotherapy. I was careful, though, to say nothing to my parents about its termination; that way I could go on staying away from home every Thursday after school, wandering around the eastern part of the city, watching life, devouring life, drinking life in through my eyes, stealing make-up, clothes, records, books, a transistor radio, and finally — my crowning glory — a Canon. I brought that off, I remember, in an under-protected camera shop at the corner of Saint Lawrence and Saint Catherine…Hmm. Turns out the guy who got grilled like a hamburger has been part of my destiny for a long time! As for lovely Saint Catherine, her body was reduced to bloody mush by a four-wheeled machine bristling with spikes and saws that revolved in opposite directions. (When I think some critics dare to call me perverse…I who so ardently cherish the human body!) That’s how, from the ruins of my therapy, my vocation was born.

Josh Walters and I continued to see one another and enjoy each other’s company. We stuck to cafés, but what went on in the bathrooms of those cafés was memorable. Memorable. Joshua taught me any number of positions, the most apparently awkward of which were not the least arousing. True, I could have noticed certain things…For example the way he’d sometimes jerk my arms behind my back when he was about to climax, brutally handcuffing my wrists with his own hands. I didn’t find that significant until much later. But I took pleasure in our conversations and actually started feeling something like love for this man.

It’s almost impossible, murmurs Subra, not to love someone who has told you about the pain of his childhood.

The following year Dr Walters got a divorce and, to celebrate, invited all his friends and acquaintances to a party on the roof of his building. My mother refused to attend — she was friends with Joshua’s ex-wife, and found the idea in poor taste. So my father and I went to the party together. My therapy with the good doctor now being officially and successfully terminated, Simon must have figured it wouldn’t do any harm for me to go along. Is that logical? I’m not quite sure. Maybe he wanted me there so as not to arouse Lisa’s suspicions? I’m trying to understand.

Josh was already half-soused when he welcomed us at the door. Seeing the Canon hanging around my neck, he burst out laughing: ‘Hey, that’s a terrific idea, young lady. You could make a fortune specialising in divorce photos. I mean, why does everybody take wedding photos? Weddings are banal. All weddings are alike, whereas every divorce is unique, unforgettable…and so much more dramatic! Let me do your Divorce Album! Marital quarrels with flying crockery! Tug-of-wars over children, books, furniture, household appliances! Gloomy hours spent in judges’ waiting rooms! Astronomical checks for legal advice…’

Simon and I laughed until we wept.

Up on the roof, the party was going full blast — Brazilian music, eighty people intent on having a good time, barrels of sangria, the late-June sky an abstract painting of pink and purple swirls. And when Simon saw his colleague clap his hand onto his daughter’s ass as they glued their bodies together to dance the samba, he held his tongue, and when I saw my father do the same with a girl I’d never seen before, I held mine. Blonde and buxom, the girl was wearing stiletto sandals and a fuchsia miniskirt; each of her fingernails was painted a different colour and her hands moved incessantly over my father’s back, now on his shirt, now under it. All that. All that, that night. An unending flow of sangria and saliva and sap. My excitement at being suddenly acknowledged by my father as an adult. My discomfort at seeing him blithely betraying my mother before my very eyes.

‘The human species still has a long way to go,’ he said to me gravely in the car, as we headed back towards Westmount at four a.m. ‘Possessiveness and jealousy are really nothing but vestiges of our ancient past. They date back to the Neolithic, when men first co-opted women’s fertility and invented the nuclear family to keep track of lineage and property rights. Jealousy serves no purpose at all in our day and age. Between women’s lib, the high divorce rate and contraception…Speaking of which, I hope you’re taking precautions?’ ‘Yes, Daddy.’ ‘Good. That’s good.’ ‘What’s her name?’ ‘Sylvie.’ ‘Is she Québecoise?’ ‘Yes, but perfectly bilingual. She works as a secretary at the university and takes night classes in theatre. She’s an amazing person.’ ‘I see.’ ‘Let’s leave it at that, okay? You agree we should leave it at that?’ ‘Yes, Daddy.’

To Lisa, Sylvie was neither more nor less than a vague colleague of her husband’s who occasionally phoned him at home to discuss administrative issues. It was both thrilling and guilt-inducing to share this secret with my father — concealing from my mother, by tacit agreement, such a crucial part of our lives. A bit like mutual blackmail—I’ll keep your secret if you keep mine—each of us holding the card which, slapped down, could ruin the other’s game in an instant. The incredible thing was how easy we found it to be duplicitous, week after week and month after month for nearly a year. I even made friends with Sylvie. We compared our methods of contraception. I was on the Pill, and Sylvie, to make sure she didn’t give me a half-brother or — sister, used a diaphragm. How did we convince ourselves that the situation could lead to anything but disaster?

What’s going on? Subra asks. Why are all these old stories coming back to haunt you this morning?

Rena has no idea. Photography’s not allowed in the museum, so her Canon is of no avail. She’s at the mercy of every memory her brain chooses to dredge up. No matter what work of art she chooses to look at, the floodgates open and it seems that nothing can shut them again.

She moves on to the next room.

La Scultura

Here, aptly enough, are the different art forms as sculpted by Andrea Pisano. Chiselled in small marble panels: La Musica, La Pittura, La Scultura. The latter brings her up short.

Burned into her retina: the primal scene, the primordial scene, the primitive scene.

The marble sculptor holds the marble body. The living sculptor holds the marble body. The living sculptor holds the living body. Furious, the sculptor strikes the marble body. Pygmalion dances with Galatea. I dance with your friend. Donatello kisses Mary Magdalene. You kiss my friend. Mary Magdalene weeps at Jesus’s feet. Camille Claudel weeps at Rodin’s feet. Rodin sculpts Camille Claudel. Your friend kisses me. Your friend strikes the marble body. I weep at your friend’s feet. Furious, you strike your friend.

I was sixteen now, and Sylvie must have been pushing twenty. Simon Greenblatt — who, though he hadn’t yet completed his thesis, had managed to publish a couple of valid articles on the medical uses of LSD — and Joshua Walters, who now ran the psychiatric ward of his hospital, had been invited to London for a conference on Mind and Brain. It so happened the dates of the conference coincided with my Easter holiday.

Why didn’t I go with them? ‘It would be a great chance for our Rena to discover Europe!’ Simon exclaimed. And Lisa walked right into his trap. I don’t really know how to explain my mother’s blindness except by saying that she was preoccupied with her work, her struggle, the daunting problems of all the Québecoises who filed into her office seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, knocked up, drugged, infected with syphilis, abused by family members or raped by strangers. Simon told his wife only as much of the truth as he figured she could digest: the conference organisers had reserved two hotel rooms for him and Joshua, each of which contained a double and a single bed; they could easily share one of the rooms and leave me the other one; the only remaining expense would be my plane ticket — it was well worth it! Absent-mindedly, Lisa must have given her consent. She must have smiled, written out a cheque for the plane ticket, and trotted off to plead at court.

Sylvie met up with us at Mirabel Airport. The money for her ticket had been forked out by Joshua (a detail we all, for some reason, found hilarious). Standing together at a counter in the airport bar, we raised our glasses in a toast — my, weren’t we clever!

While the men attended and delivered lectures, Sylvie and I spent two euphoric days criss-crossing the city of London in search of bargains. And at night…Well, under cover of night-time, many things come to pass that no one can judge or comprehend…I have no idea what went on between Simon and Sylvie in Room 418, nor do I recall the exact progression of events between Joshua and myself in Room 416; it must have been fairly swift, though, because by the morning of the third day I found myself strapped to the bed with ropes brought especially from Montreal — naked, naturally, spread-eagled and blindfolded — while, standing behind me, also naked, Joshua whipped me with his belt. I knew quite well why the good doctor was treating me like this, knew it was nothing personal — he’d told me all about his childhood…

Right, Subra puts in. Mommy’s always running off, so we have to tie her up to force her to hold still.

…and I’d given my consent. ‘You’re insatiable,’ he said — and I nodded, for it was true. I had a consuming desire to know the adult world in all its unadulterated splendour. The intervals between blows varied in length, lasting anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes — and since I never knew when they’d fall I couldn’t prepare for them and they kept taking me by surprise. Usually Josh aimed fairly well and the lashes fell on my buttocks, where they didn’t hurt too much, but sometimes they fell on my upper thighs or lower back and the pain was excruciating. It must have been after one of those poorly aimed blows that I let out a scream that changed my life forever.

In other words, it’s all my fault.

Of course, Subra says. What isn’t?

Everything that ensued was the result of that one scream. Disturbed by what he thought he’d heard, my father detached himself from his mistress’s body in Room 418, burst through the connecting door into Room 416, registered the scene at a glance and went berserk. Striding over to poor, disoriented, detumescent Joshua, he grabbed the belt from his hands and started using it to deliver wild blows to the psychiatrist’s head and body, all the while shouting at the top of his lungs, thereby drawing the attention of the chambermaids appointed to clean the fourth floor of our three-star hotel, who rang the reception, who called the police. Because I was wearing a blindfold, I didn’t actually see any of this, merely grasped it thanks to my acute sense of hearing and my gift for deduction. Charged with statutory rape, the two scientists spent the day in police custody, while Sylvie and I were transferred to a facility for juvenile delinquents. Thanks to the intervention of the prestigious Mind and Brain conference organisers, we all got released the next day — but that didn’t prevent the British government from kicking us out of the country the day after that. By the time we landed in Montreal, our story was on the front page of the Gazette. The publicity was to have two dire consequences — it destroyed my father’s last remaining hopes of having a successful career, and precipitated my mother’s decision to return to her native Australia.

You don’t say, murmurs Subra almost inaudibly. The front page of the Gazette!

Rena leaves the museum, shattered.

Belvedere

Nightmarish crossing of the Ponte Vecchio. Ingrid and Simon cling to one another; the crowd is so dense that she loses sight of them for a few minutes and fears that one of them must have fainted.

Why, in Simon’s eyes, was it not all right for Josh to hit me with his belt but all right for him to hit Rowan with his? I mean, maybe there’s something intrinsically edifying and instructive about having one’s naked bottom strapped, maybe it teaches bad little boys not to set fire to the curtains in their bedroom, what it teaches pretty young girls I don’t know yet but I’m sure I’ll find out someday — maybe we should all just spend our time whipping each other to prove our love?

Having reached the far side of the Arno safe and sound, they order sandwiches in a snack-bar on the Borgo San Jacopo.

Ingrid wonders why all the stalls on the bridge sell exactly the same thing — silver jewellery. ‘I don’t get it,’ she says. ‘Such close competition just doesn’t seem like a good idea — that way none of them can make a profit!’

Rack her brains as she might, Rena is unable to come up with an answer to this important question.

‘How about a little digestive rest?’ Simon suggests.

They find a perfect bench in the sun to rest on in the Giardini di Boboli, but then Simon and Ingrid decide to use this moment to bring Rena up to date on the medical history of one of their friends in Montreal. The woman’s illness spreads, gradually infecting the landscape in front of them; Rena knows that in her memory, every detail of this magical moment — the pond, the water-lilies, the bronze statue of Neptune bursting up from the fountain brandishing his trident, his body greened with age and moisture but still magnificently muscular and manly — will forever be tainted by the symptoms of multiple sclerosis.

She can take no more. On the improbable pretext of wishing to photograph the flowerbeds, she gets up and heads for the Forte de Belvedere, ascending the hill alone in long, swift strides.

Why am I so averse to talking about illness? It’s not illness itself I object to (Fabrice’s kidney failure taught me to respect the body, and its countless forms of strength and weakness, once and for all) — no, what sets my teeth on edge is making illness the main topic of conversation, forcing people to listen to tales of woe they can neither respond to nor escape from. That’s why I never talk about my own health problems. In fact I have none…

Apart from insomnia, Subra interrupts.

True. The bane of my existence, these past few years. After I hit forty, it started getting so bad I couldn’t hide it anymore. When Thierno spent nights at my place, it worried him to see me get up at noon, pale and haggard, with purple rings beneath my eyes. ‘You know, Mom,’ he said at last, ‘there are cures for insomnia.’ ‘Thanks but no thanks. Seen enough shrinks to last me a lifetime.’ ‘I’m not talking about analysis, I’m talking about acupuncture.’ ‘Wha…?’ ‘You heard me.’

He went on to tell me that the mother of his piano teacher Pierre Matheron had studied acupuncture in Indonesia. Her fees were reasonable, he said, her office close by, and her talent considerable. ‘Seriously,’ he wound up, laying a hand on mine, ‘you should give it a try.’

Touched by my son’s solicitude, telling myself it wouldn’t hurt to try, I called Dr Matheron’s office and set up an appointment.

One of the best decisions you ever made, whispers Subra.

The doctor shook my hand warmly as she ushered me into her office. In her mid-fifties at the time, she was a smallish woman with a reassuringly sturdy build and laughing hazel eyes. But it was her face that set me instantly at ease — a broad face framed in blonde hair liberally mixed with white; a good, crinkly face with high cheekbones and a surprisingly pointed nose; a face that freely admitted to having smiled and frowned millions of times.

Taking out a form, she asked me the usual questions: medical history, date and place of birth…‘Ah, you’re Canadian.’ I was bracing myself for the inevitable That’s funny, you don’t have a Canadian accent — such a charming accent it is, too! — a double insult for the Québecois, who prefer not to be called Canadian and consider (as do many French provincials) that if anyone has an accent, and a ridiculous one at that, it’s the Parisians — but Dr Matheron said nothing of the sort. I deduced that she wasn’t a native French speaker herself, which endeared her to me even more. I have a marked preference for people who are split — bi’s and ambi’s of all sorts. That’s why I live in the neighbourhood of Belleville, where bilingualism is the rule and not the exception, where you know that behind every face in the street is a brain teeming with sentences, quotes, expressions, songs and proverbs in French and another language, whether Chinese or Arabic, Turkish or Kurdish, German, English or Cambodian. I have no patience for people who think they know who they are just because they were born somewhere. ‘What about yourself?’ I asked Kerstin Matheron with my usual impertinence. ‘Swedish,’ she replied.

As she took my pulse, holding two fingers against the inside of my wrist and looking at her watch, I began to feel suddenly and unexpectedly euphoric. ‘Thirteen/eight — that’s fine. Now…How long have you been finding it hard to sleep?’

I told her about my nights — my addiction to working at night, whether out of doors or in my own dark room at home. My clinging to wakefulness. Wanting never to let go. My pleasure in feeling the neighbourhood asleep around me, its inhabitants’ dreams floating in the air. I go back and forth from printer to baths and from baths to printer, always on my feet, turning the lights on and off, at once excited and focused. On the dry side, I love studying the grains through the grain magnifier — they have an organic feel to them that reflects the nature of light, something pixels can’t achieve. (Pixels are real Germans: Alles ist immer in Ordnung!) On the wet side: the same awe every time an image appears, even when there’s something wrong with it. It’s like making love — stirring no matter what happens. When I take the paper out of the first bath, slick and shiny as a fish’s stomach, it seems to be alive. I slide it into the other two baths, spend long minutes washing it, slap it up on the wall, study it, and start over, printing a bit differently, using a masking card to bring out detail in one part of the image without overexposing the rest…I can remain on my feet twelve hours straight without even noticing fatigue. Night hours are flexible and generous — they have no minutes — whereas day hours go marching past like soldiers, in serried ranks…These last few months, though, nightmares have been tearing me out of slumber and washing me up on the shore of the day dead beat, broken.

I lay down on Dr Matheron’s medical bed, wearing nothing but my blue silk lace panties. She exclaimed at how thin I was. When she asked if I ate normally, I said, ‘As a rule, yes, but my sons are living with their dad right now and I find it hard to cook just for myself.’ With swift, deft, gentle motions, dabbing each spot in advance with a bit of alcohol-soaked cotton, she went about screwing thin needles into my ankles, hips, and collarbone, talking to me all the while in her warm, musical voice. ‘Everyone finds it hard to cook just for themselves,’ she said. ‘I myself have been eating like a barbarian even since my husband’s death. I just take some salmon out of the freezer, slap it into a Pyrex dish, add a bit of white wine and stick it in the microwave for ninety seconds.’ ‘I doubt the barbarians used microwaves to cook their salmon,’ I said. ‘You’re right, we have no idea what they used their microwaves for,’ she said without missing a beat.

Rena laughs out loud, remembering. Thanks to that witticism, the tendrils of friendship that had been sprouting in her heart since she’d first entered Kerstin’s office burst into bloom. Now, five years later, the two women are inseparable.

Exhilarated by the panoramic view, Rena phones Aziz and gets his answering machine. ‘Aziz I love you I miss you I want you I desire you I wish I had your gorgeous cock in my mouth this very minute. When you’re not around I feel I’m going mad, I lose my sense of humour, my bearings — my self. Just now I was looking at a statue of Neptune and I thought it had multiple sclerosis, can you believe that? Oh, baby, if only you were here with me…At least we could fool around together, sneak off into dark corners and do all sorts of naughty things to each other…I adore you. I can’t stop thinking about you. Catch you later.’

Their branches waving gently in the wind, their foliage rusted by autumn nights, the trees look like wild-haired witches. Rena crouches down, takes out her black bag (a sort of sweater with no neck opening), and loads her camera with a roll of infrared film. Instantly elated, she moves slowly back down the hill, concentrating passionately on every object in her viewfinder.

The extraordinary thing about infrared, the voice in her head tells Subra, is that it happens elsewhere, in an alternate reality. What you photograph is not what you see. You have to imagine what the photo will look like once you develop it, taking all sorts of factors into account — the reds in the landscape, the angle of sunlight, the filters you use or don’t use. You have to dream each tree individually and try to guess at its secret, knowing the foliage will end up looking like an explosion of white lace. Infrared reveals a delicately deformed light that seems to come from a forgotten past. It is not, as many people think, a gimmick. The eyes of some animals capture infrared light rays; ours happen not to — but those rays are emitted whether we see them or not.

It all depends on who’s looking at what, with what, from where. Close up, a cloud is a mass of water droplets in suspension; from far away it’s a purple mountain against a blue sky — and even the blueness vanishes, as Simon pointed out to me under LSD, if you get too close to it. Photography is relative: when you slip the negative into the enlarger and beam light through it, tiny black spots get projected onto the Barite paper below but those spots are not the photograph, they’re only a network of possibilities; you can move in closer until all you see are tiny filaments dancing in the void, or move away until the whole image is one black dot; you can drown the spots in light or lose them in shadow…People, too are relative: seen from too close up or too far away, they lose their meaning. Instinctively, you learn to manipulate distance, framing, exposure, contrast, searching for what is meaningful…‘They want to be paid that much attention,’ as Diane Arbus once put it, ‘and that’s a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.’

What a lovely thing to say, Subra breathes…

When her ex-husband and best friend Allan Arbus went off to live in California, Diane started hanging out with fringe groups — dwarfs, giants, hermaphrodites, twins and mental patients…She said her camera lens protected her, opened doors for her, helped her forage in forbidden territory…Did she use people to get the pictures she wanted, or did she use her camera to get close to people? Probably both. Later, after her father’s death, while continuing to work and to take care of daughters during the daytime, she started going on sexual sprees at night, giving a new slant to that ‘reasonable kind of attention’…

I, too, use my Canon to convince men I’m interested in them — and I am interested in them, very interested. For whatever reason, the theatre of masculinity, with its spectacular rituals, games, contests and costumes, has been studied far less than the theatre of femininity. I slip into soccer stadiums and take photographs of hooligans, big bad boys, young and not-so-young supporters. Men blind drunk on beer and testosterone, high on collective emotion, floating on the anonymity of the pack, bawling out the names of their favourite players and insulting those of the opposite team, ecstatic to be part of a group. On the surface, the supporters of Paris-Saint-Germain may seem potent and frightening, but in infrarouge you can see they’re frightened as well. Close-ups of young men’s faces twisted with hatred. Moving in…closer and closer…oh the sweet dizziness of blowing up images until you enter matter itself…slipping beneath the skin…down, down…passing through layer after layer of memory, all the way to childhood. It’s overwhelming when that starts to show up in the revealing bath…

Misteries has been my most successful show to date. It travelled to a dozen cities and was made into a book. Juxtaposed images of male behaviour the world over — military marches in front of Moscow’s Kremlin, meetings of the Camorra in Naples, welcoming speeches at the French Academy, complete with swords and green uniforms, Hell’s Angels gatherings in California, initiation rites of Brazil’s Bororo Indians, pimps in Tel Aviv, traders in Tokyo, soccer fans in Manchester, right-wing militiamen in Montana, senators, freemasons, prisoners — oh, such posturing! Such strutting and swaggering! Men, men, men! As anxious as they are arrogant, their arrogance being merely the flip side of their anxiety because they’re so much more mortal than we are. It moves me to see the way these womb-less higher primates clench their jaws, march up and down, do everything in their power to attract attention and remind the world that they, too, exist, count, matter.

I longed to understand what went on in men’s bodies, why danger turned them on…Some stories on the subject had made a powerful impression on me. The one my Cambodian husband Khim had told me, for instance, about the Viet Cong who’d received a dozen fragments of shrapnel in his crotch. Khim had operated — successfully, he had thought — but the man had come back to the hospital two days after his release. ‘What’s the matter?’ Khim had asked him. ‘You told me you were fine.’ ‘Yes, Doctor,’ the man said. ‘I felt fine when I was released…But every evening when I go out to fight, excuse me, but…I get a hard-on and the pain comes back again.’ Khim checked and found a tiny piece of shrapnel embedded in the man’s penis, so he reoperated…Or the stories Aziz’s uncle told me about his military service in Algeria in the seventies: ‘The intellect is soluble in weapons, my dear Rena,’ he told me once. ‘The minute a friend got promoted, even if you’d been hanging out with him since grade school, he suddenly started looking down his nose at you and insisting you salute him every time you ran into him. His Kalashnikov made him forget everything else; he became that intoxicating power…’

Working on Misteries, I sometimes felt like relieving the planet of nine-tenths of its phallophores — who, by their constant insecurity, the uncertainty of their being (Who do you think you are?: the male question par excellence), their passion for weapons and power, their scheming and rivalry, their scuffles and brawls of all sorts, are driving the human species towards extinction; at other times, on the contrary, I wanted to fall to my knees in gratitude because they’d invented the wheel and the canoe, the alphabet and the camera, to say nothing of developing sciences, composing music, writing books, painting paintings, building palaces churches mosques bridges dams and roads, working hard and selflessly, giving unstintingly of their strength and patience and energy and know-how, century after century, in fields, mines, factories, workshops, libraries, universities and laboratories the world over…Oh, men! Wonderful, anonymous, myriad men, suffering and sacrificing yourselves day after day so we can live a little better, with a little more comfort and beauty and meaning…how I love you!

Whenever possible, I would drag one man away from the pack, shower my attentions on him…and remunerate him. Yes: whereas men pay prostitutes to forget their individuality and play the generic Female, I paid men to renounce the comfort of the group and usher me into their privacy. Having gone home with them from stadium, colloquium, stock exchange, parade or training field, I’d ask them to talk to me, take out their photo albums, and show me the teenager, toddler and infant they’d once been. As they did so, they often wept — and I consoled them. Men are so grateful when you shower ‘that much attention’ on them. I learned to sense where they needed loving, go straight there and give it to them. I learned to take their faces in both my hands, smooth away the lines of worry between their eyebrows and on their foreheads, graze their noses with my lips and draw my fingertips over their cheekbones, ever-aware of the skull with its black eyeholes and gaping grin, right there behind the skin. I learned to slip into their souls, lick and suck them, drive them mad with my caresses, allowing them to arch their backs and discover the incomparable pleasure of passivity, calming them down so their true strengths could surge forth, instead of the phony ones they trot out for display the rest of the time. Gradually their defences would crumble and melt. I can’t even look at a man anymore without wondering how, under the onslaught of my love, his face and body would relax, fill up with light, be transfigured…

Subra sighs contentedly.

Putting her Canon back in its case, Rena returns to where her father and stepmother are sitting on the bench across from poor sick Neptune. She finds them slumped against each other, snoozing. A moment later, they head slowly for the Palazzo Pitti.

Pitti

This may be our only chance, Rena tells herself, to spend a little time with Italian Renaissance painters. I must, oh I simply must get Ingrid and Simon to fully appreciate their works.

Just what do you mean by fully appreciate? Subra asks.

Well, the way I do. Or the way I would, if…

If what?

Er…if I weren’t quite so nervous. Or if Aziz were here…

Aziz can’t stand museums.

Okay, not Aziz. Someone else…

Kerstin?

Kerstin, right. Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, Veronese, Van Dyck, Andrea del Sarto, Velasquéz, Raphael…Some of this greatness has to rub off on their souls!

But her father, made groggy by his nap in the sun, takes every chance he can to sit down and nod off again. And Ingrid is oblivious to the technical feats of the Italian masters (perspective, shadows, shading, nuance, trompe-l’œil). With disarming naiveté, she responds only to the content of their paintings.

Saint Agatha, for instance. Any number of paintings depict the lovely Sicilian maid carrying her breasts on a tray. Great are the masters who have taken up this theme; subtle are their colours; skilful is their arrangement of forms and hues on the canvas. But every time she sees one, Ingrid cries, ‘Isn’t that dreadful?’, forcing Rena to wonder whom she hates most — the Christian virgins or the Roman monsters who martyred them.

According to the guidebook, Agatha was a sweet young thing born in Catania, Sicily in the third century A.D. When the Roman prefect Quintianus started cutting off her breasts to punish her for her conversion to Christianity, she cried out, ‘Oh, cruel man, how can you mutilate me like this? Have you forgotten your mother and the breasts that fed you?’

Bad mistake, Rena says to herself. The last thing you should do when threatened by a macho is to mention his mother. That’s rubbing salt in the wound. If you want to escape alive, you should talk to him about the weather, politics, sports — anything but his mother. In a macho’s brain, the word mother is a raw nerve; I know of no exceptions to this rule. Whenever a man boasts to me that mothers are sacred in his culture, I know for sure that women get the short end of the stick there. Anyway, Quintianus freaked out and ordered that Agatha be dragged over hot coals until death ensued.

‘Isn’t that dreadful?’ says Ingrid.

How can people not notice, Rena goes on (Subra hanging as usual on her every word), that the accoutrements of érotisme noir, from de Sade to Madame Robbe-Grillet, from Réage to Bataille, come straight out of Christian martyrology? Whips and chains, hairshirts, blasphemy and transgression, pleasure derived from punishment and pain, Saint Theresa swooning as she is pierced by the angel’s ‘arrow’…

‘Not my cup of tea,’ said Fabrice, laughing, as, during a visit to him in hospital, I described a few of my libertine misadventures — for instance the evening when, rigged out in black stiletto heels, a basque and a garter-belt, my thighs sheathed in fishnet stockings, a padlock dangling from my clitoris, gagged and bound yet at the same time armed with a whip, I walked upon, nay, trampled Jean-Christophe’s swollen testicles as he writhed in pleasure and shouted, Fuck God, Madame! Oh, would that I had sodomised you with the barrel of my Kalashnikov! Would that I had pissed into your left ear! Would that I had scattered holy wafers all over your alabaster breasts!..‘Not our cup of tea, in fact,’ Fabrice corrected himself as he laughed and clapped at my parody. ‘Haitians think highly of French literature in general, but they draw the line at érotisme noir. They just can’t get off on whips and chains — the memory of slavery is too recent.’

Kerstin once told me how nonplussed she’d been, arriving in Paris to pursue her medical studies in 1967, at the mixture of Gothic eroticism and dogmatic Marxism in the French intellectual milieu. Aged twenty-four, she’d already undergone a fair number of sexual initiations in the hippy communes of Stockholm, and had had to repress her laughter when a Leftist high school teacher announced his intention of showing her what was what, sex-wise.

‘Alain-Marie, his name was,’ she told me as we ate out together for the first time, washing our food down with liberal amounts of wine. (Our relationship had swiftly moved from professional to personal and the acupuncture sessions had had no effect on my insomnia.) ‘Alain-Marie took The Revolution very seriously. To show his support for the future dictatorship of the proletariat, he wore a red neckerchief. The son of a Catholic family from the provinces, he got a big kick out of blasphemy: his favourite book was Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, and when he saw a nun or a priest walk down the street he couldn’t refrain from going “Bang-bang, you’re dead!” For weeks on end, though I was dying to make love with him, he gave me lectures on Bataille’s theory of transgression.’ ‘“You bitch in heat, you dare to want,” that sort of thing?’ I asked. ‘Exactly. To my Swedish mind, all this was fascinating but also terribly frustrating.’ ‘Yet you desired him in spite of it?’ ‘Well, he was a Frenchman, right?’ Kerstin answered. ‘I mean, he spoke such beautiful French! I was turned on by the mere idea of making love with a Frenchman, given their worldwide reputation in the field.’ ‘It’s an overrated one, wouldn’t you say?’ ‘Unfortunately, my sample is too small to do the statistics.’ ‘Well, from my experience, intellectuals are the worst by far. Same problem as with French novels. They spend so much time holding forth on literature and eroticism that they’ve forgotten how to tell stories and make love. Hyperintellectualism is an STD specific to France.’

Having endured an entire semester of lectures on the subject of desire qua transgression, Kerstin had all but given up on getting laid by this man. At long last, however, Alain-Marie decided she was ready to move on from theory to practice. They were walking side by side down the Rue Mouffetard, it was a gorgeous spring day, a market day, she was wearing a flimsy dress, and suddenly Alain-Marie caught her by the hand and dragged her into Saint-Médard Church. ‘What’s up?’ she asked him. ‘Shhh!’ he said, putting a finger to his lips. And then, gluing his body to Kerstin’s, he started caressing her through the silky material of her dress. Apart from a few little old ladies kneeling in prayer and an organist doggedly practising Bach, the church was empty. ‘Come with me, I want you,’ Alain-Marie whispered into Kerstin’s ear (fortunately one of her erogenous zones) — and, so saying, he pulled her into one of the small side chapels, where the confessionals were.

Though she knows this story off by heart, Subra is in seventh heaven.

The confessional turned out to be locked, foiling what must have been Alain-Marie’s plan — but they slipped behind it, into the furthermost corner of the chapel. Glancing up, Kerstin noticed that the painting on the wall across from them (chosen in advance or just surrealistic coincidence?) was none other than an Education of the Virgin. ‘I’m going to look after your education today, little one,’ the Marxist-Leninist muttered. Kerstin found this a bit ludicrous, given her age — but if it could help him, who cared? Turning her around and pressing up against her from behind, he lifted her pretty dress and pushed aside her panties with his fingers. ‘What sins have you committed this week?’ he asked. ‘You must tell me every one of them without exception…Sins in thought, word and deed…’ Sensing that something was about to happen at long last, Kerstin repressed a titter and blurted out, ‘Yes, Father, yes, Father…’ And he: ‘So you’ve been naughty? Very naughty?’ And she: ‘Yes, Father, very, very naughty.’ She wracked her brain in search of a nice juicy sin, but her imagination always failed her at critical moments like this, and she drew a blank. Luckily, though, she saw that Alain-Marie didn’t need it anymore, the Education of the Virgin would be enough — and since she herself was slippery with desire, things went smoothly from there on in. He continued to berate her in time with the organ music: ‘Ah, ah! You naughty little girl, here’s your punishment, here’s what you deserve, and if you go on sinning it’ll be worse next time, yes, much worse, I’ll take a candle and shove it…aaaaah!’—within a few seconds the inundation took place. ‘And you never enlightened him on the subject of your virginity?’ I asked Kerstin. ‘Of course not. If we spoil their pleasure we spoil our own, don’t we?’…

‘Yes,’ Rena acquiesces, nodding. ‘It is dreadful.’

Putti

There are limits to her spinelessness, though. She’s got to draw the line somewhere. Here in the Pitti Palace, she decides to draw it at the putti. Where the putti are concerned, she’ll refuse to go along with her stepmother. She’ll speak her mind.

Catching sight of a group of plump, ruddy, naked cherubim, Ingrid begins to coo. ‘Look, Rena — aren’t they sweet?’

‘No,’ snarls Rena.

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry, Ingrid, but I can’t stand putti. They make me sick. They embody everything I abhor. Vapid smiles, smooth pink skin…’

‘Rena! How can you say such a thing? You’re a mother! Don’t they remind you of your own boys when they were little?’ Ingrid bites her tongue, trying to take her question back — but it’s too late. The words are out; they hang there in the air between the two women…

‘No.’

‘Sorry.’

‘My kids are black.’

‘I know. I apologise. Well, they’re not black, really…More like café-au-lait. Anyway, I wasn’t talking about skin colour…’

Rena decides to go no further in that direction, though words of fury are stampeding in her brain. Well, let’s talk about it! Let’s talk about skin colour! Why do all those cute little angels have white skin? Why do Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the apostles all have white skin? Weren’t they Palestinians? Swarthy-skinned Semites, in other words? It’s a scandal! It’s racist propaganda, that’s what it is! She says none of this because it’s certainly not Ingrid’s fault if European painters hired local girls to pose for them, rather than importing more plausible-looking models from the East.

‘I meant the kids themselves,’ Ingrid goes on. ‘The babies themselves. All babies are cute, aren’t they? Don’t you find them irresistible?’

‘No, not those ones. Not babies with harps and wings. They make me want to puke.’

‘Rena!’

Seeing her stepmother’s eyes fill with horror, Rena breaks off, blushing.

Why do you have to make sure Ingrid knows how much you detest putti? queries Subra. You’re spoiling her pleasure, dragging her over the hot coals of your rage, as sadistically as Quintianus dragged Agatha…

To Rena’s surprise, Ingrid fulminates in turn. ‘Would you mind telling me,’ she says, raising her voice, ‘why it’s unthinkable for you to take an interest in pretty things? Why, to your mind, pretty can only mean insipid and despicable? Not just the cherubim and seraphim but flowers…landscapes…You haven’t even been taking pictures of our holiday! It’s not worth your while, is it? To you, anything that’s merely nice is a waste of time, isn’t it? You claim your photos tell the truth, and yet you intentionally leave out half the truth — the pleasant half. As far as you’re concerned, pleasant things are a load of…crap!’

To use that sort of vocabulary, Ingrid must be really mad.

‘Sorry,’ Rena says, contrite. ‘It’s silly to stand here fighting over putti. I’m just…allergic to innocence, that’s all. I don’t know why.’

Silence. Her head is spinning. Whatever happened to Renaissance painting?

Simon is sitting there snoring in a corner…

Might as well give up on the Palazzo Pitti.

Fuoco

All of a sudden the world is heavy. Everything they set their eyes on is heavy. The heavy sky seems clamped like an iron lid onto the heavy city of Florence. They go plodding heavily past the souvenir stands along the wall across from the museum, oppressed by the sight of the vendors sitting on their little stools looking bored to death.

Not exactly a thrilling existence, Rena thinks, to sit there from morning to night trying to convince tourists to buy your postcards and calendars, cups and various bits of junk embossed with reproductions of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century masterpieces, then take a two-hour bus ride home to an ugly distant suburb, catch up on the world’s bad news on TV while bolting down a plateful of spaghetti at a table covered with a wine-stained oilcloth, and fall into bed with your wife. Would you still have the modicum of energy and optimism you need to make love to the little lady? And what has her day been like? Did she tear her slip? Snap a heel off one of her sandals? Scream at the kids for getting on her nerves? Why doesn’t Aziz call me back?

Leaden thoughts, weighing her down. She feels like sinking to the ground in the middle of the Via Guicciardini and never getting up again.

Gee, what a fun holiday, Subra says.

Seeing a colourful sign advertising ice-cream cones, Ingrid realises she wouldn’t mind having one — her stomach is growling. What do they think? Ah, a plan at last!

They file into the café to choose their flavours. Simon insists on paying for the cones — but when the bill arrives it horrifies him. ‘You can get a quart of ice cream for that price at the local supermarket!’ And that’s just for take-away — if they eat their cones here they’ll be even more expensive. Humiliated at the rip-off, they file back out of the café.

A few yards down the street, Rena finds a charming little courtyard for them to sit down in. Perched on a low cement wall graced with flowerpots, they can admire the gay blue-and-yellow crockery in the nearby store window and slurp their cones to their hearts’ content. Okay, she doesn’t want to die anymore, for now.

Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso—oh, Dante, Dante! They’re inside of us — you knew that, didn’t you?

Suddenly they hear a commotion in the street behind them. They all get up, then rush to see what’s going on. A building is on fire, directly across from the little courtyard. Up and down the Via Guicciardini, crowds of people shout and jostle one another. A chaos of cars, sirens, fire engines, fumes of black smoke, panic-stricken faces. No way they can walk back across the Ponte Vecchio.

The hubbub reminds Rena of May 1968 in Paris as described by Kerstin. Simon would probably get a kick out of those stories, but Ingrid definitely would not.

Tell me, Subra suggests.

‘The funny thing about my Maoist lover — no, the sad thing, really,’ Kerstin told me, ‘was that in private he just couldn’t get it up. We were lucky, though — the lovely uproar of May ‘68 came to our assistance. Barricades, street battles, riot police — all that worked just fine, so when June rolled around I discovered I was pregnant. Naturally, fatherhood was out of the question for my handsome Trotskyite. While libertines endlessly repeat the platitude that eroticism is connected to death, they refuse to entertain the notion that it might be connected to birth. Anathema, for the bellows of transgressive orgasms to give rise to the gurgling of babies! So their charming libertine girlfriends frequently wound up on their backs with their feet in stirrups, having their entrails mauled by metallic instruments that gave them internal hæmorrhages and horrifying nightmares…A couple of my closest friends had been rendered sterile and depressive by that sort of butchery, so I was scared stiff of abortionists and had no intention of putting my life in their hands. My handsome, red-neckerchiefed revolutionary vanished into thin air. After the birth of our child, Pierre, I’d sometimes call Alain-Marie in the middle of the night—”Here, your son wants to talk to you”—and hold the receiver to the baby’s screaming mouth.’

I nodded, imagining the scene. ‘And did you ever tell Pierre he’d been conceived at Saint-Médard’s?’ ‘Not in the church. In the middle of the Rue Gay-Lussac at five in the morning.’ ‘Did you ever tell him?’ ‘Are you kidding?’ ‘And did he see his father, growing up?’ ‘No, virtually never. But I married Edmond five years later, and he was a father to Pierre — a marvellous one — until his death last year…’ ‘I’m sorry, Kerstin, forgive me for prying but…what about Alain-Marie?’ ‘Listen, Rena. Get this through your head. Alain-Marie has hated his son at every stage of his existence. Disgusting fœtus, bawling baby, mumbling toddler, pimply teenager, and now — by far the worst — tall, dark, handsome young rival!’

I couldn’t help laughing. The idea of an ageing libertine devoured by jealousy of his own son was irresistibly funny.

Paradiso

Night is falling by the time they get back to the Piazza San Giovanni; the tourists have dispersed and the Baptistery stands deserted. Here’s their chance to study the famous gilded Doors of Paradise. But…do they feel like it?

Putting on her reading glasses, Rena holds the guidebook up under a streetlight. ‘Ghiberti, 1425,’ she reads. ‘This door is his masterpiece. It took him twenty-five years to complete.’

Silence.

‘Before becoming a sculptor,’ she goes on, ‘he was a goldsmith.’

More silence.

‘His techniques’—one last try—’range from high relief to a mere shiver on the chiselled surface of cast metal.’

Hm, that’s not half bad. Not easy to translate, though. Can gold shiver in English?

No, it isn’t working. They don’t know how to look at this door. Don’t have the strength to identify the ten Biblical scenes — this one’s Noah, that one’s Esau, and over there must be Abraham’s philoxenia…

What the hell is philoxenia, anyway? wonders Rena.

Maybe it’s like xenophilia, Subra suggests. People who, like yourself, are keen on foreigners? Sorry.

Ingrid, however, still has the strength to talk about World War Two. She tells them how the Wehrmacht soldiers marched down the streets of Rotterdam singing at the tops of their lungs in German, giving her a permanent allergy to that language. Obligingly, Rena denounces the Third Reich’s cult of obedience. Simon chimes in, wondering why people are so often happy to abdicate their will… nicht wahr, Abraham?

Sorry, dear Ghiberti. Yet I assure you, we’re not betraying your masterpiece. Past, present and future: same abdication, same stupidity, same massacres.

Once Ingrid gets started there’s no stopping her, so the war rages on throughout their evening meal. It’s surreal.

A terrace restaurant on a little square near San Lorenzo market—the Winter of Hunger—they order grilled fish—the atrocious famine of January 1945—it’ll take a little while—we waited for days, for weeks—they’re in a good mood—there was nothing to eat, no supplies coming into Rotterdam—no matter, we’ve got good wine—we were starving, overcome with anguish—glad to be together—we stole lumps of coal down by the train tracks—this squid is scrumptious! — we melted snow for drinking water—the mullet, the bass, the gilt-head! — and then my father’s mad decision—lovely, everything’s just lovely—to travel to Aalten on foot—a bit of lemon? — 185 kilometres of cold, hunger and illness—another drop of wine? — I was the youngest, sent to beg at farmhouse doors—dolce, dolce vita—the bombing of Arnhem, huge holes in the ground—the air so mellow—bomb shelters in Baarlo, rockets, sirens—the perfection of this square—a bomb fell right on top of the shelter—its lamplit terraces bubbling with laughter and conversation—everyone was killed—If only life could—women were mummified as they sat with their children on their laps—be like this—poisoned by toxic gases, their bodies intact…

The third day is over.

Back in her room at last, Rena calls Aziz, Toussaint and Kerstin, then three or four other friends…

She gets nothing but answering machines. What on earth is going on in France?