Nancy Huston - Infrared

Maybe your own wildness trying to escape? Subra suggests.

Strange how I kept saying Oh my God in the dream — an expression that never crosses my lips in real life. Fermata means stop — a bus stop, for instance, except that the bus doesn’t stop, it goes hurtling past the city limits and plunges us into savagery, the woman farmer in my dream is desperately trying to catch the wild animals and lock them up on her farm, just as I was trying to do by firmly closing the door behind me, yes, firm farm fermata, you want to lock things out but sometimes you just can’t, and if the truth be told I wasn’t wearing a blindfold that day, Dr Walters had contented himself with binding me hand and foot, and though my bonds prevented me from moving freely I did catch a glimpse of my father as he burst into Room 416 wearing a bathrobe which, being wide open, gave me some idea of what had been going on in Room 418…Yes, you, dear Commander! Poor tottering, detumescent, living statue, reaching to tear the whip out of Don Juan’s hands in a trance of fury and indignation— What is the meaning of this, sir? With my daughter? How dare you? — and punish him for the same infamies you were committing with another man’s daughter in the next room, thus revealing the depth of the complicity between you, revolving around your irresponsible cocks. Commanders in bathrobes, dads as pals, shrinks as lovers — none of this fatally confusing mess should ever have existed.

She drifts back to sleep.

Domenica campagnola

She is wakened by silence — the silence of a Sunday morning in the country. Its purity is almost disturbing, after the hustle-bustle of Florence’s Via Guelfa with its honking horns and revving motors…

She opens her eyes and stretches luxuriously, revelling in the charm of her room and the perspective of the relatively low-stress day ahead of them. San Gimignano in the morning, Volterra in the afternoon, after which they’ll come back to Impruneta and spend a second night here at Gaia’s.

The bathroom is flooded with sunlight. An enchanting order reigns in this house; everything bears the precise and colourful imprint of their hostess — towels in different shades of green, small bouquets of dried flowers, copies of Etruscan statuettes, scented soaps in the shower stall…Even the hills seem to have been carefully arranged by Gaia and her architect lover so as to offer a pleasant view from the bathroom window.

As she splashes her body with warm water, Rena realises she’s in an excellent mood.

All is well, Subra says. You’ve passed the halfway point of the trip and so far no one has murdered anyone; there’ll definitely be an afterwards.

A moment later, she turns off the hair-dryer and stands looking at her naked body in the wardrobe mirror, first from the front then from the back. Still passable. Peaceable. Impassive. Straight, discreet lines. No one would ever guess what it’s been through.

For all that, I didn’t become allergic to sodomy.

I should hope not! exclaims Subra, who is also in an excellent mood this morning. If you had to give up everything you learned in discomfort, what would you have left, right? There’d be no reading, no eating, no playing the violin…

The first time I suggested to Alioune that he take me that way, he responded with indignation, disgust and a firm religious condemnation. Gradually the idea grew on him, though, and within a few months he’d mastered the technique of relaxing me without resorting to gadgets or vaseline, preparing me only with his fingers, tongue and words. Once he got the hang of it, he could impale me almost surreptitiously, so to speak, as I was negotiating a photo fee with Schroeder over the telephone…or hanging up the laundry in the bathroom…or even (once, unforgettably) out of doors — in July 1998, on the Dakar cliff road overhanging the ocean, while the entire population of the city was engrossed in a World Cup soccer final on TV. He even became a little more tolerant of gays.

Our marriage began to disintegrate when he found out my wanderings weren’t only geographical. For my part, I’d accepted his numerous affairs without batting an eyelid, asking only that he give me the same freedom in return. As a lawyer, Alioune could see my attitude was logical, but as an African male — or a male tout court —he was eaten away by jealousy. Like his father, his grandfather and all his Peulh ancestors before him, he considered polygamy to be natural and polyandry inadmissible. In nature, as he told me one day with a straight face, ewes live together peacefully, but you put two rams in the same field and they’ll fight to the death. ‘Bullshit!’ I retorted. ‘In our species, males are the ones who band together. Maybe because most women are mothers, they don’t need to keep rubbing up against each other, jostling and measuring and competing with each other just to feel they’re alive…’ ‘Oh yeah?’ snarled Alioune. ‘Then how come you’re never around, mother? How come you’re always gallivanting off to the four corners of the earth? Our sons suffer from your absences!’ That hit home, as Alioune had known it would — and as Aziz knows it does now — because of my own mother’s absences. I must admit I’d got into the habit of hiring one or more ‘Lucilles’ to manage the household while I was away. And I worried about the fact that Thierno, then four or five, had started tying his GI-Joes to every chair in the house…Would he tie up his mistresses later on, as Josh Walters had tied me up? Or as I myself had threatened to tie up poor, autistic Matthew Varick?

What are all these ropes about? Subra asks rhetorically, giving Rena her cue.

Oh the incredible refinement of Araki’s smooth, slender, lovely models, artistically bound and strung up in trees to be photographed. He set up this series entitled Sentimental Journey with the utmost care. The girl is horizontally suspended from a branch; ropes circle her breasts and come up in a V around her neck, forming slipknots at her chest, waist and thigh. Her arms are tightly squeezed against her body; her head dangles backwards and downwards; her face is concealed by a black cloth. All the women thus bound and photographed by Araki were consenting, they may even have been content; as usual, no mention is made of the fact that they were also paid. The photos are contemporary echos of kinbaku, an ancient Japanese rite which entailed stringing a woman up in a tree next to a Buddhist temple for the monks’ contemplation. What had the woman done to deserve such treatment? Oh, no, nothing, the monks just wanted to contemplate her, that’s all…with one hand, perhaps. Yes, as they sat there meditating in their solitary cells, listening to the gongs that marked off the hours of the day, they must have derived a certain pleasure from thinking about life’s transience, the crudely material, ephemeral and ultimately meaningless nature of human existence, admirably illustrated by the woman that hung day and night from a tree in front of their window, twisting, wailing, moaning, then falling silent, then starting to rot in the wind and rain as the ropes gradually sawed into her flesh. You can’t fool me: that woman was mommy as well. All tied-up women are mummy.

To get back to Alioune…Subra prods.

In the final years of our marriage, Alioune became jealous of everything. Not just my trips and lovers abroad but my success, my notoriety, my every phone call…Hmm…Don’t want to spoil this lovely Tuscan day by thinking about the dark rain of violence in the eyes of my handsome Senegalese…his fits of rage gradually making me blind and impotent, unable to work…my Canon locked away in its case for months on end…my darkroom deserted…our two sons desperately clinging to two foundering adults…the terror that came into their faces, Thierno’s especially, whenever we raised our voices…my own terror at realising, in the midst of a quarrel, that my adolescent sons in the next room were enduring exactly what I’d endured as an adolescent, and vowed never to inflict on my kids…