Infrared

TUESDAY

Partenza

No dreams, thanks to the sleeping-pills.

Lying in bed, Rena calculates how long it will be until her plane lands in Paris. Only twenty-seven hours to go…

Aziz was supposed to come and meet her at Roissy…but with everything that’s going on in France, will he be able to?

It’s past nine by the time she walks into the breakfast room. The minute they set eyes on her, Ingrid and Simon can tell something is off.

‘You’re white as a sheet,’ Ingrid says in a worried voice. ‘Didn’t you sleep well?’

She tells them.

‘Oh, you poor thing!’ her stepmother exclaims. ‘Look: here’s the number to block your Visa card. Quick! Go ask if you can use their phone; it’s a free call.’

Five minutes later, it’s taken care of.

‘You’re right not to have gone to the police,’ says Simon. ‘Given car theft statistics in Italy, it’s probably not even worth filing a complaint. It would only mean endless paperwork, with no real hope of finding the culprits.’

‘But how will we get back to Florence?’ Rena says. ‘You haven’t driven since your cataract operation, isn’t that right?’

‘Yes, but my dear wife can drive.’

Rena turns to Ingrid. ‘Do you have your licence with you?’

‘Of course. Wouldn’t be caught dead without it.’

‘Oh.’ (Why hadn’t it occurred to Rena to ask Ingrid if she wanted to drive?) ‘And you’re not afraid of dealing with Italian driver machismo?’

‘Not to worry. An hour and a half on the highway should be do-able. And since we didn’t put a second driver’s name on the contract, I’ll pass the wheel back to you just before we get to the agency.’

Rena stares at Ingrid in amazement. Does she always think of everything?

‘The worst loss by far,’ says Simon, ‘is your Canon.’

‘Not to worry,’ says Rena in turn. ‘I can always buy another one. No, the worst loss is what was in it — your photos of me.’

It’s ten o’clock. The blonde, efficient young owner comes over and starts clearing away their breakfast things.

‘Well,’ says Rena. ‘Shall we be off?’

‘Wait,’ says Simon. ‘Why don’t you come up to our room so we can talk over our plans for the day?’

The question kills her. (Life? Oh, that was what / went by while we were busy / making all those plans. A haiku written by Simon himself, long years ago.) Even if they leave right this minute, Rena doesn’t see how they can possibly squeeze in everything they’re supposed to do today: drive back to Florence, return the car, schlep their luggage over to the hotel…and they wanted to spend at least a few minutes at the Uffizi, failing which they can scarcely claim to have visited Florence. Right now, they’re not even packed, so if they have to sit down and discuss plans…No, thinks Rena. No, time will stop, I’ll never see Aziz or Kerstin, Toussaint or Thierno again. I’ll be stuck here forever in a B & B on the outskirts of Siena, with my father… his wife…his confusion…and his love…

‘Coming, Rena?’ says Ingrid.

She comes, and her pointy little ass barely touches the windowsill as she sits down.

Methodically, Simon goes about removing maps, clothing and books from the room’s only chair.

‘Have a chair,’ he says. (Need me.)

‘I’m fine, Dad. Don’t bother.’ (I’d sooner die!) ‘But you’ll be cold, so close to the window.’ (Let me love you!) ‘I’m forty-five years old, Dad. I know whether I’m cold or not. Trust me.’ (Leave me alone!)

‘But you’re my guest, I want to make you comfortable.’ (Whatever happened to my loving little girl?)

‘Dad, how long do you plan to push me around on pretext of making me comfortable?’ (Get off my back!)

Everything goes smoothly.

They speed across the Tuscan countryside, Ingrid driving masterfully. At last Rena can credit the idea that this ordeal might actually come to an end.

So this is…this was…this will have been…it?

Ingrid chirps and warbles as she drives. ‘Isn’t it a gorgeous day? Oh…I hope that car theft won’t spoil your whole memory of the trip. You’ve given us such a marvellous holiday…Right, Dad?’

‘I should say so!’ Simon says. ‘From now on, I’m going to turn seventy every year.’

They talk of going to Rome the next time around. Greece, too — oh, yes! Some other year…They talk and talk, believing not a word of what they say.

When they reach Florence’s ring road, Ingrid stops at a petrol station, fills up, and passes the wheel to Rena. Putting on her glasses, she guides her stepdaughter skilfully through the one-way streets around the Piazza Ognissanti.

The agency’s elegant Francophile comes out to check the car.

‘I hope everything went well, ladies and gentlemen?’ he asks them in French.

‘Si, si, grazie, naturalmente,’ Rena says, handing him the keys.

The rental was prepaid; it’s all over. Rena feels free, light-hearted, almost giddy.

That theft was basically a stroke of luck, Subra tells her. Look at all the things you don’t have to feel guilty about anymore! Not taking pictures, not calling your son who’s soon to be a father… Even Aziz’s silence has stopped torturing you: he might be trying to reach you, but you have no way of knowing it. So it’s not your fault: you’re innocent, completely innocent! Nothing to do with Beatrice Cenci, I tell you!

On the way to the Hotel Guelfa in a taxi, Simon startles them by telling the driver to stop. At once, car horns start honking indignantly.

‘What’s up, Dad?’ asks Ingrid.

Without a word, he gets out of the car and disappears into a shop. Craning her neck, Rena sees it’s an international bookshop. Incensed, she launches into a series of rhetorical questions: ‘Is this the right time to buy a book? Does he think this is the right time to buy a book?’

Her father comes out of the store a few moments later. ‘Got a little something for you’, he says, handing her a plastic bag. She peeps into it: he has replaced her Guide bleu: Italie du nord et du centre.

Drago

Though the sour-tempered proprietor seems less than overjoyed to see them again, checking into their old rooms at the Guelfa feels almost like a homecoming. Ah, that adorable Room 25! So narrow, so original…

It’s past two o’clock; they’re starved.

They stride familiarly down Via Guelfa until its name changes to Via degli Alfani, then turn right into Via dei Servi. Soon come to an end, this perpetual searching for restaurants.

‘This one look all right?’

‘No, the music’s too loud.’

‘What about this one?’

‘Nope. Too bad; they’ve stopped serving lunch.’

‘Look — over here!’

Sudden perfection. A secret alleyway. A terrace. Sunlight. Lunch tables set up just opposite a tiny twelfth-century basilica. A smiling young waitress comes and goes, bringing them food.

But when Ingrid turns to Rena and asks if Aziz deals with her absences better than Alioune used to — shaken, perhaps, by the loss of all her identities — Rena doesn’t appreciate it.

‘He deals with them,’ she says. And lights up a cigarette in the middle of the meal, knowing how much Ingrid detests cigarette smoke.

‘Uncanny,’ Simon breathes, ‘the way you blew your smoke out through your nostrils just now, dragon-style…Your mother used to do that. For a minute, you looked exactly like her.’

‘What’s so uncanny about it?’ Rena retort. ‘Does it bother you that I resemble my mother in some ways? Who knows, maybe I inherited a few of my traits from her! My hand gestures…my green eyes…my ability to carry projects through to completion? Is that a flaw, in your opinion?’

‘Rena!’ says Ingrid.

‘Yes, I did have a mother once, in case you’ve forgotten…And I don’t have one anymore. And you have the nerve to ask me about my absences, when…when…’ She doesn’t know when what.

‘For heaven’s sake, Rena,’ Ingrid says in a louder voice. ‘Don’t spoil our lovely holiday by dredging up all those old accusations…’

The more her stepmother raises her voice, the more Rena lowers hers.

‘Who’s making accusations?’ she says in a whisper. ‘Is someone making accusations?’

Suddenly overwhelmed by memories, Simon sets down his fork and weeps.

Whose fault was it? Mine? Rena asks Subra in despair.

No, not yours, Subra murmurs soothingly.

I mean, all right, Rena goes on, I’m the one who pronounced the words Portobello Road and Sylvie and vintage dresses and London, I don’t deny it, the words slipped through my lips and no one else’s — but the facts—the facts, Daddy — who was responsible for the facts? Me? I was sixteen and you were forty…I was alone with my mother that day, and when the words escaped me I saw your marriage of twenty years — everything you’d built together, a complex construction she still believed in, despite your money problems and your quarrels — slowly and spectacularly collapse. Yes, I saw the catastrophe in her green eyes…not because her husband had been unfaithful to her — that was banal — but because…because of me…because of the complicity between her husband and her daughter…their silence against her…the enormity and the duration of their betrayal…and then…even as my words went on exploding in different parts of her brain like tracer bullets, skewing her judgment, freezing her limbs, blurring her vision, confusing her thoughts, accelerating her heartbeat, Lisa went storming out of the house…She got into her car, that day, in the state she was in, and turned on the ignition…

San Lorenzo Secondo

Rena shoves her plate away, unable to swallow another bite.

And then…the speeding car…the pounding of her heart…the strangeness of her body…the sense of lightness in her head…the coldness of her hands…the speed…the bridge…her right leg shaking so badly that the car advanced by fits and starts…my words…the car…the bridge…my green eyes…you’re the one who taught me… her green eyes…how to drive, Daddy, and…sinking…my mother… those words…down…speeding…to the bottom…heartbeats…of the river…its waters…icy in that…Saint-Lawrence…season…San Lorenzo…him again…

What is old? This waitress has been around for twenty years, my pain for nearly thirty, the ivy-chewed bricks for eight hundred, the sun for four billion…yet all of it is now. New. Raw.

‘No, Rowan, no, it’s not my fault, I swear…’ ‘Whose fault is it, then? Why did you tell her? Couldn’t you keep your big mouth shut? Why did you denounce our father?’ At twenty, my brother, comfortably ensconced in his gay lifestyle on the West coast, had already made a name for himself as a jazz violinist even as he finished up a brilliant course of studies at the Conservatory. He never touched me anymore; only his words fire-branded me now. ‘She was my mother, too, Rena…And you started taking her away from me the minute you were born. She was my mother, too, and you killed her…’ ‘No, Rowan, don’t say that. Don’t say that…’ ‘I only say it because it’s true…’ ‘No, it’s not true — she had an accident!’ ‘The accident was you, Rena! You’re the only accident our mother ever had.’

Looking around at the other customers on the terrace, Rena soberly reminds herself that each and every one of them contains a Thebes, a Troy, a Jerusalem…How do we manage to go on putting one foot ahead of the other, smiling, shopping for food, not dying from the pain?

Having licked her plate clean, Ingrid pats Rena on the hand with which she has just stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Don’t you think we should drop the subject? Let bygones be bygones. Look, it’s already quarter to four. If we want to see the Uffizi, we should be on our way. I’ll go take care of the bill and pay my little visit to the ladies’ room…’ She enters the restaurant.

Simon, his eyes red with tears, seeks out Rena’s gaze behind the dark glasses she stubbornly refuses to remove. But when he stretches both hands out to her over the remains of their meal, she gives him hers, and he squeezes them so hard it hurts.

‘Daddy…’

‘I’m sorry, little one. I’m so sorry.’

She pulls her hands away and tries to smile, hiding her embarrassment by drawing out the Guide bleu he just bought for her.

‘The place is humungous,’ she mutters. ‘We should choose which galleries we want to visit…’

‘Oïe vey,’ Simon says. ‘I’m not sure I’ve got the strength to deal with the Uffizi.’

‘Okay,’ Rena laughs. ‘To hell with the Uffizi!’

San Marco

Ingrid returns. ‘The restrooms are impeccably clean here,’ she announces. ‘Everything’s taken care of. We can go.’

‘Just a second,’ Simon says. ‘Rena’s looking for something less exhausting than the Uffizi.’

‘Oh…’ Ingrid says, crestfallen. ‘So many of my friends told me it was a must.’

‘Listen to this,’ says Rena, reading aloud from the guide. ‘San Marco: impossible not to be spellbound by the atmosphere of the place. The Dominican monastery which houses the museum is one of Tuscany’s finest architectural jewels.’

‘That sounds perfect!’ says Simon.

‘And it’s close by,’ Rena adds, ‘whereas the Uffizi is a good twenty minutes’ walk away.’

That clinches it for Ingrid; she gives in and their wobbly procession starts off again.

Rena goes on reading from the guide as they advance towards the Via C. Battisti. ‘Monks’ cells decorated with frescoes by Fra Angelico…a library built for Cosimo the Elder by Michelozzo… to say nothing of Fra Bartolomeo’s famous portrait of Savonarola!’

‘Who’s that?’ Ingrid asks.

‘You know,’ Simon says. ‘The fanatical prior we mentioned the other day. Railer and reviler, impassioned orator, demented igniter of bonfires of the vanities…’

‘Oh, yes,’ mutters Ingrid. ‘I remember now.’

‘When he arrived at the Duomo for his sermon,’ Simon goes on, ‘the crowds of the faithful would drop to their knees and chant, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. A thousand foreheads would hit the floor at the same time. Imagine!’

‘Protestants don’t do that,’ Ingrid says.

‘See?’ says Rena, pointing. ‘It’s right over there. We just have to cross the square…’

But no. As they step up from street to kerb on the Piazza San Marco esplanade, Simon stumbles.

Not to worry, thinks Rena. He’ll catch his balance.

But no. Before her very eyes, he plummets earthward.

Not to worry, thinks Rena. He’ll use his arms to break his fall.

But no. His arms buckle uselessly beneath him.

Not to worry, thinks Rena. His fat tummy will absorb the shock.

But no. As she watches, aghast, Simon hits the ground with his forehead.

It’s not: his forehead hits the ground. No, it’s: he hits the ground with his forehead.

As if, on this very spot, straddling the centuries, Savonarola had forced him to confess his crime.

Grande problema

So much for San Marco.

Now what. Now what do we do? Rena asks her Special Friend, but Subra has no answer.

Simon is lying on the ground, his forehead spurting blood. At once, half a dozen passers-by rush over to help him to his feet. Luckily there’s a bench on the esplanade, just a few steps away. Ingrid sits down on it next to her husband, deeply shaken.

Maybe she’ll faint, too, Rena thinks — why not? Anything can happen. But I’ll be on that plane tomorrow morning, nothing in the world can prevent me, I’ll be on it. Drawing a tissue from her pocket, she starts dabbing at the blood on her father’s forehead.

‘Ghiacchio!’ a young man exclaims.

Yes, of course. That’s what we need. Ice. She crosses the avenue and walks into a fancy coffee shop — gleaming chrome, towering chocolate layer cakes, elegant customers milling about. ‘Ghiacchio?’ she says to a young waitress. Even as she performs a pantomime of her father’s accident, she registers every detail of the girl’s appearance: carefully made-up face, well-cut uniform, pink ruffles on her apron, mauve ribbons in her hair, purple polish on her fingernails… Ah, thinks Rena, what wouldn’t I give to have this girl as a model…a friend…a hostage…

Now the waitress is handing her a crackly cellophane bag chock-full of tiny white ice cubes. ‘Grazie, grazie!’ Rena feels like kissing her full on the lips.

She goes back outside and sizes up their new situation from afar: Tourists; spot of bother. An old man slumped on a bench, forehead bloodied; his wife muttering and fluttering around him. Called back to their respective pressing obligations, the helpful passers-by have vanished. Resolutely, Rena goes over to include herself in the tourists-spot-of-bother group. Yes, that is correct, I am the man’s daughter and this is what my life is about just at the moment — this, and nothing else. Not the riots in France, not the Dominican monks’ cells; this. Here’s the ice, Daddy. I love you…

Simon’s eyes are closed.

‘You okay?’

‘Sure, sure.’

‘Rena,’ Ingrid says feverishly, ‘several people told me we should find an ambulance and take him to the hospital.’

‘Did they say it in English?’

‘In English, in Italian, what does it matter? They made themselves clear. They said it several times. But your father doesn’t want to go.’

‘There’s no need,’ says Simon with a wave of hand. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Here,’ says Rena, handing Ingrid the ice cubes. ‘Can I take a look?’

Ingrid parts the tissue papers with which she’s been staunching the blood. Since Rena left, the bump has risen spectacularly and is now the size of a large egg. The sight of the raw flesh makes her shudder.

‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘I don’t know, maybe they’re right. Maybe we should go to a hospital and ask a doctor to check it, if only to set our minds at rest.’

‘What do you say, Dad?’

‘Not in an ambulance, anyhow,’ Simon says. ‘I wouldn’t want to take an ambulance away from someone who really needs it.’

‘Well, let’s take a taxi, then,’ Ingrid says. ‘I’m sure the taxi drivers know all the hospitals.’

‘Have you got enough cash?’ Rena looks at her.

‘Sure, I’ve got plenty of euros. Everyone has been so kind to us on this trip, I haven’t been able to spend anything.’

When they help Simon to his feet, he reels. It’s a dream. Rena hails a cab. It slows down as it approaches…but takes off again, tyres screeching, when the driver glimpses the blood on the tissue papers.

‘We’d better put his hat back on,’ Rena tells Ingrid, ‘or else no taxi will take us.’

‘Can we do that, Dad?’

‘Gently, gently…’

Eventually, another cab draws up. It takes them several minutes to settle into the back seat. The driver fidgets with impatience.

Just as you used to, says Subra.

No reason to fidget, sir. No reason at all. Your meter is ticking, believe me. You wouldn’t want it to tick any faster. Why hurry to reach the day when, like my father, you’ll fall and break your head open on the Piazza San Marco? That day will come soon enough. Believe me, sir, there’s no rush at all.

‘Ospedale,’ she says out loud, feeling an almost maternal benevolence for the impatient young idiot.

‘Spedale degli Innocenti?’ he asks, meeting her eyes in the rear-view mirror.

And though it would be perfectly plausible for a group of tourists to wish to be driven to that sumptuous art gallery, she bursts out laughing. No, no, I’m not innocent, no one is innocent, I mean everyone is innocent, I’m not Beatrice Cenci…

‘No,’ she says out loud, stifling her incongruous mirth as best she can. ‘Un ospedale vero.’

‘Il quale?’ the young man asks in exasperation.

‘Non lo so, non me ne importa un fico!’

‘Signora!’

‘Il più grande, il migliore, ma, per favore, subito presto!’

Arcispedale

It’s rush hour, and traffic is at a standstill in the Via Nazionale. Squashed into the back seat on either side of the wounded man, Ingrid and Rena each take one of his hands.

‘I’m fine, I’m just fine,’ Simon murmurs, eyes closed, gently tapping their hands with his.

Voices and music blare from the radio in a non-stop jingle. It’s impossible to tell advertisements from regular programmes; it all sounds equally imbecilic and hysterical. Other anguished car rides well up to the surface of Rena’s mind: her two deliveries (her waters broke in the taxi on the way to the hospital to give birth to Tous-saint, and the driver made her sign a paper promising to pay to have his upholstery cleaned)…various planes she all but missed, fearing for her life as taxi-drivers honk-honked their way through traffic in cities like Jaipur or Cairo, where the highway code is replaced by the notion of destiny…mad scrambles to get Alioune to Orly Airport on time when he had to take over for a colleague in Dakar at the drop of a hat…rushing to meet Thierno at the Montparnasse train station when he came back to Paris, depressed and angry, from school outings to ski resorts…It seems as if she has spent half her life stuck in traffic, glancing at her watch and swallowing exhaust fumes. All those marvellous inventions of the Renaissance — clockwork, machines, the harnessing of natural forces by man — have converged to produce this moment: a medical emergency at a standstill, amidst ten thousand aggressive vehicles that sit there revving their motors, spewing chemical poisons into the air, eating away at the ozone layer…

‘Ecco,’ says the driver at last, and Ingrid hands him the correct money.

‘Hey, Dad,’ she cries a moment later, once they’re all back on the footpath. ‘Look where we are! Over there…look, the cathedral! We never got to visit that, either!’

Indeed, they are but a stone’s throw from the Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore, and this impressive building is none other than the Arcispedale di Santa Maria Nuova. Well, how about that! An archi-hospital!

‘I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me,’ mutters Simon as they move through a swinging door marked PRONTO SOCCORSO.

They’re taken in charge at once.

It has to be a dream…Memories of endless hours spent in the emergency rooms of various hospitals in Paris, surrounded by dozens of other panic-stricken parents with whimpering babies in their arms or glassy-eyed toddlers on their laps — waiting, filling out forms, waiting, more formalities, waiting, insurance papers, waiting. The smell of urine and disinfectant, Nescafé and shit, dried sweat, and despair…

Nothing of the sort here. Nothing but polite receptionists, reassuring nurses and sympathetic doctors…Within five minutes Simon is being wheeled away on a gurney for X-rays. How civilised can you get?

Aspetto Primo

In the waiting room, the two women settle calmly into armchairs.

‘We made the right decision,’ Ingrid says.

‘Sure we did.’

‘Everything will be all right now.’

‘Of course it will, Ingrid. You’ve been terrific.’

‘Me? I haven’t done a thing. You’re the one who’s handled things beautifully. But that’s only natural; you’re a much more seasoned traveller than I am.’

Silence.

Then Ingrid asks, ‘What time is your flight tomorrow?’

‘Eight a.m. I should be at the airport by seven. What about yours?’

‘Not until eleven. We have a stopover in Paris. It’s silly — we should have arranged to take the same plane.’

‘You’ll have to lend me a little money for cab fare…’

‘No problem. But we’ll come with you to the airport. It’ll mean getting up early but that’s okay, we can catch up on our sleep during the flight.’

‘That’s sweet of you. Who’s meeting you at Mirabel?’

‘David…And you? Aziz?’

‘Theoretically. That was the plan, yes…but given all that’s been happening in the meantime, I don’t know. He must be swamped…’

‘Why don’t you call him?’

‘Very funny. I don’t have a phone.’

‘Take my Visa card. Go ahead, give him a ring…If you want to, of course.’

Illogically, Rena glances at her watch. Having no choice in the matter, the watch tells her what it has been programmed to tell her. (‘Years, months and days are natural,’ Simon had explained to her when she was little, ‘but weeks, hours and minutes are man-made.’ ‘What about seconds?’ she had asked. ‘Are they woman-made?’ ‘Ha, ha, ha!’)

Cifre

She borrows Ingrid’s Visa card. Knees quaking, she walks down a long, dark corridor, at the far end of which is a payphone.

Maybe it only accepts local phone cards, whispers Subra.

You’re right, I sort of hope so…Nope, no such luck. This payphone is a whore; it takes anything and everything.

Weird, isn’t it? says Subra. No one ever suggests that, deep down, payphones enjoy their customers’ calls. No, you put your money in the slot and they do what they’ve been paid for, period.

Rena slips the Visa card into the telephone.

We’ve invented so many things, she says to herself, slowly dialling Aziz’s number. It shouldn’t be possible to take a piece of plastic decorated with letters and numerals in bas relief, press a series of metallic buttons to dial a fifteen-figure number which is stored in one’s memory along with dozens of other numbers corresponding to various facets of one’s identity (telephone, bank account, social security, licence plate, postal code, bank code, door code), then lift a black Bakelite cradle to your ear and hear, encoded and decoded by twelve hundred miles of copper wire, the voice of the person you love.

Niente

‘Aziz speaking.’

Ah. So her man answers his mobile when an unfamiliar number flashes onto the screen. Rena, no; Not Known, yes.

‘It’s me, love…’ All that comes out of her throat is a pathetic croak.

‘Hello?’

She clears her throat. ‘It’s me. It’s Rena.’

The answer to that is silence.

‘Aziz, are you okay? Are you there?’

‘I’m here, but…’

‘Listen, love, so much has happened…in France, I know… but here, too…You wouldn’t believe it. It’ll take us weeks to catch up…We’ll start tomorrow…Are you still planning to pick me up at Roissy?’

More silence. What the hell is going on?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she babbles. ‘I can take a cab, no hassle. I mean, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do at ten a.m. I’ll have to borrow some money from Ingrid, though, because…’

‘Rena.’

‘What?’

More silence.

‘What, Aziz? Tell me. Are you mad because I couldn’t come home any soon—’

‘Rena…we’re not t-t-to…’

Oh-oh, thinks Rena. If he’s stammering, something is really wrong.

‘…gether anymore. I’ve d-d-decided not to move into the Rue des Envierges.’

‘When?’

What a stupid question: when? Aziz doesn’t answer it.

‘But…why? What’s going on? I adore you, Aziz. Living with you is the thing I care about most in the world.’

Silence.

‘It’s because I’m Jewish, is that it? Did Aicha finally convince you…’

‘No, Rena, it’s not b-b-b-because you’re Jewish…It’s because you’re nothing. See? That’s all. That’s why. B-b-b-because you’re nothing, Rena. I’m something. And just now…I have to give that something all my attention.’

‘I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Sorry if I’m c-c-c-causing you pain.’

The connection is cut off.

If you’re causing me pain? Sorry if you’re causing me pain? Rena repeats incredulously to herself as she walks down the long, dark corridor in the other direction. That’s hilarious. If you’re causing me pain…

Incapable of facing Ingrid right away, she stops off in the Bagni Signore. Pays no attention to the other women milling around in there. Walks straight to the farthest sink and plants herself in front of the mirror.

Tutto

Aziz’s ‘You’re nothing’ scared her so badly that she almost expects the mirror to reflect only the white tiling behind her. But no, it frames a face. She studies the face with a professional eye, trying to get behind it and see what makes it tick.

The last photos of Arbus, taken just before her suicide in July 1971, show her looking thin, tense and uncertain. She’s dressed in black leather pants, her hair is cut short and there are dark shadows under her eyes…Where did her stubborn neutrality come from? Rena suddenly wonders. Her refusal to find one thing better than another? Her blindness in the face of injustice? Arbus was interested only in the particular: each, each, each.

She said yes to everyone, Subra puts in. Just like the payphone.

Right. Accepting other people to the point of non-existence. Diane diaphanes, a transparent film that allows light to pass through it. ‘I just want to stay with my eye to the keyhole forever,’ she once wrote to a friend.

What had that Maisie seen? What had she endured as a little girl, growing up in New York in that wealthy Jewish family whose privileges she detested? What evil had she been forced to construe as good, so irrevocably that she would spend the rest of her life blurring the nuances between the two?

I, too, Aziz, am something.

She bends over the sink and splashes her face with cold water, scattering droplets in all directions.

All right, so you’ve lost your boyfriend, whispers Subra, forever loyal. But you’ve found your Dad again. And the minute you get back to Paris, you’ll buy a new camera…

Aspetto Secondo

It’s eight p.m. by the time she re-enters the waiting room. She sees Ingrid sitting there, not flipping through a magazine, just waiting, handbag on lap, hands folded on handbag. Determined to imitate her, she goes over and sits down next to her. No longer having a bag, she sets her hands directly on her knees.

‘No news?’ she asks.

‘Not yet. Don’t you think it’s a bit strange? They took him away two hours ago.’

‘You’re right, it is strange. Maybe there was a queue in the X-ray room. People with more serious problems that had to be seen to first.’

‘Maybe. What about you? Everything A-OK in Paris?’

‘Mmm…No.’

‘Oh, Rena…’

Without warning, Rena turns to her stepmother and bursts into tears.

‘Rena. Oh, my poor dear,’ Ingrid says, stroking her stepdaughter’s hair as she sobs on her shoulder. ‘Look!’ Rummaging in her bag, she pulls out a Kleenex and two fifty-euro bills. ‘This is for your runny nose, and this is for your little expenses when you get back to Paris — don’t get them mixed up now! Come on, give us a smile.’

Her attempt at humour is so puerile that Rena can’t help laughing as she blows her nose.

‘Maybe you could ask them what’s going on? You speak Italian…’

‘Okay,’ Rena says, borrowing a second tissue to wipe her eyes with. ‘Sure. I’ll go ask.’

The receptionist at PRONTO SOCCORSO knows nothing.

‘Couldn’t you try to get in touch with the doctor who’s looking after Mr Greenblatt?’ asks Rena.

‘No, we can’t bother the doctors. Wait, though — I can check with the nurses on that floor. He’s in radiology, you said?’

The woman puts the call through. Rena savours the music of their patronym pronounced in Italian. She observes this exhausted-looking woman who keeps tapping her pencil nervously on the desk as she waits for the answer to her question. Fiftyish, probably attractive when young, she wears reading glasses and presses her lips together far too often. Though her eyes stare up at the high window on the wall across from her desk, it’s clear she sees neither the evening sky outside (deep violet) nor the sixteenth-century moulding (black with dust); her mind is on her own troubles, which have dug deep creases in her brow…Is she aware that Timothy Leary is still up there, revolving around the Earth? Has she heard Leonard Cohen’s new album? Would she be interested to know that my brother Rowan Greenblatt is a peerless jazz violinist, a true genius of improvisation?

‘Signora.’

‘Si.’

‘They tell me to tell you to wait.’

‘But we’ve already waited two hours! What’s going on?’

‘Madame. They’re looking after your father. He needed some extra tests.’

‘What kind of tests?’

‘They didn’t tell me anything else. They said only that they will do more tests over the next few hours, and can you please be patient. You have time to go out for dinner.’

‘We have time to go out for dinner?’

‘Yes, it will take some time. There. That is all I can tell you.’

Aspetto Terzo

This time when she enters the waiting room her step must be different, for Ingrid’s eyes leap at her the minute she crosses the threshold. Rena puts an arm around the older woman’s shoulders, repeats what she has just been told…and feels her stepmother’s body seize up in shock.

‘What does that mean?’

Over the ensuing hours, they will reiterate countless variants of that question. (‘What’s going on?’ ‘Why are they keeping him?’ ‘What gives them the right…?’ ‘What are they doing to him?’ ‘Did she tell you what they were doing to him?’ ‘What can it possibly mean?’) Every once in a while they make an enormous effort to change the subject (‘Isn’t Italy beautiful?’ ‘Gorgeous!’) but it swiftly peters out and they go back to the old refrain. (‘Everything will turn out all right.’ ‘Of course it will.’ ‘But what are they doing to him?’)

Rena drifts off to sleep.

I’m in a large café somewhere, seated at a table with a dozen strangers. Among them I suddenly recognise the famous Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn. Though he doesn’t actually look like Goldwyn — he’s tall, thin, greying and alcoholic, a sort of ageing beau—I know it’s him. He insults me a little, to sound me out, and I answer sweetly and humorously, thinking, Boy, if he knew who he was talking to…He asks me to dance and gradually we start to pick up each other’s signals. Rubbing up against me, he finds me pliable and malleable, I receive his body totally, perfectly, melting at his touch. He picks me up and spins me around in the air. I’m careful to conceal my ‘true’ identity from him so that he’ll go on desiring me and playing with me — oh, this is paradise, I feel light, weightless—I wish it would never end…

Waking up with a start, Rena instantly recognises the ‘famous’ man’s initials.

Ingrid hasn’t slept a wink.

At eleven p.m., they force themselves to go down the hallway and purchase sandwiches from a machine. Each of them is now mothering both the other and herself: mothers know you can’t think clearly on an empty stomach. You get nervous and irritable when you’re hungry; you overreact.

The sandwiches stick in their throats. They wash them down with water.

‘Go out and have a cigarette if you feel like it,’ Ingrid says, ‘I’ll tell you the minute somebody comes.’

‘Thanks,’ Rena answers, ‘but I’m not going anywhere.’

Puma

At midnight, having dragged its heels unbearably all evening, time suddenly pounces on them, the way a puma pounces on a gazelle.

A doctor sticks his head through the door and motions Rena to join him in the hall. He prefers to talk to her, he says, because his French is better than his English. He can’t fool her, though: the truth is that he dreads the wife’s reaction more than the daughter’s.

‘What happened is this,’ he says. ‘We started off with an X-ray… just a routine thing, you know…your father’s injury isn’t serious…I mean, it’s always impressive to see a big bump like that…but it’ll go away in a few days, it’s nothing at all…Anyway, what happened is this…’ The man is in his early sixties; his tone is calm and professional. Rena can tell he has fulfilled this obligation countless times in the past and learned to keep his voice low, firm, and especially continuous. Yes, it’s of the utmost importance that he keep talking: his voice is like a rope the patient’s loved ones have to be able to hang onto and follow, step by step, with crystal-clear logic, from start to finish. ‘We noticed something else on the X-ray — a shadow. You never know, it might have been simply a light effect, but we figured it was worth putting him through a few other tests in case it was something more serious. Your father had his insurance papers on him and he signed all the authorisations, so we went ahead and did a TDM and then an MRI. The results just came back and… well, unfortunately, madame, to put it as simply and directly as possible, unfortunately, madame, we were right: it was serious. We discovered a glioma in your father’s brain, a sort of primitive tumour of the nervous system. I’m very sorry to have such bad news for you. For the time being, we’ve told him nothing, naturally. He’s resting up. Your father is a very nice man. A very nice man indeed.’

Rena forgets. She doesn’t know how. She doesn’t speak French anymore, or any other language. Subra, too: struck dumb.

The doctor feeds her rope for a while longer. He tells her that, in his opinion, it wouldn’t be a good idea for Mr Greenblatt to take a trans-Atlantic flight in the morning as planned. It would be better to keep him under observation for a day or two — and organise his transfer to a hospital immediately upon his return to Montreal.

Rena is hardly listening anymore. Her thoughts are rushing around in all directions like panicked mice, flashing at top speed and in random order through the images of the Tuscany trip, stopping at one only to seize up in terror and dart off to another. Her father stumbling on the Piazza San Marco…dozing off on twenty different benches…lousy Virgil…sitting on the floor in the History of Science Museum…standing in Gaia’s living room, head in hands…complaining of migraine headaches…forgetting the scarf he’d given her… All this not symptomatic, as it turns out, of bad faith or bad will or bad mood, not at all — but rather, since the outset, since day one, no, since before that, maybe long before that, no one knows since when… The third time she re-enters the waiting room, Ingrid leaps across the room and grabs her by the arm.

‘Is he all right?’ she asks.

‘He’s resting. The doctor says he’s such a nice man that they want to keep him a little longer. Let’s go out for a drink, hey? We deserve one. Let’s get soused.’

But Ingrid cannot be fooled — not even by Rena Greenblatt, that inveterate liar. She sees right through her. Grasps the fact that the two of them are the gazelle, and that the puma has just ripped their throat open.

‘Rena! Tell me.’

‘Let’s go, Ingrid.’

Rena virtually drags her stepmother to the desk, where the exhausted middle-aged receptionist has been replaced by a cute young redhead.

‘Prego, signorina, are there any cafés open at this time of night?’

‘Everything’s closed in the neighbourhood, signora. Except maybe at the train station. Yes, you might try the train station — I think there’s a coffee-shop there that stays open all night.’

Thus it is that Ingrid and Rena spend the night at the Stazione Santa Maria Novella, side by side not to say intertwined on a worn red-leather wall seat. This means that the following morning, just as Rena’s plane is taking off for Paris from Amerigo Vespucci Airport, they have top-notch seats for the TV news headlines that flash onto the screen in flaming red letters: ‘France declares a state of emergency’.

Outside, it looks as if it’s going to be a beautiful day. A church bell clangs, and, capturing the first rays of the rising sun, the Tuscan capital’s ancient bricks and roof tiles begin to smoulder.