Nancy Huston - Infrared

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 his 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.

Clasping her hands, Mary Magdalene weeps and supplicates. Tears stream down her face. She regrets her former life, no doubt about that. She falls to her knees and weeps. She washes Christ’s feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. Her tears gush forth, splashing all over the handsome young Jew’s feet. Hair on feet, tears on feet, lips on feet, perfume on feet. ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven,’ Jesus says, ‘for she loved much.’

My favourite quote by that cute bearded guy who died young, Subra murmurs.

I’ve always preferred Mary Magdalene to the Virgin Mary. In fact I’m allergic to adult virgins in general — from the goddess Athena to Mother Theresa, and from Joan of Arc to the Pope. Every time I think of the innumerable streets, buildings, neighbourhoods, towns and cities all over the world that have been named after Christian saints, id est virgins, id est individuals who deemed physical love to be dirty and vile, who dirtied and vilified physical love — every time I think of the millions of children including my brother who’ve been diddled or worse by priests who were starved for tenderness, and the millions of deaths inflicted by chaste and gallant knights of all persuasions, I pale and tremble with rage. That Saint Paul was a real catastrophe!