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 indoo
rs: 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.’