Free Heading South by Dany Laferrière Page A

doesn’t bother you?”
    â€œNo! Things are much better this way . . .”
    â€œOkay, Mama, I’ve got to go.”
    â€œAlready? Do you need money? I don’t have much, but . . .”
    â€œNo, I’m fine.”
    â€œAre you sure you don’t need anything?”
    â€œI’m sure.”
    â€œGood. Don’t forget to shut the gate behind you.”
    â€œYes, Mama.”

A Naïve Painting
    I tell you it’s springtime by placing
a couple in the centre of the landscape.
    DAVERTIGE
    MY NAME IS Laura Ingraham. I’m thirty-five years old. Men find me attractive because I am tall, slim and blonde, but they also find me a bit frightening because I’m a New York Jewish intellectual. I was born in New York, and have lived there all my life. I love that city. Especially its hardness. New York doesn’t believe in tears, as does, say, Moscow. My favourite book is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote. I always keep it in my handbag and take it out whenever I have a spare minute somewhere. For a long time I worshipped Andy Warhol. I collected anything from that era (late sixties, early seventies), the time of The Factory, the Warhol studio. My biggest regret is that I was never at Studio 54 when Jackie Kennedy, Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger were there. My favourite type of man: Peter Beard, the photographer/adventurer. My favourite film: Woody Allen’s Manhattan. I’ve seen it more than a dozen times. I also love men’s underwear by Calvin Klein. Do you remember Diane Keaton wearing it in Annie Hall ? Well, I wore the same kind for years, right up until the time one of my lovers (a music critic for Rolling Stone ) told me that once you’re past adolescence such things are ridiculous. But it wasn’t ridiculous to me.
    I HAVE ANOTHER side that no one knows about. My secret garden. It’s a story that goes back to my childhood. I was five. One day my father brought home a small painting (a landscape) and hung it in my bedroom, above my bed. A simple landscape, of the naïve school. Sometimes, at night, when I was afraid, I would spend a long time looking at this painting (nature, benevolent, luminous), until eventually my nerves would settle down. Sometimes I would imagine living in my painting. Being born in such a place instead of in Manhattan. But I need both. My urban landscape and my imaginary one. Manhattan excites me. But the landscape calms me. I believe that this duality is part of my deepest nature. Like most excitable beings, I am capable of remaining calm and quiet for hours on end. My friends are totally unaware of this aspect of my personality. All they know is this woman who is capable of spending two hours in Bloomingdale’s looking for a scarf to wear to a cocktail party that evening, then after the party running out to Queens to visit a some friends before ending the night at some trendy new club on Long Island. No matter what the hour, I never go home without stopping on Park Avenue to pick up some warm bagels. This is the girl, urban down to her fingernails, that my friends know (even my closest friends). However, I can also be this little country girl who gets up at the crack of dawn with the roosters and goes outside in bare feet to gather ripe fruit that has fallen to the ground overnight. Am I schizophrenic, like most of the people who live in this city? When I left my parents’ house and rented a small apartment near Columbia University, the one thing I took with me was that little landscape painting. And the first thing I did was hang it in my bedroom. Whenever I happened to wake up in the middle of the night with a bad case of the sweats (loneliness, combined with fear), that painting (the sole constant in my life) was the only thing that would calm me down.
    I STILL HAD no idea what country the painting came from. I could have found out easily enough, if I’d wanted to, by looking at a few art books in the