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.
Mirandola
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…