‘I’m not so sure,’ her father says. ‘Where are the figs?’
‘It’s not the right time of year,’ says Rena.
‘Yes, it is,’ he objects. (Touché!) ‘Maybe Jesus struck it down in a fit of rage,’ he goes on. ‘You know, there’s that strange passage in Saint Matthew where…’
‘Yes, I know,’ she says, cutting him off. ‘I know.’ What else? Fig tree, fig tree…(When did this hateful rivalry between them begin?) ‘In Italian,’ she says, ‘the equivalent of “I don’t give a damn” is “Non me ne importa un fico”.’
‘Really?’ says Ingrid, to say something.
‘Yes. The fico is a symbol of the vagina — the very epitome of worthlessness, as everyone knows.’
Ingrid blushes and turns away.
‘And that’s not all,’ Rena insists, recalling a reportage she did long ago in the favelas of Rio. ‘In Brazil, instead of giving people the finger, you give them the fica.’
‘What’s that?’ her father asks.
‘Uh…’ she says. Oddly enough, she can’t remember. Do they hold up an open hand, its five fingers symbolising the fig leaf? No, she doesn’t think so…Hm. ‘It’ll come back to me.’
As they turn their backs on the tree at last, she brings the crushed leaf to her nostrils.
It smells of nothingness.
Two white-washed rooms, touchingly stark and spare.
Here, she thinks. Born here. Babe-in-arms here. First gaze on life here, the master of the gaze.
Ostensibly in homage to Leonardo, the first room is plastered with hideous paintings by a contemporary artist. Rena and Ingrid take one look at them, shrug and move on. The second room is filled with reproductions of the master’s anatomical drawings. Studies based on corpses, the surface stunningly rendered thanks to the artist’s familiarity with the depths. Bones, muscles, tendons, arteries — the intricate, secret machinery of the human body…
An hour later, they go back to join Simon, who has remained in the first room all this time, cursing the modern paintings. ‘It’s outrageous,’ he says, as the guard announces closing time. ‘I felt like slashing them!’
Yup, says Subra. That’s Zeus’s big problem. With great lightning bolts and deafening rolls of thunder, he has managed to destroy — not the abhorred paintings, but his own visit to Leonardo’s birthplace.
Scandicci
‘Maybe it’s a bit late to drive all the way to Pisa?’ says Simon, his nose on the map.
‘It sure is,’ Rena agrees. ‘If we want to reach our B & B in Impruneta before nightfall.’
‘Well, let’s at least take the scenic route back, then. Through Pistoia.’
But an automobile race prevents them. Racing cars go zooming past them on the steep, narrow, twisting roads: heart attack after heart attack. Some villages are completely closed to traffic.
‘Maybe we could take this alternate route?’ Simon suggests.
But the roads grow narrower at every turn, and they end up in a farmyard.
Oh, Virgil! Rena thinks, sighing in exasperation. Can’t you guide me better than this?
Suddenly the fica gesture comes back to her. You slip your thumb between your second and third fingers, then scornfully wave your fist in the air. But the moment to demonstrate it is past.
Well, they can drop the Pistoia idea, too, and return the way they came.
At six p.m. they find themselves back on the Florence ring road, parched, sweating and exhausted. Dazzled by the million glancing reflections of the setting sun on the chrome and glass of oncoming traffic, Rena now has a splitting headache. Simon sees an exit coming up and advises her to take it—’Yes! Here, right here! Quick!’—but it’s a mistake, and they find themselves in a suburb called Scandicci. Braking angrily, Rena double-parks and goes storming into a shoe store to ask for directions. All the salespeople are busy and there’s a long queue of customers at the cash register.
She studies the features of every person in the store. These people are here because they want to be — normally, naturally, as part of their daily lives. I, on the other hand, am just passing through. My presence here is as arbitrary as it was in that farmyard an hour ago, or in the Kodak shop the other day, or on Earth…
Her mobile rings.
‘Rena, where are you?’
‘In a shoe store in…uh…Scandicci.’
‘I don’t believe it. What the fuck…? My city’s going up in smoke, I need you more than I’ve ever needed you before, and you’re trying on Italian shoes?’
‘I’ll explain later, Aziz. I really will. Just at the moment I’m double-parked and my folks are about to pass out from dehydration. To each his emergency.’
Aziz hangs up without another word.
‘Per andare all’Impruneta, per favore…?’
Salespeople and customers have a vast array of opinions on the subject.
Sometimes you wish you could just press stop, then fast-forward to a more bearable moment of the video of your existence. Yes, let’s do that. Let’s forget all about the starting and stopping, the backing up and turning around, the tension and hesitation, the sighs and silences, the petrol station restrooms, the overflowing tampons, the language barrier, the frustrating fruitless phone calls, let’s forget about the groping the misery the excuses the bad smells the sordid bedrooms the sad eyes of child prostitutes in Thailand the endless heaps of garbage along the roads north of Dakar the despicable behaviour of the customs officials in Algiers who, to welcome Aziz on his first visit to his parents’ native land (the year was 1993, he’d just turned eighteen), opened his suitcase, dumped his carefully folded clothes on the floor and told him to pick them up, the homeless kids in Durban who sniff glue and sleep in highway tunnels at night, the chaos of our lives whose stories we try to tell coherently so they’ll seem to fit into some sort of pattern, make some sort of sense, let’s just forget it, all of it, as we go along…
Impruneta
As they accept second helpings of her delicious zucchini frittati, Gaia (the gracious, sexagenarian owner of the B & B they eventually did manage to find) tells them first about her husband who committed suicide, then about her architect lover who designed this house, built it with his own hands, and died of cancer three short months after its completion.
How do people go on? How do they manage? How does Gaia get through the day? She chops up zucchini and onions, fries them golden, beats a few eggs, stirs in heavy cream, parmesan cheese, thyme and a little salt (not too much because the parmesan is already salty), pours the mixture into a buttered pan and slips it into the oven. Then she sets the table, embellishes it with a vase of hand-picked flowers, lights a candle and opens a bottle of wine. She does not spend her days screaming My love my love where are you and how am I supposed to go on living without you, sixty-six years old but still beautiful still alive and sensuous and palpitating with desire?
A bit like Kerstin Matheron, Subra puts in.
You’re right, Rena agrees. Kerstin found herself similarly at a loss after her husband Edmond’s death. She told me about it one evening as I was making prints in my darkroom. She finds it easier to confide in me when she thinks my mind is otherwise occupied and in fact I have no trouble listening to her as I work; the two activities take place in different parts of my brain. ‘I think I must envy you a bit,’ she said to me that night with a little laugh. ‘All your sexual adventures…I haven’t made love in ages…almost seven years.’ ‘Because of Edmond’s illness?’ I asked. ‘Not only that. Not only that. What happened was…He sort of…ah…well, you see…a few years before his illness, he sort of left me, actually. He fell head over heels in love with one of his patients, a poetess named Alix. She was only twenty-nine at the time, whereas he was pushing sixty. Alix had everything. She was brilliant, beautiful — and so very young. Edmond told me he was thrilled by the smoothness and firmness of her skin. And how could Alix be anything but flattered by the attentions of a distinguished, cultivated doctor like my husband? He didn’t move out, but he stopped touching me and my life sort of imploded. As long as he had loved me, I’d sort of muddled through the years thinking, well, so far so good — but now, looking in the mirror, I saw, really saw for the first time, the wrinkles on my face and the spots on my hands, the flabbiness of the flesh on my upper arms, the serious beginnings of a double chin…’ ‘Stop it, Kerstin! Stop it right this minute. I refuse to hear my best friend slandered like that.’