Though only a teaching assistant at the time, Simon was slogging away at his thesis and his future seemed full of promise. His specialty was neuropsychology, but he was determined to throw off artificial shackles and cross borders between disciplines. Freedom, freedom, freedom! One of his heroes was Leonard Cohen: born within a year of each other, raised in Westmount and educated at McGill, both had dabbled in lysergic acid diethylamide—an amazing substance that plunged you into heaven and hell by turn, twisting your memory, splattering unpredictable images—now sublime, now atrocious—onto the screen of your mind, paroxystically heightening all your perceptions, pulverising your sense of self, and imitating the symptoms of psychosis in uncontrollable ways. Also like Cohen (to say nothing of Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and many others of the time), Simon Greenblatt had turned away from the Jewish religion of his childhood to explore the arcane concepts of Buddhism, in which the very notions of self, world, and reality were dissolved.
‘Challenge authority! Invent yourself! Accept entropy, the only truth of the universe!’ My father’s other idol was Timothy Leary, one of whose phrases was to become his mantra: ‘There is no such thing as mental illness; there are only unknown or imperfectly explored nervous circuits.’ After getting himself kicked out of Harvard in 1963 for handing out hallucinogenic drugs to his students, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert had settled into a mansion in Millbrook, New York and founded the League for Spiritual Discovery or L.S.D. For years Simon Greenblatt had dreamed of going down to work with those pioneers and helping them invent a new paganism. In actual fact, he only set eyes on Leary once. So did I, on May 31, 1969, at age nine. Tim Leary had come to Montreal to support his friends John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their ‘Give Peace a Chance’ event. Simon dragged my mom and me to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel—where the Beatle, his wife and her young son sprawled stark naked in front of cameras from the world over, to express their disapproval of the Vietnam War. Because of the police cordons in front of the hotel we didn’t get to see the bed-in itself, but I did catch a glimpse of Leary’s bell-bottomed jeans when, as reporters’ cameras flashed and popped, he jumped out of his limousine and dashed into the hotel. ‘Look—that’s him!’ yelled Simon, struggling to pick me up and set me on his shoulders, though I was already far too heavy for those sort of antics. ‘One does not carry a nine-year-old child around on one’s shoulders,’ said Mommy. ‘Okay, Lisa, keep your cool,’ answered Simon, setting me back on my feet. ‘That man, darling Rena,’ he went on—I can still remember his exact words—’is a true revolutionary in my field of study. But now that he’s decided to switch to politics and run for governor of California, the path is clear for me to take up the torch and complete his discoveries. Yes, it’s perfectly possible that Professor Simon Greenblatt will some day win the Nobel Prize.’ ‘They don’t give Nobel Prizes in neuropsychology,’ my mother pointed out. ‘Well, they’ll make one just for me,’ my father retorted. ‘You’re not even a professor yet.’ ‘Not to worry.’
They exit the church.
Stupida
It’s only half past three, but Ingrid claims to be hungry. Given the number of pastries she gobbled down at the hotel just a few hours ago, Rena knows this can’t be true—what’s true is that she’s afraid of being hungry. She’s been in the grip of that fear for the past sixty years—ever since the horrendous winter of 1944-45, when hundreds of Rotterdamers starved to death and the rest were reduced to eating garbage, rats, and grass…Nothing frightens Ingrid more than the prospect of lacking food. Her eyes, like everyone else’s, reflect the demons of her childhood.
They spot a perfect-looking café on the far side of the Piazza del Duomo and start to head for it. Oh, but everything is so tedious, so difficult…The throngs on the footpath are stifling. How can my amorous strolls through Florence with Xavier be so very far away? wonders Rena. Was it really the same city? The same life? The same me? How can the past be so irrevocably past?
‘That’s weird,’ Ingrid says suddenly. ‘All the tourist shops seem to be selling Québecois T-shirts. Now, why would that be?’
Perplexed, Rena glances at one of the shops. Oh, right.
Again Simon undertakes to enlighten his wife. ‘No, no,’ he tells her gently. ‘The fleur-de-lys was the emblem of the Medici family for centuries.’
‘You don’t need to laugh, Rena,’ says Ingrid, turning crimson. ‘Anyone can make a mistake.’
‘Sorry,’ says Rena.
She’s right, Subra tells her in petto. Why would a Dutchwoman from Montreal be conversant with the history of the Medici court? Who’s required to know what about what and why? And who are you to cast stones—you who trot the globe hiding behind your Canon, guzzling down information at random, belonging neither here, there nor anywhere, and whose motto could be the ‘Just looking’ muttered by people out of pocket in fancy boutiques the world over?
‘Hey!’ Since they sat down ten minutes ago, Simon has been studying not the menu but a city map. ‘This palace here is called Vecchio, just like the famous bridge. Must be the name of some Tuscan duke or other.’
‘No,’ Rena says gently, in turn. ‘No, Daddy, it just means old. Old palace. Old bridge.’
Those who tourists do become / Must put up with being dumb.
Kodak
After their substantial snack, Simon and Ingrid feel the urgent need to go back to the hotel for a nap. Rena starts leading them in that direction, but in the Via de’ Martelli they walk past a Kodak store and Simon comes to a halt. ‘Maybe they sell disposable cameras here?’
Rena’s heart sinks.
Of course she could wait for them outside, taking advantage of the next fifteen minutes to turn on her mobile phone and call Aziz or Kerstin in Paris, Toussaint in Marseille, Thierno in Dakar…or to take pictures of the Florentine tourists’ feet. She decides against it, though. Whether out of masochism or fascination with her own annoyance, she walks into the store with them.
At once, ear-splitting rock music leaps on them and sets about mangling their synapses.
Here goes. ‘Would it be better to buy a roll of twelve pictures or sixteen? Maybe even twenty-four?’
‘Look—this one’s got sixteen pictures for six euros, and this one’s got twenty-four for only eight, it’s a better bargain.’
‘No, twenty-four’s too many. I mean, we’ll be buying postcards as well—we’ll never take twenty-four pictures.’
‘Are you sure? If we don’t use up the roll, we can always finish it in Montreal.’
‘No, ideally we should finish it in Italy and get it developed before we go home—so Rena can tell us which ones she wants copies of.’
Rena wanders through the store, studying the various cameras on sale with a penetrating, professional air, registering nothing.
This, Subra tells her in a solemn voice, is a real moment of your real life. Every bit as real as when, standing in the kitchen doorway, Aziz picks you up and plants you on his cock and you wrap your legs around his waist and toss your head back and start moving on him and moaning…As real as your two childbirths—or a sunrise in Goree—or the war in Iraq. All these things exist. Okay, you’re uncomfortable being in a Kodak store in Florence with your father and stepmother. Okay, the music is scrambling your brain. But just think, it could be worse. I mean, you’re not a pregnant young woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo, faced with a battalion of young militiamen from Burundi who are preparing to gang rape you, then shove sticks or rifles up your womb to cause you to miscarry, then force you to drink your own body’s blood and eat your own baby’s flesh. That, too, is a possibility of human existence on planet Earth in October 2005. Consider yourself lucky to have nothing worse to complain about than being forced to listen to the hemming and hawing of an elderly couple in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Getting a hold of herself, Rena looks over at the young man behind the cash register. Aged eighteen or nineteen and sporting a Bob Marley T-shirt, he flashes a smile at h
er. Far from cursing them as tourists, he seems to sympathise with her for having to kill time, assuring her that it’s no big deal, there’s no reason to rush, she’s still in the game despite her age and it’s a gorgeous day.
Who is this boy? Rena wonders. Who are his parents? What’s his goal in life—above and beyond this stultifying job that immerses him eight hours a day in ear-shattering music? What sort of future does he dream of? Our destinies have intersected here—lightly, slightly, it will all be over in a few seconds, this whole event is doomed to oblivion, non-existence, nothing is really happening, yet…What would it be like to stretch out naked on the naked body of this thin, muscular young Florentine, make drops of sweat stand out on his forehead, move my lips over the faint shadow of a moustache on his upper lip, feel his long golden fingers moving between my legs?
Subra encourages her to continue.
Oh, joy of the imaginable, the possible, the conceivable! First and foremost among human rights—the right to fantasise! Not be where you are; be where you are not. Yes, it works both ways—while her husband pumps monotonously away at her, a woman can use her mind to review her shopping list; doing the dishes, on the other hand, she can float off to seventh heaven with the lover of her dreams. In order to concentrate on the Great One’s order to Abraham Go forth and multiply, a Lubavitch labours his wife through a hole in the sheet that covers her from head to foot; meanwhile, nothing can prevent the wife from imagining that the guy beyond the sheet is Brad Pitt. In a Tokyo nightclub called Lucky Hole photographed by Araki, you see life-sized female figures sketched on a series of tall white plasterboards. Where the woman’s head should be they glue a photo of a sexy young film star, and at crotch level there’s a hole. The client can slip his member through the hole and, even as he dreams he’s possessing the starlet, be brought off by a female employee sitting on the other side of the plasterboard. Though the women hired for this job are usually old and ugly, their technique is unsurpassable. When I told my friend Kerstin about the Lucky Hole, she burst out laughing. ‘Just imagine there’s an earthquake in Tokyo one day,’ she said, ‘the nightclub collapses and one of the clients discovers he’s just come in his own mommy’s hand!’ As for me, I can’t help wondering what images go floating through the old woman’s mind as she deftly, professionally brings off her invisible clients…Yes, women, too, fantasise—thank goodness!
Go on, Subra murmurs, listening to Rena’s spiel as intently as if she were hearing it for the first time.
Oh…the day Xavier took me with him to Dublin’s National Gallery and we spent a full hour in front of Perugino’s sublime Lamentation Over the Dead Christ…Sam Beckett was fascinated by this work of art, with its ‘lovely cheery Christ full of sperm and the women touching his thighs and mourning his secrets’. And it’s true—Christ’s fleshly nature is particularly palpable in this painting. Staring at it, I couldn’t help wondering why Jesus’s experience of humanity had been limited to suffering, why it included bleeding wounds and dark temptations but not erotic swoon, not the marvellous tingling waves of desire that begin in your genitals and flow all the way to your toes and fingertips. The Perugino came back to me that same evening in a pub, as I watched the crablike movements of a musician’s left hand on the frets of his banjo. I felt as aroused by the sight of the banjo-player’s fingers as Martha and the two Marys must have been by Christ’s naked body—and so, with the taste of Guinness on my lips and the sound of words like sperm and chrism in my brain, I began to imagine how those hands would move on my hips, breasts and shoulders…When the set ended and Xavier rose to leave, I motioned to him to wait for me outside and, leaning forward, said to the man in a low voice, ‘I love the way your left hand moves on the neck.’ His gaze swerved to meet mine and he toppled headfirst into my eyes. As he sat up straight, grabbed my hand and asked me my name, the warmth in his voice told me that he was already rock hard. ‘Rena’, I replied, delighted to be able to say it in English for once, not retching the R the way the French do. ‘I’m Michael,’ said the man. Then, realising that I was about to walk out of his life as abruptly as I’d walked into it, he asked with frantic hand gestures if I lived close by, if he could get in touch with me, and I answered, also gesturing, that no, I lived far, far away. Then, leaning towards him again until our faces all but touched, I bade him good night.
My blood was fairly simmering with the fire of that brief exchange, the electrically erotic touch of the man’s hand on mine. And what caused me to swoon the following morning, when Xavier set me on my knees in our hotel bed and reared up behind me, was not just the view in the mirror of our two bodies gilded by dawn’s first light and his member moving in and out of me, but also an intoxicating mixture of Jesus Christ, Sam Beckett, and Michael the banjo-player.
No one can punish us for such joys. Even women who live behind burqas in Afghanistan continue (I hope!) to swing up onto their dream horses and canter off through the clouds, clutching their mount’s creamy mane in both hands, feeling the violent shudder of its flanks between their thighs, panting, gasping and crying out in pleasure. Every woman contains a cosmos—and who can prevent her from welcoming into it those male or female guests who know exactly how she needs to be loved, or from loving them back with a vengeance?
The Kodak chapter has come to an end.
Once she has set the couple safely on their way to the hotel, where they’ve agreed to meet up at eight, Rena heads off on her own. Within the minute, she recovers her body, her rhythm, her elasticity.
Dante
A pocket of calm on the Borgo degli Albizi. Rena photographs the chiaroscuro patterns on the balconies and façades of the buildings: sharply delineated lozenges and triangles of shadow in the slanting rays of the late-afternoon, late-October sun.
Passing in front of a tiny chapel, she reads the sign at the entrance and laughs out loud.
So it was here, on this very spot, in this simple, sober, sombre church with its whitewashed walls, that Dante first laid eyes on Beatrice di Folco Portinari. Electric shock. Love at first lightning-bolt. The year was 1284. He was nineteen and she was eighteen.
Did Beatrice even glance at the young man whose eyes were burning into her? Did she even guess at the tumult in his heart? No one knows. All we know is that he never either touched or spoke to her. The following year he married another woman, who would become the mother of his children…And in 1287, again in this very church, he attended Beatrice’s wedding to a wealthy banker (do poor ones exist?). There was nothing between them!
Ah, the fabulous power of male sublimation! Dante’s love was entire, intact, immaculate; it had no need of Bea! All it needed was itself, a magic stone that gave off sparks when he rubbed it. ‘Beatrice’ was an image, an idea, a compact nucleus of energy that eventually exploded into—La Vita Nuova! La Divina Commedia! All glory to ‘Beatrice’, who revolutionised not only the Italian language but the history of literature! Bea the woman gave up the ghost at twenty-four, most likely during a difficult childbirth. So what? By that time Dante was far away from Florence, in exile in Ravenna, alone with his masterpiece.
Subra rewards her with a laugh.
And what about me, Daddy? Men must have adored me from afar on countless occasions, don’t you think so? Me at twenty, sweet young thing wandering the streets of Naples with my white skin and green eyes, a flowery salmon-pink pantsuit floating on the body you and my mother distractedly made together, eliciting the insults, gropes and pinches of Neapolitan machos…Me at thirty-five, on assignment for a reportage in war-torn ex-Yugoslavia, feeling the Kosovars’ eyes glued to my body like melting, sticky, stinky tar…Me only last year, venturing alone into the casbah in Algiers, hearing gazelle at every step and thinking in annoyance that North Africans badly needed to renew their stock of compliments…Who knows how many masterpieces I’ve given rise to, here, there and everywhere, without knowing it?
In the same street, a little farther down—Dante’s house. Ah, yes it is impressive, though of course it’s be
en rebuilt from top to bottom. And now she has the time. She goes inside.
Standing in front of her at the cash register is an obese American couple. ‘Isn’t it hard to believe,’ the woman says, ‘that the people who built this house had never even heard of the United States?’ Her husband nods gravely. (Those who tourists do become / Must put up with being dumb.)
The second floor contains a pedagogical display on the famous war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, an episode of European history which for some reason never sticks in Rena’s mind. She deciphers the explanations. Ah, yes, it all comes back to her. Civil wars in Germany and Italy in the late Middle Ages, spiritual versus secular power, Guelphs for the Pope, Ghibellines for the Emperor, their bang-bang-you’re-dead lasting a good two centuries…The usual crap. Infighting, too, naturally. Within the Guelph ranks: moderate Whites versus fundamentalist Blacks, bang-bang-you’re-dead…The Blacks of Florence wound up expelling all the Whites, including Dante Alighieri. Banished from the beloved city of his birth, never to return. All glory to exile, all glory to intolerance—were it not for the war of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, there would have been no Divine Comedy!
On the third floor, she finds visitors seated in semi-darkness watching a slideshow of the Inferno. Illustrations by Blake and Dürer, recorded excerpts…
‘So with our guide we moved on unafraid By the red bubbles of the scalding ooze Wherein the boiled their sharp lamenting made.’