Nancy Huston - Infrared

All my friends crack up when I tell them the apartment Aziz and I moved into last summer is on the Rue des Envierges, Envirgins Street. So far, I haven’t been able to find out where the name comes from. ‘You can devirginate people, but can you envirginate them?’ I asked Aziz on the day we signed the lease, and he reminded me that such a medical specialty indeed exists in Europe today — certain doctors skilfully sew up the ruptured hymens of young Muslim girls to make them marriageable.

Really? Subra says, feigning surprise. I didn’t know Aziz co-signed the lease for the Rue des Envierges.

He will, don’t worry, Rena replies. And she hastens to pursue her train of thought.

‘Tell me, Aziz,’ I crooned to my sweetheart one evening as he went about covering my face with droll little kisses and gently rolling my clitoris between his fingers as he’s learned to do so well, ‘faithful Muslims who die as martyrs are supposed to be rewarded with ninety-two virgins when they get to heaven…But what do women get? What’s heaven like for Muslim women?’ ‘When a woman gets to heaven,’ Aziz murmured between kisses, ‘she can’t see her husband’s other wives anymore. That’s it — no more jealousy.’ ‘Oh, I see. That’s a woman’s paradise: no more jealousy. You mean she can’t even see the ninety-two virgins?’ ‘Especially not them.’ That made me laugh so hard I was unable to come.

Being a whore, Mary Magdalene reminds me of my mother.

Not that my mother was a whore, no, but people called her that because she frequently invited prostitutes into our home and defended them in court. Little wonder that, thirty years later, I did the reportage called Whore Sons and Daughters —visiting two dozen different countries, using hundreds of rolls of film, asking thousands of questions…What the hookers emphasised more than anything else was…their clients’ vulnerability and need to talk. Eventually I came to see prostitution as akin to psychoanalysis. Short but repeatable encounters whose terms were fixed in advance — one person paying the other not to talk, the horizontal position relaxing inhibitions… ‘Basically,’ a gorgeous African-American call-girl once told me in New York, ‘the john pays you for the right to be a little boy again. A little tyrant is more like it. Talking without listening, taking without giving…But afterwards, if he’s not in too much of a hurry, he’ll sometimes tell you things he tells no one else…You’d be surprised. It can be very moving. Sometimes they start to cry and you can sense the kid they used to be…Can’t get too close, though, or they’ll switch back to scorn.’

The whole tentacular, wildly lucrative prostitution and pornography industry, which makes billions of dollars by portraying fertile young females as being sterile and infinitely cooperative, reflects not men’s irrepressible desire for women but just the opposite: their need to keep them at bay. Whether the anonymous woman is in a luxury hotel room, a sordid dive or on screen, the message is the same: Do as I say. Desire me, adore me and admire me but don’t threaten to devour me, don’t bleed, above all, don’t make babies.

Asked how they chose their profession, few hookers mentioned anything vaguely synonymous with desire or pleasure; all, on the other hand, mentioned money. That’s why so many of my photos included close-ups of cash — bills changing hands, being slipped into pockets and wallets, stashed, checked and rechecked, even kissed. Yes, whether for good reasons or bad, prostitutes care deeply about money; nine times out of ten that’s what they think about when they squander their intimacy, when the client is on them and in them, seeking oblivion. The stranger’s congested face is almost invariably replaced by the faces of their parents, their children, or else the sweetheart they hope to return to once they’ve earned enough money. For some women, cash gets caught up in a vicious circle between pimp and coke and fuck; the coke helps them survive the fuck that brings in the cash that pays the pimp that keeps them in coke — those women are really lost.

My project was more than a challenge, it was a contradiction in terms: to use photography, the art of the present moment, to activate the women’s pasts and futures. That’s why I took photos of them with their kids. Virtually all of them carry around snapshots of the person they love more than anything in the world, the child for whose future’s sake they initially agreed to rent out its former home, their bodies. First I’d photograph the women, then I’d photograph the snapshot of their child, blowing it up and framing the two faces together — the same size, but one rendered blurry and ghostlike by the enlargement.

Throughout my childhood I had seen whores go traipsing through our home with one or several kids in tow, so when I heard about the antinomy between mother and whore, in an Introduction to Psychology lecture my first year at Concordia, I burst out laughing in the middle of the auditorium.

Tearing herself away from Magdalene, Rena moves on to the next room.

Cantoria

Luckily there aren’t too many visitors in the museum and she can stare at the next wonder to her heart’s content — Della Robbia’s Cantoria, stone made music. A group of choirboys in high relief, some singing, others playing instruments. They’re neither angels nor cherubim but real teenagers, with individualised features. This one has a protuberant Adam’s apple, that one’s eyes are glittering, the other one’s nose is too long, and look over here — this one’s trying to grow a moustache…

The violinist reminds her of her brother Rowan.

The words they’re singing may be pure, but Della Robbia gives us to understand that their voices have already broken and that their balls are thrilling to the first thralls of pleasure. They praise the Lord on High while fantasising about the baker-lady’s buttocks — what could be more normal at their age? Looking down at them from the pulpit, the priest swallows hard. Though he, too, is aroused, he’s compelled to hide it. Same goes for God, who’s following the scene by satellite.

Right, Subra chuckles. Ball-less: God for priest, priest for choirboys, father for daughter. Tell me…

It all began with a commendable solicitude. Worried to see his adolescent daughter increasingly introverted and withdrawn, Simon Greenblatt set up an appointment for her with his friend Dr Joshua Walters, the great gangly manitou of the psychiatry wing in one of Montreal’s most prestigious hospitals. Though chronically overbooked, Walters agreed to see Greenblatt’s neurotic daughter in therapy, at least until a diagnosis could be made. The daughter presented — I presented, that is — with the following symptoms: nervousness, kleptomania, insomnia, agoraphilia, and episodes of derealisation.

Agoraphilia? Subra queries.

Yes. I felt comfortable only outside the home, in crowded places.

I took an instant liking to Dr Walters. He was my dad’s age, forty or so. He had big hands and feet, wheat-coloured hair, and an excellent sense of humour. Also he was a man, with a man’s body; no way around it. At the first session he complimented me on my intelligence, and at the second expressed his admiration of my beauty, and at the third took me in his arms and stroked my back, shoulders and forehead, gluing his trembling lips to mine by way of a farewell, and at the fourth, taking advantage of the fact that I was already supine on his couch, stretched out on top of me and rubbed his body against mine, moaning, his face red and congested with desire, and at the fifth removed a sufficient amount of my clothing so that, using our hands and mouths — for, such is the naiveté of great scientists, Dr Walters was convinced I was a virgin and didn’t want to end up desperately scrubbing bloodstains off the light beige upholstery of the couch in his hospital office — we could bring each other to bliss. Following which, running his hands again and again through his bristly, wheat-coloured hair, he explained to me that he no longer loved his wife (she bored him now, he said; she never talked to him about anything but the value of their stocks and bonds and their children’s progress at school), that he’d never done anything like this in his life before but had simply been unable to resist my charms, that he’d been obsessed with me since I’d first floated ‘wraithlike’ into his office (yes, such is the picayune vocabulary of certain scientists), that he sincerely hoped I wouldn’t hold it against him but he was obliged to ask me not to come in again — no, never — I’d have to find myself another therapist, preferably a woman, for he was sure that no man in his right mind would be able resist feverishly tearing off every piece of my clothing. ‘Can you forgive me, Rena, my angel, my marvel? I have nothing to say in my defence except that I got carried away. I’m just a poor, defenceless male animal and you, as I’m sure you know, are an irresistibly sensuous young woman.’