In desperation, Rena opens the Guide bleu. What can she tell Simon and Ingrid about this cathedral that will bring it alive for them?
You’re not the only one, Father, to have had your plans thwarted and your dreams defeated by the ups and downs of fate…Look at Siena! The original project was to build the biggest church in the world right on this spot (the present Duomo was just the transept!). In 1348, however, construction ground to a halt as the city’s population was reduced by two-thirds. Mounds and mounds of dead bodies. Disgusting, purulent, stinking corpses. Black buboes, people moaning, women screaming in agony, babies tossed at random into common graves…The whole European continent writhing in the same pestilence…There…That make you feel better?
Naturally, she holds her tongue.
Kannon
The minute they leave the Duomo, Ingrid begs for a lunch break — yes, now, in the first café they come upon. Hoping to find a terrace in the sunlight, Rena convinces her to wait a bit — and suddenly they find themselves in Il Campo. Ah yes: she remembers this splendid, scallop-shell-shaped square, each of whose nine pavements represents one of the communes that made up the independent republic of Siena in the twelfth century, before it became the Ghibel-line enemy of Guelfan Florence. Something like that, yes, something along those lines. They find restaurant tables on the sunny side of the square, and, preoccupied not with Siena’s heroic past but with their own petty problems, just as the inhabitants of twelfth-century Siena were preoccupied with theirs, and so it goes, they order sandwiches, salads, acqua gassata.
A self-styled clown is circulating among the tables, heckling the customers, offering to imitate them. Finding him unpleasantly reminiscent of the other night’s dictator in Florence, Rena brushes him off unceremoniously: ‘Non voglio niente, niente!’ Ingrid stares at her, eyebrows raised, taken aback by her violence.
Relax, little one, Subra murmurs in her head. Look around you, take a deep breath, calm down. Life is lovely.
‘You look lovely today,’ says Simon out of the blue. Rena jumps at the coincidence between his actual utterance of the word and Subra’s imaginary one. ‘Can I take your photo?’
‘You haven’t been taking many pictures, Rena,’ Ingrid points out, as Rena hands the camera to her father.
‘Hard to compete with the postcards,’ she mutters sarcastically.
‘True.’
Rena finds it troubling to see the Canon in her father’s age-speckled hands. It’s as if he were holding one of her own limbs, a detached but living part of her body. After examining it with great care, he positions it, aims it, and presses the shutter. Once, twice…
‘Don’t you want to smile, Rena?’ asks Ingrid.
‘Not particularly. Do I have to?’
‘No,’ says Simon. ‘You’re fine just as you are. With your dark glasses, fedora hat and leather jacket, you look like a movie star incognito.’
‘Movie stars aren’t what they used to be,’ says Ingrid.
Rena shouts with laughter. Ingrid hesitates, then joins in.
You’re the exact opposite of Marilyn Monroe, teases Subra. She was happy only when looked at; and you, only when looking.
Their orders arrive, and Simon passes the camera back to her with a flourish. ‘Do you know who Canon cameras are named after?’ he asks.
‘Jimmy Canon, the sworn enemy of Bill Kodak and Bob Nikon? No, I have no idea.’
‘K-A-N-N-O-N,’ Simon spells out. ‘An exceeding strange Japanese bodhisattva.’
‘Why strange?’ queries Rena, stabbing a number of aqueous little shrimps with her fork and slipping them into her mouth.
‘Because the Japanese made a woman of her, whereas in India she was a man. And not just any man: Guanyin, the most popular bodhisattva of the Great Vehicle. I happened to see an article about it a while ago…’
‘Really?’ Rena says in surprise. So her father is still interested in Buddhism? ‘And what is Kannon’s specialty?’
‘Compassion. She’s the…hang on a sec, I jotted it down somewhere…’
Her surprise turning to stupefaction, Rena watches as her father riffles through his wallet and comes up with the appropriate scrap of paper in less than five minutes.
‘“She who listens to and receives the pain of whole world,”’ he reads aloud, ‘“and responds to it with one giant word of compassion that encompasses all in an ocean of infinite joy.”’
‘A bit like the Virgin of Divine Mercy?’ suggests Ingrid.
‘You don’t know how right you are,’ Simon nods. ‘Japanese Christians bow down before statues they call Maria Kannon. Isn’t that incredible? And Canon, the Japanese company, was named after that very bodhisattva. You remind me of her.’
‘A goddess of compassion,’ Rena grumbles. ‘What next?’ Tears fill her eyes, fortunately concealed by her dark glasses.
‘Seriously. We went to your Misteries show last April…’
‘You did?’ She feels dizzy.
‘Do you think our daughter could have a show in Montreal without our going to see it? It made a big impression on us.’
‘Yes, it was interesting,’ Ingrid concedes, ‘although I keep hoping you’ll eventually choose a more—’
‘I found it admirable,’ Simon says, interrupting his wife. ‘Not just because you’d obviously put years of work into it, but because…to open up their private lives to you like that, to allow you to get so close to them, those men had to feel you really accepted them…Kannon, see what I mean? A strong show indeed,’ he concludes.
‘I would have seduced Bin Laden,’ says Rena, to lighten the atmosphere.
‘I’ll bet you would!’ Simon laughs.
‘I would have seduced the Pope.’
‘Rena!’ Ingrid says.
‘Sorry. Er…would you believe…the Great Rabbi of Jerusalem?’
A silence ensues, in the course of which Rena directs her full attention to making sure the little beasties of her insalata di mare stay on her fork.
As they’re having coffee a while later, Simon glances through the newspapers he purchased earlier. ‘Wow. Looks as if sparks are flying in France!’
‘Of course sparks are flying. What do you expect? Two kids get their brains fried and the government contents itself with saying they deserve it. I should hope sparks would fly!’
The clown she rebuffed earlier comes up to her. ‘Grazie mille, signora, per il vostro spettacolo,’ he says in a loud voice. ‘Era veramente meraviglioso! Formidabile! Stupendo!’ So saying, he slips a fifty-centime piece into her palm.
‘You guys feel up to visiting the Museo Civico?’ she says, pocketing the coin.
‘Sure thing!’ Simon and Ingrid crow in unison.
What’s going on? wonders Rena. You’d think we loved each other or something.
Dolore
White, nude, gigantic, marble hand pressed to marble brow, looking like a Rodin Thinker who swapped meditation for despair, the man on the museum’s ground floor stares transfixed at the source of his pain. No: the word pain being masculine in Italian, it’s not what he is enduring, it’s what he is.
I’m not saying it’s you, Daddy, I’m not saying it’s you.
In fact the statue reminds her of Gérard, a former prison inmate whom she had decided not to include in Misteries, after an afternoon spent talking with him in his twentieth-arrondissement squat.
His shame at living in such poor surroundings, his stilted conversation, his complete lack of emotion when he took his childhood photos out of an old shoe box to show them to me…Those should all have been warning signs, but somehow I didn’t pick up on them.