Torn between the instinct to help a fellow human being and the impulse to flee, the man froze. Taking advantage of his momentary paralysis, I caught his gaze and hung on to it. That was when I first learned the technique of breaking and entering a man’s soul through his eyes, swimming in deeper and deeper until I could tell he was mesmerised by my green gaze…Ah. Yes.
I was inside. I’d captured and captivated him. He was at my mercy.
The man knelt by my side, glancing nervously left and right to make sure no one was watching us. I noticed he was wearing a thin gold wedding band. In tears, I reached up and flung my pretty arms around his neck, so that he had no choice but to rise to his feet with me in his embrace, his body and ringlets fairly trembling with desire. ‘Thank you, sir,’ I whispered into his ear. ‘I’m so sorry…I just need to rest for a few minutes, I’m sure I’ll be all right…It’s probably not even a real sprain. I’m just a bit shaken up, that’s all…’
Clutching me to him, convulsively now, the way a thief clutches a just-stolen wallet or a tiger its prey, he carried me to his home in a blind trance of desire. I could tell that laws were toppling like dominos in his heart, and that he was firmly convinced he had some important things to reveal to me…but I decided to leave it at that. I’d achieved my goal and that was enough; I didn’t want to plunge the poor man into the throes of eternal guilt. And so, after a few delicate caresses, as light as they were intoxicating, after the delight of watching the young man’s lips part in a joyful smile, his eyes shine with gratitude, his hands run over my naked thighs, and his tongue play with my nipples—I tore myself out of his arms, thanked him profusely and saved us both.
I’m a sin for him, I said to myself as I moved away from his house, heart pounding.
It’s weird to be a sin for someone, comments Subra.
Yes. I was to discover this on countless occasions in my adult life, always with the same incredulity—whether in Gaza, Istanbul, the Vatican, Mount Athos, or at the entrance to an ordinary café in one of Paris’s impoverished suburbs. I, Rena Greenblatt, without moving or speaking or misbehaving or taking off my clothes or baring my bottom or sticking out my tongue or brandishing a gun or selling Kalashnikovs or heroin or child porn, just by standing here, calm, smiling, motionless, with my face visible and my genitals invisible—am a sin for the men who are looking at me right now.
It’s not their fault they get hard-ons, the poor guys. Since Cro-Magnon days, their pecker has been programmed to stiffen whenever they set eyes on a shtuppable lady; their gonads are plugged directly into their retinas. Actually, they’d just as soon dispense with this reflex because it’s painful to them. I’ll never forget the day Alioune taught me that, during a Fela Kuti concert in Dijon in 1993. As Fela’s sublime dancers filed out on stage (to avoid jealousy amongst them he’d married them all, so there were no fewer than twenty-seven gorgeous young Madame Kutis; later on, as punishment for the singer’s virulent political lyrics, the Nigerian government would arrange to have all his sweet wives raped and his elderly mother tossed out of a window, but on the night of the Dijon concert none of that had happened yet), Alioune leaned over to me and moaned softly into my ear, ‘It hurts,’—I’ve never forgotten it. Seen from the front, the dancers hardly seemed to be moving at all, their hips and shoulders barely undulating—but when they spun around you saw their bead-fringed rear ends jouncing wildly up and down in synch with the wild Afro beat. Of course men find this painful. They can control the world but they can’t control that crucial part of their anatomy. It has this maddening way of standing to attention when they don’t want it to and refusing to budge when they most desperately need it to perform. Whence their tendency to cling to things whose firmness is reliable—guns, medals, briefcases, honours, doctrines…They can’t stand the fact that females hold the remote control to their cocks. It scares them, their fear makes them angry, and the effects of that anger are apparent everywhere. Since they can’t control their own bodies, they control ours by declaring them taboo…
‘Shall we hit the old bridge?’ asks Ingrid. ‘An excellent idea,’ Simon says.
Ponte Vecchio
Unfortunately, dozens of tourists have had the same excellent idea at the same moment—to stand on the Ponte alla Carraia and take each other’s pictures with the Ponte Vecchio in the background, tinged blood-colour by the dying sun.
We no doubt look grotesque to the Florentines, thinks Rena. ‘What a cliché…’ Yet each of us integrates this cliché into a specific history. That young Asian man, for instance, clambering over the parapet of the Ponte alla Carraia to set his Nikon up on one of the pylons, then dangerously backing up to be in the frame and smiling as he takes his own picture with the famous bridge behind him—where’s he from? Who is he?
How sad, Subra nods, to have such a sophisticated camera and no one to smile at…
They walk back to the Lungo Corsini and begin to wend their way along the river. The temperature is delightfully mild, and an all-but-full moon is rising beyond the Ponte Vecchio. Impossible, however, to savour the instant: no boardwalk to stroll along, no bench to sit down on, no way to be together. Squashed between the flow of cars and the flow of pedestrians, they’re forced to advance in Indian file.
‘Hey!’ Simon suddenly exclaims. ‘Doesn’t that look like a satyr’s knees?’
Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…
Rena stops, turns, looks at what he’s pointing to—the wrought-iron balustrade is studded with a decorative motif. ‘I suppose so,’ she nods vaguely. ‘Very stylised, though.’ She sets off again.
‘And if those are his knees,’ her father insists, ‘what’s this, in your opinion?’
Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…
Stopping, turning, looking again, Rena sees a protuberance between the ‘knees’.
‘Dad!’ Ingrid protests.
What does he want them to say?
‘Wow.’
All right? That make you happy? You got one, too?
Rena turns away. Sets off again, jaws clenched. Stares up, beyond the sunset-gilded bridge, at the moon. Almost full, yes, almost pure.
They reach the Ponte Vecchio at last—’the only one of Florence’s bridges,’ the Guide bleu informs Rena, ‘to have escaped destruction by the Germans.’
Having no wish to get Ingrid started on the subject of the Second World War, Rena refrains from translating this passage for them.
‘Isn’t it magnificent, Dad?’ Ingrid exclaims.
‘The ancient neighbourhoods on either side of the river,’ the Guide bleu goes on, ‘were destroyed by landmines. Though reconstructed, they delude no one.’
Oh, yes, they do. They delude us just fine, thanks.
The elderly couple stands there, entranced.
Delusion is a many-splendoured thing…right, Dante?
Piazza della Signoria
Simon is impressed.
‘Incredible. To think Savonarola held sway on this very spot.’
‘Who?’ Ingrid asks.
‘You know, the fanatical monk we talked about this morning.’
‘Oh, yes, right…’
It’s nearly time for dinner. Why not have a real meal this time, in a real restaurant?
They find a place. White tablecloths, ancient wood panelling, grey-haired waiters.
‘Do you prefer red wine or white?’
‘I don’t drink anymore,’ Simon says.
‘Oh? You mean not at all?’
‘Not at all.’
Rather than leaving it at that, he launches into an explanation. Alcohol, Rena learns, is incompatible with the drugs he now takes to steady his heartbeat, soothe his soul, calm his nerves and keep despair at bay. With Ingrid’s assistance, he runs through the list of his current medications, counting them off on his fingers, explaining dosages and proportions, chemical interactions and adjustments, experimentations and side effects (drowsiness versus insomnia; stupor versus restlessness; blinding l
ight versus darkness; vertigo, palpitations, panic attacks).
‘I see,’ Rena says. ‘Just water, then?’
‘Just water.’
She orders a bottle of Valpolicella for Ingrid and herself.
Can this really be the man who used to drop acid with me when I was seventeen or eighteen, ostensibly to cure me of my migraine headaches?
Tell me, Subra says.
‘You’ll see, it’s pretty amazing,’ he’d say, putting Bach’s Sonatas for Solo Violin on my record player, carefully extracting from his wallet the tiny squares of blotter paper he called Timothy Leary tickets and slipping them under our tongues, then calmly sitting down next to me on the couch to await the first effects. After about forty minutes, the patterns in my wallpaper would start to swirl gently in time to the music.
Now, three decades later, only a few scattered memories remain of our trips together. How excited we were, for instance, to discover—familiar, yet exponentially enhanced—the miraculous combination of tastes, colours and textures that went into the making of a ham sandwich. Ham…butter…bread…mustard…lettuce…Each ingredient a quintessence, an absolute. Explosion of saliva. ‘How is it possible,’ we’d say to each other, ‘that we usually gobble this down without noticing, after muttering, Hm, I’m feeling a bit hungry, why don’t I slap together a ham sandwich?’ Yes…’slap together’… Following which we’d spend another twenty minutes admiring—as if it were a precious gem—the various facets of the expression ‘to slap together’.
Once, I recall, as I stood at the window marvelling at the beauty of the sky, Simon came up to me and announced, ‘Blue does not exist.’ ‘What?’ ‘The colour blue. It doesn’t exist objectively in the universe. Only in the brains of certain mammals whose retina happens to capture a particular wavelength of light emitted by the sun.’ ‘Wow!’ I answered. ‘For something that doesn’t exist, the colour of that there sky sure is gorgeous.’
We laughed and laughed.
The expression I’m feeling blue was suddenly imbued with tragedy.
‘Maybe the same goes for God?’ I suggested a while later. ‘Huh?’ ‘Maybe God’s like blue—He exists only in the eye of the beholder.’ ‘Magnificent!’ Simon said, applauding in delight, and pleasure flooded through me.
Und so weiter. Every detail of the world, whether sensory or mental, would get blown up out of all proportion the minute we brought our attention to it, and we’d tumble into it head over heels, losing ourselves in its contemplation and exhausting ourselves in its commentary. When a silence came, each of us would wander through it separately, heading off on a solitary path through the forest of our own thoughts and memories, often winding up in dark thickets rife with danger. Sometimes my father would come upon me huddled in a corner of the room, convulsed with sobs and shaking in fear—in which case he’d take me by the hand, help me up, lead me over to some image, smell or sound into which I could plunge with delight. Other times, I’d come over and sit down next to him, lay his dark curly head gently on my thighs, dry his tears, stroke his forehead and sing him a lullaby to calm him down…
The bottle of Valpolicella is empty, and Ingrid has drunk only one glass.
Lurching over to the cash register to pay the bill, Rena realises her mind is a blur.
They emerge into the white floating ineffable beauty of the square by moonlight—ancient façades, Arnolfo Tower, giant statues of David, Perseus, Hercules. All is still. Perfection petrified as in a dream. They stand there staring at it in silence.
‘Takes your breath away,’ murmurs Simon.
Rena glances at him. Which of us is better able to receive this beauty, she wonders—Simon drugged, or me drunk? Which of us is happier, right now?
Davide
Ruthlessly, she whips out her Guide bleu. She can tell her stepmother resents it.
Why can’t Rena just experience the beauty? Subra says, mimicking Ingrid again. Why does she have to obfuscate it with facts and dates, darken it with ancient wars, smother it under dusty erudition?
But she does have to.
Come on, wake up, get a hold of yourself—do you realise we’re standing in front of Michelangelo’s David? Genius, great man, amazing feats of courage, are you listening? Remember David, thirty centuries ago—the little Jewboy who felled Goliath the giant with nothing but a slingshot? The young musician who appeased King Saul’s melancholy with nothing but a harp? The young warrior who defeated the Philistines and took over the city of Jerusalem with nothing but an army? O, intrepid hero! Artist and soldier, king and composer, peerless creator and destroyer! Admire him! And then… Buonarotti, at age thirty (he, too, a genius) received a block of marble another sculptor had damaged and turned it into a sheer masterpiece. The young, perfect, muscular naked body: symbol of the soul, in the loftiest neo-Platonic tradition. Stunned by the statue’s beauty, Florence’s greatest artists met to decide where it should be erected. It took four days, forty men and fourteen wooden cylinders to move the cage from the Duomo workshops to the Palazzo de la Signoria—and here it stands, before our very eyes, its perfection intact these four centuries! The acme, nay, the very epitome of the Renaissance! Twelve feet high, the kid with the slingshot! Admire him!
She doesn’t tell them this statue is in fact a copy. Who knows if they’ll have the time and energy to visit the original at the Accademia?
A young man goes by, selling postcards. One is a close-up of David’s genitals.
Ingrid giggles. ‘I promised to buy a postcard of this statue for our friend David in Montreal,’ she says. ‘But being a minister, he probably wouldn’t appreciate this one, tee, hee, hee! Right, Dad? Oh, no, I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t bring this card home to our David, aren’t you, Dad?’
Finding her own joke irresistible, she repeats it several times. Inwardly, Rena rolls her eyes heavenward.
Then she finds herself tormented by questions again. How do I know my approach to David is right and Ingrid’s wrong? Who has the ability to judge? Based on what criteria?
One thing’s for sure, Subra says. Ingrid’s having more fun in Florence than you are.
Il Duce
They drift back through the Centro Storico in silence. Approaching the Piazza della Repubblica, they hear festive noises—drum roll, circus music, salvos of laughter—what’s going on?
They decide to check it out.
It’s a clown. A clown who, though imitating Charlie Chaplin, is missing Chaplin’s humility, self-irony and truculence (missing Chaplin, in other words).
With imperious gestures—’You! Come here!’—the clown picks a young boy out of the crowd.
The boy shakes his head, trying to resist, but his mother gives him a little shove. ‘Go ahead, little one. Don’t be shy.’ Reluctantly, the child enters the arena.
The clown gives him orders, punctuated by deafening blows of his whistle. By obeying every time, the child makes a fool of himself.
‘Come here!’ the clown says, again and again, his tone of voice more furious by the minute. ‘Sit down! No, stand up! Turn around!’
The boy does his desperate best to comply.
‘Go away, I told you—are you deaf or what? Come back here!’
The child reels. ‘Fine, son,’ his mother beams. ‘You did just fine.’
The clown struts and swaggers. Ingrid joins the crowd in applauding him.
Rena is nauseous. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she says.
‘What’s wrong?’ asks Ingrid.
‘I never liked Mussolini.’
‘Come off it, Rena. This has nothing to do with fascism.’
‘It does so.’
‘It’s getting late, maybe we should be on our way?’ says Simon, who can’t bear any form of conflict between his daughter and his wife.
The true source of Rena’s nausea, though, is in her brain, her distant memories, much too close for comfort.
‘Do you remember Matthew Varick?’ she asks her father as they head for the Hotel Guelfa.
 
; ‘Sure,’ he replies. ‘What reminded you of him?’
‘No, nothing, he just flitted through my brain, I don’t know why.’
You do, though, Subra says. Tell me…
Dr Varick was a colleague of my father’s at the university. He had an autistic son named Matthew; the boy’s mother had either died or flown the coop, in any case she wasn’t in the picture. Dr Varick had been offered a sabbatical in Europe, and since hospitality was one of the values of Simon’s Jewish upbringing he cared about preserving, he suggested Matthew come and live with us for a few months, under his scientific observation and Lucille’s care.
How did the rest of the family feel about the idea? Well, Ms Lisa Heyward gave her consent, provided that it didn’t keep her from putting in her seventy-hour week at court; my brother was already off at boarding-school and didn’t care a whit; as for me…no one asked my opinion. And so it was that in September 1973, Matthew Varick moved in with us. I hated his guts from the minute I saw him. He was twelve, just a year younger than I was. He was a plump albino with ginger-coloured hair and eyelashes. Unnaturally pale beneath a thick sprinkle of freckles, his face and neck flamed crimson whenever he blushed, which was often. For no good reason I could see, he walked on tiptoe. Matthew was an unusually gifted autistic child, virtually an extraterrestrial—he had an IQ of 180, was obsessed with astronomy, and did mathematical calculations at lightning speed. He spoke incessantly in a high, thin voice, making the same exclamations over and over again, blinking his pale lashes, waving and flicking his fingers in the air—especially when he was scared, which was often. Over breakfast, the only meal the Greenblatt family took together, his excitement and volubility made conversation next to impossible, but Lisa’s mind was elsewhere and Simon found Matthew’s behaviour fascinating. I was the one who had to put up with him day after day, from after school till bedtime. Since his room was directly beneath mine, I’d hear him chattering to himself as I tried to concentrate on my homework and it would drive me up the wall.