by Carmel Bird
Edith was a philosophical and possibly saintly creature. There was no question, either, of passing true information on to Cora’s wild aunt Diana, since you never knew how Diana the Manipulator was going to react. At times she was a faithful ally, at others a fierce and wily troublemaker, taking matters into her own long elegant hands and turning them into dizzy whirls like colourful shattered glass that made its shiny way into untold nooks and crannies and splintered many an eye, slivered many a heart. Diana, you could say, was dangerous and possibly a little mad. She had been that way since childhood, had never changed. Cora was shortly to sit for her final year exams – her future depended on a good result. She was the school’s hope for the top prize in art, such a talented and promising student. The name of the school is at issue here – on a couple of levels, I suppose. A question always close to my mind is: ‘Who is going to sue whom here?’ It hasn’t come to that, however I am sure that it occurred to Dr Catherine Silver.
Dr Silver waved her arm saying suddenly in a proud and encouraging tone: ‘This is one of Cora’s pictures. I am very fond of it indeed. She has a remarkable talent. Quite remarkable.’
Edith turned to look at the picture on the deep red of the study wall. It was shocking.
It was a large canvas, a distorted oil facsimile of van Eyck’s Arnolfini marriage, finely executed, with the main figures shrunken to doll size and the image in the central mirror enlarged out of all proportion. The dolls themselves were in turn enlarged and distorted in the giant mirror. The cycle of Christ’s suffering was sharply detailed in scenes from the Passion, around the mirror’s edge, and a hideous grinning gargoyle floated above the clasped hands of the Arnolfinis. The flowing folds of the brilliant green gown of the bride hung in a way that very clearly, at least in Cora’s version, stated her pregnancy, while the drenched red of the bed hangings dripped like blood, seeped and flowed into the mirror image where it was magnified, and then out again into the room, a bleeding statement of life and death. A distorted but not unprophetic statement of the event that had just recently taken place in the art room.
Edith thought it was a most disturbing picture, and could scarcely bear to dwell on it, to connect it with her beloved little daughter. They certainly seemed to do rather horrible things in art classes at Lisieux these days. She knew her daughter was talented. It could be such a difficult and dangerous quality, talent. Edith’s sister Diana had been talented, once.
The question that the whole affair of the pregnancy raised, concerning Cora’s contact and relationship with boys while she was a boarder in the care of Lisieux, also hovered in the soft, smooth, gleaming, whispering air of the dark red study. Putting this question aside for the moment, Edith raised the matter of the incisions. It seemed pertinent. And Dr Silver was ready with her answer. Mr Benedetto, one of the top surgeons in the country, had executed two very small operations, the scars from which would soon become almost invisible.
Then Edith raised the question of the boy.
Her quiet progress through the whole matter was quite unnerving to Dr Silver. This rather plain and stolid woman could certainly have cold and unpredictable depths of a litigious nature. Did this family intend to bring an action against the school? Tread softly, Dr Silver. Tread softly.
Dr Silver said that it was inexplicable to her as to how such a thing could have happened. She would begin to conduct absolutely thorough and completely discreet enquiries, reporting fully to Cora’s family. She did not outline the nature of these enquiries, but she had already thought of investigating the cast party after the school play. This was the only occasion when the girls were off campus for any length of time while in the company of boys. That is, the only time to her knowledge. It is quite probable that there are huge gaps in Dr Silver’s knowledge of what her girls get up to when they are not in the classroom or the boarding house. How rigorous was the supervision at the cast party? The boys were all from Loyola. That might be a good thing, but might, more probably, also be a bad thing. Boys will be boys. And Loyola boys will most definitely be Loyola boys. Girls, for that matter, will also be girls. It’s not really so very complicated. And the time was right. Her mind ran on as her smile and kindness smoothed the edges of her meeting with Edith Mean and wove the pink cocoon ever thicker and tighter into its web of mystification. Ultimately she had no real fear of legal repercussions, confident that discretion, secrecy in fact, was in the interest of all concerned.
‘Least said, soonest mended.’ Did Dr Silver really say that? She did.
Cora had met Rufus Gigli at the Lisieux/Loyola Boarders’ Dance. The first time Rufus saw Cora she was wearing a dress that was her own adaptation of a Collette Dinnigan, a flutter of chiffon printed with shadowy photographs of sugared almonds in whispery shades of apple-green, lavender, sky-blue, apricot and smoke. The hemline was edged with raspberry satin. Sugared almonds in pastel colours, the coating dissolving on the tongue, revealing over time the smooth oval nut inside. Arms and shoulders bare, shape of body visible beneath the mist of almonds. Her sandals were a collection of thin straps of raspberry suede. Rufus did not of course analyse all this and break it down into its parts – he just got the general overall idea, and it was very cute and super sexy. Rufus and Cora danced and laughed and later on they called each other. This was in the days before every student had a cell phone. Then the pair went on to star as Romeo and Juliet in the combined school play. Life can be so corny, for heaven’s sake. Romeo and Juliet.
This is Rufus the Virile and Corazón the Fertile we are dealing with here.
Dr Silver’s suspicions were right. At the party on the last night Rufus and Cora ended up in the poolside cabana at a fashionable mansion nearby where they accidentally and alcoholically conceived the doomed child who lodged by mistake in the wrong part of Cora’s body. Cora, as it happened, did not even suspect that she was pregnant. Her cycles were erratic. Missing one was neither here nor there. Some Catholic schoolgirls are on the pill; some Catholic schoolboys use condoms. Cora and Rufus were not among them. Carefree, careless Cora and Rufus.
Cora went to Confession a week or so after the party, and in her courageous innocence she put before God, through the medium of Father Bruccoli – how she blushed and whispered – the nature of her sin.
‘I was drinking alcohol – a lot of alcohol – and I had a physical experience with a boy.’ She promised never to do these things again, and such was Roland’s delicacy and dare I say innocence, that he did not press the girl for detail, choosing to gloss over the term ‘physical experience’ with a swift assumption that what was meant was perhaps kissing and hugging. Fondling? Well, perhaps a little fondling. From his own schooldays he recalled the phrase ‘temple of the Holy Ghost’ and he found himself reminding Cora that her body was such a temple. It is doubtful that she, girl of the twenty-first century, understood him. He counselled her severely but kindly against drinking. She felt chastened and repentant and she partly remembered the hangover. Roland probably had no real concept of what she meant by ‘a lot of alcohol’. A very great deal was what she meant. Off her face. Out of it. Wasted. Trashed. For her penance Cora said the Joyful Mysteries and meditated solemnly on them, even maybe weeping just a little when she finally came to the Finding of Jesus in the Temple.
If Cora had confessed to another priest, to an older, stricter pastor, the rest of the story probably would have been different.
Rufus, something of an ordinary teenage unbeliever, disbeliever, did not go to Confession, and Cora and Rufus did not ever exactly discuss what happened between them on the night of the cast party. And they didn’t repeat it, although Cora possibly and Rufus certainly imagined one day they would. Quite soon. Boys at Loyola seemed to know, and it got around at Lisieux in one way or another, that Rufus got with Cora, but such matters are of little real or lasting interest in the hectic lives of these boys and girls. So they had sex after the play – so what? Didn’t everybody?
It was no real surprise to Roland when events unfolded as t
hey did, and he reflected to himself that had he really questioned Cora at Confession, nothing would have changed. Would it? Could it? Roland the Good sometimes felt wistfully impotent among the dark-bright tangle of the complicated lives of the people in his pastoral care. Particularly the young people.
Dr Silver more than suspected that Roland was not up to scratch in the pastoral care department, but there was little she could do.
If things had been different, would Cora have had a termination? It is possible. Possible. Probable? Catholic families and Catholic schools it seems are not what they once were in the days of Avila or Edith and Diana. But in the case of Cora, mother nature took a hand and the sudden bright gold paint on Cora’s paintbrush made a long thick smear across her picture of a doorway into a wild, wild garden, and she dropped to the floor as the pain of rupture went searing through her and blood came bursting out of her to make its fanning rivulets across the art room tiles. And that scorch of pain was the last thing she knew until she woke up in a hospital bed with a nurse bending over her, and in her head the one idea that she needed to call Rufus. Her head and her heart were in tune with her body, a trinity of correctness for the moments of ‘recovery’, for was not Rufus the young father of the child that was lost, and should he not have been some kind of partner in the pain and danger to which Cora had been subjected? Cora interpreted her insistent need for Rufus as a signifier of her romantic love for him. She also had a feeling, not so much a thought, that she needed to feel the embrace of her mother’s arms.
Waves of images of, and feelings about, Rufus filled her mind and heart, waking and sleeping. She was a romantic girl. If she did not dream of Rufus, she would search her dreams for the space where he was missing. She was in a hospital bed, a body in a hospital bed, a body stripped of its connections with the outside world. And wild hot panic danced through her. She was not permitted to use the phone. Remember this was before they all had cells. She became feverish and weepy and hysterical, blinding flashes of anxiety and loneliness darting through her mind and body. The doctor sedated her. She was allergic to one of the drugs and she hallucinated and she dreamt.
Hers were not the desert scenes of Rosita’s firing squad. But it was as if she died, and she moved through glass as through air and water. Unaware of her own body she drifted in a breathless nothingness. She could smell mushrooms. She was searching for something, for someone. Cora woke up as a voice called to her from a great distance. She wondered if she really was dead, but when she opened her eyes she saw the robin’s-egg blue of the wall of the hospital room, the panes of mottled, bubbled pink and green glass in the door, the freckled surface of the floor. She felt the weight of the bedcovers, she could smell the cloying aroma of disinfectant and she wanted to throw up. She was alive. They told her about her appendix.
Still she had not spoken to Rufus, and the lost connection was a source of anguish and despair that she was somehow compelled to keep to herself, sensing that to call for Rufus was to court some kind of danger. She didn’t really know what kind, but something was picking away at the back of her brain, warning her to be careful.
Too late, Cora, too late.
Chapter Six
The Innocence of Rosita the Innocent
Now it is time to look more closely at the art teacher Rosita the Innocent. Why Rosita? Well I see her, believe it or not, as a kind of foil to myself, Sydney the Navigator. What? you say. Yes, I see her as an only child born ‘naturally’ from the union of her ‘parents’. She is, unlike myself, repressed and violent. She shares with me a love of beauty, a love of plants and flowers. She doesn’t have all the pets I have. She has no pets at all. When she was a child she used to pray for pets, but the saints did not hear her, or her parents did not obey the saints; something went wrong with the connection. Rosita is going to join some of the dots in the design of the story, and if life has a design, and maybe it does, she is a nice little piece of that too. A key element. Grout or cement in a little group of the ceramic tiles of life. You might think she is just an eccentric old art mistress in a convent school, but who she is and what she is and what she thinks and how she feels – all this turns out to matter. It isn’t just that she was in charge of the class when Cora’s insides started to explode, but Rosita has been put in place, Rosita has a purpose. I begin to sound like Avila.
Rosita was an art teacher, and also an artist of some considerable local fame, and this whole Bambinello business with which I am concerned was set in motion by an act of Religious Art Theft. She fits. As Avila would say, Rosita was sent. She is possibly an unlikely figure to find being a player in the drama, but life is often peopled by such types. Rosita has been groomed and is waiting. She is being slowly but surely swept along like a leaf on a swiftly running stream. That is a rather ugly way to think of life, isn’t it? But a common one.
So here she goes, here she comes, Rosita a leaf on the turbulent surface of the water of life.
Perhaps because I am the child of Assisted Repro Tech that I am, I tend to see these things as processes and experiments, see them from an odd angle. The connection between Rosita and the fate of the Bambinello is something given, something that might, if one had been looking at things from another point of view, have been clear long before it was. I often have detailed conversations with Amber Moon and Aurora Flare along these lines, and we are inclined to conclude that I am right. It is a biblical approach to character whereby this one begat that one begat the other – until you get to the one who is really going to do the deeds and make the difference to things. It appeals to me as a literary device partly because I am totally unbegotten, so that I personally lie outside the Bible, having no bloodline to speak of.
I should say here that the bloodline of Jesus has always bothered me. I can follow the line that leads to Mary – I’m fine with that. But Mary is simply the Pure Vessel, isn’t she? The uterus. It’s not as if she supplied the Oocyte to the Godly Spermatozoon. As I understand it – and my understanding is possibly flawed here – the miraculous foetus arrived holus bolus, going from the Word to the Flesh in one clean movement. So while I don’t claim to be miraculous in the same way – although I am a modern miracle – I can see a parallel between myself and Jesus in that we are both outside the biblical theory of character. The Merovingian bloodlines are a different matter – they flow from the children of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. What I am niggling at here is the ‘bloodline’ of Jesus Himself – which is not the same thing at all.
Rosita, as I say, is within the theory of bloodline. She could be a biblical character, if they were to bring the Bible up to date.
After the session with the principal, Rosita walked through the nearby streets where the branches of the old European trees met high above the roadway, forming arches and tunnels, green in spring and summer, eerily weird in winter, silvery shadows now in the light of early evening. The streets were empty, the sound of Rosita’s footsteps echoing, ringing through the lengths of the Germanic fairytale avenues of the trees.
She lived alone in the old family home right on a bend in the river, one side of the house opening onto the line of grasses, reeds and trees that edged the riverbank. From her bedroom balcony she could watch the ducks and other waterfowl as they moved about their lives, could listen to the rustle of water-rats and the croak of frogs. There were so many frogs and so many possums, and there were snakes too. The canopy of Australian trees, tall mysterious ragged regal eucalypts and wild untidy blue wattles, stretched in places over the roof of the house, shedding their foliage into the roof gutters. There were also ancient jacarandas and wisteria, and lower down grevilleas, japonicas. An angel’s trumpet vine pushed its giant poisonous way to heaven, and when it was in bloom the pointed frills of the thick creamy blooms became the subject of Rosita’s paintings. There were also fruit trees, rose bushes, and in the spring a wash of daffodils, the earth dreamy with bluebells in waves. There was something so random and uncontained about all this – it could be construed as simply a giant mess.
This is a small lost world, a place where Rosita the Innocent rules in a kingdom made for her, a kingdom also that she has made. Across the street is the tall stone house where Roland the Good grew up, where his parents still live. Roland used to have a great fondness for Rosita’s father and all his books, and is now quite fond of old Rosita. The two families are in fact distantly related by blood on Roland’s mother’s side.
‘Let us get up early to the vineyard; let us see if the vines flourish,’ Rosita’s father would often say, shaking his head sadly as he surveyed the devastation wrought on the garden during the night by possums. Possums in Australia are pests, like raccoons.
‘No possums in the Bible, Rosita, no possums eating grapevines in the Old Testament,’ her father said. ‘When I was a boy we used to shoot them. For sport, for food, for their skins. The skins were good. We made fur caps, you know. And your great-grandmother, she made the possum rug in the study.’
All that was long ago in Tasmania, at Christmas Hills, close to the home of Cora and all the other Means, when the world was younger and you could kill any wild animal you wanted to kill and skin it and eat it too. It could come to that again I suppose, before too long, the earth being on its dizzy path of war and famine and drought and flood and the rising of the sea. The possum rug in Rosita’s house, made from a patchwork of more than a hundred squares – soft greys, dark browns, and golds, a kind of lilac – is backed with scarlet flannel that is clipped with serrations at the edges. It lies on the chaise longue in the old study, inert yet alive, and mighty warm on winter nights, a memory of the long dead possums of Christmas Hills.
Rosita lay for a time that evening, after the collapse of Cora Mean, on this possum rug, her eyes closed, listening to Haydn’s ‘Chorale for St Anthony’.