‘The cross near the tower!’
‘Sì, and like the mamuthone masks today, this mask was made of fig wood, set above a loose robe. Mostly comedies were performed at the Lenaia, to celebrate the Divine Child. The following month, in late February, there was the Ancient Dionysia, the Anthesteria, an old festival of ghosts. The souls of the dead were said to walk the streets then, especially on Choës Day, and people wore masks to resemble spirits. Tragedies were performed. Here Dionysos was called the Lord of Souls, a role that would finally pass on to us in the rituals of All Souls’ Day. The second day of the Anthesteria was the only day of the year the temple was actually open to the people.
‘The Greater Dionysia at the end of March brought the Dionysian part of the year to a close. Tragedies—goat songs—were performed here, too, to commemorate that the god had died in the month of the he-goat, but with comedies as well to show that he had risen from the dead, that the cycle was securely in place.’
‘It’s like the original purpose of Carnival,’ I said. ‘Celebrating the continuation of life.’
‘It is, David. It is very much like it. Death as an essential part of the greater life of the world. We borrow that life for a time, take it into our separate selves, then surrender it again into the great cycle. Dionysos encompassed all that. Today we try to pretend death doesn’t exist, but the Greeks being the Greeks faced it as the profound truth it was, knowing that mere words couldn’t encompass it. Wisdom has to be protected by enigma. They knew this. They created rituals to fit it properly into their world order: the Eleusinian and Dionysian Mysteries which the Orphics later made even more like what Christianity would one day become: with a divine child become mortal mediator saving humanity so it could gain eternal life. All this existed and was later borrowed.
‘And you’re right about Carnival, David. If you read up on the Lesser Dionysia, you will read how the boundaries of the ordered world were deliberately turned upside down and mocked, just as in your Carnival and Commedia. It was a deliberate and profound irreverence, a challenging of all the accepted forms. Men dressed as women, women as men: you see it on the vase paintings and frescoes, recorded in the texts. They turned themselves into primal, elemental forms. Men became satyrs and sileni, women became all-powerful maenads wielding thyrssos wands. They dressed in animal skins, just like our mamuthone here on the hill, became totemic beasts. Cloth or goatskin masks were worn; bells were strapped over chests and shoulders, fixed around waists and ankles. It wasn’t just dressing up, nothing so simple. We’re not just talking about gods here; we’re talking about powerful organising systems for a way of seeing, a way of grasping what is prized and cherished by a society, what is recognised and understood in the workings of the world. It wasn’t just the suborning of order, not just masking and role-play to excuse excess. It was a restoring of the greater order of being, a profound commemoration of indestructible life. We have no easy equivalent today.’
‘And so like Christ, as you say.’
‘He was a Divine Child just as Christ would later be in the New Testament gospels. He was a Dying God, just like Christ would one day be, just as Osiris and Shiva were. He was born out of a union between a god and a mortal, just as Christ was. On Andros he changed water into wine. You see the similarities? Dionysos was cut into seven pieces by the Titans and his phallus given to Rhea, mother of the gods, for safekeeping, to keep the eternal cycle of life in place. It’s like the Egyptian goddess Isis rescuing the dead Osiris from the sarcophagus in which Set had imprisoned him, then mounting his penis, being fertilised and giving birth to Horus. Dionysos was born in death and triumphed over it too.’
‘Just like in that pop song by Traffic: John Barleycorn Must Die.’
‘Scusi, David. I do not know this name. John Barleycorn?’
‘Sorry, Carlo. It’s a song about harvesting the grain, killing it so it all comes round again. An allegory of the great cycle of nature. Death as an integral part of life.’
‘Ah, sì! Of course!’ he said, and poured us more wine. ‘Only later was Dionysos debased into the god of wine and orgies, a travesty of his real form. The wildness of heart and spirit that Euripides sought to commemorate in his second-last play, The Bacchae, was so easily misrepresented as excess and recklessness, as terrible violence and licentiousness. It was never that, David, but it was so wonderfully elusive that it had to be contained by its detractors. And what better way than to accentuate the extremes, distort the facts, produce a caricature?
‘David, what you wrote about the Commedia was fascinating for me. You know so much. You love history, love learning about old civilisations, but for you, for me, for everyone, there are gaps, and these gaps determine what we are and what we become no less than the knowledge that could fill them. There is just too much to know. You express concern about how people forget whole areas of knowledge. We can say the same about the Etruscans, about this worship of Dionysos, simple facts, simple truths no-one bothered to write down because they thought there would be no need, that somebody else was doing so, that it was all so obvious, so self-evident, why bother? It’s how it always happens.
‘Now we allow that there have always been agencies aiding such widespread forgetting. The Church has long been notorious for it, governments everywhere, victors in wartime most of all. There is so much to know. You marvel at the horns on a Zanni mask being like the devil’s horns in the mystery plays, but just look how the Dionysian mysteries were taken and used by the early Church. Look at this wine we drink. We do it together. We drink this symbolic blood. We become easier, more honest, too honest. We lose our better judgement, give in to expansiveness. We become Dionysian. Now there are movies, news broadcasts and television documentaries to give us the purification and purging of emotions, the katharsis that puts us back in the world and keeps us human. But we try to go back, you and I. We can try to rediscover this Dionysos behind the mamuthone who has scared us so.’
I held up my glass so it was between me and the dark eyes of the mask, so they became smudges of darkness in the rich red. Carlo had lost a good deal of his accent to present his spiel about Dionysos, had found it again the moment the spiel was done. And he knew that I’d noticed, had probably meant me to notice. This extraordinary man was playing at genial, rustic pig-farmer with a hobby-horse to ride, but he was far more. It was all becoming clear.
And what was keeping Raina, I wondered, then realised that, of course, she would be with the others, and that they were leaving us alone deliberately. Allowing Carlo to present this part of the mystery. It had all been planned. And Gemma was part of it too.
But somehow I still believed him about the mamuthone, that it had surprised even him. I held my glass up to the empty terracotta eyes again and decided to test him, to see if I could trigger the clear unaffected delivery once more.
‘Carlo, how did Dionysos come to Sardinia?’
‘Ah, much is still uncertain. There are ancient colony sites on Sardinia, either eighth or seventh century Greek colonies or Phoenician colonies bringing in Greek things. Trade was so vigorous, sometimes it’s hard to tell. There is the influence through the Etruscans, but there it all becomes darker, bleaker. There too he is the god of rebirth and wild nature, symbolised by the renewal of the wine harvest and all that meant in those times. Not just the god of wine, but what wine represents symbolically: renewal and the celebration of that renewal. But a much more fatalistic and bleak religion, as I say.
‘The Etruscan gods were detached and cruel. Any equivalents of mamuthones there wouldn’t have been just shepherds becoming one with the life god; they would have been closer to, well, something like the charontes, the Etruscan demons of death: winged, goblin-faced, swinging their double headed hammers. All the vivacious, wholesome Greek things—the ghosts of Choës Day, the playfully mocking masked figures—seem vicious and terrifying when passed through Etruscan hands. They were a glorious people, an attractive and influential people but, in spite of all their rituals, feasting and fes
tivals, not a very happy one.’
Charontes. I’d do a search on the name, find what part they played, if any, in modern manifestations of the mamuthones.
‘Can you tell me what Yakkos means?’
‘David, it is Iackhos.’ He spelled it out. ‘I-A-C-K-H-O-S. One of the oldest names for Dionysos, the one that probably gave us the name Bacchus. It refers to the star Sirius and stands for the pure light of summer.’
Again, no accent. This was the new Carlo, the other Carlo, the Carlo who seemed one moment to be playing with me, the next to be sharing my predicament keenly.
Perhaps Raina had been listening, for now she appeared with coffee and pastries and sat with us again. For the first time I was aware of no longer hearing voices in the other half of the room. It seemed we were alone, just the three of us—the four of us, for the mask grinned gleefully, riotously on the wall, ogling us with its troubling, night-sighted eyes.
‘These are seadas,’ Raina said, identifying the pastries for me as she poured us coffee.
We were back to playing happy families. It seemed that the talk of intruders, Dionysian festivals and Etruscan charontes was to be set aside for a time.
But I couldn’t wait any longer. ‘What about the gumnuts, Raina?’
‘Scusi, David? The gumnuts?’
‘There was a sprig of them in my mailbox. I took it as a roundabout invitation to your picnic.’ I didn’t mention the one in her own mailbox, though I could have said I was checking for another invitation and they would have understood. ‘There was a sprig stuck in your bush-flower garland on the cross.’
Raina’s initial frown had steadily become a look of fright. When she set down the coffee pot, her hand was shaking. ‘Gumnuts, you say?’
‘Like tiny mamuthone bells. You didn’t put them there?’
She lifted her two hands to her face and peered over them at me, then lowered them again. ‘We only put a flower chain on the cross.’
‘Then someone added a sprig to it.’
Raina gripped Carlo’s hand. ‘Dio benedetto! Da la torre! Fa male, non è vero?’
‘Molte male, sì,’ Carlo answered, patting her hand, then turned to me.
‘Raina says the sprigs will have come from the tower.’
‘Then we should go there.’ I was determined now, accepting there was no other way.
‘Sì, domani? Tomorrow, David? You and I will go.’
‘The sooner the better.’
‘I will come too,’ Raina said. ‘It is time I saw inside.’
I watched her. She seemed genuinely afraid.
But Carlo gave me no time to say anything more. ‘Bene. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll come over after ten, David, okay?’
‘Okay. Raina, I need to speak with Gemma too.’
‘Gemma? You think she has something to do with this?’ Once again, Raina’s eyes were wide with astonishment.
‘No, no. It’s something else. I just need to see her.’ Need to learn the significance of her being in a swing. ‘Nothing to do with this. Could you give me her address and phone number?’
Which had to seem an odd request right then.
‘Of course. I do not need to look it up.’ She grabbed a shopping memo pad from a nearby sideboard and wrote: 14B Rastin Street, Kyogle, then added a phone number. I could see her hand was shaking a little, and she tried to hide it by giving me a knowing smile. ‘You like her, eh?’
‘I really don’t know her, but, yes, I do.’ Or thought I did until this afternoon.
‘If you like Gemma, wait till you meet Zoe.’
Carlo looked startled, as if she had betrayed a confidence. ‘Raina!’ he said, and seemed genuinely amazed.
‘Va bene,’ Raina told him. ‘It’s time, Carlo. It’s time.’
‘Zoe?’ I asked. ‘Who is Zoe? Her sister?’
‘When you call Gemma, ask if you can meet Zoe. I am interested in what she says. Forgive me being secretive. Gemma will agree that these are secrets she has to share, not me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You saw her in a swing, yes?’
‘Yes, outside a house at the corner of Sellen Road. But it wasn’t her house. I checked.’
‘Of course not. She would have chosen it because of the swing. She likes you.’
‘Raina, please. There have been too many mysteries today. What’s the significance of the swing?’
‘David, I want her to tell you. I’d hate to be wrong about this, okay? But it’s a good sign, a very old one. Ask her when you ask about Zoe.’
‘Right. Does she have a mobile phone?’
‘She does but I can never remember the number. Sorry.’
I stayed another fifteen minutes, but it was small-talk then about the sons and daughter I had met and their respective families. I tried to ask the right questions, the neighbourly questions, accepting the need for polite distraction now, but the eyes of the mask were too full of darkness, its grin too manic and knowing. As soon as it felt tactful to do so, I pushed back from the table, thanked them and rose to go. We agreed to meet the next morning and I bid them goodnight.
But I couldn’t go home. Not now that I had Gemma’s true address, not after the false house, the cryptic remarks about swings and someone named Zoe.
When I reached the end of the Risi driveway, I turned right instead of left and headed towards Kyogle, driving among the dark, lonely hills, with the sky achingly full of stars, and the lights of occasional homesteads rising up and falling away again like ships lost at sea. The wine had had its effect, but the delight and invigoration I felt had far more to do with being in the middle of something, on the edge of discovering answers. Farmhouses came and went like ships, like crowns, like scattered embers from the pented fire of the day, and I grinned at them, welcoming each one, bidding them adieu as they fell behind.
Gemma, I know where you are!
So much had been said, so much about mamuthones and charontes, about fearsome forms and ancient mysteries, but one thing kept going through my mind: what Carlo had said about things standing for other things, about the wine being more than wine, how older forms had been plundered, debased and pushed aside.
I’d recently seen a television program on the Roman gladiatorial games that tried to convey why the ancient Romans were able to endure and justify the incredible violence and cruelty of the games in the Colosseum. I thought of it now. The arena had been a symbol for the great chaos surrounding their civilised world, a measure of the outer darkness that had to be resisted at all costs. By bringing that chaos and cruelty into their midst in miniature, they had a constant and eloquent reminder of all that Rome stood for.
Originally. For it had also become mere entertainment, been made an expedient political tool, and the symbolic force was—not lost, never lost—but sidelined, diluted because overshadowed and forgotten, made part of some collective unconscious rather than an acknowledged, practised, lived thing.
It was like that now. Swings and mask-poles. Shrove Tuesday and festivals to Saint Anthony. Mamuthones as dancing charontes. I had to learn about Dionysos, and about what Dionysos had become among the Sardinians—or, rather, what he had been able to remain.
I turned onto Summerland Way, and ten minutes later reached the outskirts of Kyogle, passing the truck and farm equipment sales yards, then the district hospital, the high school and the local swimming pool. It was 9:45 on a balmy Friday evening. There was barely any traffic, hardly any movement at all but for the wind in the trees and the flicker of insects around each yellow street light I passed.
I found Rastin Street easily enough and pulled up outside number 14, a modest timber house under a sheltering poinciana that stirred in the evening breeze. It was all so strange. Not a farmhouse, not a rural property at all. A spacious-enough, rented flat at the back of a fifty-year-old house in town, tucked away down this quiet side-street.
Gemma might be at work, either here locally or over in Casino. She might be visiting friends. Since she’d li
ed about the house with the swing, she might have lied about everything else too. She might be with her boyfriend, her lover, a husband for all I knew, might be with her children, for heaven’s sake. The 14B suggested she was single or at least lived alone, but that was only if Raina had told the truth, or if Gemma weren’t tricking Raina as well. Just how well did they know each other?
Certainly I could see the second mailbox near the back gate. The 14B marked in white letters was clearly visible in the light from the street-lamp opposite.
And that was my answer. I wouldn’t knock on the door. No lights were showing, and I wouldn’t put myself through another staged event, waiting hours only to be left disappointed when no-one turned up. Deliberately didn’t. She might be standing in darkness behind her curtains for all I knew, watching to see what I would do, but there had been too many games. I’d leave a note, not in the mailbox but slipped under her door. I took a pen and paper from the glove box and wrote my message.
Raina said I should meet Zoe. Please phone. 6632 1888. David.
I almost put a PS: Thanks for the swing, but decided against it. I’d said too much to Gemma during our drive into town on Sunday. Let this be simple, direct and slightly cool. No anger, no reproaches, just quietly accepting.
I unlatched the side gate, went up the back steps and slipped the folded note under the door. Then I drove back to Starbreak Fell.
Had I been too clever? What if 14B was just another decoy house, used only as a mail drop? Gemma might never find the note. Should I go back and leave another in the mailbox?
Clowns At Midnight Page 17