Infrared (6 page)

Snow, murmurs Subra.

In infrared photography snow is black, ice cubes are black, people’s glasses (even transparent ones) are black, everything cool is black, black, black…But the dark skin of my lovers is subtly shaded, rippling with a thousand nuances of light; sometimes you can even see the veins through it. Infrared reveals what I cherish more than anything else, what I’ve always longed for, what I lacked most as a child—warmth.

When I’d lose my temper, my mother would call me a ‘fury’ and send me to my room to calm down. She meant it teasingly, but deep down I liked being called that—I thought the word suited me to a T. In my mind it was connected to fire and I liked the image of myself as flaming and flamboyant…furious, fierce, ferocious—yes, a real Fury—me!

My first memory is of being cold. Can it really have been as cold as all that in our house in Westmount? Carpets in every room, stained-glass windows, wood panelling, book-lined walls…‘Shh, your father’s working, he’s trying to write his thesis.’ ‘Your mom’s with a client. Don’t you have any homework?’ ‘Shh, can’t you see I’m reading? I need to concentrate. Please go and play, darling.’ ‘Rowan, Rena,
please
don’t make noise when I’m with a client, all right? They’re such unhappy women, you wouldn’t believe what they’ve been through.’

Apart from defending prostitutes, Ms Lisa Heyward’s primary concern at the time was the pro-choice movement: her phone would ring off the wall every time a doctor got arrested for having terminated an unwanted pregnancy. Henry Morgantaler, for instance, who claimed to have carried out some five thousand abortions single-handedly. The man had a lot in common with France’s Simone Veil—born the same year, both were Jewish and had lost their parents in the Nazi death camps; both, moreover, were subjected to revolting slander as they fought for abortion rights (hadn’t Jews always ritually killed and eaten Catholic babies?). In 1973, a fifteen-year prison sentence was handed down for Morgantaler, but he was released after only a few weeks, thanks to the efforts of tireless professional feminists like Ms Lisa Heyward.

For me this meant spending long hours alone with Lucille as I waited for Rowan to come home from school. It was Lucille, in fact—a vivacious young black woman from Martinique—who unwittingly introduced me to eroticism. Waking up one day from my afternoon nap (I can’t have been more than three or four), I heard strange noises coming from the far end of the apartment. I tiptoed across the kitchen and saw that Lucille’s bedroom door was ajar and that she was in there with a man. They were naked, their chocolate-coloured skin was smooth and slick and their bodies formed a sort of ebony gondola that rocked swiftly back and forth in the moving
waves of blankets and sheets. The man was cupping Lucille’s head in his hands, gently holding her neck and staring into her eyes and whispering to her in Creole, I could make out a word here and there but most of them were drowned out by sounds of pure music, pure desire, pure pleasure…

Maybe that’s where you acquired your taste for the French language? suggests Subra.

Could be. Definitely it was the first time I ever saw a man’s sex erect and in action, and I’ll never forget it. As her lover penetrated her simultaneously with his gaze, his voice and his impressive tool, Lucille’s eyes sparkled like diamonds, her mouth was half-open in a smile and she kept gasping and letting out these little yelps—no, more like bits of song but always on the same note, staccato—everything about the couple palpitated and vibrated and spoke to me of ecstasy. Yes, that must be when I first realised how much you could ask of life, if only you dared…

Meanwhile there were endless hours of solitude and boredom to be got through. When Rowan finally came home from school, he taught me everything he’d learned there. Day after day—reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography. My brother gradually becoming more than a brother to me—father, mother, god, sole horizon. ‘I’m the sun, Rena, and you’re the moon.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You have no light of your own; all you do is reflect my light.’ ‘Yes. We’ll stick together forever, won’t we, Rowan?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘We’ll live together when we grow up.’ ‘Come give me a hug.’ Five and nine, at the time. My plump soft body pressed up against his wiry, knotty one. ‘I’m a nice girl, aren’t I?’ ‘Sure you’re a nice girl.’ ‘You love me, don’t you?’ ‘Sure I love you.’ ‘I love you more than anything in the world.’ ‘Damn right you do.’ My heart skipping a beat at the swearword. ‘But I’m older than you are, so you have to obey me.’ ‘I know.’ ‘I’m the master and you’re the slave, okay?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Promise?’ ‘I promise.’

Rowan was warm. And because he was warm, because he was like the sun to me, because I worshipped him, overjoyed by his trust in me and awed by his inside knowledge of the adult world, everything he said and wanted was right. So when he said, ‘You know, Rena, it’s not enough to be nice, you’ve got to learn to be bad, too,’ I nodded and promised to do my best. And when he slipped his middle fingers inside of me, one from the front and the other from the back, and tried to force them to touch, I winced and squirmed but when he said, ‘That doesn’t hurt, does it?’ I said, ‘No.’ And when he used his penknife to remove all the twigs and leaves from a thin supple willow branch, then impaled me on it, causing me to bleed, and said, ‘Don’t worry, Rena, it’s only natural, women bleed all the time, you should be grateful to me for making a woman of you,’ I said, panting against the pain, ‘Thank you, Rowan.’ Crying or complaining were out of the question—I had no one to turn to. You weren’t around then, Subra; I hadn’t invented you yet.

Rowan wept sometimes—when our father, because of the tensions in his marriage or the long hours of fruitless work in his study, would suddenly turn on him, make fun of him, needle and berate him on the pretext of hardening him up, thickening his skin. ‘A boy’s got to know how to defend himself, hey?’ he’d say, flicking the tea towel at Rowan’s arm over and over again. Yes, Rowan would weep then, collapsing on the floor in tears. His bedroom was just below my own, and I knew I’d hear him sobbing long into the night…

Basta.
Enough—more than enough melancholy for one day.

Rena gets up. Within ten minutes she is washed, dressed, out of there.

Simon and Ingrid are waiting for her in the breakfast room—she, quietly stuffing herself, he, poring over a leaflet about Pico della Mirandola.

‘This guy was unbelievable,’ he says to her by way of a greeting.

Studying the leaflet as she drinks her coffee, Rena nods. Of course. The philosophical genius who died an untimely death in Florence in 1494 (he was only thirty-one) reminds Simon of himself as a youth.

No doubt about it, Dad. You and Pico were looking for the same thing—’the connections among all the universes, from the lives of ants to the music of the spheres and the dwelling-place of angels.’ Though Pico took the high road of religion and philosophy, and you, the low road of brain chemistry and neurology, what both of you hoped to prove was
The Dignity of Man.
‘The only being,’ as Pico expressed it, ‘in whom the Creator planted the seeds of every sort of life. The only one who has the privilege of shaping himself into angel or beast according to his fancy.’ What a thrilling Mirandolian idea!

Simon Greenblatt had exactly the same intuition: that people shaped themselves, fashioned selves for themselves out of the tales they were told, and were freer than they really knew to change their identities. Now, at the breakfast table in Florence, surrounded by the clatter of dishes and the hiss of milk being frothed for cappuccino, he longs to share with his daughter what he’s just learned about the great philosopher.

His sentence begins, hesitates at length, turns a corner, goes skidding off track—’Sorry’—begins again. Advances with excruciating slowness. Comes to a halt. Starts over again, after a long pause.

Oh, Daddy, Rena thinks in desperation, you’ve lost the thread.
Your brain spins dozens of threads that lead you astray, wind themselves round you, trip you up, tie you in knots, immobilise you. Poor Gulliver-on-the-Arno, how will you ever get out of this mess?

Yet your brain throbs with true wisdom and teems with countless facts. No soul could be more generous than yours, no interrogation more genuine, no quest more ardent…it never manages to jell, that’s all. What’s lacking is…lightness…alacrity…humour…the joy of choosing words, watching them file out on stage, line up, grab hands…and then, to the rhythm of pipes and tambourines, launch into a fabulous farandole!

No. I know.

What’s lacking is…self-love. Something Pico probably found at his mother’s breast…and that you didn’t find at yours?

Granny Rena was a case. You named your eldest daughter after the woman you so desperately wished you could love, so she’d forgive you…for what crime, exactly?

Tell me,
Subra says.

My paternal grandparents made a narrow escape from Poland in the early thirties, settling first in France, then in Quebec…But in 1945, upon seeing the photos of the death camps in which every member of her family had perished, from her two grandmothers down to her little second cousin, Rena sank into a permanent stupor. She was thirty-five at the time, and Simon ten.

Whose photos of Dachau and Buchenwald did she see? Very possibly the ones published in
Vogue
and
Life
by that lovely blonde American photographer named Lee Miller. At the age of seven, Lee Miller was so lovely and so blonde that a ‘friend of the family’ raped her and she contracted gonorrhoea. Over a period of several months, her tiny vagina and uterus had to be subjected to acid
baths—an excruciating treatment that made her scream, day after day. Despite the pain inside, her body stayed perfectly lovely and blonde on the outside, so when she was eight her father started photographing her in the nude. As she grew towards adolescence he asked her to strike more and more lascivious poses. Then she left for Paris and was photographed in the same poses, also in the nude, by Man Ray and other Montparnasse artists. Despite her loveliness and her blondeness, Miller thought she might be interested in looking rather than being looked at—so she became a photographer herself. One day, thanks to an accident in her dark room, she discovered solarisation—a technique that consists of very briefly exposing the photograph to light during development—just as she herself had been exposed to male desire during her own development. Solarisation creates weird effects—in photos, halos, and, in little girls, the ability to split off from their bodies and the imperious need to search for meaning…Only in war would Lee Miller find the meaning she was looking for—first the destruction, bombing and ruins of cities in Britain and France, then the death camps, which, in April 1945, she was among the very first journalists to visit. Yes, she must have recognised something in the insane pornography of what she saw in the camps—chaotically exposed nudity, violent effacement of individuality, naked, fragmented, broken Jewish bodies, people turned into objects, non-entities. Unlike the other photographers, Miller approached the corpses without revulsion and photographed them close-up. Instead of framing anonymous heaps, piles, mountains of corpses, she insisted on capturing them as people—one person, another, yet another, each with his and her own history, showing their beauty, their personality, their still-human features, their naked bodies, their living dying bodies, every body a potential
body,
still human, still so very, very human—just as women exhibited in the nude, treated as if they were interchangeable objects, are in fact
human individuals. In Buchenwald, Miller finally managed to inject meaning into an existence she had hitherto found, as she puts it, ‘extraordinarily empty’…

Once she’d seen those photos and learned what they implied, Granny Rena lost her ability to participate in life. Rena Greenblatt: prostrate, inaccessible. She never talked about her mourning, but it made her indifferent to everything else. Her pain was intimidating. Most days, her room was darkened and off-limits to her two children, Simon and his older sister Deborah. She withdrew her love from them, and her being from the world.

Baruch, on the other hand, poor sweet clumsy Baruch who sold men’s suits over on Saint Lawrence Boulevard, was a good dad—present, loving, funny, even erudite in his own way. Though his head was most often up in the clouds with God, his heart was filled with concern for his family. Morning and evening he would tie an apron around his waist and start fussing in the kitchen, trying to cook for you and failing, burning even the fried eggs, forgetting to turn off the gas, tearing the bread when he tried to butter it because the butter was rock hard, straight from the fridge. Oh, your poor pa…Old before his time, forever smiling, overworked, humble and humiliated…You felt sorry for him, Simon. Throughout your teenage years, you were filled with silent rage at your mother for not being like other mothers, and for turning your father into a
nebbish.
No way you could invite friends over to the house: with the invalid woman and the aproned man, your house was far too strange…

A little like yours? Subra whispers.

Yeah, come to think of it, a little like mine…

When you left home at last, at age eighteen, you must have solemnly sworn never to resemble your father, a weakling you loved but pitied. A meek, submissive, altruistic, unmanly man who’d given
up all hope of having a great destiny here on Earth. You, Simon, would be a real man…

Sliding the Mirandola leaflet back across the table, Rena gently pats her father’s hand.

They’ve made big plans for the day ahead: first the History of Science Museum, and then, following their afternoon siesta, the Ponte Vecchio and the Piazza della Signoria…

Haughtily ignoring the hundreds of tourists lined up at the entrance to the Uffizi, they skirt the Palazzo Vecchio and head down to the Piazza dei Giudici, the Judges’ Square.

‘This is where Savonarola was condemned to death,’ Simon solemnly announces.

‘Who’s that?’ Ingrid asks.

‘A fanatical priest. In the fifteenth century, right on this spot, he built bonfires of the vanities, burned the works of Pico della Mirandola, and was eventually hanged himself, then burned at the stake. Incredible, to think all this happened five hundred years ago, before the first white man ever set foot in Quebec. Before that part of the world was known as Quebec, in fact,’ he adds, savvier than the American lady in Dante’s house.