Infrared (21 page)

But her father goes on obsessively studying the maps.

Having dropped off the couple next to a sign pointing to the artist’s birthplace, she drives on alone to the car park. When she catches up with them, they’ve come to a halt in front of a tree.

‘What kind of tree do you think this is?’ asks Ingrid, turning to her.

‘It’s a fig tree,’ she says peremptorily, hoping to cut off idle speculations.

‘Are you sure?’ asks Simon.

‘Sure I’m sure. Look—the leaves have five fingers, like an open hand. And here’s another way of checking—crush a leaf and smell it; the scent is unmistakable.’

Exquisite memories of fig trees from the past go wafting through her mind. The heady, honeyed fragrance of the dried fig leaf Aziz handed her in the inner garden of Paris’s Great Mosque, an hour after making real love to her for the first time. Walking down a fig tree-lined path as a dramatic harvest moon rose over the Black Sea and her Bulgarian lover’s hand stroked the small of her back, then slipped inside her shorts and caressed her intimate flesh with such
musical precision that she started to come, amazed to be able to come and walk at the same time. Toussaint and Thierno climbing into a fig tree and stuffing themselves with its fruit, one November weekend in Syracuse…

‘I’m not so sure,’ her father says. ‘Where are the figs?’

‘It’s not the right time of year,’ says Rena.

‘Yes, it is,’ he objects. (Touché!) ‘Maybe Jesus struck it down in a fit of rage,’ he goes on. ‘You know, there’s that strange passage in
Saint Matthew
where…’

‘Yes, I know,’ she says, cutting him off. ‘I know.’ What else? Fig tree, fig tree…(When did this hateful rivalry between them begin?) ‘In Italian,’ she says, ‘the equivalent of “I don’t give a damn” is
“Non me ne importa un fico”.’

‘Really?’ says Ingrid, to say something.

‘Yes. The
fico
is a symbol of the vagina—the very epitome of worthlessness, as everyone knows.’

Ingrid blushes and turns away.

‘And that’s not all,’ Rena insists, recalling a reportage she did long ago in the favelas of Rio. ‘In Brazil, instead of giving people the finger, you give them
the fica.’

‘What’s that?’ her father asks.

‘Uh…’ she says. Oddly enough, she can’t remember. Do they hold up an open hand, its five fingers symbolising the fig leaf? No, she doesn’t think so…Hm. ‘It’ll come back to me.’

As they turn their backs on the tree at last, she brings the crushed leaf to her nostrils.

It smells of nothingness.

Two white-washed rooms, touchingly stark and spare.

Here, she thinks. Born here. Babe-in-arms here. First gaze on life here, the master of the gaze.

Ostensibly in homage to Leonardo, the first room is plastered with hideous paintings by a contemporary artist. Rena and Ingrid take one look at them, shrug and move on. The second room is filled with reproductions of the master’s anatomical drawings. Studies based on corpses, the surface stunningly rendered thanks to the artist’s familiarity with the depths. Bones, muscles, tendons, arteries—the intricate, secret machinery of the human body…

An hour later, they go back to join Simon, who has remained in the first room all this time, cursing the modern paintings. ‘It’s outrageous,’ he says, as the guard announces closing time. ‘I felt like slashing them!’

Yup, says Subra. That’s Zeus’s big problem. With great lightning bolts and deafening rolls of thunder, he has managed to destroy—not the abhorred paintings, but his own visit to Leonardo’s birthplace.

‘Maybe it’s a bit late to drive all the way to Pisa?’ says Simon, his nose on the map.

‘It sure is,’ Rena agrees. ‘If we want to reach our B & B in Impruneta before nightfall.’

‘Well, let’s at least take the scenic route back, then. Through Pistoia.’

But an automobile race prevents them. Racing cars go zooming past them on the steep, narrow, twisting roads: heart attack after heart attack. Some villages are completely closed to traffic.

‘Maybe we could take this alternate route?’ Simon suggests.

But the roads grow narrower at every turn, and they end up in a farmyard.

Oh, Virgil! Rena thinks, sighing in exasperation. Can’t you guide me better than this?

Suddenly the
fica
gesture comes back to her. You slip your thumb between your second and third fingers, then scornfully wave your fist in the air. But the moment to demonstrate it is past.

Well, they can drop the Pistoia idea, too, and return the way they came.

At six p.m. they find themselves back on the Florence ring road, parched, sweating and exhausted. Dazzled by the million glancing reflections of the setting sun on the chrome and glass of oncoming traffic, Rena now has a splitting headache. Simon sees an exit coming up and advises her to take it—’Yes! Here, right here! Quick!’—but it’s a mistake, and they find themselves in a suburb called Scandicci. Braking angrily, Rena double-parks and goes storming into a shoe store to ask for directions. All the salespeople are busy and there’s a long queue of customers at the cash register.

She studies the features of every person in the store. These people are here because they want to be—normally, naturally, as part of their daily lives. I, on the other hand, am just passing through. My presence here is as arbitrary as it was in that farmyard an hour ago, or in the Kodak shop the other day, or on Earth…

Her mobile rings.

‘Rena, where are you?’

‘In a shoe store in…uh…Scandicci.’

‘I don’t believe it. What the fuck…? My city’s going up in smoke, I need you more than I’ve ever needed you before, and you’re trying on Italian shoes?’

‘I’ll explain later, Aziz. I really will. Just at the moment I’m double-parked and my folks are about to pass out from dehydration. To each his emergency.’

Aziz hangs up without another word.

‘Per andare all’Impruneta, per favore…
?’

Salespeople and customers have a vast array of opinions on the subject.

Sometimes you wish you could just press stop, then fast-forward to a more bearable moment of the video of your existence. Yes, let’s do that. Let’s forget all about the starting and stopping, the backing up and turning around, the tension and hesitation, the sighs and silences, the petrol station restrooms, the overflowing tampons, the language barrier, the frustrating fruitless phone calls, let’s forget about the groping the misery the excuses the bad smells the sordid bedrooms the sad eyes of child prostitutes in Thailand the endless heaps of garbage along the roads north of Dakar the despicable behaviour of the customs officials in Algiers who, to welcome Aziz on his first visit to his parents’ native land (the year was 1993, he’d just turned eighteen), opened his suitcase, dumped his carefully folded clothes on the floor and told him to pick them up, the homeless kids in Durban who sniff glue and sleep in highway tunnels at night, the chaos of our lives whose stories we try to tell coherently so they’ll seem to fit into some sort of pattern, make some sort of sense, let’s just forget it, all of it, as we go along…

As they accept second helpings of her delicious
zucchini frittati,
Gaia (the gracious, sexagenarian owner of the B & B they eventually did manage to find) tells them first about her husband who committed suicide, then about her architect lover who designed this house, built it with his own hands, and died of cancer three short months after its completion.

How do people go on? How do they manage? How does Gaia get through the day? She chops up zucchini and onions, fries them golden, beats a few eggs, stirs in heavy cream, parmesan cheese, thyme and a little salt (not too much because the parmesan is already salty), pours the mixture into a buttered pan and slips it into the oven.
Then she sets the table, embellishes it with a vase of hand-picked flowers, lights a candle and opens a bottle of wine. She does not spend her days screaming My love my love where are you and how am I supposed to go on living without you, sixty-six years old but still beautiful still alive and sensuous and palpitating with desire?

A bit like Kerstin Matheron, Subra puts in.

You’re right, Rena agrees. Kerstin found herself similarly at a loss after her husband Edmond’s death. She told me about it one evening as I was making prints in my darkroom. She finds it easier to confide in me when she thinks my mind is otherwise occupied and in fact I have no trouble listening to her as I work; the two activities take place in different parts of my brain. ‘I think I must envy you a bit,’ she said to me that night with a little laugh. ‘All your sexual adventures…I haven’t made love in ages…almost seven years.’ ‘Because of Edmond’s illness?’ I asked. ‘Not only that. Not only that. What happened was…He sort of…ah…well, you see…a few years before his illness, he sort of left me, actually. He fell head over heels in love with one of his patients, a poetess named Alix. She was only twenty-nine at the time, whereas he was pushing sixty. Alix had everything. She was brilliant, beautiful—and so very
young.
Edmond told me he was thrilled by the smoothness and firmness of her skin. And how could Alix be anything but flattered by the attentions of a distinguished, cultivated doctor like my husband? He didn’t move out, but he stopped touching me and my life sort of imploded. As long as he had loved me, I’d sort of muddled through the years thinking, well, so far so good—but now, looking in the mirror, I saw, really
saw
for the first time, the wrinkles on my face and the spots on my hands, the flabbiness of the flesh on my upper arms, the serious beginnings of a double chin…’ ‘Stop it, Kerstin! Stop it right this minute. I refuse to hear my best friend slandered like that.’

‘Oh, Rena…All of a sudden I couldn’t stand being my body.
Things were bad that year. Then they got worse. Edmond started complaining about fatigue. He went in for tests and they found he had an extremely rare form of blood cancer. The illness evolved slowly but cruelly, attacking not only his body but his mind. Destroying his beauty, his fine intelligence, his humour, his personality. One day—he’d been hospitalised by this time and was already unable to walk—I ran into Alix at his bedside and discovered she was a lovely person. Of course I’d made her out to be a scheming conniving witch, but that’s because I was jealous. So as the weeks went by we started getting together to comfort each other. God knows we needed it: before our very eyes, the man we both loved was turning into an incontinent, deranged, obstreperous monster. He refused to see anyone but the two of us. He was ashamed…He’d been so proud of his looks, and now they were gone for good…It was a shock, Rena, to go to the hospital and find our Edmond surrounded by a bunch of obscene, paranoid, loudly abusive old men…Oh, we’d tell ourselves, but deep down he’s not like the others. With him it’s only temporary; he’ll soon be his old self again—but we knew the other visitors were thinking the same thing about
their
men. They, too, had once been young and debonair, maybe even incomparable lovers…Every time our paths crossed in the hospital corridor, Alix and I hugged each other desperately, not wanting to let go because we knew the only place to go from here was down. We wanted time to stop. Then it was the other way around—we wanted it to speed up. We longed for the end of this slow, sadistic, relentless destruction of the man we both loved.

The night before Edmond died, I spent four hours at his bedside, holding and kissing his hands. He had such beautiful hands, Rena, I’d been in love with them for thirty-five years and they’d hardly changed, they were as slim and strong as ever. Strangely enough, at that moment, I felt
the rightness of it all.’

Long silence. I was flooding my prints with water, holding them up to the light, setting aside the ones I liked. ‘I hope you know how beautiful you are, Kerstin,’ I murmured at last. ‘Thanks. Oh, I was pretty pretty once…It doesn’t matter anymore.’ ‘Don’t say that. You are truly, right now, with no reservations or qualifications whatsoever, an incredibly beautiful woman.’

I meant it. But not for a second did I imagine the effect my words would have on Kerstin Matheron…

Gaia keeps refilling their wine glasses and chattering up a storm. Rena listens and nods, weak with relief not to have to make a single decision until the next day.

Simon and Ingrid retire early—annoyed at being excluded from the conversation in Italian, or dead tired, or both. As she helps Gaia do the washing-up, Rena strives to preserve her hostess’s illusion that she understands at least half of what she’s saying.

Having guessed that Ingrid is not her mother, Gaia asks the dreaded question in a gentle voice,
‘Dov’è la sua vera madre?’

It knocks the wind out of her. Unable to form a phrase in Italian, she answers simply,
‘Partita.’

Not bad, crows Subra. It suits Ms Lisa Heyward to be described as a piece of music.

More than half asleep herself, Rena wishes her hostess goodnight and goes up an elegant wooden staircase that comes out across from the bathroom on the second floor. The two bedrooms are on either side of the landing and, because of this architectural choice made by Gaia’s dead lover—because of her fatigue, and the stress of the trip, and her boss’s anger, and the two electrocuted kids, and Aziz’s strange new aggressiveness, but especially because of the bathroom being directly across from the staircase, with one bedroom to the right and another to the left—the scene bursts into her brain.

It was summertime, the month of June. Rowan’s school had finished a week before mine and he’d returned to Montreal. He was back in his old room again just as if nothing had changed, but I was ill at ease. I didn’t recognise my brother. It was like a science fiction movie—as if there were an inhuman soul living in his body and transforming it according to its needs. His height had increased by six inches in the course of the school year, the soft blond fuzz on his upper lip had turned dark, and his hair was cut very short…But it wasn’t only that; the changes weren’t only physical; there was a new jerkiness to his movements and his eyes no longer met mine. He made fun of me every chance he got, calling me tattle-tale, birdbrain, goody-goody.