‘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.
Angoli del mondo
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.
Cro-Magnon
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.