Nancy Huston - Infrared

How sad, Subra nods, to have such a sophisticated camera and no one to smile at…

They walk back to the Lungo Corsini and begin to wend their way along the river. The temperature is delightfully mild, and an all-but-full moon is rising beyond the Ponte Vecchio. Impossible, however, to savour the instant: no boardwalk to stroll along, no bench to sit down on, no way to be together. Squashed between the flow of cars and the flow of pedestrians, they’re forced to advance in Indian file.

‘Hey!’ Simon suddenly exclaims. ‘Doesn’t that look like a satyr’s knees?’

Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…

Rena stops, turns, looks at what he’s pointing to — the wrought-iron balustrade is studded with a decorative motif. ‘I suppose so,’ she nods vaguely. ‘Very stylised, though.’ She sets off again.

‘And if those are his knees,’ her father insists, ‘what’s this, in your opinion?’

Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…

Stopping, turning, looking again, Rena sees a protuberance between the ‘knees’.

‘Dad!’ Ingrid protests.

What does he want them to say?

‘Wow.’

All right? That make you happy? You got one, too?

Rena turns away. Sets off again, jaws clenched. Stares up, beyond the sunset-gilded bridge, at the moon. Almost full, yes, almost pure.

They reach the Ponte Vecchio at last—’the only one of Florence’s bridges,’ the Guide bleu informs Rena, ‘to have escaped destruction by the Germans.’

Having no wish to get Ingrid started on the subject of the Second World War, Rena refrains from translating this passage for them.

‘Isn’t it magnificent, Dad?’ Ingrid exclaims.

‘The ancient neighbourhoods on either side of the river,’ the Guide bleu goes on, ‘were destroyed by landmines. Though reconstructed, they delude no one.’

Oh, yes, they do. They delude us just fine, thanks.

The elderly couple stands there, entranced.

Delusion is a many-splendoured thing…right, Dante?

Piazza della Signoria

Simon is impressed.

‘Incredible. To think Savonarola held sway on this very spot.’

‘Who?’ Ingrid asks.

‘You know, the fanatical monk we talked about this morning.’

‘Oh, yes, right…’

It’s nearly time for dinner. Why not have a real meal this time, in a real restaurant?

They find a place. White tablecloths, ancient wood panelling, grey-haired waiters.

‘Do you prefer red wine or white?’

‘I don’t drink anymore,’ Simon says.

‘Oh? You mean not at all?’

‘Not at all.’

Rather than leaving it at that, he launches into an explanation. Alcohol, Rena learns, is incompatible with the drugs he now takes to steady his heartbeat, soothe his soul, calm his nerves and keep despair at bay. With Ingrid’s assistance, he runs through the list of his current medications, counting them off on his fingers, explaining dosages and proportions, chemical interactions and adjustments, experimentations and side effects (drowsiness versus insomnia; stupor versus restlessness; blinding light versus darkness; vertigo, palpitations, panic attacks).

‘I see,’ Rena says. ‘Just water, then?’

‘Just water.’

She orders a bottle of Valpolicella for Ingrid and herself.

Can this really be the man who used to drop acid with me when I was seventeen or eighteen, ostensibly to cure me of my migraine headaches?

Tell me, Subra says.

‘You’ll see, it’s pretty amazing,’ he’d say, putting Bach’s Sonatas for Solo Violin on my record player, carefully extracting from his wallet the tiny squares of blotter paper he called Timothy Leary tickets and slipping them under our tongues, then calmly sitting down next to me on the couch to await the first effects. After about forty minutes, the patterns in my wallpaper would start to swirl gently in time to the music.

Now, three decades later, only a few scattered memories remain of our trips together. How excited we were, for instance, to discover — familiar, yet exponentially enhanced — the miraculous combination of tastes, colours and textures that went into the making of a ham sandwich. Ham…butter…bread…mustard…lettuce…Each ingredient a quintessence, an absolute. Explosion of saliva. ‘How is it possible,’ we’d say to each other, ‘that we usually gobble this down without noticing, after muttering, Hm, I’m feeling a bit hungry, why don’t I slap together a ham sandwich?’ Yes…’slap together’… Following which we’d spend another twenty minutes admiring — as if it were a precious gem — the various facets of the expression ‘to slap together’.

Once, I recall, as I stood at the window marvelling at the beauty of the sky, Simon came up to me and announced, ‘Blue does not exist.’ ‘What?’ ‘The colour blue. It doesn’t exist objectively in the universe. Only in the brains of certain mammals whose retina happens to capture a particular wavelength of light emitted by the sun.’ ‘Wow!’ I answered. ‘For something that doesn’t exist, the colour of that there sky sure is gorgeous.’

We laughed and laughed.

The expression I’m feeling blue was suddenly imbued with tragedy.

‘Maybe the same goes for God?’ I suggested a while later. ‘Huh?’ ‘Maybe God’s like blue — He exists only in the eye of the beholder.’ ‘Magnificent!’ Simon said, applauding in delight, and pleasure flooded through me.

Und so weiter. Every detail of the world, whether sensory or mental, would get blown up out of all proportion the minute we brought our attention to it, and we’d tumble into it head over heels, losing ourselves in its contemplation and exhausting ourselves in its commentary. When a silence came, each of us would wander through it separately, heading off on a solitary path through the forest of our own thoughts and memories, often winding up in dark thickets rife with danger. Sometimes my father would come upon me huddled in a corner of the room, convulsed with sobs and shaking in fear — in which case he’d take me by the hand, help me up, lead me over to some image, smell or sound into which I could plunge with delight. Other times, I’d come over and sit down next to him, lay his dark curly head gently on my thighs, dry his tears, stroke his forehead and sing him a lullaby to calm him down…

The bottle of Valpolicella is empty, and Ingrid has drunk only one glass.

Lurching over to the cash register to pay the bill, Rena realises her mind is a blur.

They emerge into the white floating ineffable beauty of the square by moonlight — ancient façades, Arnolfo Tower, giant statues of David, Perseus, Hercules. All is still. Perfection petrified as in a dream. They stand there staring at it in silence.

‘Takes your breath away,’ murmurs Simon.

Rena glances at him. Which of us is better able to receive this beauty, she wonders — Simon drugged, or me drunk? Which of us is happier, right now?

Davide

Ruthlessly, she whips out her Guide bleu. She can tell her stepmother resents it.

Why can’t Rena just experience the beauty? Subra says, mimicking Ingrid again. Why does she have to obfuscate it with facts and dates, darken it with ancient wars, smother it under dusty erudition?

But she does have to.

Come on, wake up, get a hold of yourself — do you realise we’re standing in front of Michelangelo’s David? Genius, great man, amazing feats of courage, are you listening? Remember David, thirty centuries ago — the little Jewboy who felled Goliath the giant with nothing but a slingshot? The young musician who appeased King Saul’s melancholy with nothing but a harp? The young warrior who defeated the Philistines and took over the city of Jerusalem with nothing but an army? O, intrepid hero! Artist and soldier, king and composer, peerless creator and destroyer! Admire him! And then… Buonarotti, at age thirty (he, too, a genius) received a block of marble another sculptor had damaged and turned it into a sheer masterpiece. The young, perfect, muscular naked body: symbol of the soul, in the loftiest neo-Platonic tradition. Stunned by the statue’s beauty, Florence’s greatest artists met to decide where it should be erected. It took four days, forty men and fourteen wooden cylinders to move the cage from the Duomo workshops to the Palazzo de la Signoria — and here it stands, before our very eyes, its perfection intact these four centuries! The acme, nay, the very epitome of the Renaissance! Twelve feet high, the kid with the slingshot! Admire him!