Nancy Huston - Infrared

Afterwards, Kamal smothers my hands with kisses. He’s happy and so am I. My whole body radiates happiness, from the roots of my hair to the soles of my feet.

A final request. ‘One of your photos. Could I take a picture of one of your photos, Kamal?’ It’s not easy to make clear in Italian — no, not a photo of you, but one you carry around with you everywhere, like a talisman. A picture of your wife, your son, your father, whatever — or you, but as a little boy…‘Would you have a photo like that in your wallet, Kamal?’

I learned to do this while working on Whore Sons and Daughters.

Kamal hesitates. Thinks it over. What are the chances his wife in Gemlik will ever hear about the opening — in Paris, Arles or Berlin — of a show called My Lovers’ Loved Ones by a weird lady photographer named Diane? None at all.

His wife’s dark eyes glint mischievously. Because of the red headscarf she is wearing, she bears a vague resemblance to Monica Vitti in L’Avventura. Kamal is showing me this person, whom he loves, to tell me that yes, we’ve truly been together in this room. I get the photo in my finder. Sense it. Capture it. Press the shutter. For the rest of my life, the young Turkish woman’s face will be imprinted on my retina, my film, and my very being.

‘Thanks, Kamal. That was fantastic.’

‘Thank you, Diane. I wish you happiness. A long life.’

All this takes place within a quarter of a second on the third floor of Dante’s house, as Rena walks past the stranger and heads for the staircase. She doesn’t have time to go with him, unfortunately — so she brushes past, lowering her eyes. ‘Scusi, Signor.’

Will he now go off to write his Comedy?

Ah. Hopefully, the warmth gleaned from the virtual body of handsome Kamal will last her until bedtime.

Arriving at Hotel Guelfa (hey, Guelfa must mean Guelph, just as Roma means Rome, Those who tourists do become… ), she climbs the stairs three at a time to her narrow Room 25.

Simon and Ingrid have slipped a note under her door — they bought sandwiches for themselves and decided to retire early, to be in tip-top shape tomorrow morning.

Rena lights a cigarette and goes over to the open window to smoke it. As she stares down at the little garden below, San Lorenzo’s melting brain comes back to her — and, on its heels, the scene with her parents in front of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel…

1969, the turning-point.

In 1969 she was playing the little mouse even more zealously than usual because her parents had just decided to kick her older brother Rowan out of the house, packing him off to a Catholic boarding school east of Montreal. Terrified they might reject and expel her, too, she took care never to complain, bother them, ask for anything, or object to having to spend so many evenings alone with Lucille the maid in the big house whose mortgage payments they were finding so difficult to meet.

Good thing you came along, Subra.

Yes…That same year, Rena had been brought up short by Diane Arbus’s portrait of an adolescent girl: long, straight blonde hair, heavy fringe all but covering her eyes, white lace dress that looked terribly scratchy, face and body frozen in sadness…If you can do that with a camera, she’d said to herself, I want to be a photographer. Rena had recognised her soul sister in this melancholy girl — and, choosing a name for her by spelling Arbus’s own name backwards, resolved to do her best to divert and amuse her. Ever since, the constant rubbing of Subra’s mind against her own has been a source of warmth to her; she’s eternally grateful to the great American photographer for the gift of this precious alter-ego.

Fatigue suddenly catches up with her and knocks her flat. She undresses, brushes her teeth and crawls into bed with her copy of Inferno.

When she falls asleep towards midnight, she is musing about Lethe, the river in Hell whose name means oblivion.

A year from now, she thinks, I’ll have again forgotten whether Dante was a Guelph or a Ghibelline. Fifteen years from now, I’ll have forgotten what the two sides were fighting over. And it’s quite possible that thirty years down the line, my brain will contain no memory at all of this trip to Tuscany…or of Dante.

Freddo e caldo

I’m out for a walk with friends in the Buttes Chaumont when suddenly I see, looming up in the middle of the park, a huge white hill made of some unidentifiable substance that looks like wax or chalk. Climbing to the top, I crumble a bit of the substance between my fingers and realise it’s artificial snow. A deep crevice appears at the heart of the mountain, I grab onto the walls but they’re smooth and slippery, I lose my footing and tumble into the crevice. It’s an endless fall, like Alice’s in the rabbit hole. Even as I fall, I start worrying about the fragile parts of my body — my sex in particular — that are liable to be damaged when I land. The moment of impact is absent. When I finally catch up with my friends in the Rue Botzaris tearoom, I tell them I left my body behind in the park — it must be badly hurt — will they please come and help me find it? But they just go on with their conversation, paying no attention to me. After a while they get up to leave. ‘B-but — what about my body?’ I stammer, icy with panic. ‘I can’t leave without my body!’

How strange, comments Subra when Rena wakes up. If there’s one part of a woman’s body that can’t be damaged when she falls, it’s her sex.

Some other kind of ‘fall’, then? And why would the snow be ‘artificial’?

The snow of my childhood…Phony snow…or perhaps…a phony childhood? My lie-riddled childhood come back to haunt my adult life? Sitting there in the middle of my neighbourhood in Paris, as conspicuous as a ‘mountain’?

I remember when Simon shoved Rowan’s face into the snow. It must have been a Sunday morning, we were out skating in Mount Royal Park — was Lisa with us? probably not — suddenly I turned around and saw my brother waving his legs in the air, gasping for air, and my father laughing as he held his head firmly in the snow with both hands…What had Rowan done? Talked back to him? Refused to obey an order? Broken a skateblade? I don’t recall. Simon punished both his children, but his son more often and more harshly than his daughter…Finally he released my brother and acted as if nothing had happened, wanting to pick up our shenanigans where we’d left off — but Rowan sulked for hours, incensed at having been humiliated in front of me.

So many snow games with Rowan and his pals when we were little. Snowball fights that went on for hours…I hated the bite of the cold, like an electric saw the length of my spine, when a boy would shove a snowball down my neck — but the boys themselves I loved. Four, five, six of them — and me, always the only girl. I loved the violent mixing of our bodies when the sled would hit a bump and we’d be ejected, rolling over and over in the snow, elbow on forehead, knee in gut, head slamming nose — it hurt like hell but it warmed me up and turned me on; I wished it would never end.

First a tomboy, then an androgyne, Subra says…Forever hanging out with boys, hankering after a man’s life and a man’s death…When did that end — when Fabrice died? Or when, scarcely a month later, little Toussaint was born?

Rena stays in bed for a while, eyes closed, breathing in the Florence air and slowly intoning the words Tuscany, Renaissance, beauty.

The laughter of a small child wafts up to her from the street below, bubbling and gurgling like a brook — oh, the word gurgle was invented for that laugh.