Meanwhile there were endless hours of solitude and boredom to be got through. When Rowan finally came home from school, he taught me everything he’d learned there. Day after day—reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography. My brother gradually becoming more than a brother to me—father, mother, god, sole horizon. ‘I’m the sun, Rena, and you’re the moon.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You have no light of your own; all you do is reflect my light.’ ‘Yes. We’ll stick together forever, won’t we, Rowan?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘We’ll live together when we grow up.’ ‘Come give me a hug.’ Five and nine, at the time. My plump soft body pressed up against his wiry, knotty one. ‘I’m a nice girl, aren’t I?’ ‘Sure you’re a nice girl.’ ‘You love me, don’t you?’ ‘Sure I love you.’ ‘I love you more than anything in the world.’ ‘Damn right you do.’ My heart skipping a beat at the swearword. ‘But I’m older than you are, so you have to obey me.’ ‘I know.’ ‘I’m the master and you’re the slave, okay?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Promise?’ ‘I promise.’
Rowan was warm. And because he was warm, because he was like the sun to me, because I worshipped him, overjoyed by his trust in me and awed by his inside knowledge of the adult world, everything he said and wanted was right. So when he said, ‘You know, Rena, it’s not enough to be nice, you’ve got to learn to be bad, too,’ I nodded and promised to do my best. And when he slipped his middle fingers inside of me, one from the front and the other from the back, and tried to force them to touch, I winced and squirmed but when he said, ‘That doesn’t hurt, does it?’ I said, ‘No.’ And when he used his penknife to remove all the twigs and leaves from a thin supple willow branch, then impaled me on it, causing me to bleed, and said, ‘Don’t worry, Rena, it’s only natural, women bleed all the time, you should be grateful to me for making a woman of you,’ I said, panting against the pain, ‘Thank you, Rowan.’ Crying or complaining were out of the question—I had no one to turn to. You weren’t around then, Subra; I hadn’t invented you yet.
Rowan wept sometimes—when our father, because of the tensions in his marriage or the long hours of fruitless work in his study, would suddenly turn on him, make fun of him, needle and berate him on the pretext of hardening him up, thickening his skin. ‘A boy’s got to know how to defend himself, hey?’ he’d say, flicking the tea towel at Rowan’s arm over and over again. Yes, Rowan would weep then, collapsing on the floor in tears. His bedroom was just below my own, and I knew I’d hear him sobbing long into the night…
Basta. Enough—more than enough melancholy for one day.
Rena gets up. Within ten minutes she is washed, dressed, out of there.
Mirandola
Simon and Ingrid are waiting for her in the breakfast room—she, quietly stuffing herself, he, poring over a leaflet about Pico della Mirandola.
‘This guy was unbelievable,’ he says to her by way of a greeting.
Studying the leaflet as she drinks her coffee, Rena nods. Of course. The philosophical genius who died an untimely death in Florence in 1494 (he was only thirty-one) reminds Simon of himself as a youth.
No doubt about it, Dad. You and Pico were looking for the same thing—’the connections among all the universes, from the lives of ants to the music of the spheres and the dwelling-place of angels.’ Though Pico took the high road of religion and philosophy, and you, the low road of brain chemistry and neurology, what both of you hoped to prove was The Dignity of Man. ‘The only being,’ as Pico expressed it, ‘in whom the Creator planted the seeds of every sort of life. The only one who has the privilege of shaping himself into angel or beast according to his fancy.’ What a thrilling Mirandolian idea!
Simon Greenblatt had exactly the same intuition: that people shaped themselves, fashioned selves for themselves out of the tales they were told, and were freer than they really knew to change their identities. Now, at the breakfast table in Florence, surrounded by the clatter of dishes and the hiss of milk being frothed for cappuccino, he longs to share with his daughter what he’s just learned about the great philosopher.
His sentence begins, hesitates at length, turns a corner, goes skidding off track—’Sorry’—begins again. Advances with excruciating slowness. Comes to a halt. Starts over again, after a long pause.
Oh, Daddy, Rena thinks in desperation, you’ve lost the thread. Your brain spins dozens of threads that lead you astray, wind themselves round you, trip you up, tie you in knots, immobilise you. Poor Gulliver-on-the-Arno, how will you ever get out of this mess?
Yet your brain throbs with true wisdom and teems with countless facts. No soul could be more generous than yours, no interrogation more genuine, no quest more ardent…it never manages to jell, that’s all. What’s lacking is…lightness…alacrity…humour…the joy of choosing words, watching them file out on stage, line up, grab hands…and then, to the rhythm of pipes and tambourines, launch into a fabulous farandole!
No. I know.
What’s lacking is…self-love. Something Pico probably found at his mother’s breast…and that you didn’t find at yours?
Granny Rena was a case. You named your eldest daughter after the woman you so desperately wished you could love, so she’d forgive you…for what crime, exactly?
Tell me, Subra says.
My paternal grandparents made a narrow escape from Poland in the early thirties, settling first in France, then in Quebec…But in 1945, upon seeing the photos of the death camps in which every member of her family had perished, from her two grandmothers down to her little second cousin, Rena sank into a permanent stupor. She was thirty-five at the time, and Simon ten.
Whose photos of Dachau and Buchenwald did she see? Very possibly the ones published in Vogue and Life by that lovely blonde American photographer named Lee Miller. At the age of seven, Lee Miller was so lovely and so blonde that a ‘friend of the family’ raped her and she contracted gonorrhoea. Over a period of several months, her tiny vagina and uterus had to be subjected to acid baths—an excruciating treatment that made her scream, day after day. Despite the pain inside, her body stayed perfectly lovely and blonde on the outside, so when she was eight her father started photographing her in the nude. As she grew towards adolescence he asked her to strike more and more lascivious poses. Then she left for Paris and was photographed in the same poses, also in the nude, by Man Ray and other Montparnasse artists. Despite her loveliness and her blondeness, Miller thought she might be interested in looking rather than being looked at—so she became a photographer herself. One day, thanks to an accident in her dark room, she discovered solarisation—a technique that consists of very briefly exposing the photograph to light during development—just as she herself had been exposed to male desire during her own development. Solarisation creates weird effects—in photos, halos, and, in little girls, the ability to split off from their bodies and the imperious need to search for meaning…Only in war would Lee Miller find the meaning she was looking for—first the destruction, bombing and ruins of cities in Britain and France, then the death camps, which, in April 1945, she was among the very first journalists to visit. Yes, she must have recognised something in the insane pornography of what she saw in the camps—chaotically exposed nudity, violent effacement of individuality, naked, fragmented, broken Jewish bodies, people turned into objects, non-entities. Unlike the other photographers, Miller approached the corpses without revulsion and photographed them close-up. Instead of framing anonymous heaps, piles, mountains of corpses, she insisted on capturing them as people—one person, another, yet another, each with his and her own history, showing their beauty, their personality, their still-human features, their naked bodies, their living dying bodies, every body a potential body, still human, still so very, very human—just as women exhibited in the nude, treated as if they were interchangeable objects, are in fact human individuals. In Buchenwald, Miller finally managed to inject meaning into an existence she had hitherto found, as she puts it, ‘extraordinarily empty’…
Once she’d seen those photos and learned what they implied,
Granny Rena lost her ability to participate in life. Rena Greenblatt: prostrate, inaccessible. She never talked about her mourning, but it made her indifferent to everything else. Her pain was intimidating. Most days, her room was darkened and off-limits to her two children, Simon and his older sister Deborah. She withdrew her love from them, and her being from the world.
Baruch, on the other hand, poor sweet clumsy Baruch who sold men’s suits over on Saint Lawrence Boulevard, was a good dad—present, loving, funny, even erudite in his own way. Though his head was most often up in the clouds with God, his heart was filled with concern for his family. Morning and evening he would tie an apron around his waist and start fussing in the kitchen, trying to cook for you and failing, burning even the fried eggs, forgetting to turn off the gas, tearing the bread when he tried to butter it because the butter was rock hard, straight from the fridge. Oh, your poor pa…Old before his time, forever smiling, overworked, humble and humiliated…You felt sorry for him, Simon. Throughout your teenage years, you were filled with silent rage at your mother for not being like other mothers, and for turning your father into a nebbish. No way you could invite friends over to the house: with the invalid woman and the aproned man, your house was far too strange…
A little like yours? Subra whispers.
Yeah, come to think of it, a little like mine…
When you left home at last, at age eighteen, you must have solemnly sworn never to resemble your father, a weakling you loved but pitied. A meek, submissive, altruistic, unmanly man who’d given up all hope of having a great destiny here on Earth. You, Simon, would be a real man…
Sliding the Mirandola leaflet back across the table, Rena gently pats her father’s hand.
They’ve made big plans for the day ahead: first the History of Science Museum, and then, following their afternoon siesta, the Ponte Vecchio and the Piazza della Signoria…
Haughtily ignoring the hundreds of tourists lined up at the entrance to the Uffizi, they skirt the Palazzo Vecchio and head down to the Piazza dei Giudici, the Judges’ Square.
‘This is where Savonarola was condemned to death,’ Simon solemnly announces.
‘Who’s that?’ Ingrid asks.
‘A fanatical priest. In the fifteenth century, right on this spot, he built bonfires of the vanities, burned the works of Pico della Mirandola, and was eventually hanged himself, then burned at the stake. Incredible, to think all this happened five hundred years ago, before the first white man ever set foot in Quebec. Before that part of the world was known as Quebec, in fact,’ he adds, savvier than the American lady in Dante’s house.
‘Right,’ Rena nods. ‘The Indians didn’t do bonfires of the vanities, they just did campfires.’
‘And they couldn’t burn books,’ Ingrid puts in, ‘because they were illiterate. Hitler burned books, though…’
Rena hastens to change the subject. She has nothing against Hitler, so to speak, but feels he shouldn’t be allowed to invade the whole world.
Scienza
It’s for Simon’s sake, of course, that they’ve chosen to visit the History of Science Museum.
Once they’ve whisked through the first room, however (wonders of ancient clockwork, tiny crenellated cogs from the workshops of Florence, Geneva and Vienna), Simon decides to peruse the museum pamphlet for a while. No benches—so, oblivious to stares, he sits down on the floor like a tramp, baseball cap on lap, wispy grey hair standing on end.
Ingrid and Rena move on alone—too scared of him to urge him off the floor, too scared of the museum guards to join him there. Astronomy, meteorology, mathematics…but how to discuss these things without Simon? Where to go? What to do? Everything they visit now without him will need to be revisited later with him; the present moment thus becomes absurd.
After a good half hour, they go back to the first room and timorously ask (last thing they’d want to do is offend him, harass him, give him the impression they’re bossing him around), ‘Don’t you want to come and see?’
Rising at last to join them, he strides through one room after another—prisms, magnetism, optical machinery, transmission of energy…
Hey, what’s the hurry, Dad?
You the precocious child, forever top of the class, admitted to university at age sixteen…You the brilliant, curious, gifted young thinker, light of foot and heart. You the insomniac, mad with joy, utterly possessed by your vocation: to fathom and describe the origins of consciousness, the fabulous machinery of the human brain. You who, later on, would initiate me into these rites—thrilled to see my eyes widening in amazement, the light getting passed on. And it did get passed on. Look, Daddy—I inherited all these discoveries! To measure the temperature of the invisible in 1800, Herschel needed both Galileo’s thermometer and Newton’s prism; these allowed him to demonstrate the prodigious fact that the sun emitted infrared rays. I’ve been working on that side of the spectrum for twenty years—the spectral side, yes—the ghostlike, dreamlike universe wherein light waves, so short as to be invisible to the naked eye, start turning into heat. I use my camera to slip beneath people’s skin and show their veins, the warmth of their blood, the life that pulses within them. I reveal their invisible auras, the traces left by the past on their faces, hands and bodies. In rural and urban landscapes, I explore the ethereal detail of shadows, turning foreground into background and the other way around. I set the motionless into motion as no film could ever do, and show how the different periods of our lives echo one another. Connecting past to present, here to there, young to old, dead to living, I capture the fundamental instability of our lives. I try, in every reportage, to make the acquaintance of one person and to do all I can to understand what has shaped them. Leading them away from their official identities, I accompany them home, question them and listen to their answers, play with them and their convictions, watch them change masks, study them in the flow of their existence, love them as they love themselves, leave them freer than I found them…I use infrared to disturb the hic et nunc that is the very essence of photography.
Oh, Dad, why are you walking so fast?
‘I’m mainly interested in Rooms Six and Seven,’ says Simon. ‘The ones devoted to Galileo.’
Bambini
To get to Rooms Six and Seven, though, they must first pass through Room Five—the History of Obstetrics.
Plaster moulds hanging on walls: dozens of life-sized uteruses painted in realistic colours. Nestled amidst the viscera, against the backbones or beneath the ileums: babies babies babies, single or twins, on the verge or in the process of being born, head first, rump first, foot first, arm first, sometimes with the help of forceps.
As they pass through this room, visitors tend to hasten their step.
These gaping wounds are a shock to them. A far cry indeed from the immaculate blue-and-white Virgins of the Nativities. Here, bodies teem, glisten and ooze. Flesh is garish, slippery, awful. Piles of intestines. The parturients’ legs are chopped off at the thighs, bloody steaks.
Simon, too, hastens his step.
Obscene obstetrical obstacles…It was all those naissances, wasn’t it, that prevented your own Renaissance? A giant lets out a roar. A jet of sperm shoots from his stiff cock. Year after year, each jet an embryo-clot—cells which, dividing, multiply. The babies grow, come into the world, grow, drink, grow, eat, grow. Horrified, the giant takes to his heels, pursued by his offspring. He trips and falls headlong. His children devour him.
Galileo had only three children, all with the same non-wife, Marina Gamba. The girls were placed in convents; the boy lived with his mother in Padova. No family life of any sort. It was the tradition for erudites to remain unmarried.
Right, Subra nods. Two wives, six kids—far too many, for a man who hopes to think.
Galileo
Room Six proudly exhibits a framed copy, in both Latin and Italian, of the great scientist’s retractatio.
At Ingrid’s request, Rena translates: ‘I have been judged and vehemently suspected of he
resy, that is, of having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the centre of the same…I hereby abjure with sincere heart and unfeigned faith. I curse and detest the said errors and heresies.’
As she reads, Simon moves on a bit. Suddenly he comes to a halt in front of a glass display case and shouts with laughter, causing dozens of touristic heads to turn.
‘What is it?’ asks Ingrid in a worried voice.
‘Look—oh, no, just look at this!’
Obedient as usual, the two women approach the display case. Ingrid gets there first, and Rena sees her features contract in disgust.
‘A finger?’ she says.
‘And not just any finger,’ Simon chuckles.
He goes on chuckling until they get the joke. There, decked out in a lace ribbon and preserved these four centuries under a bell jar, stand the remains of the great man’s middle finger. The nail has blackened and the bones are starting to crumble, but the relic proudly declares to the Catholic powers-that-be: Eppur si muove!
Oh, Galileo Galilei! If only you and my father could have met, you would have become the best of pals! You’d have spent long hours together, discussing the law of floating bodies. ‘Ice: lighter or heavier than water?’ ‘Heavier,’ said scientists of old. ‘Why does it float, then?’ ‘Because of its shape. Large pieces of ice with flat bottoms float, just like boats. Read Aristotle.’ ‘You’re wrong,’ said brave Galileo. ‘Even if you shove a piece of ice to the bottom and hold it there, it will rise to the surface the minute you let go of it. Lighter than water, then, appearances notwithstanding.’