Why didn’t I go with them? ‘It would be a great chance for our Rena to discover Europe!’ Simon exclaimed. And Lisa walked right into his trap. I don’t really know how to explain my mother’s blindness except by saying that she was preoccupied with her work, her struggle, the daunting problems of all the Québecoises who filed into her office seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, knocked up, drugged, infected with syphilis, abused by family members or raped by strangers. Simon told his wife only as much of the truth as he figured she could digest: the conference organisers had reserved two hotel rooms for him and Joshua, each of which contained a double and a single bed; they could easily share one of the rooms and leave me the other one; the only remaining expense would be my plane ticket—it was well worth it! Absent-mindedly, Lisa must have given her consent. She must have smiled, written out a cheque for the plane ticket, and trotted off to plead at court.
Sylvie met up with us at Mirabel Airport. The money for her ticket had been forked out by Joshua (a detail we all, for some reason, found hilarious). Standing together at a counter in the airport bar, we raised our glasses in a toast—my, weren’t we clever!
While the men attended and delivered lectures, Sylvie and I spent two euphoric days criss-crossing the city of London in search of bargains. And at night…Well, under cover of night-time, many things come to pass that no one can judge or comprehend…I have no idea what went on between Simon and Sylvie in Room 418, nor do I recall the exact progression of events between Joshua and myself in Room 416; it must have been fairly swift, though, because by the morning of the third day I found myself strapped to the bed with ropes brought especially from Montreal—naked, naturally, spread-eagled and blindfolded—while, standing behind me, also naked, Joshua whipped me with his belt. I knew quite well why the good doctor was treating me like this, knew it was nothing personal—he’d told me all about his childhood…
Right, Subra puts in. Mommy’s always running off, so we have to tie her up to force her to hold still.
…and I’d given my consent. ‘You’re insatiable,’ he said—and I nodded, for it was true. I had a consuming desire to know the adult world in all its unadulterated splendour. The intervals between blows varied in length, lasting anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes—and since I never knew when they’d fall I couldn’t prepare for them and they kept taking me by surprise. Usually Josh aimed fairly well and the lashes fell on my buttocks, where they didn’t hurt too much, but sometimes they fell on my upper thighs or lower back and the pain was excruciating. It must have been after one of those poorly aimed blows that I let out a scream that changed my life forever.
In other words, it’s all my fault.
Of course, Subra says. What isn’t?
Everything that ensued was the result of that one scream. Disturbed by what he thought he’d heard, my father detached himself from his mistress’s body in Room 418, burst through the connecting door into Room 416, registered the scene at a glance and went berserk. Striding over to poor, disoriented, detumescent Joshua, he grabbed the belt from his hands and started using it to deliver wild blows to the psychiatrist’s head and body, all the while shouting at the top of his lungs, thereby drawing the attention of the chambermaids appointed to clean the fourth floor of our three-star hotel, who rang the reception, who called the police. Because I was wearing a blindfold, I didn’t actually see any of this, merely grasped it thanks to my acute sense of hearing and my gift for deduction. Charged with statutory rape, the two scientists spent the day in police custody, while Sylvie and I were transferred to a facility for juvenile delinquents. Thanks to the intervention of the prestigious Mind and Brain conference organisers, we all got released the next day—but that didn’t prevent the British government from kicking us out of the country the day after that. By the time we landed in Montreal, our story was on the front page of the Gazette. The publicity was to have two dire consequences—it destroyed my father’s last remaining hopes of having a successful career, and precipitated my mother’s decision to return to her native Australia.
You don’t say, murmurs Subra almost inaudibly. The front page of the Gazette!
Rena leaves the museum, shattered.
Belvedere
Nightmarish crossing of the Ponte Vecchio. Ingrid and Simon cling to one another; the crowd is so dense that she loses sight of them for a few minutes and fears that one of them must have fainted.
Why, in Simon’s eyes, was it not all right for Josh to hit me with his belt but all right for him to hit Rowan with his? I mean, maybe there’s something intrinsically edifying and instructive about having one’s naked bottom strapped, maybe it teaches bad little boys not to set fire to the curtains in their bedroom, what it teaches pretty young girls I don’t know yet but I’m sure I’ll find out someday—maybe we should all just spend our time whipping each other to prove our love?
Having reached the far side of the Arno safe and sound, they order sandwiches in a snack-bar on the Borgo San Jacopo.
Ingrid wonders why all the stalls on the bridge sell exactly the same thing—silver jewellery. ‘I don’t get it,’ she says. ‘Such close competition just doesn’t seem like a good idea—that way none of them can make a profit!’
Rack her brains as she might, Rena is unable to come up with an answer to this important question.
‘How about a little digestive rest?’ Simon suggests.
They find a perfect bench in the sun to rest on in the Giardini di Boboli, but then Simon and Ingrid decide to use this moment to bring Rena up to date on the medical history of one of their friends in Montreal. The woman’s illness spreads, gradually infecting the landscape in front of them; Rena knows that in her memory, every detail of this magical moment—the pond, the water-lilies, the bronze statue of Neptune bursting up from the fountain brandishing his trident, his body greened with age and moisture but still magnificently muscular and manly—will forever be tainted by the symptoms of multiple sclerosis.
She can take no more. On the improbable pretext of wishing to photograph the flowerbeds, she gets up and heads for the Forte de Belvedere, ascending the hill alone in long, swift strides.
Why am I so averse to talking about illness? It’s not illness itself I object to (Fabrice’s kidney failure taught me to respect the body, and its countless forms of strength and weakness, once and for all)—no, what sets my teeth on edge is making illness the main topic of conversation, forcing people to listen to tales of woe they can neither respond to nor escape from. That’s why I never talk about my own health problems. In fact I have none…
Apart from insomnia, Subra interrupts.
True. The bane of my existence, these past few years. After I hit forty, it started getting so bad I couldn’t hide it anymore. When Thierno spent nights at my place, it worried him to see me get up at noon, pale and haggard, with purple rings beneath my eyes. ‘You know, Mom,’ he said at last, ‘there are cures for insomnia.’ ‘Thanks but no thanks. Seen enough shrinks to last me a lifetime.’ ‘I’m not talking about analysis, I’m talking about acupuncture.’ ‘Wha…?’ ‘You heard me.’
He went on to tell me that the mother of his piano teacher Pierre Matheron had studied acupuncture in Indonesia. Her fees were reasonable, he said, her office close by, and her talent considerable. ‘Seriously,’ he wound up, laying a hand on mine, ‘you should give it a try.’
Touched by my son’s solicitude, telling myself it wouldn’t hurt to try, I called Dr Matheron’s office and set up an appointment.
One of the best decisions you ever made, whispers Subra.
The doctor shook my hand warmly as she ushered me into her office. In her mid-fifties at the time, she was a smallish woman with a reassuringly sturdy build and laughing hazel eyes. But it was her face that set me instantly at ease—a broad face framed in blonde hair liberally mixed with white; a good, crinkly face with high cheekbones and a surprisingly pointed nose; a face that freely admitted to having smiled and frowned millions of times.
Taking out a form, she asked me the usual questions: medical history, date and place of birth…‘Ah, you’re Canadian.’ I was bracing myself for the inevitable That’s funny, you don’t have a Canadian accent—such a charming accent it is, too!—a double insult for the Québecois, who prefer not to be called Canadian and consider (as do many French provincials) that if anyone has an accent, and a ridiculous one at that, it’s the Parisians—but Dr Matheron said nothing of the sort. I deduced that she wasn’t a native French speaker herself, which endeared her to me even more. I have a marked preference for people who are split—bi’s and ambi’s of all sorts. That’s why I live in the neighbourhood of Belleville, where bilingualism is the rule and not the exception, where you know that behind every face in the street is a brain teeming with sentences, quotes, expressions, songs and proverbs in French and another language, whether Chinese or Arabic, Turkish or Kurdish, German, English or Cambodian. I have no patience for people who think they know who they are just because they were born somewhere. ‘What about yourself?’ I asked Kerstin Matheron with my usual impertinence. ‘Swedish,’ she replied.
As she took my pulse, holding two fingers against the inside of my wrist and looking at her watch, I began to feel suddenly and unexpectedly euphoric. ‘Thirteen/eight—that’s fine. Now…How long have you been finding it hard to sleep?’
I told her about my nights—my addiction to working at night, whether out of doors or in my own dark room at home. My clinging to wakefulness. Wanting never to let go. My pleasure in feeling the neighbourhood asleep around me, its inhabitants’ dreams floating in the air. I go back and forth from printer to baths and from baths to printer, always on my feet, turning the lights on and off, at once excited and focused. On the dry side, I love studying the grains through the grain magnifier—they have an organic feel to them that reflects the nature of light, something pixels can’t achieve. (Pixels are real Germans: Alles ist immer in Ordnung!) On the wet side: the same awe every time an image appears, even when there’s something wrong with it. It’s like making love—stirring no matter what happens. When I take the paper out of the first bath, slick and shiny as a fish’s stomach, it seems to be alive. I slide it into the other two baths, spend long minutes washing it, slap it up on the wall, study it, and start over, printing a bit differently, using a masking card to bring out detail in one part of the image without overexposing the rest…I can remain on my feet twelve hours straight without even noticing fatigue. Night hours are flexible and generous—they have no minutes—whereas day hours go marching past like soldiers, in serried ranks…These last few months, though, nightmares have been tearing me out of slumber and washing me up on the shore of the day dead beat, broken.
I lay down on Dr Matheron’s medical bed, wearing nothing but my blue silk lace panties. She exclaimed at how thin I was. When she asked if I ate normally, I said, ‘As a rule, yes, but my sons are living with their dad right now and I find it hard to cook just for myself.’ With swift, deft, gentle motions, dabbing each spot in advance with a bit of alcohol-soaked cotton, she went about screwing thin needles into my ankles, hips, and collarbone, talking to me all the while in her warm, musical voice. ‘Everyone finds it hard to cook just for themselves,’ she said. ‘I myself have been eating like a barbarian even since my husband’s death. I just take some salmon out of the freezer, slap it into a Pyrex dish, add a bit of white wine and stick it in the microwave for ninety seconds.’ ‘I doubt the barbarians used microwaves to cook their salmon,’ I said. ‘You’re right, we have no idea what they used their microwaves for,’ she said without missing a beat.
Rena laughs out loud, remembering. Thanks to that witticism, the tendrils of friendship that had been sprouting in her heart since she’d first entered Kerstin’s office burst into bloom. Now, five years later, the two women are inseparable.
Exhilarated by the panoramic view, Rena phones Aziz and gets his answering machine. ‘Aziz I love you I miss you I want you I desire you I wish I had your gorgeous cock in my mouth this very minute. When you’re not around I feel I’m going mad, I lose my sense of humour, my bearings—my self. Just now I was looking at a statue of Neptune and I thought it had multiple sclerosis, can you believe that? Oh, baby, if only you were here with me…At least we could fool around together, sneak off into dark corners and do all sorts of naughty things to each other…I adore you. I can’t stop thinking about you. Catch you later.’
Their branches waving gently in the wind, their foliage rusted by autumn nights, the trees look like wild-haired witches. Rena crouches down, takes out her black bag (a sort of sweater with no neck opening), and loads her camera with a roll of infrared film. Instantly elated, she moves slowly back down the hill, concentrating passionately on every object in her viewfinder.
The extraordinary thing about infrared, the voice in her head tells Subra, is that it happens elsewhere, in an alternate reality. What you photograph is not what you see. You have to imagine what the photo will look like once you develop it, taking all sorts of factors into account—the reds in the landscape, the angle of sunlight, the filters you use or don’t use. You have to dream each tree individually and try to guess at its secret, knowing the foliage will end up looking like an explosion of white lace. Infrared reveals a delicately deformed light that seems to come from a forgotten past. It is not, as many people think, a gimmick. The eyes of some animals capture infrared light rays; ours happen not to—but those rays are emitted whether we see them or not.
It all depends on who’s looking at what, with what, from where. Close up, a cloud is a mass of water droplets in suspension; from far away it’s a purple mountain against a blue sky—and even the blueness vanishes, as Simon pointed out to me under LSD, if you get too close to it. Photography is relative: when you slip the negative into the enlarger and beam light through it, tiny black spots get projected onto the Barite paper below but those spots are not the photograph, they’re only a network of possibilities; you can move in closer until all you see are tiny filaments dancing in the void, or move away until the whole image is one black dot; you can drown the spots in light or lose them in shadow…People, too are relative: seen from too close up or too far away, they lose their meaning. Instinctively, you learn to manipulate distance, framing, exposure, contrast, searching for what is meaningful…‘They want to be paid that much attention,’ as Diane Arbus once put it, ‘and that’s a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.’
What a lovely thing to say, Subra breathes…
When her ex-husband and best friend Allan Arbus went off to live in California, Diane started hanging out with fringe groups—dwarfs, giants, hermaphrodites, twins and mental patients…She said her camera lens protected her, opened doors for her, helped her forage in forbidden territory…Did she use people to get the pictures she wanted, or did she use her camera to get close to people? Probably both. Later, after her father’s death, while continuing to work and to take care of daughters during the daytime, she started going on sexual sprees at night, giving a new slant to that ‘reasonable kind of attention’…
I, too, use my Canon to convince men I’m interested in them—and I am interested in them, very interested. For whatever reason, the theatre of masculinity, with its spectacular rituals, games, contests and costumes, has been studied far less than the theatre of femininity. I slip into soccer stadiums and take photographs of hooligans, big bad boys, young and not-so-young supporters. Men blind drunk on beer and testosterone, high on collective emotion, floating on the anonymity of the pack, bawling out the names of their favourite players and insulting those of the opposite team, ecstatic to be part of a group. On the surface, the supporters of Paris-Saint-Germain may seem potent and frightening, but in infrarouge you can see they’re frightened as well. Close-ups of young men’s faces twisted with hatred. Moving in…closer and closer…oh the sweet dizziness of blowing up images until you enter matter itself…slipping beneath the skin…down, down…passing through layer after layer of memory, all the way to
childhood. It’s overwhelming when that starts to show up in the revealing bath…
Misteries has been my most successful show to date. It travelled to a dozen cities and was made into a book. Juxtaposed images of male behaviour the world over—military marches in front of Moscow’s Kremlin, meetings of the Camorra in Naples, welcoming speeches at the French Academy, complete with swords and green uniforms, Hell’s Angels gatherings in California, initiation rites of Brazil’s Bororo Indians, pimps in Tel Aviv, traders in Tokyo, soccer fans in Manchester, right-wing militiamen in Montana, senators, freemasons, prisoners—oh, such posturing! Such strutting and swaggering! Men, men, men! As anxious as they are arrogant, their arrogance being merely the flip side of their anxiety because they’re so much more mortal than we are. It moves me to see the way these womb-less higher primates clench their jaws, march up and down, do everything in their power to attract attention and remind the world that they, too, exist, count, matter.
I longed to understand what went on in men’s bodies, why danger turned them on…Some stories on the subject had made a powerful impression on me. The one my Cambodian husband Khim had told me, for instance, about the Viet Cong who’d received a dozen fragments of shrapnel in his crotch. Khim had operated—successfully, he had thought—but the man had come back to the hospital two days after his release. ‘What’s the matter?’ Khim had asked him. ‘You told me you were fine.’ ‘Yes, Doctor,’ the man said. ‘I felt fine when I was released…But every evening when I go out to fight, excuse me, but…I get a hard-on and the pain comes back again.’ Khim checked and found a tiny piece of shrapnel embedded in the man’s penis, so he reoperated…Or the stories Aziz’s uncle told me about his military service in Algeria in the seventies: ‘The intellect is soluble in weapons, my dear Rena,’ he told me once. ‘The minute a friend got promoted, even if you’d been hanging out with him since grade school, he suddenly started looking down his nose at you and insisting you salute him every time you ran into him. His Kalashnikov made him forget everything else; he became that intoxicating power…’