‘I know,’ she says lamely to Simon.
He purchases some newspapers in English and starts flipping through them as they walk. ‘Hey,’ he mutters in a worried voice. ‘Isn’t that the place Aziz comes from?’
‘Yes, it is,’ she says. ‘It’s also where Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables.’
‘Oh, Les Misérables!’ exclaims Ingrid. ‘We saw the musical comedy at the Place des Arts a few years ago. It was terrific, wasn’t it, Dad?’
‘Well, it’s been playing non-stop in that city for the past hundred and fifty years,’ Rena says. ‘Thousands of Jean Valjeans have been locked up for stealing a loaf of bread, or for less.’
She doesn’t tell them how many times Aziz has been held in custody overnight, or that his brother has spent the past eighteen months in the Villepinte penitentiary…Knowing that Ingrid thinks her native Rotterdam is in the process of becoming a second Kabul, she has no wish to get her started on the subject of the Muslim threat.
Instead, feigning gaiety, she chirps, ‘Why don’t we check out the cathedral?’
Duomo
Their disappointment is instantaneous.
The façade is under renovation, concealed beneath a tarpaulin on which its red, white and black striped marble has been painted in trompe-l’œil.
‘Hey!’ says Simon. ‘That almost looks like a copy!’
He’s not joking. Afflicted with near-sightedness, far-sightedness and perhaps a bit of astigmatism as well, he’s convinced he’s looking at the real thing, sun-flattened. Those who tourists do become…This time Ingrid goes about unfooling her husband’s eye.
They file slowly across the threshold, into the penumbra of the enormous cathedral. Seeing their twin fedoras, an employee gestures to Simon to take his off (in places of Catholic worship, as everyone knows, women’s heads should be covered and men’s uncovered). Without missing a beat—condensing humour and insolence, obedience and insult into a single act, eliciting Rena’s reluctant admiration and the employee’s acute annoyance—Simon removes his hat and plunks it on his wife’s head.
Innocenti
Unlike San Lorenzo in Florence, the space here is crowded, congested, fairly dripping with hybrid decoration. Fearing they’ll be overwhelmed, they decide to concentrate on the coloured marble pavements—twenty-five thousand square feet of Biblical scenes. Despite this restriction, Rena soon finds herself in the grip of familiar anxiety: how much should I try to understand? How can I be here, truly here and now—for it’s today, not tomorrow, that we’re visiting the cathedral of Siena? Determined to engrave the floor mosaics in her memory once and for all, she moves a little ahead of the others.
Here is The Slaughter of the Innocents…How many times, in paintings, drawings, photos, movies or documentaries, have we seen the emblematic image of a mother screaming as she struggles to wrest her living baby from a man bent on killing it, or wailing in despair as she holds up her dead baby?
What about you? whispers Subra. The dead half-baby in your dream…who will weep for you?
Just last April, fourteen people, including an old woman and two little girls, were massacred at a false roadblock near Larbaa. Over the past few years, more than one hundred and fifty thousand people have been murdered in Algeria, Aziz’s parents’ native land. And who are the assassins, if not our own sons? Yes, our boys—forever marching off to war, eager to suffer and spill rivers of blood, dying, killing, screaming, hating, marching, singing, putting on uniforms, saluting, seeking unison, destroying the bodies of other mothers’ sons with daggers, lances, swords, bombs, bullets, poisons and laser rays…
Feeling a sudden vibration on her left thigh, she starts as if a stranger had just pinched her.
No. Her mobile. A phone call.
Digging the phone (Aziz?) out of her tight jeans (Aziz?) with some difficulty (Aziz?), she glances at the screen. No, it’s Kerstin.
‘How are you doing?’ she whispers, heading for the cathedral door.
‘What about you—still kicking?’
‘Barely.’
‘I’ve got some bad news.’
‘Ah.’
‘Bad for me, anyway.’
‘Then it is for me, too.’
‘Well…even for me, it’s not that bad, but…’
‘Cut the suspense. Who’s dead?’
‘Alain-Marie.’
‘Oh.’
‘Heart attack—bang, gone. Yesterday. His sister called to tell me. Since then I’ve talked to a number of his friends and learned the details…He was with a young woman…’
‘Twenty-four?’
‘Something like that. And…don’t laugh, Rena…’
‘Oh, no, let me guess…An overdose of Viagra?’
‘Isn’t that awful? He was just my age, sixty-one. It’s so weird, you know? The veterans of May ‘68 are starting to die…Weirder still, Pierre is devastated. He says I prevented him from getting to know his real father. He wants to learn all he can about Alain-Marie; he’s even composing piano music for his funer—’
As if in imitation of Alain-Marie’s heart attack, Rena’s mobile emits a series of panicky beeps and suddenly the screen goes blank. Silence. Even though Siena’s cathedral was wired with electricity in the late nineteenth century, she doubts they’d let her use it to recharge her phone battery.
She goes back to join the others.
Pestilenza
They’re seated on a bench across from an enormous fresco. Ingrid is leaning forward to rub her ankles; Simon’s eyes are closed. Standing next to them are four tall, blond individuals dressed in white: clearly a happy, closely knit Scandinavian family. The mother is analysing the painting; the father is nodding his interest; their teenage son and daughter are asking intelligent questions.
In desperation, Rena opens the Guide bleu. What can she tell Simon and Ingrid about this cathedral that will bring it alive for them?
You’re not the only one, Father, to have had your plans thwarted and your dreams defeated by the ups and downs of fate…Look at Siena! The original project was to build the biggest church in the world right on this spot (the present Duomo was just the transept!). In 1348, however, construction ground to a halt as the city’s population was reduced by two-thirds. Mounds and mounds of dead bodies. Disgusting, purulent, stinking corpses. Black buboes, people moaning, women screaming in agony, babies tossed at random into common graves…The whole European continent writhing in the same pestilence…There…That make you feel better?
Naturally, she holds her tongue.
Kannon
The minute they leave the Duomo, Ingrid begs for a lunch break—yes, now, in the first café they come upon. Hoping to find a terrace in the sunlight, Rena convinces her to wait a bit—and suddenly they find themselves in Il Campo. Ah yes: she remembers this splendid, scallop-shell-shaped square, each of whose nine pavements represents one of the communes that made up the independent republic of Siena in the twelfth century, before it became the Ghibel-line enemy of Guelfan Florence. Something like that, yes, something along those lines. They find restaurant tables on the sunny side of the square, and, preoccupied not with Siena’s heroic past but with their own petty problems, just as the inhabitants of twelfth-century Siena were preoccupied with theirs, and so it goes, they order sandwiches, salads, acqua gassata.
A self-styled clown is circulating among the tables, heckling the customers, offering to imitate them. Finding him unpleasantly reminiscent of the other night’s dictator in Florence, Rena brushes him off unceremoniously: ‘Non voglio niente, niente!’ Ingrid stares at her, eyebrows raised, taken aback by her violence.
Relax, little one, Subra murmurs in her head. Look around you, take a deep breath, calm down. Life is lovely.
‘You look lovely today,’ says Simon out of the blue. Rena jumps at the coincidence between his actual utterance of the word and Subra’s imaginary one. ‘Can I take your photo?’
‘You haven’t been taking many pictures, Rena,’ Ingrid points out, as Rena hand
s the camera to her father.
‘Hard to compete with the postcards,’ she mutters sarcastically.
‘True.’
Rena finds it troubling to see the Canon in her father’s age-speckled hands. It’s as if he were holding one of her own limbs, a detached but living part of her body. After examining it with great care, he positions it, aims it, and presses the shutter. Once, twice…
‘Don’t you want to smile, Rena?’ asks Ingrid.
‘Not particularly. Do I have to?’
‘No,’ says Simon. ‘You’re fine just as you are. With your dark glasses, fedora hat and leather jacket, you look like a movie star incognito.’
‘Movie stars aren’t what they used to be,’ says Ingrid.
Rena shouts with laughter. Ingrid hesitates, then joins in.
You’re the exact opposite of Marilyn Monroe, teases Subra. She was happy only when looked at; and you, only when looking.
Their orders arrive, and Simon passes the camera back to her with a flourish. ‘Do you know who Canon cameras are named after?’ he asks.
‘Jimmy Canon, the sworn enemy of Bill Kodak and Bob Nikon? No, I have no idea.’
‘K-A-N-N-O-N,’ Simon spells out. ‘An exceeding strange Japanese bodhisattva.’
‘Why strange?’ queries Rena, stabbing a number of aqueous little shrimps with her fork and slipping them into her mouth.
‘Because the Japanese made a woman of her, whereas in India she was a man. And not just any man: Guanyin, the most popular bodhisattva of the Great Vehicle. I happened to see an article about it a while ago…’
‘Really?’ Rena says in surprise. So her father is still interested in Buddhism? ‘And what is Kannon’s specialty?’
‘Compassion. She’s the…hang on a sec, I jotted it down somewhere…’
Her surprise turning to stupefaction, Rena watches as her father riffles through his wallet and comes up with the appropriate scrap of paper in less than five minutes.
‘“She who listens to and receives the pain of whole world,”’ he reads aloud, ‘“and responds to it with one giant word of compassion that encompasses all in an ocean of infinite joy.”’
‘A bit like the Virgin of Divine Mercy?’ suggests Ingrid.
‘You don’t know how right you are,’ Simon nods. ‘Japanese Christians bow down before statues they call Maria Kannon. Isn’t that incredible? And Canon, the Japanese company, was named after that very bodhisattva. You remind me of her.’
‘A goddess of compassion,’ Rena grumbles. ‘What next?’ Tears fill her eyes, fortunately concealed by her dark glasses.
‘Seriously. We went to your Misteries show last April…’
‘You did?’ She feels dizzy.
‘Do you think our daughter could have a show in Montreal without our going to see it? It made a big impression on us.’
‘Yes, it was interesting,’ Ingrid concedes, ‘although I keep hoping you’ll eventually choose a more—’
‘I found it admirable,’ Simon says, interrupting his wife. ‘Not just because you’d obviously put years of work into it, but because…to open up their private lives to you like that, to allow you to get so close to them, those men had to feel you really accepted them…Kannon, see what I mean? A strong show indeed,’ he concludes.
‘I would have seduced Bin Laden,’ says Rena, to lighten the atmosphere.
‘I’ll bet you would!’ Simon laughs.
‘I would have seduced the Pope.’
‘Rena!’ Ingrid says.
‘Sorry. Er…would you believe…the Great Rabbi of Jerusalem?’
A silence ensues, in the course of which Rena directs her full attention to making sure the little beasties of her insalata di mare stay on her fork.
As they’re having coffee a while later, Simon glances through the newspapers he purchased earlier. ‘Wow. Looks as if sparks are flying in France!’
‘Of course sparks are flying. What do you expect? Two kids get their brains fried and the government contents itself with saying they deserve it. I should hope sparks would fly!’
The clown she rebuffed earlier comes up to her. ‘Grazie mille, signora, per il vostro spettacolo,’ he says in a loud voice. ‘Era veramente meraviglioso! Formidabile! Stupendo!’ So saying, he slips a fifty-centime piece into her palm.
‘You guys feel up to visiting the Museo Civico?’ she says, pocketing the coin.
‘Sure thing!’ Simon and Ingrid crow in unison.
What’s going on? wonders Rena. You’d think we loved each other or something.
Dolore
White, nude, gigantic, marble hand pressed to marble brow, looking like a Rodin Thinker who swapped meditation for despair, the man on the museum’s ground floor stares transfixed at the source of his pain. No: the word pain being masculine in Italian, it’s not what he is enduring, it’s what he is.
I’m not saying it’s you, Daddy, I’m not saying it’s you.
In fact the statue reminds her of Gérard, a former prison inmate whom she had decided not to include in Misteries, after an afternoon spent talking with him in his twentieth-arrondissement squat.
His shame at living in such poor surroundings, his stilted conversation, his complete lack of emotion when he took his childhood photos out of an old shoe box to show them to me…Those should all have been warning signs, but somehow I didn’t pick up on them.
Tell me, Subra says.
Gérard had been sentenced to—and done—ten years for the hard-porn films he’d produced and posted on the net in the mid-nineties. Because they were banned, those films are worth a mint today. He had hired the best lawyers in Paris to draw up a contract for him, and convinced a dozen young women to sign it. I agree, the contract said in substance, to remain naked in front of a camera for two hours and let two men do whatever they want to me. ‘The films really got interesting, Rena,’ Gérard told me, ‘when the girls changed their minds.’ He didn’t offer and I didn’t request details as to the reason for this reversal. With a firm contract, Gérard knew he was legally covered, so he paid no attention when the women begged him to call the whole thing off. Staring at the man’s handsome face just a few inches from my own, I realised I’d have to renounce taking his picture. Gérard is one of the few people I’ve been unable to photograph—that is, to love. He was beyond the pale.
Never could he have told me what was done to him, long ago. Forever obliterated, the memory of his mother—a young, exhausted single woman, her nerves on edge—teasing and mocking him when he was a boy of two, making him sob, then hitting him to make him sob louder—Hey Gérard, stop crying you little baby, you little asshole, you little cocksucker—slapping his face, then really getting into it, raining blows down on his head, giddy with the possibility of killing him—you little asshole—and he, Gérard, so tiny, helpless, utterly at her mercy. The more he begged her to stop, the more she felt like bullying him, breaking him. The more ear-shattering his cries grew, the more she wanted to get rid of him. They were alone in the apartment—just as, later on, Gérard would be alone in a soundproofed basement of Paris’s ninth arrondissement with the beautiful, reckless, masochistic, penniless young women who, for money, had agreed to take off their clothes in front of a camera. It excited him to have them at his mercy, just as children are at their mothers’ mercy. When they sobbed he felt a rush of euphoria, and when they begged him to stop he motioned to the cameraman to keep shooting: that was when the very best scenes got shot, the ones that caused the most sperm and money to flow. Men who hate themselves—and they are legion, as Gérard well knew—are more than willing to pay to ejaculate. The more they pay, the more they feel they’re worth. In Washington, Moscow, Paris, and Tokyo, big shots who are still little boys deep down are prepared to part with ten thousand dollars for a single coitus with a call-girl; they’re sure to come then, because they’ve paid a fortune to do so.
Back when Gérard was producing those films, his wife had guessed he must be involved in something fishy because suddenly the
y were rolling in it—but, happy to be able to buy mink coats and go on holidays in Majorca, she hadn’t asked too many questions. Then everything fell apart. Of the dozen young women Gérard had paid to be savagely raped in front of a camera, four decided to sue.
Just the sort of case Ms Lisa Heyward might have handled, Subra puts in.
True…Gérard was sent to prison, and his wife left him. Dolore, dolore, he lost everything. ‘I’ll never understand, Rena,’ he told me, at least fifteen times in the three hours we spent together. ‘I didn’t break a single law!’ Like Eichmann’s, his incomprehension was sincere. I’ll bet anything Eichmann’s mother tortured him, too. Impossible to understand your punishment, afterwards. What little boy would ever dream of dragging his mom to court?
They ascend the grand staircase together.
Buon Governo
Still radiant from their recent exchange over the shrimp, they stand side by side in front of the famous Ambrogio Lorenzetti frescoes. Next to them, an elderly Englishwoman is giving explanations to a young man, probably her son.
My sons! Where are my sons? Suddenly Rena misses Toussaint and Thierno terribly. If I take a trip with them a quarter of a century down the line, when I’m seventy years old, will they be as tormented by guilt, impatience and fury as I’ve been with my father over the past few days?
‘What are the prerequisites of Good Government?’ asks the pedagogical Brit. ‘Reading the painting as if it were a book, from left to right and from top to bottom, you can find the answer. There have to be strong bonds, first between heavenly angels and Lady Justice, then between Lady Justice and Lady Concord. Concord goes on to weave those bonds into a rope and the rope gets passed from one burgher to the next, eventually coming out over here, where it moves upwards to become a sceptre…’