Infrared (3 page)

She makes every effort not to rush them, telling herself there’s no reason to advance at one speed rather than another. (‘Why is my little Rena always in such a hurry?’ Alioune often asked her, when they were still married…‘What Makes Rena Greenblatt Run?’—the title of an article about her in some Parisian magazine, ages ago.) But here, today, her impatience is intransitive. Existential. A solid, flourishing psychic reality, eager to apply itself to any activity that might come along in the course of the day.

Some twenty yards further on, Simon comes to a halt. ‘On the other hand,’ he muses, ‘it’s altogether possible that the cavewoman’s mother trotted out her herbal pastes and tended to her daughter’s back once the caveman had pulled up his pants and trundled off to shoot a mammoth.’

‘Cro-Magnon didn’t wear pants,’ says Ingrid.

‘Right,’ sighs Rena. ‘Shall we have a look at this church?’

Before they can even get close to San Lorenzo, though, the couple asks for a break. They want to rest on a bench for a few minutes.

Simon shuts his eyes and Rena studies him: heavy eyelids, age-speckled hands and cheeks, furrowed brow, wispy grey hair…Her Daddy. And such a big belly now. How heavy he’s become…Whatever happened to the man she’d worshipped during childhood and adolescence, the Westmount years—that slender, handsome young Jewish scientist with his shock of dark curly hair? You, too, Father, once dreamed of Rinascimento. So many botched rebirths, tufts of hair torn out by the roots, tears shed, screams screamed or repressed, years wasted under the sombre reign of doubt…Hey Daddy, it’s a gorgeous day, relax! Sit down, sit back, let this ray of Florentine sunshine warm your face…

When Rena was little, her father would sometimes allow her to creep into his study and watch him read and write. (As for her mother’s study, either it was empty because she was off pleading in court or else she was receiving a client there for some top-secret conversation and no one else was allowed in. Ms Lisa Heyward had foreign origins and a man’s job—two things Rena was proud of. Whereas other kids’ mothers were boringly Canadian and worked as homemakers, schoolteachers or secretaries, hers hailed from Australia and was a lawyer. Not only that, but Ms Lisa Heyward hadn’t changed her name when she married, which was almost unheard-of at the time. As mothers went, she was exceptionally independent, not to say unreachable.)

On good days, Simon would let his daughter come and curl up on
the couch across from his desk. How she loved those moments! Her daddy looked so handsome, lost in thought…his glasses pushed back on his high forehead, his sensitive hands holding pen and paper… ‘Mommy’s a lawyer and what are you, Daddy?’ ‘A researcher.’ ‘How come? Do you keep losing things?’ ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha!’

But there were bad days, too, when Simon would stay locked up in his study from dawn to dusk. Silence and absence in the daytime—and at night, spectacular quarrels with Lisa in the course of which Rena would learn new words in spite of herself—pretentious, irresponsible, pseudo-genius, mortgage, immature, castrating princess… Simon would roar and Lisa would shriek. Simon would kick walls and Lisa would slam doors. Simon would overturn tables and Lisa would hurl plates. Rena guessed at this division of labour rather than actually witnessing it, for at such times she had a marked tendency to burrow beneath her blankets, drag a pillow over her head and stick her fingers into her ears…

‘I got talking to this American woman on the train yesterday,’ says Ingrid. ‘She told me two cities were absolute musts for tourists in Italy—Florence and Roma.’

‘She’s right,’ nods Rena. ‘Unfortunately, as I told you over the phone, we won’t have time to visit Rome this time around. There’s plenty to do in Tuscany, don’t worry.’

‘She didn’t say Rome,’ Ingrid insists, ‘she said Roma—didn’t she, Dad?’

Rena glances at her to see if she’s joking, but she isn’t. Finally Simon leans over and whispers into his wife’s ear, ‘It’s the same thing.’

They attempt to enter the church, but—no such luck. They must first purchase tickets—over there, in the passageway that leads to the Biblioteca Laurenziana. There’s a lengthy queue at the booth.

As Simon and Rena settle in for a wait, Ingrid wanders into the courtyard to look at the cloister.

But can she really see it? Rena wonders. Can she feel the beauty of this place? Does she know how to marvel at buildings that date back six hundred years? I do, don’t I, oh, yes, I do, no doubt about it…Oh, Aziz, it’s only the first day and already I’m floundering, sliding towards hysteria…You told me I was armed to the teeth—was it really only
this morning
you pronounced those words?

Photo. Photo. Photo. In black and white, she captures Ingrid’s bleached-blonde hair against a background of the cream-coloured Florentine stone known as
pietra serena
—and, despite the crowds of tourists and her own vile mood, the magic works. The minute she adjusts the focus in the viewfinder, her thoughts settle down and the universe goes still. Always the same elation just before she presses the shutter—the photo may turn well or badly, but whatever happens she will take it,
it will happen…
Same thrill as in department stores at age thirteen when her hand would tense up, preparing to dart and grab and steal,
it will happen…
Or as in seduction, when she can tell that yes,
it will happen,
within an hour or two the man whose gaze has just crossed hers will possess her, rip off her clothes, open her up and bellow…

Through the viewfinder, she can see what escapes her gaze the rest of the time. In the present instance, the distress in Ingrid’s eyes. A swirling abyss of distress and insecurity, which vanishes the second Rena lowers her camera.

‘You still haven’t switched to digital?’ asks Ingrid, returning to join them in the queue.

‘Nope!’

Rena doesn’t even attempt to explain that, seen through a digital camera, reality itself looks unconvincing to her. Or that, in digital, an infuriating fraction of a second elapses between the pressing of
the shutter and the recording of the image. Ingrid wouldn’t believe her. She wouldn’t understand. To her mind, reality is something that can be accurately reflected in a photograph, and a fraction of a second is nothing.

‘Doesn’t the magazine get on your case about it?’ Ingrid insists.

‘No, no,’ Rena says. ‘I scan my photos, that’s all—they get their pixels in the end. Besides, they’re not about to complain: my name is one of their biggest assets.’

‘I see…’ says Ingrid.

One of their biggest assets, Subra sniggers softly as the three of them move at last through the portals of San Lorenzo. Schroeder has never given you anything but temporary contracts, and he almost refused to let you take this unpaid holiday—but sure, right, your name is one of their biggest assets…

‘Designed by Brunelleschi,
the
great Renaissance architect,’ Rena hastens to proclaim, having leafed through the
Guide bleu
on her flight this morning. ‘Look how the sun’s rays light up every square inch of space…’

She can tell Ingrid is disappointed. To her eyes, the church is empty. There’s really nothing much to look at—not even any stained-glass windows. Even the Amsterdam Cathedral is more lavishly decorated than this. Yes, thinks Rena, but you don’t understand. Here, instead of being dazzled by ostentation, overwhelmed by fancy ornament or intimidated by dark shadows, man himself is writ large. Thanks to the light that comes flooding through the transparent windowpanes, the eye can apprehend the inner space in its entirety. The church’s geometrical structure, its sober hues of blue, grey and white, reassure and respect the individual instead of boggling his
mind. This is the very essence of humanism.

She spares Ingrid her spiel, though. If her stepmother wants to be disappointed, why deprive her of that pleasure?

So as father and daughter move through the transept, deep in conversation, Ingrid gets bored, allows her mind to wander and waits for the visit to end. This is how it’s always been.

Rena holds forth a little longer. ‘Lorenzo for Lorenzo the Magnificent, of course—that Medici duke under whose patronage, in the mid-fifteenth century, the arts and sciences blossomed almost miraculously…’

‘But also for poor Saint Lawrence,’ says Simon, who had picked up a leaflet at the entrance, ‘whose martyrdom consisted of being grilled like a hamburger. As the tale goes, he asked to be turned over after a while, saying, “That side’s already cooked!”’

Saint Lawrence’s flesh sputters on the grill, his fat melts and drips, the flames lick, leap, eat…Rena does her best to banish these images from her mind and force her attention back to Brunelleschi’s sober beauty, but no—again and again, grey greasy matter, Saint Lawrence’s brain melting, great fat drops dripping and sputtering in the fire, avid flames devouring them, feeding on them, leaping higher and higher…Such a fine brain it once was. Well-lubricated, pulsing, throbbing, palpitating with curiosity…

The brain, she explains to Subra (the only person in the world who is captivated by her stories no matter how often she’s heard them before), was my father’s passion back in the sensational sixties, when all fields of knowledge—music and biochemistry, poetry and psychology, painting and neurology—were cross-fertilising. Yes, the incredible, unfathomable, untapped potential of human grey matter. The way the human brain contrives to put a self together in the first few years of life, then keep it in place, assign it limits…Even as a child I could sense Simon’s enthusiasm for this subject. Sometimes
he’d talk to me about the content of his work. I remember how, looking up at me from the book he was reading, he once declared out of the blue: ‘A self is neither more nor less than the story of a human body, as told by that body’s brain.’ I felt proud when he shared this sort of insight with me, even if it was way over my head.

Though only a teaching assistant at the time, Simon was slogging away at his thesis and his future seemed full of promise. His specialty was neuropsychology, but he was determined to throw off artificial shackles and cross borders between disciplines. Freedom, freedom, freedom! One of his heroes was Leonard Cohen: born within a year of each other, raised in Westmount and educated at McGill, both had dabbled in lysergic acid diethylamide—an amazing substance that plunged you into heaven and hell by turn, twisting your memory, splattering unpredictable images—now sublime, now atrocious—onto the screen of your mind, paroxystically heightening all your perceptions, pulverising your sense of self, and imitating the symptoms of psychosis in uncontrollable ways. Also like Cohen (to say nothing of Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and many others of the time), Simon Greenblatt had turned away from the Jewish religion of his childhood to explore the arcane concepts of Buddhism, in which the very notions of self, world, and reality were dissolved.

‘Challenge authority! Invent yourself! Accept entropy, the only truth of the universe!’ My father’s other idol was Timothy Leary, one of whose phrases was to become his mantra: ‘There is no such thing as mental illness; there are only unknown or imperfectly explored nervous circuits.’ After getting himself kicked out of Harvard in 1963 for handing out hallucinogenic drugs to his students, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert had settled into a mansion in Millbrook, New York and founded the League for Spiritual Discovery or L.S.D. For years Simon Greenblatt had dreamed of going down to work
with those pioneers and helping them invent a new paganism. In actual fact, he only set eyes on Leary once. So did I, on May 31, 1969, at age nine. Tim Leary had come to Montreal to support his friends John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their ‘Give Peace a Chance’ event. Simon dragged my mom and me to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel—where the Beatle, his wife and her young son sprawled stark naked in front of cameras from the world over, to express their disapproval of the Vietnam War. Because of the police cordons in front of the hotel we didn’t get to see the bed-in itself, but I did catch a glimpse of Leary’s bell-bottomed jeans when, as reporters’ cameras flashed and popped, he jumped out of his limousine and dashed into the hotel. ‘Look—that’s him!’ yelled Simon, struggling to pick me up and set me on his shoulders, though I was already far too heavy for those sort of antics. ‘One does
not
carry a nine-year-old child around on one’s shoulders,’ said Mommy. ‘Okay, Lisa, keep your cool,’ answered Simon, setting me back on my feet. ‘That man, darling Rena,’ he went on—I can still remember his exact words—’is a true revolutionary in my field of study. But now that he’s decided to switch to politics and run for governor of California, the path is clear for me to take up the torch and complete his discoveries. Yes, it’s perfectly possible that Professor Simon Greenblatt will some day win the Nobel Prize.’ ‘They don’t give Nobel Prizes in neuropsychology,’ my mother pointed out. ‘Well, they’ll make one just for me,’ my father retorted. ‘You’re not even a professor yet.’ ‘Not to worry.’

They exit the church.

It’s only half past three, but Ingrid claims to be hungry. Given the number of pastries she gobbled down at the hotel just a few hours ago, Rena knows this can’t be true—what’s true is that she’s
afraid
of being hungry. She’s been in the grip of that fear for the past sixty years—ever since the horrendous winter of 1944-45, when hundreds of Rotterdamers starved to death and the rest were reduced to eating garbage, rats, and grass…Nothing frightens Ingrid more than the prospect of lacking food. Her eyes, like everyone else’s, reflect the demons of her childhood.

They spot a perfect-looking café on the far side of the Piazza del Duomo and start to head for it. Oh, but everything is so tedious, so difficult…The throngs on the footpath are stifling. How can my amorous strolls through Florence with Xavier be so very far away? wonders Rena. Was it really the same city? The same life? The same me? How can the past be so irrevocably
past?

‘That’s weird,’ Ingrid says suddenly. ‘All the tourist shops seem to be selling Québecois T-shirts. Now, why would that be?’