by Carmel Bird
The house and garden embraced her and she felt herself returning to herself. This was a self not really glimpsed by her acquaintances and her colleagues. To them and to her students she was a sharp, dry, ironic, sarcastic, eccentric and sometimes amusing old woman. In truth the outside world – the world outside the house, outside the painting and the garden – was frightening to her, and she protected herself, shielded her vulnerability, with barbs of language and with the cloak of a kind of witty cruelty that sometimes made her own heart weep. She would recall the cruelty of her remarks to her students and would gaze out at the shifting green shadows of the garden with half closed eyes and let tears fall. Once in a rage long ago she had thrown a girl against the wall of the art room. There had been no repercussions, and the girl’s behaviour had not improved, nor had her ability to draw and paint. Rosita’s rage and violence had been pointless. Life went on.
This evening there was a taut anxiety that hung on from the events of the late afternoon. One glass of old French burgundy from the cellar. Perhaps two. This night after the terrible Cora Mean episode in the art room, Rosita the Innocent poured herself one glass of wine, stopped the bottle with a vacuum seal shaped like a baby seal, and put it back in the cupboard. The seal was a gift from Roland. Rosita felt particularly close to him and even proud of him when she saw him in his vestments in the chapel at Lisieux. She didn’t know him very well, being far removed from him in years and temperament, but his mother was one of the daughters of Rosita’s mother’s half-sister.
It is biblical, you see. Somebody begat somebody begat somebody else.
‘It is a small world, and no mistake,’ Dr Silver had said when she discovered the family connection. She arched her eyebrows above her spectacles. The students found the relationship between the Brussel Sprout and Miss Vienna faintly intriguing but possibly unbelievable – the funny old art teacher in her smock and the somewhat sexy and mysterious Brussel Sprout. Not that they gave Rosita a lot of thought.
Every night of her life since the age of twelve Rosita had taken a glass of burgundy with her dinner. The burgundy came from the cellar where her father, a scholar of the history of wine-growing, had built up an impressive collection of wines that lay there still in silent, beautiful rows of dusty old bottles from which Rosita selected favourites. Professor Vienna had also hoarded dozens of bottles of Worcestershire sauce that he liked to pour onto his food, even to drink from a small thick shot-glass, particularly in his later years. When he was old and failing, a sickly aroma of Worcestershire sauce hung over his bedroom. To reduce the total number of sauce bottles in the cellar Rosita always took one to school for the annual charity food drive for ‘the poor and hungry’ of the city. It was not in her nature to take the lot, or to throw the lot into the trash. She didn’t realise it, but the girls always recognised her contribution – it was a traditional school joke, Miss Vienna’s bottle of yucky old sauce with its funny orange label. They pretended to believe she had a secret witchy hoard of it, bottles of sauce going back fifty years, not realising that this was in fact the sad truth.
One time a witty student, dressed in the jolly britches and scarlet waistcoat of the man on the sauce label, presented an epic poem titled ‘Tamarind and Anchovy’ in the end-of-year revue. Tamarind was the heroine and Anchovy her lover, and they ended up being boiled with garlic and wheat in a huge vat, and transformed into sauce. There was a chorus of small girls who chanted the refrain: ‘Shake the bottle, shake the bottle.’ The whole thing went over Rosita’s head, but the audience was in hysterics.
Rosita imagined that she in her house was a part of the forest, a fellow creature with the land animals and the waterfowl. She would go kicking through the leaf-litter, staring for hours on end into the river where she could see every colour ever known. Oyster-grey and tree-frog-green, Prussian blue and dark bloody vermilion. The house was crammed with her drawings and paintings of the plants and animals, and her feeling for flowers approached worship; her friends from schooldays had named her ‘Flora-n-Fauna’. Her Spanish mother had named her after the heroine of Lorca’s play Rosita the Spinster, subtitled The Language of Flowers. You can understand the mother being drawn to the subtitle, but the word ‘Spinster’ might have given her a moment’s pause before she named her daughter. Avila/Barnaby etc. and I went to a performance of that play in Madrid and I thought it was brilliant. Brilliantly done – but also fascinating because it is probably secretly autobiographical, about Lorca’s deep solitude and the impossibility of same-sex love in Spain at the time. This is incredibly sad. I am drawn to secret autobiography expressed in code.
Rosita the Innocent was the only child of the Vienna union, treasured but not indulged. She was what was known as ‘an old-fashioned’ child, quaint and quiet and polite and thoughtful and clever. The house, by the time Cora’s event in the art room comes into the story, was alive with Rosita’s botanical drawings – she was moderately famous for them – leaves and flowers and insects rendered in fine, fine detail and rich glowing colours.
Her mother died when Rosita was a small child. To outsiders this tragedy accounted in part for her character, and perhaps they were right.
I’m not surprised I am attracted to some aspects of this woman, since I am very much an only child, with my own devotion to flowers and my two flowery friends, and a deep interest in frogs and fish. I love art obviously and I have been known to go on painting sprees. But I don’t really like Rosita. I can see she’s a terrific artist, who should be well known outside her immediate precinct, but that doesn’t mean I have to like her. She freaks me out. Maybe she will be famous after she is dead.
It’s a funny thing, but a writer seems to be stuck with a certain group of characters within any given story, and whether the writer would warm to this or that character in life is not part of the deal. There have been times when I wished it had not been Rosita who was in the art room with Corazón and Pieta, had not been the one who went on to take her role in the events that followed. But it was always her, there she was, in all her ‘innocence’, and I have to document her.
Also in the house were Rosita’s portraits of all and sundry. There was a painting of little Roland and Eleena playing on the sand – a picture she could not part with, but which she kept in an obscure corner of her studio.
She knew that Callianthe would suffer great distress were she to know of this painting. As a very small child Roland shared with Eleena the dandelion aureole of hair. It is strange to think of that now, to try to reconcile the quiet dark-haired priest with the exuberant little blond boy at the fatal cricket match.
Rosita enjoyed painting the glowing innocence of children playing. She also did still-life portraits of toys, rows of teddy bears and golliwogs and dolls, and these were strangely Gothic, suggesting not the joy of childhood but the ghosts of dead children. Like that poem ‘Little Boy Blue’ where the toys live forever in the empty nursery after ‘an angel’ comes in the night and takes Boy Blue away. The absence of the boy is dramatised by the eerie presence of the staring and beloved toys who sit so still and quiet and pregnant with empty hope.
Every so often Rosita would do a painting from memory of her best friend from childhood. Veronica had entered an enclosed convent on the island of Tenerife, the home of her father’s family, when she was fifteen. After Veronica’s profession the nuns had sent home to her family a long white cardboard box containing her hair, dark glowing titian curls that had spilled halfway to Veronica’s teenage waist. The hair came by ship, and Veronica’s father had to go to a place at the docks to pick it up. He carried it home in the tram, weeping all the way for the daughter he had lost, and weeping also for the sorrowing box full of hair that lay heavy in its coffin on his knees. In her portraits of Veronica, Rosita always paid particular attention to the hair. These were portraits from memory, imaginative reconstructions of a face never to be seen again. It was possible to visit Veronica on special days, or for very special reasons, but Rosita had never made the long and complica
ted journey to Tenerife. As the years went by Veronica’s eyes in the portraits became steadily larger and stranger, until they were huge brown orbs, gleaming with a holy light, in a pale ascetic face, which bore little resemblance to the young girl remembered.
In some ways these pictures are not unlike me. Interesting to think that Rosita was painting portraits of me with no foreknowledge and no sittings. I couldn’t imagine sitting still for Rosita. As a child I used to sit for some of Avila’s friends who were painters. They rewarded me well with chocolate and ice-cream, and there are now spooky replicas of me at various stages of life hanging on the walls of the upstairs red gallery of the house. Once a Chinese artist called Claude Zhang stayed with us while he painted my portrait, and when his work was hung in the gallery he insisted all the others should be hung upside-down. I liked that.
Rosita fancied that Veronica’s prayers in her enclosure were part of a thread that was holding the world together. If the sisters in the convent of the Divine Heart in Tenerife, and other such endlessly praying nuns, were to cease to pray, the world would spin out of control and would fall away into darkness. This idea is one to which Avila and Callianthe also subscribe. If Veronica stopped praying a link would be broken in the meaning of the whole universe. These were private ideas, showing up perhaps in some of the portraits where the wickednesses and woes and wars of the world can be seen in miniature in the depths of Veronica’s mysterious eyes.
It’s not unlike the importance of Vishnu the Preserver – if he ever stops breathing for an instant the whole world will simply disappear. In Rosita’s imagination, when volcanoes erupted, or when Basque or Irish terrorists blew up buildings or railway stations, the direction of the whole of human enterprise changed too, and she fancied that a stitch had been dropped in the embroidery of the Divine Heart prayers. You realise we are talking here of a world before the Twin Towers and the bombings in Madrid and Bali and London.
The precious fabric continued to unravel with the arrival of wars and hurricanes, and Rosita found she could suspect, secretly, that perhaps Veronica had died and that her prayers on earth had ceased. But she wasn’t old – surely Sisters of the Divine Heart could be expected to live to be a hundred? Would a disaster or a disease or a sinister act of violence dare to touch the convent in Tenerife where the wellbeing of mankind was being held together with prayer – dare to remove Veronica from the register of saviours? No, surely not.
Rosita had always been mystical and superstitious, so such thinking was not at all foreign to her. And I as the daughter of Avila find it quite routine and familiar. There’s a bit of Rosita in Avila – or vice versa.
On the evening of 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on the runway at Tenerife, and five hundred and eighty-three people were killed. An accident. The number of dead people draws my morbid attention and fascination. Was the First World War, for instance, just an accident? When I see huge numbers of people killed I think of the chilling figure of twenty thousand – the number of soldiers who died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Then there are the huge numbers of infertile couples to think about – when I hear huge numbers of dead I think of huge numbers unborn never to be born. I say I think this, but in fact it’s unthinkable.
Why hadn’t Veronica’s prayers kept the Tenerife planes apart? Such questions must remain beyond contemplation. What was going on – what was God thinking? Those planes collided long before I was manufactured. Before Cora was born. Before the child of Cora and Rufus was not born. Long, long, long ago.
As her imagination swirled around the prayers of Veronica, Rosita’s mind came to rest on the question of Diana. Diana, Veronica, Rosita – they had all been boarders at Lisieux in the sixties, and look where they were now. Rosita was still safe and sound (safe? and sound?) living in the old house by the river, sleeping in her parents’ bed, seeing the face of the moon through the gum trees, or watching it rippling in the black surface of the river. Painting her pictures, teaching her girls.
Veronica was safe and sound in the convent in Tenerife, holding the world together with the silky stitches of her endless and musical prayers.
Diana was the one who moved about, drifting through the air as if in the basket of a colourful hot-air balloon, alighting every now and then, now in Barcelona, now in Paris, now Rome, Milan, Madrid, Melbourne, Woodpecker Point. And off again, swinging along in the wicker hamper beneath the great inflated petals of a giant aerial rose.
I have not forgotten the Bambinello. He stands at the heart of this world I am bringing together: Cosimo, Roland, Diana, Cora, Rufus, Rosita, Veronica, Avila, Barnaby. So far so good. I have to follow the knots and threads of past and present and if I work at it I will get there. Avila and Barnaby are on the list, but there is no need to add myself as I am the reporter, the investigator, external to events. If you are beginning to think I am arrogant, I must beg to differ, for in all this I truly am the humble watcher, benign navigator, industrious scrivener. Sydney the Scrivener. I like it.
Often when she was in Melbourne, Diana stayed at the house with Rosita. At this time of Cora’s illness it seemed like a perfect arrangement, since Cora was the reason for the visit, and Rosita was teaching at Lisieux.
And so it was that two days after the event, the incident, the accident – whatever it was – in the art room, Diana arrived in a taxi and alighted on the broad sweep of grass outside the gate like – or so Rosita fancied – like a mediaeval princess. Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross to see a fine lady upon a white horse. Her long overcoat was of old gold velvet and she wore neat little dark brown Spanish boots that buttoned up at the sides. Great eggs of polished amber circled her throat. In one a trapped butterfly – ‘It’s sixty million years old, this butterfly,’ she said – and Rosita believed her. Why not? It might be true. When Rosita, wide-eyed, repeated, ‘Sixty million years,’ she could be a schoolgirl again, falling under Diana’s spell.
Sometimes long ago Diana stayed here with Rosita’s family on weekends, on holidays – once Rosita went home with Diana to Woodpecker Point where she said she would like to stay forever because she loved all the people they visited, and the sea and the sand and the rocks and the great silences of the midnights, and the flowers at the flower farm, and the persistent thought that the vast whiteness of frightening Antarctica was not so very far away. ‘I could be here forever, stay here forever, never leave, never go home,’ she said, and meant it. ‘Okay,’ Diana had said, ‘you stay here then, and I’ll go. Away, away.’ Those were prophetic words. Diana knew she was going, away, away in her hot-air balloon.
Rosita’s childhood bedroom is ready for Diana. The two aged friends spring up the stairs like schoolgirls, almost, and Diana rushes into the room. There are the two high yellow beds, the dark wardrobe carved with fruits and birds, the cabin trunk on which the dolls are still sitting, staring in their eternal empty glass-eyed old dusty creepy wisdom. On top of a fat cedar chest of drawers is a statue of the Black Virgin of Montserrat.
‘You sent her to me all those years ago,’ Rosita says, brushing the figure lightly and lovingly with her fingers.
And the moment takes them back just fleetingly to the month before Diana’s wedding in Madrid, when she and Federico went out to Montserrat from Barcelona to ask the blessing of the Black Virgin upon their union. Diana sent small statues home to everyone she could think of. It is a sort of shock to her to meet the darkly primitive Virgin here in Rosita’s room, the Virgin with the large head and sad, wise face, seated, holding the child stiffly on her knee.
There is also in the old bedroom the long oval mirror and the Japanese screen, gold with butterflies – cream, lilac and almost black – some flying upside down. One wall is occupied by bookshelves where, old but recently dusted, are the books – picture books, stories and poetry and school textbooks, the books that were there when Diana and Rosita were girls. There is something dead and forlorn, strange and theatrical about the long-suffering existence of these books, which
stand up in their long-beloved rows in the white childish shelves.
‘Your dolls, I was always so envious of your dolls,’ Diana says. ‘And they are still here – keeping watch over their flocks by night. They haven’t moved.’
And indeed they have not. The dolls are dressed as they were always dressed, in frocks and coats handmade by Rosita’s mother. Two of them wear white silk dresses, decorated with elaborate white smocking, and these are examples of the dresses that Rosita’s mother and her circle of dedicated women once laboured over with quiet love and prayer. For one of the purposes of the sewing circle was to make beautiful dresses destined for the bodies of stillborn babies born in the maternity hospitals of the city. So many babies, so much hope crushed, so many cold little bodies dressed for baptism and burial in the dear exquisite dresses made by the sewing circle. Avila has never belonged to such a circle, but I know it is the kind of thing that might appeal to her if she had the time. Nobody had thought back then of cremating those babies and adding them to clay and firing them as pots. Their dresses adorn the staring old dolls in Rosita’s childhood bedroom, a room as empty of a living child as is the room of Little Boy Blue.
Above the dolls is a painting, a mirror-image painting, lifelike, of these same dolls as they sit in their white baby dresses. But then Diana realises something.
‘But where – where is the Beloved, where is Cordelia? The Favourite?’
Rosita’s body stiffens and her face darkens swiftly. Tears spring to her eyes. There is a silence that goes on too long as Diana waits for the answer.
At last Rosita replies, in a childish whisper, ‘I sent her – I put her – when my father died – I buried her – with my father.’
‘Oh. So. Just so.’
They stand for a moment and stare out the window into the tops of the gum trees, their spirits stilled by the gentle almost imperceptible rocking of the branches, the faint shiver of the leaves in the wind, too many images flooding their minds. Diana’s mind in particular is spinning.