Infrared Read online

  PRAISE FOR NANCY HUSTON and Fault Lines

  ‘Glittering…accomplished.’ Guardian

  ‘Masterful; the language is direct and arresting; the story is engaging to the end.’ Globe and Mail

  ‘Huston succeeds in exploring the darkest of subjects with a lightness of touch.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Explosive in its control and ambition.’ Le Figaro

  ‘Nancy Huston is a brilliant, lyrical, unforgettable writer.’ Janette Turner Hospital

  Praise for Infrared

  ‘Nancy Huston is at her best in this portrait of a troubled woman who is simultaneously an ambiguous mother, an insatiable and mature lover, and a daughter distraught at the decline of her father. A snapshot of great depth, and written in a perfectly limpid prose.’ Charlie Hebdo

  ‘An intense and sensual novel, in which unapologetic feminism never for a minute excludes the desire for men.’ France Soir

  ‘A truly great novel. Such control, finesse and intelligence. What powerful writing and what a joy to read.’ Le Devoir

  ‘There is something eminently subversive in Nancy Huston’s latest novel. If it’s only that a forty-five-year-old woman dares to talk about her sexuality, her immense desire for men. But even more, Infrared is a staggering expression of the power of art as salvation.’ Voir

  ‘Nancy Huston is in top form writing about individual and collective memories, and she knows better than most how to dramatise family destinies.’ Le Monde des Livres

  Nancy Huston was born in Canada and has lived in France since she was twenty. She writes in both French and English, translates her work herself, and is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, as well as plays, children’s books and screenplays. Her novel Fault Lines won the Prix Femina and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

  Nancy Huston

  Infrared

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Nancy Huston 2011

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Originally published in French by Editions Actes Sud, Paris 2010

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2011

  Design by WH Chong

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921834967

  Cover image: a detail from Caravaggio’s St John the Baptist

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Huston, Nancy, 1953-

  Title: Infrared / Nancy Huston.

  ISBN: 9781921758683 (pbk.)

  Dewey Number: 843.914

  For the Djawara

  ‘…and suddenly the piercing pain of love, the lost look in the stranger’s eyes, expressing all that’s missing…’

  CLAUDIO MAGRIS

  ‘Take my wound!

  Through it, the whole world will flow into you.’

  THE BROTHERS GRIMM

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  PRAISE FOR NANCY HUSTON and Fault Lines

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Forward

  TUESDAY

  Cenci

  Sacco di Firenze

  Angoli del mondo

  Cro-Magnon

  Proroga

  San Lorenzo Primo

  Stupida

  Kodak

  Dante

  WEDNESDAY

  Freddo e caldo

  Mirandola

  Scienza

  Bambini

  Galileo

  Feltro

  Vietato

  Ponte Vecchio

  Piazza della Signoria

  Davide

  Il Duce

  Piccoli problemi

  THURSDAY

  Pietà

  Maddalena

  Cantoria

  La Scultura

  Belvedere

  Pitti

  Putti

  Fuoco

  Paradiso

  FRIDAY

  Diluvio

  Semplici

  Gatto

  Cartoline

  Gioielli

  Romulus e Remus

  Mummia

  Chimera

  Disputatio

  Elettrizzare

  SATURDAY

  Supplizio

  Sregolatezza

  Guidare

  Vinci

  Anchiano

  Scandicci

  Impruneta

  SUNDAY

  Selvaggio

  Domenica campagnola

  La nonna

  Scartoffie

  Lombaggine

  L’amore

  Caos

  MONDAY

  Rovine

  Capriccio

  Miserabili

  Duomo

  Innocenti

  Pestilenza

  Kannon

  Dolore

  Buon Governo

  Motorini

  Fazzoletto

  Sacco di Siena

  Notturno

  TUESDAY

  Partenza

  Drago

  San Lorenzo Secondo

  San Marco

  Grande problema

  Arcispedale

  Aspetto Primo

  Cifre

  Niente

  Tutto

  Aspetto Secondo

  Aspetto Terzo

  Puma

  NOTES

  Rena is slanting to the right, slowly sinking farther and farther to the right on the red leather seat of the coffee shop, gradually collapsing against her stepmother’s corpulent maternal body. They’ve been up all night, and it’s been a long night indeed. Ingrid puts an arm around her and in the dawn’s uncertain light it would be difficult to say which of the two women is hanging onto the other. Though her eyes are closed, Rena is not asleep—far from it. She’s conscious of the smells of bleach and frothy milk, the bitter taste of tobacco in her throat, the soft touch of Ingrid’s blouse against her cheek, all the reassuring noises in the café—spoons clinking, doors opening and shutting, to say nothing of the numerous overlapping voices, businessmen in a hurry to down a last ristretto before boarding the train for Rome, a drunkard ordering his first beer of the day, loud-speaker announcements about arrivals and departures, the chatter of waitresses. I sink therefore I am, Rena says to herself, or rather, I’m sinking towards the right therefore I am in Italy, in italics, all my thoughts are in italics, insisting, repeating, recriminating, accusing, screaming at me, How is it possible? You claim to be an ultrasensitive film and yet you saw nothing, noticed nothing, detected nothing, guessed at nothing, comprehended nothing? No, because—not that, you understand, breast yes skin yes stomach yes bronchia yes mediastinum yes, since 1936 infrared photography has been used in all those areas but not in this one not in this one no, no, not at all.

  TUESDAY

  ‘I’ll go anywhere.’

  Cenci

  ‘So you’re the last Greenblatt,’ grunts the proprietor of the Hotel Guelfa, in Italian, without looking at her, glancing sullenly instead at the photo in her passport. ‘Your parents arrived late last night,’ he adds—repeating, in a tone heavily laced with reproach, ‘Very late.’

  Rena doesn’t correct him, doesn�
��t explain that they’re not her parents, or rather that one is and that the other isn’t; having not the slightest wish to open that can of worms, that Pandora’s box, that raft of the Medusa, she holds her tongue in Italian, smiles in Italian, nods in Italian, and strives to radiate the serenity to which she ardently aspires. The truth is that she’s been dreading this moment for weeks.

  ‘I know it’s absurd,’ she murmured to Aziz only a few hours ago as they nosed through the thick fog which for some mysterious reason seems to shroud Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport in all seasons and at all hours. ‘My trip hasn’t even started yet, and already I feel guilty.’

  ‘Hey, the lady exaggerates,’ said Aziz teasingly, even as he stroked her left thigh. ‘Not only is she treating herself to a week’s holiday in Tuscany, but she wants us to feel sorry for her.’

  Standing next to the car at the drop-off point, she kissed her man lingeringly. ‘Goodbye, love…We’ll talk every day, won’t we?’

  ‘You bet.’ Aziz took her in his arms and gave her a mighty hug. Then, stepping back, looking into her eyes: ‘You do look a bit wasted this morning, but I’m not worried. You’re armed to the teeth—you’ll survive.’

  Aziz knows her well. Knows she’s planned to keep Simon and Ingrid at a distance by aiming, framing, firing at them with her Canon. ‘You’ll survive,’ he repeated as he climbed back into the car. She leaned down to drown herself in his dark eyes one more time—and then, by way of farewell, slowly drew her index finger along his lower lip.

  They’d made love this morning before the alarm clock went off and she’d wanted him to come on her face, it was such a powerful sensation to be holding his sex with both her hands and suddenly feel the semen spurting through, when it had splashed out warm and marvellous she’d spread it over her face and neck and breasts like an elixir of youth, feeling it cool as it dried…Washing this morning, she’d purposely left a bit of her lover’s invisible trace beneath her jaw, at the top of her neck—like a thin, translucid mask to protect her, see her through the impending trial…

  The man hands her a key and informs her, still grumpily and in Italian, that Room 25 is on the second floor, by which he means the third floor, at the far end of the corridor.

  What he doesn’t tell her is that the room is in fact the same thing as the corridor; they’ve simply put up a door and built a tiny shower stall in one corner. Rena sees at once that she mustn’t leave anything on the sink, because the sink will be taking its shower at the same time as she does. The room is long and narrow—well, narrow, anyhow—and its window gives onto a charming little garden in the back: flowers, climbing vines, red-tiled roofs. She takes a deep breath. You see? she says inwardly to Subra, the special Friend who accompanies her wherever she goes. It is Florence. I mean, there is beauty.

  And why on earth would you feel guilty? Subra asks her. I mean, you’re not Beatrice Cenci or anything.

  True, Rena nods. In the first place, I wasn’t born into an aristocratic family in Rome in the sixteenth century. In the second place, I’m not twenty-one years old. My forty-five-year-old father didn’t lock me up in his palazzo in the Abruzzi with his second wife Lucrezia, to humiliate and brutalise us. He didn’t try to rape me. I didn’t plan his murder with the help of my brother and stepmother. I didn’t hire professional killers, instruct them to drive an iron peg into his right eye and personally oversee the crime. I didn’t go on to push his dead body over the edge of the cliff. I wasn’t arrested, brought to trial, and condemned to death. My head didn’t get chopped off in 1599 near the Ponte Sant’Angelo on the Tiber. No, no, the whole situation is different—this is Florence, not Rome, my stepmother loves my father, I’m the one who’s forty-five, my head is sitting squarely on my shoulders…and everyone is innocent.

  Subra chuckles.

  Rena walks down the corridor to Room 23 and scratches at the door like a cat. Lengthy silence. So why am I so terrified? There is beauty. I’ve simply made them the gift of a trip to Italy, a country neither of them has ever visited before, to celebrate my Daddy’s seventieth birthday…

  Sacco di Firenze

  Simon has never looked in a less celebratory mood; as for Ingrid, her eyes are red and puffy from crying.

  Though it’s past noon, they’ve just got up. It seems they narrowly escaped a tragedy last night—Ingrid tells Rena about it in detail over breakfast. They’d arrived late from Rotterdam, at one a.m., having travelled all day in a train filled to bursting with rambunctious ragazzi. Exhausted, they’d disembarked and tried to get their bearings in this foreign city, foreign country, foreign tongue. They’d wandered endlessly around the Stazione Santa Maria Novella, weighed down by all seven pieces of their luggage, some on wheels, others straining their back and shoulder muscles. Disorientated, they’d got lost and made a huge detour, trudging past wonders and detesting them for not being the Hotel Guelfa. (Santa Maria Novella—not the station but the church, decorated by Domenico Ghirlandaio, the master of Michelangelo himself—right there before their eyes, in the sweet Florentine night…) Bone-tired, they’d stopped on a corner to catch their breath, calm the pounding of their hearts and check the map under a streetlight. When at long last they’d reached their room at the Hotel Guelfa, after waiting at the door, explaining things to the irate proprietor and gasping their way up two steep flights of stairs, Ingrid had automatically counted their bags and…six instead of seven. Re-counted—truly, six. Heart flip. The missing piece of luggage, though the smallest, was also the most precious: a small rucksack containing their money, plane tickets, passports…Simon—dog-tired, wiped-out, septuagenarian, lost—trundled back downstairs, returned to the corner where they’d stopped to rest, and—despite the incessant comings and goings at that spot—found the bag propped up against the streetlight.

  ‘As miraculously intact as the Madonna,’ he triumphantly concludes.

  The mere memory of last night’s panic has reduced Ingrid to tears.

  Gee, thinks Rena, we could write an epic poem about this. The Sack of Florence, a counterpart to The Sack of Rome. But Ingrid wouldn’t want to know that Charles V’s armies razed the latter city in 1527, causing twenty thousand deaths and incalculable losses to Italy’s artistic heritage: to her mind, the only destruction in the history of humanity is that of her native city of Rotterdam by the Germans, on the fourteenth of May 1940. She was just a month old at the time, her family’s house was hit, her mother and three brothers died when it collapsed, her own life was saved by the cast-iron stove next to which her cradle had been set—’I was born in ruins,’ she loves to tell people, sobbing; ‘I suckled a corpse.’

  ‘Uh…Florence? Did you want to see Florence?’

  Bad start.

  Angoli del mondo

  Whereas the Florentines are already halfway through their day’s work, Simon and Ingrid seem in no rush to get up from the breakfast table.

  ‘Won’t you have some pastry, Rena?’ Ingrid says. ‘You’ve lost weight, haven’t you? How much do you weigh now?’

  She resents it that my body doesn’t change, thinks Rena. So far, at least, neither motherhood nor passing time have managed to fill it out. At forty-five my measurements are the same as they were at age eighteen, when we first met. She thinks poor Toussaint and Thierno must have been horribly squashed in there. She has a hard time with my appearance in general, which she finds morbid—my inordinate taste for dark glasses, dark everything, leather.

  That Rena! Subra says, imitating Ingrid’s voice in Rena’s mind. Still using a backpack instead of a handbag, because she’s allergic to ladies’ handbags and to everything ladylike in general. Now also sporting a man’s fedora, no doubt to protect her head from the sun and rain while leaving her hands free for photography. And her hair’s cut so short, you’d think she was a lesbian…Actually that wouldn’t surprise me…nothing surprises me, coming from Rena…I mean, why limit yourself to men? If you’ve got an explorer’s soul you explore everything, don’t you? Besides which, there’s her brot
her’s example…

  ‘You know I abhor scales,’ Rena says aloud. ‘Even when my kids were babies, I refused to weigh them. I figured if they got too puny, I’d notice it all by myself.’

  ‘But surely they weigh you when you have an appointment at the doctor’s?’

  ‘That’s one reason I do my best to avoid members of that profession…Um, let me think…Hundred and seven or so, last time I checked.’

  ‘That’s not enough for a woman of your height…Right, Dad?’

  ‘Sorry…I’ll do my best to shrink.’

  Oh, dear, Simon doesn’t laugh. He is Rena’s father, not Ingrid’s, but Ingrid has been calling him Dad since their four daughters were born in the eighties and he doesn’t seem to mind.

  Poor Simon, Rena thinks. He looks discouraged in advance. Dreads the coming days. Fears I’ll be dragging them here and there, pushing them around, impressing and amazing them, overwhelming them with my erudition, my energy and curiosity. Thinks maybe they should have gone straight home to Montreal from Rotterdam. Is afraid of disappointing me. ‘Dear daughter, I confess that I am old,’ as Lear puts it…Seventy isn’t old at all nowadays, but the fact is that he’s tired and I weigh on him. No matter how skinny I am…

  After ingesting the disgusting cellophane-wrapped pastries and the so-called orange juice, they wonder if they could have a second cup of coffee. Not cappuccino this time round, regular coffee.