TUESDAY
‘I’ll go anywhere.’
‘So you’re the last Greenblatt,’ grunts the proprietor of the Hotel Guelfa, in Italian, without looking at her, glancing sullenly instead at the photo in her passport. ‘Your parents arrived late last night,’ he adds—repeating, in a tone heavily laced with reproach, ‘Very late.’
Rena doesn’t correct him, doesn’t explain that they’re not her parents, or rather that one is and that the other isn’t; having not the slightest wish to open that can of worms, that Pandora’s box, that raft of the Medusa, she holds her tongue in Italian, smiles in Italian, nods in Italian, and strives to radiate the serenity to which she ardently aspires. The truth is that she’s been dreading this moment for weeks.
‘I know it’s absurd,’ she murmured to Aziz only a few hours ago as they nosed through the thick fog which for some mysterious reason seems to shroud Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport in all seasons and at all hours. ‘My trip hasn’t even started yet, and already I feel guilty.’
‘Hey, the lady exaggerates,’ said Aziz teasingly, even as he stroked her left thigh. ‘Not only is she treating herself to a week’s holiday in Tuscany, but she wants us to feel sorry for her.’
Standing next to the car at the drop-off point, she kissed her man lingeringly. ‘Goodbye, love…We’ll talk every day, won’t we?’
‘You bet.’ Aziz took her in his arms and gave her a mighty hug. Then, stepping back, looking into her eyes: ‘You do look a bit wasted this morning, but I’m not worried. You’re armed to the teeth—you’ll survive.’
Aziz knows her well. Knows she’s planned to keep Simon and Ingrid at a distance by aiming, framing, firing at them with her Canon. ‘You’ll survive,’ he repeated as he climbed back into the car. She leaned down to drown herself in his dark eyes one more time—and then, by way of farewell, slowly drew her index finger along his lower lip.
They’d made love this morning before the alarm clock went off and she’d wanted him to come on her face, it was such a powerful sensation to be holding his sex with both her hands and suddenly feel the semen spurting through, when it had splashed out warm and marvellous she’d spread it over her face and neck and breasts like an elixir of youth, feeling it cool as it dried…Washing this morning, she’d purposely left a bit of her lover’s invisible trace beneath her jaw, at the top of her neck—like a thin, translucid mask to protect her, see her through the impending trial…
The man hands her a key and informs her, still grumpily and in Italian, that Room 25 is on the second floor, by which he means the third floor, at the far end of the corridor.
What he doesn’t tell her is that the room is in fact the same thing as the corridor; they’ve simply put up a door and built a tiny shower stall in one corner. Rena sees at once that she mustn’t leave anything on the sink, because the sink will be taking its shower at the same time as she does. The room is long and narrow—well, narrow, anyhow—and its window gives onto a charming little garden in the back: flowers, climbing vines, red-tiled roofs. She takes a deep breath. You see? she says inwardly to Subra, the special Friend who accompanies her wherever she goes. It is Florence. I mean, there is beauty.
And why on earth would you feel guilty? Subra asks her. I mean, you’re not Beatrice Cenci or anything.
True, Rena nods. In the first place, I wasn’t born into an aristocratic family in Rome in the sixteenth century. In the second place, I’m not twenty-one years old. My forty-five-year-old father didn’t lock me up in his palazzo in the Abruzzi with his second wife Lucrezia, to humiliate and brutalise us. He didn’t try to rape me. I didn’t plan his murder with the help of my brother and stepmother. I didn’t hire professional killers, instruct them to drive an iron peg into his right eye and personally oversee the crime. I didn’t go on to push his dead body over the edge of the cliff. I wasn’t arrested, brought to trial, and condemned to death. My head didn’t get chopped off in 1599 near the Ponte Sant’Angelo on the Tiber. No, no, the whole situation is different—this is Florence, not Rome, my stepmother loves my father, I’m the one who’s forty-five, my head is sitting squarely on my shoulders…and everyone is innocent.
Subra chuckles.
Rena walks down the corridor to Room 23 and scratches at the door like a cat. Lengthy silence. So why am I so terrified? There is beauty. I’ve simply made them the gift of a trip to Italy, a country neither of them has ever visited before, to celebrate my Daddy’s seventieth birthday…
Simon has never looked in a less celebratory mood; as for Ingrid, her eyes are red and puffy from crying.
Though it’s past noon, they’ve just got up. It seems they narrowly escaped a tragedy last night—Ingrid tells Rena about it in detail over breakfast. They’d arrived late from Rotterdam, at one a.m., having travelled all day in a train filled to bursting with rambunctious ragazzi. Exhausted, they’d disembarked and tried to get their bearings in this foreign city, foreign country, foreign tongue. They’d wandered endlessly around the Stazione Santa Maria Novella, weighed down by all seven pieces of their luggage, some on wheels, others straining their back and shoulder muscles. Disorientated, they’d got lost and made a huge detour, trudging past wonders and detesting them for not being the Hotel Guelfa. (Santa Maria Novella—not the station but the church, decorated by Domenico Ghirlandaio, the master of Michelangelo himself—right there before their eyes, in the sweet Florentine night…) Bone-tired, they’d stopped on a corner to catch their breath, calm the pounding of their hearts and check the map under a streetlight. When at long last they’d reached their room at the Hotel Guelfa, after waiting at the door, explaining things to the irate proprietor and gasping their way up two steep flights of stairs, Ingrid had automatically counted their bags and…six instead of seven. Re-counted—truly, six. Heart flip. The missing piece of luggage, though the smallest, was also the most precious: a small rucksack containing their money, plane tickets, passports…Simon—dog-tired, wiped-out, septuagenarian, lost—trundled back downstairs, returned to the corner where they’d stopped to rest, and—despite the incessant comings and goings at that spot—found the bag propped up against the streetlight.
‘As miraculously intact as the Madonna,’ he triumphantly concludes.
The mere memory of last night’s panic has reduced Ingrid to tears.
Gee, thinks Rena, we could write an epic poem about this. The Sack of Florence, a counterpart to The Sack of Rome. But Ingrid wouldn’t want to know that Charles V’s armies razed the latter city in 1527, causing twenty thousand deaths and incalculable losses to Italy’s artistic heritage: to her mind, the only destruction in the history of humanity is that of her native city of Rotterdam by the Germans, on the fourteenth of May 1940. She was just a month old at the time, her family’s house was hit, her mother and three brothers died when it collapsed, her own life was saved by the cast-iron stove next to which her cradle had been set—‘I was born in ruins,’ she loves to tell people, sobbing; ‘I suckled a corpse.’
‘Uh…Florence? Did you want to see Florence?’
Bad start.
Whereas the Florentines are already halfway through their day’s work, Simon and Ingrid seem in no rush to get up from the breakfast table.
‘Won’t you have some pastry, Rena?’ Ingrid says. ‘You’ve lost weight, haven’t you? How much do you weigh now?’
She resents it that my body doesn’t change, thinks Rena. So far, at least, neither motherhood nor passing time have managed to fill it out. At forty-five my measurements are the same as they were at age eighteen, when we first met. She thinks poor Toussaint and Thierno must have been horribly squashed in there. She has a hard time with my appearance in general, which she finds morbid—my inordinate taste for dark glasses, dark everything, leather.
That Rena! Subra says, imitating Ingrid’s voice in Rena’s mind. Still using a backpack instead of a handbag, because she’s allergic to ladies’ handbags and to everything ladylike in general. Now also sporting a man’s fedora, no doubt to protect her head from the sun and rain while leaving her hands free for photography. And her hair’s cut so short, you’d think she was a lesbian…Actually that wouldn’t surprise me…nothing surprises me, coming from Rena…I mean, why limit yourself to men? If you’ve got an explorer’s soul you explore everything, don’t you? Besides which, there’s her brother’s example…
‘You know I abhor scales,’ Rena says aloud. ‘Even when my kids were babies, I refused to weigh them. I figured if they got too puny, I’d notice it all by myself.’
‘But surely they weigh you when you have an appointment at the doctor’s?’
‘That’s one reason I do my best to avoid members of that profession…Um, let me think…Hundred and seven or so, last time I checked.’
‘That’s not enough for a woman of your height…Right, Dad?’
‘Sorry…I’ll do my best to shrink.’
Oh, dear, Simon doesn’t laugh. He is Rena’s father, not Ingrid’s, but Ingrid has been calling him Dad since their four daughters were born in the eighties and he doesn’t seem to mind.
Poor Simon, Rena thinks. He looks discouraged in advance. Dreads the coming days. Fears I’ll be dragging them here and there, pushing them around, impressing and amazing them, overwhelming them with my erudition, my energy and curiosity. Thinks maybe they should have gone straight home to Montreal from Rotterdam. Is afraid of disappointing me. ‘Dear daughter, I confess that I am old,’ as Lear puts it…Seventy isn’t old at all nowadays, but the fact is that he’s tired and I weigh on him. No matter how skinny I am…
After ingesting the disgusting cellophane-wrapped pastries and the so-called orange juice, they wonder if they could have a second cup of coffee. Not cappuccino this time round, regular coffee.
Rena moves to the counter to place their order, and when the proprietor mutters that cappuccino and caffè latte are the stessa cosa, she goes into more detail, explaining that what the couple would really like is a pot of weak coffee with a jug of hot milk on the side. This she obtains. The couple is flabbergasted.
‘But…you speak Italian!’ exclaims Ingrid.
No, not really, it’s just that…communication’s so much easier between strangers.
‘Easy to be a polyglot,’ says Ingrid, pursuing her reflection on Rena’s linguistic gifts, ‘when you’ve been married to a whole slew of foreigners and travelled to the four corners of the Earth for your profession.’
Yeah, Subra snickers, so don’t go putting on airs.
Right, Rena sighs. No point in reminding her, as I’ve already done countless times, that my four husbands—Fabrice the Haitian, Khim the Cambodian, Alioune the Senegalese and Aziz the Algerian—were all, thanks to the unstinting generosity of French colonisation, francophones…as, indeed, were my Québecois lovers—all the professors, truck drivers, waiters, singers and garbage-men whose t’es belle, fais-moi une ’tite bec, chu tombé en amour avec toué graced my teenage years…I much preferred them to my anglophone neighbours and classmates—far too healthy for my taste, approaching sex in much the same way as they approached jogging (though usually removing their shoes first), interrogating me in the thick of things as to the nature and intensity of my pleasure, and dashing off to shower the minute they’d climaxed.
Maybe that’s when you started thinking of the English language as a cold shower, jokes Subra.
Could be. I’m not a Francophile but a Francophonophile—I have a foible for the French language in all its forms…Still, I get by just fine in Italian.
‘Funny expression, when you think about it,’ muses Simon, ‘the four corners of the Earth.’
‘It’s a figure of speech!’ Ingrid says defensively.
‘Yeah, but it must date from before Columbus, don’t you think?’ insists her husband. ‘When people still believed the Earth was flat.’
‘Uh…’ Rena dares to interject. ‘Don’t you guys want to go out?’
They can’t say no, she adds, in an aside to Subra. I mean, they can’t cross their arms and say, To tell you the truth, Rena, we prefer to spend our week in Tuscany locked up in cheap hotel room without a view.
Rena clings to Subra, the imaginary older sister who, these thirty-odd years, has been sharing her opinions, laughing at her jokes, blithely swallowing her lies (feigning, for instance, to credit the idea that she and Aziz are already married) and assuaging her anxieties.
Scarcely half an hour later, they emerge into the Via Guelfa.
When she sees that Simon has donned a bright blue baseball cap and Ingrid a fluorescent pink dufflecoat, Rena swallows her dismay. Okay, I’ll go the whole hog, she thinks. I’ll drink the bitter cup of tourism to the dregs—why be embarrassed? That’s what we are. She gets a hold of herself by gently drawing the back of her hand over the faint trace of Aziz beneath her jaw.
Their first destination is the Basilica of San Lorenzo, but before they’ve gone half a block, Simon’s gaze is drawn by something in an inner courtyard. What is it?
‘What did he see?’
‘A pair of legs,’ says Ingrid.
‘Legs?’
‘Yes,’ cries Simon. ‘Come and see!’
The two women have no choice but to cross the courtyard. He’s right—beyond the filthy windowpane of some sort of workshop is a pair of human legs.
‘Weird, isn’t it? What do you think it is?’
I have no idea, Dad—and besides, who cares? This isn’t Florence…
They approach. There’s no denying it’s weird. The legs are naked but full of holes, hollow inside, and surrounded by animal furs. Weirder still, they’re upside down, spread apart and bent at the knees…
‘It almost looks like a woman giving birth, doesn’t it, Dad?’ says Ingrid.
‘Yeah, except that they’re men’s legs,’ Simon points out.
‘Don’t you want to take a photo, Rena?’
‘I don’t photograph weird things.’
Oh, I see, says Subra, again imitating Ingrid’s voice, you don’t photograph weird things. Three hundred and fifty Whore Sons and Daughters—there’s nothing weird about that, of course. Mafiosi, hooligans, traders, sleeping nudes—just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill stuff.
Rena moves closer to the window and peers beyond the pair of legs inside the workshop, then recoils with a gasp.
‘What’s wrong?’
There, inches away from her face, lying on his back—a living man. Smouldering dark eyes, slightly yellowed teeth, flaring nostrils, low forehead, reddish beard, hairy arms—a Cro-Magnon male, alive.
No. But for an instant, yes. She receives his presence, the heat of his body. No. But for an instant, yes.
Simon points out a dusty sign tacked to the workshop door, and she translates: ‘Taxidermy, Moulding.’
‘Must be some sort of wax figure they’re making for an installation at the Museum of Natural History,’ Simon speculates. ‘When they finish with the legs, they’ll rotate him through a hundred and eighty degrees and set him on his feet.’
‘But he won’t be erect,’ Ingrid objects.
‘Yeah, well, he’ll be sort of hunched over—to light a fire, say.’
That mystery more or less satisfactorily solved, they hobble back across the courtyard. The wild man continues to smoulder within her, though. What is it? Like what? A disturbing twinge of some far-off thing…
Simon comes to a halt. ‘I wonder what the cavewoman felt,’ he says, ‘when the caveman grabbed her by the hair and dragged her down the path to shtup her in the cave.’
Rena laughs to be polite, even as she heaves an inward sigh.
‘I mean,’ her father goes on, ‘it can’t have been much fun to go bouncing and scraping along on the pebbles and rocks like that. To say nothing of all the thistles and nettles and spiky plants that would have been growing amongst them. After her deflowering, the woman would probably cut her hair real short, to let the other men know—okay you guys, from now on: shtupping yes, dragging no. No more of that dragging crap.’
‘What I wonder,’ says Rena, joining the game out of habit, ‘is why he had to drag her to a cave in the first place. Why wouldn’t he just shtup her out in the open? I mean, were the Cro-Magnon as modest as all that? Was shtupping already a private activity back then?’
Ostentatiously, Ingrid holds her tongue. She detests conversations like this between Simon and Rena. Finds it abnormal for a father and daughter to indulge in this sort of banter, as if they were buddies. With her own father…God forbid! Had a single syllable on the theme of sex ever passed her lips in his presence, he would have turned her to stone with a glance. To stone!
Try as she might, Rena can’t stop. ‘Besides,’ she insists, ‘why would he have had to grab her by the hair? I don’t get it. Didn’t she feel like shtupping? The virginity taboo didn’t come along until much later, right? In the Neolithic?’
No man ever had to drag you by the hair, that’s for sure, says Subra in Ingrid’s voice. That Rena is boy-crazy!
True, concedes Rena. All a man needs to do is put his hand on the small of my back and my will dissolves completely, my blood tingles like quicksilver, my skin grows a million small soft glittering scales, my legs become a fishtail and I metamorphose into a mermaid. There’s something so hypnotic about a man’s desire…its imperiousness…A violent thrill of fright and euphoria goes through you when you sense he’s chosen you…at this instant…Surely the cavewoman would have felt the same melting, the same tingling…
They start walking again. Some fifty yards along, Simon comes to a halt. ‘Maybe the cavewoman didn’t mind being dragged by the caveman,’ he says. ‘Maybe her brain released a bunch of endorphins so she wouldn’t feel the pain. A bit like when a fakir walks barefoot on hot coals.’
‘That’s conceivable,’ Rena says.
‘But maybe the fakir’s pain makes itself felt later on,’ suggests Ingrid, in a rare attempt at humour. ‘I mean, maybe he nurses his burns in secret after the performance, when no one is looking. Right, Dad?’
‘No, no,’ says Simon. ‘There are plenty of scientific studies on fakirs—the soles of their feet are perfectly smooth and pink at the end of the ordeal. No doubt about that.’
They start walking again.
When did my father lose the ability to talk and walk at the same time? wonders Rena.
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?’
Perplexed, Rena glances at one of the shops. Oh, right.
Again Simon undertakes to enlighten his wife. ‘No, no,’ he tells her gently. ‘The fleur-de-lys was the emblem of the Medici family for centuries.’
‘You don’t need to laugh, Rena,’ says Ingrid, turning crimson. ‘Anyone can make a mistake.’
‘Sorry,’ says Rena.
She’s right, Subra tells her in petto. Why would a Dutchwoman from Montreal be conversant with the history of the Medici court? Who’s required to know what about what and why? And who are you to cast stones—you who trot the globe hiding behind your Canon, guzzling down information at random, belonging neither here, there nor anywhere, and whose motto could be the ‘Just looking’ muttered by people out of pocket in fancy boutiques the world over?
‘Hey!’ Since they sat down ten minutes ago, Simon has been studying not the menu but a city map. ‘This palace here is called Vecchio, just like the famous bridge. Must be the name of some Tuscan duke or other.’
‘No,’ Rena says gently, in turn. ‘No, Daddy, it just means old. Old palace. Old bridge.’
Those who tourists do become / Must put up with being dumb.
After their substantial snack, Simon and Ingrid feel the urgent need to go back to the hotel for a nap. Rena starts leading them in that direction, but in the Via de’ Martelli they walk past a Kodak store and Simon comes to a halt. ‘Maybe they sell disposable cameras here?’
Rena’s heart sinks.
Of course she could wait for them outside, taking advantage of the next fifteen minutes to turn on her mobile phone and call Aziz or Kerstin in Paris, Toussaint in Marseille, Thierno in Dakar…or to take pictures of the Florentine tourists’ feet. She decides against it, though. Whether out of masochism or fascination with her own annoyance, she walks into the store with them.
At once, ear-splitting rock music leaps on them and sets about mangling their synapses.
Here goes. ‘Would it be better to buy a roll of twelve pictures or sixteen? Maybe even twenty-four?’
‘Look—this one’s got sixteen pictures for six euros, and this one’s got twenty-four for only eight, it’s a better bargain.’
‘No, twenty-four’s too many. I mean, we’ll be buying postcards as well—we’ll never take twenty-four pictures.’
‘Are you sure? If we don’t use up the roll, we can always finish it in Montreal.’
‘No, ideally we should finish it in Italy and get it developed before we go home—so Rena can tell us which ones she wants copies of.’
Rena wanders through the store, studying the various cameras on sale with a penetrating, professional air, registering nothing.
This, Subra tells her in a solemn voice, is a real moment of your real life. Every bit as real as when, standing in the kitchen doorway, Aziz picks you up and plants you on his cock and you wrap your legs around his waist and toss your head back and start moving on him and moaning…As real as your two childbirths—or a sunrise in Goree—or the war in Iraq. All these things exist. Okay, you’re uncomfortable being in a Kodak store in Florence with your father and stepmother. Okay, the music is scrambling your brain. But just think, it could be worse. I mean, you’re not a pregnant young woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo, faced with a battalion of young militiamen from Burundi who are preparing to gang rape you, then shove sticks or rifles up your womb to cause you to miscarry, then force you to drink your own body’s blood and eat your own baby’s flesh. That, too, is a possibility of human existence on planet Earth in October 2005. Consider yourself lucky to have nothing worse to complain about than being forced to listen to the hemming and hawing of an elderly couple in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Getting a hold of herself, Rena looks over at the young man behind the cash register. Aged eighteen or nineteen and sporting a Bob Marley T-shirt, he flashes a smile at her. Far from cursing them as tourists, he seems to sympathise with her for having to kill time, assuring her that it’s no big deal, there’s no reason to rush, she’s still in the game despite her age and it’s a gorgeous day.
Who is this boy? Rena wonders. Who are his parents? What’s his goal in life—above and beyond this stultifying job that immerses him eight hours a day in ear-shattering music? What sort of future does he dream of? Our destinies have intersected here—lightly, slightly, it will all be over in a few seconds, this whole event is doomed to oblivion, non-existence, nothing is really happening, yet…What would it be like to stretch out naked on the naked body of this thin, muscular young Florentine, make drops of sweat stand out on his forehead, move my lips over the faint shadow of a moustache on his upper lip, feel his long golden fingers moving between my legs?
Subra encourages her to continue.
Oh, joy of the imaginable, the possible, the conceivable! First and foremost among human rights—the right to fantasise! Not be where you are; be where you are not. Yes, it works both ways—while her husband pumps monotonously away at her, a woman can use her mind to review her shopping list; doing the dishes, on the other hand, she can float off to seventh heaven with the lover of her dreams. In order to concentrate on the Great One’s order to Abraham Go forth and multiply, a Lubavitch labours his wife through a hole in the sheet that covers her from head to foot; meanwhile, nothing can prevent the wife from imagining that the guy beyond the sheet is Brad Pitt. In a Tokyo nightclub called Lucky Hole photographed by Araki, you see life-sized female figures sketched on a series of tall white plasterboards. Where the woman’s head should be they glue a photo of a sexy young film star, and at crotch level there’s a hole. The client can slip his member through the hole and, even as he dreams he’s possessing the starlet, be brought off by a female employee sitting on the other side of the plasterboard. Though the women hired for this job are usually old and ugly, their technique is unsurpassable. When I told my friend Kerstin about the Lucky Hole, she burst out laughing. ‘Just imagine there’s an earthquake in Tokyo one day,’ she said, ‘the nightclub collapses and one of the clients discovers he’s just come in his own mommy’s hand!’ As for me, I can’t help wondering what images go floating through the old woman’s mind as she deftly, professionally brings off her invisible clients…Yes, women, too, fantasise—thank goodness!
Go on, Subra murmurs, listening to Rena’s spiel as intently as if she were hearing it for the first time.
Oh…the day Xavier took me with him to Dublin’s National Gallery and we spent a full hour in front of Perugino’s sublime Lamentation Over the Dead Christ…Sam Beckett was fascinated by this work of art, with its ‘lovely cheery Christ full of sperm and the women touching his thighs and mourning his secrets’. And it’s true—Christ’s fleshly nature is particularly palpable in this painting. Staring at it, I couldn’t help wondering why Jesus’s experience of humanity had been limited to suffering, why it included bleeding wounds and dark temptations but not erotic swoon, not the marvellous tingling waves of desire that begin in your genitals and flow all the way to your toes and fingertips. The Perugino came back to me that same evening in a pub, as I watched the crablike movements of a musician’s left hand on the frets of his banjo. I felt as aroused by the sight of the banjo-player’s fingers as Martha and the two Marys must have been by Christ’s naked body—and so, with the taste of Guinness on my lips and the sound of words like sperm and chrism in my brain, I began to imagine how those hands would move on my hips, breasts and shoulders…When the set ended and Xavier rose to leave, I motioned to him to wait for me outside and, leaning forward, said to the man in a low voice, ‘I love the way your left hand moves on the neck.’ His gaze swerved to meet mine and he toppled headfirst into my eyes. As he sat up straight, grabbed my hand and asked me my name, the warmth in his voice told me that he was already rock hard. ‘Rena’, I replied, delighted to be able to say it in English for once, not retching the R the way the French do. ‘I’m Michael,’ said the man. Then, realising that I was about to walk out of his life as abruptly as I’d walked into it, he asked with frantic hand gestures if I lived close by, if he could get in touch with me, and I answered, also gesturing, that no, I lived far, far away. Then, leaning towards him again until our faces all but touched, I bade him good night.
My blood was fairly simmering with the fire of that brief exchange, the electrically erotic touch of the man’s hand on mine. And what caused me to swoon the following morning, when Xavier set me on my knees in our hotel bed and reared up behind me, was not just the view in the mirror of our two bodies gilded by dawn’s first light and his member moving in and out of me, but also an intoxicating mixture of Jesus Christ, Sam Beckett, and Michael the banjo-player.
No one can punish us for such joys. Even women who live behind burqas in Afghanistan continue (I hope!) to swing up onto their dream horses and canter off through the clouds, clutching their mount’s creamy mane in both hands, feeling the violent shudder of its flanks between their thighs, panting, gasping and crying out in pleasure. Every woman contains a cosmos—and who can prevent her from welcoming into it those male or female guests who know exactly how she needs to be loved, or from loving them back with a vengeance?
The Kodak chapter has come to an end.
Once she has set the couple safely on their way to the hotel, where they’ve agreed to meet up at eight, Rena heads off on her own. Within the minute, she recovers her body, her rhythm, her elasticity.
A pocket of calm on the Borgo degli Albizi. Rena photographs the chiaroscuro patterns on the balconies and façades of the buildings: sharply delineated lozenges and triangles of shadow in the slanting rays of the late-afternoon, late-October sun.
Passing in front of a tiny chapel, she reads the sign at the entrance and laughs out loud.
So it was here, on this very spot, in this simple, sober, sombre church with its whitewashed walls, that Dante first laid eyes on Beatrice di Folco Portinari. Electric shock. Love at first lightning-bolt. The year was 1284. He was nineteen and she was eighteen.
Did Beatrice even glance at the young man whose eyes were burning into her? Did she even guess at the tumult in his heart? No one knows. All we know is that he never either touched or spoke to her. The following year he married another woman, who would become the mother of his children…And in 1287, again in this very church, he attended Beatrice’s wedding to a wealthy banker (do poor ones exist?). There was nothing between them!
Ah, the fabulous power of male sublimation! Dante’s love was entire, intact, immaculate; it had no need of Bea! All it needed was itself, a magic stone that gave off sparks when he rubbed it. ‘Beatrice’ was an image, an idea, a compact nucleus of energy that eventually exploded into—La Vita Nuova! La Divina Commedia! All glory to ‘Beatrice’, who revolutionised not only the Italian language but the history of literature! Bea the woman gave up the ghost at twenty-four, most likely during a difficult childbirth. So what? By that time Dante was far away from Florence, in exile in Ravenna, alone with his masterpiece.
Subra rewards her with a laugh.
And what about me, Daddy? Men must have adored me from afar on countless occasions, don’t you think so? Me at twenty, sweet young thing wandering the streets of Naples with my white skin and green eyes, a flowery salmon-pink pantsuit floating on the body you and my mother distractedly made together, eliciting the insults, gropes and pinches of Neapolitan machos…Me at thirty-five, on assignment for a reportage in war-torn ex-Yugoslavia, feeling the Kosovars’ eyes glued to my body like melting, sticky, stinky tar…Me only last year, venturing alone into the casbah in Algiers, hearing gazelle at every step and thinking in annoyance that North Africans badly needed to renew their stock of compliments…Who knows how many masterpieces I’ve given rise to, here, there and everywhere, without knowing it?
In the same street, a little farther down—Dante’s house. Ah, yes it is impressive, though of course it’s been rebuilt from top to bottom. And now she has the time. She goes inside.
Standing in front of her at the cash register is an obese American couple. ‘Isn’t it hard to believe,’ the woman says, ‘that the people who built this house had never even heard of the United States?’ Her husband nods gravely. (Those who tourists do become / Must put up with being dumb.)
The second floor contains a pedagogical display on the famous war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, an episode of European history which for some reason never sticks in Rena’s mind. She deciphers the explanations. Ah, yes, it all comes back to her. Civil wars in Germany and Italy in the late Middle Ages, spiritual versus secular power, Guelphs for the Pope, Ghibellines for the Emperor, their bang-bang-you’re-dead lasting a good two centuries…The usual crap. Infighting, too, naturally. Within the Guelph ranks: moderate Whites versus fundamentalist Blacks, bang-bang-you’re-dead…The Blacks of Florence wound up expelling all the Whites, including Dante Alighieri. Banished from the beloved city of his birth, never to return. All glory to exile, all glory to intolerance—were it not for the war of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, there would have been no Divine Comedy!
On the third floor, she finds visitors seated in semi-darkness watching a slideshow of the Inferno. Illustrations by Blake and Dürer, recorded excerpts…
‘So with our guide we moved on unafraid
By the red bubbles of the scalding ooze
Wherein the boiled their sharp lamenting made.’
Mesmerised, Rena contemplates the tortures of the damned, listens to their screams and blasphemies, feels herself being sucked down into the vortex…
‘The soul that had become a reptile fled
With hissing noise along the valley side
And the other sputtered at it as it sped.’
Suddenly, to her left, she senses a man’s eyes on her.
Really? She turns her head. Yes. There, by the door. His eyes interrogate, hers acquiesce.
They exit Dante’s house together.
Tell me, Subra says.
The man is Turkish. Older than my Aziz—who isn’t?—but a few years younger than me. Our only common language is Italian, which both of us speak imperfectly. That’s fine with me. Touchingly, lamely, we exchange a few basic facts—true or false, what difference does it make? He tells me his name is Kamal; I’ll go along with that. As a private homage to Arbus, I tell him mine is Diane. I gather he works for some sort of import-export business…Then we move away from conversation.
In his hotel elevator, Kamal’s eyes move down to my chest. Assuming his curiosity in the area has less to do with my breasts—their exact shape and size, the presence or absence of a bra to enhance their appeal—than with the Canon nesting like a baby’s head between them, I say, ‘Non sono giornalista, sono artista.’ Having gone that far, I figure I might as well go a bit farther. I ask if he’ll allow me to photograph him afterwards, without specifying after what. ‘Verramo,’ he answers—making, I think, a slight error in Italian. Then, stroking my cheek, he moves up close. Murmurs something about my occhi verdi. When his body grazes mine, I feel he’s hard already—and the familiar tingling starts up at once, making me weightless, beautiful, and desirable in my own eyes. As I walk down the worn carpet of the third-floor corridor at the stranger’s side, I am floating.
Go on, says Subra.
He opens the door, revealing a room that looks for all the world like a Matisse—shadowy light, deep colours, red-brick wall, a framed picture of flowers, the bedspread striped by the shadows of half-closed shutters…only the fishbowl and the violin are missing. Every detail offers itself up to me, fairly shimmering with beauty and meaning. I move over to the window—red-tiled roofs, swifts wheeling in the air, the murmurs of passers-by in the street below, the occasional roar of a motorbike, the rich resonance of a churchbell. A faintly dank smell in the room, not unpleasant. The firm grip of the stranger’s hands on my waist. Oh utter delight. All of this exists—painted flowers, shutters, bell, October afternoon, my father napping a mere stone’s throw away. I am in Florence. A man is about to make love to me. Nothing could be more powerful than this anticipation.
No sooner have we settled onto the bed and begun to remove each other’s clothes with the clumsy gestures of impatience than I realise Kamal also knows about passivity—yes, he also knows how to remain still, fully awake and attentive, and give himself up to me as a cello gives itself up to the bow. Arching his back, he surrenders his face, shoulders, back and buttocks, waiting for me to play them, and I do—I play them, play with them. Most men are afraid to let go like this—whereas with a little finesse the wonders of passivity can be tasted in even the most violent throes of love-making. In a delirium of restrained desire, I weigh, stroke and lick Kamal’s balls, then take his penis in my hands, between my breasts, into my mouth. He sits up, reaches for me and I allow him to explore me in turn. He runs his tongue and lips over my breasts, the back of my neck, my toes, my stomach, the countless treasures between my legs, oh the sheer ecstasy of lips and tongues on genitals, either simultaneously or in alternation, never will I tire of that silvery fluidity, my sex swimming in joy like a fish in water, my self freed of both self and other, the quivering sensation, the carnal pink palpitation that detaches you from all colour and all flesh, making you see only stars, constellations, milky ways, propelling you bodiless and soulless into undulating space where the undulating skies make your non-body undulate…And orgasm—the way a man’s face is transformed by orgasm—oh it’s not true they all look alike, you have to be either miserable and broke or furiously blasé and sarcastic to say they all look alike—to me, every climax is unique. That’s why I love to photograph men when they climax—not the first time but the second—or, better still, the third, when they’re completely cut off from their moorings, when they’ve lost themselves and are wildly grateful to you for the loss…
Speaking slowly in my poor Italian with the assistance of gestures, I explain to Kamal that to take his photo I’ll use infrared film, which captures not visible light but heat. I add (not quite truthfully) that this will make his face unrecognisable, even to friends. He consents, as virtually all my lovers have. It takes me a while to arm my camera with the ultrasensitive film: since the least ray of visible light would veil the images, I need to slip my Canon and both my hands into a black lightproof bag. But I’ve done this hundreds of times before and I work swiftly, still naked, humming a bit and speaking to Kamal in a low voice, preserving the electric arc of desire between us so it will be easy to pick up where we left off. When our bodies unite for the third time we leave all theatres behind. What happens then has as little to do with the libertinage prized by the French (oh the blasphemers, the precious precocious ejaculators, the nasty naughty boys, the cruel fouteurs and fouetteurs) as with the healthy, egalitarian intercourse championed by Americans (who hand out bachelors degrees in G-points, masters in masturbation and Ph.Ds in endorphines). Kamal and I are totally immersed in flesh, that archaic kingdom that brings forth tears and terrors, nightmares, babies and bedazzlements. The word pleasure is far too weak for what transpires there. So is the word bliss. And it’s not even a matter of sharing because, the self having evaporated, you scarcely know whether you’re alone or with another person.
This is when I take my picture, from deep inside the loving. The Canon is part of my body. I myself am the ultrasensitive film—capturing invisible reality, capturing heat.
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.