Sometimes one is magnetically attracted to one’s opposite, one’s nightmare, one’s antithesis — that’s what happened to me with Yasu. So when he called to say he was in Paris for one night only, and asked me to join him in his hotel room a few hours before his opening, I broke my own rule about Parisian monogamy and rushed to obey. And as we busied ourselves with a number of (to my mind) rather depressing gadgets on the super-king-sized bed in his five-star hotel room, the bitch Isolde, in a fit of jealousy that would later give me food for thought, methodically chewed holes in every single piece of my clothing scattered on the floor, leaving her master’s clothes intact.
What was I to do? It was five o’clock and I had an appointment with Thierno and his school counsellor at five-thirty. And. So. Well. Hastily donning Yasu’s elegant black suit, which he needed for his seven o’clock opening, I rushed to the Monoprix next door, bought myself a new set of clothes, raced to Thierno’s school, attended the meeting, then raced back to the hotel — yes, son in tow, I had no choice — to give my lover back his suit, at which point the bitch Isolde could think of nothing better to do than leap on my son and sink her savage teeth into his thigh. And that is how my third marriage came to an end.
Sitting at the coffee table, Rena flips through the past week’s newspapers. The events in France are mentioned only briefly, on inside pages.
Aziz, Aziz, where are you? What’s going on?
She dials his number and gets his answering machine. ‘It’s me, love,’ she says…and, not knowing what to add, hangs up.
Disturbed by the memory of Yasu, she tries to imagine the church service Gaia is attending right now. This stirs memories of all the religious ceremonies she has sat in on — forever an outsider — in Durban, Mumbai, Port-au-Prince, New Orleans, Ouro Preto or Dublin, moved in spite of herself by the beauty, solemnity and power of these collective rituals. She replaces Bach with Pergole-si on the sound system, all the while pursuing a futile argument with Gaia in her brain — Yes, I do have the right to love this music, she insists defensively, even if I reject the church that gave rise to it…
The morning is melting away like snow in springtime.
At ten-thirty, Ingrid comes down alone and announces, ‘Dad’s not feeling well.’
‘Oh? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, he’s just having a hard time emerging, that’s all. It happens more and more often.’
‘It does?’
‘Yes.’
Rena wonders if she detects a note of reproach in Ingrid’s voice — but no, only worry.
‘But…will he be getting up?’
‘Oh, he’s up.’
‘And is he planning on coming down?’
‘Yes. He told me to tell you he’d be right down.’
She serves Ingrid her breakfast, desperately trying to be as sweet and gentle as Gaia…but it’s no use, she feels sullen and mean. Doesn’t want to share with Ingrid the good news that wafted in on Alioune’s trade wind this morning. Everything feels ‘off’.
Heavy silence between them.
Simon, at last.
Ingrid and she, in chorus: ‘Are you all right, Dad?’
He grunts his assent, smiles to dispel their fears, and breakfasts royally.
Then he says, ‘Can we sit down in the living room and talk things over for a while?’
Scartoffie
Rena looks at the perfect Sunday morning around her. Out of doors: calm, sunlight, the marvellous Chianti hills—gold! Oh, gold of grapevines, red of October maples, mauve of heather and lavender, a landscape copied from Leonardo’s paintings…And indoors: elegant burnished furniture, books serried on shelves, the neat stacks of Gaia’s dead lover’s architectural magazines, ceramic bowls… Every thing in its place. All the day’s possibilities converging here and now…And her father wants to talk things over.
‘When I retired five years ago and we had the house in West-mount renovated,’ he begins, ‘I had a sort of dream. Or, let’s say, a hope. I hoped we’d be able to entertain more often…And now I see that dream’s just not coming true…maybe because when you invite people over, they feel obliged to invite you back…or because… I don’t know…the food shopping is getting to be a burden on Ingrid…’
Rena sees Ingrid hesitate, gather her courage, hesitate again, then decide to speak up. ‘I don’t want to sound critical, Dad,’ she says, on the verge of tears, ‘but how can we entertain when the dining-room table is stacked high with all your papers?’
Dante neither saw nor foresaw the circle of Hell to which my father seems condemned for all eternity.
‘I’m getting old,’ Simon says, looking steadily at Rena, ‘and my concentration is not what it used to be. I only have an hour a two a day of mental clarity — if I’m lucky! If I’ve had a good sleep, and if my medication hasn’t made me lethargic. So when, by miracle, I do get a bit of clarity, rather than squandering it on practical chores like tidying up my study, I prefer to use it for something, uh, let’s say, well…creative.’
It’s eleven-thirty. Soon Gaia will be home, and they won’t have budged. Oh, well. They can give up the idea of Volterra and settle for San Gimignano; what difference will that make?
In Ravenna, Dante sat down at his desk, took out a sheet of paper and a pen, allowed the images to well up in his mind, and transcribed them word by word.
Same thing when I enter my darkroom and close the door behind me: the space is orderly, the surfaces clean and bare. I prepare the baths, measuring one part substance to nine parts water, dust my negatives with a tiny paintbrush and slip them (shiny side up) into the enlarger, choose my filters and paper, peer through the grain magnifier at the arrangement of the tiny grains of silver halide, those molecules informed by light. When at last everything is ready, when the silence is ready, I turn off the lights and start exposing. Calm, concentrated, absent, I count off the seconds of exposure, work, rework, improve, stay there, expose, count the seconds, study the grain…
It’s all about framing. You’ve got to keep some things outside the frame. You’ve got to exclude. Only God can get away with embracing everything.
Impossible — such is his hell — to set a sheet of paper on my father’s desk. It vanished years ago, beneath a Himalaya of inextricably miscellaneous papers. On its surface, the urgent and the futile writhe together like the snakes of Laocoon; the future is blocked off by perpetual, guilt-inducing calls from the past. Every surface in his study literally overflows with ancient invitations, leaflets, newspaper clippings, magazines, advertisements, concert programmes, scribbled chemical formulae, snapshots, to say nothing of the report cards of children long grown and gone…The painful grimace of an African woman dying of AIDS overlaps with the benevolent smile of a Buddhist monk; the photocopy of an old Leonard Cohen poem finds itself face-to-face with the latest treacly letter from Simon’s sister Deborah (turned Zionist and pious in her old age); hip X-rays are interleaved with outdated issues of Brain magazine. Sufferings jostle and jive, memories vie for attention, reminders from the tax office scream their impatience…
Simon Greenblatt’s papers slide off the table, line up on the floor in military formation, march out of his study in Montreal, cross the Atlantic Ocean and invade Impruneta. A triumphant army of ancient papers overwhelms Gaia’s living room, wrenching Rena’s guts, causing tears to well up in her stepmother’s eyes, obstructing their bronchial tubes, clogging their arteries, blocking the circulation of blood and meaning, drowning out the music in their ears, cutting off their view of the Chianti hills, darkening the delightful Tuscan sun, and striking their perfect Sunday morning dead.