Infrared

  ‘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 m
aking 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 r
ace 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.’