My project was more than a challenge, it was a contradiction in terms: to use photography, the art of the present moment, to activate the women’s pasts and futures. That’s why I took photos of them with their kids. Virtually all of them carry around snapshots of the person they love more than anything in the world, the child for whose future’s sake they initially agreed to rent out its former home, their bodies. First I’d photograph the women, then I’d photograph the snapshot of their child, blowing it up and framing the two faces together — the same size, but one rendered blurry and ghostlike by the enlargement.
Throughout my childhood I had seen whores go traipsing through our home with one or several kids in tow, so when I heard about the antinomy between mother and whore, in an Introduction to Psychology lecture my first year at Concordia, I burst out laughing in the middle of the auditorium.
Tearing herself away from Magdalene, Rena moves on to the next room.
Cantoria
Luckily there aren’t too many visitors in the museum and she can stare at the next wonder to her heart’s content — Della Robbia’s Cantoria, stone made music. A group of choirboys in high relief, some singing, others playing instruments. They’re neither angels nor cherubim but real teenagers, with individualised features. This one has a protuberant Adam’s apple, that one’s eyes are glittering, the other one’s nose is too long, and look over here — this one’s trying to grow a moustache…
The violinist reminds her of her brother Rowan.
The words they’re singing may be pure, but Della Robbia gives us to understand that their voices have already broken and that their balls are thrilling to the first thralls of pleasure. They praise the Lord on High while fantasising about the baker-lady’s buttocks — what could be more normal at their age? Looking down at them from the pulpit, the priest swallows hard. Though he, too, is aroused, he’s compelled to hide it. Same goes for God, who’s following the scene by satellite.
Right, Subra chuckles. Ball-less: God for priest, priest for choirboys, father for daughter. Tell me…
It all began with a commendable solicitude. Worried to see his adolescent daughter increasingly introverted and withdrawn, Simon Greenblatt set up an appointment for her with his friend Dr Joshua Walters, the great gangly manitou of the psychiatry wing in one of Montreal’s most prestigious hospitals. Though chronically overbooked, Walters agreed to see Greenblatt’s neurotic daughter in therapy, at least until a diagnosis could be made. The daughter presented — I presented, that is — with the following symptoms: nervousness, kleptomania, insomnia, agoraphilia, and episodes of derealisation.
Agoraphilia? Subra queries.
Yes. I felt comfortable only outside the home, in crowded places.
I took an instant liking to Dr Walters. He was my dad’s age, forty or so. He had big hands and feet, wheat-coloured hair, and an excellent sense of humour. Also he was a man, with a man’s body; no way around it. At the first session he complimented me on my intelligence, and at the second expressed his admiration of my beauty, and at the third took me in his arms and stroked my back, shoulders and forehead, gluing his trembling lips to mine by way of a farewell, and at the fourth, taking advantage of the fact that I was already supine on his couch, stretched out on top of me and rubbed his body against mine, moaning, his face red and congested with desire, and at the fifth removed a sufficient amount of my clothing so that, using our hands and mouths — for, such is the naiveté of great scientists, Dr Walters was convinced I was a virgin and didn’t want to end up desperately scrubbing bloodstains off the light beige upholstery of the couch in his hospital office — we could bring each other to bliss. Following which, running his hands again and again through his bristly, wheat-coloured hair, he explained to me that he no longer loved his wife (she bored him now, he said; she never talked to him about anything but the value of their stocks and bonds and their children’s progress at school), that he’d never done anything like this in his life before but had simply been unable to resist my charms, that he’d been obsessed with me since I’d first floated ‘wraithlike’ into his office (yes, such is the picayune vocabulary of certain scientists), that he sincerely hoped I wouldn’t hold it against him but he was obliged to ask me not to come in again — no, never — I’d have to find myself another therapist, preferably a woman, for he was sure that no man in his right mind would be able resist feverishly tearing off every piece of my clothing. ‘Can you forgive me, Rena, my angel, my marvel? I have nothing to say in my defence except that I got carried away. I’m just a poor, defenceless male animal and you, as I’m sure you know, are an irresistibly sensuous young woman.’
Any fifteen-year-old girl, Subra murmurs, would be flattered to hear herself called a woman, to say nothing of a sensuous woman.
‘I shouldn’t have touched you — oh, you naughty hands!’ And he started slapping his own hands, making me laugh and leap to stop him—’No, don’t do that. I forbid you to hurt the hands that just gave me so much pleasure!’ I thought the doctor looked cute as hell, all deprofessionalised like that, with his hair tousled, his jacket off, his tie askew, his shirt wrinkled, his cheeks fairly flaming with embarrassment and arousal. I was still lying on the couch, and he was on his knees between my thighs. ‘Well, if I can’t come to any more appointments with you,’ I added, gently running my index finger along the three parallel lines on his forehead, ‘I hope I can at least see you outside of the office now and then.’
A silence ensued. The good doctor’s eyes were riveted to mine. ‘Do you mean that seriously?’ he asked me. ‘Do you really want to see me again?’ ‘My father holds you in high esteem,’ I told him disarmingly, in a clever reversal of roles. ‘So I mean, maybe we could just get together downtown every once in a while and chat over coffee?’ ‘Maybe we could, little one,’ said Dr Walters. ‘Just maybe I’d be able to handle myself a little better in a coffee shop. But I’m not making any promises.’ ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want you to handle yourself too well,’ I said, pouting up at him sweetly. And so, laughing, elated, in cahoots, the great specialist of neurosis and the little madwoman buttoned and zipped themselves up, kissed each other on the lips, and parted ways.
Thus ended my first experience with psychotherapy. I was careful, though, to say nothing to my parents about its termination; that way I could go on staying away from home every Thursday after school, wandering around the eastern part of the city, watching life, devouring life, drinking life in through my eyes, stealing make-up, clothes, records, books, a transistor radio, and finally — my crowning glory — a Canon. I brought that off, I remember, in an under-protected camera shop at the corner of Saint Lawrence and Saint Catherine…Hmm. Turns out the guy who got grilled like a hamburger has been part of my destiny for a long time! As for lovely Saint Catherine, her body was reduced to bloody mush by a four-wheeled machine bristling with spikes and saws that revolved in opposite directions. (When I think some critics dare to call me perverse…I who so ardently cherish the human body!) That’s how, from the ruins of my therapy, my vocation was born.