Working on Misteries, I sometimes felt like relieving the planet of nine-tenths of its phallophores—who, by their constant insecurity, the uncertainty of their being (Who do you think you are?: the male question par excellence), their passion for weapons and power, their scheming and rivalry, their scuffles and brawls of all sorts, are driving the human species towards extinction; at other times, on the contrary, I wanted to fall to my knees in gratitude because they’d invented the wheel and the canoe, the alphabet and the camera, to say nothing of developing sciences, composing music, writing books, painting paintings, building palaces churches mosques bridges dams and roads, working hard and selflessly, giving unstintingly of their strength and patience and energy and know-how, century after century, in fields, mines, factories, workshops, libraries, universities and laboratories the world over…Oh, men! Wonderful, anonymous, myriad men, suffering and sacrificing yourselves day after day so we can live a little better, with a little more comfort and beauty and meaning…how I love you!
Whenever possible, I would drag one man away from the pack, shower my attentions on him…and remunerate him. Yes: whereas men pay prostitutes to forget their individuality and play the generic Female, I paid men to renounce the comfort of the group and usher me into their privacy. Having gone home with them from stadium, colloquium, stock exchange, parade or training field, I’d ask them to talk to me, take out their photo albums, and show me the teenager, toddler and infant they’d once been. As they did so, they often wept—and I consoled them. Men are so grateful when you shower ‘that much attention’ on them. I learned to sense where they needed loving, go straight there and give it to them. I learned to take their faces in both my hands, smooth away the lines of worry between their eyebrows and on their foreheads, graze their noses with my lips and draw my fingertips over their cheekbones, ever-aware of the skull with its black eyeholes and gaping grin, right there behind the skin. I learned to slip into their souls, lick and suck them, drive them mad with my caresses, allowing them to arch their backs and discover the incomparable pleasure of passivity, calming them down so their true strengths could surge forth, instead of the phony ones they trot out for display the rest of the time. Gradually their defences would crumble and melt. I can’t even look at a man anymore without wondering how, under the onslaught of my love, his face and body would relax, fill up with light, be transfigured…
Subra sighs contentedly.
Putting her Canon back in its case, Rena returns to where her father and stepmother are sitting on the bench across from poor sick Neptune. She finds them slumped against each other, snoozing. A moment later, they head slowly for the Palazzo Pitti.
Pitti
This may be our only chance, Rena tells herself, to spend a little time with Italian Renaissance painters. I must, oh I simply must get Ingrid and Simon to fully appreciate their works.
Just what do you mean by fully appreciate? Subra asks.
Well, the way I do. Or the way I would, if…
If what?
Er…if I weren’t quite so nervous. Or if Aziz were here…
Aziz can’t stand museums.
Okay, not Aziz. Someone else…
Kerstin?
Kerstin, right. Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, Veronese, Van Dyck, Andrea del Sarto, Velasquéz, Raphael…Some of this greatness has to rub off on their souls!
But her father, made groggy by his nap in the sun, takes every chance he can to sit down and nod off again. And Ingrid is oblivious to the technical feats of the Italian masters (perspective, shadows, shading, nuance, trompe-l’œil). With disarming naiveté, she responds only to the content of their paintings.
Saint Agatha, for instance. Any number of paintings depict the lovely Sicilian maid carrying her breasts on a tray. Great are the masters who have taken up this theme; subtle are their colours; skilful is their arrangement of forms and hues on the canvas. But every time she sees one, Ingrid cries, ‘Isn’t that dreadful?’, forcing Rena to wonder whom she hates most—the Christian virgins or the Roman monsters who martyred them.
According to the guidebook, Agatha was a sweet young thing born in Catania, Sicily in the third century A.D. When the Roman prefect Quintianus started cutting off her breasts to punish her for her conversion to Christianity, she cried out, ‘Oh, cruel man, how can you mutilate me like this? Have you forgotten your mother and the breasts that fed you?’
Bad mistake, Rena says to herself. The last thing you should do when threatened by a macho is to mention his mother. That’s rubbing salt in the wound. If you want to escape alive, you should talk to him about the weather, politics, sports—anything but his mother. In a macho’s brain, the word mother is a raw nerve; I know of no exceptions to this rule. Whenever a man boasts to me that mothers are sacred in his culture, I know for sure that women get the short end of the stick there. Anyway, Quintianus freaked out and ordered that Agatha be dragged over hot coals until death ensued.
‘Isn’t that dreadful?’ says Ingrid.
How can people not notice, Rena goes on (Subra hanging as usual on her every word), that the accoutrements of érotisme noir, from de Sade to Madame Robbe-Grillet, from Réage to Bataille, come straight out of Christian martyrology? Whips and chains, hairshirts, blasphemy and transgression, pleasure derived from punishment and pain, Saint Theresa swooning as she is pierced by the angel’s ‘arrow’…
‘Not my cup of tea,’ said Fabrice, laughing, as, during a visit to him in hospital, I described a few of my libertine misadventures—for instance the evening when, rigged out in black stiletto heels, a basque and a garter-belt, my thighs sheathed in fishnet stockings, a padlock dangling from my clitoris, gagged and bound yet at the same time armed with a whip, I walked upon, nay, trampled Jean-Christophe’s swollen testicles as he writhed in pleasure and shouted, Fuck God, Madame! Oh, would that I had sodomised you with the barrel of my Kalashnikov! Would that I had pissed into your left ear! Would that I had scattered holy wafers all over your alabaster breasts!…‘Not our cup of tea, in fact,’ Fabrice corrected himself as he laughed and clapped at my parody. ‘Haitians think highly of French literature in general, but they draw the line at érotisme noir. They just can’t get off on whips and chains—the memory of slavery is too recent.’
Kerstin once told me how nonplussed she’d been, arriving in Paris to pursue her medical studies in 1967, at the mixture of Gothic eroticism and dogmatic Marxism in the French intellectual milieu. Aged twenty-four, she’d already undergone a fair number of sexual initiations in the hippy communes of Stockholm, and had had to repress her laughter when a Leftist high school teacher announced his intention of showing her what was what, sex-wise.
‘Alain-Marie, his name was,’ she told me as we ate out together for the first time, washing our food down with liberal amounts of wine. (Our relationship had swiftly moved from professional to personal and the acupuncture sessions had had no effect on my insomnia.) ‘Alain-Marie took The Revolution very seriously. To show his support for the future dictatorship of the proletariat, he wore a red neckerchief. The son of a Catholic family from the provinces, he got a big kick out of blasphemy: his favourite book was Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, and when he saw a nun or a priest walk down the street he couldn’t refrain from going “Bang-bang, you’re dead!” For weeks on end, though I was dying to make love with him, he gave me lectures on Bataille’s theory of transgression.’ ‘“You bitch in heat, you dare to want,” that sort of thing?’ I asked. ‘Exactly. To my Swedish mind, all this was fascinating but also terribly frustrating.’ ‘Yet you desired him in spite of it?’ ‘Well, he was a Frenchman, right?’ Kerstin answered. ‘I mean, he spoke such beautiful French! I was turned on by the mere idea of making love with a Frenchman, given their worldwide reputation in the field.’ ‘It’s an overrated one, wouldn’t you say?’ ‘Unfortunately, my sample is too small to do the statistics.’ ‘Well, from my experience, intellectuals are the worst by far. Same problem as with French novels. They spend so much time holding forth on li
terature and eroticism that they’ve forgotten how to tell stories and make love. Hyperintellectualism is an STD specific to France.’
Having endured an entire semester of lectures on the subject of desire qua transgression, Kerstin had all but given up on getting laid by this man. At long last, however, Alain-Marie decided she was ready to move on from theory to practice. They were walking side by side down the Rue Mouffetard, it was a gorgeous spring day, a market day, she was wearing a flimsy dress, and suddenly Alain-Marie caught her by the hand and dragged her into Saint-Médard Church. ‘What’s up?’ she asked him. ‘Shhh!’ he said, putting a finger to his lips. And then, gluing his body to Kerstin’s, he started caressing her through the silky material of her dress. Apart from a few little old ladies kneeling in prayer and an organist doggedly practising Bach, the church was empty. ‘Come with me, I want you,’ Alain-Marie whispered into Kerstin’s ear (fortunately one of her erogenous zones)—and, so saying, he pulled her into one of the small side chapels, where the confessionals were.
Though she knows this story off by heart, Subra is in seventh heaven.
The confessional turned out to be locked, foiling what must have been Alain-Marie’s plan—but they slipped behind it, into the furthermost corner of the chapel. Glancing up, Kerstin noticed that the painting on the wall across from them (chosen in advance or just surrealistic coincidence?) was none other than an Education of the Virgin. ‘I’m going to look after your education today, little one,’ the Marxist-Leninist muttered. Kerstin found this a bit ludicrous, given her age—but if it could help him, who cared? Turning her around and pressing up against her from behind, he lifted her pretty dress and pushed aside her panties with his fingers. ‘What sins have you committed this week?’ he asked. ‘You must tell me every one of them without exception…Sins in thought, word and deed…’ Sensing that something was about to happen at long last, Kerstin repressed a titter and blurted out, ‘Yes, Father, yes, Father…’ And he: ‘So you’ve been naughty? Very naughty?’ And she: ‘Yes, Father, very, very naughty.’ She wracked her brain in search of a nice juicy sin, but her imagination always failed her at critical moments like this, and she drew a blank. Luckily, though, she saw that Alain-Marie didn’t need it anymore, the Education of the Virgin would be enough—and since she herself was slippery with desire, things went smoothly from there on in. He continued to berate her in time with the organ music: ‘Ah, ah! You naughty little girl, here’s your punishment, here’s what you deserve, and if you go on sinning it’ll be worse next time, yes, much worse, I’ll take a candle and shove it…aaaaah!’—within a few seconds the inundation took place. ‘And you never enlightened him on the subject of your virginity?’ I asked Kerstin. ‘Of course not. If we spoil their pleasure we spoil our own, don’t we?’…
‘Yes,’ Rena acquiesces, nodding. ‘It is dreadful.’
Putti
There are limits to her spinelessness, though. She’s got to draw the line somewhere. Here in the Pitti Palace, she decides to draw it at the putti. Where the putti are concerned, she’ll refuse to go along with her stepmother. She’ll speak her mind.
Catching sight of a group of plump, ruddy, naked cherubim, Ingrid begins to coo. ‘Look, Rena—aren’t they sweet?’
‘No,’ snarls Rena.
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry, Ingrid, but I can’t stand putti. They make me sick. They embody everything I abhor. Vapid smiles, smooth pink skin…’
‘Rena! How can you say such a thing? You’re a mother! Don’t they remind you of your own boys when they were little?’ Ingrid bites her tongue, trying to take her question back—but it’s too late. The words are out; they hang there in the air between the two women…
‘No.’
‘Sorry.’
‘My kids are black.’
‘I know. I apologise. Well, they’re not black, really…More like café-au-lait. Anyway, I wasn’t talking about skin colour…’
Rena decides to go no further in that direction, though words of fury are stampeding in her brain. Well, let’s talk about it! Let’s talk about skin colour! Why do all those cute little angels have white skin? Why do Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the apostles all have white skin? Weren’t they Palestinians? Swarthy-skinned Semites, in other words? It’s a scandal! It’s racist propaganda, that’s what it is! She says none of this because it’s certainly not Ingrid’s fault if European painters hired local girls to pose for them, rather than importing more plausible-looking models from the East.
‘I meant the kids themselves,’ Ingrid goes on. ‘The babies themselves. All babies are cute, aren’t they? Don’t you find them irresistible?’
‘No, not those ones. Not babies with harps and wings. They make me want to puke.’
‘Rena!’
Seeing her stepmother’s eyes fill with horror, Rena breaks off, blushing.
Why do you have to make sure Ingrid knows how much you detest putti? queries Subra. You’re spoiling her pleasure, dragging her over the hot coals of your rage, as sadistically as Quintianus dragged Agatha…
To Rena’s surprise, Ingrid fulminates in turn. ‘Would you mind telling me,’ she says, raising her voice, ‘why it’s unthinkable for you to take an interest in pretty things? Why, to your mind, pretty can only mean insipid and despicable? Not just the cherubim and seraphim but flowers…landscapes…You haven’t even been taking pictures of our holiday! It’s not worth your while, is it? To you, anything that’s merely nice is a waste of time, isn’t it? You claim your photos tell the truth, and yet you intentionally leave out half the truth—the pleasant half. As far as you’re concerned, pleasant things are a load of…crap!’
To use that sort of vocabulary, Ingrid must be really mad.
‘Sorry,’ Rena says, contrite. ‘It’s silly to stand here fighting over putti. I’m just…allergic to innocence, that’s all. I don’t know why.’
Silence. Her head is spinning. Whatever happened to Renaissance painting?
Simon is sitting there snoring in a corner…
Might as well give up on the Palazzo Pitti.
Fuoco
All of a sudden the world is heavy. Everything they set their eyes on is heavy. The heavy sky seems clamped like an iron lid onto the heavy city of Florence. They go plodding heavily past the souvenir stands along the wall across from the museum, oppressed by the sight of the vendors sitting on their little stools looking bored to death.
Not exactly a thrilling existence, Rena thinks, to sit there from morning to night trying to convince tourists to buy your postcards and calendars, cups and various bits of junk embossed with reproductions of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century masterpieces, then take a two-hour bus ride home to an ugly distant suburb, catch up on the world’s bad news on TV while bolting down a plateful of spaghetti at a table covered with a wine-stained oilcloth, and fall into bed with your wife. Would you still have the modicum of energy and optimism you need to make love to the little lady? And what has her day been like? Did she tear her slip? Snap a heel off one of her sandals? Scream at the kids for getting on her nerves? Why doesn’t Aziz call me back?
Leaden thoughts, weighing her down. She feels like sinking to the ground in the middle of the Via Guicciardini and never getting up again.
Gee, what a fun holiday, Subra says.
Seeing a colourful sign advertising ice-cream cones, Ingrid realises she wouldn’t mind having one—her stomach is growling. What do they think? Ah, a plan at last!
They file into the café to choose their flavours. Simon insists on paying for the cones—but when the bill arrives it horrifies him. ‘You can get a quart of ice cream for that price at the local supermarket!’ And that’s just for take-away—if they eat their cones here they’ll be even more expensive. Humiliated at the rip-off, they file back out of the café.
A few yards down the street, Rena finds a charming little courtyard for them to sit down in. Perched on a low cement wall graced with flowerpots, they can admire the gay blue-and-yellow crockery in t
he nearby store window and slurp their cones to their hearts’ content. Okay, she doesn’t want to die anymore, for now.
Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso—oh, Dante, Dante! They’re inside of us—you knew that, didn’t you?
Suddenly they hear a commotion in the street behind them. They all get up, then rush to see what’s going on. A building is on fire, directly across from the little courtyard. Up and down the Via Guicciardini, crowds of people shout and jostle one another. A chaos of cars, sirens, fire engines, fumes of black smoke, panic-stricken faces. No way they can walk back across the Ponte Vecchio.
The hubbub reminds Rena of May 1968 in Paris as described by Kerstin. Simon would probably get a kick out of those stories, but Ingrid definitely would not.
Tell me, Subra suggests.
‘The funny thing about my Maoist lover—no, the sad thing, really,’ Kerstin told me, ‘was that in private he just couldn’t get it up. We were lucky, though—the lovely uproar of May ‘68 came to our assistance. Barricades, street battles, riot police—all that worked just fine, so when June rolled around I discovered I was pregnant. Naturally, fatherhood was out of the question for my handsome Trotskyite. While libertines endlessly repeat the platitude that eroticism is connected to death, they refuse to entertain the notion that it might be connected to birth. Anathema, for the bellows of transgressive orgasms to give rise to the gurgling of babies! So their charming libertine girlfriends frequently wound up on their backs with their feet in stirrups, having their entrails mauled by metallic instruments that gave them internal hæmorrhages and horrifying nightmares…A couple of my closest friends had been rendered sterile and depressive by that sort of butchery, so I was scared stiff of abortionists and had no intention of putting my life in their hands. My handsome, red-neckerchiefed revolutionary vanished into thin air. After the birth of our child, Pierre, I’d sometimes call Alain-Marie in the middle of the night—”Here, your son wants to talk to you”—and hold the receiver to the baby’s screaming mouth.’