Infrared

SUNDAY

Selvaggio

Doing a reportage with Aziz in a foreign city — we’re in a bus but we forget to ring the bell and the bus goes hurtling past our stop — by the time we lurch to the front to ask the driver to let us off, the bus is already beyond the city limits. Getting off at last, we find ourselves in an unbelievably beautiful landscape — bright sunlight, clouds scudding across the sky, trees waving in the wind—’Look!’ I exclaim. ‘It’s pure Stieglitz!’ Glancing around, I see some enormous animals in the field right next to us. ‘Look, Aziz! What are they? Oh, my God…they’re gorillas!’ There are several of them, circling one another and emitting angry cries, clearly about to start fighting…I see lions as well, and other wild animals roaming free — there’s no barrier of any kind between them and us. ‘I’m scared, Aziz,’ I say. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ A bit farther down the road, a wildcat has escaped and a woman farmer is running after it…‘Oh my God, Aziz,’ I keep repeating. ‘Oh my God!’

Maybe your own wildness trying to escape? Subra suggests.

Strange how I kept saying Oh my God in the dream — an expression that never crosses my lips in real life. Fermata means stop — a bus stop, for instance, except that the bus doesn’t stop, it goes hurtling past the city limits and plunges us into savagery, the woman farmer in my dream is desperately trying to catch the wild animals and lock them up on her farm, just as I was trying to do by firmly closing the door behind me, yes, firm farm fermata, you want to lock things out but sometimes you just can’t, and if the truth be told I wasn’t wearing a blindfold that day, Dr Walters had contented himself with binding me hand and foot, and though my bonds prevented me from moving freely I did catch a glimpse of my father as he burst into Room 416 wearing a bathrobe which, being wide open, gave me some idea of what had been going on in Room 418…Yes, you, dear Commander! Poor tottering, detumescent, living statue, reaching to tear the whip out of Don Juan’s hands in a trance of fury and indignation—What is the meaning of this, sir? With my daughter? How dare you? — and punish him for the same infamies you were committing with another man’s daughter in the next room, thus revealing the depth of the complicity between you, revolving around your irresponsible cocks. Commanders in bathrobes, dads as pals, shrinks as lovers — none of this fatally confusing mess should ever have existed.

She drifts back to sleep.

Domenica campagnola

She is wakened by silence — the silence of a Sunday morning in the country. Its purity is almost disturbing, after the hustle-bustle of Florence’s Via Guelfa with its honking horns and revving motors…

She opens her eyes and stretches luxuriously, revelling in the charm of her room and the perspective of the relatively low-stress day ahead of them. San Gimignano in the morning, Volterra in the afternoon, after which they’ll come back to Impruneta and spend a second night here at Gaia’s.

The bathroom is flooded with sunlight. An enchanting order reigns in this house; everything bears the precise and colourful imprint of their hostess — towels in different shades of green, small bouquets of dried flowers, copies of Etruscan statuettes, scented soaps in the shower stall…Even the hills seem to have been carefully arranged by Gaia and her architect lover so as to offer a pleasant view from the bathroom window.

As she splashes her body with warm water, Rena realises she’s in an excellent mood.

All is well, Subra says. You’ve passed the halfway point of the trip and so far no one has murdered anyone; there’ll definitely be an afterwards.

A moment later, she turns off the hair-dryer and stands looking at her naked body in the wardrobe mirror, first from the front then from the back. Still passable. Peaceable. Impassive. Straight, discreet lines. No one would ever guess what it’s been through.

For all that, I didn’t become allergic to sodomy.

I should hope not! exclaims Subra, who is also in an excellent mood this morning. If you had to give up everything you learned in discomfort, what would you have left, right? There’d be no reading, no eating, no playing the violin…

The first time I suggested to Alioune that he take me that way, he responded with indignation, disgust and a firm religious condemnation. Gradually the idea grew on him, though, and within a few months he’d mastered the technique of relaxing me without resorting to gadgets or vaseline, preparing me only with his fingers, tongue and words. Once he got the hang of it, he could impale me almost surreptitiously, so to speak, as I was negotiating a photo fee with Schroeder over the telephone…or hanging up the laundry in the bathroom…or even (once, unforgettably) out of doors — in July 1998, on the Dakar cliff road overhanging the ocean, while the entire population of the city was engrossed in a World Cup soccer final on TV. He even became a little more tolerant of gays.

Our marriage began to disintegrate when he found out my wanderings weren’t only geographical. For my part, I’d accepted his numerous affairs without batting an eyelid, asking only that he give me the same freedom in return. As a lawyer, Alioune could see my attitude was logical, but as an African male — or a male tout court—he was eaten away by jealousy. Like his father, his grandfather and all his Peulh ancestors before him, he considered polygamy to be natural and polyandry inadmissible. In nature, as he told me one day with a straight face, ewes live together peacefully, but you put two rams in the same field and they’ll fight to the death. ‘Bullshit!’ I retorted. ‘In our species, males are the ones who band together. Maybe because most women are mothers, they don’t need to keep rubbing up against each other, jostling and measuring and competing with each other just to feel they’re alive…’ ‘Oh yeah?’ snarled Alioune. ‘Then how come you’re never around, mother? How come you’re always gallivanting off to the four corners of the earth? Our sons suffer from your absences!’ That hit home, as Alioune had known it would — and as Aziz knows it does now — because of my own mother’s absences. I must admit I’d got into the habit of hiring one or more ‘Lucilles’ to manage the household while I was away. And I worried about the fact that Thierno, then four or five, had started tying his GI-Joes to every chair in the house…Would he tie up his mistresses later on, as Josh Walters had tied me up? Or as I myself had threatened to tie up poor, autistic Matthew Varick?

What are all these ropes about? Subra asks rhetorically, giving Rena her cue.

Oh the incredible refinement of Araki’s smooth, slender, lovely models, artistically bound and strung up in trees to be photographed. He set up this series entitled Sentimental Journey with the utmost care. The girl is horizontally suspended from a branch; ropes circle her breasts and come up in a V around her neck, forming slipknots at her chest, waist and thigh. Her arms are tightly squeezed against her body; her head dangles backwards and downwards; her face is concealed by a black cloth. All the women thus bound and photographed by Araki were consenting, they may even have been content; as usual, no mention is made of the fact that they were also paid. The photos are contemporary echos of kinbaku, an ancient Japanese rite which entailed stringing a woman up in a tree next to a Buddhist temple for the monks’ contemplation. What had the woman done to deserve such treatment? Oh, no, nothing, the monks just wanted to contemplate her, that’s all…with one hand, perhaps. Yes, as they sat there meditating in their solitary cells, listening to the gongs that marked off the hours of the day, they must have derived a certain pleasure from thinking about life’s transience, the crudely material, ephemeral and ultimately meaningless nature of human existence, admirably illustrated by the woman that hung day and night from a tree in front of their window, twisting, wailing, moaning, then falling silent, then starting to rot in the wind and rain as the ropes gradually sawed into her flesh. You can’t fool me: that woman was mommy as well. All tied-up women are mummy.

To get back to Alioune…Subra prods.

In the final years of our marriage, Alioune became jealous of everything. Not just my trips and lovers abroad but my success, my notoriety, my every phone call…Hmm…Don’t want to spoil this lovely Tuscan day by thinking about the dark rain of violence in the eyes of my handsome Senegalese…his fits of rage gradually making me blind and impotent, unable to work…my Canon locked away in its case for months on end…my darkroom deserted…our two sons desperately clinging to two foundering adults…the terror that came into their faces, Thierno’s especially, whenever we raised our voices…my own terror at realising, in the midst of a quarrel, that my adolescent sons in the next room were enduring exactly what I’d endured as an adolescent, and vowed never to inflict on my kids…

The situation worsened with every passing day. Alioune began to drink, and I met the Mr Hyde of his Dr Jekyll. On bad nights, as of the second drink, I could almost see his white teeth turn into fangs and hair sprout from his handsome face. He’d wait for some pretext to come along, then turn and pounce on me, roar at me, crush me beneath the weight of his scorn. Appalled to find myself still vulnerable to the female atavism I most abhorred, that awful paralysis of will which makes us murmur Yes, master when confronted with a male who’s mad with rage or just plain mad — I finally walked out on him. ‘Behave like a Cro-Magnon if you feel like it — but without me.’ That’s when I cut my hair cut short.

Maybe this is as good a time as any to change the subject? Subra suggests.

Right. Mustn’t ever forget that shred of wisdom gleaned long ago on LSD: hell is only one of the countless rooms in the Versailles palace of the brain; you can always close the door on that room and walk into another. I can choose, for instance, to relive the divine love-making of my first years with Alioune. Waking up in the morning, I’d feel his hardened cock against my thigh, he’d slip into me and not move, I’d close my eyes and pretend to be drifting innocently back to sleep whereas in fact I was squeezing him inwardly with all my might, skilfully massaging his sex with the contractions of my own. Then he’d start to move inside me, as gently as in a dream. At first I’d keep my pleasure at bay, purposely remaining above or outside of it, but before long the weakness would become irresistible — a thing I could feel expanding within me, slowly invading my whole body, turning it inside out, and when I came it was like weeping. Afterwards Alioune and I could touch each other in any way at all — I could press my head against the inside of his thigh, for instance, near the top — and we’d be happy just like that. It’s incredible how happy you can be sometimes for no reason at all. Is it possible I’ll never know that kind of happiness again?

Hmm, murmurs Subra. Maybe we shouldn’t hang around in that room, either.

So go back to the night we came home from a party at three in the morning and, having put on a Susanne Abbuehl record, I let Alioune slowly peel off my clothes and carry me to the bed, my loins draped in a scarf of turquoise silk. Giving myself up to Abbuehl’s voice singing e.e. cummings and the warmth pulsing through my body, I released an interminable cry of joy as his tongue caressed the very point of my being and then, after the convulsions, first mine then his then mine again, I remained curled up in the disorder of the sheets as the after-tremors of my body gradually spaced themselves out and subsided, melting into the final poignant chords of somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond…But Alioune, who spoke not a word of English, jolted me out of my reverie by exclaiming, ‘Boy, what syrupy music!’…

Rena finishes dressing, impatient to go down to the kitchen and let Gaia’s chatter deliver her from her demons. When she gets to the landing halfway down the wooden staircase, however, her mobile rings.

‘Alioune! Incredible! I was thinking about you just a minute ago!’

‘Is that so unusual?’

‘No, what’s unusual is for you to call me.’

‘How are things with you?’

Ah, yes. Ritual greetings. Rena loves ritual greetings. The first time Alioune took her to Senegal with him, just before their wedding, she thought people were having her on. ‘Salaamaalekum! — Maalekum Salaam!’ But no, they weren’t. Ritual greetings are taken very seriously in Africa. And now she misses them. Not easy, afterwards, to readjust to the rude and rapid manners of Parisians.

‘Just fine, thanks…How have you been doing?’

‘I’m fine, too. I heard you were in Italy?’

‘You heard right.’

‘How’s your father doing? Is he in good health?’

‘Not bad, not bad at all.’

‘And your stepmother — is she well?’

‘Hanging in there. What about your own folks?’

‘They’re fine, inch’Allah.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

Even when he was pleading in court, Alioune never spoke fast. He refused to be rushed — whether he was eating, walking, reading or making love. The first time they found themselves alone together in a bedroom, Rena was blown away by his consummate calm and self-confidence. He taught her the African tempo.

Tell me, Subra says.

Not many men are so utterly devoid of impatience, so gifted at eliciting desire. Alioune would lie down on me, naked, his sex would approach mine and he’d watch me start to tremble…Oh the beauty of that indefinite moment when, though hard, a man hesitates at the entrance to your body, playing and rubbing and teasing and pretending to wonder if you want him to come in whereas he knows you’re dying for it, yes, when you know for sure he’ll enter you but he wants to keep you guessing as to when…and then he enters you…only slightly at first, to prolong your exquisite torment of knowing he’ll move in further…then he moves in further… suddenly plunging in up to the hilt, and the cry which then rips from your throat is one you didn’t know you contained, a cry of liberation in crescendo…Other times, with me on top, Alioune would guide my body down at a particular angle that made me swoon at every thrust, at, every, thrust, swoon, swoon, close my eyes and give myself up to pure sensation, the infra-infra-infrared of longed-for warmth beyond visibility, oh yes that man certainly did know how to elicit, prolong and intensify my body’s vibrato, quivers becoming tremors, tectonic plates sliding, the earth opening up, boulders cracking, cascades tumbling, volcanoes erupting…Sometimes, when we were already well launched into this mad affair, our bodies would suddenly stop moving and we’d hang there suspended on the crest of an intense, all but motionless thrum — just as a warbler sits frozen on its branch, only the ripple at its throat revealing its lifesong — until at last, far from exploding, we’d slide endlessly down and down together, cascading in slow motion into the abyss…

Ah, Subra sighs, you’ve certainly lost that African tempo since your break-up with Alioune.

La nonna

‘Which way’s the wind blowing, Alioune?’

‘Oh, the best possible way.’

‘Must be a trade wind, then.’

She sees the two of them one evening, strolling through the fortress ruins at the top of Goree, caressing each other amidst the caresses of that divinely cool Atlantic breeze.

‘A trade wind, exactly. And along with my voice, Rena, it brings some marvellous news.’

‘What news, Alioune?’

‘We’re going to be grandparents.’

She swerves to study the hills framed by the six small rectangular windows in Gaia’s front door. A double triptych of photographs. You could shift the images around, she thinks, changing their order, putting the sky beneath the hills…Everything is photography, when you think about it. All of us are constantly framing and reframing, zooming in and out, freezing and retouching the instants of our lives — the better to preserve them, protect them, prevent them from being whooshed away by Time’s mighty current…

‘Are you there, Rena? Jasmine is pregnant.’

Objectively speaking, her legs don’t have a lot of weight to carry, but suddenly they can’t carry it anymore. Of its own volition, her body sinks onto Gaia’s leather couch, which is almost the same reddish-purple as the hills framed by the windowpanes.

When Toussaint was little, he liked playing in the bath so much that he never wanted to get out. So I’d spread a large, sand-coloured towel on the bathroom floor and say, ‘Now the famous explorer has to make an emergency landing in the desert!’ Toussaint would turn to me and stretch out his tiny arms, I’d pick him up by the underarms and lift his small body out of the tub, shake him slightly so the excess water would run off, see his diminutive cock and balls jiggling, set him on the towel that was desert sand, then wrap it round him… How many times did we act out that little play together? Hundreds of times, and then…

Finished, Subra chimes in, always happy to sing a refrain she knows by heart.

When you’re a mother, you touch your newborn baby boy’s penis and testicles with respect; they’re soft and strange and fragile, sometimes the penis hardens slightly when you graze it and you smile. You wipe your baby’s anus, change his diapers, oversee the cycle, certain liquids and solids going in at the top, others coming out down below. You clean the boy’s penis; later you teach him how to hold and aim it when he pees, whether in the toilet bowl or at the side of a highway…and then…that’s over and done with.

The main reason I decided not to marry Xavier, my handsome French art collector and connoisseur, is that we couldn’t agree on the subject of our future son’s penis. Our worst fight broke out one day in the Louvre. One minute we were standing in front of a seventeenth-century painting of baby Jesus amidst a swirling group of rabbis in coloured robes, one of whom was brandishing a knife; the next minute we were screaming at each other about whether or not to circumcise our son, not yet conceived. ‘No!’ I said. ‘It’s a barbaric practice dating from another age.’ ‘Yes!’ said Xavier. ‘To me it’s a symbol of his connection to the Jewish people. I want my son to feel he belongs to something — a lineage, a history. Even if other customs and rituals have died out, it matters to me that this one be preserved.’ ‘No way!’ I retorted. ‘Customs evolve. You don’t have to go on blindly repeating them, you’re allowed to change them or chuck them. Men have stopped dragging women by the hair, shrinking their enemies’ heads, slitting oxen’s throats at the altar — they can also stop mutilating their children, whether boys or girls. Cut up your own body if you feel like it; no one’s going to damage the physical integrity of my kids.’ ‘How American can you get?’ said Xavier, who knew how much Canadians dislike being assimilated to their neighbours from the south. ‘You have the Americans’ silly naiveté, their arrogant ignorance, their lack of culture, history, and depth — in a word, their superficiality. If you’d read up on the subject, you’d know that circumcision is basically a measure of hygiene. Statistics show that circumcised men are much less vulnerable to STDs.’ Then he added, shouting so loudly that half a dozen Guadeloupian museum attendants moved across the room to shush us, ‘I can’t believe how uneducated you are!’ ‘Uneducated yourself!’ I screamed back at him. ‘Ha! You don’t even know that until recently, all male children born in North America were circumcised.’ There was no way our relationship could have worked out. A few years later, Alioune and I were at each other’s throats over the same issue: only one fight, but a monumental one. ‘No matter what his religion,’ thundered Alioune, ‘a non-circumcised African male is not human.’ This time, though, it occurred to me that my older son could protect his younger brother. For how could we justify circumcising little Thierno and leaving Toussaint intact?

Mother and son, Subra murmurs. Go on.

After two years or so, you stop wiping his bottom and holding his penis to help him pee because he’s learned to do it by himself. He’ll do it by himself for a few decades, after which (as was the case with Kerstin’s husband, Edmond) he might need help again — but by that time you, his mother, won’t be around anymore…Yes, you stop touching and looking at your son’s genitals, and supervising his peeing and pooping. You leave him alone, move away, avert your eyes, give him room to grow — this is indispensable. (It’s hilarious, in a way, to think of all the perverts who, generation after generation in bordellos the world over, reinvent the scatological wheel…and all the whores who, half docile and half despairing, shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes heavenwards and, for a fee, go on playing Mommy to those big fat babies.) Your little boy grows and…and then…of course, it’s only natural…You know his genitals have been growing along with the rest of his body…his cock and balls have become those of an adolescent…Without giving it much thought, you assume dark hair has sprouted in that area of his body you used to attend to and no longer attend to, used to wash and no longer wash…You surmise that, like all pubescent boys, he’s started getting hard-ons, fantasising and masturbating…When you launder his sheets, you’re not surprised to catch an occasional glimpse of what the French call a map of France; you wonder whether the Chinese call it a map of China and the Russians a map of Russia and the Canadians a map of Canada; you sort of doubt the Japanese call it a map of Japan — lots of little islands everywhere — or the Chileans, a map of Chile, one long narrow streak…You abstain from speculating about your son’s sexual fantasies. You have no idea whether they’re homo, hetero, zoo-o, scato or necro. His desire is none of your business so you avert your eyes and avoid thinking about it. That distance is sacred: never again must you be involved with your son’s genitals, the engendering part of his body, the part that will turn him into a father. Yet it’s dizzying to think that the lips which so recently drew milk through your nipples are now teasing and sucking on another woman’s nipples, that the body you once held in your arms is now rising in lovely virile violence above another woman’s body, that the boy who once inhabited your womb is now spurting his seed into another woman’s womb…Then one day a line gets drawn beneath your children’s generation — and, twenty-five rungs farther down the ladder of your life, another generation bursts into bloom, reshuffling all the roles for a new deal. One day you wake up to discover that the grandfather has become a great-grandfather, the mother a grandmother, and the son a father.

‘Rena? Are you there, Rena?’

‘I just can’t…Why didn’t…’

‘Why didn’t he call you himself?’

‘Yes…’

‘Well, I think he’s a bit intimidated…He sent you an email three days ago and it worried him when you didn’t answer.’

‘Ah. I admit I’ve been a bit cut off these past few days. I’m somewhere…uh, in the middle of the fifteenth century.’

‘You do know what’s going on in France, though?’

‘You mean the death of those two boys?’

‘That was just the beginning. The young people in the projects are up in arms. The proverbial shit is going to hit the fan, Rena — there’ll be riots any minute now. I’ve been thinking of you. It’s the sort of subject you usually cover.’

‘Yeah, well, unfortunately, Alioune, I still haven’t learned how to be in two places at once.’

‘Hey!’

‘Sorry. I’ll be back in three days’ time. Don’t worry, I’ll catch up.’

‘I never worry about you, Rena.’

‘Tell Toussaint I’ll…Tell him I…’

‘Sure. I’ll pass your congratulations on to him. Give my best regards to Simon and Ingrid.’

Gaia is waiting for her in the kitchen, an apron tied around her waist and a smile on her lips. ‘Did you have a good sleep?’

Yes, she had a good sleep…even if the universe has shifted since.

Gaia pours her coffee and introduces her to the various jams and jellies on the breakfast table. ‘Everything is homemade,’ she says. ‘Even the bread.’

I admire the way this person turns domesticity into one of the fine arts, she tells Subra. Leading the sort of woman’s life that has always been a mystery to me, mothering everyone who crosses her threshold, planting and picking flowers and fruit to make bouquets and jams, taking pleasure in the simple joys she bestows upon her clients. She must be about Ingrid’s age.

Also the age Lisa would be now, Subra points out, if she hadn’t effaced herself at thirty-seven.

True. It’s weird being older than one’s own mother — do you realise you’re my little sister now, Ma?

‘Do you have any children?’ Rena asks out loud.

‘Just one daughter, in Milan,’ Gaia says. ‘But three grandchildren,’ she adds, pointing to their snapshots on the fridge door. ‘What about you?’

‘Two sons. Also grown.’

But no, no photos. I, the professional photographer, have always eschewed carrying around photos of my sons. I wonder why?

You avoid simple happiness, Subra clowns, imitating Ingrid’s voice.

Yet I’d give anything to be able to show Gaia what Toussaint and Thierno looked like last summer, and no longer look like, and tell her that Toussaint teaches children with learning difficulties, lives with a vivacious young colleague of his, named Jasmine, and will soon be a father…

Instead she says nothing. Contents herself with nodding as she listens to her hostess’s patter and samples her delectable homemade jams.

After a while, Gaia turns on the radio and starts washing the dishes. A Bach cantata comes to an end and is replaced by the heavy, monotonous drone of a man’s voice.

Rena tenses up at once. ‘Mind if we change stations?’

‘Ma perché?’ Gaia says.

‘I have a thing about preachers…’

Seeing her hostess’s eyebrows knit in incomprehension, Rena catches herself in time and banishes the words she was about to utter — Oh, men’s voices! Men’s voices! They have the right to harangue us, harass us, boom at us at all hours of the day and night from balconies, pulpits and minarets the world over; do they have to invade our kitchens, too? — and replaces them with ‘I prefer Bach.’

Wisely, Gaia switches off the radio, goes into the living room and puts on a recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Then, untying her apron, she dons a pert blue hat and announces in Italian, ‘I’m off to town for ten o’clock mass. I should be back at around noon — will you still be here?’

‘Oh, no, definitely not. Spero di no!’

So Gaia hands her a bunch of keys — this one’s for the door to the driveway, these two are for the house — flashes a bright smile at her, and vanishes.

Good thing my anticlericalism didn’t alter her kindness.

Bach…

No, all right, she concedes to Subra, who has been frowning at her sceptically for the past half hour. I didn’t leave Alioune, Alioune left me.

For once I’d made an exception and agreed to see one of my lovers in Paris. Yasu was a photographer. I’d first met him in a gallery on top of Tokyo’s Mori Tower. He’s my twin! I breathed in astonishment the minute I set eyes on him. Young, slender and androgynous, with black hair and dark eyes, dressed in black from head to toe, he was utterly engrossed in the photos he was taking. At first I mistook him for a woman. I wanted him to be a woman; I would have liked for a woman to be engrossed in her work to the point of not even noticing my existence, and when I realised he was a man I wanted to be him — or, failing that, to be one with him. When that dream came true within the hour, I learned that he had delicate hands, long sinewy limbs, hairless, amber-coloured skin and an incomparably graceful body, but that he was a twisted, perverted little prince. Apart from himself, Yasu loved no one but his dog — a young pedigree bitch named Isolde. As for women, he made love to them only to keep them at bay, took them to bed with him only to icily reject them afterwards. His photos were as cold, beautiful and frightening as he was — either inhuman urban landscapes with sharp angles and starkly alternating light and shadow, or ultra-refined pornography.

Sometimes one is magnetically attracted to one’s opposite, one’s nightmare, one’s antithesis — that’s what happened to me with Yasu. So when he called to say he was in Paris for one night only, and asked me to join him in his hotel room a few hours before his opening, I broke my own rule about Parisian monogamy and rushed to obey. And as we busied ourselves with a number of (to my mind) rather depressing gadgets on the super-king-sized bed in his five-star hotel room, the bitch Isolde, in a fit of jealousy that would later give me food for thought, methodically chewed holes in every single piece of my clothing scattered on the floor, leaving her master’s clothes intact.

What was I to do? It was five o’clock and I had an appointment with Thierno and his school counsellor at five-thirty. And. So. Well. Hastily donning Yasu’s elegant black suit, which he needed for his seven o’clock opening, I rushed to the Monoprix next door, bought myself a new set of clothes, raced to Thierno’s school, attended the meeting, then raced back to the hotel — yes, son in tow, I had no choice — to give my lover back his suit, at which point the bitch Isolde could think of nothing better to do than leap on my son and sink her savage teeth into his thigh. And that is how my third marriage came to an end.

Sitting at the coffee table, Rena flips through the past week’s newspapers. The events in France are mentioned only briefly, on inside pages.

Aziz, Aziz, where are you? What’s going on?

She dials his number and gets his answering machine. ‘It’s me, love,’ she says…and, not knowing what to add, hangs up.

Disturbed by the memory of Yasu, she tries to imagine the church service Gaia is attending right now. This stirs memories of all the religious ceremonies she has sat in on — forever an outsider — in Durban, Mumbai, Port-au-Prince, New Orleans, Ouro Preto or Dublin, moved in spite of herself by the beauty, solemnity and power of these collective rituals. She replaces Bach with Pergole-si on the sound system, all the while pursuing a futile argument with Gaia in her brain — Yes, I do have the right to love this music, she insists defensively, even if I reject the church that gave rise to it…

The morning is melting away like snow in springtime.

At ten-thirty, Ingrid comes down alone and announces, ‘Dad’s not feeling well.’

‘Oh? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing, he’s just having a hard time emerging, that’s all. It happens more and more often.’

‘It does?’

‘Yes.’

Rena wonders if she detects a note of reproach in Ingrid’s voice — but no, only worry.

‘But…will he be getting up?’

‘Oh, he’s up.’

‘And is he planning on coming down?’

‘Yes. He told me to tell you he’d be right down.’

She serves Ingrid her breakfast, desperately trying to be as sweet and gentle as Gaia…but it’s no use, she feels sullen and mean. Doesn’t want to share with Ingrid the good news that wafted in on Alioune’s trade wind this morning. Everything feels ‘off’.

Heavy silence between them.

Simon, at last.

Ingrid and she, in chorus: ‘Are you all right, Dad?’

He grunts his assent, smiles to dispel their fears, and breakfasts royally.

Then he says, ‘Can we sit down in the living room and talk things over for a while?’

Scartoffie

Rena looks at the perfect Sunday morning around her. Out of doors: calm, sunlight, the marvellous Chianti hills—gold! Oh, gold of grapevines, red of October maples, mauve of heather and lavender, a landscape copied from Leonardo’s paintings…And indoors: elegant burnished furniture, books serried on shelves, the neat stacks of Gaia’s dead lover’s architectural magazines, ceramic bowls… Every thing in its place. All the day’s possibilities converging here and now…And her father wants to talk things over.

‘When I retired five years ago and we had the house in West-mount renovated,’ he begins, ‘I had a sort of dream. Or, let’s say, a hope. I hoped we’d be able to entertain more often…And now I see that dream’s just not coming true…maybe because when you invite people over, they feel obliged to invite you back…or because… I don’t know…the food shopping is getting to be a burden on Ingrid…’

Rena sees Ingrid hesitate, gather her courage, hesitate again, then decide to speak up. ‘I don’t want to sound critical, Dad,’ she says, on the verge of tears, ‘but how can we entertain when the dining-room table is stacked high with all your papers?’

Dante neither saw nor foresaw the circle of Hell to which my father seems condemned for all eternity.

‘I’m getting old,’ Simon says, looking steadily at Rena, ‘and my concentration is not what it used to be. I only have an hour a two a day of mental clarity — if I’m lucky! If I’ve had a good sleep, and if my medication hasn’t made me lethargic. So when, by miracle, I do get a bit of clarity, rather than squandering it on practical chores like tidying up my study, I prefer to use it for something, uh, let’s say, well…creative.’

It’s eleven-thirty. Soon Gaia will be home, and they won’t have budged. Oh, well. They can give up the idea of Volterra and settle for San Gimignano; what difference will that make?

In Ravenna, Dante sat down at his desk, took out a sheet of paper and a pen, allowed the images to well up in his mind, and transcribed them word by word.

Same thing when I enter my darkroom and close the door behind me: the space is orderly, the surfaces clean and bare. I prepare the baths, measuring one part substance to nine parts water, dust my negatives with a tiny paintbrush and slip them (shiny side up) into the enlarger, choose my filters and paper, peer through the grain magnifier at the arrangement of the tiny grains of silver halide, those molecules informed by light. When at last everything is ready, when the silence is ready, I turn off the lights and start exposing. Calm, concentrated, absent, I count off the seconds of exposure, work, rework, improve, stay there, expose, count the seconds, study the grain…

It’s all about framing. You’ve got to keep some things outside the frame. You’ve got to exclude. Only God can get away with embracing everything.

Impossible — such is his hell — to set a sheet of paper on my father’s desk. It vanished years ago, beneath a Himalaya of inextricably miscellaneous papers. On its surface, the urgent and the futile writhe together like the snakes of Laocoon; the future is blocked off by perpetual, guilt-inducing calls from the past. Every surface in his study literally overflows with ancient invitations, leaflets, newspaper clippings, magazines, advertisements, concert programmes, scribbled chemical formulae, snapshots, to say nothing of the report cards of children long grown and gone…The painful grimace of an African woman dying of AIDS overlaps with the benevolent smile of a Buddhist monk; the photocopy of an old Leonard Cohen poem finds itself face-to-face with the latest treacly letter from Simon’s sister Deborah (turned Zionist and pious in her old age); hip X-rays are interleaved with outdated issues of Brain magazine. Sufferings jostle and jive, memories vie for attention, reminders from the tax office scream their impatience…

Simon Greenblatt’s papers slide off the table, line up on the floor in military formation, march out of his study in Montreal, cross the Atlantic Ocean and invade Impruneta. A triumphant army of ancient papers overwhelms Gaia’s living room, wrenching Rena’s guts, causing tears to well up in her stepmother’s eyes, obstructing their bronchial tubes, clogging their arteries, blocking the circulation of blood and meaning, drowning out the music in their ears, cutting off their view of the Chianti hills, darkening the delightful Tuscan sun, and striking their perfect Sunday morning dead.

‘Daddy! Stop it!’ That’s Rena screaming at the top of her lungs. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ She seems unable to find a more subtle way of putting it. ‘STOP IT!’

She flees.

Lombaggine

Head awhirl, she runs up to her bedroom.

The clay-footed ogre pursues me by not moving. His torpor strikes terror into my heart, breathes down my neck. Oh, Daddy! Daddy! Save me from the ogre who is you! If I don’t run as fast as I can, panting and sweating, he’ll catch up with me and throttle all my hopes — gloop, gloop. Engulfed by his misery, I’ll disappear forever. Look at Horemheb, he says. Look at Romulus. Look at the soul’s immortality. No, Daddy, no! — I need to run and run and keep on running — to escape your immobility!

Though it must be eighty degrees in her room beneath the roof, she’s shivering; her hands are freezing; and when she takes out her mobile to call Kerstin, she misdials three times in a row.

‘Dr Matheron’s office.’

‘Kerstin!’

‘Rena! How marvellous to hear your voice. Tell me! How’s the Tuscan trek?’

‘You first — how have you been? How’s your lumbago?’

Rena feels a bit responsible for that lumbago. Shortly after their fateful conversation in her darkroom, when she’d told Kerstin how gorgeous and sexy she still was, that stoical widow (whose erotic experience up until then had been limited to three or four impatient deflowerers, a fine husband lost to illness and an endless desert of abstinence), had shyly sat down at her computer.

Tell me, Subra says.

It wasn’t easy for her. It meant choosing a pseudonym, then learning to filter out weirdos, psychos, phallocrats…Still, the pickings have been excellent, overall. Between the ages of fifty-five and sixty, Kerstin has had a good dozen lovers and the things they’ve done together sound intriguing not to say extraordinary, even to my jaded ears. The men are almost all married, between forty and sixty. They confide in her after the love-making. They tell her their problems and listen to hers, make her laugh, shower her with compliments, tenderness and flowers. ‘You were right,’ Kerstin told me, after a few months of assiduous experimentation. ‘As long as you keep away from intellectuals, Frenchmen are remarkable lovers. They’ve got all sorts of qualities — curiosity, delicacy, boyishness, a sense of humour, a taste for vice…I can hardly believe my luck! I’m having a ball and I don’t plan to stop any time soon. God bless the internet!’ One day she confessed to a weakness for whippings and thrashings, probably dating back to the spankings her severe Protestant Swede of a father regularly inflicted on her plump pink bottom. She recently made the acquaintance of a young man in the Auvergne region who showed himself willing to punish her in all the ways she’d ever dreamed of, and many that had never occurred to her. ‘It’s pure theatre,’ Kerstin assured me. Though I don’t object to this sort of mise en scène on moral grounds (every true erotic encounter, be it with a…member of the other sex or of one’s own, with a broomstick or a mere fleeting image, opens our bodies onto the void that surrounds us and revives the violence of brute animal infantile life — a life that emerges from matter is destined to return to it), I admit I feared for my friend’s safety. So when she was struck down by a lumbago attack, following a strange excursion to the Auvergne last summer for a rendez-vous with the whipping man, I interpreted it as a wise warning from her body.

‘Better. A little better, these past few days.’

‘What does “a little better” mean?’

‘Well, I’m not about to go schlepping through the Afghan mountains with a sixty-pound back pack, but I do manage to get out of bed now and then. So I’m making progress. How about you? Oh… my darling Rena…are you crying?’

Absurdly, Rena nods.

‘So you’re having a rough time? As rough as you feared?’

She nods again, squeaking out a yes between sobs.

‘Dear heart. Come on, now, take a few deep breaths the way I taught you…’

‘Thanks, Kerstin.’

‘What about Aziz?’

‘That’s part of it. I haven’t heard from him for two days.’

‘The magazine’s probably making him work around the clock, don’t you think? Because of the events?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t worry, dear one. It’s just a bad patch, you’ll see. You’ll pull through. Everything will turn out all right.’

L’amore

Car tyres crunch on gravel — Gaia is back.

Rena comes out of her room. ‘So what do you guys feel like doing?’

As traumatised by her outburst as if he were a little boy and she his mother, Simon answers in a low voice that he plans to spend the day here. She and Ingrid are welcome to go sightseeing wherever they want.

‘No problem,’ says Rena.

‘No, Dad,’ Ingrid protests. ‘I’ll stay here with you. It’s a good idea to rest up a bit. We’ve been running around so much these past few days.’

‘No problem,’ says Rena.

Fine. So they’ll see neither Volterra nor San Gimignano; they’ll go nowhere. What difference does it make?

Gaia’s cheerful voice wafts up to them from downstairs: ‘Tutto bene?’

‘Si, si. Molto bene!’ Rena replies.

And the day goes by.

Rena settles down with a book beneath the open dormer windows of her bedroom. As the afternoon sun crosses the sky, snatches of the couple’s gentle madness come floating up to her ears.

‘We haven’t had the time to write a single postcard. If we don’t do it now, we’ll get to Montreal before they do.’

‘Good idea. Where did you put them?’

‘I thought you had them. Wait a minute, I’ll check…Our bags need repacking anyway…’

‘Where should we sit? Cold in the shade, hot in the sun…’

‘Forgot my hat.’

‘Shall I fetch it?’

‘No, no, let’s sit in the shade.’

‘Which ones do you want?…Okay, I’ll take the others.’

‘So where should we start?’

‘Let’s make a list.’

‘The children, of course…and the grandchildren.’

‘But it’s the same address. No point in wasting stamps.’

‘Just as you like…’

‘Deborah…No, I’ll do hers later.’

‘My stomach’s growling.’

‘Hey, I’m getting hungry, too.’

‘Maybe we could ask Gaia to make us a snack and bring it out here.’

‘Sure. She could set up another table, it shouldn’t be a problem.’

‘Wait, I’ll ask…What a talker that woman is! She’s coming, though.’

‘So you write to David, okay?’

‘No, go ahead, you do it. Here, take Michelangelo’s David. The complete view, eh? Not the close-up of his thingamajig. Ha ha!’

‘Know his address?’

‘Not off the top of my head.’

‘Too bad. We’ll have to give him the card when we get back.’

‘And Whosit’s Campanile — should we send that to Freda?’

‘Sure thing. I wonder how she’s doing…Hope her medicine has kicked in by now.’

‘Speaking of which…what about Marcy’s operation?’

‘You’re right, it was scheduled for last week. We should have given her a call.’

‘Oh, she knows it’s not easy to telephone from overseas…’

‘Aren’t those hills just beautiful?’

‘Mm-hmm! The foliage back home must be looking great, too.’

‘Should I take a picture?’

‘Why not?’

‘Where’s the camera?’

‘Upstairs in the red bag.’

‘I’ll get it — tell the sun not to move!’

‘Could you bring a sweater down for me, too?’

‘Are you cold?’

‘Just a little.’

‘Maybe we should go inside.’

‘Okay. I’ll bring the tray.’

‘Careful of that step!’

‘Oops! Just in time!’

…They love each other.

Where is Aziz?

Grabbing her Canon, Rena joins Gaia outside in the garden and starts taking photos. She photographs everything she likes, and she likes everything. One photo after another: Gaia herself — a marvellous woman, radiant despite mourning and solitude. Her hazel trees and fig trees, her vegetable garden, her autumn flowers. All in black in white. An orgy of greys.

Gaia talks and talks, smiling, seeming to understand her.

She’d understand, Rena says inwardly to Subra, if I could tell her, if I could make it clear to her, if my Italian were better than it is, I’m sure Gaia would understand that the words escaped me. I didn’t mean to say them. The word, rather, a single word, the word Sylvie, the name Sylvie, such a lovely name, meaning forest or glade… ‘What?’ my mother said. ‘What are you talking about? Sylvie wasn’t with you in London!’ And my silence then my silence then my silence then…I’m sure Gaia would believe me if I told her I didn’t do it on purpose; the word came out all by itself. Three months after the trip to London, I was chattering about flea markets with my mother who adored flea markets, I was telling her about the Portobello Market and how much fun Sylvie and I had had trying on vintage dresses there…’What?’ Silence. ‘Sorry, no, of course she wasn’t there…’ Cringing, blushing, stammering…I saw the dawning of catastrophe in Ms Lisa Heyward’s eyes. I didn’t mean to, I swear. I didn’t do it on purpose, it was a simple mistake, not a Freudian slip, just a mistake, people do make plain ordinary mistakes sometimes, don’t they, Gaia? I’m the one who…it’s my fault that…no way of unsaying it, taking it back…undoing the damage…The word Sylvie irreparably destroyed…

Caos

It’s six o’clock. Sweetly, with a sharp, burning sweetness, dusk arrives. Rena has taken a hundred photos. Simon and Ingrid get up from their nap. All they need to do now is invent an evening for this day…

‘I don’t want you to cook for us again,’ Rena tells Gaia. ‘We’ll find ourselves a restaurant in town.’

‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to make dinner for you tonight, I’m having friends over.’

‘Ah. Benissimo.’

She’s having friends over, thinks Rena. Maybe that’s how the whole thing all started: waking up this morning, Simon must have sensed this was a house in which it was possible to entertain.

As Rena heads for the staircase, Gaia turns on the TV to catch the evening news. ‘Dio mio, look!’ she exclaims suddenly. ‘It’s about your country. La Francia.’

Rena covers the six yards between the staircase and the TV set in zero seconds.

Scenes of chaos. A doorway, with choking men and billows of smoke pouring out of it. Thunderstruck, Rena recognises the little mosque — part of the same building as the Turkish baths she visited with Aicha. From inside the baths, she recalls, the women could hear the men praying; other days of the week it was no doubt the other way around. She recognises the men, too. Not the individuals but the type. Modest, humble. Not young. Not proud. Bruised and battered by life. All-enduring. ‘What’s going on?’ she asks Gaia, because the Italian anchorman is speaking much too fast for her to understand.

Even when Gaia repeats what he’s saying at a slower speed she doesn’t understand it, and even if Gaia were to translate it into French or English she wouldn’t understand it, because what he is saying is incomprehensible. The police, it would seem, tossed, it would seem, a tear bomb, it would seem, into the mosque, it would seem, during the evening prayer service. The two women sit there and watch the coughing, weeping, spitting men pour out of the building. Then the camera jumps to another scene — crowds of young men shouting and throwing stones—’It looks like the Intifada!’ says Gaia (and Rena is reminded of an elderly Jewish couple she met in Haifa, Argentine-born but living in Israel since the 1950s, shocked to hear she planned to visit the Palestinian Territories as well, asking her if she took her Canadian friends to visit Sarcelles when they came to Paris; Rena had been disconcerted by the comparison — quite an admission, when you thought about it)…Violent clashes between the young men and the riot police, cars burning, women’s faces convulsed with rage, more cars burning, and she realises Aziz must be on the spot. Of course he’s there, either in the middle of the crowd or right next to it, covering the event for On the Fringe, maybe if she looks at the TV screen hard enough she’ll catch sight of him and be able to say to Gaia, Look, that’s my husband — the one over there, see? Do you see the one I mean? The tall thin young Arab with the high cheekbones. Yes, him, him! Isn’t he just so beautiful you could weep? That’s him, I swear! We’ve been working together for two years and living together since last summer. He’s a real hero…He learned early on how to turn sadness into energy and bitterness into creativity. A poor student in grade school, he got turned around by a wonderful teacher in eighth grade and made it through to his baccalaureate, and it didn’t take long after that for the fast-talker to turn into a reporter. Today he’s one of France’s few bicultural journalists, capable of bridging the gap between the nervous, touchy, overcautious old-stock population of France’s city centres and the boiling cauldron of the suburbs with their hundred nationalities, seventy languages, fifteen religions and two million problems…True, he’s younger than I am, indeed closer to my sons’ ages than to mine (it wasn’t easy for them to accept this new stepfather), but all is well now, Gaia, I can hardly believe my luck…

Rena says none of these things because the cameras have long since moved away from the projects, impatient to highlight other suppurating sores of the planet — interspersed, naturally, with advertisements. When she goes upstairs to dress for dinner, she can hear Simon and Ingrid getting ready in their room.

The storm will have blown over by tomorrow, Subra tells her, and you’ll all get off to a new start. You’ll be on the last leg of your journey.

Right, Rena says. Cool it.

In the restaurant, they alternate between clumsy attempts at conversation, embarrassed silences and contrite smiles.

Early to bed.

Vast hiatus between lights out and sleep.