Read Online Infrared by Nancy Huston - Free Book Online Page A

concocting remedies, and…dying at age thirty-four, long before he did. Sorry about that, Dad.
Feltro
    Their next destination is the siesta—but naturally it would be unthinkable for them to head straight for the Hotel Guelfa and make it there without detours, hesitations, twists, turns or distractions. As they pass a hat stall in the marketplace near San Lorenzo, Simon (who needs to protect his vulnerable pate) decides this is as good a time as any to replace the absurd blue baseball cap he’s been wearing since they left Montreal.
    He comes to a halt. Rena sighs inwardly.
    It’s just the opposite of love, she realises in amazement. When you’re in love, time expands and boredom is unthinkable; every second is as round, full and juicy as a ripe grape. Your lover needs a pack of Pall Malls? Ah! A thrilling adventure, to spend twenty minutes waiting in line with him in a stinking tobacco shop while fifteen depressing individuals in slow succession scratch their heads over which Lotto ticket to buy. Everything is exciting, simply because the two of you are sharing it. Your love infuses every particle of the universe, even the most trivial and unsightly, with meaning—no, with music…
    Simon removes his cap and tries on several hats in front of a cheap hand mirror dangling from a nail. Meanwhile, Ingrid strikesup a conversation with the stallholder. Three minutes later, he opens his wallet to show her a snapshot of his daughter in Sri Lanka.
    ‘Oh, isn’t she cute?’ Ingrid coos.
    ‘Thank you, madam. Soon I have another child.’
    ‘Really? That’s wonderful!’
    ‘God willing, I go to visit them next summer…’
    This is October. Rena studies the young hat seller, searching his features for signs of anxiety over his future—money problems, the children not recognising him when he comes home on his annual visit…Objectively, his life seems grim indeed, and yet his face shines with hope.
    After trying on some two dozen hats, Simon finally selects a brown fedora almost identical to Rena’s.
    Ingrid frowns. ‘That’s not your style,’ she says dubiously.
    ‘It can become my style,’ Simon retorts. And he begins to haggle over the price. But even haggling is something Simon can’t do the way other people do.
    The young salesman, who had instantly knocked the price down from twenty-five to twenty euros because his merchandise was overpriced to begin with, wants to knock it down some more. ‘I’ll let you have it for eighteen,’ he says, touched by their admiration of his daughter.
    ‘No,’ says Simon, digging coins out of his change-purse and laboriously counting them out. ‘You said twenty, I’ll pay you twenty.’
    ‘No, really, I insist,’ says the young man. ‘Fifteen, come now, fifteen. You’ve been so kind.’
    ‘Twenty-three,’ Simon says.
    This goes on for another five minutes. When at last they move away from the stall, Simon has paid twenty-five euros for his hat and everyone is beaming.
Vietato
    A moment of peace.
    Rena showers, puts on fresh clothes and smokes a cigarette, sitting next to the window in her room’s only armchair. Down below, the garden is no longer empty: a bare-chested young man stands next to the white plastic picnic table, shouting into a mobile phone.
    He looks about twenty—Thierno’s age. His authoritarian tone contrasts comically with his fragile body—narrow shoulders, almost hairless chest and tummy. Physically, he reminds her of Khim—the slender, gracious Cambodian she married to do him a favour, shortly after Fabrice’s death…
    Tell me, murmurs Subra.
    Khim was forty at the time but looked twenty. He was a gastro-enterologist and had received his medical degree in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge came to power. After the five years of the genocide, during which he’d been ‘re-educated’ in the rice fields, he’d managed to leave Cambodia following the Vietnamese invasion, thanks to a patient of his who was in the Viet Cong. Once in Paris, Khim