Nancy Huston - Infrared

‘I got talking to this American woman on the train yesterday,’ says Ingrid. ‘She told me two cities were absolute musts for tourists in Italy — Florence and Roma.’

‘She’s right,’ nods Rena. ‘Unfortunately, as I told you over the phone, we won’t have time to visit Rome this time around. There’s plenty to do in Tuscany, don’t worry.’

‘She didn’t say Rome,’ Ingrid insists, ‘she said Roma — didn’t she, Dad?’

Rena glances at her to see if she’s joking, but she isn’t. Finally Simon leans over and whispers into his wife’s ear, ‘It’s the same thing.’

They attempt to enter the church, but — no such luck. They must first purchase tickets — over there, in the passageway that leads to the Biblioteca Laurenziana. There’s a lengthy queue at the booth.

As Simon and Rena settle in for a wait, Ingrid wanders into the courtyard to look at the cloister.

But can she really see it? Rena wonders. Can she feel the beauty of this place? Does she know how to marvel at buildings that date back six hundred years? I do, don’t I, oh, yes, I do, no doubt about it…Oh, Aziz, it’s only the first day and already I’m floundering, sliding towards hysteria…You told me I was armed to the teeth — was it really only this morning you pronounced those words?

Photo. Photo. Photo. In black and white, she captures Ingrid’s bleached-blonde hair against a background of the cream-coloured Florentine stone known as pietra serena —and, despite the crowds of tourists and her own vile mood, the magic works. The minute she adjusts the focus in the viewfinder, her thoughts settle down and the universe goes still. Always the same elation just before she presses the shutter — the photo may turn well or badly, but whatever happens she will take it, it will happen… Same thrill as in department stores at age thirteen when her hand would tense up, preparing to dart and grab and steal, it will happen… Or as in seduction, when she can tell that yes, it will happen, within an hour or two the man whose gaze has just crossed hers will possess her, rip off her clothes, open her up and bellow…

Through the viewfinder, she can see what escapes her gaze the rest of the time. In the present instance, the distress in Ingrid’s eyes. A swirling abyss of distress and insecurity, which vanishes the second Rena lowers her camera.

‘You still haven’t switched to digital?’ asks Ingrid, returning to join them in the queue.

‘Nope!’

Rena doesn’t even attempt to explain that, seen through a digital camera, reality itself looks unconvincing to her. Or that, in digital, an infuriating fraction of a second elapses between the pressing of the shutter and the recording of the image. Ingrid wouldn’t believe her. She wouldn’t understand. To her mind, reality is something that can be accurately reflected in a photograph, and a fraction of a second is nothing.

‘Doesn’t the magazine get on your case about it?’ Ingrid insists.

‘No, no,’ Rena says. ‘I scan my photos, that’s all — they get their pixels in the end. Besides, they’re not about to complain: my name is one of their biggest assets.’

‘I see…’ says Ingrid.

One of their biggest assets, Subra sniggers softly as the three of them move at last through the portals of San Lorenzo. Schroeder has never given you anything but temporary contracts, and he almost refused to let you take this unpaid holiday — but sure, right, your name is one of their biggest assets…

San Lorenzo Primo

‘Designed by Brunelleschi, the great Renaissance architect,’ Rena hastens to proclaim, having leafed through the Guide bleu on her flight this morning. ‘Look how the sun’s rays light up every square inch of space…’

She can tell Ingrid is disappointed. To her eyes, the church is empty. There’s really nothing much to look at — not even any stained-glass windows. Even the Amsterdam Cathedral is more lavishly decorated than this. Yes, thinks Rena, but you don’t understand. Here, instead of being dazzled by ostentation, overwhelmed by fancy ornament or intimidated by dark shadows, man himself is writ large. Thanks to the light that comes flooding through the transparent windowpanes, the eye can apprehend the inner space in its entirety. The church’s geometrical structure, its sober hues of blue, grey and white, reassure and respect the individual instead of boggling his mind. This is the very essence of humanism.

She spares Ingrid her spiel, though. If her stepmother wants to be disappointed, why deprive her of that pleasure?

So as father and daughter move through the transept, deep in conversation, Ingrid gets bored, allows her mind to wander and waits for the visit to end. This is how it’s always been.

Rena holds forth a little longer. ‘Lorenzo for Lorenzo the Magnificent, of course — that Medici duke under whose patronage, in the mid-fifteenth century, the arts and sciences blossomed almost miraculously…’

‘But also for poor Saint Lawrence,’ says Simon, who had picked up a leaflet at the entrance, ‘whose martyrdom consisted of being grilled like a hamburger. As the tale goes, he asked to be turned over after a while, saying, “That side’s already cooked!”’

Saint Lawrence’s flesh sputters on the grill, his fat melts and drips, the flames lick, leap, eat…Rena does her best to banish these images from her mind and force her attention back to Brunelleschi’s sober beauty, but no — again and again, grey greasy matter, Saint Lawrence’s brain melting, great fat drops dripping and sputtering in the fire, avid flames devouring them, feeding on them, leaping higher and higher…Such a fine brain it once was. Well-lubricated, pulsing, throbbing, palpitating with curiosity…

The brain, she explains to Subra (the only person in the world who is captivated by her stories no matter how often she’s heard them before), was my father’s passion back in the sensational sixties, when all fields of knowledge — music and biochemistry, poetry and psychology, painting and neurology — were cross-fertilising. Yes, the incredible, unfathomable, untapped potential of human grey matter. The way the human brain contrives to put a self together in the first few years of life, then keep it in place, assign it limits…Even as a child I could sense Simon’s enthusiasm for this subject. Sometimes he’d talk to me about the content of his work. I remember how, looking up at me from the book he was reading, he once declared out of the blue: ‘A self is neither more nor less than the story of a human body, as told by that body’s brain.’ I felt proud when he shared this sort of insight with me, even if it was way over my head.

Though only a teaching assistant at the time, Simon was slogging away at his thesis and his future seemed full of promise. His specialty was neuropsychology, but he was determined to throw off artificial shackles and cross borders between disciplines. Freedom, freedom, freedom! One of his heroes was Leonard Cohen: born within a year of each other, raised in Westmount and educated at McGill, both had dabbled in lysergic acid diethylamide — an amazing substance that plunged you into heaven and hell by turn, twisting your memory, splattering unpredictable images — now sublime, now atrocious — onto the screen of your mind, paroxystically heightening all your perceptions, pulverising your sense of self, and imitating the symptoms of psychosis in uncontrollable ways. Also like Cohen (to say nothing of Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and many others of the time), Simon Greenblatt had turned away from the Jewish religion of his childhood to explore the arcane concepts of Buddhism, in which the very notions of self, world, and reality were dissolved.