‘Daddy! Stop it!’ That’s Rena screaming at the top of her lungs. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ She seems unable to find a more subtle way of putting it. ‘STOP IT!’
She flees.
Lombaggine
Head awhirl, she runs up to her bedroom.
The clay-footed ogre pursues me by not moving. His torpor strikes terror into my heart, breathes down my neck. Oh, Daddy! Daddy! Save me from the ogre who is you! If I don’t run as fast as I can, panting and sweating, he’ll catch up with me and throttle all my hopes — gloop, gloop. Engulfed by his misery, I’ll disappear forever. Look at Horemheb, he says. Look at Romulus. Look at the soul’s immortality. No, Daddy, no! — I need to run and run and keep on running — to escape your immobility!
Though it must be eighty degrees in her room beneath the roof, she’s shivering; her hands are freezing; and when she takes out her mobile to call Kerstin, she misdials three times in a row.
‘Dr Matheron’s office.’
‘Kerstin!’
‘Rena! How marvellous to hear your voice. Tell me! How’s the Tuscan trek?’
‘You first — how have you been? How’s your lumbago?’
Rena feels a bit responsible for that lumbago. Shortly after their fateful conversation in her darkroom, when she’d told Kerstin how gorgeous and sexy she still was, that stoical widow (whose erotic experience up until then had been limited to three or four impatient deflowerers, a fine husband lost to illness and an endless desert of abstinence), had shyly sat down at her computer.
Tell me, Subra says.
It wasn’t easy for her. It meant choosing a pseudonym, then learning to filter out weirdos, psychos, phallocrats…Still, the pickings have been excellent, overall. Between the ages of fifty-five and sixty, Kerstin has had a good dozen lovers and the things they’ve done together sound intriguing not to say extraordinary, even to my jaded ears. The men are almost all married, between forty and sixty. They confide in her after the love-making. They tell her their problems and listen to hers, make her laugh, shower her with compliments, tenderness and flowers. ‘You were right,’ Kerstin told me, after a few months of assiduous experimentation. ‘As long as you keep away from intellectuals, Frenchmen are remarkable lovers. They’ve got all sorts of qualities — curiosity, delicacy, boyishness, a sense of humour, a taste for vice…I can hardly believe my luck! I’m having a ball and I don’t plan to stop any time soon. God bless the internet!’ One day she confessed to a weakness for whippings and thrashings, probably dating back to the spankings her severe Protestant Swede of a father regularly inflicted on her plump pink bottom. She recently made the acquaintance of a young man in the Auvergne region who showed himself willing to punish her in all the ways she’d ever dreamed of, and many that had never occurred to her. ‘It’s pure theatre,’ Kerstin assured me. Though I don’t object to this sort of mise en scène on moral grounds (every true erotic encounter, be it with a…member of the other sex or of one’s own, with a broomstick or a mere fleeting image, opens our bodies onto the void that surrounds us and revives the violence of brute animal infantile life — a life that emerges from matter is destined to return to it), I admit I feared for my friend’s safety. So when she was struck down by a lumbago attack, following a strange excursion to the Auvergne last summer for a rendez-vous with the whipping man, I interpreted it as a wise warning from her body.
‘Better. A little better, these past few days.’
‘What does “a little better” mean?’
‘Well, I’m not about to go schlepping through the Afghan mountains with a sixty-pound back pack, but I do manage to get out of bed now and then. So I’m making progress. How about you? Oh… my darling Rena…are you crying?’
Absurdly, Rena nods.
‘So you’re having a rough time? As rough as you feared?’
She nods again, squeaking out a yes between sobs.
‘Dear heart. Come on, now, take a few deep breaths the way I taught you…’
‘Thanks, Kerstin.’
‘What about Aziz?’
‘That’s part of it. I haven’t heard from him for two days.’
‘The magazine’s probably making him work around the clock, don’t you think? Because of the events?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t worry, dear one. It’s just a bad patch, you’ll see. You’ll pull through. Everything will turn out all right.’
L’amore
Car tyres crunch on gravel — Gaia is back.
Rena comes out of her room. ‘So what do you guys feel like doing?’
As traumatised by her outburst as if he were a little boy and she his mother, Simon answers in a low voice that he plans to spend the day here. She and Ingrid are welcome to go sightseeing wherever they want.
‘No problem,’ says Rena.
‘No, Dad,’ Ingrid protests. ‘I’ll stay here with you. It’s a good idea to rest up a bit. We’ve been running around so much these past few days.’
‘No problem,’ says Rena.
Fine. So they’ll see neither Volterra nor San Gimignano; they’ll go nowhere. What difference does it make?
Gaia’s cheerful voice wafts up to them from downstairs: ‘Tutto bene?’
‘Si, si. Molto bene!’ Rena replies.
And the day goes by.
Rena settles down with a book beneath the open dormer windows of her bedroom. As the afternoon sun crosses the sky, snatches of the couple’s gentle madness come floating up to her ears.
‘We haven’t had the time to write a single postcard. If we don’t do it now, we’ll get to Montreal before they do.’
‘Good idea. Where did you put them?’
‘I thought you had them. Wait a minute, I’ll check…Our bags need repacking anyway…’
‘Where should we sit? Cold in the shade, hot in the sun…’
‘Forgot my hat.’
‘Shall I fetch it?’
‘No, no, let’s sit in the shade.’
‘Which ones do you want?…Okay, I’ll take the others.’
‘So where should we start?’
‘Let’s make a list.’
‘The children, of course…and the grandchildren.’
‘But it’s the same address. No point in wasting stamps.’
‘Just as you like…’
‘Deborah…No, I’ll do hers later.’
‘My stomach’s growling.’
‘Hey, I’m getting hungry, too.’
‘Maybe we could ask Gaia to make us a snack and bring it out here.’
‘Sure. She could set up another table, it shouldn’t be a problem.’
‘Wait, I’ll ask…What a talker that woman is! She’s coming, though.’
‘So you write to David, okay?’
‘No, go ahead, you do it. Here, take Michelangelo’s David. The complete view, eh? Not the close-up of his thingamajig. Ha ha!’
‘Know his address?’
‘Not off the top of my head.’
‘Too bad. We’ll have to give him the card when we get back.’
‘And Whosit’s Campanile — should we send that to Freda?’
‘Sure thing. I wonder how she’s doing…Hope her medicine has kicked in by now.’
‘Speaking of which…what about Marcy’s operation?’