Infrared

SATURDAY

Supplizio

A man has set up a camera facing a machine. He stands in front of the machine and declares, ‘No matter what you do to me, I’ll never reveal the truth about…’ (I forget about what). To prove it, he climbs into the machine, lies flat on his stomach between two metal plates, hooks his left foot to the one above him so it’s bent at the knee, and presses a button. The top plaque starts moving slowly downwards, crushing his leg against his back—No, no, I protest inwardly, horrified—No, stop! — but the plaque just keeps coming down and down—No, no! — down and down—NO! — eventually crushing him completely.

Rena may have forgotten most of what she learned in her Introduction to Psychology class at Concordia, but she still knows one thing: all the characters in a dream are the dreamer.

So. Myself, the guy who brags about his ability to remain silent… the absurd hero who tortures himself to death. I’d rather die than tell the truth about…what?

What would I rather die than tell the truth about?

Sregolatezza

Getting out of bed, she sees bright red bloodstains on her sheets and nightgown — a shock, coming in the wake of that nightmare.

Damn it all to hell. It’s not fair. I had my period only two weeks ago, in all its crimson glory. It has no right to pursue me all the way to Tuscany — I didn’t pack any tampons. How dare my ovaries misbehave like this?

Not only that, but she was so busy torturing herself that she didn’t hear the alarm clock go off — it’s nine-thirty already and her appointment with the car rental agency is at ten. How will she manage to wash up this mess, pack her suitcase, help Simon and Ingrid carry theirs downstairs, buy a box of Tampax (Super), put them in place (two — and maybe a Kotex thrown in for good measure) and rush to the agency, all in the space of half an hour?

My periods have got pretty chaotic these past few months.

Maybe an early symptom of menopause? Subra suggests.

Yes, I suppose I’m getting there. No hot flashes so far, but plenty of night sweats…Could be one of the causes of my insomnia, come to think of it. And when I asked Kerstin how long I’d have to endure these symptoms, she said, ‘Tell you the truth, I don’t remember… Seven, eight years, something like that.’ ‘Seven, eight years? Are you serious?’ ‘Sure, why?’ ‘Come off it. You mean I’m supposed to put up with this crap for the next one hundred months and keep my mouth shut?’ ‘Oh, I doubt that.’ ‘You doubt what?’ ‘That you’ll keep your mouth shut.’

At age twelve, I faked it…

Tell me, Subra says.

I was impatient to have my period. I figured that, by making a woman of me, it would bring me closer to my mother. So once a month I’d writhe theatrically in the throes of abominable abdominal pain (loved the way that sounded) — and it worked! Lisa would allow me to stay home from school, and she’d take care of me. Divine days of calm and clarity in my sun-filled room, snoozing in bed and gorging on Daphne Du Maurier novels (an author I worshipped because my mother’s brand of cigarettes was named after her). Every couple of hours, Lisa would knock at my door and I’d put a long-suffering look on my face. She’d sit down at my bedside, stroke my hair and give me my medicine. ‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ she’d say. ‘Some women’s periods are more painful than others, that’s all.’

‘You wouldn’t believe how I found out about menstruation,’ she added once. ‘My mother was a prude — it embarrassed her to talk about such things, so she told me nothing at all. Then, the summer I turned twelve, a cousin of mine in Sydney — a couple of years older than me, and far more worldly-wise — told me all about it during the Christmas holidays. I thought she must be pulling my leg. Are you nuts? Blood dripping out of us once a month — nah, come off it! Just as I was about to get on the train and head back to Melbourne, she stuck a medical pamphlet under my nose and said, “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to, I could care less, but if by any chance you’re interested, read this.” Well, I read “that” on the train and it left me speechless. When I got home, I realised I still had the pamphlet in my bag — how could I get rid of it? I couldn’t toss it into the wastebasket because all the wastebaskets were emptied by my mother. So I went up and hid it under a pile of old magazines in the attic, as if it was pornography or something.’

Mommy laughed and I laughed right along with her. I was grateful to her for assuming that at age twelve I knew about pornography…which I did. Thanks to the neighbourhood I walked through every week for my dance classes, a red-light district rife with strip joints, sex shops, peep shows and hostess bars, I was far more savvy about dildoes than I was about menstruation. Even as I went on playing the role of the obedient, submissive young daughter in my official life — the smooth, clean world of Westmount from which my brother had been banished — I was magnetised by the sordid scenes on Saint Catherine Street.

Lisa went on with her tale. An unusually thorough housekeeper, her mother had stumbled on the pamphlet one day as she was cleaning out the attic. ‘She figured it must have been left there by former tenants and decided it would enable her to teach me about puberty without pronouncing a word. “Here, Lisa. Time you knew.” And that was it.’ I giggled. Mommy hugged me to her, then pressed her lips to my forehead. ‘You’re fine, sweet Rena. You don’t have a fever. See you later!’—and she trotted off to receive her next client.

I loved it when she said ‘sweet Rena’. I loved hearing her call my name from her office or the kitchen, and rushing to her side. Sometimes I’d drag my feet on purpose, just for the pleasure of hearing her call me again—’Rena!’ It was marvellous. I existed. This woman was my mother, and she wanted to see me. No matter what the reason (whether to send me on an errand or to use me as a go-between in one of her quarrels with my father), when her lips formed the word ‘Rena’ it meant that instead of struggling for women in general, she wanted to see one woman in particular, a diminutive woman whom she held infinitely dear. Me. Her daughter.

I was so proud.

Didn’t happen often, Subra remarks drily.

Stupid tears drip into the tiny bathroom sink of the absurd Room 25 in Florence’s Hotel Guelfa, where Rena is feverishly rinsing bloodstains out of her nightgown. Good, good, the biggest one is gone.

Washing out menstrual blood is one of the arts of womanhood. You have to do it as swiftly as possible, preferably before the blood has had time to dry, and using lukewarm water, neither too hot nor too cold. Memories of standing at sinks early in the morning or late at night, over the course of three decades, and scrubbing away at sheets, the corners of sheets, bedspreads, sleeping bags, underwear, skirts, tights, trousers and dresses, in hotel rooms, apartments, lofts, campground bathrooms, hovels, trailers…And Samuel-the-bearded-cantor’s indignation when, after our first clumsy attempt at love-making, he spotted a drop of blood on the sheet, then another on his shrivelled penis. I saw him recoil. He leaped out of bed in horror. ‘Rena!’ ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘You…’ ‘No, no, I wasn’t a virgin, don’t worry.’ ‘You’ve got…you’ve got your…’ ‘Yes, as you can see. It just started this morning.’ ‘You mean…you knew you were impure? You wilfully caused me to transgress…one of the most sacred laws of my religion?’ The question went through a weird crescendo, attaining scream level by the time he reached religion. I still remember Samuel’s wide-open mouth, his teeth and tongue visible in the middle of his beard, screaming the word religion at me.

Now I was genuinely pissed off. ‘What do you expect?’ I said with a shrug. ‘Serves you right for fooling around with a…um…what’s the female of goy, again? A goya? No, sorry — a shikse.’ Though Samuel had deemed me shtuppable because of my Jewish name, I knew he was really attracted by my goyity. My mother was a goy so I was a goy; without admitting it even to himself, he’d wanted to go to bed with a goy. It always annoys me when love-making diminishes me instead of enhancing me — when it reduces me to one dwarfy little aspect of myself instead of multiplying me and turning me into a giant…‘Listen, man, you wanna shtup a shikse, you’ve got to accept the quirks that go along with it. Sorry, but shikses don’t feel impure when they menstruate. Now, whatever shall you do to purify yourself?’ Samuel, who had been dressing hastily as I spoke, stopped and stared at me in wide-eyed disgust. ‘Dip your kosher pickle in virgin donkey milk? Beg papa Abraham for forgiveness?’ The cantor high-tailed it out of there.

That incident took place in my little student’s studio on Maison-neuve Street. A few months later I found myself between the same pair of sheets with my French professor, a Catholic who was keen on shtupping me because I was Jewish. In the heat of the action, even as he groaned and panted, he repeated over and over, ‘You’re really Jewish, aren’t you? How do you like my goy cock, huh? How do you like it? Jesus-Mary-Joseph I can’t believe it, I’m fuckin’ a fuckin’ Jewess, oh, Momma, if you could see me now, oh, if you could only see me, Momma, hey you guys I’m fuckin’ a fuckin’ Jewess, I’m gonna come I’m gonna come I’m gonna come, aaahh good Christ it’s coming, it’s, aaah. Aaaaah. AAAHHH — AH!’ After which, from the bathroom where he was washing his crotch with my facecloth, he made some terrible puns about foreskins and foreplay, and two weeks later I discovered I was pregnant.

Fortunately Mom was able to smuggle my Canon into the hospital. The photos I took there — clandestinely, using an 87C filter and infrared film — turned out to be my first published reportage. They created quite a stir. Curettage with no anaesthesia. Blanched faces of very young girls, grimaces of pain and fear, blood-drenched sheets, sadistic nurses. I quoted one of the latter in the text I wrote to accompany the photos: ‘She had her fun, let her scream a bit. Maybe she’ll think twice before she sins again.’

That’s all well and good, Subra says, but shouldn’t we be looking for tampons?

After slipping six carefully folded Kleenexes into her panties, Rena drags on her tightest pair of black jeans to make sure it won’t even occur to the blood to go slithering down her thighs.

‘So much blood!’ as Lady Macbeth put it. ‘So much blood!’ whispered Alioune, my proud Peulh husband, who was annoyed at all the noise I had made giving birth to our son. I had whined, laughed, moaned, caterwauled, and chatted my way through the afternoon and evening, whereas a Peulh woman — to prove herself worthy of her future role as mother, enduring all sorts of suffering in stoical silence — mustn’t let so much as a sigh escape her during delivery. When, after sixteen hours of labour, Thierno’s head finally burst from between my thighs along with a flood of blood, plunging me into an incomparable state of ecstasy, the plenitude of absolute creation, I saw that Alioune was as white as a sheet. ‘So much blood!’ he said queasily. ‘Stay with me, my love,’ I told him. ‘Don’t look down there, stay up here next to my head. It’s all over, Alioune, stay here, don’t look at the blood…Alioune! Our son has arrived!’

But he had passed out.

Even as a child, Arbus was fascinated by menstruation, pregnancy and delivery. As a grown woman, she took delight in every facet of her femininity, refusing to shave her legs and underarms or even use deodorants. If she had her period while on an assignment for Life or Vogue, she’d boast about it to the whole crew. She insisted on having a home birth for her second child, and later described it as the most grotesque and sublime experience of her life. Few women artists — none, in fact, with the possible exception of Plath and Tsvetaeva — ever embraced maternity as wholeheartedly as she.

A pity, Subra murmurs. A pity that, one sweltering day in July 1971, she decided to add several pints of her own blood to the bathwater in her Manhattan apartment. Yeah, a real pity she wound up killing herself. Hmm, so did Plath, come to think of it. Molto peccato. Hmm, so did Tsvetaeva. What a coincidence.

‘Vorrei una scatoletta di Tampax, per favore…Grazie.’

As she goes back up the hotel staircase, she passes Ingrid and Simon coming down.

‘You guys packed?’

‘Just about, just about. Have you had breakfast already?’

‘No, I’ll grab an espresso on the way to the car rental — I should be there now.’

‘We’ll be all set when you get back.’

Five minutes later, the absorbent cotton duly inserted into her innermost being, she emerges into the blinding light of the Florentine morning.

If the vagina were an erogenous zone we’d have heard about it by now, she says to herself. How would women be able to stuff tampons into it four times a day, six days a month, twelve months a year without feeling at least an occasional twinge of pleasure? But no. Not one of my women friends has ever blushingly confessed to getting her kicks that way…Memory of myself at fourteen, having finally reached puberty after two years of faking it, twisting and turning on the bathroom floor at my best friend Jennifer’s place, legs akimbo, desperately trying to insert a tampon as Jennifer shouted advice to me from beyond the door—’Relax, Rena. You gotta relax. If you tense up, it won’t go in. Don’t worry, you won’t lose your virginity or anything.’ Naturally, I wouldn’t have dreamed of enlightening her as to the state of my hymen.

The car rental is on Borgo Ognissanti, All-Saints Street — same name as Toussaint, her older son. She decides to interpret this as a good omen.

People are often puzzled that a virgophobic atheist like myself would have named her son Toussaint — but it’s because my beloved Fabrice idolised Toussaint Louverture, the great leader of the Haitian Revolution in 1802, and his dying wish was that our son be named after him.

Louverture himself was anything but a saint, Subra points out.

Yeah, his folks probably just had him baptised on November 1st and gave him the name they found on the Catholic calendar that day…Could have been worse. Other kids in France’s former colonies wound up with names like Epiphany or Armistice.

Here we are — Ognissanti.

Guidare

Rena fills out the necessary forms with the Auto-Escape employee. He insists on speaking French to her, and she answers him in Italian: under pretence of being deferential, both are in fact showing off. At last he entrusts her with a red Megane.

‘This, madame,’ he explains unnecessarily, showing her the remote control attached to the key chain, ‘is for locking and unlocking the car doors. Do you understand?’

‘Si, certo, signore,’ she retorts. ‘Non sono nata ieri.’

At her first manœuvre on the Piazza Ognissanti, she manages to stall. On the verge of hysteria, she wonders if she should interpret this superstitiously, as Aziz would. Allah does not want me to rent a car; he does not want me to spend four days traipsing around Tuscany with my father and stepmother. He wants me to obey my husband’s subtly expressed command: head straight for Amerigo Vespucci airport and jump on the first plane for Paris.

On her third try, unfortunately, the car takes off like a fireball and she finds herself hurtling willy-nilly through the sumptuous Renaissance city of Florence, Italy.

Reading glasses perched on her nose, Rena attempts to keep her left eye on the road while darting desperate glances with her right eye at the city map on the passenger seat, where the itinerary to Via Guelfa has been highlighted in green by Auto-Escape’s elegant employee. ‘Because of all the one-way streets,’ the man had told her in his excellent French, ‘you’ll need to make a big detour — like this, see? You get on this ring road north of city centre — be careful, it has three different names — then take a right here, in Via Santa Caterina.’ A piece of cake!

Sweating profusely, zooming along the Viale F. Strozzi at sixty miles per hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic, she hears her mobile ring.

Maybe it’s my father…Maybe they’re in some sort of trouble… Maybe someone really did make off with their precious sacco this time…

Digging the phone out of her jeans pocket, she tosses it onto the seat beside her and the map slides to the floor.

Oh God, it’s Aziz! Heart aflutter, she leans over to make sure it really is his name on the screen; as she does so the car drifts leftward and narrowly escapes a collision.

‘Aziz!’ she says, clamping the telephone between her ear and shoulder.

‘Yes.’

‘Hang on a minute!’

‘What do you mean, hang on? We haven’t spoken for days, and when I finally get you on the phone you tell me to hang on?’

‘Just a second, love, I’m driving…’

She slows down, setting off a cacophony of honking horns behind her. Having cut the connection with Aziz, she spews epithets in French and English at the Fiats and their impatient, aggressive macho drivers, nods perfunctorily at a giant fortress to her left and its probable thousands of dead of whom she knows nothing, and finally, perspiring and palpitating, pulls over to the kerb at the corner of Santa Caterina.

‘Aziz. Sorry, love. Driving alone in a foreign city can be a little nerve-wracking.’

‘Rena, you’ve got to come home.’

‘What?’

‘Drop everything and come back to Paris. Things are getting too serious.’

‘You…I…Aziz…’

‘Stop stammering. Are you trying to make fun of me?’

‘No, of course not…Listen, I just rented a car, my father and stepmother are waiting for me in the street, I can’t just leave them in the lurch…Schroeder’s the one who gave me this week’s holiday…’

‘I’m not talking about Schroeder. Hey, Rena, listen to me, okay? I’ve been up here working for three days and three nights non-stop, we’re trying to hold things together but the place is on the verge of exploding. The media are already rushing in to do their sensationalist crap. We need intelligent night photos for the magazine. The point of view of someone who has a little background, a minimal understanding of what’s going on, you know what I mean? I can’t put it more clearly than that. Rena, get your ass back here.’

‘No, I…’

‘Okay, forget it.’

Aziz cuts off the connection. As she inches down the Via Santa Caterina, Rena shoves her hat back to keep the hairs on the nape of her neck from bristling.

To her surprise, Simon and Ingrid actually are standing in front of the hotel with their luggage, ready and waiting on time. They load up the car. Ingrid climbs into the back seat and Simon settles in at Rena’s side; it’s almost as if she had dreamed that abominable phone call.

‘I’ll take charge of the maps,’ her father says. ‘I’ll be your guide.’

‘Okay, look…we’re right…here.’

It was your job to show me the way, Daddy. It was your job to help me. You’re the one who taught me to drive. You weren’t supposed to get hopelessly lost in life’s dark labyrinths. Lousy Virgil, Daddy! Lousy Virgil…Why so tense now, sitting next to me in the car?

Tell me, Subra says.

When I was little, Simon would sometimes take me to visit his sister Deborah in the Eastern Townships. When we got onto one of those long straight roads, he’d tuck me between his thighs and let me steer. It thrilled me to think that my tiny hands were controlling the big black Volvo. Every time an oncoming truck pulled out to pass, hurtling straight at us, I’d let go of the steering-wheel and bury my face in my Daddy’s chest. And he’d always make things come out all right, in a great burst of laughter. I couldn’t help boasting to Lisa about it afterwards. ‘I drove the car all by myself, Mommy!’ Pale with rage, she’d light into Simon for having risked my life.

Where transgression was concerned, Subra says, you were always on your Daddy’s side.

Yeah…sitting between his thighs, mad with excitement. Mad with excitement, sitting between his thighs…

And your father…?

Hmm. I don’t recall his having given my older brother that sort of driving lesson. All I remember is that when Rowan had a minor scooter accident at age sixteen, Simon confiscated his licence for a month.

The sun beats mercilessly down on them. Aziz’s last words ricochet in Rena’s head: ‘Okay, forget it.’

Dear Lord…if I were to lose Aziz…

Tell me, Subra says.

I fell in love with him the minute I set eyes on him. I’d come to do a reportage in the projects northeast of Paris…One day I walked into a cultural centre and there he was, tutoring a little first-grade kid from Mali. The boy was behind in learning how to read, and Aziz, sitting there next to him, bent over his textbook, was calmly showing him the letters, asking him questions, listening to his answers…I saw the kid staring up in adoration at this lovely, gentle young man and I said to myself, Wow, he’s right. I think the guy’s pretty amazing myself. If only he’d lean over me and talk to me like that…I didn’t yet know that in addition to everything else Aziz was a poet, a songwriter and a guitarist, that he’d grown up in one of the worst projects in the area, that he was second-born in a family of eight, that his older brother was doing time for dealing, that he’d started working at fifteen, taking night jobs in factories while attending school during the day, that he had a degree from the Rue du Louvre journalism school…Then one day a miracle happened: he was hired as a reporter by On the Fringe, the magazine I freelance for. Our first exchanges took place during accidental meetings in the magazine offices, running into each other in the hall or in front of the coffee machine, but our handshakes rapidly became hugs, our traded jokes traded glances, our hugs kisses, our glances caresses, our coffees lunches…and by the end of the week, the office a hotel room. Though he couldn’t make love to me at first, I was entranced by every square inch of this tall young Arab’s magnificent body — his doe eyes, powerful hands, white teeth, muscular back, firm buttocks, to say nothing of his long, fragile, lovely penis, darker in hue than the thighs it rested on. Never could I have dreamed that this man would have so much to teach me, that I’d teach him to love a woman’s body, and that one miracle would follow another until we found ourselves signing a lease together for a four-room apartment on the Rue des Envierges. Both night birds, we work together in perfect harmony — I’ve never known anything like it! Our marriage means the world to me, but I can’t just throw up everything and fly back to Paris at the drop of a hat…

Subra nods sympathetically. She refrains from pointing out that Aziz generally spends only one or two nights a week at Rue des Envierges, and hasn’t yet come to a decision about moving in with her, let alone making her his wife.

‘You’re not very talkative today, Rena,’ says Ingrid after about an hour’s drive west on the FiPiLi (Firenze, Pisa, Livorno).

‘Sorry.’

To bring them up to date on what is happening in France’s impoverished suburbs these days, she’d have to give them a lecture on French colonial history since 1830. Not having the strength for that, she holds her tongue.

Ingrid hums to herself to fill the silence.

Obsessed with his responsibility as guide, Simon keeps his eyes glued to the map and sees virtually nothing of the gorgeous landscape it represents.

Vinci

Lunch break. Across from their charming restaurant at the cliff’s base, the Tuscan hills undulate to infinity. Grapevines, cypress trees, red roofs: the very landscape Leonardo immortalised in his Giocanda. Ah, ineffable harmony…

Harmonious, too, are the hues and flavours of the dishes brought by the waiters.

Among the three of them, though: nothing but false notes.

Looking at her stepmother, Rena thinks of her mother and feels anger rising within her. She is furious that it should be too late for fury, too late for anything.

Oh, Lisa! Mona Lisa! Nearly thirty years now since you effaced yourself, like Alice’s Cheshire Cat. Yes, that’s one way of putting it. It’s as if Leonardo had rubbed out the Giocanda’s hair…the contours of her forehead…her cheeks, her eyes, and finally her enigmatic smile…Now all that’s left is the landscape, undulating to infinity.

She gets up and goes to the bathroom, where she changes her tampons and has a good cry. Still sitting on the toilet, she wipes her nose and crotch, then starts flipping through the Guide bleu to calm her nerves.

Hmm. Turns out Leonardo had not two but five mothers — Caterina, Albiera, Francesca, Margherita, Lucrezia. All but the first (who gave birth to him) were married to his father — successively, of course. Not simultaneously, like Fela Kuti’s wives.

You see? Subra exclaims. The word ‘family’ has always meant una cosa complicata.

Yeah, you’d think people would stop acting so surprised about it. As if the norm were a stable, stainless-steel nuclear unit. Bullshit. Œdipus grew up with adoptive parents, far from his native Thebes. Kerstin’s son Pierre has only a nodding acquaintance with the man who sired him; my Toussaint, Fabrice’s son, was raised by Alioune, whose own father was polygamous and absent; as for Aziz, his dad died when he was four and he has no memory of him at all. Families have always been a mess, so why am I sitting here crying my eyes out in the toilet of a restaurant in Vinci?

‘It’s nearly three,’ she says, re-entering the dining room dry-eyed and straight-backed, all her fluids under control. ‘Shall we do some visiting?’

Vinci gives them the choice between two museums, the Leonar-diano at the top of the hill and the Utopian Museum at the bottom. Both promise wondrous machines, models and sketches. (A wooden bridge, for instance, built without a single nail! Logs, nothing but logs, criss-crossed into a structure of mutual support — very handy, if you’re an army and you run into a river…)

‘Which do you prefer?’

‘I’ll let Dad decide.’

‘Dad?’

Her father hesitates, compares, skims the brochures, dawdles, temporises, checks out the façades of church and castle, admires the panoramic view from the esplanade.

The minutes go sliding by.

Finally he makes up his mind: ‘Neither…This little book will do just fine.’

The story of his life.

‘Well, then, let’s at least visit his birthplace — it’s called Anchiano. It’s just three kilometres away.’

A winding mountain road…

It was on winding roads such as this, in the Laurentians, that my father later gave me real driving lessons. Teaching me, for instance, to avoid carsickness by moving to the left of the white line as I came out of a leftward curve. I’ve now got that technique down pat; I wish Simon would notice it and say something about the good old days…

But her father goes on obsessively studying the maps.

Anchiano

Having dropped off the couple next to a sign pointing to the artist’s birthplace, she drives on alone to the car park. When she catches up with them, they’ve come to a halt in front of a tree.

‘What kind of tree do you think this is?’ asks Ingrid, turning to her.

‘It’s a fig tree,’ she says peremptorily, hoping to cut off idle speculations.

‘Are you sure?’ asks Simon.

‘Sure I’m sure. Look — the leaves have five fingers, like an open hand. And here’s another way of checking — crush a leaf and smell it; the scent is unmistakable.’

Exquisite memories of fig trees from the past go wafting through her mind. The heady, honeyed fragrance of the dried fig leaf Aziz handed her in the inner garden of Paris’s Great Mosque, an hour after making real love to her for the first time. Walking down a fig tree-lined path as a dramatic harvest moon rose over the Black Sea and her Bulgarian lover’s hand stroked the small of her back, then slipped inside her shorts and caressed her intimate flesh with such musical precision that she started to come, amazed to be able to come and walk at the same time. Toussaint and Thierno climbing into a fig tree and stuffing themselves with its fruit, one November weekend in Syracuse…

‘I’m not so sure,’ her father says. ‘Where are the figs?’

‘It’s not the right time of year,’ says Rena.

‘Yes, it is,’ he objects. (Touché!) ‘Maybe Jesus struck it down in a fit of rage,’ he goes on. ‘You know, there’s that strange passage in Saint Matthew where…’

‘Yes, I know,’ she says, cutting him off. ‘I know.’ What else? Fig tree, fig tree…(When did this hateful rivalry between them begin?) ‘In Italian,’ she says, ‘the equivalent of “I don’t give a damn” is “Non me ne importa un fico”.’

‘Really?’ says Ingrid, to say something.

‘Yes. The fico is a symbol of the vagina — the very epitome of worthlessness, as everyone knows.’

Ingrid blushes and turns away.

‘And that’s not all,’ Rena insists, recalling a reportage she did long ago in the favelas of Rio. ‘In Brazil, instead of giving people the finger, you give them the fica.’

‘What’s that?’ her father asks.

‘Uh…’ she says. Oddly enough, she can’t remember. Do they hold up an open hand, its five fingers symbolising the fig leaf? No, she doesn’t think so…Hm. ‘It’ll come back to me.’

As they turn their backs on the tree at last, she brings the crushed leaf to her nostrils.

It smells of nothingness.

Two white-washed rooms, touchingly stark and spare.

Here, she thinks. Born here. Babe-in-arms here. First gaze on life here, the master of the gaze.

Ostensibly in homage to Leonardo, the first room is plastered with hideous paintings by a contemporary artist. Rena and Ingrid take one look at them, shrug and move on. The second room is filled with reproductions of the master’s anatomical drawings. Studies based on corpses, the surface stunningly rendered thanks to the artist’s familiarity with the depths. Bones, muscles, tendons, arteries — the intricate, secret machinery of the human body…

An hour later, they go back to join Simon, who has remained in the first room all this time, cursing the modern paintings. ‘It’s outrageous,’ he says, as the guard announces closing time. ‘I felt like slashing them!’

Yup, says Subra. That’s Zeus’s big problem. With great lightning bolts and deafening rolls of thunder, he has managed to destroy — not the abhorred paintings, but his own visit to Leonardo’s birthplace.

Scandicci

‘Maybe it’s a bit late to drive all the way to Pisa?’ says Simon, his nose on the map.

‘It sure is,’ Rena agrees. ‘If we want to reach our B & B in Impruneta before nightfall.’

‘Well, let’s at least take the scenic route back, then. Through Pistoia.’

But an automobile race prevents them. Racing cars go zooming past them on the steep, narrow, twisting roads: heart attack after heart attack. Some villages are completely closed to traffic.

‘Maybe we could take this alternate route?’ Simon suggests.

But the roads grow narrower at every turn, and they end up in a farmyard.

Oh, Virgil! Rena thinks, sighing in exasperation. Can’t you guide me better than this?

Suddenly the fica gesture comes back to her. You slip your thumb between your second and third fingers, then scornfully wave your fist in the air. But the moment to demonstrate it is past.

Well, they can drop the Pistoia idea, too, and return the way they came.

At six p.m. they find themselves back on the Florence ring road, parched, sweating and exhausted. Dazzled by the million glancing reflections of the setting sun on the chrome and glass of oncoming traffic, Rena now has a splitting headache. Simon sees an exit coming up and advises her to take it—’Yes! Here, right here! Quick!’—but it’s a mistake, and they find themselves in a suburb called Scandicci. Braking angrily, Rena double-parks and goes storming into a shoe store to ask for directions. All the salespeople are busy and there’s a long queue of customers at the cash register.

She studies the features of every person in the store. These people are here because they want to be — normally, naturally, as part of their daily lives. I, on the other hand, am just passing through. My presence here is as arbitrary as it was in that farmyard an hour ago, or in the Kodak shop the other day, or on Earth…

Her mobile rings.

‘Rena, where are you?’

‘In a shoe store in…uh…Scandicci.’

‘I don’t believe it. What the fuck…? My city’s going up in smoke, I need you more than I’ve ever needed you before, and you’re trying on Italian shoes?’

‘I’ll explain later, Aziz. I really will. Just at the moment I’m double-parked and my folks are about to pass out from dehydration. To each his emergency.’

Aziz hangs up without another word.

‘Per andare all’Impruneta, per favore…?’

Salespeople and customers have a vast array of opinions on the subject.

Sometimes you wish you could just press stop, then fast-forward to a more bearable moment of the video of your existence. Yes, let’s do that. Let’s forget all about the starting and stopping, the backing up and turning around, the tension and hesitation, the sighs and silences, the petrol station restrooms, the overflowing tampons, the language barrier, the frustrating fruitless phone calls, let’s forget about the groping the misery the excuses the bad smells the sordid bedrooms the sad eyes of child prostitutes in Thailand the endless heaps of garbage along the roads north of Dakar the despicable behaviour of the customs officials in Algiers who, to welcome Aziz on his first visit to his parents’ native land (the year was 1993, he’d just turned eighteen), opened his suitcase, dumped his carefully folded clothes on the floor and told him to pick them up, the homeless kids in Durban who sniff glue and sleep in highway tunnels at night, the chaos of our lives whose stories we try to tell coherently so they’ll seem to fit into some sort of pattern, make some sort of sense, let’s just forget it, all of it, as we go along…

Impruneta

As they accept second helpings of her delicious zucchini frittati, Gaia (the gracious, sexagenarian owner of the B & B they eventually did manage to find) tells them first about her husband who committed suicide, then about her architect lover who designed this house, built it with his own hands, and died of cancer three short months after its completion.

How do people go on? How do they manage? How does Gaia get through the day? She chops up zucchini and onions, fries them golden, beats a few eggs, stirs in heavy cream, parmesan cheese, thyme and a little salt (not too much because the parmesan is already salty), pours the mixture into a buttered pan and slips it into the oven. Then she sets the table, embellishes it with a vase of hand-picked flowers, lights a candle and opens a bottle of wine. She does not spend her days screaming My love my love where are you and how am I supposed to go on living without you, sixty-six years old but still beautiful still alive and sensuous and palpitating with desire?

A bit like Kerstin Matheron, Subra puts in.

You’re right, Rena agrees. Kerstin found herself similarly at a loss after her husband Edmond’s death. She told me about it one evening as I was making prints in my darkroom. She finds it easier to confide in me when she thinks my mind is otherwise occupied and in fact I have no trouble listening to her as I work; the two activities take place in different parts of my brain. ‘I think I must envy you a bit,’ she said to me that night with a little laugh. ‘All your sexual adventures…I haven’t made love in ages…almost seven years.’ ‘Because of Edmond’s illness?’ I asked. ‘Not only that. Not only that. What happened was…He sort of…ah…well, you see…a few years before his illness, he sort of left me, actually. He fell head over heels in love with one of his patients, a poetess named Alix. She was only twenty-nine at the time, whereas he was pushing sixty. Alix had everything. She was brilliant, beautiful — and so very young. Edmond told me he was thrilled by the smoothness and firmness of her skin. And how could Alix be anything but flattered by the attentions of a distinguished, cultivated doctor like my husband? He didn’t move out, but he stopped touching me and my life sort of imploded. As long as he had loved me, I’d sort of muddled through the years thinking, well, so far so good — but now, looking in the mirror, I saw, really saw for the first time, the wrinkles on my face and the spots on my hands, the flabbiness of the flesh on my upper arms, the serious beginnings of a double chin…’ ‘Stop it, Kerstin! Stop it right this minute. I refuse to hear my best friend slandered like that.’

‘Oh, Rena…All of a sudden I couldn’t stand being my body. Things were bad that year. Then they got worse. Edmond started complaining about fatigue. He went in for tests and they found he had an extremely rare form of blood cancer. The illness evolved slowly but cruelly, attacking not only his body but his mind. Destroying his beauty, his fine intelligence, his humour, his personality. One day — he’d been hospitalised by this time and was already unable to walk — I ran into Alix at his bedside and discovered she was a lovely person. Of course I’d made her out to be a scheming conniving witch, but that’s because I was jealous. So as the weeks went by we started getting together to comfort each other. God knows we needed it: before our very eyes, the man we both loved was turning into an incontinent, deranged, obstreperous monster. He refused to see anyone but the two of us. He was ashamed…He’d been so proud of his looks, and now they were gone for good…It was a shock, Rena, to go to the hospital and find our Edmond surrounded by a bunch of obscene, paranoid, loudly abusive old men…Oh, we’d tell ourselves, but deep down he’s not like the others. With him it’s only temporary; he’ll soon be his old self again — but we knew the other visitors were thinking the same thing about their men. They, too, had once been young and debonair, maybe even incomparable lovers…Every time our paths crossed in the hospital corridor, Alix and I hugged each other desperately, not wanting to let go because we knew the only place to go from here was down. We wanted time to stop. Then it was the other way around — we wanted it to speed up. We longed for the end of this slow, sadistic, relentless destruction of the man we both loved.

The night before Edmond died, I spent four hours at his bedside, holding and kissing his hands. He had such beautiful hands, Rena, I’d been in love with them for thirty-five years and they’d hardly changed, they were as slim and strong as ever. Strangely enough, at that moment, I felt the rightness of it all.’

Long silence. I was flooding my prints with water, holding them up to the light, setting aside the ones I liked. ‘I hope you know how beautiful you are, Kerstin,’ I murmured at last. ‘Thanks. Oh, I was pretty pretty once…It doesn’t matter anymore.’ ‘Don’t say that. You are truly, right now, with no reservations or qualifications whatsoever, an incredibly beautiful woman.’

I meant it. But not for a second did I imagine the effect my words would have on Kerstin Matheron…

Gaia keeps refilling their wine glasses and chattering up a storm. Rena listens and nods, weak with relief not to have to make a single decision until the next day.

Simon and Ingrid retire early — annoyed at being excluded from the conversation in Italian, or dead tired, or both. As she helps Gaia do the washing-up, Rena strives to preserve her hostess’s illusion that she understands at least half of what she’s saying.

Having guessed that Ingrid is not her mother, Gaia asks the dreaded question in a gentle voice, ‘Dov’è la sua vera madre?’

It knocks the wind out of her. Unable to form a phrase in Italian, she answers simply, ‘Partita.’

Not bad, crows Subra. It suits Ms Lisa Heyward to be described as a piece of music.

More than half asleep herself, Rena wishes her hostess goodnight and goes up an elegant wooden staircase that comes out across from the bathroom on the second floor. The two bedrooms are on either side of the landing and, because of this architectural choice made by Gaia’s dead lover — because of her fatigue, and the stress of the trip, and her boss’s anger, and the two electrocuted kids, and Aziz’s strange new aggressiveness, but especially because of the bathroom being directly across from the staircase, with one bedroom to the right and another to the left — the scene bursts into her brain.

It was summertime, the month of June. Rowan’s school had finished a week before mine and he’d returned to Montreal. He was back in his old room again just as if nothing had changed, but I was ill at ease. I didn’t recognise my brother. It was like a science fiction movie — as if there were an inhuman soul living in his body and transforming it according to its needs. His height had increased by six inches in the course of the school year, the soft blond fuzz on his upper lip had turned dark, and his hair was cut very short…But it wasn’t only that; the changes weren’t only physical; there was a new jerkiness to his movements and his eyes no longer met mine. He made fun of me every chance he got, calling me tattle-tale, birdbrain, goody-goody.

‘No, Rowan,’ I protested in panic. ‘I’m not a goody-goody, I just pretend to be one! Deep down I’m still bad and dirty, I haven’t changed, I swear!’ ‘Prove it. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Poor little innocent girl.’ ‘Well, then teach me. Please don’t reject me. All you have to do is teach me. I’ve always been a good student.’ ‘Get the fuck out of my room. Did I give you permission to come into my room?’ ‘No, but…’ ‘Did you so much as knock?’ ‘No, but I didn’t used to have to knock.’ ‘I didn’t used to have to knock!’ (Sarcastic imitation.) ‘You may not be aware of this, Rena, but things change. Learn the new rules. You fucking well have to knock now. Got that?’ ‘Sure, Rowan. I won’t forget.’ ‘Okay. See you later.’

But since my cheeks were aflame with the rage of rejection, and since Rowan was sitting at his desk with his back to me, I couldn’t resist the temptation of snitching his miniature transistor as I went past his dresser.

The next memory is slapped up against that one as if it came right afterwards, whereas several hours must have elapsed because the sky had changed colour in the meantime. Night was falling…it must have been about nine p.m. Where were our parents? I don’t know. Oddly enough, Lucille wasn’t home either; Rowan and I were alone in the house.

You weren’t little anymore, Subra gently points out. Rowan was fifteen and you were eleven. You didn’t need babysitters anymore.

Yeah, that must be it…I was already in my pyjamas, doing my homework and listening to Sweet Emotion, I’d practically forgotten about the theft of the transistor, when suddenly I heard Rowan coming up the stairs. I knew he was furious because his step was light and swift — if he’d been faking it, he would have come upstairs with heavy plodding giant steps: ‘Okay, now you’re in for it!’ Suddenly I was electrified by fear. My heart started hammering in my chest. He’ll kill me, he’ll kill me…I decided to take refuge in the only room with a lock — the bathroom. I dived into it just as Rowan reached the top of the stairs and managed to slam the door in his face, but before I could lock it he started throwing his whole body against it like a mad bull. He’ll come in and murder me, my parents will find me lying here in the morning, bathed in my own blood…

I pushed against the door with all my strength but I could feel Rowan’s greater strength pushing on the other side, my slippers were sliding on the tiling and the door kept coming open…Icy with fear I pleaded with him—’Please, please, Rowan!’—no, I tried to plead with him but I’d lost my voice, fear had frozen my vocal chords and my throat emitted nothing but a series of rusty croaks. I kept striving to calm my heart, clear my throat and articulate the words clearly, ‘Please, I’m sorry! I apologise! I’ll do whatever you say! Please!’ but all that came out was an absurd whisper and Rowan, in silent, furious determination, kept crashing into the door with monstrous thumps of his shoulder. Finally the weakness and impotence of my vocal chords spread throughout my body and I gave up, gave in, the door burst open, inwards, knocking me flat, Rowan grabbed me by the hair and dragged me across the tiles, my head banged up against the toilet bowl, and he said, ‘Now I’ll teach you, you asked for it.’ I kept pleading with him, saying, ‘No, no, please, Rowan!’ over and over again — that is to say, my lips shaped the words, the air passed through my throat, but not a word came out of my mouth and my body didn’t put up even the semblance of a struggle. All this was in semi-darkness, it was late evening and there was almost no light coming from outside, just a single streak of orange along the top of the blue-black rectangle of sky framed by the bathroom window as seen from the floor, interrupted by the jagged black silhouettes of three pine trees, the sentries of our back yard.

When his spasms had abated, Rowan glued his sweating body to my back and I felt a fraternal tear run down my neck. Then, getting to his feet and adjusting his clothes, he said in a voice so low as to be all but inaudible, ‘Remember when you were little you always wanted me to teach you what I’d learned at school?’ His voice broke then and I had to strain to hear what followed—’Well, now you know… what I’ve been learning…in that goddamn fucking school I got sent to…because of you.’

Rena takes a Noctran and a half before slipping into Gaia’s large soft bed. Impeccably washed and ironed, the white linen sheets are redolent of lavender.