Waking up with a start, Rena instantly recognises the ‘famous’ man’s initials.
Ingrid hasn’t slept a wink.
At eleven p.m., they force themselves to go down the hallway and purchase sandwiches from a machine. Each of them is now mothering both the other and herself: mothers know you can’t think clearly on an empty stomach. You get nervous and irritable when you’re hungry; you overreact.
The sandwiches stick in their throats. They wash them down with water.
‘Go out and have a cigarette if you feel like it,’ Ingrid says, ‘I’ll tell you the minute somebody comes.’
‘Thanks,’ Rena answers, ‘but I’m not going anywhere.’
Puma
At midnight, having dragged its heels unbearably all evening, time suddenly pounces on them, the way a puma pounces on a gazelle.
A doctor sticks his head through the door and motions Rena to join him in the hall. He prefers to talk to her, he says, because his French is better than his English. He can’t fool her, though: the truth is that he dreads the wife’s reaction more than the daughter’s.
‘What happened is this,’ he says. ‘We started off with an X-ray… just a routine thing, you know…your father’s injury isn’t serious…I mean, it’s always impressive to see a big bump like that…but it’ll go away in a few days, it’s nothing at all…Anyway, what happened is this…’ The man is in his early sixties; his tone is calm and professional. Rena can tell he has fulfilled this obligation countless times in the past and learned to keep his voice low, firm, and especially continuous. Yes, it’s of the utmost importance that he keep talking: his voice is like a rope the patient’s loved ones have to be able to hang onto and follow, step by step, with crystal-clear logic, from start to finish. ‘We noticed something else on the X-ray—a shadow. You never know, it might have been simply a light effect, but we figured it was worth putting him through a few other tests in case it was something more serious. Your father had his insurance papers on him and he signed all the authorisations, so we went ahead and did a TDM and then an MRI. The results just came back and… well, unfortunately, madame, to put it as simply and directly as possible, unfortunately, madame, we were right: it was serious. We discovered a glioma in your father’s brain, a sort of primitive tumour of the nervous system. I’m very sorry to have such bad news for you. For the time being, we’ve told him nothing, naturally. He’s resting up. Your father is a very nice man. A very nice man indeed.’
Rena forgets. She doesn’t know how. She doesn’t speak French anymore, or any other language. Subra, too: struck dumb.
The doctor feeds her rope for a while longer. He tells her that, in his opinion, it wouldn’t be a good idea for Mr Greenblatt to take a trans-Atlantic flight in the morning as planned. It would be better to keep him under observation for a day or two—and organise his transfer to a hospital immediately upon his return to Montreal.
Rena is hardly listening anymore. Her thoughts are rushing around in all directions like panicked mice, flashing at top speed and in random order through the images of the Tuscany trip, stopping at one only to seize up in terror and dart off to another. Her father stumbling on the Piazza San Marco…dozing off on twenty different benches…lousy Virgil…sitting on the floor in the History of Science Museum…standing in Gaia’s living room, head in hands…complaining of migraine headaches…forgetting the scarf he’d given her… All this not symptomatic, as it turns out, of bad faith or bad will or bad mood, not at all—but rather, since the outset, since day one, no, since before that, maybe long before that, no one knows since when… The third time she re-enters the waiting room, Ingrid leaps across the room and grabs her by the arm.
‘Is he all right?’ she asks.
‘He’s resting. The doctor says he’s such a nice man that they want to keep him a little longer. Let’s go out for a drink, hey? We deserve one. Let’s get soused.’
But Ingrid cannot be fooled—not even by Rena Greenblatt, that inveterate liar. She sees right through her. Grasps the fact that the two of them are the gazelle, and that the puma has just ripped their throat open.
‘Rena! Tell me.’
‘Let’s go, Ingrid.’
Rena virtually drags her stepmother to the desk, where the exhausted middle-aged receptionist has been replaced by a cute young redhead.
‘Prego, signorina, are there any cafés open at this time of night?’
‘Everything’s closed in the neighbourhood, signora. Except maybe at the train station. Yes, you might try the train station—I think there’s a coffee-shop there that stays open all night.’
Thus it is that Ingrid and Rena spend the night at the Stazione Santa Maria Novella, side by side not to say intertwined on a worn red-leather wall seat. This means that the following morning, just as Rena’s plane is taking off for Paris from Amerigo Vespucci Airport, they have top-notch seats for the TV news headlines that flash onto the screen in flaming red letters: ‘France declares a state of emergency’.
Outside, it looks as if it’s going to be a beautiful day. A church bell clangs, and, capturing the first rays of the rising sun, the Tuscan capital’s ancient bricks and roof tiles begin to smoulder.
NOTES
The quotes on chapter title pages are from Diane Arbus’s correspondence, excerpts of which are published in Revelations, Random House, New York, 2003.
The translation of Dante’s Inferno is by Laurence Binyon.
Beckett’s description of Perugino’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ is from a letter to his friend William McGreevy.
Pico della Mirandola quotes are from Catherine David, L’homme qui savait trop, Seuil, 2001, p. 125, translated by the author.
The dialogue with Galileo paraphrases one of Dava Sobel’s paragraphs on the subject in her book, Galileo’s Daughter, Fourth Estate, London, 1999, p.44.
‘Some men really deserve…’ is from Galileo’s Daughter, ibid, pp 152-3, from Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Translated by Stillman Drake. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967, p. 59.
Woe! Woe is me!’ lines are from a sonnet by Michelangelo, in Nadine Sautel’s Michel-Ange, Gallimard, Folio, 2006, p.28; the line ‘Painting and sculpture have been my downfall’ is quoted on p. 77 of the same work. Translations by the author.
‘that much attention’ from the notes of a student who attended Arbus’s photography class at Westbeth in July 1971, quoted in the film Going Where I’ve Never Been.
On kinbaku, the custom of tying up women for the pleasure of monks, as well the characteristics of the Buddhist deity Kannon, cf. Philippe Forest, Araki enfin: l’homme qui ne vécut que pour aimer, Gallimard, 2008.
‘because, quite simply…’, interview from Jean-Pierre Krief’s film Nobuyoshi Araki, La Sept/Arte.
My heartfelt thanks to Séverine Auffret, Mihai Mangiulea, John Stewart, Fred Le Van and Tamia Valmont.
Nancy Huston, Infrared
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