Rowan was sobbing softly, his head on the counter. I came and put an arm around his shoulders. Does he strangle his lovers, too? I wondered. Or ask them to strangle him? I’d be moved but not surprised if the answer was yes…‘Hey, bro’. It’s all over now…Listen, it’s getting late, I’m going to put you to bed.’
At least Lisa nursed you, Subra points out.
Yeah, I was glad to learn that, says Rena. It’s something, anyway, isn’t it?
They move together into the hall of mummies.
Mummia
Penumbra. They’re all alone in the enormous room. (The conformist crowds can keep the Duomo and the Uffizi!) Profound, disturbing mystery of the swaddled dead.
Oh, the Egyptians! Peerless embalmers! Unsurpassable technicians of the Passage…
As they move past the sarcophagi with their magnificent painted effigies of the departed, they notice some of them are open, their contents visible. The ancient strips of cloth, though still impeccably twined, are tainted and tattered. The presence of human corpses is palpable.
‘Brrr,’ says Ingrid.
And Simon: ‘Do you think they really believed their slaves would go on working for them in the Great Beyond?’
And Rena (still humming her no-point-in-having-an-opinion refrain): ‘I mostly think we can’t project ourselves into the minds of pharaohs.’
And Simon: ‘Really? Why?’
And she: ‘Well, I can’t, anyway. Maybe you can, because — like them — you believe in the soul’s immortality.’
Though Simon Greenblatt is a scientist and a rationalist, there’s a whole section of his brain set aside for metaphysical mysteries.
Tell me, Subra says.
He flabbergasted me by not laughing his head off when, in the spring of 1996, his idol Timothy Leary started making preparations for his death. First he made arrangements with a company called CryoCare to have his corpse frozen. Then, before his body rotted completely from the mind-boggling quantities of nicotine and narcotics he’d been pumping into it over six decades, he figured maybe he should commit suicide ‘live’ on the internet. Finally he requested that his ashes be rocketed into outer space — and his preposterous request was granted.
‘Don’t you think that’s bananas, Dad?’ I yelled over the phone. My tone of voice upset Thierno, who was doing his homework next to me in the living room. At twelve, Thierno was hypersensitive to conflict; the faintest stirrings of a quarrel would plunge him into a state of panic.
Maybe because you and Alioune were fighting non-stop at the time? Subra suggests.
Could be. Anyway, just as my father in Montreal said, ‘Why bananas?’ into my right ear, my son came over and whispered into my left ear, ‘Why are you yelling at Grandad?’ ‘People do all sorts of things with their dead bodies,’ Simon went on. ‘Why is it sillier to put them into orbit around the Earth than to donate them to worms or vultures?’ ‘Daddy, I can’t believe my ears!’ I yelled. ‘Are you telling me there’s a little glass bottle up there in the sky with Leary’s name on it, and he’s counting on extraterrestrials to come and wake him up twenty million years from now, and you don’t think that’s bananas? Come off it!’ At that point, Thierno put a hand over my mouth and I had no choice but to drop the subject.
Today in Florence, though, I suddenly feel very lonely. On their side, believing or having believed in the soul’s immortality: mummies, Bach, Michelangelo, endless multitudes of human beings from that handsome hunk of Cro-Magnon down to my sweet Aziz. On my side, the materialistic side: Lucretius; maybe Shakespeare; a handful of modern miscreants.
Ah, whispers Subra. But retain this instant, in the shadowy silence. Look — two thousand years after J.C., three living people lean down over dead ones dating from two thousand years before. May they rest in peace, in peace, in peace.
Rena holds the instant…then it dissolves.
Straightening, the living leave the darkened room and move towards their own deaths.
Why hurry? Oh, whatever is the rush?
Chimera
Their bodies stay close together as they inch down the broad, sunlit corridor filled with Etruscan art — ah, astonishing grace in bronze, tall thin figures, leaping acrobats, funerary urns — but their thoughts scatter in all directions. Each of them mixes the museum’s contents with that of his or her own brain. Facts gleaned over the years, memories, moods, associations…
Okay, Rena is telling Subra. Okay, you’re right, there was no article in the Gazette. The stagnation of Simon’s career wasn’t the Gazette’s fault. As for ‘Australia’…well, that’s a figure of speech. When I say native land…When I say my mother abruptly decided to return to her native land…
‘Rena, look!’ Simon cries.
She whirls around and sees — right there in a glass cage, smack in the middle of the corridor — she’d missed it, moving from case to case along the walls, her mind elsewhere — a chimera. Called the Arezzo Chimera because it was found in the vicinity of that city, but dating from long before its foundation. Etruscan, fifth century B.C.; Greek influence? A lion is poised to leap; its tail is a snake that rears up to attack the horned antelope bursting out of its back…
Simon and Rena stand rooted to the spot, stunned by the creature’s violent beauty.
‘It’s like a prefiguration of the Freudian psyche,’ Simon says. ‘Ego the lion, Id, the antelope, Superego the snake.’
Rena nods. We know all about the struggle of self against self, don’t we, Daddy? You against you and me against me…
But Ingrid interrupts: ‘It’s five-thirty already. I’m famished!’
So they retrace their steps — bronze figurines, tattered mummies, Hathor giving suck to Horemheb, great stone staircases, ancient jewellery, and then — a mandatory stop, after the bathroom but before the exit — the postcard stand. Suspecting that Simon and Ingrid will take a while to make their choice, Rena forces herself to study the cards. Which of the objects contained in the museum will the curators have deemed worthy of reproduction?
Despite her own resolutions and Aziz’s good advice, she herself is taking fewer and fewer photographs. Both her art and her eroticism wither and die in the presence of Simon and Ingrid; she’s reduced to living in reality and, at the same time, deprived of what makes reality liveable for her.
Her eyes scan the postcards. Hey…what’s this?
A smiling, perfectly preserved polychrome maidservant, forty-two centimetres high, dating from the Fifth Dynasty, kneeling on the ground and kneading dough…
Aziz’s grandmother still makes bread that way, in her village in the Algerian district of Chelef: she kneels down and bends forward, almost in praying position. Aziz once told me why Muslim men and women have to pray separately: the faithful stand shoulder to shoulder, he said, to prevent the evil spirit from slipping between them. And a man wouldn’t want his wife, mother or sister to rub shoulders with a male stranger, now, would he? Nor would he want male strangers in the row behind them to see their rear ends sticking up in the air as they prayed!