Subra laughs in appreciation.
Seriously, insists Rena. Michelangelo and Simon Greenblatt have all sorts of things in common. Grand ambitions, high hopes, woefully inadequate accomplishments, self-castigation. Indifference towards food, sleep, and clothing. Refusal to take care of their bodies. Fits of anger and despair. Unstinting generosity. My father could have echoed each and every word of the artist’s poem:
Woe! Woe is me!
In all my past I can find Not a day that belongs to me!
Oh! Above all, I pray Not to return to myself!
Before he died, Buonarotti burned all the drawings, sketches, cartoons and poems that betrayed his fumbling and uncertainty; my father will probably do the same with his own ‘scribblings’. Only difference: however much he wept and lamented (‘Painting and sculpture have been my downfall’) Buonarotti was sufficiently arrogant — or vulgar? — to leave a few rough drafts lying around for terrestrial judgment. Pietà, Moses, David, Sistine Chapel, Capitol Square, Night, Day, Slaves, Last Judgment, Dome of Saint Paul, and so forth. Not my Dad. Oh, no, not that! Either wait for the right moment — the ripening, the glorious culmination, or…nothing.
So…nothing, echoes Subra with a sigh.
‘After Michelangelo’s death,’ the sign concludes, ‘this statue was completed by a certain Tiberio Calcagni. He added a Mary Magdalene to conceal the mutilation.’ Who — oh, who will come to complete my father’s absence-of-works?
Never have I been impressed by great men, or considered they were a species unto themselves.
Maybe, whispers Subra, because so many men who were powerful in the outside world turned out to be powerless in your bed?
True, Rena agrees. Yes — a fact to be stated without the least mockery or bitterness. In fact it’s rather moving when a man wants to make love to you and can’t. The child is there at once. And I don’t mean only older men — no, I mean men in their prime, who block, stress, seize up, freak out and freeze. It happens all the time. I’ve known at least as many too slow to start as too fast to end.
Tell me, Subra says.
Kerstin and I were talking about it just the other day. ‘Men have so much less fun in bed than they claim,’ I said. ‘It’s tough for them,’ she nodded. ‘They’ve got so much responsibility in love-making — the whole thing rests on their…’ ‘Shoulders,’ I put in. ‘Ah, yes, those poor shoulders of theirs — so exposed, so vulnerable. They have to keep proving they’re up to par, and if they’re not…’ ‘If they’re not,’ Kerstin said, ‘they feel pathetic, ridiculous, unmanly…And if their lover takes advantage of their weakness to make fun of them, all they yearn for is the void.’ ‘Yeah,’ I nodded. ‘Times like that, there’s not much difference between homicide and suicide.’
Aziz, too, at first. It took him months to learn to give himself up to my caresses. His mother had done everything in her power to keep him from reaching manhood, including taking him to the Turkish baths with her until he was fourteen. ‘But madame,’ the cashier finally protested, ‘he’s not a child anymore. At fourteen, he should be going with the men.’ ‘Not at all, not at all,’ Aicha replied, pressing and squeezing him against her body, squashing his face between her breasts, ‘what are you talking about? He’s my baby — look, he’s still a little boy, my darling son!’ And so, week after week, Aziz found himself surrounded by frightening mountains of female flesh — blue-veined breasts with giant nipples that looked like repulsive brown suns, quivering marbled thighs and buttocks, stomachs whose rills and ripples jiggled at every step, bloated backs and necks dripping with henna…an experience all the more traumatising that these same bodies were ferociously concealed the rest of the time, hidden scalp to sole behind long dresses, scarves and veils, so that no one could glimpse as much as an ankle or a strand of hair…
I know what I’m talking about because Aicha once dragged me along with her to the Turkish baths. It was an unusual gesture of inclusion on her part — proof of the huge effort she was making to accept this new daughter-in-law of hers, whose age (fifteen years older than Aziz), appearance (androgynous), origins (Judeo-Christian), and morals (loose to say the least) made her the antithesis of the wife Aicha had always dreamed of for her next-to-eldest son…even if she still secretly hoped I’d magically vanish some day soon and Aziz would go to find himself a sweet, submissive virgin in Algeria. Anyway, one Sunday when we were over at her place for lunch, Aicha announced that she planned to go to the baths, then added, turning to me, ‘Would you like to come along?’ And how could I refuse how could I refuse how could I refuse?
What an expedition! Worse than an outing to Disneyworld with a group of preschoolers. Just making preparations took us nearly an hour: Aicha filled three huge plastic bags to overflowing with towels, robes, hijabs, thongs, horsehair washcloths, leather slippers, boxes of henna, combs, brushes, creams, shampoo, nail files, pumice stones…’Okay, are we all set?’ ‘No.’ We needed oranges, for our after-hammam snack. ‘Really, Aicha, we can dispense with oranges…’ ‘Out of the question…’ So, as we drove to the baths (yes, yes, she has her licence), she stopped in front of a fruit stand. I saw her hesitate, make as if to get out of the car, then decide against it. ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked. Aicha told me she couldn’t purchase the oranges herself because there was ‘a whole tableful of Arabs’ on the café terrace across from the fruit stand. I was floored. ‘She’s a widow,’ Aziz explained to me later, ‘and widows mustn’t allow men to look at them.’ I managed not to retort: Listen, what kind of bullshit is it that turns a man’s eyes into a man’s cock and a fully-dressed woman into a naked woman, so that the gaze of any man on any woman, even from a distance, even if she’s clothed from head to foot, is tantamount to rape? What kind of bullshit is it that makes women lower their eyes, avert their eyes, abdicate their vision, pretend they can’t and don’t see anything, so men can go on thinking they’re the only ones with eyes in their heads? Just what are men afraid we might see? I, for one, refuse to lower my gaze. I insist on looking. It was the first decision I ever took on my own — to steal a camera and learn to frame, zoom, print, study, reprint…
In the end, Aicha sent me to buy the oranges (given that I was already an infidel, id est practically a whore) — but with her money, of course; after all, I was her guest. We got to the baths at last, and to me it was a foray into hell. The hot steam clogged up my nose and throat until I could hardly breathe; even more stifling was the sight of so many women endlessly rubbing and scrubbing their bodies, working themselves over with soaps and creams — how can you spend four hours just getting clean? As always happens when I can’t take photographs, I gradually felt myself being overcome by nausea. I kept thinking about the odalisques, all those nineteenth- and twentieth-century images depicting the voluptuous mysteries of women in the baths…Why do we never see men in the baths? I wondered. Why has no painter or photographer ever deemed it worthwhile to show us what male bodies look like as they lie around sweating and chatting? Hmm, that’s what I should do — disguise myself as a man, put some infrared film in my camera and do a series of photos in the Turkish baths on men’s day.
A hitch, Subra puts in. Not easy to disguise yourself as a naked man…
Even now, on women’s day, I wasn’t exactly blending in. Abnormally white and skinny in this context, my body elicited an embarrassing number of stares. Despite my polite refusals—’No, thanks. Really, there’s no need.’ ‘Yes, yes,’—Aicha plastered henna all over my hair because she had some left over and didn’t want to waste it. Then, still under the pretext that I was her guest and that hospitality is sacred, she made me the gift of a peeling. So it was that I found myself in the fleshy claws of another ogress — who slammed me down on my back and scrubbed me sadistically with a bar of rough black soap, literally tearing the skin off my poor little breasts, back, thighs and ass…When she released me some ten minutes later, I was flayed, scarlet, and incensed. Realising I’d go berserk if I stayed there one more minute, I told Aicha I was late for an appointment, skipped the last two stages of the inexorable ritual — donning djellabas and eating oranges — and went back to the foyer.