Infrared (15 page)

The hubbub reminds Rena of May 1968 in Paris as described by Kerstin. Simon would probably get a kick out of those stories, but Ingrid definitely would not.

Tell me,
Subra suggests.

‘The funny thing about my Maoist lover—no, the sad thing, really,’ Kerstin told me, ‘was that in private he just couldn’t get it up. We were lucky, though—the lovely uproar of May ‘68 came to our assistance. Barricades, street battles, riot police—all that worked just fine, so when June rolled around I discovered I was pregnant. Naturally, fatherhood was out of the question for my handsome Trotskyite. While libertines endlessly repeat the platitude that eroticism is connected to death, they refuse to entertain the notion that it might be connected to birth. Anathema, for the bellows of transgressive orgasms to give rise to the gurgling of babies! So their charming libertine girlfriends frequently wound up on their backs with their feet in stirrups, having their entrails mauled by metallic instruments that gave them internal hæmorrhages and horrifying nightmares…A couple of my closest friends had been rendered sterile and depressive by that sort of butchery, so I was scared stiff of abortionists and had no intention of putting my life in their hands. My handsome, red-neckerchiefed revolutionary vanished into thin air. After the birth of our child, Pierre, I’d sometimes call Alain-Marie in the middle of the night—”Here, your son wants to talk to you”—and hold the receiver to the baby’s screaming mouth.’

I nodded, imagining the scene. ‘And did you ever tell Pierre he’d been conceived at Saint-Médard’s?’ ‘Not in the church. In the middle of the Rue Gay-Lussac at five in the morning.’ ‘Did you ever tell him?’ ‘Are you kidding?’ ‘And did he see his father, growing up?’ ‘No, virtually never. But I married Edmond five years later, and he was a father to Pierre—a marvellous one—until his death last year…’ ‘I’m
sorry, Kerstin, forgive me for prying but…what about Alain-Marie?’ ‘Listen, Rena. Get this through your head. Alain-Marie has hated his son at every stage of his existence. Disgusting fœtus, bawling baby, mumbling toddler, pimply teenager, and now—by far the worst—tall, dark, handsome young rival!’

I couldn’t help laughing. The idea of an ageing libertine devoured by jealousy of his own son was irresistibly funny.

Night is falling by the time they get back to the Piazza San Giovanni; the tourists have dispersed and the Baptistery stands deserted. Here’s their chance to study the famous gilded
Doors of Paradise.
But…do they feel like it?

Putting on her reading glasses, Rena holds the guidebook up under a streetlight. ‘Ghiberti, 1425,’ she reads. ‘This door is his masterpiece. It took him twenty-five years to complete.’

Silence.

‘Before becoming a sculptor,’ she goes on, ‘he was a goldsmith.’

More silence.

‘His techniques’—one last try—’range from high relief to a mere shiver on the chiselled surface of cast metal.’

Hm, that’s not half bad. Not easy to translate, though. Can gold
shiver
in English?

No, it isn’t working. They don’t know how to look at this door. Don’t have the strength to identify the ten Biblical scenes—this one’s Noah, that one’s Esau, and over there must be Abraham’s philoxenia…

What the hell is philoxenia, anyway? wonders Rena.

Maybe it’s like xenophilia, Subra suggests. People who, like yourself, are keen on foreigners? Sorry.

Ingrid, however, still has the strength to talk about World War Two. She tells them how the Wehrmacht soldiers marched down the streets of Rotterdam singing at the tops of their lungs in German, giving her a permanent allergy to that language. Obligingly, Rena denounces the Third Reich’s cult of obedience. Simon chimes in, wondering why people are so often happy to abdicate their will…
nicht wahr,
Abraham?

Sorry, dear Ghiberti. Yet I assure you, we’re not betraying your masterpiece. Past, present and future: same abdication, same stupidity, same massacres.

Once Ingrid gets started there’s no stopping her, so the war rages on throughout their evening meal. It’s surreal.

A terrace restaurant on a little square near San Lorenzo market—
the Winter of Hunger
—they order grilled fish—
the atrocious famine of January 1945
—it’ll take a little while—
we waited for days, for weeks
—they’re in a good mood—
there was nothing to eat, no supplies coming into Rotterdam
—no matter, we’ve got good wine—
we were starving, overcome with anguish
—glad to be together—
we stole lumps of coal down by the train tracks
—this squid is scrumptious!—
we melted snow for drinking water
—the mullet, the bass, the gilt-head!—
and then my father’s mad decision
—lovely, everything’s just lovely—
to travel to Aalten on foot
—a bit of lemon?—
185 kilometres of cold, hunger and illness
—another drop of wine?—I
was the youngest, sent to beg at farmhouse doors
—dolce, dolce vita—
the bombing of Arnhem, huge holes in the ground
—the air so mellow—
bomb shelters in Baarlo, rockets, sirens
—the perfection of this square—
a bomb fell right on top of the shelter
—its lamplit terraces bubbling with laughter and conversation—
everyone was killed
—If only life could—
women were mummified as they sat with their children on their laps
—be like this—
poisoned by toxic gases, their bodies intact…

The third day is over.

Back in her room at last, Rena calls Aziz, Toussaint and Kerstin, then three or four other friends…

She gets nothing but answering machines. What on earth is going on in France?

In the offices of
On the Fringe,
Schroeder is showing me the mock-up of the cover for the next issue. To my surprise, it’s a frontal portrait of a voluptuous nude, her legs cut off at mid-thigh, her head tossed back. ‘What’s this?’ I ask. ‘Have we decided to sell ass like everyone else?’ Schroeder looks a bit uncomfortable. ‘It’s because we’re in the red just now,’ he says. ‘Still, it’s a good photo, isn’t it?’ As I look again, the cover suddenly comes to life. The photo turns into a film and a baby bursts out of the dark triangle at the woman’s crotch. It’s violent and magnificent. A few seconds later, a geyser comes gushing from the same spot, literally inundating the child. Schroeder is stunned speechless, but I assure him this sort of flooding is fairly common in the aftermath of a delivery, adding that I experienced it myself when I gave birth to Thierno.

I wonder why I said
that
in the dream? Rena muses. It’s not true at all—I experienced no flooding of any kind after my deliveries. Only before, when my waters broke…

Not only that, Subra points out, but Schroeder never consults you about cover illustrations.

Another dream about whores
qua
madonnas…Reminds me of the pin-ups in all the trucks that picked me up hitch-hiking when I was fifteen or sixteen. When the drivers noticed my eyes glued to the photos of those broads with siliconed boobs, dumb looks on their faces, eyes half-shut and pointy pink tongues between their teeth, they would blush and apologise. ‘Sorry,’ they’d say, in French or in English, to the skinny adolescent they mistook for an innocent child.

Heavens, how often did
that
happen? Subra says, with the faintest trace of irony in her voice.

Oh, dozens of times, Rena answers airily. Er, would you believe… ten? How about…three? Anyway, all the truck drivers said the same thing: ‘What are you doing hitch-hiking around all by yourself? Don’t
you know how dangerous it is? You’re lucky I came along, you could have been picked up by some pervert, I picked you up to protect you from perverts…’ But as we moved from coffee to sandwiches and from conversation to jokes, they invariably wound up pleading with me to climb in the back with them, into the bed behind the cab, with its stained wrinkly sheets, reeking of the tobacco, sweat, and sperm of their solitary nights. I saw no reason to decline, for I’d never believed in God, was on the Pill, and passionately longed to know what adults knew and to do what adults did. So, time and again, I revelled in the sensation of their scrapy cheeks against my neck, their impatient cocks seeking out my cunt, their groans of climax, and their surprised embarrassment, afterwards, to find themselves with a minor. ‘Sorry,’ they’d mutter. And I’d forgive them, because I knew, had known for a long time already (ever since the garage event) how helpless men are in the face of this mystery, how much it scares and stupefies them, how ardently they respond
Yes
and
No
simultaneously when confronted with the simple fact, as self-evident as it is unfathomable, that all of us come out of a cunt, owe our presence on this Earth to a cunt…

Never have I forgotten the valuable lesson Rowan taught me that day. Scared stiff—not only pubescent boys in garages and tenement basements but also Hasidim and Taliban, pure hard men of every religious war and gang bang in history, Sadean libertines who bind and lacerate, desperate militiamen who rape and mutilate—all, all—fear and trembling and sickness unto death.

Tell me,
Subra says.

‘Meet you in the garage at five,’ Rowan said to me, and when I showed up at five on the dot I wasn’t even surprised to discover that I was yet again the only girl, a diminutive seven-year-old girl surrounded by half a dozen eleven-year-old boys…‘You know how to play spin-the-bottle, Rena?’ ‘No…’ ‘Look.’ We got into a circle,
kneeling on the cement floor, and set an empty glass Coke bottle at its centre. One kid set the bottle spinning (I can still hear the scrape of thick glass on cement); the child it pointed to when it stopped had to remove a piece of clothing. But after a few rounds and the indifferent shedding of their shoes and socks, the boys began to cheat, shoving and jostling one another and re-spinning the bottle so that it pointed always and only to me, and Rowan insisted I comply, reminding me I’d sworn obedience, and saying, ‘Come on now, Rena, don’t be a sissy, take it off.’ And since I dreaded nothing in the world more than being deemed a sissy by my brother, I kept my eyes trained on him as my hands peeled away the final shreds of clothing—hair ribbons, undershirt, finally my flower-printed pink cotton undies. Seeing the other boys’ eyes fill with apprehension, I realised that Rowan had selected those of his schoolmates who’d never before seen a girl in the nude. At first they stood there and gawked in disbelief; then they muttered and mumbled and averted their eyes. ‘Show them, Rena,’ Rowan said. ‘Go on, show them all you’ve got!’

And because my brother and I were so powerfully together, because I felt his confidence and his love, I stepped daintily out of my panties and thrust my tiny hips forward, reaching down to part the lips of my vagina with my fingers. Several of the boys drew back in fear. I felt a thrill of pride go through me, flushing upwards from chest to brow. Made euphoric by my power and their fear, I moved towards them, brandishing my sex at them, and Rowan snorted with laughter as his friends rose hastily to their feet, stammering and blushing and stumbling backwards, breaking up the circle, blurting out excuses, urgent matters they had to attend to, things they’d just remembered now, important reasons for which they had to get home lickety-split.

It’s a gesture you see in thousands of Japanese photographs, a gesture that’s become banal in nightclubs in Tokyo’s Shinjuku
neighbourhood. The stripper walks up to the edge of the stage, her body ferociously protected and contained by her black and strass costume (fishnet stockings, basque, stiletto heels). The clients swarm up to her and, using her long varnished fingernails, she parts the lips of her vagina—Yes, dear children, this is where you come from. As incredible as it may seem, each and every one of you entered the world through here. Araki claims the first thing he did when his mother gave birth to him was to turn around and photograph her cunt. His own beloved wife had no children; she died young of uterine cancer. After her death he began taking pictures of nude women—thousands of them, some prostitutes, others not, but virtually all of them young, with vapid smiles on their faces. Again and again he zoomed in on their cunts. Seen by Araki, flowers, too, become vaginas, their petals labia majora and minora, their pistils clitorises. He captures them in close-up—’because, quite simply,’ he says, ‘I love vaginas. I wish my eyes could travel inside the womb. In spirit I keep getting closer and closer.’ Yes—if men have drawn and filmed and painted and photographed the female body from time immemorial, if they’ve devoted so much time and energy to scrutinising, imagining, projecting, fantasising, veiling, unveiling, hiding, revealing, reworking, decorating and banishing it, it’s because everything revolves around
that,
the vortex both boys and girls burst out of, the opening that bespeaks…not castration, as Freud stupidly claimed, but rather the void that precedes and follows being.

Precious few women, on the other hand, have painted or photographed male genitals, despite their reputation for being so much more visible! Even I who specialise in the invisible world of heat—night scenes, the hidden face of reality—even I who have always been insatiably curious about the wonders men carry around down there, so different from each other in shape and colour, smell and size—even I, who love to pay the most attentive homage to those
wonders with my hands, eyes, lips, and tongue—even I, who relish every micro-stage of undressing a man, figuring out what sort of trousers he’s wearing and how they open, undoing the button or the hook or both, feeling his member’s soft hardness already beginning to swell, trying to guess which direction it’s pointing, undoing the fly and slipping my hand through the opening, still outside of the underpants for the time being, that’s one of my favourite stages—pressing my hand, cheeks, and nose into his crotch, feeling him harden against my face, finally slipping one hand behind the elastic waistband or through the opening of his underpants, sometimes gently removing with my finger or tongue the single pearly drop that oozes from the tip, then circling the stiffened organ itself with my warm and avid hand—even I don’t photograph these things I so adore.