Infrared (26 page)

‘Yes, I finally caught some footage last night. It’s…’

‘What about this morning?’

A wave of fear washes through her.

‘Not yet. Is there…’

‘Rena, listen. There’s a civil war going on here. Aziz tells me he asked you to cut your holiday short and you said no. Don’t you think you’re going a bit far? I mean, you’re not Salgado, you know? You’re replaceable. I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, but I want to be sure you understand. Rena, you’ve got to come back today. That’s an ultimatum. If you decide not to, I won’t be able to renew your contract.’

‘Is Aziz with you?’

‘Did you hear me?
On the Fringe
won’t be able to publish your photos anymore.’

‘Could you put him on? I’ll talk to you again right afterwards.’

A silence. Her brain is shrouded in the same fog as the landscape.

‘Yeah.’

Aziz. His bad-day voice.

‘What’s going on, love? What have I done to deserve this overdose of silence?’

No, that’s not the right approach—she shouldn’t force him to discuss their love life in front of their boss. It will only make him feel trapped, cornered, tricked. But she can’t help it.

‘You’re
thinking about replacing me, too, is that it?’

What a stupid thing to say. The worst possible tactic. She can practically see his shoulders shrugging to shake her off.

Schroeder has taken the phone back.

‘Well, Rena. What’s your decision?’

‘Ciao,
Patrice.’

There. I’ve lost my job. Good start to the day. Let’s see what else can happen before the sun goes down.

Going upstairs to pack, she passes Ingrid coming down for breakfast. Simon isn’t hungry, she informs Rena. But they’re almost ready…

Rena brings down her suitcase, moves the car to the doorstep, and settles down to wait in the living room with Gaia.

The minutes inch by like slobbery, amorphous slugs. They swell up into obese quarter-hours, ugly and useless as gobs of saliva.

Gaia puts a sympathetic arm around her shoulders and tells her in a low voice that her father was depressive, too. So many failed Galileos! So many immature Zeuses! So many Commanders in bathrobes! Why did no one warn us about this?

Using hand gestures and her modicum of Italian, Rena conveys to her hostess that the little mice are fed up with tiptoeing around their big, depressed lion-daddies. Gaia bursts out laughing.

At long last, Ingrid comes down and tells her they’re all set. Rena goes up to help Simon with their suitcases…But first he wants to carry down the plates, glasses, cups and saucers Gaia brought them for their various snacks.

‘Leave it, Daddy, please. Don’t worry, Gaia will take care of it. It’s her job.’

Simon thinks it would be more polite, more generous, indeed, more feminist of them to take care of it themselves. The debate goes on for a good five minutes; downstairs, Gaia must be losing patience. Rena gives in and carries down the tray.

The car is waiting at the doorstep; the luggage is in the trunk;
now
what’s holding them up?

Oh, right. Life.

Simon has come to a halt in the middle of the living room. A step. A pause. A question—insoluble, as always. A sigh. Encroaching darkness. His hands go up to cover his face. Blackout. Endgame.
They’ll go nowhere. They’ve been struck motionless, like the party guests in Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Finally Gaia breaks the spell. Striding across the room, she kindly, smilingly—
’Arrivederci’
—but firmly—‘
Ciao! Ciao!
’—kicks them out of her house.

God bless her—if, that is, He’s still able to lift a finger.

They’re off. Naturally, though, their troubles are far from over.

‘Looks like we took a wrong turn,’ Rena says after a while, braking gently. ‘We’re headed for the highway, not the Chiantigiana.’

Simon studies the little map Gaia sketched for them. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But if we keep on going, I think we can catch up with it a bit further on.’

‘I don’t think so,’ says Rena, stopping at the side of the road to make a U-turn.

‘Fine!’ Simon says, slamming his palms down onto the open map of Tuscany on his lap. ‘No point in my reading the maps, then—just do as you please!’

Zeus does the Zeus thing, Subra says. What do you expect? He rants, raves, and thunders, reducing all to ash.

Listen, Zeus, I’m fed up to the teeth with your temper tantrums, do you hear me? You’d better watch out or I’ll warm your bum!

Rena forces herself to take a deep breath, behave like an adult, control her voice. ‘Okay, show me.’

Trembling with the same contained rage, the two of them study the map together. Rena is right. She turns around and drives back through the invisible hills at top speed.

A while later, on the Chiantigiana, she feels suddenly euphoric.

When you come right down to it, she says to herself, I’m a manic-depressive with ultra-short phases.

When they reach Siena at morning’s end, she parks in the Via Curta-tone near San Domenico’s—illegally, but only slightly so—and the three of them start wandering through the lovely streets of the old city, feeling perfectly miserable. Neither Ingrid nor Simon have said a word since the altercation at the side of the road. Rena banishes from her brain the images of herself as a young woman discovering Siena at Xavier’s side—tired old memories that are now stretching their limbs and rubbing their eyes, trying to wake up…Don’t bother, she tells them. Go back to sleep, I don’t need you. I prefer to create new memories!

A bit farther on, Simon tugs at her sleeve—’Rena, look.’

His voice is low, his tone ominous. It startles her.

Turning, she sees a newspaper stand and the headlines leap out at her, silently shouting the same thing in a dozen different languages:
France, France, France,
they say.
Paris, Paris, Paris. Fire, fire, fire.
She sees photographs. Chaotic crowds of teenage boys, ranks of anti-riot police. Flames. Helmets. Shields. Stones. Flames. Riots spreading. Three hundred cars burned. Her Canon dangles uselessly between her breasts.

‘I know,’ she says lamely to Simon.

He purchases some newspapers in English and starts flipping through them as they walk. ‘Hey,’ he mutters in a worried voice. ‘Isn’t that the place Aziz comes from?’

‘Yes, it is,’ she says. ‘It’s also where Victor Hugo wrote
Les Misérables.’

‘Oh,
Les Misérables!’
exclaims Ingrid. ‘We saw the musical comedy at the Place des Arts a few years ago. It was terrific, wasn’t it, Dad?’

‘Well, it’s been playing non-stop in that city for the past hundred
and fifty years,’ Rena says. ‘Thousands of Jean Valjeans have been locked up for stealing a loaf of bread, or for less.’

She doesn’t tell them how many times Aziz has been held in custody overnight, or that his brother has spent the past eighteen months in the Villepinte penitentiary…Knowing that Ingrid thinks her native Rotterdam is in the process of becoming a second Kabul, she has no wish to get her started on the subject of the Muslim threat.

Instead, feigning gaiety, she chirps, ‘Why don’t we check out the cathedral?’

Their disappointment is instantaneous.

The façade is under renovation, concealed beneath a tarpaulin on which its red, white and black striped marble has been painted in trompe-l’œil.

‘Hey!’ says Simon. ‘That almost looks like a copy!’

He’s not joking. Afflicted with near-sightedness, far-sightedness and perhaps a bit of astigmatism as well, he’s convinced he’s looking at the real thing, sun-flattened.
Those who tourists do become…
This time Ingrid goes about unfooling her husband’s eye.

They file slowly across the threshold, into the penumbra of the enormous cathedral. Seeing their twin fedoras, an employee gestures to Simon to take his off (in places of Catholic worship, as everyone knows, women’s heads should be covered and men’s uncovered). Without missing a beat—condensing humour and insolence, obedience and insult into a single act, eliciting Rena’s reluctant admiration and the employee’s acute annoyance—Simon removes his hat and plunks it on his wife’s head.

Unlike San Lorenzo in Florence, the space here is crowded, congested, fairly dripping with hybrid decoration. Fearing they’ll be overwhelmed, they decide to concentrate on the coloured marble pavements—twenty-five thousand square feet of Biblical scenes. Despite this restriction, Rena soon finds herself in the grip of familiar anxiety: how much should I try to understand? How can I be
here,
truly here and now—for it’s today, not tomorrow, that we’re visiting the cathedral of Siena? Determined to engrave the floor mosaics in her memory once and for all, she moves a little ahead of the others.

Here is
The Slaughter of the Innocents…
How many times, in paintings, drawings, photos, movies or documentaries, have we seen the emblematic image of a mother screaming as she struggles to wrest her living baby from a man bent on killing it, or wailing in despair as she holds up her dead baby?

What about you? whispers Subra. The dead half-baby in your dream…who will weep for you?

Just last April, fourteen people, including an old woman and two little girls, were massacred at a false roadblock near Larbaa. Over the past few years, more than one hundred and fifty thousand people have been murdered in Algeria, Aziz’s parents’ native land. And who are the assassins, if not our own sons? Yes, our boys—forever marching off to war, eager to suffer and spill rivers of blood, dying, killing, screaming, hating, marching, singing, putting on uniforms, saluting, seeking unison, destroying the bodies of other mothers’ sons with daggers, lances, swords, bombs, bullets, poisons and laser rays…

Feeling a sudden vibration on her left thigh, she starts as if a stranger had just pinched her.

No. Her mobile. A phone call.

Digging the phone (Aziz?) out of her tight jeans (Aziz?) with some
difficulty (Aziz?), she glances at the screen. No, it’s Kerstin.

‘How are you doing?’ she whispers, heading for the cathedral door.

‘What about you—still kicking?’

‘Barely.’

‘I’ve got some bad news.’

‘Ah.’

‘Bad for me, anyway.’

‘Then it is for me, too.’

‘Well…even for me, it’s not
that
bad, but…’

‘Cut the suspense. Who’s dead?’

‘Alain-Marie.’

‘Oh.’

‘Heart attack—bang, gone. Yesterday. His sister called to tell me. Since then I’ve talked to a number of his friends and learned the details…He was with a young woman…’

‘Twenty-four?’

‘Something like that. And…don’t laugh, Rena…’

‘Oh, no, let me guess…An overdose of Viagra?’

‘Isn’t that awful? He was just my age, sixty-one. It’s so weird, you know? The veterans of May ‘68 are starting to die…Weirder still, Pierre is devastated. He says I prevented him from getting to know his real father. He wants to learn all he can about Alain-Marie; he’s even composing piano music for his funer—’

As if in imitation of Alain-Marie’s heart attack, Rena’s mobile emits a series of panicky beeps and suddenly the screen goes blank. Silence. Even though Siena’s cathedral was wired with electricity in the late nineteenth century, she doubts they’d let her use it to recharge her phone battery.

She goes back to join the others.

They’re seated on a bench across from an enormous fresco. Ingrid is leaning forward to rub her ankles; Simon’s eyes are closed. Standing next to them are four tall, blond individuals dressed in white: clearly a happy, closely knit Scandinavian family. The mother is analysing the painting; the father is nodding his interest; their teenage son and daughter are asking intelligent questions.

In desperation, Rena opens the
Guide bleu.
What can she tell Simon and Ingrid about this cathedral that will bring it alive for them?

You’re not the only one, Father, to have had your plans thwarted and your dreams defeated by the ups and downs of fate…Look at Siena! The original project was to build the biggest church in the world right on this spot (the present Duomo was just the transept!). In 1348, however, construction ground to a halt as the city’s population was reduced by two-thirds. Mounds and mounds of dead bodies. Disgusting, purulent, stinking corpses. Black buboes, people moaning, women screaming in agony, babies tossed at random into common graves…The whole European continent writhing in the same pestilence…There…That make you feel better?

Naturally, she holds her tongue.

The minute they leave the Duomo, Ingrid begs for a lunch break—yes, now, in the first café they come upon. Hoping to find a terrace in the sunlight, Rena convinces her to wait a bit—and suddenly they find themselves in Il Campo. Ah yes: she remembers this splendid, scallop-shell-shaped square, each of whose nine pavements
represents one of the communes that made up the independent republic of Siena in the twelfth century, before it became the Ghibel-line enemy of Guelfan Florence. Something like that, yes, something along those lines. They find restaurant tables on the sunny side of the square, and, preoccupied not with Siena’s heroic past but with their own petty problems, just as the inhabitants of twelfth-century Siena were preoccupied with theirs, and so it goes, they order sandwiches, salads,
acqua gassata.

A self-styled clown is circulating among the tables, heckling the customers, offering to imitate them. Finding him unpleasantly reminiscent of the other night’s dictator in Florence, Rena brushes him off unceremoniously:
‘Non voglio niente, niente!’
Ingrid stares at her, eyebrows raised, taken aback by her violence.

Relax, little one, Subra murmurs in her head. Look around you, take a deep breath, calm down. Life is lovely.

‘You look lovely today,’ says Simon out of the blue. Rena jumps at the coincidence between his actual utterance of the word and Subra’s imaginary one. ‘Can I take your photo?’

‘You haven’t been taking many pictures, Rena,’ Ingrid points out, as Rena hands the camera to her father.