Infrared (25 page)

‘Better. A little better, these past few days.’

‘What does “a little better” mean?’

‘Well, I’m not about to go schlepping through the Afghan mountains with a sixty-pound back pack, but I do manage to get out of bed now and then. So I’m making progress. How about you? Oh… my darling Rena…are you crying?’

Absurdly, Rena nods.

‘So you’re having a rough time? As rough as you feared?’

She nods again, squeaking out a yes between sobs.

‘Dear heart. Come on, now, take a few deep breaths the way I taught you…’

‘Thanks, Kerstin.’

‘What about Aziz?’

‘That’s part of it. I haven’t heard from him for two days.’

‘The magazine’s probably making him work around the clock, don’t you think? Because of the events?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t worry, dear one. It’s just a bad patch, you’ll see. You’ll pull through. Everything will turn out all right.’

Car tyres crunch on gravel—Gaia is back.

Rena comes out of her room. ‘So what do you guys feel like doing?’

As traumatised by her outburst as if he were a little boy and she his mother, Simon answers in a low voice that he plans to spend the day here. She and Ingrid are welcome to go sightseeing wherever they want.

‘No problem,’ says Rena.

‘No, Dad,’ Ingrid protests. ‘I’ll stay here with you. It’s a good idea to rest up a bit. We’ve been running around so much these past few days.’

‘No problem,’ says Rena.

Fine. So they’ll see neither Volterra nor San Gimignano; they’ll go nowhere. What difference does it make?

Gaia’s cheerful voice wafts up to them from downstairs: ‘Tutto
bene?’

‘Si, si. Molto bene!’
Rena replies.

And the day goes by.

Rena settles down with a book beneath the open dormer windows of her bedroom. As the afternoon sun crosses the sky, snatches of the couple’s gentle madness come floating up to her ears.

‘We haven’t had the time to write a single postcard. If we don’t do it now, we’ll get to Montreal before they do.’

‘Good idea. Where did you put them?’

‘I thought you had them. Wait a minute, I’ll check…Our bags need repacking anyway…’

‘Where should we sit? Cold in the shade, hot in the sun…’

‘Forgot my hat.’

‘Shall I fetch it?’

‘No, no, let’s sit in the shade.’

‘Which ones do you want?…Okay, I’ll take the others.’

‘So where should we start?’

‘Let’s make a list.’

‘The children, of course…and the grandchildren.’

‘But it’s the same address. No point in wasting stamps.’

‘Just as you like…’

‘Deborah…No, I’ll do hers later.’

‘My stomach’s growling.’

‘Hey, I’m getting hungry, too.’

‘Maybe we could ask Gaia to make us a snack and bring it out here.’

‘Sure. She could set up another table, it shouldn’t be a problem.’

‘Wait, I’ll ask…What a talker that woman is! She’s coming, though.’

‘So you write to David, okay?’

‘No, go ahead, you do it. Here, take Michelangelo’s
David.
The complete view, eh? Not the close-up of his thingamajig. Ha ha!’

‘Know his address?’

‘Not off the top of my head.’

‘Too bad. We’ll have to give him the card when we get back.’

‘And Whosit’s Campanile—should we send that to Freda?’

‘Sure thing. I wonder how she’s doing…Hope her medicine has kicked in by now.’

‘Speaking of which…what about Marcy’s operation?’

‘You’re right, it was scheduled for last week. We should have given her a call.’

‘Oh, she knows it’s not easy to telephone from overseas…’

‘Aren’t those hills just beautiful?’

‘Mm-hmm! The foliage back home must be looking great, too.’

‘Should I take a picture?’

‘Why not?’

‘Where’s the camera?’

‘Upstairs in the red bag.’

‘I’ll get it—tell the sun not to move!’

‘Could you bring a sweater down for me, too?’

‘Are you cold?’

‘Just a little.’

‘Maybe we should go inside.’

‘Okay. I’ll bring the tray.’

‘Careful of that step!’

‘Oops! Just in time!’

…They love each other.

Where is Aziz?

Grabbing her Canon, Rena joins Gaia outside in the garden and starts taking photos. She photographs everything she likes, and she likes everything. One photo after another: Gaia herself—a marvellous woman, radiant despite mourning and solitude. Her hazel trees and fig trees, her vegetable garden, her autumn flowers. All in black in white. An orgy of greys.

Gaia talks and talks, smiling, seeming to understand her.

She’d understand, Rena says inwardly to Subra, if I could tell her, if I could make it clear to her, if my Italian were better than it is, I’m sure Gaia would understand that
the words escaped me.
I didn’t mean to say them.
The
word, rather, a single word, the word Sylvie, the name Sylvie, such a lovely name, meaning forest or glade… ‘What?’ my mother said. ‘What are you talking about? Sylvie wasn’t with you in London!’ And my silence then my silence then my silence then…I’m sure Gaia would believe me if I told her I didn’t do it on purpose; the word came out all by itself. Three months after the trip to London, I was chattering about flea markets with my mother who adored flea markets, I was telling her about the Portobello Market and how much fun Sylvie and I had had trying on vintage dresses there…’What?’ Silence. ‘Sorry, no, of course she wasn’t there…’ Cringing, blushing, stammering…I saw the dawning of catastrophe in Ms Lisa Heyward’s eyes. I didn’t mean to, I swear. I didn’t do it on purpose, it was a simple mistake, not a Freudian slip, just a mistake, people do make plain ordinary mistakes sometimes, don’t they, Gaia? I’m the one who…it’s my fault that…no way of unsaying it, taking it back…undoing the damage…The word
Sylvie
irreparably destroyed…

It’s six o’clock. Sweetly, with a sharp, burning sweetness, dusk arrives. Rena has taken a hundred photos. Simon and Ingrid get up from their nap. All they need to do now is invent an evening for this day…

‘I don’t want you to cook for us again,’ Rena tells Gaia. ‘We’ll find ourselves a restaurant in town.’

‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to make dinner for you tonight, I’m having friends over.’

‘Ah.
Benissimo.’

She’s having friends over, thinks Rena. Maybe that’s how the whole thing all started: waking up this morning, Simon must have sensed this was a house in which it was possible to entertain.

As Rena heads for the staircase, Gaia turns on the TV to catch the evening news. ‘Dio
mio,
look!’ she exclaims suddenly. ‘It’s about your country.
La Francia.’

Rena covers the six yards between the staircase and the TV set in zero seconds.

Scenes of chaos. A doorway, with choking men and billows of smoke pouring out of it. Thunderstruck, Rena recognises the little mosque—part of the same building as the Turkish baths she visited with Aicha. From inside the baths, she recalls, the women could hear the men praying; other days of the week it was no doubt the other way around. She recognises the men, too. Not the individuals but the type. Modest, humble. Not young. Not proud. Bruised and battered by life. All-enduring. ‘What’s going on?’ she asks Gaia, because the Italian anchorman is speaking much too fast for her to understand.

Even when Gaia repeats what he’s saying at a slower speed she doesn’t understand it, and even if Gaia were to translate it into French or English she wouldn’t understand it, because what he is saying is incomprehensible. The police, it would seem, tossed, it would seem,
a tear bomb, it would seem, into the mosque, it would seem, during the evening prayer service. The two women sit there and watch the coughing, weeping, spitting men pour out of the building. Then the camera jumps to another scene—crowds of young men shouting and throwing stones—’It looks like the Intifada!’ says Gaia (and Rena is reminded of an elderly Jewish couple she met in Haifa, Argentine-born but living in Israel since the 1950s, shocked to hear she planned to visit the Palestinian Territories as well, asking her if she took her Canadian friends to visit Sarcelles when they came to Paris; Rena had been disconcerted by the comparison—quite an admission, when you thought about it)…Violent clashes between the young men and the riot police, cars burning, women’s faces convulsed with rage, more cars burning, and she realises Aziz must be on the spot. Of course he’s there, either in the middle of the crowd or right next to it, covering the event for
On the Fringe,
maybe if she looks at the TV screen hard enough she’ll catch sight of him and be able to say to Gaia, Look, that’s my husband—the one over there, see? Do you see the one I mean? The tall thin young Arab with the high cheekbones. Yes, him, him! Isn’t he just so beautiful you could weep? That’s him, I swear! We’ve been working together for two years and living together since last summer. He’s a real hero…He learned early on how to turn sadness into energy and bitterness into creativity. A poor student in grade school, he got turned around by a wonderful teacher in eighth grade and made it through to his baccalaureate, and it didn’t take long after that for the fast-talker to turn into a reporter. Today he’s one of France’s few bicultural journalists, capable of bridging the gap between the nervous, touchy, overcautious old-stock population of France’s city centres and the boiling cauldron of the suburbs with their hundred nationalities, seventy languages, fifteen religions and two million problems…True, he’s younger than I am, indeed closer to my sons’ ages than to mine (it wasn’t easy for them to accept
this new stepfather), but all is well now, Gaia, I can hardly believe my luck…

Rena says none of these things because the cameras have long since moved away from the projects, impatient to highlight other suppurating sores of the planet—interspersed, naturally, with advertisements. When she goes upstairs to dress for dinner, she can hear Simon and Ingrid getting ready in their room.

The storm will have blown over by tomorrow, Subra tells her, and you’ll all get off to a new start. You’ll be on the last leg of your journey.

Right, Rena says. Cool it.

In the restaurant, they alternate between clumsy attempts at conversation, embarrassed silences and contrite smiles.

Early to bed.

Vast hiatus between lights out and sleep.

France is in ruins
—
a landscape like Baghdad or Mogadishu
—
heaps of rubble, wandering shadows
—
scenes of unspeakable horror…Right afterwards, I’m supposed to give birth to a baby
—
apparently a boy. His mother(??) gave him to me and asked me to do this as a favour to her. The delivery itself is swift and easy
—
but the child comes out motionless and caked in fat, looking like a lump of duck conserve
—
not only that, but it’s in two pieces. Horrified at having given birth to a stillborn baby, I call Alioune. He joins me…‘No,’ he says, picking up the larger of the two pieces and gently unfolding it. ‘No, look. The baby’s alive, it’s magnificent!’ I take the tiny boy in my arms. He’s beautiful indeed. He smiles up at me, staring straight into my eyes…Then I have to run and find the mother, to tell her that her baby is born and that everything went fine
—
it was an incredibly easy delivery, I didn’t suffer at all
—
ah!
—
compared to the birth of my own children! Alioune and I are amazed at the baby’s innate capacity to smile. We’re so happy…Then, just as we’re preparing to leave, I remember that the country is war torn…

No problem interpreting France as a country at war—the images I saw last night more than suffice. But the baby. Who is that baby? Myself? ‘Apparently a boy.’ Half dead. The dream doesn’t say what happens to the other half, the part no one bothers to unfold or take in their arms, the part no one smiles at.
It’s there, too, though.
I mean, we can’t just toss it onto the garbage heap. Why does the mother take no interest in it?

Who is that mother? asks Subra.

Parting the bedroom curtains, Rena sees that Sunday’s limpid brilliance has given way to a chilly, steel-grey Monday—as if the Creator himself were reluctant to head back to work after His day of rest. A thick fog has invaded Chianti, narrowing the universe, effacing
the distant hills and blurring even the contours of the garden. Only nearby objects are visible, and even they look dull and lustreless.

It’s only eight o’clock but Gaia has told them she needs to lock up the house by nine-thirty at the latest. How will they ever manage to extricate themselves in time?

Determined not to go stir-crazy waiting for Simon and Ingrid, Rena flips through the beautiful edition of
The Divine Comedy
in Gaia’s library, admiring Gustave Doré’s illustrations, and stumbles on a passage about bodies metamorphosing…

The two heads were by now to one comprest, When there before our eyes two forms begin To mix in one where neither could be traced. Two arms were made where the four bands had been; The belly and chest and with the legs the thighs Became such members as were never seen…

Hard to believe this passage was written seven centuries before movie cameras were invented, Rena says to herself. You’d think it was describing special effects for the next
Harry Potter
film.

This house is so lovely…

Still no sign of Simon and Ingrid. Maybe when they come down she’ll tell them to take the Megane and continue the trip without her; she’s decided to stay here. She wants to live with Gaia until the end of her days, absorbing her wisdom, making fruit jam, drying flowers, planting vegetables in the earth…

Her mobile rings. It’s Schroeder.

‘Patrice! How are you?’

‘I’m not calling to make small talk, Rena.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘I don’t know if you’ve been keeping abreast of…’