The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  He lay there for a long time before he heard anything much. Shouting and screaming and a commotion that he didn’t want to put a name to. He smelled or thought he smelled smoke and heard the crackle of flames. Joe tried to summon God for the first time since El Mreir, not praying but pleading. Almost immediately he heard a single shot and a piercing wail and knew that it didn’t matter any more how soon the war ended. The damage was done.

  Sometime later — he could see through the slats that daylight had gone — someone came to the trapdoor and began lifting off the vine prunings. He sat up, clicked off the safety catch and put the barrel of the pistol against his temple.

  When the hatch lifted off, it was Donatella. She was covered in ash, her hair and clothes grey, her cheeks streaked with tears but her hazel eyes clear. The Gestapo had come with a copy of the poster, with a reward of one million lire for Rico. When no one said a word, they burned both houses, and when still no one spoke, the captain put his Luger to Leo’s head. The child had looked puzzled and asked his mother, ‘Che cosa vuole, mamma?’ What does he want, Mummy?

  Joe cried and Donatella waited for him to finish, then said, ‘Sei un bravo ragazzo, Gianni. Non è colpa tua.’ You’re a good boy, Gianni. It’s not your fault. ‘Torna dai tuoi.’ Go back to your own. She told him they had put Leo’s body and what was left of their possessions into a wagon and were driving the last of the oxen over to relations near Osoppo. She kissed him on both cheeks and left.

  Much later Joe came out into the moonlit night and walked towards the houses. They were still smouldering and he was hit by the stench of the cows that had been burnt in the stalle where he’d been found covered in shit eighteen months ago. He looked up at the stars in a cold sky. He hadn’t known it at the time, but he’d brought the fire with him.

  Treviso 2014

  51

  December 8, 1976.

  The team, the club, the town, is in disarray. The collective brutta figura when we hosted the Calabrians last Sunday has had repercussions: a column on page 16 of Corriere dello Sport condemning us, and a rap on the knuckles from the Italian Rugby Federation. Aldo told me about that this morning and wants me to attend a meeting of the dirigenti tonight.

  Aldo also told me we’ll be struggling to field a team for the next game in Sicily. I know that Franco’s going to be busy with his revolution in Bologna, and it wasn’t really news that Big Dom can’t be risked because, apparently, the Sicilian team are full of fascisti too. So there goes the fiery guts of the team but that’s not all: some of the other players have decided that Sicily is a game too far.

  At Aldo’s direction, I drove out to see brothers who are two thirds of our loose forward trio. They’re both squat tough buggers, hugely strong in hand and fore-arm and seemed utterly fearless, until today.

  They speak only dialect and are the Italian equivalent of sharecroppers, living in what turns out to be a pretty bizarre out-building on someone’s estate. It has dirt floors and two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen/dining/sitting room. Pride of place in that room is a glass-topped display case from a fairground, the sort you put a coin in and an arm sweeps across to knock some worthless trinket into a pocket. Except there’s nothing to plug it into. From where we were sitting I could see the wallpaper of their bedroom, culled centrefolds from Playboy and Penthouse, blonde brunette and red-head, wall to wall beaver. Fair enough, they’re bachelors but as we sculled home-made grappa which would have incinerated my tonsils if I had any, they told me they wouldn’t come to Sicily.

  This was the younger one talking. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the other one say a word through his handle-bar moustache. He always wears a hat, a kind of stetson I guess, which he only takes off at the last moment before a game — weird because he’s got a fine head of hair. Anyway, the younger brother tells me they can’t come to Sicily because they won’t fly. We’ve been able to bus to all our away matches so far but it would take the best part of three days to get to Catania by train and ferry. The thought of the two of them doing that did worry me. These are guys who had never seen a hotel atrium before our overnight stay in Milan on our first away game, and stared in wonder at the chandelier, then thought the mini-bar in their room had to be gifts from their hosts which would be rude not to drink. But we were so desperate I told them that maybe one of the dirigenti could travel on the train to Catania with them, but they’d be losing nearly a week of work there and back for which the club would have to compensate them. Was this an option worth discussing?

  They looked at each other — I swear the older one didn’t say a word — then the younger one tells me they have another problem. What would happen, he asked, if either of them got injured in the game and had to spend the night in a Sicilian hospital? I was telling them I hoped they’d be looked after, etc, when the older brother began shaking his head. I thought he might actually say something, but no. It was younger one who told me that Sicilian women were streghe, witches. He was surprised that I hadn’t heard this incontrovertible truth, and ‘that while we are lying defenceless in hospital, the Sicilian witches will put an evil spell on us from which our lives will not recover.’

  Bugger all point looking in the coaching manual for that one either — I’ll have to run it past Aldo tonight.

  I drove into Venice to talk to Beppino but I was too late for the market so I rang Cinzia, supposedly to ask where I might find Beppino. Lady P answered and said Cinzia wasn’t here, she’d gone to church, the one off Santo Stefano. That surprised me, I don’t know why. I’d just assumed she’d be a socialist atheist like Franco.

  I thought I might have a coffee at Santo Stefano and who knows, run into Cinzia. I wanted to position myself outside the church but couldn’t see one. Most of them — and there are a lot of them — are hard to miss, but I had to ask for directions and was pointed towards a big door in a wall at the end of the piazza where you exit towards Rialto. It was so discreet that I pushed it open to check, and this huge cavernous space opened up with frescoes and stained glass and naves and altars, so I quickly closed the door and ordered a coffee at the cafe opposite and pretended to be reading a paper while keeping an eye on the door of the church.

  I missed her. I must have looked away and she was there standing beside the table. Are you waiting for me? she asked.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. She looked quite stern but it was better not to lie — Lady P would tell her I’d rung. So I said yes, I was waiting for her.

  She smiled, said Good! and punched me lightly on the arm. Can I have a coffee?

  After I’d ordered an espresso there was a long silence and she said that church was a quiet time and afterwards she found it hard to talk.

  I said I was surprised that she went to church. It was a stupid thing to say. I’d forced my assumptions on to her when I hardly knew her.

  She said that she’d been brought up by her mother and the Canossian Sisters, who all believed. She hadn’t been sure whether she believed, but when she was a little girl waiting for her father to come back, her great-aunt Isabella would occasionally come down from Gemona and take her to church. Her great-aunt told her not to expect anything of God but to pray anyway ‘just in case’.

  In case what?

  In case God exists, she said, in case the world turns out rotto.

  I knew rotto meant broken, but the way she said the word it sounded like rotten.

  I tried to make a joke and said she was having a bob each way. Who’s Bob? she asked. You fear there might be a God, so you go to church, I said. She looked at me with a kind of pity, and I thought if she’s really La Testa Calda I’m going to get both barrels and I bloody deserve it.

  It’s got nothing to do with fear, she said. It’s respect. Not everything is explicable. At the heart of everything is a mystery. Where did we come from? How did this universe happen? I want to respect the mystery of life, I want my life to have meaning, I want to do something good, but
I don’t know what it is. If God exists, I cannot ignore him. But either way, I want to do something with my life.

  She swallowed her espresso, said she had to go and kissed me, a bit brusquely and I drove back to San Pietro cursing myself for blowing it. Was she wearing her ring? I’d forgotten to look.

  Clare read Cinzia’s words again. At the heart of everything is a mystery. Where did we come from? How did this universe happen? I want to respect the mystery of life, I want my life to have meaning, I want to do something good, but I don’t know what it is. She found herself wishing that when her father had knocked on that dark red door in Dorsoduro, she’d at least glimpsed the woman who had answered it: the woman who could say something so true that it reached out across forty years to touch her.

  52

  December 9, 1976.

  I’ve been sacked. Aldo told me after the meeting of the dirigenti. He was wiping tears with a big hanky. I’d appeared in front of them earlier, and had come out thinking it went pretty well, considering — we were playing good, constructive rugby, etc, and our win/loss ratio was about fifty percent, not too bad for our first season in Serie A, particularly given we’d lost a few that we could have, should have, won. As I was talking, I tried to engage the men sitting in front of me. I know most of them. Aldo, of course, the de facto chairman, and Il Dottore, the local doctor who stands sideline most games so he can pull my dislocated finger back into place when it goes. From the look on his face, it hurts him more than it hurts me. Vincenzo the local grain merchant who talked about his customers as ‘my dear friends the peasants’ and who Franco told me was a fascist, and Orlando, a handsome semi-retired well intentioned blowhard who knows fuck all about rugby but loves talking up a storm. But there was one guy there I’d never seen before, who I wasn’t introduced to, but was addressed by the others as Signor Gianni. Signor Gianni was sitting at Aldo’s right and obviously had some power because they all kinda deferred to him even though he said not one word. As Orlando blew on about what a catastrophe Sunday’s game had been for the national standing of the club and the town and the sponsor, Signor Gianni’s eyes never left me. Unsettling because one of them was a bit wonky and looked like it was coming at me from a different angle.

  I thought that the Calabrian episode had had nothing to do with me, so I didn’t really respond directly to that, but Aldo told me that was basically why I had been sacked. The lack of discipline in that game showed that my control of the team was weak. The dirigenti have decided that now the original coach has recovered from his grief, he would take over the team. I can live with that, given that he was the man who had got them to Serie A in the first place. That wasn’t why Aldo was in tears. Signor Gianni is the original coach and doesn’t want me as a player in his team. I was free to go. Merry Christmas.

  I was in a bit of a daze. My first thought was, So that’s who Signor Gianni was! Then I realised. If Signor Gianni was the original coach, then he’s also Beppino and Franco and Cinzia’s father? Is he the same man? I asked Aldo.

  He is.

  December 10, 1976.

  Jesus.

  Didn’t sleep much. Kept thinking about the man who’d made a dash at the market when he saw me — that must have been why he took off. Then turned up at the meeting to turf me out. Signor Gianni. There’ve been so many strange goings-on here, things I don’t understand that have fuck all to do with rugby or life as I know it. I feel innocent and naive but I’ve tried to act in good faith. Part of me is more than happy to clear out, side-step the whole Sicilian thing and go back to London, find some mates to spend the rest of the winter with. Xmas with Kiwis whose context I can understand. But I’d be deserting the boys. And I’m carrying a sense of injustice about what’s happened — I can understand that he was the coach and he’s ready to step back up, but why doesn’t he want me as a player? He never said a word, didn’t ask me one question.

  Then there’s Cinzia.

  Franco was already gone to Bologna, but I had plenty of questions for Beppino when I saw him at the market. His father was nowhere to be seen. Beppino was horrified when I told him what had happened. He couldn’t leave the stall but told me not to worry, he would speak to his father, clear up this ‘casin’, this mess.

  So I went back to Piazzale Roma, hopped in the car, but just sat there thinking that I didn’t want to drive back to San Pietro. Vergogna. Shame. I would be an embarrassment to Aldo in his bar because all the boys would know what had happened and I would be a reminder of his powerlessness to stop it.

  I only had one way of contacting Cinzia. The number of Lady P’s palazzo in Cannaregio. I rang her from the public box. If Lady P or Hartley had answered, I was going to replace the receiver. A woman’s voice said Pronto and it was so formal that I wasn’t sure it was her but took a chance.

  How to describe what happened next.

  Cinzia let me in to this grand palazzo and led me up curving stone stairs to a huge room with high stud and antique furniture and then to a little alcove with a chaise longue and carpet, looking out on a canal. She still wasn’t wearing her ring — I look for those things now. She was already furious with her father, sat me down and started patting my head and neck like you’d comfort a dog. I felt my fucking brain was bursting and I started blubbing like a baby. Next thing she was kissing my tears, kissing me.

  We fell into each other. Made love on the carpet. It wasn’t sex as I knew it, hot breath and clumsy . . .

  Clare’s voice trailed off as she lost the sense of the story and came back to herself. She felt uncomfortable, reading aloud this awkwardly described sex, while her father lay comatose beside her. She quickly checked that he was still out to it, before allowing her eyes to get back to his description. He’d never once talked like this: she could sense his discomfort in the writing of it.

  . . . two separate bodies, thinking about what to do next, who was doing what to who, skin on skin. I forgot where we each began and ended.

  When it did end she took my head in her hands and said it was me she’d been waiting for, part of her had always been waiting for me. Since she was a little girl she’d always dreamt about someone coming from far away. Until she was six she and her mother had believed that her father must be dead. He’d been a partisan who’d been caught in the last days of the war and imprisoned in Germany and was then interned by the Americans because the Germans had destroyed his identity papers. That’s why he is always a bit fuck-ed, she said cheerfully. And now there is you. Mi fai, tu. Mi fai.

  I wasn’t sure what that actually means, but it sounded good, so I said, Me too. I told her if I never love again I’ll remember this moment and be grateful. Don’t know why I said that. Why shouldn’t it last? There’s a part of me that’s frightened by the perfection of what happened. Has anyone the right to expect this sort of happiness? There’s nothing in my upbringing that tells me it’s normal or even possible.

  We talked as if it was. About London, her coming with me. She’s ready to fly she told me, she feels trapped in Venice, in her life here, it’s too close and cloying. I worried about overselling London, said we’d have bugger all money and she might miss her family. She said all adventures have danger but we’d have each other.

  That’s the guts of it. We didn’t talk about NZ. But the decisions I have to make about the farm or law, where to live, how to live, all that I’ll have to look at through a different lens. Love isn’t free and I’m prepared to pay any price. Whatever happens, my life has changed forever.

  Jesus.

  There was a knock on the door. Clare didn’t want the interruption. There weren’t many pages to go and now she desperately wanted history to be reinvented, to protect her mother from a loveless marriage and for her father to be with the love of his life. Has anyone the right to expect that sort of happiness? There’s nothing in my upbringing that tells me it’s normal or even possible. Yet he had tried to believe in love. There was something so up
lifting in knowing that. How on earth could it have gone wrong?

  It was light outside, as Renzo let himself in, with two coffees and a chocolate pastry. ‘I thought we could share,’ he said.

  He kissed her as she took the coffees. This time she didn’t turn her cheek but found his lips. He might have been surprised but he didn’t show it. They stood there lips and hands locked, balancing the coffees. ‘I must taste awful,’ she said and stepped back.

  She excused herself and went to the toilet, looked at her shiny face in the mirror. Her make-up had succumbed. How could he like what he saw? And yet he kept coming back, appearing in her life with impeccable timing. It came to her again, as it had outside the hotel: He fits.

  When she re-entered the room, there was a nun in a grey smock with white collar, plain white wimple holding back white hair, kneeling beside the bed praying, one hand clasping her father’s. Clare called ‘Stop!’ but the nun finished her prayer while Renzo looked embarrassed and Clare pleaded with him to intervene. ‘Please tell her that my father is an atheist — he was brought up Church of England.’ After she’d said it, she realised it was a pretty strange non sequitur. ‘Please tell her to stop.’

  By that time, the nun was finished anyway and rose to her feet, turning her face away and left the room.

  ‘I thought, what harm can she do? said Renzo. ‘I’m sorry.’

  53

  December 11, 1976.

  Catania. Palm trees. Warm. So good to get out of the seeping cold.

  Aldo asked me as one last favour to come. San Pietro could hardly get a team on the plane — the two loose forward brothers weren’t the only ones worried about the witches of Sicily — so I’m here strictly as a player to make up the numbers. When Aldo put it to me, I couldn’t refuse, he’s done so much for me and I owe it to the boys. They all know I’m going and there have been tears — no idea how moving it is to have two giant props, Rifi and Tomaso, in front of you blubbing their eyes out. I can talk.