Nancy Huston - Infrared

Finally Gaia breaks the spell. Striding across the room, she kindly, smilingly— ’Arrivederci’ —but firmly—‘ Ciao! Ciao! ’—kicks them out of her house.

God bless her — if, that is, He’s still able to lift a finger.

They’re off. Naturally, though, their troubles are far from over.

‘Looks like we took a wrong turn,’ Rena says after a while, braking gently. ‘We’re headed for the highway, not the Chiantigiana.’

Simon studies the little map Gaia sketched for them. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But if we keep on going, I think we can catch up with it a bit further on.’

‘I don’t think so,’ says Rena, stopping at the side of the road to make a U-turn.

‘Fine!’ Simon says, slamming his palms down onto the open map of Tuscany on his lap. ‘No point in my reading the maps, then — just do as you please!’

Zeus does the Zeus thing, Subra says. What do you expect? He rants, raves, and thunders, reducing all to ash.

Listen, Zeus, I’m fed up to the teeth with your temper tantrums, do you hear me? You’d better watch out or I’ll warm your bum!

Rena forces herself to take a deep breath, behave like an adult, control her voice. ‘Okay, show me.’

Trembling with the same contained rage, the two of them study the map together. Rena is right. She turns around and drives back through the invisible hills at top speed.

A while later, on the Chiantigiana, she feels suddenly euphoric.

When you come right down to it, she says to herself, I’m a manic-depressive with ultra-short phases.

Miserabili

When they reach Siena at morning’s end, she parks in the Via Curta-tone near San Domenico’s — illegally, but only slightly so — and the three of them start wandering through the lovely streets of the old city, feeling perfectly miserable. Neither Ingrid nor Simon have said a word since the altercation at the side of the road. Rena banishes from her brain the images of herself as a young woman discovering Siena at Xavier’s side — tired old memories that are now stretching their limbs and rubbing their eyes, trying to wake up…Don’t bother, she tells them. Go back to sleep, I don’t need you. I prefer to create new memories!

A bit farther on, Simon tugs at her sleeve—’Rena, look.’

His voice is low, his tone ominous. It startles her.

Turning, she sees a newspaper stand and the headlines leap out at her, silently shouting the same thing in a dozen different languages: France, France, France, they say. Paris, Paris, Paris. Fire, fire, fire. She sees photographs. Chaotic crowds of teenage boys, ranks of anti-riot police. Flames. Helmets. Shields. Stones. Flames. Riots spreading. Three hundred cars burned. Her Canon dangles uselessly between her breasts.

‘I know,’ she says lamely to Simon.

He purchases some newspapers in English and starts flipping through them as they walk. ‘Hey,’ he mutters in a worried voice. ‘Isn’t that the place Aziz comes from?’

‘Yes, it is,’ she says. ‘It’s also where Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables.’

‘Oh, Les Misérables!’ exclaims Ingrid. ‘We saw the musical comedy at the Place des Arts a few years ago. It was terrific, wasn’t it, Dad?’

‘Well, it’s been playing non-stop in that city for the past hundred and fifty years,’ Rena says. ‘Thousands of Jean Valjeans have been locked up for stealing a loaf of bread, or for less.’

She doesn’t tell them how many times Aziz has been held in custody overnight, or that his brother has spent the past eighteen months in the Villepinte penitentiary…Knowing that Ingrid thinks her native Rotterdam is in the process of becoming a second Kabul, she has no wish to get her started on the subject of the Muslim threat.

Instead, feigning gaiety, she chirps, ‘Why don’t we check out the cathedral?’

Duomo

Their disappointment is instantaneous.

The façade is under renovation, concealed beneath a tarpaulin on which its red, white and black striped marble has been painted in trompe-l’œil.

‘Hey!’ says Simon. ‘That almost looks like a copy!’

He’s not joking. Afflicted with near-sightedness, far-sightedness and perhaps a bit of astigmatism as well, he’s convinced he’s looking at the real thing, sun-flattened. Those who tourists do become… This time Ingrid goes about unfooling her husband’s eye.

They file slowly across the threshold, into the penumbra of the enormous cathedral. Seeing their twin fedoras, an employee gestures to Simon to take his off (in places of Catholic worship, as everyone knows, women’s heads should be covered and men’s uncovered). Without missing a beat — condensing humour and insolence, obedience and insult into a single act, eliciting Rena’s reluctant admiration and the employee’s acute annoyance — Simon removes his hat and plunks it on his wife’s head.

Innocenti

Unlike San Lorenzo in Florence, the space here is crowded, congested, fairly dripping with hybrid decoration. Fearing they’ll be overwhelmed, they decide to concentrate on the coloured marble pavements — twenty-five thousand square feet of Biblical scenes. Despite this restriction, Rena soon finds herself in the grip of familiar anxiety: how much should I try to understand? How can I be here, truly here and now — for it’s today, not tomorrow, that we’re visiting the cathedral of Siena? Determined to engrave the floor mosaics in her memory once and for all, she moves a little ahead of the others.

Here is The Slaughter of the Innocents… How many times, in paintings, drawings, photos, movies or documentaries, have we seen the emblematic image of a mother screaming as she struggles to wrest her living baby from a man bent on killing it, or wailing in despair as she holds up her dead baby?

What about you? whispers Subra. The dead half-baby in your dream…who will weep for you?

Just last April, fourteen people, including an old woman and two little girls, were massacred at a false roadblock near Larbaa. Over the past few years, more than one hundred and fifty thousand people have been murdered in Algeria, Aziz’s parents’ native land. And who are the assassins, if not our own sons? Yes, our boys — forever marching off to war, eager to suffer and spill rivers of blood, dying, killing, screaming, hating, marching, singing, putting on uniforms, saluting, seeking unison, destroying the bodies of other mothers’ sons with daggers, lances, swords, bombs, bullets, poisons and laser rays…

Feeling a sudden vibration on her left thigh, she starts as if a stranger had just pinched her.

No. Her mobile. A phone call.

Digging the phone (Aziz?) out of her tight jeans (Aziz?) with some difficulty (Aziz?), she glances at the screen. No, it’s Kerstin.

‘How are you doing?’ she whispers, heading for the cathedral door.

‘What about you — still kicking?’

‘Barely.’

‘I’ve got some bad news.’

‘Ah.’

‘Bad for me, anyway.’

‘Then it is for me, too.’

‘Well…even for me, it’s not that bad, but…’

‘Cut the suspense. Who’s dead?’

‘Alain-Marie.’

‘Oh.’

‘Heart attack — bang, gone. Yesterday. His sister called to tell me. Since then I’ve talked to a number of his friends and learned the details…He was with a young woman…’

‘Twenty-four?’

‘Something like that. And…don’t laugh, Rena…’

‘Oh, no, let me guess…An overdose of Viagra?’

‘Isn’t that awful? He was just my age, sixty-one. It’s so weird, you know? The veterans of May ‘68 are starting to die…Weirder still, Pierre is devastated. He says I prevented him from getting to know his real father. He wants to learn all he can about Alain-Marie; he’s even composing piano music for his funer—’