The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  * * *

  A true lawyer to the last, her father had left written instructions for Clare. He’d wanted to be cremated immediately ‘to save on repatriation costs’, even though they would have been covered by his insurance. He wanted ‘no fuss, no ceremony’. He’d also been very specific about what he wanted to happen to his ashes: ‘simple wishes’ he called them, a handful spread here, a handful there. She wasn’t looking forward to standing alone on that crag at Tokarahi where they’d once stood together, where her grandfather had howled in sorrow, but she’d do what she had to do.

  Clare had trawled the internet for an urn that had a screw-top rather than a sealed lid, but the on-line catalogue was bewildering. Did she want what remained of her father preserved in original Venetian blown glass or in pietra serizzo stone? Stainless steel or hand-cast brass? Or perhaps biodegradable from renewable paper produced in a sustainable manner, or bamboo with a magnetic lid? Could she see him in a container that looked like a phallus or a gherkin, or in one that looked like a chocolate box? In an imitation giant acorn in russet brown or moss green, or in a heart-shaped biodegradable corn-starch heart with a soft natural feel, or in sand-gel guaranteed to biodegrade within three months if buried, or within three days if immersed in water? By way of decoration, would she prefer sculpted motifs or accent bands or gold-leaf decorations intricately hand decorated by skilled artisans, or handmade paper flowers, or a solid gold bow? Or perhaps just a bloody great sculpture of a horse or a lion or other personally meaningful statuette on top?

  Renzo hadn’t helped by telling her, in his informative way, that cremated remains aren’t really ashes at all, they’re actually particles — what else! — of bone too dense to be fully vaporised by the heat, and that some of them can still look like bone, not ashes, and by the way did your father have any metal dental work because that stuff can survive the fire too?

  She’d burst into tears. He’d held her and told her it was only the second time she’d cried for her father, and that it was good. When she’d stopped crying, he’d suggested they buy a clear glass preserving jar, because then they’d have easy access and would have a running gauge on how much they were dispersing at each location. Her father had also asked that Clare keep some of his ashes ‘if she wanted’ and Renzo suggested that once they’d spread the last handful in accordance with his instructions, she’d have a better idea of what sized receptacle she’d need for what was left over.

  So Broochay travelled back to San Pietro for the last time in an Agee jar with an airtight seal, and they sat him on the table in Aldo’s bar so he could see and hear the fine speeches that were made in his honour by his old team-mates and dirigenti. As much as they tried valiantly to celebrate his life, Clare felt again that unspoken sense of regret and melancholy. Now she understood why. Renzo felt it too and while pretending to translate whispered to her that he wished he could tell them why Bruce had gone away.

  Renzo now felt able to point out his grandfather. Gianni Lamonza featured prominently in many of the photos around the walls of the dining room, usually in the middle of the front row, captain or vice-captain as a young man, then progressing to the dirigenti, sitting in a dark suit with his wonky eye ever lower in his face and more askew as he hit middle age. Renzo pointed out there were no recent photographs: his grandfather, a founding member of the club in the early 1950s, had never set foot in San Pietro again after the embarrassment of the game in Sicily in 1976, when his youngest son had turned against him and he’d lost face in front of the dirigenti by sacking Bruce.

  What a waste, she thought, as she looked at all the smiling faces of mostly young men in their happy pomp, then at these same men around her at the long table, desiccated as if the years were gradually leaching the juice from them. She could barely look at the photo of her father and Franco, the due coglioni of San Pietro. God, how handsome Franco had been, and how much of Renzo she could now see in him!

  When the meal was finished and all the speeches made, several of the men told her they could not come to the ground for the spreading of the ashes, and kissed her and wished her well. In the car, Renzo explained that some of them might have religious reservations, that the Catholic church still had problems with scattering ashes because it meant the denial of the resurrection of the body. ‘They can tolerate his ashes sitting on the table because they want to believe the best of Bruce and tell themselves that he wouldn’t have denied the resurrection before he died. But scattering his ashes is a step too far.’

  There were also questions of local regulation, because the rugby field was commune land, so Aldo, a councillor, suggested they do it at night. They lined up a few of the cars beside the clubhouse, left the motors running and headlights on and then walked to the centre of the field. Clare looked out at the low concrete stand where the crowd had chanted ‘Terr-on-i!’ and Big Dom had scaled the wire fence to climb into the Calabrians. It seemed inconceivable that anything like that could happen now.

  The grass was already wet with dew when Renzo unscrewed the lid of the jar and Clare reached in and took a handful of the gritty shards and flakes. The cold easterly was still blowing so she was careful to turn her back to the wind and get the men in a semi-circle behind her. Aldo stilled her arm and said something that sounded like an invocation.

  ‘In bocca al lupo, caro amico.’

  ‘In the mouth of the wolf, dear friend,’ translated Renzo.

  Clare brought her arm back, then through and upwards. The particles of her father’s bones were light enough to be taken away by the wind. Maybe tomorrow they’d be sitting on the dew when the sun rose.

  There were more hugs for Clare, more whiskery kisses. Aldo stood, a heavy figure propped on his slender stick, tears streaming, and waved them away. As Renzo backed the car around, they could still see him out there on the gleaming grass, his back to them and the wind.

  She ached to tell the old man what she knew: that her father had left and ruined their one moment in the big time through no fault of San Pietro’s. But she realised that secret was no longer her burden. It was like the game of pass the parcel at her childhood birthday parties, but this time the parcel contained a booby prize. Cinzia had ended up holding it when the music stopped. Her turn to decide what happened next.

  That thought was still in her head when Renzo took the call from Cinzia.

  Dorsoduro 2014

  73

  I giorni se strassinava e i ani i volava via. No podeva ricordarse de geri e de staltrogeri, ma ghe gera momenti del pasato che i restava dentro de iù, come che i fosse qua desso. Face e vosi che vegniva fora vive come gera sempre sta vive, anca se ’l saveva che i gera tuti morti. The days dragged and the years flew. He couldn’t remember yesterday from the day before, but moments from his past still sat within him like a presence. Faces and voices welling up as alive as they ever had been, though he knew they were all dead. Franco and Beppino, Donatella, Luca, little Leo, Bepi and Nina, Gigi and Marisa, his brother Dan and the dark pervasive shadow of Harry Spence. They were more real to him now than the newspapers he tried to read every morning with the one eye that still accepted the light, where Bunga Bunga Berlusconi, a convicted tax fraudster and exploiter of underage puttane, and Grillo, a professional comedian, danced across the national conscience with impunity, reducing political discourse to farce.

  He considered it a failing of the left that such fools from the right were able to hold onto power and popular sentiment, and wondered whether Franco, moderated by age and guided by his uncle Luca, might have been the leader the left needed, and whether those who ordered Franco’s death in Bologna knew that too. There’d been an inquiry that proved Franco had been shot before the demonstration turned violent, that it turned violent only because Franco had been shot. Someone had whispered in that carabiniere’s ear: someone, left or right, was afraid of Franco’s leadership and had ordered a political assassination. Ciò nonostante, his son was dead.

 
Of everything that had happened, closing Franco’s eyes was perhaps the hardest. He tried to keep the memory of the light in those eyes alive inside him: despite Cinzia’s efforts on His behalf, he didn’t believe in God any more, not even a socialist or non-sectarian God. The only immortality people had was in the memories of those who knew them.

  Ten years ago, he’d travelled alone to the war cemetery at Girone in the low hills just south of Florence, where his brother Daniel was buried. He’d stood in front of a white stone tablet, one of over sixteen hundred patterned across a vast sward surrounded by cedars and cypresses. Daniel had been killed and buried further south, then exhumed and reinterred there. He’d stared at his brother’s name, engraved between a laurel wreath and a cross, but felt nothing. It was war: hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, had died and his brother was one of them.

  Then he’d taken the train back north to Bologna and found a small plaque in Via Mascarella, close to the spot where Franco had been shot: Franco Lamonza, Qui Assassinato dalla Ferocia Armata di Regime. He’d held himself together until he’d read the words at the bottom: Franco è vivo e lotta insieme con noi. Franco lives and struggles together with us.

  Then he’d wailed and crumpled to his knees beside the wall. He’d wanted to shout: ‘Non è vero! Non è vero!’ It isn’t true! He’s dead! He’d felt clamped in a dreadful maw of loss and waste. Maybe war was a cataclysm more intelligible than this arbitrary shot by a carabiniere. He could ask ‘Why him?’ on behalf of his son in a way that he couldn’t for his brother in a war where millions had died. After a while, a woman in sturdy shoes had come to help him up, a demented elderly man. He didn’t tell her who he was, but composed himself, thanked her and made his way back to the railway station.

  Now the interrogators were about to arrive: his daughter Cinzia, who had been unusually insistent on this meeting; his grandson Renzo, the extraordinary boy who always had the sky in his head; and a young woman who was the daughter of Bruce and granddaughter of Harry. Cinzia had insisted that this young woman be there too. What did that mean? Before agreeing to meet her, he’d asked his grandson to describe her. Did she have light blue eyes the colour of a snow-fed lake? Was her hair dark blonde? He’d said yes, and that she had a lovely smile. That had worried him. Does the smile tease you? he’d asked. Is she sincere? Has she a buon cuore, a good heart?

  Just days or perhaps weeks ago, he’d slammed the door on Bruce because it had been such a shock to have him suddenly there, tall and spectral and scarcely recognisable except as the son of his father, asking for Cinzia. Now, according to Renzo, Bruce was dead. And Bruce’s father too, apparently, for many, many years. Years when he’d needlessly lived with the fear, the cold dread, that Harry Spence would reappear with his cruel smile to claim Cinzia and wreck his tenuously built reality and family. Now Harry and Bruce were both gone, did that make a difference to what he should divulge?

  He hadn’t been ready when Bruce had knocked at his door, but now he had to be. His daughter and Harry’s granddaughter and his own grandson were the ones who would carry his memories into the future, keep alive those who might otherwise die with him. He had to decide which of the faces and voices, the loves and losses, the blood and betrayals, the secrets and lies, was worthy of light and life beyond his own.

  And first he had to tell his daughter and grandson who he was: as Gianni Lamonza he’d lived a lie, a lie full of integrity and honour, he believed, but a lie nevertheless.

  Where to begin? With himself, surely.

  74

  He’d got work down at the market below the Rialto, helping to unload the barche, the barges, in the early morning and cleaning up in the early afternoon. The men and women at the market knew who Gianni Lamonza was from the moment he opened his mouth: his dialect was Venetian but with the subtle differences in inflection and some words that told them he was from Gemona. Some of them called him Mountain Goat because he had encouraged that provenance and because he was so agile in leaping from barca to land. But it was no longer the mountains he looked towards north and west across the laguna, but the rivers.

  He’d got to know Sandro, the owner of one of the barche that delivered produce to the market. Sandro was a volatile bully who shaved his head, beard and moustache once a year on the first day of summer and then didn’t touch either for another twelve months. Gianni had a way of teasing him that deflected the worst of his tirades and when his latest off-sider quit, he went with Sandro on his barge, across the laguna to the Sile and up the coast to Cortellazzo, the entrance to the Piave, and further north to Caorle, nestled round the mouth of the Livenza, where Arch Scott had brought prisoners of war to be taken to safety off the beach.

  He would be away for a couple of days at a time, puttering up and down those gorgeous rivers, collecting produce from the farmers and delivering it across the laguna to the market in Venice. His favourite was probably the Sile, spring-fed and constant in flow and volume, which would take them right up to the old gates of Treviso, where legend had it Attila the Hun had been stopped.

  They often passed the little beach on the Livenza where Joe and the other prisoners had swum. They passed PG 107/7, the huge farmhouse that had served as their prison. They picked up produce from the estate at the wharf where Joe had surprised Harry with the woman who’d given them her husband’s clothes before they escaped from San Pietro that night after the armistice.

  From the water he saw the best side of the old towns because they had been built to face the river, not the road. Otherwise nondescript little towns, like Casale Sul Sile and San Pietro, had a purposeful beauty when seen from the water. They had towers and piazze that faced the wharf and he could watch the life of the towns unfolding as he drifted by on Sandro’s barca.

  One day, early evening, passing San Pietro, he saw half a dozen kids of about twelve or thirteen in the piazza by the wharf kicking a ball. That wasn’t unusual: what was unusual was that it was a rugby ball. Joe asked Sandro to put in to the wharf.

  * * *

  Gianni and Donatella had found they didn’t need to tell stories about themselves: the people around them filled in the spaces using the information they had. In that way he’d become the Gianni Lamonza they’d always known. So it was with Cinzia, then with Franco and Beppino. Joe Lamont became almost forgotten by the few people who had known him.

  The most dangerous times were when they visited Bepi and Nina in Gemona, and Gigi and Marisa. Bepi didn’t live much longer, but liked to tell stories. His favourite was the one about the soldier called Giuseppe who’d come from the other end of the earth to fight with the Garibaldis and then returned to marry his daughter and become a Venetian called Gianni. Bepi would have loved to tell his grandchildren that story but never did: it became, like the rest of the Bonnazon and Zanardi families’ history with Joe Lamont, too dangerous to ever speak of.

  Neither Bepi and Nina nor Gigi and Marisa ever blamed Joe for the loss of their sons. Joe sometimes allowed himself to think that to some small extent having Gianni in the family as a son-in-law was at least some compensation for the loss of Luca, but Leo’s execution crippled Gigi and Marisa for the rest of their lives, and was the reason neither family ever returned to the campi they used to farm.

  Thanks to Peta, Joe had known enough not to try to seduce Donatella, but to wait until she came to him. They’d slept together from the first but as wounded friends, not lovers. They never once discussed Harry but he was often there between them. It had been nearly six weeks, the beginning of winter, before her hand had reached across the bed and alighted on his bare chest and she’d lifted her nightdress and straddled him.

  Could he say she ever loved him the way he loved her, felt at the mere sight of her the kind of unbidden exaltation of the human heart described by the hymns they used to sing at the basilica in Reed Street? He told himself it didn’t matter: she showed him a knowing tenderness, a deep empathy out of which passion gradually
surfaced, irregular and raw, with a needy intensity that sometimes scared him. It was enough, as they carefully reconstructed their lives in the tiny house in Dorsoduro.

  Venetians knew La Serenissima was a place of ghosts, and Gianni Lamonza could understand its attraction for the spirits of those long dead: where else would they find that virtually nothing changed as the centuries flowed by? He came to like the thought that Joe Lamont had become another of Venice’s ghosts, but it was something of a private joke until that day down at the market in 1976 when he’d seen a spectre that turned his blood to water. Harry Spence walking towards him. With his daughter who was Harry’s daughter.

  He’d been taking courgette flowers from the crate and laying them out on the banco, when he’d looked up. He could still see it now. Cinzia turning to say something to Harry, putting her hand on his as she talked in that intimate way he’d thought she reserved for him. It was like a blow to the head. He could feel his brain bouncing off the inside of his skull, bruising and fizzing. Was it an illusion? Was his drinking and grief over Donatella making him mad? Was his good eye failing? He looked again, carefully, and it was Harry, more real than when he’d last seen him in Trieste thirty odd years before. He could feel the skein of lies that held together what was left of his world fraying and breaking. He staggered away from the banco, then ran, as Beppino and Cinzia called out after him, ‘Papà! Papà!’

  He knew what he must do to Harry’s son, and he’d done it. But now, nearly forty years later, he was paralysed by doubt. His relationship with Beppino had never recovered from the sacking of Harry’s son. And that same weekend Franco had died on the streets of Bologna: explanation enough, surely, for Cinzia being so broken.

  Had it been worth it, for the preservation of a lie? He no longer knew, but more and more he would see the expectancy in Donatella’s eyes, urging him to speak before it was too late. Truth must be their final legacy to their only survivors, Cinzia and Renzo: the truth and what sat behind that truth, family and connection. Whoever the Spences now were, well, so be it. Harry was Harry but Bruce had been much admired in San Pietro by all his children not just Cinzia, and he had done the honourable and unselfish thing. Renzo had spoken highly of Bruce’s granddaughter, and he would have to trust that.