Nancy Huston - Infrared

Louverture himself was anything but a saint, Subra points out.

Yeah, his folks probably just had him baptised on November 1st and gave him the name they found on the Catholic calendar that day…Could have been worse. Other kids in France’s former colonies wound up with names like Epiphany or Armistice.

Here we are — Ognissanti.

Guidare

Rena fills out the necessary forms with the Auto-Escape employee. He insists on speaking French to her, and she answers him in Italian: under pretence of being deferential, both are in fact showing off. At last he entrusts her with a red Megane.

‘This, madame,’ he explains unnecessarily, showing her the remote control attached to the key chain, ‘is for locking and unlocking the car doors. Do you understand?’

‘Si, certo, signore,’ she retorts. ‘Non sono nata ieri.’

At her first manœuvre on the Piazza Ognissanti, she manages to stall. On the verge of hysteria, she wonders if she should interpret this superstitiously, as Aziz would. Allah does not want me to rent a car; he does not want me to spend four days traipsing around Tuscany with my father and stepmother. He wants me to obey my husband’s subtly expressed command: head straight for Amerigo Vespucci airport and jump on the first plane for Paris.

On her third try, unfortunately, the car takes off like a fireball and she finds herself hurtling willy-nilly through the sumptuous Renaissance city of Florence, Italy.

Reading glasses perched on her nose, Rena attempts to keep her left eye on the road while darting desperate glances with her right eye at the city map on the passenger seat, where the itinerary to Via Guelfa has been highlighted in green by Auto-Escape’s elegant employee. ‘Because of all the one-way streets,’ the man had told her in his excellent French, ‘you’ll need to make a big detour — like this, see? You get on this ring road north of city centre — be careful, it has three different names — then take a right here, in Via Santa Caterina.’ A piece of cake!

Sweating profusely, zooming along the Viale F. Strozzi at sixty miles per hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic, she hears her mobile ring.

Maybe it’s my father…Maybe they’re in some sort of trouble… Maybe someone really did make off with their precious sacco this time…

Digging the phone out of her jeans pocket, she tosses it onto the seat beside her and the map slides to the floor.

Oh God, it’s Aziz! Heart aflutter, she leans over to make sure it really is his name on the screen; as she does so the car drifts leftward and narrowly escapes a collision.

‘Aziz!’ she says, clamping the telephone between her ear and shoulder.

‘Yes.’

‘Hang on a minute!’

‘What do you mean, hang on? We haven’t spoken for days, and when I finally get you on the phone you tell me to hang on?’

‘Just a second, love, I’m driving…’

She slows down, setting off a cacophony of honking horns behind her. Having cut the connection with Aziz, she spews epithets in French and English at the Fiats and their impatient, aggressive macho drivers, nods perfunctorily at a giant fortress to her left and its probable thousands of dead of whom she knows nothing, and finally, perspiring and palpitating, pulls over to the kerb at the corner of Santa Caterina.

‘Aziz. Sorry, love. Driving alone in a foreign city can be a little nerve-wracking.’

‘Rena, you’ve got to come home.’

‘What?’

‘Drop everything and come back to Paris. Things are getting too serious.’

‘You…I…Aziz…’

‘Stop stammering. Are you trying to make fun of me?’

‘No, of course not…Listen, I just rented a car, my father and stepmother are waiting for me in the street, I can’t just leave them in the lurch…Schroeder’s the one who gave me this week’s holiday…’

‘I’m not talking about Schroeder. Hey, Rena, listen to me, okay? I’ve been up here working for three days and three nights non-stop, we’re trying to hold things together but the place is on the verge of exploding. The media are already rushing in to do their sensationalist crap. We need intelligent night photos for the magazine. The point of view of someone who has a little background, a minimal understanding of what’s going on, you know what I mean? I can’t put it more clearly than that. Rena, get your ass back here.’

‘No, I…’

‘Okay, forget it.’

Aziz cuts off the connection. As she inches down the Via Santa Caterina, Rena shoves her hat back to keep the hairs on the nape of her neck from bristling.

To her surprise, Simon and Ingrid actually are standing in front of the hotel with their luggage, ready and waiting on time. They load up the car. Ingrid climbs into the back seat and Simon settles in at Rena’s side; it’s almost as if she had dreamed that abominable phone call.

‘I’ll take charge of the maps,’ her father says. ‘I’ll be your guide.’

‘Okay, look…we’re right…here.’

It was your job to show me the way, Daddy. It was your job to help me. You’re the one who taught me to drive. You weren’t supposed to get hopelessly lost in life’s dark labyrinths. Lousy Virgil, Daddy! Lousy Virgil…Why so tense now, sitting next to me in the car?

Tell me, Subra says.

When I was little, Simon would sometimes take me to visit his sister Deborah in the Eastern Townships. When we got onto one of those long straight roads, he’d tuck me between his thighs and let me steer. It thrilled me to think that my tiny hands were controlling the big black Volvo. Every time an oncoming truck pulled out to pass, hurtling straight at us, I’d let go of the steering-wheel and bury my face in my Daddy’s chest. And he’d always make things come out all right, in a great burst of laughter. I couldn’t help boasting to Lisa about it afterwards. ‘I drove the car all by myself, Mommy!’ Pale with rage, she’d light into Simon for having risked my life.

Where transgression was concerned, Subra says, you were always on your Daddy’s side.

Yeah…sitting between his thighs, mad with excitement. Mad with excitement, sitting between his thighs…

And your father…?

Hmm. I don’t recall his having given my older brother that sort of driving lesson. All I remember is that when Rowan had a minor scooter accident at age sixteen, Simon confiscated his licence for a month.

The sun beats mercilessly down on them. Aziz’s last words ricochet in Rena’s head: ‘Okay, forget it.’

Dear Lord…if I were to lose Aziz…

Tell me, Subra says.

I fell in love with him the minute I set eyes on him. I’d come to do a reportage in the projects northeast of Paris…One day I walked into a cultural centre and there he was, tutoring a little first-grade kid from Mali. The boy was behind in learning how to read, and Aziz, sitting there next to him, bent over his textbook, was calmly showing him the letters, asking him questions, listening to his answers…I saw the kid staring up in adoration at this lovely, gentle young man and I said to myself, Wow, he’s right. I think the guy’s pretty amazing myself. If only he’d lean over me and talk to me like that…I didn’t yet know that in addition to everything else Aziz was a poet, a songwriter and a guitarist, that he’d grown up in one of the worst projects in the area, that he was second-born in a family of eight, that his older brother was doing time for dealing, that he’d started working at fifteen, taking night jobs in factories while attending school during the day, that he had a degree from the Rue du Louvre journalism school…Then one day a miracle happened: he was hired as a reporter by On the Fringe, the magazine I freelance for. Our first exchanges took place during accidental meetings in the magazine offices, running into each other in the hall or in front of the coffee machine, but our handshakes rapidly became hugs, our traded jokes traded glances, our hugs kisses, our glances caresses, our coffees lunches…and by the end of the week, the office a hotel room. Though he couldn’t make love to me at first, I was entranced by every square inch of this tall young Arab’s magnificent body — his doe eyes, powerful hands, white teeth, muscular back, firm buttocks, to say nothing of his long, fragile, lovely penis, darker in hue than the thighs it rested on. Never could I have dreamed that this man would have so much to teach me, that I’d teach him to love a woman’s body, and that one miracle would follow another until we found ourselves signing a lease together for a four-room apartment on the Rue des Envierges. Both night birds, we work together in perfect harmony — I’ve never known anything like it! Our marriage means the world to me, but I can’t just throw up everything and fly back to Paris at the drop of a hat…