The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  As he stumbled through the mists, they were beginning, he saw, as though for his special benefit, to give up the moon. He was standing on the edge of a great gorge, into which there was no need to throw himself because he had experienced every stone of it already. He was the black water trickling, trickling, at the bottom of it. He was the cliffside pocked with hidden caves. He was the deformed elbows of stalwart trees.

  And all the time in the gorge, the mists were lying together, dreaming together, fur and feather gently touching, on which the healing moon rode. It was not that any of them had abandoned their material forms, but that night and mist had melted those broad faces, making more accessible the soothingly similar features, to which he had never dared demonstrate his love.

  He went back presently. There was a single voice singing in the kitchens, and a clash of late crockery. In the fuzzy half-light of the hotel there was nobody to notice that Harold Fazackerley’s kneecap was showing through his dark suit. Evelyn was sleeping, really sleeping, under a glitter of cold cream and tears. Her mouth was sucking at life with the desperation of rubber.

  When Harold had undressed his somewhat unfamiliar body, and scrubbed his teeth, and put them back, he got into the other bed.

  The rest of their stay at the Currawong Palace was agreeable enough, thanks chiefly to Mrs Haggart, who had taken a fancy to Evelyn. And you couldn’t deny the old thing her little pleasures.

  Evelyn and Mrs Haggart would be driven most afternoons, in the Cadillac, by Mrs Haggart’s Bill, to look-outs, waterfalls, ghost towns, and the entrances to caves. (If they didn’t venture inside the latter, it was because all caves are much alike.) The two women most enjoyed pulling up in front of a view, where Evelyn would tell about the Nile, and Mrs Haggart remember the vegetables she had bought. They would sit there until a swirl of mist gave them warning.

  Sometimes Mr Fazackerley was persuaded to accompany the ladies, in his tweed cap set straight, and the English overcoat which wouldn’t wear out. Mrs Haggart made him sit beside Bill, and her world was once again orderly and masculine.

  ‘When he was younger,’ she remarked, ‘my husband had a leather motoring coat. It smelt most delicious.’

  Evelyn continued to worship the kolinsky cape, which its owner wore only at night, and the string of naked diamonds, which sometimes overlapped with day, because Mrs Haggart forgot to take it off.

  Once Evelyn Fazackerley began, ‘Nesta Pine …’ and stopped.

  ‘Who?’ Mrs Haggart asked, although she wasn’t interested.

  ‘A friend,’ said Mrs Fazackerley, noticing how the changed light was carving the sandstone into other shapes.

  And soon the week was up. The two women exchanged addresses, which even Mrs Haggart suspected they would never use.

  It could not have been more agreeable, however.

  ‘I have so much enjoyed,’ Mrs Haggart said.

  Looking to the husband, she wove one of those smiles over her almost colourless lips.

  ‘I envy you,’ she added as colourlessly. ‘Anyone can see you are such mates.’

  Harold had learnt, no doubt in the Army, to hold himself erect. It made Evelyn proud.

  The Fazackerleys continued making their trips. That winter they went to Cairns. You couldn’t expect them to sit at home listening to their creaking cupboard and the leaking tap. They went twice to the Barrier Reef. They were lucky that, as age increased, their mechanism seemed to have been built for life. They flew to the Adelaide Festival, once only, because Evelyn cracked her ribs in the shower at that motel. She suffered perfect agonies, but the toughest moment was always when, hats held down, they walked into the wind across the tarmac. One year they did that cruise round the Pacific, beyond their means, and a mistake in other ways besides: for the scent of mangoes, and the drowned thoughts the sea kept washing up at them. They flew to New Zealand, but really it was antiquated. (On the way back, one of the engines conked out.) The winter Evelyn’s arthritis played up – her hands were pretty twisted by now – and Harold’s turn gave her a scare, they started off earlier than usual; they visited the Dead Heart.

  Harold always arranged her rug.

  He would ask, ‘You’re sure you’re feeling comfortable, dear?’

  Couples from Coffs Harbour and Hay, Wollongong and Peak Hill, never stopped asking one another who those people could possibly be, as the Fazackerleys continued to enjoy their retirement, preferably in seats up forward, so that nothing might obstruct.

  Only on one occasion, above an aerial landscape of lashing trees, Harold Fazackerley, his limbs again fleshed, straddling the globe, returned for an instant to the solitary condition he remembered as normal, and the faces of those who were missing, the faces he had never touched.

  But he was quick to inquire, ‘You’re sure you’re comfortable, darling?’

  As they sat out their travelogue, they became so inured to technicolour, it was hoped they would not be startled if it ended in a flack flacker of transparent film.

  The Full Belly

  NOT MANY MONTHS after the Germans walked in, the elder Miss Makridis began to fail. She spoke rarely, which was distressing enough for those around her, but worse still, what she said was to the point. She said to her younger sister, ‘If only we could go off quickly, Pronoë, there would be two mouths less, but age has toughened us, if anything, and we’ll probably spend a long time dying.’

  Pronoë, pinker, softer, less ascetic than her sister, naturally protested. Raising her furry upper lip, she whimpered back, ‘Ach, Maro, you speak as though we were no longer human beings, but cattle!’

  Miss Makridis didn’t contradict. Ladies of perfect hearing liked to discuss Maro’s increasing deafness, whereas the family recognized her silences as a kind of curtain behind which she chose to withdraw.

  ‘And I don’t want to die!’ Pronoë insisted, who all her life had resented the hard corners designed for her hurt and humiliation.

  As the two elderly ladies continued standing at the window, in the clear light which often seemed all that was left to them of the city they had known, Costa was sitting, warming his hands between his thighs, the other side of the folding doors. It was one of those afternoons which congealed the blood in his raw fingers, one of the days, frequent now, when he failed to turn the piano from furniture into instrument. The conversation in the next room might have sounded more ominous if it hadn’t been for his faith in the aunts’ permanence. It was as unthinkable that the Parthenon, say, should disappear. The real world must obviously survive even these explosive times, because his will would not allow it not to.

  The light was already playing its game of coloured slides with the old ladies at the window. From girlhood it had been accepted that Maro was the intellectual one. Pronoë grew up artistic: there were the high-lit bowls of fruit, in oils, her Cypresses against a Wall (a whole series); there were the yards of crochet lace she hadn’t succeeded in giving away. While Maro dealt, rather, in ideas. She used to exchange ideas, passionately, with men. She accepted men as intellects, she admired them as scholars, as poets, as priests. Otherwise, the whole thing was inconceivable. Between the wars Goethe had been her great love. She spoke English, Italian, French, reckless Russian, and with the greatest pedantic accuracy, though her conscience now hushed it up – German.

  After Eleni’s marriage, the two remaining sisters had wandered about Europe with Mother, in search of the kind of employment nice people expected. They visited watering places, for Mother’s liver, her asthma, and her gout. There were museums for Maro. She had taken courses at some of the universities. While Pronoë had her little social flutter, in Greek circles, in Paris, and Vienna. She tried on hats, and sketched the easier monuments. Mother had died at Rome, after which they brought her back to Greece, for Christian burial, and because, they suddenly realized, their money was running out.

  Through the folded doors Costa watched the fading light strew his aunts’ crumbling cheeks with ashes of violets. Light, it seemed, turned marble to p
umice, flesh into grey pottery. There was a certain light by which his own genius became suspect: he couldn’t believe in the music congealed in his mottled sausages of fingers.

  So he was glad enough when Anna gave him a rough kiss in passing through the dining-room. (Acquaintances considered Anna cold, simply because she was too busy, too much depended on her.) This evening she was wearing her brownest, her most livery look, which meant she had spent most of the day hunting for food. On the whole Costa enjoyed being the practical Anna’s younger brother. He got up now and followed her sturdy calves, which had something in common with his own hands. He was anxious to see what she had got in the bundle.

  Anna kept for her aunts a gentleness she seldom showed to others, probably not even to Stavro.

  ‘Did you take your tablets?’ Her face changed shape, she lowered her voice, to indulge Aunt Pronoë’s imagined heart. ‘Are you cold, Maroula?’ She touched the other old woman’s hand as though it were of the flimsiest material.

  Aunt Maro answered, ‘No. But if I were, nothing could be done about it.’

  It was the kind of realism which had begun to upset ladies of their acquaintance.

  Aunt Pronoë let a sharp little whine escape; she couldn’t wait to see what Anna had found.

  ‘What is it?’ she breathed, gasped, her watering eyes focused on the bundle.

  ‘What have you brought?’ Paraskevi came shuffling, slit-slat, over the honey-coloured parquet.

  Springing from such different sources the maid and her mistresses had united far back. They had aged together querulously.

  ‘It’s the same.’ Handing over the ragful of uprooted dandelion, Anna sounded apologetic.

  ‘Weeds again? It’s always weeds. I’m all wind from eating weeds,’ the maid grumbled from out of her seamed leather, and went back, slip-slop, across the no longer polished parquet.

  Aunt Pronoë advised her, through an overflow of tears, to give thanks to God.

  ‘Poh! If He’s feeding the other side?’ Paraskevi was cranky this evening.

  Aunt Maro recollected, ‘He sent us the lamb from Vitina. It wasn’t His fault if some pig of a man stole it out of the sack.’

  It was true. And left a dog’s carcass in its place.

  Aunt Maro laughed. It still amused her, because it was the kind of incident which illustrates what one can expect. But almost at once her face grew stern, her eyes glittered: she remembered that she was in love with God.

  A smell of cold moist earth lingered in the room, from the weeds Paraskevi had carried off to wash and boil. Costa used the prospect of a meal as an excuse to postpone working on the Haydn sonata. He promised himself that the wad of boiled dandelion he was going to eat, without oil, without salt, without anything, would endow him with a strength to overcome physical obstacles and lift him to pinnacles of understanding.

  While knowing that Paraskevi was right: the weeds would turn to wind in their stomachs; just as the same thin notes would continue twittering out of his fingers.

  ‘But we shall eat, at least!’ Aunt Pronoë was filled in advance with a kind of hectic gaiety.

  ‘Not I.’ Aunt Maro’s decision landed amongst them like a stone. ‘Not when every mouthful counts. Remember the children. Who am I to deny them food?’

  Possibly everyone had become a bit feverish. Costa’s hair was permanently damp. Old Paraskevi muttered, and repeated; her eyes burned holes in anyone she looked at. And it was on this same evening that Aunt Maro took to her bed.

  From there during the days which followed, she continued to conjure up those unconvincing, over-idealized children. The flame she had kept burning under the icons, in spite of shortages, at great expense, was more substantial than Aunt Maro’s children.

  At first his ailing aunt was the perfect excuse for Costa not to practise. In that small flat.

  But she began insisting from her bed, ‘Play to me, Costaki. Music is more nourishing than food.’

  So he played for her, and at times the music ascended some of the way towards the heights he was determined to reach.

  After they had learnt to admit to the Occupation, and the first knife-thrusts of hunger had developed into a permanent ache of emptiness, he had decided to utilize, to spiritualize, his physical distress. (He even made a memo of it, in French, in his neatest hand, at the back of his Wohltemperiertes Klavier.) To a certain extent he had succeeded, he liked to think. For instance, a detached, hungry melancholy, arising out of his physical condition, helped his Chopin. Out of the ebb and flow of his altered blood, his own submergence, his Cathédrale engloutie rose with a glowing conviction he hadn’t achieved before. The architecture, some of the austerities of Bach, he had begun to grasp, if not yet the epiphanies. Pronoë suggested these depended on ‘maturity of soul’. He no longer had the strength to feel irritated by his aunt. Instead he was amused to visualize his ‘soul’ rounding out, like a football bladder suspended in air, in a space beside the Parthenon.

  Costa Iordanou was a serious stubble-headed boy with broad muscular hands. His hands were surprising to those who could recite his pedigree.

  Consider his mother alone: Eleni – so dazzling from many worldly angles, her toilettes from Worth, her long sheaths of hands, her judgments, her generosity, her malice, her abandoned hair, her throat, her eyes. Her eyes. It was not so extraordinary that Iordanou, a cold, upright man, should have accepted her without a dowry. No doubt it was Eleni who had helped him to the Presidency. Tragic how leukaemia shortened his term of office, far more tragic that Eleni, driving her own car, should crash at that bend in the Kakia Skala.

  For Costa his parents had never been more than photographs and myths. His aunts were what his touch confirmed. Only natural that those good souls should have taken Eleni’s Anna and Costaki. (It’s always sad for the children.) Anna was a brown sulky girl, Costa an amusing child making up his little tunes at Pronoë’s piano not long after he began to toddle.

  Until now, from her bed, under the icon of the Panayia, Maro was reminding him of her favourite.

  ‘Play for me, Costaki, La Cathédrale.’

  His aunt’s voice rising slowly in sonorities of green masonry out of his tremulous belly out of the iridescent waters glowed with the light of rose-windows resurrected.

  From the beginning the aunts had decided the children should inherit the brilliance of their parents. Anna would marry an ambassador, on a dowry provided – it was hoped – by Cousin Stepho Mavromati. But Anna the brown girl had thrown herself away on that young doctor, Stavro Vlachos, from Vitina. Months later ladies of the aunts’ acquaintance were still putting on their kindest voices, as though to help the poor things over another bereavement, or an operation.

  Fortunate for them, in the circumstances, that Costaki was born a prodigy. Nina Zakinthinou, one heard, had grown jealous of her own pupil. At the Odeion, Antoniadis finally informed Miss Makridis that Costa must study with someone able to take him farther. Maro returned looking even more haggard than her usual self. Until it was arranged, with the help of Cousin Stepho, that Costa should go to Cortambert in Paris.

  When the house of Europe incredibly collapsed.

  Costa taught himself not to remember the details of his pretended future. Though he kept the steamer ticket at the bottom of his handkerchief drawer. And his music remained, which nothing could devalue or destroy. Its flow continued, perhaps more uneven than formerly, reduced at times to a frustrated stammer, at others forcing itself with the glug-glug of water escaping through a hole.

  If ever in the over-intimate flat the atmosphere of cloying love, of suffocating thoughtfulness, dried the music up, he used to refresh himself by invoking a fantasy of property: a studio just large enough to hold his piano, a divan besides, on the cushions of which he might occasionally undress some girl, not yet completely visualized, let alone possessed, her buttresses of thighs, her gargoyle breasts, rising slowly out of the oil-smeared waters and sumptuous lights of his imagination. Or discuss with his friend Loukas some of t
he theories of love over the frayed halves of a come-by cigarette. Fingers smelling of nicotine. Loukas said there was a sexual position in which the two bodies made a kind of boat together. So.

  Loukas, who had in his left groin a birthmark like the map of Crete, disappeared on a November night the way people did nowadays. The map of Crete was no advantage; nobody had identified him. Costa found himself forgetting Loukas, not even caring. That, too, was the way it happened now. Mourning belonged to the age of visiting-cards and maiden ladies of sufficient means.

  Or was he self-centred, as Aunt Pronoë, in moments of extreme hunger, accused? At least he didn’t flinch on recognizing his own flaws, moral as well as physical, when he caught sight of them in the glass: that spot on the chin of an overindulged puppy face; eyes which tormented nights had stamped with circles of sticky brown flannel. To this extent he was realistic; or was he self-congratulatory? He longed to be as old, as wily, as inviolable as Goethe, say, at the end of his sensuality, when his vices passed for experience, and his platitudes were accepted as gold.

  ‘It is so satisfying’, Aunt Maro called, as she got control of her machinery, ‘to realize that music can be French as well. Thank you, dear Costaki. For your Cathédrale.’

  And Aunt Pronoë, that elderly baby, gurgled, ‘Ravissant, ravissant!’ on her way to disturb Maroula’s pillows.

  Very briefly as a young girl Pronoë was engaged to an officer. Nobody knew why the engagement had been broken off. Something mysterious, never discussed, had happened to Maro in Munich. After which, the two ladies gave themselves to Athene and the Panayia. Perhaps their names had designed them for it. Neither of them was in any way resentful of their fate. Each, in fact, would have protested her fulfilment. And her devotion to the other.

  ‘Leave me, Pronoë!’ Maro’s voice began to grate as she sawed with her neck against the pillow. ‘You are such a fiddler!’