Infrared by Nancy Huston Read Free Book Online Page B

halt. Starts over again, after a long pause.
    Oh, Daddy, Rena thinks in desperation, you’ve lost the thread.Your brain spins dozens of threads that lead you astray, wind themselves round you, trip you up, tie you in knots, immobilise you. Poor Gulliver-on-the-Arno, how will you ever get out of this mess?
    Yet your brain throbs with true wisdom and teems with countless facts. No soul could be more generous than yours, no interrogation more genuine, no quest more ardent…it never manages to jell, that’s all. What’s lacking is…lightness…alacrity…humour…the joy of choosing words, watching them file out on stage, line up, grab hands…and then, to the rhythm of pipes and tambourines, launch into a fabulous farandole!
    No. I know.
    What’s lacking is…self-love. Something Pico probably found at his mother’s breast…and that you didn’t find at yours?
    Granny Rena was a case. You named your eldest daughter after the woman you so desperately wished you could love, so she’d forgive you…for what crime, exactly?
    Tell me, Subra says.
    My paternal grandparents made a narrow escape from Poland in the early thirties, settling first in France, then in Quebec…But in 1945, upon seeing the photos of the death camps in which every member of her family had perished, from her two grandmothers down to her little second cousin, Rena sank into a permanent stupor. She was thirty-five at the time, and Simon ten.
    Whose photos of Dachau and Buchenwald did she see? Very possibly the ones published in Vogue and Life by that lovely blonde American photographer named Lee Miller. At the age of seven, Lee Miller was so lovely and so blonde that a ‘friend of the family’ raped her and she contracted gonorrhoea. Over a period of several months, her tiny vagina and uterus had to be subjected to acidbaths—an excruciating treatment that made her scream, day after day. Despite the pain inside, her body stayed perfectly lovely and blonde on the outside, so when she was eight her father started photographing her in the nude. As she grew towards adolescence he asked her to strike more and more lascivious poses. Then she left for Paris and was photographed in the same poses, also in the nude, by Man Ray and other Montparnasse artists. Despite her loveliness and her blondeness, Miller thought she might be interested in looking rather than being looked at—so she became a photographer herself. One day, thanks to an accident in her dark room, she discovered solarisation—a technique that consists of very briefly exposing the photograph to light during development—just as she herself had been exposed to male desire during her own development. Solarisation creates weird effects—in photos, halos, and, in little girls, the ability to split off from their bodies and the imperious need to search for meaning…Only in war would Lee Miller find the meaning she was looking for—first the destruction, bombing and ruins of cities in Britain and France, then the death camps, which, in April 1945, she was among the very first journalists to visit. Yes, she must have recognised something in the insane pornography of what she saw in the camps—chaotically exposed nudity, violent effacement of individuality, naked, fragmented, broken Jewish bodies, people turned into objects, non-entities. Unlike the other photographers, Miller approached the corpses without revulsion and photographed them close-up. Instead of framing anonymous heaps, piles, mountains of corpses, she insisted on capturing them as people—one person, another, yet another, each with his and her own history, showing their beauty, their personality, their still-human features, their naked bodies, their living dying bodies, every body a potential body, still human, still so very, very human—just as women exhibited in the nude, treated as if they were interchangeable objects, are in facthuman individuals. In Buchenwald, Miller finally managed to inject meaning into an existence she