The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

‘Why not?’

  ‘Take a seat outside and I’ll bring us some lunch.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said.

  ‘But you still need to eat something.’

  She couldn’t argue, but went out and sat looking at the vista until he appeared with two glasses of white wine, then a torn baguette with cheese and prosciutto. He was right: she was hungry — until he began talking again.

  ‘How this started. I wanted to stay close to your father because I thought he might reveal something very important to me: who my grandfather is. I put that incorrectly. I know my grandfather is Gianni Lamonza, but I don’t know who Gianni Lamonza is.’

  ‘Why would my father have known anything about that?’

  ‘Six months ago my grandfather had a minor stroke and was hospitalised. They discovered there were no medical records for Gianni Lamonza. He’d never been in hospital before or even visited a doctor. So I went through his personal items and found his old identity papers, his carta d’identità from the war, and presented them. The hospital passed them to the authorities, who confirmed they were forged.

  He took a sip from his glass. ‘Okay, that kind of fitted with the story we’d always been told, of his real ID papers being destroyed by the Germans in a prisoner of war camp. We were told that was why he took so long to be repatriated from Germany to Italy. The Allied authorities couldn’t determine who he was. So, the fact that his ID was forged, well, the aftermath of the war, it was a confusing time. So, while my grandfather was in hospital, I tried to trace his identity so that he could be issued with legitimate papers. Further investigation revealed he hadn’t paid tax, registered as a voter, drawn any benefits. He’d lived in this society for ninety odd years like a ghost, leaving no official footprints.’

  Clare didn’t see how this could possibly be relevant to her father. She hoped it wouldn’t be.

  ‘There’s more. Lamonza is a very unusual name: we were always told that his family was from a remote mountain valley up the back of Trentino, and that his family were all killed by the Germans, but I went through all the births, deaths and marriages records for the whole of the Brennero in the decade 1920 to 1930. There was no record of a Gianni Lamonza having being born. Not only is there no record of Gianni Lamonza, there is no record of any Lamonza ever. It doesn’t exist as a family name, and it never has, as far as I can tell. So Gianni Lamonza, my grandfather, doesn’t exist and neither does his family.

  ‘I had no one to turn to. All the people who might have known anything about my grandfather’s provenance — my grandmother, particularly — had been wiped out in the terremoto in 1976. He also lost Franco that year, when your father was here. It was a terrible time for him, as bad as the war, and he refuses to talk about either.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have to tell the authorities?’

  ‘The case has been shelved. The man is more than ninety years old, after all, and he’s one of the last surviving confusioni from the Second World War. But I want to know. You can understand that?’

  ‘Of course.’ She wanted to be able to agree with as much as possible of what he was saying, in the hope that he wouldn’t require a revelation from her.

  ‘The reason my grandfather was able to exist without ever having to have an official identity was because of my grandmother, Donatella. She was at the centre of everything, according to my father, Beppino, so when they lost her they all felt cast adrift. People who knew Beppino when he was young said he was a real live-wire, but he filled up with sorrow and then alcohol. Maybe he never got over the loss of Donatella and Franco. But he also fell out with my grandfather, and that didn’t help. Over Bruce.’

  Until this point, Renzo could have been addressing the vines and the view, but Clare now felt his eyes turning towards her, with real intent, as if his part in the story was drawing to a close and she was about to pick it up.

  ‘Something happened back then. My grandfather sabotaged San Pietro’s moment in the sun, which he’d spent two decades creating, and wrecked his relationship with his youngest son. Why?’

  Clare was overtaken by a creeping fear. Where was this going? She didn’t want to be the one holding the secret to anything and feared that the contents of the manila file would be the key to whatever Renzo was driving at. To avoid his eyes, she looked out at the golden vines and shivered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Renzo. ‘I can get you a blanket from the car?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  ‘My father used to talk of your father. He would have loved to have been at the reunion: whenever he talked of Bruce it was always in a tone of great respect. But with great regret also. Whatever happened back then to make Bruce leave was a sore point between my father and my grandfather. My father said Gianni had destroyed Bruce’s figura, his respect, by sacking him as coach and dropping him from the team. I’ve never been brave enough to ask my grandfather what happened. Did your father talk about it?’

  Not talk, no. She shook her head, not prepared to trust her voice.

  ‘My father Beppino said there was something very strange about my grandfather’s reaction to Bruce. That when he first saw your father at the market, he’d run away from him in shock. When Gianni had Bruce sacked, my father pleaded with him to reinstate him. Beppino and Gianni loved rugby, that was their biggest connection. They would happily talk rugby all day and night but Gianni refused to discuss Bruce or why he had sacked him and broken the team. Beppino said he’d never seen his father so intransigent and he got the impression from what little Gianni said that there was some kind of history, some kind of bad blood between him and Bruce. But how could that be? It’s surely not possible. And yet my father said he got that strong feeling.’

  Clare was mute with fear. ‘I have no idea who your grandfather is,’ she said, carefully. ‘Dad never indicated to me that he knew anything about him.’

  Which was true, as far as it went. That seemed to confirm something in Renzo, perhaps just his next question. ‘I don’t want to be indelicate,’ he said, ‘but did he ever talk about a woman called Cinzia?’

  Oh Jesus, thought Clare.

  ‘Cinzia was my father’s sister, my aunt. Beppino said she fell in love with Bruce.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My father said that her relationship with Bruce was very short but was Le Grande Histoire d’Amour, the big affair — you understand? Maybe that was all that happened: Cinzia was the apple of my grandfather’s eye and he was jealous of his daughter’s love for Bruce and perhaps feared that he would take her away, back to New Zealand. You can perhaps understand that Gianni had lost his wife and his beloved eldest son, so the prospect of losing also his daughter . . .’

  ‘I can understand that, yes.’

  ‘But it still doesn’t explain why my grandfather ran away at the market when he first saw Bruce, and when he had no idea that Bruce and Cinzia were interested in each other.’

  Renzo seemed to have finished, and he hadn’t ended with a question, yet it was there, palpable in the silence between them. What do you know?

  It would be so easy to say it, just let the words go. Cinzia wasn’t your grandfather’s child. Your grandfather knew that Bruce and Cinzia were brother and sister. Just say it and let the heavy truth land like a cluster bomb and cause what damage it might.

  It’s not my place, she thought. This isn’t my place. Her father, who had never appeared in court as far as she knew, used to say that it was an unspoken rule of cross-examination never to ask a question that you didn’t know the answer to, because it might not be the one you were looking for and it could wreck your case. He never told her what to do if you were the one holding the wrecking ball, and the question had already been asked. As of this morning she had no family and she would love to claim her aunt, a woman she’d never met yet somehow felt she knew. But her father had held that truth to himself for nearly forty years. Was it right for her to just le
t it go? Is that what he’d intended by giving her the file?

  She stared out at the view for some time, as if the answer to her dilemma might be there. Death and tragedy and betrayal seemed to arc back from her father this morning to God knows when. Yet all she could see was golden beauty, from one horizon to the other.

  Dimmi qualcosa, caro, Cinzia had written to her father before he ran away without saying a word. Tell me something, dear one. Clare was no longer sure that Cinzia had been behind the little red door in Dorsoduro, no longer sure that Cinzia could have shut the door in her father’s face. Now, before Clare said anything, she needed to be sure. Where was she now, the woman of her father’s diary who had also been smashed by love? Did she recover? Did she find meaning in her life?

  ‘I’d like to meet Cinzia,’ she said, as casually as she could. ‘If she’s still around.’

  Renzo looked surprised, but said, ‘Of course.’ Then he spoke again, awkwardly. ‘I have one further confession to make,’ he said. ‘Another sin of omission.’

  The Antipodes 1951

  66

  Joe was never a very militant unionist. He’d joined the coal miners’ union at Ngapara because that was a prerequisite of getting the job, and at Huntly East he’d joined the union again for much the same reason. After a childhood spent in servitude to Malachy Lamont on the farm at Devil’s Bridge, any working conditions that allowed a break, any employment that gave workers any rights, any payment of money for work done, seemed enlightened.

  Robert had dragged him along to union meetings, and he’d found there some of the same passion for workers’ rights and aspirations for a more equitable society that Bepi and Gigi used to argue over in the fields. There was also another element he recognised: the fiery anger of Luca when he talked about the fascists, and the concept of class warfare where the workers’ only recourse was to take up arms against their oppressors, the owners and employers. That element was small but vociferous and Joe watched the great bulk of miners hear them out and then get back to the business of making a rational case for better wages and conditions.

  Robert Laing was one of the angry ones. His Scots burr was more persuasive than most, partly because he carried the mine’s institutional memory: of the forty-three miners who’d died in a methane explosion in 1914, and of the eleven men asphyxiated at nearby Glen Afton just before the war. But the principal cause of Robert’s fury was that he’d not been allowed to fight for his adopted country because the war’s hunger for coal had made mining an essential industry.

  Joe had known none of this. His boss at Ngapara, Captain Nimmo, had enlisted, though he’d had to invent a new Christian name before the army would allow him in. When Joe thought back to the superficiality of his own reasons for enlisting and the horror that ensued, he felt Robert and his family might have been well served by the government intervention, but he said nothing.

  Robert’s anger was compounded during the war. In 1942 he’d been one of a thousand Huntly miners who’d gone out on strike when the owners of nearby Pukemiro mine had broken an agreement to top up wages. He’d been incensed — still was — when the government prosecuted the miners who’d gone out, then took control of the mine and suspended the sentences of those they’d collared so they could go back to work. ‘We’re mere pawns in a larger game,’ proclaimed Robert, a chess enthusiast. ‘A game where the bosses keep changing the rules so we have nae chance of winning!’

  Four years into Joe’s stay at Huntly, the union’s treasurer retired. Joe had studied the previous year’s financial report and thought he could remember enough from the accounting course he’d done at PG 57 to do the job. He’d had ulterior motives: he was keen to learn again and he was already thinking that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life down a mine. As the El Mreir nightmare receded and he lost his fear of the sky, his need for the security of earth above his head also faded. He could see a life above ground. Perhaps running his own business, maybe something relating to mining supplies.

  In the meantime, as long as he was taking out Robert Laing’s daughter there was no avoiding the union meetings and being treasurer made them slightly less boring. When Joe tried to pinpoint why, initially at least, he’d found the spirited discussions between Bepi and Gigi so interesting — and even the arguments between Luca and Harry and Donatella up in the hayloft — he thought it might have been because the subject under discussion back then was always how to make a better world, a brave new post-war world.

  That sort of aspiration was seldom expressed at the union meetings. The agenda would be about the minutiae that directly affected the miners’ well-being: safety matters, percentages, relativities, shift hours, holidays, smoko breaks — all good practical concerns but not exactly compelling.

  * * *

  Just before Christmas in 1950, a union rep came up from Wellington with the news that New Zealand’s economy was booming. After more than a decade of restrictions and shortages, not to mention the Great Depression before that, their union was going to make sure that miners got a fair share of the national wealth they’d helped to create, not to mention compensation for the soaring cost of living.

  ‘Christmas is finally coming for the workers,’ the rep told them, ‘if not this year, then next.’

  That was the first Joe had heard of an economic boom. Huntly was not a pretty town and had seemed in the five years he’d been there to have become neither better nor worse off.

  In early 1951 they’d been told the Arbitration Court had awarded a fifteen per cent wage increase to all workers. That certainly made a difference to Joe’s pay packet and was greeted with quiet satisfaction by most of the miners, though not by Robert and his cronies, who thought it wasn’t sufficient compensation for over a decade of selfless sacrifice by workers for the war effort and recovery.

  ‘Enough is never enough,’ was another of old Mal’s maxims, applied usually when Joe and Dan pleaded for respite, but fifteen per cent was significant and voices like Robert’s would have quickly been forgotten had it not been for the exclusion of watersiders from the largesse.

  It turned out that ‘all workers’ actually meant workers covered by the industrial arbitration system, and technically the watersiders stood outside that because they were controlled by the Waterfront Industry Commission. This, according to the union reps who came to speak to the miners, was dominated by British shipping companies who offered the wharfies nine per cent. ‘The same greedy bastards whose merchant ships were protected by our sailors,’ said Robert.

  In response, the Watersiders’ Union refused to work overtime and there was, for Joe, a bewilderingly rapid escalation: the shipping companies wouldn’t hire the wharfies unless they changed their stance about overtime, and when the wharfies resisted, they were locked out of the wharves, which came to a standstill.

  On 21 February, the government said that the country’s export-based economy was under threat and declared a state of emergency. The next morning, Joe stared dumbstruck at the headline in the Waikato Times and felt the blood drain from his face: ‘New Zealand at War’ read the quote from the Prime Minister, Sid Holland. Knowing that there were a thousand or so New Zealand soldiers in Korea, Joe feared that the situation had worsened and conscription might be imminent. But the body of the article confirmed that Holland was talking about the waterfront. The enemy was within. A few days later the government sent troops to Auckland and Wellington to do the wharfies’ jobs.

  At a hastily convened union gathering, Robert told the miners that this meeting was now illegal in so far as it supported or gave any information about their comrades on the wharves, that under newly imposed emergency regulations all newspapers and publications and media were rigidly censored, that police had been given sweeping powers of search and arrest, and that it was now an offence for citizens to assist strikers. ‘Even giving food to the bairns of the strikers has been outlawed,’ thundered Robert.

  Even
the workers were divided: the watersiders and their striking supporters were members of the Trade Union Congress, labelled communist not just by the government but also by a rival workers’ organisation, the Federation of Labour, whose membership included the great majority of unions. The FOL leader was a man called Fintan Patrick Walsh, known to many as the Black Prince, but referred to dismissively by Robert as ‘Tuohy, that gob-spittle Irish sheep shagger’.

  This time, though, Robert couldn’t be dismissed as a dyspeptic radical. The newspapers obediently stopped reporting the wharfies’ side of the strike and the miners’ information about what was happening on the waterfront came from illegally gestetnered leaflets and word of mouth from unionists in the know.

  Joe’s every instinct was to keep his head down and stay well clear as the stand-off worsened. Within weeks 22,000 workers went on strike in sympathy: freezing workers, drivers and, inevitably, miners. In a small mining town like Huntly, the shopkeepers and mining supply companies soon suffered too. The community rallied and, despite the emergency regulations, food got through, including the odd slaughtered sheep from local farmers and fresh vegetables from market gardeners.

  Perhaps as a response to the crisis, Peta’s husband came back from the forests.

  * * *

  Joe was in the habit of turning up at Peta’s little brick house whenever he felt inclined. In mid-April, when the chimneys were already puffing grey smoke into the cooling air, he let himself through the back gate. There was a solidly built man swinging a shining axe, splitting logs like matchsticks, watched in awe by Andrew, now almost ready to start school. When the man saw Joe he offered a callused hand and introduced himself as Winston.

  Joe had heard Peta talk about Win, and Joe could anyway see the son in the face of the father.

  As they were shaking hands Peta appeared on the back porch, her eyes full of beseeching appeal. Joe fibbed to Win that he’d called by as part of his rounds as union treasurer to see everyone was okay. By that time Andrew had moved towards Joe and put his hand proprietorially on his trouser leg. ‘Uncle Joe,’ he said. Maybe Win knew, but they all went along with the fiction.