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 o
n 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 midd
le 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.’