Nancy Huston - Infrared

True. It’s weird being older than one’s own mother — do you realise you’re my little sister now, Ma?

‘Do you have any children?’ Rena asks out loud.

‘Just one daughter, in Milan,’ Gaia says. ‘But three grandchildren,’ she adds, pointing to their snapshots on the fridge door. ‘What about you?’

‘Two sons. Also grown.’

But no, no photos. I, the professional photographer, have always eschewed carrying around photos of my sons. I wonder why?

You avoid simple happiness, Subra clowns, imitating Ingrid’s voice.

Yet I’d give anything to be able to show Gaia what Toussaint and Thierno looked like last summer, and no longer look like, and tell her that Toussaint teaches children with learning difficulties, lives with a vivacious young colleague of his, named Jasmine, and will soon be a father…

Instead she says nothing. Contents herself with nodding as she listens to her hostess’s patter and samples her delectable homemade jams.

After a while, Gaia turns on the radio and starts washing the dishes. A Bach cantata comes to an end and is replaced by the heavy, monotonous drone of a man’s voice.

Rena tenses up at once. ‘Mind if we change stations?’

‘Ma perché?’ Gaia says.

‘I have a thing about preachers…’

Seeing her hostess’s eyebrows knit in incomprehension, Rena catches herself in time and banishes the words she was about to utter — Oh, men’s voices! Men’s voices! They have the right to harangue us, harass us, boom at us at all hours of the day and night from balconies, pulpits and minarets the world over; do they have to invade our kitchens, too? — and replaces them with ‘I prefer Bach.’

Wisely, Gaia switches off the radio, goes into the living room and puts on a recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Then, untying her apron, she dons a pert blue hat and announces in Italian, ‘I’m off to town for ten o’clock mass. I should be back at around noon — will you still be here?’

‘Oh, no, definitely not. Spero di no!’

So Gaia hands her a bunch of keys — this one’s for the door to the driveway, these two are for the house — flashes a bright smile at her, and vanishes.

Good thing my anticlericalism didn’t alter her kindness.

Bach…

No, all right, she concedes to Subra, who has been frowning at her sceptically for the past half hour. I didn’t leave Alioune, Alioune left me.

For once I’d made an exception and agreed to see one of my lovers in Paris. Yasu was a photographer. I’d first met him in a gallery on top of Tokyo’s Mori Tower. He’s my twin! I breathed in astonishment the minute I set eyes on him. Young, slender and androgynous, with black hair and dark eyes, dressed in black from head to toe, he was utterly engrossed in the photos he was taking. At first I mistook him for a woman. I wanted him to be a woman; I would have liked for a woman to be engrossed in her work to the point of not even noticing my existence, and when I realised he was a man I wanted to be him — or, failing that, to be one with him. When that dream came true within the hour, I learned that he had delicate hands, long sinewy limbs, hairless, amber-coloured skin and an incomparably graceful body, but that he was a twisted, perverted little prince. Apart from himself, Yasu loved no one but his dog — a young pedigree bitch named Isolde. As for women, he made love to them only to keep them at bay, took them to bed with him only to icily reject them afterwards. His photos were as cold, beautiful and frightening as he was — either inhuman urban landscapes with sharp angles and starkly alternating light and shadow, or ultra-refined pornography.

Sometimes one is magnetically attracted to one’s opposite, one’s nightmare, one’s antithesis — that’s what happened to me with Yasu. So when he called to say he was in Paris for one night only, and asked me to join him in his hotel room a few hours before his opening, I broke my own rule about Parisian monogamy and rushed to obey. And as we busied ourselves with a number of (to my mind) rather depressing gadgets on the super-king-sized bed in his five-star hotel room, the bitch Isolde, in a fit of jealousy that would later give me food for thought, methodically chewed holes in every single piece of my clothing scattered on the floor, leaving her master’s clothes intact.

What was I to do? It was five o’clock and I had an appointment with Thierno and his school counsellor at five-thirty. And. So. Well. Hastily donning Yasu’s elegant black suit, which he needed for his seven o’clock opening, I rushed to the Monoprix next door, bought myself a new set of clothes, raced to Thierno’s school, attended the meeting, then raced back to the hotel — yes, son in tow, I had no choice — to give my lover back his suit, at which point the bitch Isolde could think of nothing better to do than leap on my son and sink her savage teeth into his thigh. And that is how my third marriage came to an end.

Sitting at the coffee table, Rena flips through the past week’s newspapers. The events in France are mentioned only briefly, on inside pages.

Aziz, Aziz, where are you? What’s going on?

She dials his number and gets his answering machine. ‘It’s me, love,’ she says…and, not knowing what to add, hangs up.

Disturbed by the memory of Yasu, she tries to imagine the church service Gaia is attending right now. This stirs memories of all the religious ceremonies she has sat in on — forever an outsider — in Durban, Mumbai, Port-au-Prince, New Orleans, Ouro Preto or Dublin, moved in spite of herself by the beauty, solemnity and power of these collective rituals. She replaces Bach with Pergole-si on the sound system, all the while pursuing a futile argument with Gaia in her brain — Yes, I do have the right to love this music, she insists defensively, even if I reject the church that gave rise to it…

The morning is melting away like snow in springtime.

At ten-thirty, Ingrid comes down alone and announces, ‘Dad’s not feeling well.’

‘Oh? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing, he’s just having a hard time emerging, that’s all. It happens more and more often.’

‘It does?’

‘Yes.’

Rena wonders if she detects a note of reproach in Ingrid’s voice — but no, only worry.

‘But…will he be getting up?’

‘Oh, he’s up.’

‘And is he planning on coming down?’

‘Yes. He told me to tell you he’d be right down.’

She serves Ingrid her breakfast, desperately trying to be as sweet and gentle as Gaia…but it’s no use, she feels sullen and mean. Doesn’t want to share with Ingrid the good news that wafted in on Alioune’s trade wind this morning. Everything feels ‘off’.

Heavy silence between them.

Simon, at last.

Ingrid and she, in chorus: ‘Are you all right, Dad?’

He grunts his assent, smiles to dispel their fears, and breakfasts royally.

Then he says, ‘Can we sit down in the living room and talk things over for a while?’

Scartoffie

Rena looks at the perfect Sunday morning around her. Out of doors: calm, sunlight, the marvellous Chianti hills— gold! Oh, gold of grapevines, red of October maples, mauve of heather and lavender, a landscape copied from Leonardo’s paintings…And indoors: elegant burnished furniture, books serried on shelves, the neat stacks of Gaia’s dead lover’s architectural magazines, ceramic bowls… Every thing in its place. All the day’s possibilities converging here and now…And her father wants to talk things over.

‘When I retired five years ago and we had the house in West-mount renovated,’ he begins, ‘I had a sort of dream. Or, let’s say, a hope. I hoped we’d be able to entertain more often…And now I see that dream’s just not coming true…maybe because when you invite people over, they feel obliged to invite you back…or because… I don’t know…the food shopping is getting to be a burden on Ingrid…’