Infrared (16 page)

For Fabrice I regret it—I’m sure he would have given his consent. My beloved Haitian husband complied with all my wishes. I was a few weeks shy of nineteen when we married. I’d just arrived in Paris with a scholarship to pursue my studies in photography, and turned my back on the hip neighbourhoods, like Saint-Germain-des-Prés or the Marais, in favour of the city’s northern and eastern edges, where immigrants tend to gravitate because the rents are lower. Fabrice and I were both living in Montreuil when we met at the flea market there. Entranced by the sight of his long fingers on the red Moroccan leather case he’d just purchased for his manuscripts, and with the white pants he was wearing in mid-winter, I entered his bed that same afternoon. He read his poems out loud to me and allowed me to photograph him. That was in December 1978; I became his wife in January; in February we celebrated my naturalisation with a bottle of Asti Spumante; and in April my husband was diagnosed with acute kidney failure. Fabrice and I didn’t have time to disappoint each other.

Oh, the abysmal anguish of that diagnosis. ‘Come off it, doctor.
What are you talking about? I’ve just married the most wonderful man in the world and you’re telling me he’s going to
die?
Come on. You can’t be serious.’ I remember that nephrologist very clearly. His name was Dujardin and he had a salt-and-pepper beard. One day he came in to check the fistula he’d created in Fabrice’s left arm for dialysis. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked the patient. ‘You’re looking a bit pale’—and Fabrice burst out laughing because he was just as black as usual.

Another day, mad with fear, I got down on my knees in Dr Dujar-din’s office, feverishly begging him to allow me to give Fabrice one of my kidneys (we had the same blood type, a rare one)—but the answer was no. The law stipulated that donors had to be either newly dead, the patient’s blood relatives, or both. ‘Besides,’ Dr Dujardin said, walking me to the door of his office with an arm nonchalantly thrown around my shoulders, ‘there’s no way I’m going to carve up such a lovely body. Out of the question.’

I managed to smile back at him, but not too much, just enough so that he’d allow me to take photos of Fabrice anywhere in the hospital including the dialysis centre, and to declare his room off-limits to the nurses during my visits. The imminence of death seemed to make Fabrice’s whole body as swollen and hypersensitive as his sex. I came to see him every day but only dared slip into bed with him on the days midway between his sessions with ‘The Machine’. Then, no longer exhausted by the previous session and not yet exhausted by the impurities accumulated in his blood, he had energy and could stay inside me for hours on end, hard and happy. We’d fuck calmly, casually, talking and teasing each other even as we fucked; now and then our passion would suddenly burst into flames, and when that happened he’d give himself up to me, tossing his head back and saying, ‘Yes, yes, fuck me, my love, fuck me, baby’ the way a woman might say to a man—‘Yes my love, take me, take me’—and, acutely
aware that the illness was destroying his beauty (his hair was greying by the day and he was putting on weight), I photographed him a few times like that—naked and totally abandoned beneath me, yes, while he was still inside of me and I was fucking him so to speak with his own cock, I’d get him in the viewfinder and press the shutter again and again, moved to tears by Fabrice’s wild beauty when he came. ‘More, my love,’ he’d say, ‘more, more, take me, yes, fuck me, give me your syrup…’ Looking at him through the viewfinder I’d see him as a child, an adolescent, a youth, an old man, I was insanely in love with this poet and I was about to lose him, and so, even as I fucked him, I took pictures of him in that position of utter abandonment, his head tossed back, his neck offered up to me and his lips moving, murmuring—until the explosion of light made me release the camera, arch up, then collapse, laughing and weeping myself to sleep upon his chest.

My, my, says Subra. Are you sure all that happened in the
hospital?

Well, it might have been at our place, between hospitalisations. But what I wanted to say was, why would I have taken photos of his cock? The upright peckers immortalised with maniacal symmetry by Mapplethorpe leave me cold. Body parts in general bore me, and the only time I ever made pornographic photos, with Yasu my Japanese ‘twin’ (polaroids of our organs in close-up, intensely involved in this or that), I threw them out afterwards because they’d lost their meaning. What I care about are stories. Faces always tell stories, bodies sometimes do, body parts, rarely. Flashing—an exhibitionist who gets off on the shock in a girl’s eyes when he suddenly, unexpectedly shows her his penis—is the exact equivalent of peep-shows, where men pay to spend a few seconds watching flesh in movement…Furtive, transgressive, breathtaking bits of image, fragmentary as hallucinations—infra-meaning, infra-syntax, flash, flash, flash! Nothing could be more at odds with my own æsthetics. My
gaze insists on moving slowly and deeply, so I never use flash. I put a filter over my light source so it won’t dazzle or surprise my subject. I try to make the moment vibrate to suggest duration.

My credo:
photograph only what I can love.
Turn my gaze into that love, always and only. Of all my photography projects, the one I’m proudest of is a series of sleeping nudes called
N(o)us:
bodies of all ages, colours and sexes, obese and scrawny, smooth and wrinkly, hairless and hirsute, spotted with tattoos, birthmarks and scars, dreaming and breathing, defenceless, vulnerable, mortal, curled up in the lovely abandonment of slumber…Each and every one of them is beautiful.

Fabrice and I conceived Toussaint during one of those, shall we say, hospitable afternoons. Six weeks into the pregnancy, I started bringing in ultrasound pictures of our baby, and Fabrice pretended to confuse my amniotic liquid with a revealing bath. ‘You’re right, it’s the same thing,’ I told him. Yes, the same thrill of surprise when you see a form coalescing out of nowhere—
here it comes.
This curve, this spectrum of greys, these increasingly ramified, complex features—yes here it comes, my love, oh look, here it comes, here it is…Something is arriving, someone is here—alive, its tiny heart beating! I had the most incandescent orgasms of my life during that pregnancy. Fabrice died a few weeks before our baby was born. He’d received the kidney of a young girl who’d died in a car accident but his body had rejected the transplant. Now that body, every square centimetre of which I once licked and stroked and kissed and actively worshipped, is buried somewhere in the Cité Soleil neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, I’m not even sure where…

Really? Subra asks, feigning surprise. You don’t know where your first husband is buried?

Okay, okay, I know. He’s in Montreuil cemetery.

Time to get up, for Christ’s sake.

It’s nearly eleven o’clock already. The hotel proprietor is conveying his annoyance by clattering the cups and saucers as loudly as he can—Enough, already! Do these Canadese think they can just sit around all day, the way they do back at home in their wigwams?

‘We thought it would be a good idea to start by going for a nice walk in a park,’ Ingrid says, helping Simon to his feet. ‘Get some exercise to perk us up a bit. Right, Dad? We found some gardens on the map, very close by.’

They set out, but the park isn’t as close by as it looks (the map doesn’t show all the streets). Their nerves are rapidly frayed by the incessant, invasive noise of impatient cars revving their motors and honking their horns in the narrow streets. Simon has become hypersensitive to traffic noise since the City of Westmount decided to run an expressway right under the windows of their home. Remembering this, Rena begins to suffer from what she imagines to be his discomfort, and also from Ingrid’s anxiety about how the noise must be bothering him; their misery compounding her own, in a state of acute distress within minutes. At the same time, she’s experiencing a strange epiphany. Thanks to the birdcalls, the gradually evaporating haze, and the greenery on ochre walls, she finds herself magically lifted out of this scene and wafted back to a solitary walk she took a dozen years ago in Mumbai’s Hanging Gardens.

She’d come to the city to work with women in the red-light district, but within a day or two she’d found herself overwhelmed by their sheer number—there were thousands of them, living in tiny rooms stacked like beehive cells in three- and four-storey buildings—street after street, an entire neighbourhood run by the mafia. ‘Oh, there are worse places than this,’ smiled Arunha, the young woman she eventually chose to photograph. ‘Here, at least, we can go out
in the morning, walk around, chat together, do a bit of shopping…In other neighbourhoods there are ten-year-old girls locked up in cages.’ After one of these conversations, Rena had gone back to her hotel feeling suicidal. The next day, rising early, she’d walked all the way up Malabar Hill to the Hanging Gardens and been revived by their beauty. And today, even as she moves with excruciating slowness through the streets of Florence, she is unexpectedly soothed by the memory of Indian greenery and Indian haze, the mingled scent of smoke, musk and dung that hangs in the air over Indian cities.

You’ll survive, Subra whispers. Tomorrow you’ll rent a car and go speeding through the hills of Tuscany, the days will pass, they’re already passing, this trip will end, you’ll return to Paris, recover your apartment, your lover and your job, pick up where you left off… Don’t worry. Every step you take in Florence is a step towards Aziz’s arms.

When they reach the Via P.A. Micheli at last, it turns out that the Semplici gardens, though clearly indicated on the map, belong to the university and are not open to the public.

Through an archway, Rena glimpses flowerbeds and trimmed hedges. ‘Let’s give it a try,’ she says.

Red light? Go for it! Subra teases her. Barrier? Plough right through.

A rigid little guard in uniform rushes up to them at once: it’s obvious that no one in their trio belongs to either the faculty or the student body. ‘May I help you?’ the man queries aggressively in Italian.

With an apologetic smile, Rena explains that her parents are exhausted. Would it be all right if they rested for a moment on a bench?

Her smile is anything but hypocritical—to her mind, elderly
people should be allowed to rest on benches the world over, and she hopes to assist the little guard in acknowledging this simple human fact. He hesitates. On the one hand, he, too, has elderly parents; on the other, he yearns to demonstrate his power. Taking advantage of his momentary paralysis, as with the young Lubavitch from Outrem-ont those many years ago, Rena catches his gaze and hangs on to it. A good three seconds elapse.

Hmm. Losing your touch! Subra says. What will become of you a few years down the track? Once wrinkles, bags and dark circles have done permanent damage to your lovely gaze, and the seduction techniques you’ve been polishing for decades no longer suffice to get you what you want, what you’re so utterly accustomed to obtaining…

‘No photos,’ the man mutters at last, staring pointedly at the Canon between Rena’s breasts.

Be my guest, she thinks. Go ahead and stare at the nipples pointing through my black T-shirt, if it makes you happy. Get an eyeful; both of us are mortal anyway.

Not much to see, if the truth be told, Subra teases her. Not exactly Fellini material…

Seated on a bench surrounded by idyllic Florentine beauty, Ingrid and Simon decide that now is a good time to fill Rena in on the details of their recent visit to Holland—the ageing, illnesses and deaths of Ingrid’s siblings, the new jobs, children and divorces of her nieces and nephews…Rena nods absently, her eyes following the students and professors as they wend their way across the campus grounds.

You hate universities, don’t you, Daddy? Because of that Ph.D. you never finished. The thesis on
The Origins of Consciousness,
which weighed on all our lives for ten long years. You tried so hard… When reality resisted, you struck out…mutilated…and turned away, stunned by your failure. Here in Florence—yes, such a thing truly
can exist—j
oia della sapienza!
Look how beautiful the buildings are, amidst sunlit greenery and flowers. Look at the warmth of their colours—ochre, yellow, beige, brown, pale pink. Look how eagerly the students run up the staircases to attend their lectures in Philosophy, History, Mathematics, Philology, and Life Sciences…Never could you have found that sort of harmony and peace of mind in the grey, glacial city of Montreal, amidst the forbidding stone buildings of McGill…All so long ago now. All so terribly too late. Come, close your eyes, relax…The origins of consciousness can wait.

Right. So…maybe we could
er…do
something with the rest of the day? Fine, no problem, we can go on avoiding the Uffici, but… couldn’t we maybe take in…ah…(she checks the map)…the Archaeological Museum? They’re off.

All of a sudden Ingrid announces that she feels thirsty and wouldn’t mind stopping somewhere for a Coke.

No, thinks Rena. I will
not
scream with impatience. I will
not
rant and rave at this couple’s mind-boggling force of inertia. I will
not
protest at how they keep pitilessly plunging me into banality.

On the contrary, Subra puts in, you should take advantage of this rare opportunity to study banality at close range. The tiny stuffed kitten dangling from the key to the ladies’ toilet, for instance. Now,
there’s
an object that unquestionably plays a minor role in the history of humanity…But since the
signora
who runs the café felt it deserved to be attached to a key, it must hold meaning for her. Did she buy it herself or receive it as a gift? Did it remind her of a cat she loved when she was little, but that unfortunately got run over by a car or
savaged by a dog? You are
here,
Rena, and nowhere else. Why are you always convinced the important stuff is happening elsewhere?

Oh, poor, banal moment of my life—will no one ever sing your praises? Sitting on the toilet, Rena takes a few photos of the ridiculous stuffed kitten. That moment fades and vanishes, and the next one comes into being. It’s Ingrid’s turn to pee while Simon and Rena wait for her outside, leaning against the wall, side by side.