Nancy Huston - Infrared

The doctor feeds her rope for a while longer. He tells her that, in his opinion, it wouldn’t be a good idea for Mr Greenblatt to take a trans-Atlantic flight in the morning as planned. It would be better to keep him under observation for a day or two — and organise his transfer to a hospital immediately upon his return to Montreal.

Rena is hardly listening anymore. Her thoughts are rushing around in all directions like panicked mice, flashing at top speed and in random order through the images of the Tuscany trip, stopping at one only to seize up in terror and dart off to another. Her father stumbling on the Piazza San Marco…dozing off on twenty different benches…lousy Virgil…sitting on the floor in the History of Science Museum…standing in Gaia’s living room, head in hands…complaining of migraine headaches…forgetting the scarf he’d given her… All this not symptomatic, as it turns out, of bad faith or bad will or bad mood, not at all — but rather, since the outset, since day one, no, since before that, maybe long before that, no one knows since when… The third time she re-enters the waiting room, Ingrid leaps across the room and grabs her by the arm.

‘Is he all right?’ she asks.

‘He’s resting. The doctor says he’s such a nice man that they want to keep him a little longer. Let’s go out for a drink, hey? We deserve one. Let’s get soused.’

But Ingrid cannot be fooled — not even by Rena Greenblatt, that inveterate liar. She sees right through her. Grasps the fact that the two of them are the gazelle, and that the puma has just ripped their throat open.

‘Rena! Tell me.’

‘Let’s go, Ingrid.’

Rena virtually drags her stepmother to the desk, where the exhausted middle-aged receptionist has been replaced by a cute young redhead.

‘Prego, signorina, are there any cafés open at this time of night?’

‘Everything’s closed in the neighbourhood, signora. Except maybe at the train station. Yes, you might try the train station — I think there’s a coffee-shop there that stays open all night.’

Thus it is that Ingrid and Rena spend the night at the Stazione Santa Maria Novella, side by side not to say intertwined on a worn red-leather wall seat. This means that the following morning, just as Rena’s plane is taking off for Paris from Amerigo Vespucci Airport, they have top-notch seats for the TV news headlines that flash onto the screen in flaming red letters: ‘France declares a state of emergency’.

Outside, it looks as if it’s going to be a beautiful day. A church bell clangs, and, capturing the first rays of the rising sun, the Tuscan capital’s ancient bricks and roof tiles begin to smoulder.

The quotes on chapter title pages are from Diane Arbus’s correspondence, excerpts of which are published in Revelations, Random House, New York, 2003.

The translation of Dante’s Inferno is by Laurence Binyon.

Beckett’s description of Perugino’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ is from a letter to his friend William McGreevy.

Pico della Mirandola quotes are from Catherine David, L’homme qui savait trop, Seuil, 2001, p. 125, translated by the author.

The dialogue with Galileo paraphrases one of Dava Sobel’s paragraphs on the subject in her book, Galileo’s Daughter, Fourth Estate, London, 1999, p.44.

‘Some men really deserve…’ is from Galileo’s Daughter, ibid, pp 152-3, from Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Translated by Stillman Drake. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967, p. 59.

Woe! Woe is me!’ lines are from a sonnet by Michelangelo, in Nadine Sautel’s Michel-Ange, Gallimard, Folio, 2006, p.28; the line ‘Painting and sculpture have been my downfall’ is quoted on p. 77 of the same work. Translations by the author.

‘that much attention’ from the notes of a student who attended Arbus’s photography class at Westbeth in July 1971, quoted in the film Going Where I’ve Never Been.

On kinbaku, the custom of tying up women for the pleasure of monks, as well the characteristics of the Buddhist deity Kannon, cf. Philippe Forest, Araki enfin: l’homme qui ne vécut que pour aimer, Gallimard, 2008.

‘because, quite simply…’, interview from Jean-Pierre Krief’s film N obuyoshi Araki, La Sept/Arte.

My heartfelt thanks to Séverine Auffret, Mihai Mangiulea, John Stewart, Fred Le Van and Tamia Valmont.