Nancy Huston - Infrared

What a lovely thing to say, Subra breathes…

When her ex-husband and best friend Allan Arbus went off to live in California, Diane started hanging out with fringe groups — dwarfs, giants, hermaphrodites, twins and mental patients…She said her camera lens protected her, opened doors for her, helped her forage in forbidden territory…Did she use people to get the pictures she wanted, or did she use her camera to get close to people? Probably both. Later, after her father’s death, while continuing to work and to take care of daughters during the daytime, she started going on sexual sprees at night, giving a new slant to that ‘reasonable kind of attention’…

I, too, use my Canon to convince men I’m interested in them — and I am interested in them, very interested. For whatever reason, the theatre of masculinity, with its spectacular rituals, games, contests and costumes, has been studied far less than the theatre of femininity. I slip into soccer stadiums and take photographs of hooligans, big bad boys, young and not-so-young supporters. Men blind drunk on beer and testosterone, high on collective emotion, floating on the anonymity of the pack, bawling out the names of their favourite players and insulting those of the opposite team, ecstatic to be part of a group. On the surface, the supporters of Paris-Saint-Germain may seem potent and frightening, but in infrarouge you can see they’re frightened as well. Close-ups of young men’s faces twisted with hatred. Moving in…closer and closer…oh the sweet dizziness of blowing up images until you enter matter itself…slipping beneath the skin…down, down…passing through layer after layer of memory, all the way to childhood. It’s overwhelming when that starts to show up in the revealing bath…

Misteries has been my most successful show to date. It travelled to a dozen cities and was made into a book. Juxtaposed images of male behaviour the world over — military marches in front of Moscow’s Kremlin, meetings of the Camorra in Naples, welcoming speeches at the French Academy, complete with swords and green uniforms, Hell’s Angels gatherings in California, initiation rites of Brazil’s Bororo Indians, pimps in Tel Aviv, traders in Tokyo, soccer fans in Manchester, right-wing militiamen in Montana, senators, freemasons, prisoners — oh, such posturing! Such strutting and swaggering! Men, men, men! As anxious as they are arrogant, their arrogance being merely the flip side of their anxiety because they’re so much more mortal than we are. It moves me to see the way these womb-less higher primates clench their jaws, march up and down, do everything in their power to attract attention and remind the world that they, too, exist, count, matter.

I longed to understand what went on in men’s bodies, why danger turned them on…Some stories on the subject had made a powerful impression on me. The one my Cambodian husband Khim had told me, for instance, about the Viet Cong who’d received a dozen fragments of shrapnel in his crotch. Khim had operated — successfully, he had thought — but the man had come back to the hospital two days after his release. ‘What’s the matter?’ Khim had asked him. ‘You told me you were fine.’ ‘Yes, Doctor,’ the man said. ‘I felt fine when I was released…But every evening when I go out to fight, excuse me, but…I get a hard-on and the pain comes back again.’ Khim checked and found a tiny piece of shrapnel embedded in the man’s penis, so he reoperated…Or the stories Aziz’s uncle told me about his military service in Algeria in the seventies: ‘The intellect is soluble in weapons, my dear Rena,’ he told me once. ‘The minute a friend got promoted, even if you’d been hanging out with him since grade school, he suddenly started looking down his nose at you and insisting you salute him every time you ran into him. His Kalashnikov made him forget everything else; he became that intoxicating power…’

Working on Misteries, I sometimes felt like relieving the planet of nine-tenths of its phallophores — who, by their constant insecurity, the uncertainty of their being (Who do you think you are?: the male question par excellence), their passion for weapons and power, their scheming and rivalry, their scuffles and brawls of all sorts, are driving the human species towards extinction; at other times, on the contrary, I wanted to fall to my knees in gratitude because they’d invented the wheel and the canoe, the alphabet and the camera, to say nothing of developing sciences, composing music, writing books, painting paintings, building palaces churches mosques bridges dams and roads, working hard and selflessly, giving unstintingly of their strength and patience and energy and know-how, century after century, in fields, mines, factories, workshops, libraries, universities and laboratories the world over…Oh, men! Wonderful, anonymous, myriad men, suffering and sacrificing yourselves day after day so we can live a little better, with a little more comfort and beauty and meaning…how I love you!

Whenever possible, I would drag one man away from the pack, shower my attentions on him…and remunerate him. Yes: whereas men pay prostitutes to forget their individuality and play the generic Female, I paid men to renounce the comfort of the group and usher me into their privacy. Having gone home with them from stadium, colloquium, stock exchange, parade or training field, I’d ask them to talk to me, take out their photo albums, and show me the teenager, toddler and infant they’d once been. As they did so, they often wept — and I consoled them. Men are so grateful when you shower ‘that much attention’ on them. I learned to sense where they needed loving, go straight there and give it to them. I learned to take their faces in both my hands, smooth away the lines of worry between their eyebrows and on their foreheads, graze their noses with my lips and draw my fingertips over their cheekbones, ever-aware of the skull with its black eyeholes and gaping grin, right there behind the skin. I learned to slip into their souls, lick and suck them, drive them mad with my caresses, allowing them to arch their backs and discover the incomparable pleasure of passivity, calming them down so their true strengths could surge forth, instead of the phony ones they trot out for display the rest of the time. Gradually their defences would crumble and melt. I can’t even look at a man anymore without wondering how, under the onslaught of my love, his face and body would relax, fill up with light, be transfigured…

Subra sighs contentedly.

Putting her Canon back in its case, Rena returns to where her father and stepmother are sitting on the bench across from poor sick Neptune. She finds them slumped against each other, snoozing. A moment later, they head slowly for the Palazzo Pitti.

Pitti

This may be our only chance, Rena tells herself, to spend a little time with Italian Renaissance painters. I must, oh I simply must get Ingrid and Simon to fully appreciate their works.

Just what do you mean by fully appreciate? Subra asks.

Well, the way I do. Or the way I would, if…

If what?

Er…if I weren’t quite so nervous. Or if Aziz were here…

Aziz can’t stand museums.

Okay, not Aziz. Someone else…

Kerstin?

Kerstin, right. Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, Veronese, Van Dyck, Andrea del Sarto, Velasquéz, Raphael… Some of this greatness has to rub off on their souls!

But her father, made groggy by his nap in the sun, takes every chance he can to sit down and nod off again. And Ingrid is oblivious to the technical feats of the Italian masters (perspective, shadows, shading, nuance, trompe-l’œil). With disarming naiveté, she responds only to the content of their paintings.