Yes, Galileo and Greenblatt—thick as thieves, for sure! Alike, as well, in their scorn for all those who prize jaspers and diamonds over fruit and flowers. ‘Some men really deserve,’ said Galileo, ‘to encounter a Medusa’s head which would transmute them into statues of jasper or of diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are.’
Dreadful obstacles were placed in the Italian astronomer’s path. Real persecution, real impediments. Harassment, condemnation, destruction of career. At seventy-five—five years older than you are now—he was placed under house arrest, and would remain a prisoner of the Inquisition until his death. All this afflicted him at first, yet he recovered and went back to work. Kept at it. So they wouldn’t let him speculate about the cosmos anymore? All right, then he’d cast a bell for Siena’s cathedral…take up his old treatise on movement… write a few more Mathematical Demonstrations and Discourses…In other words, despite all the obstacles, he went on discovering things all his life…because he wanted to. Because he could, and would, and had to. Because it gave him joy.
Oh! Had my father only met him! But no…So he spent long years bravely struggling with his colleagues’ pragmatism and his employers’ indifference, to say nothing of his own doubts. In Montreal circa 1965, where were the Galileos who could have joined him in exploring the farthest reaches of sky and soul?
No one persecuted him. But he used up his time, squandered his energy, and watched his dreams go floating off into the distance. Boats of ice…
Why did Simon Greenblatt never deserve any joy? Why did he let his vocation get bogged down in absurd marital quarrels?
You, of course, Subra teases, would never dream of quarrelling with your husbands.
Two subjects and only two spark quarrels between Aziz and me: mothers and God.
Aren’t you ashamed of squabbling over such trifles? smiles her Friend.
I am, but there’s nothing for it. On the subject of mothers—when I dare tell him I feel asphyxiated by Aicha’s hospitality, her endless meals of couscous and sweet pastries, her pathological demand for gratitude, he gets all worked up and yells, ‘Basically you think mothers should be unavailable, don’t you? The way your mother was with you? Or the way you are with your own kids? Come right down to it, you have no idea what motherhood is all about!’ At that point I start beating him up. I enjoy a good tussle now and then—it reminds me of wrestling-matches with Rowan when we were kids, or football games with his friends in Westmount. I adored pile-ups—a dozen male bodies thudding on top of mine as I clutched the precious ball to my stomach—sure, I got hurt, even badly sometimes, but I never cried. Aziz is stronger than I am, and when he gets tired of fending off my punches he grabs me by the wrists and starts twisting my arms; almost invariably we wind up making peace in bed…
On the subject of God, Aziz simply refuses to believe I don’t believe in him, though I’ve explained countless times that in my father’s brain there was a place for God but it was empty, whereas in my own brain the place doesn’t exist so neither does the emptiness. Those quarrels don’t lead to punching or shouting; the air between us simply roils with silence, suspicion and dark misery. Here again, though, the bad feeling usually dissipates when we start tearing off our clothes, panting, soldering our bodies together in the kitchen doorway, in the shower, on the living-room rug, on or under the dining-room table…
Our worst quarrels occur when the two themes converge, for instance when Aziz comes home from a visit to his mother in the projects and I can tell Aicha has been getting on his case again about his girlfriend’s age and atheism: ‘So you’ll never give me a grandson? You’ll never have a Muslim son, Aziz? You’ll never be a real man?’ Those nights, as during the first weeks of our love, my sweetheart’s cock stays soft and small…
Still standing next to Simon, Rena stares at Galileo’s middle finger.
‘Did the Catholic Church ever apologise for its error?’ she asks. ‘Once they were forced to acknowledge that the Earth revolved around the Sun, I mean?’
‘Yes,’ Simon replies. ‘John Paul II finally admitted Galileo was right, three and a half centuries after the great scientist’s death.’
‘Did he add that, by the same token, Urban VIII was wrong?’
‘Oh, I doubt he went that far. Don’t forget, the pope’s infallibility didn’t become dogma until the nineteenth century.’
‘I see. And it’s not retroactive?’
‘No. So Urban VIII had the right to make a mistake.’
‘Well, the museum could at least mention the fact that Galileo’s story didn’t end with his retraction.’
Simon checks to make sure Ingrid is out of earshot. ‘Yeah, you see?’ he says. ‘Only his finger protests.’
And Rena laughs. Even if he’s belabouring the point a bit, she laughs. Even if she suspects that, deep down, he’s comparing Galileo’s persecution to Timothy Leary’s, she laughs.
As they sit waiting for lunch in a nearby pizzeria, Rena leafs through the book Simon purchased at the museum gift shop.
Galileo’s Daughter. Well, well.
It would seem Virginia and her father shared a deep spiritual communion…just like you and me, hey, Dad? Except that I betrayed you. Virginia entered the convent at age fourteen and took her vows two years later under the name of Suor Maria Celeste; she fervently loved her daddy all her life long—supporting him, doing all she could to protect him from the Inquisition, writing him hundreds of letters, sewing clothes for him, turning his fruit into jams and jellies, running the convent apothecary, concocting remedies, and…dying at age thirty-four, long before he did. Sorry about that, Dad.
Feltro
Their next destination is the siesta—but naturally it would be unthinkable for them to head straight for the Hotel Guelfa and make it there without detours, hesitations, twists, turns or distractions. As they pass a hat stall in the marketplace near San Lorenzo, Simon (who needs to protect his vulnerable pate) decides this is as good a time as any to replace the absurd blue baseball cap he’s been wearing since they left Montreal.
He comes to a halt. Rena sighs inwardly.
It’s just the opposite of love, she realises in amazement. When you’re in love, time expands and boredom is unthinkable; every second is as round, full and juicy as a ripe grape. Your lover needs a pack of Pall Malls? Ah! A thrilling adventure, to spend twenty minutes waiting in line with him in a stinking tobacco shop while fifteen depressing individuals in slow succession scratch their heads over which Lotto ticket to buy. Everything is exciting, simply because the two of you are sharing it. Your love infuses every particle of the universe, even the most trivial and unsightly, with meaning—no, with music…
Simon removes his cap and tries on several hats in front of a cheap hand mirror dangling from a nail. Meanwhile, Ingrid strikes up a conversation with the stallholder. Three minutes later, he opens his wallet to show her a snapshot of his daughter in Sri Lanka.
‘Oh, isn’t she cute?’ Ingrid coos.
‘Thank you, madam. Soon I have another child.’
‘Really? That’s wonderful!’
‘God willing, I go to visit them next summer…’
This is October. Rena studies the young hat seller, searching his features for signs of anxiety over his future—money problems, the children not recognising him when he comes home on his annual visit…Objectively, his life seems grim indeed, and yet his face shines with hope.
After trying on some two dozen hats, Simon finally selects a brown fedora almost identical to Rena’s.
Ingrid frowns. ‘That’s not your style,’ she says dubiously.
‘It can become my style,’ Simon retorts. And he begins to haggle over the price. But even haggling is something Simon can’t do the way other people do.
The young salesman, who had instantly knocked the price down from twenty-five to twenty euros because his merchandise was overpriced to begin with, wants to knock it down some more. ‘I’ll let you have it for eighteen,’ he says, touched
by their admiration of his daughter.
‘No,’ says Simon, digging coins out of his change-purse and laboriously counting them out. ‘You said twenty, I’ll pay you twenty.’
‘No, really, I insist,’ says the young man. ‘Fifteen, come now, fifteen. You’ve been so kind.’
‘Twenty-three,’ Simon says.
This goes on for another five minutes. When at last they move away from the stall, Simon has paid twenty-five euros for his hat and everyone is beaming.
Vietato
A moment of peace.
Rena showers, puts on fresh clothes and smokes a cigarette, sitting next to the window in her room’s only armchair. Down below, the garden is no longer empty: a bare-chested young man stands next to the white plastic picnic table, shouting into a mobile phone.
He looks about twenty—Thierno’s age. His authoritarian tone contrasts comically with his fragile body—narrow shoulders, almost hairless chest and tummy. Physically, he reminds her of Khim—the slender, gracious Cambodian she married to do him a favour, shortly after Fabrice’s death…
Tell me, murmurs Subra.
Khim was forty at the time but looked twenty. He was a gastro-enterologist and had received his medical degree in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge came to power. After the five years of the genocide, during which he’d been ‘re-educated’ in the rice fields, he’d managed to leave Cambodia following the Vietnamese invasion, thanks to a patient of his who was in the Viet Cong. Once in Paris, Khim discovered that, unless he acquired French nationality, he’d have to start his education all over again, so he set about looking for a French wife. I’d been naturalised thanks to my marriage with Fabrice—who, though Haitian-born, had himself acquired French nationality thanks to his first marriage with a woman from Madagascar, who in turn had been previously married to a Basque. That sort of daisy-chain of mutual assistance was easier to bring off in the eighties than it is nowadays…
Subra snickers obligingly.
Anyway, I was happy to be able to help Khim—a lovely, feminine, traumatised, delicate man, Buddhist into the bargain—by wedding him. Our marriage was as light and ephemeral as a butterfly. We lived together for a year, not making love (he was gay) but taking acute pleasure in each other’s company. By the time we divorced by mutual consent, I’d taken a thousand photos of him and he’d told me a thousand stories…
Returning to Inferno, Rena stumbles on a passage that makes her sit up straight:
Per l’argine sinistro volta dienno; ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta coi denti, verso lor duca, per cenno; ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
Incredulous, she checks the English translation. Yes, that’s really what it says.
Along the left-hand dike they wheeled about; But first had each one thrust his tongue between His teeth towards their leader for a signal; And he had made a trumpet of his rump.
She laughs out loud at the seven-hundred-year-old fart. At that very second there’s a knock on her door and she jumps out of her skin—as if she herself had been caught farting.
Revived by their nap, Simon and Ingrid have come to see her room. Not much to see, but…Simon finds it a pity that she doesn’t have a balcony. He goes back out into the hallway, sees a door with the universal no-entry symbol on it—a red circle with a white horizontal line—and opens it at once. Rena represses a flare of anger.
He can’t help it, Subra reminds her. That’s just the way he is.
I know, sighs Rena. As an adolescent, following Leonard Cohen’s example, Simon rebelled against his father Baruch, the sweetest pious Jew who ever lived, and all the restrictions of their milieu. ‘Jews are born bargainers, my little Rena,’ he told me one day. ‘More than anything else, they love to bargain with God. “Listen, YHWH, you don’t want us to do this, but you don’t mind if we do a little of that, do you? Will you spare the city of Sodom if we can find fifty good people there? How about if we can only find thirty? How about ten? Hmm, let’s see…If there’s only one good person, will you spare the city then?”…Or else: “All right, you don’t want us to use electricity on the Sabbath, but you know how it is in modern-day cities, it’s no fun walking up eleven flights of stairs, so listen, YHWH, let’s make a deal. Next to the Goy elevator we’ll build a Jewish elevator—it’ll stop automatically on every floor without our having to press a single button—that all right with you? You won’t notice a thing, will you?”… Or again: “You told us not to move stuff from one house to another on the Sabbath, but the fact is that in this Goys’ world Saturday’s the most convenient day for moving. So we’ll just put an Eruv around the neighbourhood—very discreetly running an almost invisible plastic or metal wire through the trees and bushes—that way the whole neighbourhood can be thought of as a single ‘house’ and we can move as much stuff as we like from one ‘room’ to another—all right, will you go along with that? You won’t notice a thing, will you?” People set limits where they need them, my little Rena. As for my own limits, God and I came to an understanding long ago: I tell him I don’t believe in Him, and He says that’s fine with Him. That way I can study brain synapses without having to worry about blasphemy.’
Simon thus allowed himself to be carried away by the radical ideas he gleaned from Leary’s books (Start Your Own Religion, The Politics of Ecstasy, Your Brain is God, and so forth), and was hypnotised by his endlessly repeated order to ‘Question authority’. As a result, the minute someone forbids him to do something, he feels compelled to do it—apparently not noticing that this implies unquestioning submission to the authority of Timothy Leary.
The forbidden door opens onto a fire escape, and Simon promptly sits down on it. ‘Isn’t this terrific?’ he says proudly. ‘It’s almost as good as a balcony.’
The young man in the garden looks up and glowers at them. ‘Proprietà privata,’ he says in his booming voice.
‘Scusi, signor,’ says Rena.
She drags her father back inside—gently but firmly, as if he were one of her sons—and shuts the door.
What Simon neglected to explain to me that day, she goes on, mentally addressing Subra, was that there were in fact two ways of being Jewish in Montreal—on the mountain and behind the mountain (to say nothing of the many nuances in between). Our own family was emphatically on the mountain—the affluent, secular neighbourhood of Westmount, inhabited mostly by male Jewish professionals who had married Goys and chosen, among their people’s motley and contradictory traditions, to perpetuate only scintillating intelligence and self-irony. Outremont, behind the mountain, was another kettle of fish, and the Saturday morning I first went there with my mother was a real shock to me. I must have been twelve or thirteen, and when I saw the frowning, hard-featured, bearded men striding down the street dressed in black coats and tall, stiff, often sable-trimmed black hats, long ringlets dangling from their temples…and the bewigged women with no make-up, thick black stockings, shapeless skirts hanging to mid-calf, my eyes popped out of my head.
‘Who are they?’ I asked my mother. ‘They’re Hasidim,’ Lisa answered absent-mindedly, which didn’t enlighten me much. ‘Hasidim means the very-pious,’ she added. ‘They’re Lubavitches. Orthodox Jews.’ Now she’d lost me completely. ‘Jews? You mean like Daddy?’ ‘Yes, but not like him. Daddy’s a Jew too, but not an Orthodox Jew.’ ‘What kind of a Jew is he, then?’ ‘Well, you see, large groups of people tend to split up into smaller groups, each with its own customs, its own ways of eating and dressing and celebrating feast days…’ ‘So what are our customs?’ ‘Oh…nothing special.’ ‘Why do those men look so angry?’ ‘They’re not angry—they’re just not supposed to look at us, that’s all.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because we’re women.’ ‘So what?’ ‘So nothing. So they want to concentrate.’ ‘On what?’ ‘How should I know? On what they consider important. The Torah, for example. Especially today, because Saturday’s the sacred day they call the Sabbath.’ ‘What about us? Have we got a Sabbath?’ ‘No. Yes. Well, not exactly. We rest up a bit on Sunday,
which is the Christian Sabbath, but only if we feel like it. Sometimes we work Sundays, too, whereas Orthodox Jews never work Saturdays; they have to obey a whole slew of rules from sunup to sundown. I thought Simon explained it to you.’ ‘Yeah, he did, a bit, but…but I didn’t know what they looked like.’
Impressed by the sullen, scowling faces of the Lubavitches, I conceived the plan of forcing one of them to desire me.
Forbidden? Let’s do it, Subra chuckles. Red light? Go for it. Barrier? Plough right through.
I’m not blind, Rena nods. I can see I’m caught in the same double bind as Simon. Not easy to challenge the authority of someone who has ordered you to challenge authority. The more I rebel against my father, the more I resemble him.
Since my parents paid scant attention to my comings and goings, it was no problem for me to jump on my bike the following Saturday and pedal all the way to Outremont. I hid behind a tree on Durocher Street to wait for the ideal victim. The Hasidim men strode past me in their great black fluttering coats, looking for all the world like sinister crows. Finally I saw a young man approaching—mid-twenties or so, tall, thin, angular and nervous-looking, wearing a hat that was too big for him. I made up my mind on the spot: he’d be the one. Carefully concealed behind my tree, I let him go by, then leapt on my bike and zoomed past him, hitting him just hard enough to knock off his hat. As the man was picking up his rolling hat and clamping it back on his head, I braked and turned at the same time, let out a yell and tumbled painlessly to the ground. There I was at the poor man’s feet, spread-eagled on the footpath with my skirt awry. ‘Ow, ow, I’m sorry, sir,’ I moaned. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but a bee stung me…and now I think I must have sprained my ankle. Oh, it hurts, it hurts…’