Infrared (30 page)

‘Protestants don’t do that,’ Ingrid says.

‘See?’ says Rena, pointing. ‘It’s right over there. We just have to cross the square…’

But no. As they step up from street to kerb on the Piazza San Marco esplanade, Simon stumbles.

Not to worry, thinks Rena. He’ll catch his balance.

But no. Before her very eyes, he plummets earthward.

Not to worry, thinks Rena. He’ll use his arms to break his fall.

But no. His arms buckle uselessly beneath him.

Not to worry, thinks Rena. His fat tummy will absorb the shock.

But no. As she watches, aghast, Simon hits the ground with his forehead.

It’s not:
his forehead hits the ground.
No, it’s:
he hits the ground with his forehead.

As if, on this very spot, straddling the centuries, Savonarola had forced him to confess his crime.

So much for San Marco.

Now what. Now what do we do? Rena asks her Special Friend, but Subra has no answer.

Simon is lying on the ground, his forehead spurting blood. At once, half a dozen passers-by rush over to help him to his feet. Luckily there’s a bench on the esplanade, just a few steps away. Ingrid sits down on it next to her husband, deeply shaken.

Maybe she’ll faint, too, Rena thinks—why not? Anything can happen. But I’ll be on that plane tomorrow morning, nothing in the world can prevent me, I’ll be on it. Drawing a tissue from her pocket, she starts dabbing at the blood on her father’s forehead.

‘Ghiacchio!’
a young man exclaims.

Yes, of course. That’s what we need. Ice. She crosses the avenue and walks into a fancy coffee shop—gleaming chrome, towering chocolate layer cakes, elegant customers milling about. ‘
Ghiacchio?’
she says to a young waitress. Even as she performs a pantomime of her father’s accident, she registers every detail of the girl’s appearance: carefully made-up face, well-cut uniform, pink ruffles on her apron, mauve ribbons in her hair, purple polish on her fingernails… Ah, thinks Rena, what wouldn’t I give to have this girl as a model…a friend…a hostage…

Now the waitress is handing her a crackly cellophane bag chock-full of tiny white ice cubes. ‘
Grazie, grazie!’
Rena feels like kissing her full on the lips.

She goes back outside and sizes up their new situation from afar: Tourists; spot of bother. An old man slumped on a bench, forehead
bloodied; his wife muttering and fluttering around him. Called back to their respective pressing obligations, the helpful passers-by have vanished. Resolutely, Rena goes over to include herself in the tourists-spot-of-bother group. Yes, that is correct, I am the man’s daughter and this is what my life is about just at the moment—this, and nothing else. Not the riots in France, not the Dominican monks’ cells; this. Here’s the ice, Daddy. I love you…

Simon’s eyes are closed.

‘You okay?’

‘Sure, sure.’

‘Rena,’ Ingrid says feverishly, ‘several people told me we should find an ambulance and take him to the hospital.’

‘Did they say it in English?’

‘In English, in Italian, what does it matter? They made themselves clear. They said it several times. But your father doesn’t want to go.’

‘There’s no need,’ says Simon with a wave of hand. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Here,’ says Rena, handing Ingrid the ice cubes. ‘Can I take a look?’

Ingrid parts the tissue papers with which she’s been staunching the blood. Since Rena left, the bump has risen spectacularly and is now the size of a large egg. The sight of the raw flesh makes her shudder.

‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘I don’t know, maybe they’re right. Maybe we should go to a hospital and ask a doctor to check it, if only to set our minds at rest.’

‘What do you say, Dad?’

‘Not in an ambulance, anyhow,’ Simon says. ‘I wouldn’t want to take an ambulance away from someone who really needs it.’

‘Well, let’s take a taxi, then,’ Ingrid says. ‘I’m sure the taxi drivers know all the hospitals.’

‘Have you got enough cash?’ Rena looks at her.

‘Sure, I’ve got plenty of euros. Everyone has been so kind to us on this trip, I haven’t been able to spend anything.’

When they help Simon to his feet, he reels. It’s a dream. Rena hails a cab. It slows down as it approaches…but takes off again, tyres screeching, when the driver glimpses the blood on the tissue papers.

‘We’d better put his hat back on,’ Rena tells Ingrid, ‘or else no taxi will take us.’

‘Can we do that, Dad?’

‘Gently, gently…’

Eventually, another cab draws up. It takes them several minutes to settle into the back seat. The driver fidgets with impatience.

Just as
you
used to, says Subra.

No reason to fidget, sir. No reason at all. Your meter is ticking, believe me. You wouldn’t want it to tick any faster. Why hurry to reach the day when, like my father, you’ll fall and break your head open on the Piazza San Marco? That day will come soon enough. Believe me, sir, there’s no rush at all.

‘Ospedale,’
she says out loud, feeling an almost maternal benevolence for the impatient young idiot.

‘Spedale degli Innocenti?’
he asks, meeting her eyes in the rear-view mirror.

And though it would be perfectly plausible for a group of tourists to wish to be driven to that sumptuous art gallery, she bursts out laughing. No, no, I’m not innocent, no one is innocent, I mean everyone is innocent, I’m not Beatrice Cenci…

‘No,’ she says out loud, stifling her incongruous mirth as best she can.
‘Un ospedale vero.’

‘Il quale?’
the young man asks in exasperation.

‘Non lo so, non me ne importa un fico!’

‘Signora!’

‘Il più grande, il migliore, ma, per favore, subito presto!’

It’s rush hour, and traffic is at a standstill in the Via Nazionale. Squashed into the back seat on either side of the wounded man, Ingrid and Rena each take one of his hands.

‘I’m fine, I’m just fine,’ Simon murmurs, eyes closed, gently tapping their hands with his.

Voices and music blare from the radio in a non-stop jingle. It’s impossible to tell advertisements from regular programmes; it all sounds equally imbecilic and hysterical. Other anguished car rides well up to the surface of Rena’s mind: her two deliveries (her waters broke in the taxi on the way to the hospital to give birth to Tous-saint, and the driver made her sign a paper promising to pay to have his upholstery cleaned)…various planes she all but missed, fearing for her life as taxi-drivers honk-honked their way through traffic in cities like Jaipur or Cairo, where the highway code is replaced by the notion of destiny…mad scrambles to get Alioune to Orly Airport on time when he had to take over for a colleague in Dakar at the drop of a hat…rushing to meet Thierno at the Montparnasse train station when he came back to Paris, depressed and angry, from school outings to ski resorts…It seems as if she has spent half her life stuck in traffic, glancing at her watch and swallowing exhaust fumes. All those marvellous inventions of the Renaissance—clockwork, machines, the harnessing of natural forces by man—have converged to produce this moment: a medical emergency at a standstill, amidst ten thousand aggressive vehicles that sit there revving their motors, spewing chemical poisons into the air, eating away at the ozone layer…

‘Ecco,’
says the driver at last, and Ingrid hands him the correct money.

‘Hey, Dad,’ she cries a moment later, once they’re all back on the
footpath. ‘Look where we are! Over there…look, the cathedral! We never got to visit that, either!’

Indeed, they are but a stone’s throw from the Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore, and
this
impressive building is none other than the Arcispedale di Santa Maria Nuova. Well, how about that! An archi-hospital!

‘I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me,’ mutters Simon as they move through a swinging door marked PRONTO SOCCORSO.

They’re taken in charge at once.

It has to be a dream…Memories of endless hours spent in the emergency rooms of various hospitals in Paris, surrounded by dozens of other panic-stricken parents with whimpering babies in their arms or glassy-eyed toddlers on their laps—waiting, filling out forms, waiting, more formalities, waiting, insurance papers, waiting. The smell of urine and disinfectant, Nescafé and shit, dried sweat, and despair…

Nothing of the sort here. Nothing but polite receptionists, reassuring nurses and sympathetic doctors…Within five minutes Simon is being wheeled away on a gurney for X-rays. How civilised can you get?

In the waiting room, the two women settle calmly into armchairs.

‘We made the right decision,’ Ingrid says.

‘Sure we did.’

‘Everything will be all right now.’

‘Of course it will, Ingrid. You’ve been terrific.’

‘Me? I haven’t done a thing. You’re the one who’s handled things beautifully. But that’s only natural; you’re a much more seasoned traveller than I am.’

Silence.

Then Ingrid asks, ‘What time is your flight tomorrow?’

‘Eight a.m. I should be at the airport by seven. What about yours?’

‘Not until eleven. We have a stopover in Paris. It’s silly—we should have arranged to take the same plane.’

‘You’ll have to lend me a little money for cab fare…’

‘No problem. But we’ll come with you to the airport. It’ll mean getting up early but that’s okay, we can catch up on our sleep during the flight.’

‘That’s sweet of you. Who’s meeting you at Mirabel?’

‘David…And you? Aziz?’

‘Theoretically. That was the plan, yes…but given all that’s been happening in the meantime, I don’t know. He must be swamped…’

‘Why don’t you call him?’

‘Very funny. I don’t have a phone.’

‘Take my Visa card. Go ahead, give him a ring…If you want to, of course.’

Illogically, Rena glances at her watch. Having no choice in the matter, the watch tells her what it has been programmed to tell her. (‘Years, months and days are natural,’ Simon had explained to her when she was little, ‘but weeks, hours and minutes are man-made.’ ‘What about seconds?’ she had asked. ‘Are they woman-made?’ ‘Ha, ha, ha!’)

She borrows Ingrid’s Visa card. Knees quaking, she walks down a long, dark corridor, at the far end of which is a payphone.

Maybe it only accepts local phone cards, whispers Subra.

You’re right, I sort of hope so…Nope, no such luck. This payphone is a whore; it takes anything and everything.

Weird, isn’t it? says Subra. No one ever suggests that, deep down, payphones
enjoy
their customers’ calls. No, you put your money in the slot and they do what they’ve been paid for, period.

Rena slips the Visa card into the telephone.

We’ve invented so many things, she says to herself, slowly dialling Aziz’s number. It shouldn’t be possible to take a piece of plastic decorated with letters and numerals in bas relief, press a series of metallic buttons to dial a fifteen-figure number which is stored in one’s memory along with dozens of other numbers corresponding to various facets of one’s identity (telephone, bank account, social security, licence plate, postal code, bank code, door code), then lift a black Bakelite cradle to your ear and hear, encoded and decoded by twelve hundred miles of copper wire, the voice of the person you love.

‘Aziz speaking.’

Ah. So her man answers his mobile when an unfamiliar number flashes onto the screen.
Rena,
no;
Not Known,
yes.

‘It’s me, love…’ All that comes out of her throat is a pathetic croak.

‘Hello?’

She clears her throat. ‘It’s me. It’s Rena.’

The answer to that is silence.

‘Aziz, are you okay? Are you there?’

‘I’m here, but…’

‘Listen, love, so much has happened…in France, I know… but here, too…You wouldn’t believe it. It’ll take us weeks to catch
up…We’ll start tomorrow…Are you still planning to pick me up at Roissy?’

More silence. What the hell is going on?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she babbles. ‘I can take a cab, no hassle. I mean, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do at ten a.m. I’ll have to borrow some money from Ingrid, though, because…’

‘Rena.’

‘What?’

More silence.

‘What, Aziz? Tell me. Are you mad because I couldn’t come home any soon—’

‘Rena…we’re not t-t-to…’

Oh-oh, thinks Rena. If he’s stammering, something is really wrong.

‘…gether anymore. I’ve d-d-decided not to move into the Rue des Envierges.’

‘When?’

What a stupid question: when? Aziz doesn’t answer it.

‘But…why? What’s going on? I adore you, Aziz. Living with you is the thing I care about most in the world.’

Silence.

‘It’s because I’m Jewish, is that it? Did Aicha finally convince you…’

‘No, Rena, it’s not b-b-b-because you’re Jewish…It’s because you’re nothing. See? That’s all. That’s why. B-b-b-because you’re nothing, Rena. I’m something. And just now…I have to give that something all my attention.’

‘I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Sorry if I’m c-c-c-causing you pain.’

The connection is cut off.

If you’re causing me pain? Sorry if you’re causing me pain? Rena
repeats incredulously to herself as she walks down the long, dark corridor in the other direction. That’s hilarious.
If you’re
causing me pain…

Incapable of facing Ingrid right away, she stops off in the
Bagni Signore.
Pays no attention to the other women milling around in there. Walks straight to the farthest sink and plants herself in front of the mirror.

Aziz’s ‘You’re nothing’ scared her so badly that she almost expects the mirror to reflect only the white tiling behind her. But no, it frames a face. She studies the face with a professional eye, trying to get behind it and see what makes it tick.

The last photos of Arbus, taken just before her suicide in July 1971, show her looking thin, tense and uncertain. She’s dressed in black leather pants, her hair is cut short and there are dark shadows under her eyes…Where did her stubborn neutrality come from? Rena suddenly wonders. Her refusal to find one thing better than another? Her blindness in the face of injustice? Arbus was interested only in the particular: each, each, each.