Free Infrared by Nancy Huston Page B

young Madame Kutis; later on, as punishment for the singer’s virulent political lyrics, the Nigerian government would arrange to have all his sweet wives raped and his elderly mother tossed out of a window, but on the night of the Dijon concert none of that had happened yet), Alioune leaned over to me and moaned softly intomy ear, ‘It hurts,’—I’ve never forgotten it. Seen from the front, the dancers hardly seemed to be moving at all, their hips and shoulders barely undulating—but when they spun around you saw their bead-fringed rear ends jouncing wildly up and down in synch with the wild Afro beat. Of course men find this painful. They can control the world but they can’t control that crucial part of their anatomy. It has this maddening way of standing to attention when they don’t want it to and refusing to budge when they most desperately need it to perform. Whence their tendency to cling to things whose firmness is reliable—guns, medals, briefcases, honours, doctrines…They can’t stand the fact that females hold the remote control to their cocks. It scares them, their fear makes them angry, and the effects of that anger are apparent everywhere. Since they can’t control their own bodies, they control ours by declaring them taboo…
    ‘Shall we hit the old bridge?’ asks Ingrid. ‘An excellent idea,’ Simon says.
Ponte Vecchio
    Unfortunately, dozens of tourists have had the same excellent idea at the same moment—to stand on the Ponte alla Carraia and take each other’s pictures with the Ponte Vecchio in the background, tinged blood-colour by the dying sun.
    We no doubt look grotesque to the Florentines, thinks Rena. ‘What a cliché…’ Yet each of us integrates this cliché into a specific history. That young Asian man, for instance, clambering over the parapet of the Ponte alla Carraia to set his Nikon up on one of the pylons, then dangerously backing up to be in the frame and smiling as he takes his own picture with the famous bridge behind him—where’s he from? Who is he?
    How sad, Subra nods, to have such a sophisticated camera and no one to smile at…
    They walk back to the Lungo Corsini and begin to wend their way along the river. The temperature is delightfully mild, and an all-but-full moon is rising beyond the Ponte Vecchio. Impossible, however, to savour the instant: no boardwalk to stroll along, no bench to sit down on, no way to be together. Squashed between the flow of cars and the flow of pedestrians, they’re forced to advance in Indian file.
    ‘Hey!’ Simon suddenly exclaims. ‘Doesn’t that look like a satyr’s knees?’
    Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…
    Rena stops, turns, looks at what he’s pointing to—the wrought-iron balustrade is studded with a decorative motif. ‘I suppose so,’ she nods vaguely. ‘Very stylised, though.’ She sets off again.
    ‘And if those are his knees,’ her father insists, ‘what’s this, in your opinion?’
    Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…
    Stopping, turning, looking again, Rena sees a protuberance between the ‘knees’.
    ‘Dad!’ Ingrid protests.
    What does he want them to say?
    ‘Wow.’
    All right? That make you happy? You got one, too?
    Rena turns away. Sets off again, jaws clenched. Stares up, beyond the sunset-gilded bridge, at the moon. Almost full, yes, almost pure.
    They reach the Ponte Vecchio at last—’the only one of Florence’s bridges,’ the Guide bleu informs Rena, ‘to have escaped destruction by the Germans.’
    Having no wish to get Ingrid started on the subject of the SecondWorld War, Rena refrains from translating this passage for them.
    ‘Isn’t it magnificent, Dad?’ Ingrid exclaims.
    ‘The ancient neighbourhoods on either side of the river,’ the Guide bleu goes on, ‘were destroyed by landmines. Though reconstructed, they delude no one.’
    Oh, yes, they do. They delude us just fine, thanks.
    The elderly couple stands there, entranced.
    Delusion is