Aziz hangs up without another word.
‘Per andare all’Impruneta, per favore…?’
Salespeople and customers have a vast array of opinions on the subject.
Sometimes you wish you could just press stop, then fast-forward to a more bearable moment of the video of your existence. Yes, let’s do that. Let’s forget all about the starting and stopping, the backing up and turning around, the tension and hesitation, the sighs and silences, the petrol station restrooms, the overflowing tampons, the language barrier, the frustrating fruitless phone calls, let’s forget about the groping the misery the excuses the bad smells the sordid bedrooms the sad eyes of child prostitutes in Thailand the endless heaps of garbage along the roads north of Dakar the despicable behaviour of the customs officials in Algiers who, to welcome Aziz on his first visit to his parents’ native land (the year was 1993, he’d just turned eighteen), opened his suitcase, dumped his carefully folded clothes on the floor and told him to pick them up, the homeless kids in Durban who sniff glue and sleep in highway tunnels at night, the chaos of our lives whose stories we try to tell coherently so they’ll seem to fit into some sort of pattern, make some sort of sense, let’s just forget it, all of it, as we go along…
Impruneta
As they accept second helpings of her delicious zucchini frittati, Gaia (the gracious, sexagenarian owner of the B & B they eventually did manage to find) tells them first about her husband who committed suicide, then about her architect lover who designed this house, built it with his own hands, and died of cancer three short months after its completion.
How do people go on? How do they manage? How does Gaia get through the day? She chops up zucchini and onions, fries them golden, beats a few eggs, stirs in heavy cream, parmesan cheese, thyme and a little salt (not too much because the parmesan is already salty), pours the mixture into a buttered pan and slips it into the oven. Then she sets the table, embellishes it with a vase of hand-picked flowers, lights a candle and opens a bottle of wine. She does not spend her days screaming My love my love where are you and how am I supposed to go on living without you, sixty-six years old but still beautiful still alive and sensuous and palpitating with desire?
A bit like Kerstin Matheron, Subra puts in.
You’re right, Rena agrees. Kerstin found herself similarly at a loss after her husband Edmond’s death. She told me about it one evening as I was making prints in my darkroom. She finds it easier to confide in me when she thinks my mind is otherwise occupied and in fact I have no trouble listening to her as I work; the two activities take place in different parts of my brain. ‘I think I must envy you a bit,’ she said to me that night with a little laugh. ‘All your sexual adventures…I haven’t made love in ages…almost seven years.’ ‘Because of Edmond’s illness?’ I asked. ‘Not only that. Not only that. What happened was…He sort of…ah…well, you see…a few years before his illness, he sort of left me, actually. He fell head over heels in love with one of his patients, a poetess named Alix. She was only twenty-nine at the time, whereas he was pushing sixty. Alix had everything. She was brilliant, beautiful—and so very young. Edmond told me he was thrilled by the smoothness and firmness of her skin. And how could Alix be anything but flattered by the attentions of a distinguished, cultivated doctor like my husband? He didn’t move out, but he stopped touching me and my life sort of imploded. As long as he had loved me, I’d sort of muddled through the years thinking, well, so far so good—but now, looking in the mirror, I saw, really saw for the first time, the wrinkles on my face and the spots on my hands, the flabbiness of the flesh on my upper arms, the serious beginnings of a double chin…’ ‘Stop it, Kerstin! Stop it right this minute. I refuse to hear my best friend slandered like that.’
‘Oh, Rena…All of a sudden I couldn’t stand being my body. Things were bad that year. Then they got worse. Edmond started complaining about fatigue. He went in for tests and they found he had an extremely rare form of blood cancer. The illness evolved slowly but cruelly, attacking not only his body but his mind. Destroying his beauty, his fine intelligence, his humour, his personality. One day—he’d been hospitalised by this time and was already unable to walk—I ran into Alix at his bedside and discovered she was a lovely person. Of course I’d made her out to be a scheming conniving witch, but that’s because I was jealous. So as the weeks went by we started getting together to comfort each other. God knows we needed it: before our very eyes, the man we both loved was turning into an incontinent, deranged, obstreperous monster. He refused to see anyone but the two of us. He was ashamed…He’d been so proud of his looks, and now they were gone for good…It was a shock, Rena, to go to the hospital and find our Edmond surrounded by a bunch of obscene, paranoid, loudly abusive old men…Oh, we’d tell ourselves, but deep down he’s not like the others. With him it’s only temporary; he’ll soon be his old self again—but we knew the other visitors were thinking the same thing about their men. They, too, had once been young and debonair, maybe even incomparable lovers…Every time our paths crossed in the hospital corridor, Alix and I hugged each other desperately, not wanting to let go because we knew the only place to go from here was down. We wanted time to stop. Then it was the other way around—we wanted it to speed up. We longed for the end of this slow, sadistic, relentless destruction of the man we both loved.
The night before Edmond died, I spent four hours at his bedside, holding and kissing his hands. He had such beautiful hands, Rena, I’d been in love with them for thirty-five years and they’d hardly changed, they were as slim and strong as ever. Strangely enough, at that moment, I felt the rightness of it all.’
Long silence. I was flooding my prints with water, holding them up to the light, setting aside the ones I liked. ‘I hope you know how beautiful you are, Kerstin,’ I murmured at last. ‘Thanks. Oh, I was pretty pretty once…It doesn’t matter anymore.’ ‘Don’t say that. You are truly, right now, with no reservations or qualifications whatsoever, an incredibly beautiful woman.’
I meant it. But not for a second did I imagine the effect my words would have on Kerstin Matheron…
Gaia keeps refilling their wine glasses and chattering up a storm. Rena listens and nods, weak with relief not to have to make a single decision until the next day.
Simon and Ingrid retire early—annoyed at being excluded from the conversation in Italian, or dead tired, or both. As she helps Gaia do the washing-up, Rena strives to preserve her hostess’s illusion that she understands at least half of what she’s saying.
Having guessed that Ingrid is not her mother, Gaia asks the dreaded question in a gentle voice, ‘Dov’è la sua vera madre?’
It knocks the wind out of her. Unable to form a phrase in Italian, she answers simply, ‘Partita.’
Not bad, crows Subra. It suits Ms Lisa Heyward to be described as a piece of music.
More than half asleep herself, Rena wishes her hostess goodnight and goes up an elegant wooden staircase that comes out across from the bathroom on the second floor. The two bedrooms are on either side of the landing and, because of this architectural choice made by Gaia’s dead lover—because of her fatigue, and the stress of the trip, and her boss’s anger, and the two electrocuted kids, and Aziz’s strange new aggressiveness, but especially because of the bathroom being directly across from the staircase, with one bedroom to the right and another to the left—the scene bursts into her brain.
It was summertime, the month of June. Rowan’s school had finished a week before mine and he’d returned to Montreal. He was back in his old room again just as if nothing had changed, but I was ill at ease. I didn’t recognise my brother. It was like a science fiction movie—as if there were an inhuman soul living in his body and transforming it according to its needs. His height had increased by six inches in the course of the school year, the soft blond fuzz on his upper lip had turned dark, and his hair was cut very short…But it wasn’t only that; the changes weren’t only physical; there was a new jerkiness to his movements and his
eyes no longer met mine. He made fun of me every chance he got, calling me tattle-tale, birdbrain, goody-goody.
‘No, Rowan,’ I protested in panic. ‘I’m not a goody-goody, I just pretend to be one! Deep down I’m still bad and dirty, I haven’t changed, I swear!’ ‘Prove it. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Poor little innocent girl.’ ‘Well, then teach me. Please don’t reject me. All you have to do is teach me. I’ve always been a good student.’ ‘Get the fuck out of my room. Did I give you permission to come into my room?’ ‘No, but…’ ‘Did you so much as knock?’ ‘No, but I didn’t used to have to knock.’ ‘I didn’t used to have to knock!’ (Sarcastic imitation.) ‘You may not be aware of this, Rena, but things change. Learn the new rules. You fucking well have to knock now. Got that?’ ‘Sure, Rowan. I won’t forget.’ ‘Okay. See you later.’
But since my cheeks were aflame with the rage of rejection, and since Rowan was sitting at his desk with his back to me, I couldn’t resist the temptation of snitching his miniature transistor as I went past his dresser.
The next memory is slapped up against that one as if it came right afterwards, whereas several hours must have elapsed because the sky had changed colour in the meantime. Night was falling…it must have been about nine p.m. Where were our parents? I don’t know. Oddly enough, Lucille wasn’t home either; Rowan and I were alone in the house.
You weren’t little anymore, Subra gently points out. Rowan was fifteen and you were eleven. You didn’t need babysitters anymore.
Yeah, that must be it…I was already in my pyjamas, doing my homework and listening to Sweet Emotion, I’d practically forgotten about the theft of the transistor, when suddenly I heard Rowan coming up the stairs. I knew he was furious because his step was light and swift—if he’d been faking it, he would have come upstairs with heavy plodding giant steps: ‘Okay, now you’re in for it!’ Suddenly I was electrified by fear. My heart started hammering in my chest. He’ll kill me, he’ll kill me…I decided to take refuge in the only room with a lock—the bathroom. I dived into it just as Rowan reached the top of the stairs and managed to slam the door in his face, but before I could lock it he started throwing his whole body against it like a mad bull. He’ll come in and murder me, my parents will find me lying here in the morning, bathed in my own blood…
I pushed against the door with all my strength but I could feel Rowan’s greater strength pushing on the other side, my slippers were sliding on the tiling and the door kept coming open…Icy with fear I pleaded with him—’Please, please, Rowan!’—no, I tried to plead with him but I’d lost my voice, fear had frozen my vocal chords and my throat emitted nothing but a series of rusty croaks. I kept striving to calm my heart, clear my throat and articulate the words clearly, ‘Please, I’m sorry! I apologise! I’ll do whatever you say! Please!’ but all that came out was an absurd whisper and Rowan, in silent, furious determination, kept crashing into the door with monstrous thumps of his shoulder. Finally the weakness and impotence of my vocal chords spread throughout my body and I gave up, gave in, the door burst open, inwards, knocking me flat, Rowan grabbed me by the hair and dragged me across the tiles, my head banged up against the toilet bowl, and he said, ‘Now I’ll teach you, you asked for it.’ I kept pleading with him, saying, ‘No, no, please, Rowan!’ over and over again—that is to say, my lips shaped the words, the air passed through my throat, but not a word came out of my mouth and my body didn’t put up even the semblance of a struggle. All this was in semi-darkness, it was late evening and there was almost no light coming from outside, just a single streak of orange along the top of the blue-black rectangle of sky framed by the bathroom window as seen from the floor, interrupted by the jagged black silhouettes of three pine trees, the sentries of our back yard.
When his spasms had abated, Rowan glued his sweating body to my back and I felt a fraternal tear run down my neck. Then, getting to his feet and adjusting his clothes, he said in a voice so low as to be all but inaudible, ‘Remember when you were little you always wanted me to teach you what I’d learned at school?’ His voice broke then and I had to strain to hear what followed—’Well, now you know… what I’ve been learning…in that goddamn fucking school I got sent to…because of you.’
Rena takes a Noctran and a half before slipping into Gaia’s large soft bed. Impeccably washed and ironed, the white linen sheets are redolent of lavender.
SUNDAY
‘The principle of photography…secrets no one knows.’
Selvaggio
Doing a reportage with Aziz in a foreign city—we’re in a bus but we forget to ring the bell and the bus goes hurtling past our stop—by the time we lurch to the front to ask the driver to let us off, the bus is already beyond the city limits. Getting off at last, we find ourselves in an unbelievably beautiful landscape—bright sunlight, clouds scudding across the sky, trees waving in the wind—’Look!’ I exclaim. ‘It’s pure Stieglitz!’ Glancing around, I see some enormous animals in the field right next to us. ‘Look, Aziz! What are they? Oh, my God…they’re gorillas!’ There are several of them, circling one another and emitting angry cries, clearly about to start fighting…I see lions as well, and other wild animals roaming free—there’s no barrier of any kind between them and us. ‘I’m scared, Aziz,’ I say. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ A bit farther down the road, a wildcat has escaped and a woman farmer is running after it…‘Oh my God, Aziz,’ I keep repeating. ‘Oh my God!’
Maybe your own wildness trying to escape? Subra suggests.
Strange how I kept saying Oh my God in the dream—an expression that never crosses my lips in real life. Fermata means stop—a bus stop, for instance, except that the bus doesn’t stop, it goes hurtling past the city limits and plunges us into savagery, the woman farmer in my dream is desperately trying to catch the wild animals and lock them up on her farm, just as I was trying to do by firmly closing the door behind me, yes, firm farm fermata, you want to lock things out but sometimes you just can’t, and if the truth be told I wasn’t wearing a blindfold that day, Dr Walters had contented himself with binding me hand and foot, and though my bonds prevented me from moving freely I did catch a glimpse of my father as he burst into Room 416 wearing a bathrobe which, being wide open, gave me some idea of what had been going on in Room 418…Yes, you, dear Commander! Poor tottering, detumescent, living statue, reaching to tear the whip out of Don Juan’s hands in a trance of fury and indignation—What is the meaning of this, sir? With my daughter? How dare you?—and punish him for the same infamies you were committing with another man’s daughter in the next room, thus revealing the depth of the complicity between you, revolving around your irresponsible cocks. Commanders in bathrobes, dads as pals, shrinks as lovers—none of this fatally confusing mess should ever have existed.
She drifts back to sleep.
Domenica campagnola
She is wakened by silence—the silence of a Sunday morning in the country. Its purity is almost disturbing, after the hustle-bustle of Florence’s Via Guelfa with its honking horns and revving motors…
She opens her eyes and stretches luxuriously, revelling in the charm of her room and the perspective of the relatively low-stress day ahead of them. San Gimignano in the morning, Volterra in the afternoon, after which they’ll come back to Impruneta and spend a second night here at Gaia’s.
The bathroom is flooded with sunlight. An enchanting order reigns in this house; everything bears the precise and colourful imprint of their hostess—towels in different shades of green, small bouquets of dried flowers, copies of Etruscan statuettes, scented soaps in the shower stall…Even the hills seem to have been carefully arranged by Gaia and her architect lover so as to offer a pleasant view from the bathroom window.
As she splashes her body with warm water, Rena realises she’s in an excellent mood.
All is well, Subra says. You’ve passed the halfway point of the trip and so far no one has murdered anyone; there’ll definitely be an afterwards.
A moment later, she turns off the hair-dryer and stands looking at her naked body in the wardrobe mirror, first from the front then from the back. Still passable. Peaceable. Impassive. Straight, discreet lines. No one would ever guess what it’s been through.
For all that, I didn’t become allergic to sodomy.
I should hope not! exclaims Subra, who is also in an excellent mood this morning. If you had to give up everything you learned in discomfort, what would you have left, right? There’d be no reading, no eating, no playing the violin…
The first time I suggested to Alioune that he take me that way, he responded with indignation, disgust and a firm religious condemnation. Gradually the idea grew on him, though, and within a few months he’d mastered the technique of relaxing me without resorting to gadgets or vaseline, preparing me only with his fingers, tongue and words. Once he got the hang of it, he could impale me almost surreptitiously, so to speak, as I was negotiating a photo fee with Schroeder over the telephone…or hanging up the laundry in the bathroom…or even (once, unforgettably) out of doors—in July 1998, on the Dakar cliff road overhanging the ocean, while the entire population of the city was engrossed in a World Cup soccer final on TV. He even became a little more tolerant of gays.
Our marriage began to disintegrate when he found out my wanderings weren’t only geographical. For my part, I’d accepted his numerous affairs without batting an eyelid, asking only that he give me the same freedom in return. As a lawyer, Alioune could see my attitude was logical, but as an African male—or a male tout court—he was eaten away by jealousy. Like his father, his grandfather and all his Peulh ancestors before him, he considered polygamy to be natural and polyandry inadmissible. In nature, as he told me one day with a straight face, ewes live together peacefully, but you put two rams in the same field and they’ll fight to the death. ‘Bullshit!’ I retorted. ‘In our species, males are the ones who band together. Maybe because most women are mothers, they don’t need to keep rubbing up against each other, jostling and measuring and competing with each other just to feel they’re alive…’ ‘Oh yeah?’ snarled Alioune. ‘Then how come you’re never around, mother? How come you’re always gallivanting off to the four corners of the earth? Our sons suffer from your absences!’ That hit home, as Alioune had known it would—and as Aziz knows it does now—because of my own mother’s absences. I must admit I’d got into the habit of hiring one or more ‘Lucilles’ to manage the household while I was away. And I worried about the fact that Thierno, then four or five, had started tying his GI-Joes to every chair in the house…Would he tie up his mistresses later on, as Josh Walters had tied me up? Or as I myself had threatened to tie up poor, autistic Matthew Varick?