Infrared (2 page)

Rena walks down the corridor to Room 23 and scratches at the door like a cat. Lengthy silence. So why am I so terrified? There is beauty. I’ve simply made them the gift of a trip to Italy, a country neither of them has ever visited before, to celebrate my Daddy’s seventieth birthday…

Simon has never looked in a less celebratory mood; as for Ingrid, her eyes are red and puffy from crying.

Though it’s past noon, they’ve just got up. It seems they narrowly escaped a tragedy last night—Ingrid tells Rena about it in detail over breakfast. They’d arrived late from Rotterdam, at one a.m., having travelled all day in a train filled to bursting with rambunctious
ragazzi.
Exhausted, they’d disembarked and tried to get their bearings in this foreign city, foreign country, foreign tongue. They’d wandered endlessly around the Stazione Santa Maria Novella, weighed down by all seven pieces of their luggage, some on wheels, others straining their back and shoulder muscles. Disorientated, they’d got lost and made a huge detour, trudging past wonders and detesting
them for not being the Hotel Guelfa. (Santa Maria Novella—not the station but the church, decorated by Domenico Ghirlandaio, the master of Michelangelo himself—right there before their eyes, in the sweet Florentine night…) Bone-tired, they’d stopped on a corner to catch their breath, calm the pounding of their hearts and check the map under a streetlight. When at long last they’d reached their room at the Hotel Guelfa, after waiting at the door, explaining things to the irate proprietor and gasping their way up two steep flights of stairs, Ingrid had automatically counted their bags and…six instead of seven. Re-counted—truly, six. Heart flip. The missing piece of luggage, though the smallest, was also the most precious: a small rucksack containing their money, plane tickets, passports…Simon—dog-tired, wiped-out, septuagenarian, lost—trundled back downstairs, returned to the corner where they’d stopped to rest, and—despite the incessant comings and goings at that spot—found the bag propped up against the streetlight.

‘As miraculously intact as the Madonna,’ he triumphantly concludes.

The mere memory of last night’s panic has reduced Ingrid to tears.

Gee, thinks Rena, we could write an epic poem about this.
The Sack of Florence,
a counterpart to The Sack of Rome. But Ingrid wouldn’t want to know that Charles V’s armies razed the latter city in 1527, causing twenty thousand deaths and incalculable losses to Italy’s artistic heritage: to her mind, the only destruction in the history of humanity is that of her native city of Rotterdam by the Germans, on the fourteenth of May 1940. She was just a month old at the time, her family’s house was hit, her mother and three brothers died when it collapsed, her own life was saved by the cast-iron stove next to which her cradle had been set—’I was born in ruins,’ she loves to tell people, sobbing; ‘I suckled a corpse.’

‘Uh…Florence? Did you want to see Florence?’

Bad start.

Whereas the Florentines are already halfway through their day’s work, Simon and Ingrid seem in no rush to get up from the breakfast table.

‘Won’t you have some pastry, Rena?’ Ingrid says. ‘You’ve lost weight, haven’t you? How much do you weigh now?’

She resents it that my body doesn’t change, thinks Rena. So far, at least, neither motherhood nor passing time have managed to fill it out. At forty-five my measurements are the same as they were at age eighteen, when we first met. She thinks poor Toussaint and Thierno must have been horribly squashed in there. She has a hard time with my appearance in general, which she finds morbid—my inordinate taste for dark glasses, dark everything, leather.

That Rena! Subra says, imitating Ingrid’s voice in Rena’s mind. Still using a backpack instead of a handbag, because she’s allergic to ladies’ handbags and to everything ladylike in general. Now also sporting a man’s fedora, no doubt to protect her head from the sun and rain while leaving her hands free for photography. And her hair’s cut so short, you’d think she was a lesbian…Actually that wouldn’t surprise me…nothing surprises me, coming from Rena…I mean, why limit yourself to men? If you’ve got an explorer’s soul you explore everything, don’t you? Besides which, there’s her brother’s example…

‘You know I abhor scales,’ Rena says aloud. ‘Even when my kids were babies, I refused to weigh them. I figured if they got too puny, I’d notice it all by myself.’

‘But surely they weigh you when you have an appointment at the doctor’s?’

‘That’s one reason I do my best to avoid members of that profession…Um, let me think…Hundred and seven or so, last time I checked.’

‘That’s not enough for a woman of your height…Right, Dad?’

‘Sorry…I’ll do my best to shrink.’

Oh, dear, Simon doesn’t laugh. He is Rena’s father, not Ingrid’s, but Ingrid has been calling him Dad since their four daughters were born in the eighties and he doesn’t seem to mind.

Poor Simon, Rena thinks. He looks discouraged in advance. Dreads the coming days. Fears I’ll be dragging them here and there, pushing them around, impressing and amazing them, overwhelming them with my erudition, my energy and curiosity. Thinks maybe they should have gone straight home to Montreal from Rotterdam. Is afraid of disappointing me. ‘Dear daughter, I confess that I am old,’ as Lear puts it…Seventy isn’t old at all nowadays, but the fact is that he’s tired and I weigh on him. No matter how skinny I am…

After ingesting the disgusting cellophane-wrapped pastries and the so-called orange juice, they wonder if they could have a second cup of coffee. Not cappuccino this time round, regular coffee.

Rena moves to the counter to place their order, and when the proprietor mutters that
cappuccino
and
caffè latte
are the
stessa cosa,
she goes into more detail, explaining that what the couple would really like is a pot of weak coffee with a jug of hot milk on the side. This she obtains. The couple is flabbergasted.

‘But…you speak Italian!’ exclaims Ingrid.

No, not really, it’s just that…communication’s so much easier between strangers.

‘Easy to be a polyglot,’ says Ingrid, pursuing her reflection on Rena’s linguistic gifts, ‘when you’ve been married to a whole slew of foreigners and travelled to the four corners of the Earth for your profession.’

Yeah, Subra snickers, so don’t go putting on airs.

Right, Rena sighs. No point in reminding her, as I’ve already done countless times, that my four husbands—Fabrice the Haitian, Khim the Cambodian, Alioune the Senegalese and Aziz the Algerian—were all, thanks to the unstinting generosity of French colonisation, francophones…as, indeed, were my Québecois lovers—all the professors, truck drivers, waiters, singers and garbage-men whose
t’es belle, fais-moi une ‘tite bec, chu tombé en amour avec toué
graced my teenage years…I much preferred them to my anglophone neighbours and classmates—far too healthy for my taste, approaching sex in much the same way as they approached jogging (though usually removing their shoes first), interrogating me in the thick of things as to the nature and intensity of my pleasure, and dashing off to shower the minute they’d climaxed.

Maybe that’s when you started thinking of the English language as a cold shower, jokes Subra.

Could be. I’m not a Francophile but a Francophonophile—I have a foible for the French language in all its forms…Still, I get by just fine in Italian.

‘Funny expression, when you think about it,’ muses Simon, ‘the four corners of the Earth.’

‘It’s a figure of speech!’ Ingrid says defensively.

‘Yeah, but it must date from before Columbus, don’t you think?’ insists her husband. ‘When people still believed the Earth was flat.’

‘Uh…’ Rena dares to interject. ‘Don’t you guys want to go out?’

They can’t say no, she adds, in an aside to Subra. I mean, they can’t cross their arms and say, To tell you the truth, Rena, we prefer to spend our week in Tuscany locked up in cheap hotel room without a view.

Rena clings to Subra, the imaginary older sister who, these thirty-odd years, has been sharing her opinions, laughing at her jokes,
blithely swallowing her lies (feigning, for instance, to credit the idea that she and Aziz are already married) and assuaging her anxieties.

Scarcely half an hour later, they emerge into the Via Guelfa.

When she sees that Simon has donned a bright blue baseball cap and Ingrid a fluorescent pink dufflecoat, Rena swallows her dismay. Okay, I’ll go the whole hog, she thinks. I’ll drink the bitter cup of tourism to the dregs—why be embarrassed? That’s what we are. She gets a hold of herself by gently drawing the back of her hand over the faint trace of Aziz beneath her jaw.

Their first destination is the Basilica of San Lorenzo, but before they’ve gone half a block, Simon’s gaze is drawn by something in an inner courtyard. What is it?

‘What did he see?’

‘A pair of legs,’ says Ingrid.

‘Legs?’

‘Yes,’ cries Simon. ‘Come and see!’

The two women have no choice but to cross the courtyard. He’s right—beyond the filthy windowpane of some sort of workshop is a pair of human legs.

‘Weird, isn’t it? What do you think it is?’

I have no idea, Dad—and besides, who cares?
This
isn’t Florence…

They approach. There’s no denying it’s weird. The legs are naked but full of holes, hollow inside, and surrounded by animal furs. Weirder still, they’re upside down, spread apart and bent at the knees…

‘It almost looks like a woman giving birth, doesn’t it, Dad?’ says Ingrid.

‘Yeah, except that they’re men’s legs,’ Simon points out.

‘Don’t you want to take a photo, Rena?’

‘I don’t photograph weird things.’

Oh, I see, says Subra, again imitating Ingrid’s voice, you don’t photograph weird things. Three hundred and fifty
Whore Sons and Daughters
—there’s nothing weird about that, of course. Mafiosi, hooligans, traders, sleeping nudes—just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill stuff.

Rena moves closer to the window and peers beyond the pair of legs inside the workshop, then recoils with a gasp.

‘What’s wrong?’

There, inches away from her face, lying on his back—a living man. Smouldering dark eyes, slightly yellowed teeth, flaring nostrils, low forehead, reddish beard, hairy arms—a Cro-Magnon male, alive.

No. But for an instant, yes. She receives his presence, the heat of his body. No. But for an instant, yes.

Simon points out a dusty sign tacked to the workshop door, and she translates: ‘Taxidermy, Moulding.’

‘Must be some sort of wax figure they’re making for an installation at the Museum of Natural History,’ Simon speculates. ‘When they finish with the legs, they’ll rotate him through a hundred and eighty degrees and set him on his feet.’

‘But he won’t be erect,’ Ingrid objects.

‘Yeah, well, he’ll be sort of hunched over—to light a fire, say.’

That mystery more or less satisfactorily solved, they hobble back across the courtyard. The wild man continues to smoulder within her, though. What is it? Like what? A disturbing twinge of some far-off thing…

Simon comes to a halt. ‘I wonder what the cavewoman felt,’ he says, ‘when the caveman grabbed her by the hair and dragged her down the path to shtup her in the cave.’

Rena laughs to be polite, even as she heaves an inward sigh.

‘I mean,’ her father goes on, ‘it can’t have been much fun to go bouncing and scraping along on the pebbles and rocks like that. To say nothing of all the thistles and nettles and spiky plants that would have been growing amongst them. After her deflowering, the woman would probably cut her hair real short, to let the other men know—okay you guys, from now on: shtupping yes, dragging no. No more of that dragging crap.’

‘What I wonder,’ says Rena, joining the game out of habit, ‘is why he had to drag her to a cave in the first place. Why wouldn’t he just shtup her out in the open? I mean, were the Cro-Magnon as modest as all that? Was shtupping already a private activity back then?’

Ostentatiously, Ingrid holds her tongue. She detests conversations like this between Simon and Rena. Finds it abnormal for a father and daughter to indulge in this sort of banter, as if they were buddies. With her own father…God forbid! Had a single syllable on the theme of sex ever passed her lips in his presence, he would have turned her to stone with a glance. To stone!

Try as she might, Rena can’t stop. ‘Besides,’ she insists, ‘why would he have had to grab her by the hair? I don’t get it. Didn’t she feel like shtupping? The virginity taboo didn’t come along until much later, right? In the Neolithic?’

No man ever had to drag you by the hair, that’s for sure, says Subra in Ingrid’s voice. That Rena is boy-crazy!

True, concedes Rena. All a man needs to do is put his hand on the small of my back and my will dissolves completely, my blood tingles like quicksilver, my skin grows a million small soft glittering scales, my legs become a fishtail and I metamorphose into a mermaid. There’s something so hypnotic about a man’s desire…its imperiousness…A violent thrill of fright and euphoria goes through
you when you sense he’s chosen
you…
at this instant…Surely the cavewoman would have felt the same melting, the same tingling…

They start walking again. Some fifty yards along, Simon comes to a halt. ‘Maybe the cavewoman didn’t mind being dragged by the caveman,’ he says. ‘Maybe her brain released a bunch of endorphins so she wouldn’t feel the pain. A bit like when a fakir walks barefoot on hot coals.’

‘That’s conceivable,’ Rena says.

‘But maybe the fakir’s pain makes itself felt later on,’ suggests Ingrid, in a rare attempt at humour. ‘I mean, maybe he nurses his burns in secret after the performance, when no one is looking. Right, Dad?’

‘No, no,’ says Simon. ‘There are plenty of scientific studies on fakirs—the soles of their feet are perfectly smooth and pink at the end of the ordeal. No doubt about that.’

They start walking again.

When did my father lose the ability to talk and walk at the same time? wonders Rena.