Nancy Huston - Infrared

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.