One evening when everyone else was out, I strode into Matthew’s bedroom, grabbed him by the collar and dragged him up to my room. Fuming with rage, I brandished my skipping rope under his nose, pointed to a roll of Scotch tape on my desk, and said, ‘If you don’t shut up right this minute, I’ll bind you hand and foot and tape your mouth shut. Do you hear me?’ Matthew blushed and gulped and started shaking like a leaf.
Never had my words had such a powerful effect on another person. I found it thrilling. I wanted more. ‘S.T.A.R.,’ I went on. ‘Scotch Tape And Rope. That’s what’s in store for you if you don’t shut up. Now get out of here!’—and, so saying, I shoved him out into the hallway. He stood there gesticulating and blushing, so frightened he couldn’t budge. Then he peed his pants. The piss puddled around his feet on the hardwood floor and I told him to clean it up…But just as he was filling a basin with water at the kitchen sink, Lucille burst in and gave him the dressing-down of his life.
In the course of the ensuing months, I whispered the word S.T.A.R. to Matthew on an almost daily basis and it never failed to scare him out of his wits. I got a huge kick out of watching his cheeks go from white to red in the space of a…
Rena retches.
Remembering this story in detail between the Piazza della Repubblica and the Via Guelfa has brought her to the verge of vomiting.
Piccoli problemi
Alone at last in Room 25, she listens to the messages that have accumulated on her mobile since the day before—a good dozen of them, including two from Patrice Schroeder, her employer at On the Fringe, and three (the only ones she cares about) from Aziz.
‘Call me back.’ ‘Rena, please call me back.’ ‘Rena, what the hell is going on? Will you call me back, please? Make it snappy.’
She puts the call through, undressing as she does so. ‘My love.’
‘About time!’
There’s something odd about Aziz’s voice, a tone she’s never heard before. Inwardly, she steels herself to hear bad news.
‘Is anything wrong? You’re shaking, love.’
Often, as he approaches orgasm, Aziz’s whole body starts to shake. But she can tell that right now he’s trembling not with pleasure but with rage, reactivating the stammer that had plagued him throughout childhood.
‘All hell is b-b-b-breaking loose here, Rena. Have you been following what’s going on?’
‘No, I haven’t had a second to watch the news.’
Spluttering and stuttering, Aziz quotes to her the French government’s latest outrageous remarks about the projects north of Paris, a neighbourhood they both know well since Aziz was born there, his mother and sisters still live there, and Rena has done numerous reportages in the area. Rena listens closely, but finds it hard to connect his words with what she’s currently enduring in Florence.
‘Don’t they have TV in Italy?’ Aziz says at last. ‘Everybody’s talking about it.’
‘Of course they’ve got TV! But the Italians don’t care about France’s little problems.’
‘Little problems? You think this is a little problem?’
‘No, I think it’s a big problem, but that’s because I’m French. Maybe they’ll mention it on the news tomorrow morning—I’ll look out for it. Meanwhile, how’s my man doing?’
‘He’s eating his heart away.’
‘Hey, love, why is that?’ (She doesn’t tell Aziz you can’t eat your heart away, only out.)
‘’Cause his lady’s a thousand miles away and his heart is wasted.’
‘So why doesn’t he play his lady a song on the guitar?’
‘Oh, Rena, this week will last a year! I can’t help imagining things…’
‘Seriously…get your guitar and sing me a lullaby. I need it.’
‘Why? Are the old folks giving you a hard time of it?’ ‘Not exactly, but…Oh, please, Aziz…Sing to me.’ ‘All right, hold on…’
Before long she hears chords being strummed, before long she hears her beloved Aziz singing songs that revive and enhance the folktales his mother Aicha told him as a child, in Arabic, a language that to Rena’s ears is as sensuous as it is opaque, before long her cheeks are bathed in tears, before long she thanks Aziz in a low voice and before long she is sound asleep.
THURSDAY
‘I see the divineness in ordinary things.’
Pietà
Two young adults, a brother and a sister. They’re in some foreign country—Israel, perhaps—where the political tension is palpable and intimidating. Two circles have been drawn on the ground, one for believers, the other for non-believers. Saying he’s a believer, the boy walks over to stand inside that circle. The girl announces that she believes only in her love for her brother. To punish her, the authorities give her a gun and order her to kill him. As he slumps lifeless to the ground, her brother falls into the circle of non-believers.
No idea why my brain would suggest that version of my relationship with Rowan.
Still in bed, Rena grabs the remote control and surfs channels for a while—but there are only half a dozen of them, all in Italian, and she learns nothing of what’s been going on in the projects around Paris.
When she knocks at the door to Room 23, Ingrid, still in her nightgown, sticks out her head and whispers to her that Simon spent most of the night reading Galileo’s Daughter and didn’t get to sleep until about an hour ago. It would probably be best for Rena to do some visiting by herself, and for them to meet up at noon. Where? The Ponte Vecchio? Right.
Filled with evil delight at this new prospect of freedom, Rena runs all the way to the Piazza del Duomo, enters the Museum of the Works of Santa Maria dei Fiori, buys a ticket and draws up short, heart thumping, in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà.
A sign explains that this actually isn’t a Pietà but a Descent from the Cross, and that the old man standing behind Christ’s body—bearded, hooded, his face twisted in pain—is actually not Nicodemus but the artist himself. ‘Aged eighty at the time,’ the sign goes on, ‘suffering from increasingly acute bouts of depression, Michelangelo was obsessed with death; the statue was meant to decorate his tomb.’
Oh, all these moping, miserable men, Rena sighs. Jesus, Nicodemus, Michelangelo, my dad…If only I could pick them up and bounce them on my knees! ‘Come to me, one and all!’ Rocking them and singing to them…Lullaby and good-night, With old age bedight…La, la, la, I’d hum and croon to them, time is but a lullaby…Mary knew this well, having held her son on her lap first as a baby, then as a corpse…But men insist on pursuing lofty goals. Each wants to make his mark—God by creating the world, Jesus by saving it, Nicodemus by carrying Christ’s dead body, Michelangelo by sculpting the whole mess, my father by understanding it. They all try so hard! None will achieve his goal. Instead of complying with their wishes, reality resists. Buonarotti worked on this statue for eight years and winded up hating it. The poor-quality marble gave off sparks when his chisel bit into it. Furious, Buonarotti struck out at his creation, mutilated it, and turned away. God, too—strikes out, mutilates, turns away. My father too—strikes out, mutilates, turns away.
Subra laughs in appreciation.
Seriously, insists Rena. Michelangelo and Simon Greenblatt have all sorts of things in common. Grand ambitions, high hopes, woefully inadequate accomplishments, self-castigation. Indifference towards food, sleep, and clothing. Refusal to take care of their bodies. Fits of anger and despair. Unstinting generosity. My father could have echoed each and every word of the artist’s poem:
Woe! Woe is me!
In all my past I can find Not a day that belongs to me!
Oh! Above all, I pray Not to return to myself!
Before he died, Buonarotti burned all the drawings, sketches, cartoons and poems that betrayed his fumbling and uncertainty; my father will probably do the same with his own ‘scribblings’. Only difference: however much he wept and lamented (‘Painting and sculpture have been my downfall’) Buonarotti was sufficiently arrogant—or vulgar?—to leave a few rough
drafts lying around for terrestrial judgment. Pietà, Moses, David, Sistine Chapel, Capitol Square, Night, Day, Slaves, Last Judgment, Dome of Saint Paul, and so forth. Not my Dad. Oh, no, not that! Either wait for the right moment—the ripening, the glorious culmination, or…nothing.
So…nothing, echoes Subra with a sigh.
‘After Michelangelo’s death,’ the sign concludes, ‘this statue was completed by a certain Tiberio Calcagni. He added a Mary Magdalene to conceal the mutilation.’ Who—oh, who will come to complete my father’s absence-of-works?
Never have I been impressed by great men, or considered they were a species unto themselves.
Maybe, whispers Subra, because so many men who were powerful in the outside world turned out to be powerless in your bed?
True, Rena agrees. Yes—a fact to be stated without the least mockery or bitterness. In fact it’s rather moving when a man wants to make love to you and can’t. The child is there at once. And I don’t mean only older men—no, I mean men in their prime, who block, stress, seize up, freak out and freeze. It happens all the time. I’ve known at least as many too slow to start as too fast to end.
Tell me, Subra says.
Kerstin and I were talking about it just the other day. ‘Men have so much less fun in bed than they claim,’ I said. ‘It’s tough for them,’ she nodded. ‘They’ve got so much responsibility in love-making—the whole thing rests on their…’ ‘Shoulders,’ I put in. ‘Ah, yes, those poor shoulders of theirs—so exposed, so vulnerable. They have to keep proving they’re up to par, and if they’re not…’ ‘If they’re not,’ Kerstin said, ‘they feel pathetic, ridiculous, unmanly…And if their lover takes advantage of their weakness to make fun of them, all they yearn for is the void.’ ‘Yeah,’ I nodded. ‘Times like that, there’s not much difference between homicide and suicide.’
Aziz, too, at first. It took him months to learn to give himself up to my caresses. His mother had done everything in her power to keep him from reaching manhood, including taking him to the Turkish baths with her until he was fourteen. ‘But madame,’ the cashier finally protested, ‘he’s not a child anymore. At fourteen, he should be going with the men.’ ‘Not at all, not at all,’ Aicha replied, pressing and squeezing him against her body, squashing his face between her breasts, ‘what are you talking about? He’s my baby—look, he’s still a little boy, my darling son!’ And so, week after week, Aziz found himself surrounded by frightening mountains of female flesh—blue-veined breasts with giant nipples that looked like repulsive brown suns, quivering marbled thighs and buttocks, stomachs whose rills and ripples jiggled at every step, bloated backs and necks dripping with henna…an experience all the more traumatising that these same bodies were ferociously concealed the rest of the time, hidden scalp to sole behind long dresses, scarves and veils, so that no one could glimpse as much as an ankle or a strand of hair…
I know what I’m talking about because Aicha once dragged me along with her to the Turkish baths. It was an unusual gesture of inclusion on her part—proof of the huge effort she was making to accept this new daughter-in-law of hers, whose age (fifteen years older than Aziz), appearance (androgynous), origins (Judeo-Christian), and morals (loose to say the least) made her the antithesis of the wife Aicha had always dreamed of for her next-to-eldest son…even if she still secretly hoped I’d magically vanish some day soon and Aziz would go to find himself a sweet, submissive virgin in Algeria. Anyway, one Sunday when we were over at her place for lunch, Aicha announced that she planned to go to the baths, then added, turning to me, ‘Would you like to come along?’ And how could I refuse how could I refuse how could I refuse?
What an expedition! Worse than an outing to Disneyworld with a group of preschoolers. Just making preparations took us nearly an hour: Aicha filled three huge plastic bags to overflowing with towels, robes, hijabs, thongs, horsehair washcloths, leather slippers, boxes of henna, combs, brushes, creams, shampoo, nail files, pumice stones…’Okay, are we all set?’ ‘No.’ We needed oranges, for our after-hammam snack. ‘Really, Aicha, we can dispense with oranges…’ ‘Out of the question…’ So, as we drove to the baths (yes, yes, she has her licence), she stopped in front of a fruit stand. I saw her hesitate, make as if to get out of the car, then decide against it. ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked. Aicha told me she couldn’t purchase the oranges herself because there was ‘a whole tableful of Arabs’ on the café terrace across from the fruit stand. I was floored. ‘She’s a widow,’ Aziz explained to me later, ‘and widows mustn’t allow men to look at them.’ I managed not to retort: Listen, what kind of bullshit is it that turns a man’s eyes into a man’s cock and a fully-dressed woman into a naked woman, so that the gaze of any man on any woman, even from a distance, even if she’s clothed from head to foot, is tantamount to rape? What kind of bullshit is it that makes women lower their eyes, avert their eyes, abdicate their vision, pretend they can’t and don’t see anything, so men can go on thinking they’re the only ones with eyes in their heads? Just what are men afraid we might see? I, for one, refuse to lower my gaze. I insist on looking. It was the first decision I ever took on my own—to steal a camera and learn to frame, zoom, print, study, reprint…
In the end, Aicha sent me to buy the oranges (given that I was already an infidel, id est practically a whore)—but with her money, of course; after all, I was her guest. We got to the baths at last, and to me it was a foray into hell. The hot steam clogged up my nose and throat until I could hardly breathe; even more stifling was the sight of so many women endlessly rubbing and scrubbing their bodies, working themselves over with soaps and creams—how can you spend four hours just getting clean? As always happens when I can’t take photographs, I gradually felt myself being overcome by nausea. I kept thinking about the odalisques, all those nineteenth- and twentieth-century images depicting the voluptuous mysteries of women in the baths…Why do we never see men in the baths? I wondered. Why has no painter or photographer ever deemed it worthwhile to show us what male bodies look like as they lie around sweating and chatting? Hmm, that’s what I should do—disguise myself as a man, put some infrared film in my camera and do a series of photos in the Turkish baths on men’s day.
A hitch, Subra puts in. Not easy to disguise yourself as a naked man…
Even now, on women’s day, I wasn’t exactly blending in. Abnormally white and skinny in this context, my body elicited an embarrassing number of stares. Despite my polite refusals—’No, thanks. Really, there’s no need.’ ‘Yes, yes,’—Aicha plastered henna all over my hair because she had some left over and didn’t want to waste it. Then, still under the pretext that I was her guest and that hospitality is sacred, she made me the gift of a peeling. So it was that I found myself in the fleshy claws of another ogress—who slammed me down on my back and scrubbed me sadistically with a bar of rough black soap, literally tearing the skin off my poor little breasts, back, thighs and ass…When she released me some ten minutes later, I was flayed, scarlet, and incensed. Realising I’d go berserk if I stayed there one more minute, I told Aicha I was late for an appointment, skipped the last two stages of the inexorable ritual—donning djellabas and eating oranges—and went back to the foyer.
There, a group of young women were chattering up a storm in a mixture of French and Arabic, indulging all the while in mutual eyebrow-plucking, cream-rubbing, back-massaging, make-up-apply-ing, hair-brushing and toenail-painting. A pert young mom in her early twenties tugged at her four- or five-year-old son. ‘Hey, you! Come over here.’ The boy stiffened, refusing to cuddle up against her body. ‘Oh, so you’re a big boy, now, is that it? You’re acting proud? Well, then I won’t be your friend anymore…What? What did you say? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ She amplified her son’s whisper for her friends’ benefit: ‘I tell him I won’t be his friend anymore, and he says that’s fine with him!’ Cascades of shrill laughter. Glancing down at her son’s crotch, the young mother giggled. ‘Look! He loves me in spite of himself!’ And she started fooling around with hi
s penis, setting off fresh gales of laughter. That’ll make one more macho for the crop of 2020, I said to myself. Yet another young man who’ll be incapable of making love to women…
Subra nods gravely.
‘It’s the old story of Achilles’ heel,’ I remember saying to Aziz, after our second or third fiasco in bed. ‘Whose heel?’ ‘In the Iliad. When Achilles was a baby, his mother grabbed him by the heel and dipped him in a bath of immortality. His whole body was immersed except the heel, and he ended up dying when an arrow struck him there. Moral of the story: all men are vulnerable where their mother once held them—in your case, by the weenie.’ ‘Weird place for a heel,’ laughed Aziz. ‘Oh, it’s much more common than you think,’ I told him as I went about covering the said heel with all sorts of naughty kisses and caresses. ‘Plenty of men have heels between their legs.’ Still, it was months before Aziz was finally able to enter me, stay inside me, bloom and blossom there.
Turning away from the pseudo-Pietà, Rena finds herself face to face with Donatello’s Maria Maddalena.
Maddalena
Pretty piece of wood, this wild woman, her voluptuous naked body concealed behind a rippling curtain of long hair.