Infrared (18 page)

Oh, the Egyptians! Peerless embalmers! Unsurpassable technicians of the Passage…

As they move past the sarcophagi with their magnificent painted effigies of the departed, they notice some of them are open, their contents visible. The ancient strips of cloth, though still impeccably twined, are tainted and tattered. The presence of human corpses is palpable.

‘Brrr,’ says Ingrid.

And Simon: ‘Do you think they really believed their slaves would
go on working for them in the Great Beyond?’

And Rena (still humming her no-point-in-having-an-opinion refrain): ‘I mostly think we can’t project ourselves into the minds of pharaohs.’

And Simon: ‘Really? Why?’

And she: ‘Well, I can’t, anyway. Maybe you can, because—like them—you believe in the soul’s immortality.’

Though Simon Greenblatt is a scientist and a rationalist, there’s a whole section of his brain set aside for metaphysical mysteries.

Tell me,
Subra says.

He flabbergasted me by not laughing his head off when, in the spring of 1996, his idol Timothy Leary started making preparations for his death. First he made arrangements with a company called CryoCare to have his corpse frozen. Then, before his body rotted completely from the mind-boggling quantities of nicotine and narcotics he’d been pumping into it over six decades, he figured maybe he should commit suicide ‘live’ on the internet. Finally he requested that his ashes be rocketed into outer space—and his preposterous request was granted.

‘Don’t you think that’s
bananas,
Dad?’ I yelled over the phone. My tone of voice upset Thierno, who was doing his homework next to me in the living room. At twelve, Thierno was hypersensitive to conflict; the faintest stirrings of a quarrel would plunge him into a state of panic.

Maybe because you and Alioune were fighting non-stop at the time? Subra suggests.

Could be. Anyway, just as my father in Montreal said, ‘Why bananas?’ into my right ear, my son came over and whispered into my left ear, ‘Why are you yelling at Grandad?’ ‘People do all sorts of things with their dead bodies,’ Simon went on. ‘Why is it sillier to put
them into orbit around the Earth than to donate them to worms or vultures?’ ‘Daddy, I can’t believe my ears!’ I yelled. ‘Are you telling me there’s a little glass bottle up there in the sky with Leary’s name on it, and he’s counting on extraterrestrials to come and wake him up twenty million years from now, and you don’t think that’s bananas? Come off it!’ At that point, Thierno put a hand over my mouth and I had no choice but to drop the subject.

Today in Florence, though, I suddenly feel very lonely. On their side, believing or having believed in the soul’s immortality: mummies, Bach, Michelangelo, endless multitudes of human beings from that handsome hunk of Cro-Magnon down to my sweet Aziz. On my side, the materialistic side: Lucretius; maybe Shakespeare; a handful of modern miscreants.

Ah, whispers Subra. But retain this instant, in the shadowy silence. Look—two thousand years after J.C., three living people lean down over dead ones dating from two thousand years before. May they rest in peace, in peace, in peace.

Rena holds the instant…then it dissolves.

Straightening, the living leave the darkened room and move towards their own deaths.

Why hurry? Oh, whatever is the rush?

Their bodies stay close together as they inch down the broad, sunlit corridor filled with Etruscan art—ah, astonishing grace in bronze, tall thin figures, leaping acrobats, funerary urns—but their thoughts scatter in all directions. Each of them mixes the museum’s contents with that of his or her own brain. Facts gleaned over the years, memories, moods, associations…

Okay, Rena is telling Subra. Okay, you’re right, there was no
article in the
Gazette.
The stagnation of Simon’s career wasn’t the
Gazette
’s fault. As for ‘Australia’…well, that’s a figure of speech. When I say native land…When I say my mother abruptly decided to return to her native land…

‘Rena, look!’ Simon cries.

She whirls around and sees—right there in a glass cage, smack in the middle of the corridor—she’d missed it, moving from case to case along the walls, her mind elsewhere—a chimera. Called the
Arezzo Chimera
because it was found in the vicinity of that city, but dating from long before its foundation. Etruscan, fifth century B.C.; Greek influence? A lion is poised to leap; its tail is a snake that rears up to attack the horned antelope bursting out of its back…

Simon and Rena stand rooted to the spot, stunned by the creature’s violent beauty.

‘It’s like a prefiguration of the Freudian psyche,’ Simon says. ‘Ego the lion, Id, the antelope, Superego the snake.’

Rena nods. We know all about the struggle of self against self, don’t we, Daddy? You against you and me against me…

But Ingrid interrupts: ‘It’s five-thirty already. I’m famished!’

So they retrace their steps—bronze figurines, tattered mummies, Hathor giving suck to Horemheb, great stone staircases, ancient jewellery, and then—a mandatory stop, after the bathroom but before the exit—the postcard stand. Suspecting that Simon and Ingrid will take a while to make their choice, Rena forces herself to study the cards. Which of the objects contained in the museum will the curators have deemed worthy of reproduction?

Despite her own resolutions and Aziz’s good advice, she herself is taking fewer and fewer photographs. Both her art and her eroticism wither and die in the presence of Simon and Ingrid; she’s reduced to living in reality and, at the same time, deprived of what makes reality liveable for her.

Her eyes scan the postcards. Hey…what’s this?

A smiling, perfectly preserved polychrome maidservant, forty-two centimetres high, dating from the Fifth Dynasty, kneeling on the ground and kneading dough…

Aziz’s grandmother still makes bread that way, in her village in the Algerian district of Chelef: she kneels down and bends forward, almost in praying position. Aziz once told me why Muslim men and women have to pray separately: the faithful stand shoulder to shoulder, he said, to prevent the evil spirit from slipping between them. And a man wouldn’t want his wife, mother or sister to rub shoulders with a male stranger, now, would he? Nor would he want male strangers in the row behind them to see their rear ends sticking up in the air as they prayed!

How did we miss that little statue? Rena thinks. And what should I do now? Rush back up to look at her this very minute, all by myself? For who knows when (or if) I’ll see Florence’s Archaeological Museum again?

And you
do
want to see that perfectly preserved statue of a little smiling slave, murmurs Subra. Don’t you?

Feeling like a coward, Rena buys the postcard. She’ll tell Aziz she saw the statue and that it reminded her of his grandmother.

What, after all, is
seeing?
she says to herself. By the time it gets projected onto our retina, even the real statue is an image. Seeing a photo of it is basically just another way of
seeing
it, right?

Subra has a good laugh.

They find a convivial greasy-spoon for their early dinner. Unfortunately, the only free table is right next to the toilet; there are incessant comings and goings in that corner and most of the customers forget
to close the door when they come out…Still, Rena chooses this moment to return to the subject of the soul’s immortality.

W.C. versus the Great Beyond? The abject versus the sublime? But that’s exactly what is at stake. The very dilemma Michelangelo ran into as he prepared to paint his
Last Judgment
frescoes—what do people’s bodies
look like
after resurrection?

‘So tell me,’ she says, stabbing at her tomato and mozzarella salad, ‘just what is this belief you both believe? Can you explain it to me? You, dear Ingrid—tell me, I’m all ears. You say the soul is eternal, but…starting when?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Yes, when does the soul’s eternity begin? At conception? At birth? Or is it
whenless,
being eternal—extending to infinity both in past and future? Before conception and after death?’

Ingrid is uncomfortable. Though raised a Protestant, she stopped attending church when she married a Jew, reassuring herself with the vague idea that they saw eye-to-eye on important things. Now, avoiding Rena’s gaze, she butters a piece of bread, folds three slices of mortadella onto it and takes a big bite. ‘All I know,’ she says with her mouth full, ‘is that I’ll return to meet my Maker when I die. It’s simple.’

‘And…are humans beings the only ones to be so lucky? Of all the possible creatures in all the billions of constellations, we and we alone, on our tiny planet revolving around its tiny sun in the tiny Milky Way…What about you, Dad? Do you, too, think we’re so unique?’

They hear the toilet flush. An old lady comes out of the bathroom and a powerful effluvium sweeps across their table.

‘I can think of better places to have this conversation,’ says Simon as he rises to shut the door. ‘And frankly, Rena, your tone of voice is a bit offensive.’

Don’t worry, says Subra. He’s smiling to let you know he’s proud of you just the same. You’re his daughter, his disciple. He taught you philosophical fencing. He sharpened the blade you’re needling his wife with right now.

‘Sorry, I don’t mean to be offensive. I just want to understand. Okay. Only humans, then, but…starting when? With Neanderthal? Yes? No? Or that Cro-Magnon guy we ran into the other day—was his soul immortal, too?’

‘Let’s drop the subject,’ Ingrid splutters. ‘You don’t respect anything…’

‘I do. I respect you, believe me. Only Homo sapiens, then, not Neanderthal. I think we can all agree on that. And not animals, of course.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Ingrid says pensively. ‘Sometimes when I look deeply into Lassie’s eyes, I could swear she’s got a soul… Right, Dad?’

Simon nods. Having grown up between a catatonic mother and an overworked father, he has always appreciated the company of dogs.

‘Dogs, then. What about cats? And horses?’

‘Yes, I would think they had souls, too,’ Ingrid says, attacking a plateful of gnocchi. ‘Right, Dad?’

Simon lifts a hand as if to say, why not?

‘But not mosquitoes, right?’

‘Rena!’ Ingrid says, reddening. ‘To you, everything is a joke!’

‘No, she’s right,’ says Simon. ‘I mean, we wouldn’t want to itch and scratch up there in heaven, would we?’

Again the toilet flushes and a heavy-built man comes out of the bathroom, zipping up his fly. Rena thinks of all the flies she has undone in the course of her long love life, all the penises that have entered her body, here, there and everywhere, all the men who
have bellowed as they poured into her what Dr Walters called their ‘half-children’—yes, crying out in fear and rage and loss as they hurled themselves over the cliff’s edge, tumbling head over heels into their chromosomes, thrashing about in the tangled threads of their DNA, releasing in a violent spurt the magic potion of their future, a liquid teeming with their offspring, their immortality, returning momentarily to their earlier bodies, their animal, child and savage bodies, their nothingness bodies, passing on the splash of sperm so as never to die, and dying as they do so…

‘I’m not joking,’ Rena tells Ingrid with an ingratiating smile. ‘I’m sincerely trying to understand what a soul is, and on what condition, under what circumstances, it becomes immortal. Okay, then, not mosquitoes. Maybe the soul depends on warm blood? Sorry. All right, we can forget the whole animal issue if you like…but will it have a body?’

‘What?’ Ingrid says in bewilderment.

‘Your soul, when it goes to meets its Maker. I mean, what does a soul actually
look
like after death? Is it a vapour, an ethereal essence, or does the flesh resuscitate as well? When you get to heaven, will you have a body and all that goes along with it—blood, lungs, toenails, digestive tract—or will you be a pure soul?’

For once, Ingrid feels she’s on firm ground. ‘The Bible says we’ll rise up from the dead on Judgment Day with our bodies intact. Right, Dad?’

‘Absolutely.’

Snippets of Bible passages go floating through their memories.

‘Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere,’ Rena says. ‘And how old will our bodies be, in the Great Hereafter?’

‘We’ll rise up with our bodies in their prime,’ Ingrid says jubilantly. ‘It’s written that the body will recover all its limbs, and that not a hair will be missing from its head. Good thing for you,
Dad—you’ll get all your hair back in heaven!’

‘Ha-ha-ha-ha!’ Simon says, rubbing his balding pate to make sure Rena has got the joke.

‘What about babies?’ she asks.

‘What about them?’ says Ingrid, nonplussed.

‘I mean, people who die as babies…Do they, too, rise up with their bodies in their prime?’

‘Rena! You should be ashamed!’

The waiter brings them their desserts.

‘Okay, we can forget about babies, too…to say nothing of foetuses, right? I won’t even mention them. Abortions, miscarriages… down the drain. But, er…what about Hindus?’

‘What about them?’ Ingrid says.

‘Well, you know…Hindus…Muslims…Buddhists…voodoo adepts…the billions of people who happened to be born before Christ—or afterwards, but on non-Christian soil—do they get to meet their Maker, too, or will they—’

‘Stop it!
’ Livid, Ingrid sets down her spoon. ‘It’s impossible to have a serious conversation with you. Anyway, this place is unbearable. It spoils my appetite, it spoils—everything.’

This time they head back to the hotel in silence.

About halfway there, Rena’s phone rings. Aziz’s name shines up at her from the tiny screen.

‘My love.’

‘Rena…’

Aziz can barely speak. Rena can tell he has a lump in his throat, like when he was a kid in school and didn’t know the answer to a question and was afraid the teacher would make fun of him in front
of the whole class. Instantly, she knows it’s serious. A matter of life and death. If the event took place in the projects around Paris and needs to be conveyed to Florence at once, someone is dead for sure.