I nodded, imagining the scene. ‘And did you ever tell Pierre he’d been conceived at Saint-Médard’s?’ ‘Not in the church. In the middle of the Rue Gay-Lussac at five in the morning.’ ‘Did you ever tell him?’ ‘Are you kidding?’ ‘And did he see his father, growing up?’ ‘No, virtually never. But I married Edmond five years later, and he was a father to Pierre—a marvellous one—until his death last year…’ ‘I’m sorry, Kerstin, forgive me for prying but…what about Alain-Marie?’ ‘Listen, Rena. Get this through your head. Alain-Marie has hated his son at every stage of his existence. Disgusting fœtus, bawling baby, mumbling toddler, pimply teenager, and now—by far the worst—tall, dark, handsome young rival!’
I couldn’t help laughing. The idea of an ageing libertine devoured by jealousy of his own son was irresistibly funny.
Paradiso
Night is falling by the time they get back to the Piazza San Giovanni; the tourists have dispersed and the Baptistery stands deserted. Here’s their chance to study the famous gilded Doors of Paradise. But…do they feel like it?
Putting on her reading glasses, Rena holds the guidebook up under a streetlight. ‘Ghiberti, 1425,’ she reads. ‘This door is his masterpiece. It took him twenty-five years to complete.’
Silence.
‘Before becoming a sculptor,’ she goes on, ‘he was a goldsmith.’
More silence.
‘His techniques’—one last try—’range from high relief to a mere shiver on the chiselled surface of cast metal.’
Hm, that’s not half bad. Not easy to translate, though. Can gold shiver in English?
No, it isn’t working. They don’t know how to look at this door. Don’t have the strength to identify the ten Biblical scenes—this one’s Noah, that one’s Esau, and over there must be Abraham’s philoxenia…
What the hell is philoxenia, anyway? wonders Rena.
Maybe it’s like xenophilia, Subra suggests. People who, like yourself, are keen on foreigners? Sorry.
Ingrid, however, still has the strength to talk about World War Two. She tells them how the Wehrmacht soldiers marched down the streets of Rotterdam singing at the tops of their lungs in German, giving her a permanent allergy to that language. Obligingly, Rena denounces the Third Reich’s cult of obedience. Simon chimes in, wondering why people are so often happy to abdicate their will… nicht wahr, Abraham?
Sorry, dear Ghiberti. Yet I assure you, we’re not betraying your masterpiece. Past, present and future: same abdication, same stupidity, same massacres.
Once Ingrid gets started there’s no stopping her, so the war rages on throughout their evening meal. It’s surreal.
A terrace restaurant on a little square near San Lorenzo market—the Winter of Hunger—they order grilled fish—the atrocious famine of January 1945—it’ll take a little while—we waited for days, for weeks—they’re in a good mood—there was nothing to eat, no supplies coming into Rotterdam—no matter, we’ve got good wine—we were starving, overcome with anguish—glad to be together—we stole lumps of coal down by the train tracks—this squid is scrumptious!—we melted snow for drinking water—the mullet, the bass, the gilt-head!—and then my father’s mad decision—lovely, everything’s just lovely—to travel to Aalten on foot—a bit of lemon?—185 kilometres of cold, hunger and illness—another drop of wine?—I was the youngest, sent to beg at farmhouse doors—dolce, dolce vita—the bombing of Arnhem, huge holes in the ground—the air so mellow—bomb shelters in Baarlo, rockets, sirens—the perfection of this square—a bomb fell right on top of the shelter—its lamplit terraces bubbling with laughter and conversation—everyone was killed—If only life could—women were mummified as they sat with their children on their laps—be like this—poisoned by toxic gases, their bodies intact…
The third day is over.
Back in her room at last, Rena calls Aziz, Toussaint and Kerstin, then three or four other friends…
She gets nothing but answering machines. What on earth is going on in France?
FRIDAY
‘I think I must have been brought up to be a sort of magic mirror…’
Diluvio
In the offices of On the Fringe, Schroeder is showing me the mock-up of the cover for the next issue. To my surprise, it’s a frontal portrait of a voluptuous nude, her legs cut off at mid-thigh, her head tossed back. ‘What’s this?’ I ask. ‘Have we decided to sell ass like everyone else?’ Schroeder looks a bit uncomfortable. ‘It’s because we’re in the red just now,’ he says. ‘Still, it’s a good photo, isn’t it?’ As I look again, the cover suddenly comes to life. The photo turns into a film and a baby bursts out of the dark triangle at the woman’s crotch. It’s violent and magnificent. A few seconds later, a geyser comes gushing from the same spot, literally inundating the child. Schroeder is stunned speechless, but I assure him this sort of flooding is fairly common in the aftermath of a delivery, adding that I experienced it myself when I gave birth to Thierno.
I wonder why I said that in the dream? Rena muses. It’s not true at all—I experienced no flooding of any kind after my deliveries. Only before, when my waters broke…
Not only that, Subra points out, but Schroeder never consults you about cover illustrations.
Another dream about whores qua madonnas…Reminds me of the pin-ups in all the trucks that picked me up hitch-hiking when I was fifteen or sixteen. When the drivers noticed my eyes glued to the photos of those broads with siliconed boobs, dumb looks on their faces, eyes half-shut and pointy pink tongues between their teeth, they would blush and apologise. ‘Sorry,’ they’d say, in French or in English, to the skinny adolescent they mistook for an innocent child.
Heavens, how often did that happen? Subra says, with the faintest trace of irony in her voice.
Oh, dozens of times, Rena answers airily. Er, would you believe… ten? How about…three? Anyway, all the truck drivers said the same thing: ‘What are you doing hitch-hiking around all by yourself? Don’t you know how dangerous it is? You’re lucky I came along, you could have been picked up by some pervert, I picked you up to protect you from perverts…’ But as we moved from coffee to sandwiches and from conversation to jokes, they invariably wound up pleading with me to climb in the back with them, into the bed behind the cab, with its stained wrinkly sheets, reeking of the tobacco, sweat, and sperm of their solitary nights. I saw no reason to decline, for I’d never believed in God, was on the Pill, and passionately longed to know what adults knew and to do what adults did. So, time and again, I revelled in the sensation of their scrapy cheeks against my neck, their impatient cocks seeking out my cunt, their groans of climax, and their surprised embarrassment, afterwards, to find themselves with a minor. ‘Sorry,’ they’d mutter. And I’d forgive them, because I knew, had known for a long time already (ever since the garage event) how helpless men are in the face of this mystery, how much it scares and stupefies them, how ardently they respond Yes and No simultaneously when confronted with the simple fact, as self-evident as it is unfathomable, that all of us come out of a cunt, owe our presence on this Earth to a cunt…
Never have I forgotten the valuable lesson Rowan taught me that day. Scared stiff—not only pubescent boys in garages and tenement basements but also Hasidim and Taliban, pure hard men of every religious war and gang bang in history, Sadean libertines who bind and lacerate, desperate militiamen who rape and mutilate—all, all—fear and trembling and sickness unto death.
Tell me, Subra says.
‘Meet you in the garage at five,’ Rowan said to me, and when I showed up at five on the dot I wasn’t even surprised to discover that I was yet again the only girl, a diminutive seven-year-old girl surrounded by half a dozen eleven-year-old boys…‘You know how to play spin-the-bottle, Rena?’ ‘No…’ ‘Look.’ We got into a circle, kneeling on the cement floor, and set an empty glass Coke bottle at its centre. One kid set the bottle spinning (I can still hear the scrape of thick glass on cement); the child it pointed to when it stopped had to remove a p
iece of clothing. But after a few rounds and the indifferent shedding of their shoes and socks, the boys began to cheat, shoving and jostling one another and re-spinning the bottle so that it pointed always and only to me, and Rowan insisted I comply, reminding me I’d sworn obedience, and saying, ‘Come on now, Rena, don’t be a sissy, take it off.’ And since I dreaded nothing in the world more than being deemed a sissy by my brother, I kept my eyes trained on him as my hands peeled away the final shreds of clothing—hair ribbons, undershirt, finally my flower-printed pink cotton undies. Seeing the other boys’ eyes fill with apprehension, I realised that Rowan had selected those of his schoolmates who’d never before seen a girl in the nude. At first they stood there and gawked in disbelief; then they muttered and mumbled and averted their eyes. ‘Show them, Rena,’ Rowan said. ‘Go on, show them all you’ve got!’
And because my brother and I were so powerfully together, because I felt his confidence and his love, I stepped daintily out of my panties and thrust my tiny hips forward, reaching down to part the lips of my vagina with my fingers. Several of the boys drew back in fear. I felt a thrill of pride go through me, flushing upwards from chest to brow. Made euphoric by my power and their fear, I moved towards them, brandishing my sex at them, and Rowan snorted with laughter as his friends rose hastily to their feet, stammering and blushing and stumbling backwards, breaking up the circle, blurting out excuses, urgent matters they had to attend to, things they’d just remembered now, important reasons for which they had to get home lickety-split.
It’s a gesture you see in thousands of Japanese photographs, a gesture that’s become banal in nightclubs in Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighbourhood. The stripper walks up to the edge of the stage, her body ferociously protected and contained by her black and strass costume (fishnet stockings, basque, stiletto heels). The clients swarm up to her and, using her long varnished fingernails, she parts the lips of her vagina—Yes, dear children, this is where you come from. As incredible as it may seem, each and every one of you entered the world through here. Araki claims the first thing he did when his mother gave birth to him was to turn around and photograph her cunt. His own beloved wife had no children; she died young of uterine cancer. After her death he began taking pictures of nude women—thousands of them, some prostitutes, others not, but virtually all of them young, with vapid smiles on their faces. Again and again he zoomed in on their cunts. Seen by Araki, flowers, too, become vaginas, their petals labia majora and minora, their pistils clitorises. He captures them in close-up—’because, quite simply,’ he says, ‘I love vaginas. I wish my eyes could travel inside the womb. In spirit I keep getting closer and closer.’ Yes—if men have drawn and filmed and painted and photographed the female body from time immemorial, if they’ve devoted so much time and energy to scrutinising, imagining, projecting, fantasising, veiling, unveiling, hiding, revealing, reworking, decorating and banishing it, it’s because everything revolves around that, the vortex both boys and girls burst out of, the opening that bespeaks…not castration, as Freud stupidly claimed, but rather the void that precedes and follows being.
Precious few women, on the other hand, have painted or photographed male genitals, despite their reputation for being so much more visible! Even I who specialise in the invisible world of heat—night scenes, the hidden face of reality—even I who have always been insatiably curious about the wonders men carry around down there, so different from each other in shape and colour, smell and size—even I, who love to pay the most attentive homage to those wonders with my hands, eyes, lips, and tongue—even I, who relish every micro-stage of undressing a man, figuring out what sort of trousers he’s wearing and how they open, undoing the button or the hook or both, feeling his member’s soft hardness already beginning to swell, trying to guess which direction it’s pointing, undoing the fly and slipping my hand through the opening, still outside of the underpants for the time being, that’s one of my favourite stages—pressing my hand, cheeks, and nose into his crotch, feeling him harden against my face, finally slipping one hand behind the elastic waistband or through the opening of his underpants, sometimes gently removing with my finger or tongue the single pearly drop that oozes from the tip, then circling the stiffened organ itself with my warm and avid hand—even I don’t photograph these things I so adore.
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.