Infrared

FRIDAY

Diluvio

In the offices of On the Fringe, Schroeder is showing me the mock-up of the cover for the next issue. To my surprise, it’s a frontal portrait of a voluptuous nude, her legs cut off at mid-thigh, her head tossed back. ‘What’s this?’ I ask. ‘Have we decided to sell ass like everyone else?’ Schroeder looks a bit uncomfortable. ‘It’s because we’re in the red just now,’ he says. ‘Still, it’s a good photo, isn’t it?’ As I look again, the cover suddenly comes to life. The photo turns into a film and a baby bursts out of the dark triangle at the woman’s crotch. It’s violent and magnificent. A few seconds later, a geyser comes gushing from the same spot, literally inundating the child. Schroeder is stunned speechless, but I assure him this sort of flooding is fairly common in the aftermath of a delivery, adding that I experienced it myself when I gave birth to Thierno.

I wonder why I said that in the dream? Rena muses. It’s not true at all — I experienced no flooding of any kind after my deliveries. Only before, when my waters broke…

Not only that, Subra points out, but Schroeder never consults you about cover illustrations.

Another dream about whores qua madonnas…Reminds me of the pin-ups in all the trucks that picked me up hitch-hiking when I was fifteen or sixteen. When the drivers noticed my eyes glued to the photos of those broads with siliconed boobs, dumb looks on their faces, eyes half-shut and pointy pink tongues between their teeth, they would blush and apologise. ‘Sorry,’ they’d say, in French or in English, to the skinny adolescent they mistook for an innocent child.

Heavens, how often did that happen? Subra says, with the faintest trace of irony in her voice.

Oh, dozens of times, Rena answers airily. Er, would you believe… ten? How about…three? Anyway, all the truck drivers said the same thing: ‘What are you doing hitch-hiking around all by yourself? Don’t you know how dangerous it is? You’re lucky I came along, you could have been picked up by some pervert, I picked you up to protect you from perverts…’ But as we moved from coffee to sandwiches and from conversation to jokes, they invariably wound up pleading with me to climb in the back with them, into the bed behind the cab, with its stained wrinkly sheets, reeking of the tobacco, sweat, and sperm of their solitary nights. I saw no reason to decline, for I’d never believed in God, was on the Pill, and passionately longed to know what adults knew and to do what adults did. So, time and again, I revelled in the sensation of their scrapy cheeks against my neck, their impatient cocks seeking out my cunt, their groans of climax, and their surprised embarrassment, afterwards, to find themselves with a minor. ‘Sorry,’ they’d mutter. And I’d forgive them, because I knew, had known for a long time already (ever since the garage event) how helpless men are in the face of this mystery, how much it scares and stupefies them, how ardently they respond Yes and No simultaneously when confronted with the simple fact, as self-evident as it is unfathomable, that all of us come out of a cunt, owe our presence on this Earth to a cunt…

Never have I forgotten the valuable lesson Rowan taught me that day. Scared stiff — not only pubescent boys in garages and tenement basements but also Hasidim and Taliban, pure hard men of every religious war and gang bang in history, Sadean libertines who bind and lacerate, desperate militiamen who rape and mutilate — all, all — fear and trembling and sickness unto death.

Tell me, Subra says.

‘Meet you in the garage at five,’ Rowan said to me, and when I showed up at five on the dot I wasn’t even surprised to discover that I was yet again the only girl, a diminutive seven-year-old girl surrounded by half a dozen eleven-year-old boys…‘You know how to play spin-the-bottle, Rena?’ ‘No…’ ‘Look.’ We got into a circle, kneeling on the cement floor, and set an empty glass Coke bottle at its centre. One kid set the bottle spinning (I can still hear the scrape of thick glass on cement); the child it pointed to when it stopped had to remove a piece of clothing. But after a few rounds and the indifferent shedding of their shoes and socks, the boys began to cheat, shoving and jostling one another and re-spinning the bottle so that it pointed always and only to me, and Rowan insisted I comply, reminding me I’d sworn obedience, and saying, ‘Come on now, Rena, don’t be a sissy, take it off.’ And since I dreaded nothing in the world more than being deemed a sissy by my brother, I kept my eyes trained on him as my hands peeled away the final shreds of clothing — hair ribbons, undershirt, finally my flower-printed pink cotton undies. Seeing the other boys’ eyes fill with apprehension, I realised that Rowan had selected those of his schoolmates who’d never before seen a girl in the nude. At first they stood there and gawked in disbelief; then they muttered and mumbled and averted their eyes. ‘Show them, Rena,’ Rowan said. ‘Go on, show them all you’ve got!’

And because my brother and I were so powerfully together, because I felt his confidence and his love, I stepped daintily out of my panties and thrust my tiny hips forward, reaching down to part the lips of my vagina with my fingers. Several of the boys drew back in fear. I felt a thrill of pride go through me, flushing upwards from chest to brow. Made euphoric by my power and their fear, I moved towards them, brandishing my sex at them, and Rowan snorted with laughter as his friends rose hastily to their feet, stammering and blushing and stumbling backwards, breaking up the circle, blurting out excuses, urgent matters they had to attend to, things they’d just remembered now, important reasons for which they had to get home lickety-split.

It’s a gesture you see in thousands of Japanese photographs, a gesture that’s become banal in nightclubs in Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighbourhood. The stripper walks up to the edge of the stage, her body ferociously protected and contained by her black and strass costume (fishnet stockings, basque, stiletto heels). The clients swarm up to her and, using her long varnished fingernails, she parts the lips of her vagina — Yes, dear children, this is where you come from. As incredible as it may seem, each and every one of you entered the world through here. Araki claims the first thing he did when his mother gave birth to him was to turn around and photograph her cunt. His own beloved wife had no children; she died young of uterine cancer. After her death he began taking pictures of nude women — thousands of them, some prostitutes, others not, but virtually all of them young, with vapid smiles on their faces. Again and again he zoomed in on their cunts. Seen by Araki, flowers, too, become vaginas, their petals labia majora and minora, their pistils clitorises. He captures them in close-up—’because, quite simply,’ he says, ‘I love vaginas. I wish my eyes could travel inside the womb. In spirit I keep getting closer and closer.’ Yes — if men have drawn and filmed and painted and photographed the female body from time immemorial, if they’ve devoted so much time and energy to scrutinising, imagining, projecting, fantasising, veiling, unveiling, hiding, revealing, reworking, decorating and banishing it, it’s because everything revolves around that, the vortex both boys and girls burst out of, the opening that bespeaks…not castration, as Freud stupidly claimed, but rather the void that precedes and follows being.

Precious few women, on the other hand, have painted or photographed male genitals, despite their reputation for being so much more visible! Even I who specialise in the invisible world of heat — night scenes, the hidden face of reality — even I who have always been insatiably curious about the wonders men carry around down there, so different from each other in shape and colour, smell and size — even I, who love to pay the most attentive homage to those wonders with my hands, eyes, lips, and tongue — even I, who relish every micro-stage of undressing a man, figuring out what sort of trousers he’s wearing and how they open, undoing the button or the hook or both, feeling his member’s soft hardness already beginning to swell, trying to guess which direction it’s pointing, undoing the fly and slipping my hand through the opening, still outside of the underpants for the time being, that’s one of my favourite stages — pressing my hand, cheeks, and nose into his crotch, feeling him harden against my face, finally slipping one hand behind the elastic waistband or through the opening of his underpants, sometimes gently removing with my finger or tongue the single pearly drop that oozes from the tip, then circling the stiffened organ itself with my warm and avid hand — even I don’t photograph these things I so adore.

For Fabrice I regret it — I’m sure he would have given his consent. My beloved Haitian husband complied with all my wishes. I was a few weeks shy of nineteen when we married. I’d just arrived in Paris with a scholarship to pursue my studies in photography, and turned my back on the hip neighbourhoods, like Saint-Germain-des-Prés or the Marais, in favour of the city’s northern and eastern edges, where immigrants tend to gravitate because the rents are lower. Fabrice and I were both living in Montreuil when we met at the flea market there. Entranced by the sight of his long fingers on the red Moroccan leather case he’d just purchased for his manuscripts, and with the white pants he was wearing in mid-winter, I entered his bed that same afternoon. He read his poems out loud to me and allowed me to photograph him. That was in December 1978; I became his wife in January; in February we celebrated my naturalisation with a bottle of Asti Spumante; and in April my husband was diagnosed with acute kidney failure. Fabrice and I didn’t have time to disappoint each other.

Oh, the abysmal anguish of that diagnosis. ‘Come off it, doctor. What are you talking about? I’ve just married the most wonderful man in the world and you’re telling me he’s going to die? Come on. You can’t be serious.’ I remember that nephrologist very clearly. His name was Dujardin and he had a salt-and-pepper beard. One day he came in to check the fistula he’d created in Fabrice’s left arm for dialysis. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked the patient. ‘You’re looking a bit pale’—and Fabrice burst out laughing because he was just as black as usual.

Another day, mad with fear, I got down on my knees in Dr Dujar-din’s office, feverishly begging him to allow me to give Fabrice one of my kidneys (we had the same blood type, a rare one) — but the answer was no. The law stipulated that donors had to be either newly dead, the patient’s blood relatives, or both. ‘Besides,’ Dr Dujardin said, walking me to the door of his office with an arm nonchalantly thrown around my shoulders, ‘there’s no way I’m going to carve up such a lovely body. Out of the question.’

I managed to smile back at him, but not too much, just enough so that he’d allow me to take photos of Fabrice anywhere in the hospital including the dialysis centre, and to declare his room off-limits to the nurses during my visits. The imminence of death seemed to make Fabrice’s whole body as swollen and hypersensitive as his sex. I came to see him every day but only dared slip into bed with him on the days midway between his sessions with ‘The Machine’. Then, no longer exhausted by the previous session and not yet exhausted by the impurities accumulated in his blood, he had energy and could stay inside me for hours on end, hard and happy. We’d fuck calmly, casually, talking and teasing each other even as we fucked; now and then our passion would suddenly burst into flames, and when that happened he’d give himself up to me, tossing his head back and saying, ‘Yes, yes, fuck me, my love, fuck me, baby’ the way a woman might say to a man—‘Yes my love, take me, take me’—and, acutely aware that the illness was destroying his beauty (his hair was greying by the day and he was putting on weight), I photographed him a few times like that — naked and totally abandoned beneath me, yes, while he was still inside of me and I was fucking him so to speak with his own cock, I’d get him in the viewfinder and press the shutter again and again, moved to tears by Fabrice’s wild beauty when he came. ‘More, my love,’ he’d say, ‘more, more, take me, yes, fuck me, give me your syrup…’ Looking at him through the viewfinder I’d see him as a child, an adolescent, a youth, an old man, I was insanely in love with this poet and I was about to lose him, and so, even as I fucked him, I took pictures of him in that position of utter abandonment, his head tossed back, his neck offered up to me and his lips moving, murmuring — until the explosion of light made me release the camera, arch up, then collapse, laughing and weeping myself to sleep upon his chest.

My, my, says Subra. Are you sure all that happened in the hospital?

Well, it might have been at our place, between hospitalisations. But what I wanted to say was, why would I have taken photos of his cock? The upright peckers immortalised with maniacal symmetry by Mapplethorpe leave me cold. Body parts in general bore me, and the only time I ever made pornographic photos, with Yasu my Japanese ‘twin’ (polaroids of our organs in close-up, intensely involved in this or that), I threw them out afterwards because they’d lost their meaning. What I care about are stories. Faces always tell stories, bodies sometimes do, body parts, rarely. Flashing — an exhibitionist who gets off on the shock in a girl’s eyes when he suddenly, unexpectedly shows her his penis — is the exact equivalent of peep-shows, where men pay to spend a few seconds watching flesh in movement…Furtive, transgressive, breathtaking bits of image, fragmentary as hallucinations — infra-meaning, infra-syntax, flash, flash, flash! Nothing could be more at odds with my own æsthetics. My gaze insists on moving slowly and deeply, so I never use flash. I put a filter over my light source so it won’t dazzle or surprise my subject. I try to make the moment vibrate to suggest duration.

My credo: photograph only what I can love. Turn my gaze into that love, always and only. Of all my photography projects, the one I’m proudest of is a series of sleeping nudes called N(o)us: bodies of all ages, colours and sexes, obese and scrawny, smooth and wrinkly, hairless and hirsute, spotted with tattoos, birthmarks and scars, dreaming and breathing, defenceless, vulnerable, mortal, curled up in the lovely abandonment of slumber…Each and every one of them is beautiful.

Fabrice and I conceived Toussaint during one of those, shall we say, hospitable afternoons. Six weeks into the pregnancy, I started bringing in ultrasound pictures of our baby, and Fabrice pretended to confuse my amniotic liquid with a revealing bath. ‘You’re right, it’s the same thing,’ I told him. Yes, the same thrill of surprise when you see a form coalescing out of nowhere—here it comes. This curve, this spectrum of greys, these increasingly ramified, complex features — yes here it comes, my love, oh look, here it comes, here it is…Something is arriving, someone is here — alive, its tiny heart beating! I had the most incandescent orgasms of my life during that pregnancy. Fabrice died a few weeks before our baby was born. He’d received the kidney of a young girl who’d died in a car accident but his body had rejected the transplant. Now that body, every square centimetre of which I once licked and stroked and kissed and actively worshipped, is buried somewhere in the Cité Soleil neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, I’m not even sure where…

Really? Subra asks, feigning surprise. You don’t know where your first husband is buried?

Okay, okay, I know. He’s in Montreuil cemetery.

Time to get up, for Christ’s sake.

Semplici

It’s nearly eleven o’clock already. The hotel proprietor is conveying his annoyance by clattering the cups and saucers as loudly as he can — Enough, already! Do these Canadese think they can just sit around all day, the way they do back at home in their wigwams?

‘We thought it would be a good idea to start by going for a nice walk in a park,’ Ingrid says, helping Simon to his feet. ‘Get some exercise to perk us up a bit. Right, Dad? We found some gardens on the map, very close by.’

They set out, but the park isn’t as close by as it looks (the map doesn’t show all the streets). Their nerves are rapidly frayed by the incessant, invasive noise of impatient cars revving their motors and honking their horns in the narrow streets. Simon has become hypersensitive to traffic noise since the City of Westmount decided to run an expressway right under the windows of their home. Remembering this, Rena begins to suffer from what she imagines to be his discomfort, and also from Ingrid’s anxiety about how the noise must be bothering him; their misery compounding her own, in a state of acute distress within minutes. At the same time, she’s experiencing a strange epiphany. Thanks to the birdcalls, the gradually evaporating haze, and the greenery on ochre walls, she finds herself magically lifted out of this scene and wafted back to a solitary walk she took a dozen years ago in Mumbai’s Hanging Gardens.

She’d come to the city to work with women in the red-light district, but within a day or two she’d found herself overwhelmed by their sheer number — there were thousands of them, living in tiny rooms stacked like beehive cells in three- and four-storey buildings — street after street, an entire neighbourhood run by the mafia. ‘Oh, there are worse places than this,’ smiled Arunha, the young woman she eventually chose to photograph. ‘Here, at least, we can go out in the morning, walk around, chat together, do a bit of shopping…In other neighbourhoods there are ten-year-old girls locked up in cages.’ After one of these conversations, Rena had gone back to her hotel feeling suicidal. The next day, rising early, she’d walked all the way up Malabar Hill to the Hanging Gardens and been revived by their beauty. And today, even as she moves with excruciating slowness through the streets of Florence, she is unexpectedly soothed by the memory of Indian greenery and Indian haze, the mingled scent of smoke, musk and dung that hangs in the air over Indian cities.

You’ll survive, Subra whispers. Tomorrow you’ll rent a car and go speeding through the hills of Tuscany, the days will pass, they’re already passing, this trip will end, you’ll return to Paris, recover your apartment, your lover and your job, pick up where you left off… Don’t worry. Every step you take in Florence is a step towards Aziz’s arms.

When they reach the Via P.A. Micheli at last, it turns out that the Semplici gardens, though clearly indicated on the map, belong to the university and are not open to the public.

Through an archway, Rena glimpses flowerbeds and trimmed hedges. ‘Let’s give it a try,’ she says.

Red light? Go for it! Subra teases her. Barrier? Plough right through.

A rigid little guard in uniform rushes up to them at once: it’s obvious that no one in their trio belongs to either the faculty or the student body. ‘May I help you?’ the man queries aggressively in Italian.

With an apologetic smile, Rena explains that her parents are exhausted. Would it be all right if they rested for a moment on a bench?

Her smile is anything but hypocritical — to her mind, elderly people should be allowed to rest on benches the world over, and she hopes to assist the little guard in acknowledging this simple human fact. He hesitates. On the one hand, he, too, has elderly parents; on the other, he yearns to demonstrate his power. Taking advantage of his momentary paralysis, as with the young Lubavitch from Outrem-ont those many years ago, Rena catches his gaze and hangs on to it. A good three seconds elapse.

Hmm. Losing your touch! Subra says. What will become of you a few years down the track? Once wrinkles, bags and dark circles have done permanent damage to your lovely gaze, and the seduction techniques you’ve been polishing for decades no longer suffice to get you what you want, what you’re so utterly accustomed to obtaining…

‘No photos,’ the man mutters at last, staring pointedly at the Canon between Rena’s breasts.

Be my guest, she thinks. Go ahead and stare at the nipples pointing through my black T-shirt, if it makes you happy. Get an eyeful; both of us are mortal anyway.

Not much to see, if the truth be told, Subra teases her. Not exactly Fellini material…

Seated on a bench surrounded by idyllic Florentine beauty, Ingrid and Simon decide that now is a good time to fill Rena in on the details of their recent visit to Holland — the ageing, illnesses and deaths of Ingrid’s siblings, the new jobs, children and divorces of her nieces and nephews…Rena nods absently, her eyes following the students and professors as they wend their way across the campus grounds.

You hate universities, don’t you, Daddy? Because of that Ph.D. you never finished. The thesis on The Origins of Consciousness, which weighed on all our lives for ten long years. You tried so hard… When reality resisted, you struck out…mutilated…and turned away, stunned by your failure. Here in Florence — yes, such a thing truly can exist — joia della sapienza! Look how beautiful the buildings are, amidst sunlit greenery and flowers. Look at the warmth of their colours — ochre, yellow, beige, brown, pale pink. Look how eagerly the students run up the staircases to attend their lectures in Philosophy, History, Mathematics, Philology, and Life Sciences…Never could you have found that sort of harmony and peace of mind in the grey, glacial city of Montreal, amidst the forbidding stone buildings of McGill…All so long ago now. All so terribly too late. Come, close your eyes, relax…The origins of consciousness can wait.

Right. So…maybe we could er…do something with the rest of the day? Fine, no problem, we can go on avoiding the Uffici, but… couldn’t we maybe take in…ah…(she checks the map)…the Archaeological Museum? They’re off.

Gatto

All of a sudden Ingrid announces that she feels thirsty and wouldn’t mind stopping somewhere for a Coke.

No, thinks Rena. I will not scream with impatience. I will not rant and rave at this couple’s mind-boggling force of inertia. I will not protest at how they keep pitilessly plunging me into banality.

On the contrary, Subra puts in, you should take advantage of this rare opportunity to study banality at close range. The tiny stuffed kitten dangling from the key to the ladies’ toilet, for instance. Now, there’s an object that unquestionably plays a minor role in the history of humanity…But since the signora who runs the café felt it deserved to be attached to a key, it must hold meaning for her. Did she buy it herself or receive it as a gift? Did it remind her of a cat she loved when she was little, but that unfortunately got run over by a car or savaged by a dog? You are here, Rena, and nowhere else. Why are you always convinced the important stuff is happening elsewhere?

Oh, poor, banal moment of my life — will no one ever sing your praises? Sitting on the toilet, Rena takes a few photos of the ridiculous stuffed kitten. That moment fades and vanishes, and the next one comes into being. It’s Ingrid’s turn to pee while Simon and Rena wait for her outside, leaning against the wall, side by side.

Silence between the two of them. The sun is at its zenith. Its golden rays pour down over the church steeple, warming the wall behind them. This moment she does not photograph — but it, too, fades and vanishes. She’ll remember the stuffed kitten for the rest of her life and forget the church wall, warm and luminous.

Cartoline

Here they are in the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, and once again — there’s nothing for it — Rena seethes inwardly with rage.

Most Holy Annunciation, my eye! My ass! Mary didn’t get knocked up by a whispered word from the angel Gabriel, she got knocked up by some guy’s tool. Same goes for your mom — and yours — and yours!

Oh! Shocking! Subra laughs.

Enough already! When will we finally cut the bullshit? When will we stop propagating the ridiculously immature fairytale of immaculate conception, invented by Neolithic human males? Like all mothers, Mary got herself shtupped. Whether she was well or badly shtupped, whether her deflowerer was a brute or a delicate lover no one knows for sure; what we do know for sure is that a man came along and ploughed her furrows, so when oh when will we put an end to all this nonsense about virgin mothers? That’s where East meets West. Pornographers want eroticism without procreation, Talibans want procreation without eroticism; the idea of orgasmic moms is unbearable to everyone.

She hesitates. Decides to ask a passer-by.

‘Excuse me, is this the Archaeological Museum?’

‘No,’ he says, ‘this is the Hospital of the Innocents.’

‘I see…’

Scratching her head, she checks it out in the guidebook.

Not half bad, either. Also designed by Brunelleschi. Painting gallery, arcades, Della Robbia medallions. Suddenly she feels dizzy. Why go here rather than there, visit this rather than that, guzzle down these facts rather than those? What is it we are hoping to see? What are we looking for in this city — and, more generally, in life?

At the thought of giving in to indifference and starting to flounder through the same fuzzy, amorphous time as Simon and Ingrid, Rena begins to panic. She clings desperately to their ‘plan’ (devised a mere three minutes ago) to visit the Archaeological Museum. Bravely following the passer-by’s directions, they strike off down the Via della Colonna. As usual, the footpaths are too narrow for them to talk or walk together, and trucks and buses keep thundering past. As usual, her father finds any number of things worth paying attention to along the way. As usual, Rena takes the lead, walks too quickly, and has to stop every few yards to wait for them. Seeing an Italian flag up ahead, she tells herself it probably marks the museum entrance. Oh, but it’s hopelessly far away, we’ll never get there, ever. Might as well turn around and go back right now — first to the hotel, then to our respective countries — this whole trip is one enormous mistake…

Her mobile rings. It’s Thierno.

‘Hey, kid.’

‘Hi, how’s it going?’

‘Good!’

Incredible, Rena thinks, to have this sort of laconic exchange—’How’s it going?’ ‘Good!’—with a person who once lived inside you and whose development you supervised for twenty years, a person you taught to speak, to whom you read a thousand bedtime stories, for whom you cooked countless meals, whose homework you helped with and whose ill health you nursed, whose problems you listened to and whose friends you welcomed into your home. Incredible to end up exchanging platitudes with your own children.

Yes, says Subra. Don’t forget, though: you were terse over the phone with your own folks, when you were a teenager.

‘Where are you?’ she asks Thierno. (This, too, she has learned to say.)

‘Still in Dakar. Quick, remind me — what are the rules for three-man crib?’

‘Well, there are two schools of thought. Either you deal five cards to each player plus one to the crib and each player puts a card in the crib, or else you deal six cards like in the regular game — in which case the dealer puts two cards in his crib and the others put one in the crib and another on the bottom of the pack.’

‘Which way’s the most authentic?’

‘The first. Your dad and I invented the other one. Generally speaking, it results in superior hands and inferior cribs.’

‘Got it. Thanks, Ma. Take care.’

‘Bye, my love.’

By the time Rena has finished shaking her head at the idea that this card game, originally a pastime for idle Victorian ladies, has spread all the way to Senegal via Australia, Canada and France, they find themselves at the ticket desk of the Archaeological Museum.

Gioielli

The minute they enter the first room, though, she feels like turning around and walking out again. Damn it all to hell, what are they doing in ancient Egypt? They’ve come here to see Tuscany, not ancient Egypt. They can see ancient Egypt any old day, in Boston, New York or Paris, whereas Tuscany…

Whereas Tuscany what? Subra queries. What would seeing Tuscany be like?

Well…I suppose we might as well take a look, since we’re here.

Gold, planished 5600 years ago. One display case after another of precious stones — necklaces, bracelets, earrings — a bedazzlement. As they move through the cool calm rooms, Ingrid’s voice drones on and on about Rotterdam yesterday and today, the harshness of the post-war years…Stop it! Rena refrains from screaming at her. What have you come here for? Do you want to see these wonders or don’t you? Look — right there, before your very eyes — planished gold and precious stones from ancient Egypt! Enjoy them or I’ll kill you!

Swallowing down her annoyance, she says nothing. After all, she tells herself, the Theban courtesans who wore those jewels were probably chatterboxes, too.

Yes, Subra murmurs. And moreover, they had slaves.

Romulus e Remus

On the second floor, her father suddenly tugs at her sleeve. ‘Rena, look!’

She glances impatiently at what he’s pointing to — a block of pink granite with a fragment of bas-relief representing a child and an animal — fine.

‘What do you think that’s about?’

‘Frankly, Dad,’ she says with condescending kindness, ‘I wouldn’t presume to have an opinion on the matter. Egyptologists, historians, and archaeologists have been studying these objects for centuries. They know the answer, so there’s no point in our guessing at it. Just a sec.’

Grabbing the sheet of plasticised cardboard listing the objects in the room, she finds the granite block and reads aloud, rather haughtily: ‘An extremely rare representation of the cow Hathor suckling Horemheb, the Pharaoh who came to power after Tutankhamun’s death (fourteenth century B.C.).’ You see, Dad? she natters on, though not out loud. No point in our having an opinion.

My own periods of lactation, she continues in an aside to Subra — and to a lesser extent, my pregnancies — were the only times I ever had breasts worthy of the name. Such an insanely erotic experience, those first months of motherhood. Deep sweet perpetual inner climax. Sheer joy of being so passionately desired and caressed, and fulfilling someone’s needs so utterly. Exhilaration of having another person’s body, first nestled inside your own, then perfectly fed by it: the baby’s lips tugging away at one nipple while its tiny fingers play with the other, making it stiffen in pleasure. In Renaissance paintings you sometimes see baby Jesus playing with his mom’s breast that way…

Yeah, Subra says, but the Madonna never seems turned on by it.

Women are right to hide that pleasure from men, Rena laughs. They’d have good reason to be jealous. Poor guys — forever at a distance, dry, tense, nervous, on their guard, never entirely convinced that they’re loved, wanted, needed…

‘Even so,’ Simon insists, not offended by her peremptory tone of voice, ‘doesn’t it remind you of something?’

‘What do you mean, something? Frankly, there’s not much point in our…in our…Wait a minute.’

At last Rena looks. Really looks. That’s all her father has been asking her to do.

A two-ton block of pink granite brought back from Egypt by the Romans…The Romans, when? Why? Look. Look at what the bas-relief is about: a beast suckling a boy.

Suddenly it’s obvious. Blindingly clear. No doubt about it, Rena tells herself. My father is right and the specialists are a bunch of nincompoops. If the Romans dragged this monumental sculpture all the way from Egypt to Italy in the third century A.D. (and just think what that entailed: the weight…the distance…in the boats they had back then…and no Suez Canal!), it was because it spoke to them of themselves. Yes: in Horemheb they recognised Romulus; and in Hathor, the She-wolf.

One point for you, Dad.

Horemheb suckled at Hathor’s breast…Romulus at the She-wolf’s… Jesus at Mary’s…Pico at Giulia Boiardo’s…How about you, Dad? Whose nipples would you have needed to drink from, in order to become immortal?

Granny Rena’s two children were born in the sinister 1930s. Years of painful exile for her, persecution and terror for all the Jews of Europe. If she nursed her children, they can only have drunk down anxiety and bitterness along with their breastmilk…

That’s how destinies get forged, Subra says philosophically.

Rowan and I were Lisa’s Romulus and Remus, I know that. Remus was an afterthought, a usurper, an impostor, I know that. In the first sculptures of the She-Wolf that symbolises Rome, only Romulus crouches beneath her, sucking at her teat, I know that… Yes, I’m familiar with that scene now. Rowan told me about it last summer — first laughing, then in tears.

Tell me, Subra says.

I’d gone to Vancouver to help him celebrate his forty-ninth birthday. He didn’t want to make a big deal about his fiftieth like everybody else—’Why do people always celebrate round figures?’ he asked me over the phone. ‘I mean, it’s completely arbitrary, isn’t it? I’ve never liked round figures and I see no reason to celebrate them. My own lucky number has always been seven, so I’ve decided to throw a big party for my seven-times-seventh birthday. Please try to come, Rena…’ So I made the trip.

It’s about eight thousand kilometres from Paris to Vancouver. I flew all that distance just to see my big brother’s eyes light up — those beautiful green eyes we both inherited from our Australian mom. Some fifty friends of his — musicians and actors of both sexes, mainly gays and lesbians — had converged for the celebration, which was heavily laced with gin, cocaine and a number of other magic potions. When we finally found ourselves alone together at around three in the morning, Rowan suggested we go on celebrating for a while and I said yes, I said yes, I’ve always said yes to my older brother. ‘For me it’s already twelve noon,’ I told him. ‘I can’t possibly be tired.’ Rowan laughed. So we talked for another three hours — or rather, since gin loosens his tongue, Rowan talked for another three hours, and by the time dawn started whitening the sky he was telling me about my arrival in his life when he was four.

‘You took Lisa away from me,’ he said. ‘One day, I remember, she was nursing you and I tried to drink from the other breast but she pushed me away. She had eyes only for you. I wanted to kill you, you know? I mean, it wasn’t personal or anything,’ he added, laughing. ‘I had nothing against you personally. I just wanted you to disappear and for things to go back to the way they were before. Was that too much to ask — that things should go back to the way they were before? I think it was a completely reasonable thing to ask. The idea was to do it very gently. No bloodshed or anything. Just to keep you from breathing, so you’d go back to wherever you came from.’ Again he laughed. ‘So first I held a pillow over your face while you were asleep, but you woke up and started crying and Mommy ran in looking horrified. “What’s the matter? Rowan, what’s the matter? What’s that pillow doing in Rena’s crib? I told you babies slept without pillows, didn’t I?” “Yes.” “No pillows for babies. Right?” “Yes.” “Will you be sure to remember that next time?” “Yes.” “Rena doesn’t like sleeping with a pillow, she’s not big enough yet. For you it’s different, you’re a big boy. Do you understand?” “Yes…” So I went on to my second plan — strangulation. I fetched a scarf, slipped it around your neck, tied the two ends together and pulled with all my might…But again Mommy woke up. And what happened next was awful.’

Tears were reddening his eyes now, his cheeks were grey with stubble and his features were twisted into a grimace of pain; my usually handsome brother looked ugly at that moment, exhausted, inebriated and ugly in the pallid light of dawn. ‘I’ll…never…I can’t ever, ever forget it. How Lisa’s face came right up close to mine. Scarlet with rage. Deformed by hatred. Her mouth open, and her lips — those sensual lips I so loved to kiss — all sort of stiff and square. She was screaming at me. “Ro-o-o-o-wa-a-a-a-a-a-an! How could you do-o-o such a thing? Do you reali-i-i-i-ise, Rowan? Rowan, you almost killed your little sii-i-i-ister!” I couldn’t stand it, so I turned off the sound. I could tell she was still screaming from the way her mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear her anymore…and then…in that silence…she started strangling me…She probably did it…so… so…so I’d realise what I had done…so I’d see what it felt like not to be able to breathe…“But Mommy,” I wanted to say to her…“But Mommy, it’s just because I love you so much!” What could I do to make her love me again? “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, it’s because I love you, Mommy! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…”’

Rowan was sobbing softly, his head on the counter. I came and put an arm around his shoulders. Does he strangle his lovers, too? I wondered. Or ask them to strangle him? I’d be moved but not surprised if the answer was yes…‘Hey, bro’. It’s all over now…Listen, it’s getting late, I’m going to put you to bed.’

At least Lisa nursed you, Subra points out.

Yeah, I was glad to learn that, says Rena. It’s something, anyway, isn’t it?

They move together into the hall of mummies.

Mummia

Penumbra. They’re all alone in the enormous room. (The conformist crowds can keep the Duomo and the Uffizi!) Profound, disturbing mystery of the swaddled dead.

Oh, the Egyptians! Peerless embalmers! Unsurpassable technicians of the Passage…

As they move past the sarcophagi with their magnificent painted effigies of the departed, they notice some of them are open, their contents visible. The ancient strips of cloth, though still impeccably twined, are tainted and tattered. The presence of human corpses is palpable.

‘Brrr,’ says Ingrid.

And Simon: ‘Do you think they really believed their slaves would go on working for them in the Great Beyond?’

And Rena (still humming her no-point-in-having-an-opinion refrain): ‘I mostly think we can’t project ourselves into the minds of pharaohs.’

And Simon: ‘Really? Why?’

And she: ‘Well, I can’t, anyway. Maybe you can, because — like them — you believe in the soul’s immortality.’

Though Simon Greenblatt is a scientist and a rationalist, there’s a whole section of his brain set aside for metaphysical mysteries.

Tell me, Subra says.

He flabbergasted me by not laughing his head off when, in the spring of 1996, his idol Timothy Leary started making preparations for his death. First he made arrangements with a company called CryoCare to have his corpse frozen. Then, before his body rotted completely from the mind-boggling quantities of nicotine and narcotics he’d been pumping into it over six decades, he figured maybe he should commit suicide ‘live’ on the internet. Finally he requested that his ashes be rocketed into outer space — and his preposterous request was granted.

‘Don’t you think that’s bananas, Dad?’ I yelled over the phone. My tone of voice upset Thierno, who was doing his homework next to me in the living room. At twelve, Thierno was hypersensitive to conflict; the faintest stirrings of a quarrel would plunge him into a state of panic.

Maybe because you and Alioune were fighting non-stop at the time? Subra suggests.

Could be. Anyway, just as my father in Montreal said, ‘Why bananas?’ into my right ear, my son came over and whispered into my left ear, ‘Why are you yelling at Grandad?’ ‘People do all sorts of things with their dead bodies,’ Simon went on. ‘Why is it sillier to put them into orbit around the Earth than to donate them to worms or vultures?’ ‘Daddy, I can’t believe my ears!’ I yelled. ‘Are you telling me there’s a little glass bottle up there in the sky with Leary’s name on it, and he’s counting on extraterrestrials to come and wake him up twenty million years from now, and you don’t think that’s bananas? Come off it!’ At that point, Thierno put a hand over my mouth and I had no choice but to drop the subject.

Today in Florence, though, I suddenly feel very lonely. On their side, believing or having believed in the soul’s immortality: mummies, Bach, Michelangelo, endless multitudes of human beings from that handsome hunk of Cro-Magnon down to my sweet Aziz. On my side, the materialistic side: Lucretius; maybe Shakespeare; a handful of modern miscreants.

Ah, whispers Subra. But retain this instant, in the shadowy silence. Look — two thousand years after J.C., three living people lean down over dead ones dating from two thousand years before. May they rest in peace, in peace, in peace.

Rena holds the instant…then it dissolves.

Straightening, the living leave the darkened room and move towards their own deaths.

Why hurry? Oh, whatever is the rush?

Chimera

Their bodies stay close together as they inch down the broad, sunlit corridor filled with Etruscan art — ah, astonishing grace in bronze, tall thin figures, leaping acrobats, funerary urns — but their thoughts scatter in all directions. Each of them mixes the museum’s contents with that of his or her own brain. Facts gleaned over the years, memories, moods, associations…

Okay, Rena is telling Subra. Okay, you’re right, there was no article in the Gazette. The stagnation of Simon’s career wasn’t the Gazette’s fault. As for ‘Australia’…well, that’s a figure of speech. When I say native land…When I say my mother abruptly decided to return to her native land…

‘Rena, look!’ Simon cries.

She whirls around and sees — right there in a glass cage, smack in the middle of the corridor — she’d missed it, moving from case to case along the walls, her mind elsewhere — a chimera. Called the Arezzo Chimera because it was found in the vicinity of that city, but dating from long before its foundation. Etruscan, fifth century B.C.; Greek influence? A lion is poised to leap; its tail is a snake that rears up to attack the horned antelope bursting out of its back…

Simon and Rena stand rooted to the spot, stunned by the creature’s violent beauty.

‘It’s like a prefiguration of the Freudian psyche,’ Simon says. ‘Ego the lion, Id, the antelope, Superego the snake.’

Rena nods. We know all about the struggle of self against self, don’t we, Daddy? You against you and me against me…

But Ingrid interrupts: ‘It’s five-thirty already. I’m famished!’

So they retrace their steps — bronze figurines, tattered mummies, Hathor giving suck to Horemheb, great stone staircases, ancient jewellery, and then — a mandatory stop, after the bathroom but before the exit — the postcard stand. Suspecting that Simon and Ingrid will take a while to make their choice, Rena forces herself to study the cards. Which of the objects contained in the museum will the curators have deemed worthy of reproduction?

Despite her own resolutions and Aziz’s good advice, she herself is taking fewer and fewer photographs. Both her art and her eroticism wither and die in the presence of Simon and Ingrid; she’s reduced to living in reality and, at the same time, deprived of what makes reality liveable for her.

Her eyes scan the postcards. Hey…what’s this?

A smiling, perfectly preserved polychrome maidservant, forty-two centimetres high, dating from the Fifth Dynasty, kneeling on the ground and kneading dough…

Aziz’s grandmother still makes bread that way, in her village in the Algerian district of Chelef: she kneels down and bends forward, almost in praying position. Aziz once told me why Muslim men and women have to pray separately: the faithful stand shoulder to shoulder, he said, to prevent the evil spirit from slipping between them. And a man wouldn’t want his wife, mother or sister to rub shoulders with a male stranger, now, would he? Nor would he want male strangers in the row behind them to see their rear ends sticking up in the air as they prayed!

How did we miss that little statue? Rena thinks. And what should I do now? Rush back up to look at her this very minute, all by myself? For who knows when (or if) I’ll see Florence’s Archaeological Museum again?

And you do want to see that perfectly preserved statue of a little smiling slave, murmurs Subra. Don’t you?

Feeling like a coward, Rena buys the postcard. She’ll tell Aziz she saw the statue and that it reminded her of his grandmother.

What, after all, is seeing? she says to herself. By the time it gets projected onto our retina, even the real statue is an image. Seeing a photo of it is basically just another way of seeing it, right?

Subra has a good laugh.

Disputatio

They find a convivial greasy-spoon for their early dinner. Unfortunately, the only free table is right next to the toilet; there are incessant comings and goings in that corner and most of the customers forget to close the door when they come out…Still, Rena chooses this moment to return to the subject of the soul’s immortality.

W.C. versus the Great Beyond? The abject versus the sublime? But that’s exactly what is at stake. The very dilemma Michelangelo ran into as he prepared to paint his Last Judgment frescoes — what do people’s bodies look like after resurrection?

‘So tell me,’ she says, stabbing at her tomato and mozzarella salad, ‘just what is this belief you both believe? Can you explain it to me? You, dear Ingrid — tell me, I’m all ears. You say the soul is eternal, but…starting when?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Yes, when does the soul’s eternity begin? At conception? At birth? Or is it whenless, being eternal — extending to infinity both in past and future? Before conception and after death?’

Ingrid is uncomfortable. Though raised a Protestant, she stopped attending church when she married a Jew, reassuring herself with the vague idea that they saw eye-to-eye on important things. Now, avoiding Rena’s gaze, she butters a piece of bread, folds three slices of mortadella onto it and takes a big bite. ‘All I know,’ she says with her mouth full, ‘is that I’ll return to meet my Maker when I die. It’s simple.’

‘And…are humans beings the only ones to be so lucky? Of all the possible creatures in all the billions of constellations, we and we alone, on our tiny planet revolving around its tiny sun in the tiny Milky Way…What about you, Dad? Do you, too, think we’re so unique?’

They hear the toilet flush. An old lady comes out of the bathroom and a powerful effluvium sweeps across their table.

‘I can think of better places to have this conversation,’ says Simon as he rises to shut the door. ‘And frankly, Rena, your tone of voice is a bit offensive.’

Don’t worry, says Subra. He’s smiling to let you know he’s proud of you just the same. You’re his daughter, his disciple. He taught you philosophical fencing. He sharpened the blade you’re needling his wife with right now.

‘Sorry, I don’t mean to be offensive. I just want to understand. Okay. Only humans, then, but…starting when? With Neanderthal? Yes? No? Or that Cro-Magnon guy we ran into the other day — was his soul immortal, too?’

‘Let’s drop the subject,’ Ingrid splutters. ‘You don’t respect anything…’

‘I do. I respect you, believe me. Only Homo sapiens, then, not Neanderthal. I think we can all agree on that. And not animals, of course.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Ingrid says pensively. ‘Sometimes when I look deeply into Lassie’s eyes, I could swear she’s got a soul… Right, Dad?’

Simon nods. Having grown up between a catatonic mother and an overworked father, he has always appreciated the company of dogs.

‘Dogs, then. What about cats? And horses?’

‘Yes, I would think they had souls, too,’ Ingrid says, attacking a plateful of gnocchi. ‘Right, Dad?’

Simon lifts a hand as if to say, why not?

‘But not mosquitoes, right?’

‘Rena!’ Ingrid says, reddening. ‘To you, everything is a joke!’

‘No, she’s right,’ says Simon. ‘I mean, we wouldn’t want to itch and scratch up there in heaven, would we?’

Again the toilet flushes and a heavy-built man comes out of the bathroom, zipping up his fly. Rena thinks of all the flies she has undone in the course of her long love life, all the penises that have entered her body, here, there and everywhere, all the men who have bellowed as they poured into her what Dr Walters called their ‘half-children’—yes, crying out in fear and rage and loss as they hurled themselves over the cliff’s edge, tumbling head over heels into their chromosomes, thrashing about in the tangled threads of their DNA, releasing in a violent spurt the magic potion of their future, a liquid teeming with their offspring, their immortality, returning momentarily to their earlier bodies, their animal, child and savage bodies, their nothingness bodies, passing on the splash of sperm so as never to die, and dying as they do so…

‘I’m not joking,’ Rena tells Ingrid with an ingratiating smile. ‘I’m sincerely trying to understand what a soul is, and on what condition, under what circumstances, it becomes immortal. Okay, then, not mosquitoes. Maybe the soul depends on warm blood? Sorry. All right, we can forget the whole animal issue if you like…but will it have a body?’

‘What?’ Ingrid says in bewilderment.

‘Your soul, when it goes to meets its Maker. I mean, what does a soul actually look like after death? Is it a vapour, an ethereal essence, or does the flesh resuscitate as well? When you get to heaven, will you have a body and all that goes along with it — blood, lungs, toenails, digestive tract — or will you be a pure soul?’

For once, Ingrid feels she’s on firm ground. ‘The Bible says we’ll rise up from the dead on Judgment Day with our bodies intact. Right, Dad?’

‘Absolutely.’

Snippets of Bible passages go floating through their memories.

‘Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere,’ Rena says. ‘And how old will our bodies be, in the Great Hereafter?’

‘We’ll rise up with our bodies in their prime,’ Ingrid says jubilantly. ‘It’s written that the body will recover all its limbs, and that not a hair will be missing from its head. Good thing for you, Dad — you’ll get all your hair back in heaven!’

‘Ha-ha-ha-ha!’ Simon says, rubbing his balding pate to make sure Rena has got the joke.

‘What about babies?’ she asks.

‘What about them?’ says Ingrid, nonplussed.

‘I mean, people who die as babies…Do they, too, rise up with their bodies in their prime?’

‘Rena! You should be ashamed!’

The waiter brings them their desserts.

‘Okay, we can forget about babies, too…to say nothing of foetuses, right? I won’t even mention them. Abortions, miscarriages… down the drain. But, er…what about Hindus?’

‘What about them?’ Ingrid says.

‘Well, you know…Hindus…Muslims…Buddhists…voodoo adepts…the billions of people who happened to be born before Christ — or afterwards, but on non-Christian soil — do they get to meet their Maker, too, or will they—’

‘Stop it!’ Livid, Ingrid sets down her spoon. ‘It’s impossible to have a serious conversation with you. Anyway, this place is unbearable. It spoils my appetite, it spoils — everything.’

This time they head back to the hotel in silence.

Elettrizzare

About halfway there, Rena’s phone rings. Aziz’s name shines up at her from the tiny screen.

‘My love.’

‘Rena…’

Aziz can barely speak. Rena can tell he has a lump in his throat, like when he was a kid in school and didn’t know the answer to a question and was afraid the teacher would make fun of him in front of the whole class. Instantly, she knows it’s serious. A matter of life and death. If the event took place in the projects around Paris and needs to be conveyed to Florence at once, someone is dead for sure.

Rena presses the phone to her ear — harder, then so hard that it hurts. As she listens to Aziz, the beautiful buildings before her eyes — Palazzo Rucellai, Palazzo Strozzi — are gradually replaced by the housing projects she knows so well, with their graffiti, satellite dishes, leprous walls, broken elevators, rat-infested cellars, young men swamped in hopelessness and rage. Running away from the police this afternoon, two teenage boys had taken refuge in a transformer and died of electrocution.

‘I knew one of them,’ Aziz says. ‘His mother’s one of my aunt’s b-b-best friends…Rena, you c-c-c-an’t stay away on holiday at a time like this…Shit, my work phone’s ringing…I’ll try and get back to you later on.’

Rena recoils as if she herself had just received the jolt of an electric shock. The hairs at the nape of her neck bristle and she feels inordinately, unpleasantly wide awake. Two young kids…dead? Oh God, Aziz must be grinding his teeth, smoke must be pouring out of his nostrils…She says nothing of the tragedy to Simon and Ingrid, so as not to weigh them down with it — but as they approach the hotel she can’t help hastening her step. Wishes them a good night the minute they reach reception. Starts dialling Aziz’s number as she goes up the stairs. Connects only with his recorded voice. Leaves him a message: ‘Darling, please try to understand. Everything about this trip is slow and heavy and confusing. I still haven’t had time to check the internet, or even buy a French newspaper…Believe me, I’m as upset as you are about the death of those two kids…Keep me posted, all right? I’ll be waiting for your call, my love.’

When she finally falls asleep at nearly three in the morning, Aziz still hasn’t called back.