Infrared (27 page)

‘Hard to compete with the postcards,’ she mutters sarcastically.

‘True.’

Rena finds it troubling to see the Canon in her father’s age-speckled hands. It’s as if he were holding one of her own limbs, a detached but living part of her body. After examining it with great care, he positions it, aims it, and presses the shutter. Once, twice…

‘Don’t you want to smile, Rena?’ asks Ingrid.

‘Not particularly. Do I have to?’

‘No,’ says Simon. ‘You’re fine just as you are. With your dark glasses, fedora hat and leather jacket, you look like a movie star incognito.’

‘Movie stars aren’t what they used to be,’ says Ingrid.

Rena shouts with laughter. Ingrid hesitates, then joins in.

You’re the exact opposite of Marilyn Monroe, teases Subra. She was happy only when looked at; and you, only when looking.

Their orders arrive, and Simon passes the camera back to her with a flourish. ‘Do you know who Canon cameras are named after?’ he asks.

‘Jimmy Canon, the sworn enemy of Bill Kodak and Bob Nikon? No, I have no idea.’

‘K-A-N-N-O-N,’ Simon spells out. ‘An exceeding strange Japanese bodhisattva.’

‘Why strange?’ queries Rena, stabbing a number of aqueous little shrimps with her fork and slipping them into her mouth.

‘Because the Japanese made a woman of her, whereas in India she was a man. And not just any man: Guanyin, the most popular bodhisattva of the Great Vehicle. I happened to see an article about it a while ago…’

‘Really?’ Rena says in surprise. So her father is still interested in Buddhism? ‘And what is Kannon’s specialty?’

‘Compassion. She’s the…hang on a sec, I jotted it down somewhere…’

Her surprise turning to stupefaction, Rena watches as her father riffles through his wallet and comes up with the appropriate scrap of paper in less than five minutes.

‘“She who listens to and receives the pain of whole world,”’ he reads aloud, ‘“and responds to it with one giant word of compassion that encompasses all in an ocean of infinite joy.”’

‘A bit like the Virgin of Divine Mercy?’ suggests Ingrid.

‘You don’t know how right you are,’ Simon nods. ‘Japanese Christians bow down before statues they call Maria Kannon. Isn’t that incredible? And Canon, the Japanese company, was named after
that very bodhisattva. You remind me of her.’

‘A goddess of compassion,’ Rena grumbles. ‘What next?’ Tears fill her eyes, fortunately concealed by her dark glasses.

‘Seriously. We went to your
Misteries
show last April…’

‘You did?’ She feels dizzy.

‘Do you think our daughter could have a show in Montreal without our going to see it? It made a big impression on us.’

‘Yes, it was interesting,’ Ingrid concedes, ‘although I keep hoping you’ll eventually choose a more—’

‘I found it admirable,’ Simon says, interrupting his wife. ‘Not just because you’d obviously put years of work into it, but because…to open up their private lives to you like that, to allow you to get so close to them, those men had to feel you really accepted them…Kannon, see what I mean? A strong show indeed,’ he concludes.

‘I would have seduced Bin Laden,’ says Rena, to lighten the atmosphere.

‘I’ll bet you would!’ Simon laughs.

‘I would have seduced the Pope.’

‘Rena!’ Ingrid says.

‘Sorry. Er…would you believe…the Great Rabbi of Jerusalem?’

A silence ensues, in the course of which Rena directs her full attention to making sure the little beasties of her
insalata di mare
stay on her fork.

As they’re having coffee a while later, Simon glances through the newspapers he purchased earlier. ‘Wow. Looks as if sparks are flying in France!’

‘Of course sparks are flying. What do you expect? Two kids get their brains fried and the government contents itself with saying they deserve it. I should hope sparks would fly!’

The clown she rebuffed earlier comes up to her.
‘Grazie mille, signora, per il vostro spettacolo,’
he says in a loud voice.
‘Era veramente
meraviglioso! Formidabile! Stupendo!’
So saying, he slips a fifty-centime piece into her palm.

‘You guys feel up to visiting the Museo Civico?’ she says, pocketing the coin.

‘Sure thing!’ Simon and Ingrid crow in unison.

What’s going on? wonders Rena. You’d think we loved each other or something.

White, nude, gigantic, marble hand pressed to marble brow, looking like a Rodin
Thinker
who swapped meditation for despair, the man on the museum’s ground floor stares transfixed at the source of his pain. No: the word pain being masculine in Italian, it’s not what he is enduring, it’s what he is.

I’m not saying it’s you, Daddy, I’m not saying it’s you.

In fact the statue reminds her of Gérard, a former prison inmate whom she had decided not to include in
Misteries,
after an afternoon spent talking with him in his twentieth-arrondissement squat.

His shame at living in such poor surroundings, his stilted conversation, his complete lack of emotion when he took his childhood photos out of an old shoe box to show them to me…Those should all have been warning signs, but somehow I didn’t pick up on them.

Tell me,
Subra says.

Gérard had been sentenced to—and done—ten years for the hard-porn films he’d produced and posted on the net in the mid-nineties. Because they were banned, those films are worth a mint today. He had hired the best lawyers in Paris to draw up a contract for him, and convinced a dozen young women to sign it.
I agree,
the contract said in substance,
to remain naked in front of a camera for two hours and let two men do whatever they want to me.
‘The films really got
interesting, Rena,’ Gérard told me, ‘when the girls changed their minds.’ He didn’t offer and I didn’t request details as to the reason for this reversal. With a firm contract, Gérard knew he was legally covered, so he paid no attention when the women begged him to call the whole thing off. Staring at the man’s handsome face just a few inches from my own, I realised I’d have to renounce taking his picture. Gérard is one of the few people I’ve been unable to photograph—that is, to love. He was beyond the pale.

Never could he have told me what was done to
him,
long ago. Forever obliterated, the memory of his mother—a young, exhausted single woman, her nerves on edge—teasing and mocking him when he was a boy of two, making him sob, then hitting him to make him sob louder—Hey Gérard, stop crying you little baby, you little asshole, you little cocksucker—slapping his face, then really getting into it, raining blows down on his head, giddy with the possibility of killing him—you little asshole—and he, Gérard, so tiny, helpless, utterly at her mercy. The more he begged her to stop, the more she felt like bullying him, breaking him. The more ear-shattering his cries grew, the more she wanted to get rid of him. They were alone in the apartment—just as, later on, Gérard would be alone in a soundproofed basement of Paris’s ninth arrondissement with the beautiful, reckless, masochistic, penniless young women who, for money, had agreed to take off their clothes in front of a camera. It excited him to have them at his mercy, just as children are at their mothers’ mercy. When they sobbed he felt a rush of euphoria, and when they begged him to stop he motioned to the cameraman to keep shooting: that was when the very best scenes got shot, the ones that caused the most sperm and money to flow. Men who hate themselves—and they are legion, as Gérard well knew—are more than willing to pay to ejaculate. The more they pay, the more they feel they’re worth. In Washington, Moscow,
Paris, and Tokyo, big shots who are still little boys deep down are prepared to part with ten thousand dollars for a single coitus with a call-girl; they’re sure to come then, because they’ve paid a fortune to do so.

Back when Gérard was producing those films, his wife had guessed he must be involved in something fishy because suddenly they were rolling in it—but, happy to be able to buy mink coats and go on holidays in Majorca, she hadn’t asked too many questions. Then everything fell apart. Of the dozen young women Gérard had paid to be savagely raped in front of a camera, four decided to sue.

Just the sort of case Ms Lisa Heyward might have handled, Subra puts in.

True…Gérard was sent to prison, and his wife left him.
Dolore, dolore,
he lost everything. ‘I’ll never understand, Rena,’ he told me, at least fifteen times in the three hours we spent together. ‘I didn’t break a single law!’ Like Eichmann’s, his incomprehension was sincere. I’ll bet anything Eichmann’s mother tortured
him,
too. Impossible to understand your punishment, afterwards. What little boy would ever dream of dragging his mom to court?

They ascend the grand staircase together.

Still radiant from their recent exchange over the shrimp, they stand side by side in front of the famous Ambrogio Lorenzetti frescoes. Next to them, an elderly Englishwoman is giving explanations to a young man, probably her son.

My sons! Where are my sons? Suddenly Rena misses Toussaint and Thierno terribly. If I take a trip with them a quarter of a century down the line, when
I’m
seventy years old, will they be as tormented
by guilt, impatience and fury as I’ve been with my father over the past few days?

‘What are the prerequisites of
Good Government?
’ asks the pedagogical Brit. ‘Reading the painting as if it were a book, from left to right and from top to bottom, you can find the answer. There have to be strong bonds, first between heavenly angels and Lady Justice, then between Lady Justice and Lady Concord. Concord goes on to weave those bonds into a rope and the rope gets passed from one burgher to the next, eventually coming out over here, where it moves upwards to become a sceptre…’

‘…in the hands of the king!’ the young man guesses.

‘No,’ his mother corrects him gently. ‘He’s not a king, that’s what’s so amazing. For the space of seventy years, in the twelfth century, Siena wasn’t a monarchy at all, but a republic. So this man is the governor.’

‘Still, the republic wasn’t exactly a bowl of cherries,’ Ingrid whispers. ‘Look over there, in the bottom right-hand corner: men in chains. Prisoners-of-war. I wonder where
they
come from!’

‘Good question,’ concedes Rena. Again she remembers Jean Valjean condemned to the galleys, and the fury that overcomes Aziz every time the police make him pull over because he looks like an Arab. ‘Shut up, turn around, hands on the boot of the car.’ ‘Hey, what’s up? What did you stop me for?’ ‘Are you resisting arrest, you little prick? Just wait, you’ll be sorry…’ And they take him in and lock him up and frisk him. They make him strip, squat down in front of them and cough three times, ostensibly to check for dope in his anus but really just to humiliate him and make sure he knows who’s in charge. He comes home from those nights pale with rage, a little more deeply wounded every time…

Turning to the wall on their right, they study
The Effects of Good Government:
flourishing countryside, graceful women dancing,
students listening to their professor. Work and rest, order and joy, prosperity and peace. On the wall to their left, on the other hand, are
The Effects of Bad Government:
the beautiful statue of Justice toppled and smashed, cities burned, fields gone sterile, distress and disorder, violence running amok. That fresco, moreover, is less well preserved than the other—as if the citizens’ misdeeds had corroded the very wall on which they were painted.

To the right, murmurs Subra, the landscape you’ve been traipsing through with Simon and Ingrid. To the left: Aziz’s universe, teetering on the brink of an abyss. These days you’re split between the two—your body here, your mind over there.

You said it, Rena sighs. My holiday was badly timed, as it turns out. I’m only beginning to realise what it’s going to cost me.

Back in Il Campo, she unfolds the map of Siena and spreads it out in front of Ingrid. ‘You wanted to see the ramparts? I suggest we head up this way, then along from here to there, then here, and come back around to the car like this. What do you think?’

‘I didn’t bring my glasses,’ Ingrid answers, ‘but I trust you. Fine, Let’s go.’

The two women strike out, with Simon close behind. But the hills are steeper than they had expected; the narrow streets twist and turn, stubbornly refusing to lead them to the ramparts.

When they reach the barrier called San Lorenzo (him again!), Ingrid tells her they have to stop off at a pharmacy. Simon has a headache. He wants to buy…no, not aspirin, he’s not allowed to take aspirin, but some sort of analgesic.

‘Look,’ he says, drawing an empty vial out of his pants pocket.

The pharmacist sets about translating the English label into Italian.

Ingrid has glimpsed a post office across the street. ‘Rena, would you mind buying us some stamps while we’re busy in here?’

Yes, I would mind, thinks Rena. I don’t feel like either buying stamps or translating labels. I want Aziz, I want Aziz, I want Aziz.

She exits the pharmacy, slamming the door behind her.

If I can’t remember the word for stamps, I refuse to ask for them. What’s the point in buying stamps for postcards that haven’t been written yet?

Of their own volition, her feet cross the street. Of its own volition, her brain rummages around in its darkest depths. And Rena finds herself standing at the counter like a normal human being, smiling and murmuring, ‘
Francobolli, per favore!’

The medical parenthesis lasts and lasts, drawn out by her father’s indecision. Rena waits for Simon and Ingrid outside, determined not to explode with impatience. Kicking her heels at the corner of the Via Garibaldi, she absent-mindedly reads the plaque recounting the Italian patriot’s heroic deeds in Siena…then forgets them at once.

When the couple emerges some thirty-five minutes later, the afternoon turns into a nightmare. In the steep hilly streets near Porta d’Ovile, motor-scooters with no mufflers zoom past them one after another. How can a bunch of pimply teenagers be allowed to inflict such violence on their ears and souls? Forgotten, the bonds woven by Lady Concord! Night is falling and Simon is furious with her for having read the Garibaldi plaque without him…A thick cloud layer has swallowed up the sun…The air is heavy with a thousand human exhalations: poisonous gases, failed aspirations and petty quarrels… Rena’s Canon bangs relentlessly against her solar plexus. Why aren’t you working? it needles her. Why have you stopped looking? Don’t you want me to help you see things anymore? They get lost, wandering at length and at random through smelly Siena. And when at last they find their car: a parking ticket.