by Carmel Bird
‘They’re going to make me go to Spain with my aunt,’ she said.
‘What, how long for? Why?’
‘I think they think the exams will be too much for me. After being sick.’
‘That’s crazy. Don’t go. They can’t make you go.’
‘You don’t know what they’re like. My aunt can do anything.’
‘You can run away. We could run away together.’
‘That is crazy. You know it is.’
‘I’ll come to Spain.’
Cora laughed. ‘You make it sound like the Civil War or something. “I’ll come to Spain.” I wonder what Aunt Diana would say about it if you did. She’s very romantic.’
‘Then I’m going to talk to her,’ Rufus said.
‘No! No, you can’t. You mustn’t. They don’t know about us. And we’re going all over the place. Going to Venice, Rome and stuff – you know how it is.’
‘I’ll just come then. I’ll just turn up. I’ll materialise.’
‘You have to do your exams.’
‘If you repeat – I can repeat the year as well. School’s crap, you know, anyhow. I hate it.’
‘So what are you going to do, stow away on an aircraft?’
‘Maybe.’
By this time Cora was in tears at the brave silliness of his words, the tender meaning she discerned beneath them, and as she wept on Rufus’s chest she had the distinct feeling that she really would see him in Spain, and that they would be together forever after. She was her godmother’s goddaughter, and a rather silly girl at that. With much sweet sad passionate kissing and not a little weeping by Cora, they parted and Cora crept back into the house across a soft damp lawn, under the spreading chestnut tree where the ghosts from the afternoon-tea table hung in the misty air. She picked up the green rubber ball from behind a daphne bush, hurled it into the air so it sailed into the river, and went inside to bed. She slept the deathlike dreamless sleep of exhausted youth, the sleep of a baby, of happiness, bliss, fulfilment, hope.
The word ‘Venice’ in Cora’s brief overview of her coming journey is music to the ears of the bright and somewhat devious Rufus. Here is the substance of what is going on in his quick-bright brain, quick brown fox that he is: School’s crap. I need to do something. Cora’s lucky – she gets out of it just like that. I need some old aunt or something, someone, somewhere. Some hope. But I know what – ah ha – the Design folio, as yet full of useless crap. I’ll talk to Daddo about the stuff he’s working on with the guys in Venice.
So Rufus speaks to his father: ‘Yeah – so I’ve decided I want to – ah – to make a short film about water levels in Venice – y’know, I mean it’s kind of about the history of Venice and the hopes for the MOSE Project – the gates and stuff – will it ever happen – it’s so huge and weird – the magic water gates in the Lagoon – yeah – go to Venice these holidays and shoot the footage for my Folio Piece on your MOSE Project thing, um, yeah.’
You can see that all this possibly has more to do with Rufus’s own disenchantment and boredom than with any great romantic attachment to Cora. But the affair with Cora has already become bound up with the desire to escape for a while the bonds and strictures he feels or imagines he feels in the Loyola classroom, to get out of home, to cheat time and skip out into the wide world for an adventure. Rufus still thinks of himself as Romeo to Cora’s Juliet. He is the youngest child of a large family and his mother is dead. He and his father rattle around in the house that is most efficiently managed by Heidi the Housekeeper who may one day end up marrying Rufus’s Daddo Salvatore, consultant to the MOSE Project. Although the relationship between Salvatore and Heidi is not part of this story, it’s a nice idea, and a definite possibility. You know how I am about romance.
I also like thinking about how ‘large families’ form and how they function and how they can be whittled down to one man in a big stone house with a housekeeper and one restless boy on the move. As a girl with the company of not one but two imaginary friends, and not afraid to talk about these friends and their role in my life, I sometimes wonder about the prevalence of imaginary friends in the lives of other people. Maybe they are everywhere but not discussed. Does Salvatore Gigli have a trusty and philosophical shadow who will never leave him? It’s possible. His thoughts and dreams generally are of the mobile barriers designed to protect the three entrances to the Venetian lagoon. These barriers rest on the seabed until storms and high tides threaten, and then, like creatures in a dream, they will inflate and block the rushing waters of the sea from overwhelming the lapping waters of the lagoon. It is a modern miracle of science and technology, like myself.
I shouldn’t say that, I know, but whenever I see the words ‘modern miracle’ I naturally think of myself.
Rufus continued to put the idea of his making the movie in Venice in the vacation to Salvatore who grew quite excited about it and began calling and emailing key people in Italy. They also liked it. So Rufus put it to Thomas Piper who was the design teacher at Loyola, and Tom-Tom simply leapt at it. Tom-Tom may be just a passing figure in this plan, but he was certainly a key player at this point. He went off to the old Dean of Studies at Loyola and convinced him that a student could present a film about engineering in Italy as his major work in his Studio Art Design folio. Did Rufus need to add an extra week to his vacation then? asked the dear old Dean of Studies. Of course he did. Next the request was rubber-stamped by the Principal in his light-filled eyrie decorated with reproductions of thirteenth-century mosaics (some of them, as it happened, from St Mark’s in Venice) in the tower on top of the hill. A brilliant result all round as far as Rufus was concerned. I like all that detail about going up the chain of command to get the metaphoric rubber-stamp that would bring Rufus back to Cora under the highly romantic circumstance of a gondola on a canal under a rising moon.
Before you know what has happened, Rufus with his camera is on an aircraft headed for Italy. He plans to intercut his shots of the project with footage of shops selling masks, and also old footage of his mother and father when they were young, in Venice. He was scooped up in Venice by Valentina Montale, a somewhat sexy unmotherly childless chaperone provided by Salvatore’s colleagues on the MOSE. She took Rufus by water taxi, much to his delight, to her apartment in Dorso Duro where her husband Mario was cooking vast quantities of fish for dinner. Mario’s a chef – but I mustn’t get carried away with everybody’s life-story. Mario is just another passing figure, but important of course, as a boy needs a good dinner and a place to stay.
I am now getting a little ahead of myself. Leave Rufus in his own pleasant Venetian limbo, goblet of wine in one hand, small cigar in the other, leave him where the twilight is silver and where the façade of St Mark’s is losing its twinkles and glitters in the creep of the crepuscular gloom, and the birds – are they swallows? – wheel and flit in the dying light while I do a quick backtrack to Cora and her problems.
The chill Cora had caught while on the riverbank kept her in bed with a fever for two days, much to the alarm of her mother, aunt, hostess and doctor. During those days her father said yes to the holiday and Dr Silver, with a certain feeling of relief, also said yes, and plans began to surge ahead.
I possibly haven’t told you that my imaginary friend Aurora Flare is of a positive turn of mind, whereas Amber Moon is inclined to be negative, not always, but often. So when the three of us and Google sat down among the mirrors and the snow globes to mull over the romantic encounter between Corazón the Fertile and Rufus the Virile that lovely cool midnight by the darkly babbling brook, Aurora thought it was delicious and hopeful, while Amber felt the dull beating of distant and ominous drums. She leans towards the primitive as well as the negative. We also talked over the long walk taken by Diana and Callianthe by the self-same riverbank. A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk along the briny beach – well, there was really no beach and they bore little resemblance to the Walrus and the Carpenter, but I love that poem and like to make reference sometimes.
Aurora and
Amber and I see this walk and talk as a key moment in the narrative. Much as we find ourselves drawn to the image of Cora and Rufus locked in passion, we know we must now focus on how Callianthe and Diana, who are both, among other things, mothers of dead children, are united here at the other end of the earth by the cause of the dear lost Bambinello. Cora and Rufus will come back, but for now let’s roam in the fertile meadows down by the riverside with the elder stateswomen of the piece. Yes, this is the self-same location in which you last saw the young lovers. Life can be very like the theatre, with its recycled sets.
The two women meandered through the overhanging willows and scrubby tea-trees, along the grassy path from which they could look down to the water moving thoughtfully, secretive, below them. The deep unspoken link between the women, something they will never discuss (perhaps they should?), consists of the ghosts of little Eleena and baby Xavier. These perfect sprites of unfulfilled beauty and loving are powerful haunters and demanding clients on the heart and mind.
Callianthe simply never speaks of Eleena, who resides in her heart of hearts, deep deep down. All pictures of her destroyed or hidden away. Callianthe is unaware of the seaside painting in Rosita’s studio. Diana will sometimes speak of Xavier, whose image decorates her apartment and the homes of her Australian and Spanish families, but she knows she must not bring him into being when Callianthe is present. The unspoken, strange to tell, is the core of the link between them. Well, perhaps that is not so very strange. Friends, family and neighbours over the years often commented that Callianthe was never the same after Eleena was killed. Although she had other children there was something distinctly preoccupied, distant, sorrowful – what is the word – removed – about her. She was functioning in this world, functioning as you have seen, quite brilliantly really, but she was somehow truly living and loving in the place where Eleena’s spirit called her.
Diana had always been an oddity – her double grief did not so much change her as confirm her in her ways, allowing her to be the self she had always been. She gave much of her time and thought to the continuing of her late husband’s work on the history of the black statues of the Virgin, a curious and fitting task, one for which Diana was suited. Avila certainly saw it that way; she considered Diana was made, put on earth, sent to document the history of the great and deeply mysterious images of the Black Virgin. I have a certain sympathy for this, being a collector of Black Virgins in snow globes myself.
Callianthe and Diana spoke of their happy memories of the past in this place, of Diana’s life in Spain, which was vivid and exotic, exciting and dangerous in the mind of Callianthe, and then they came to Diana’s plans to take Cora to Europe. Truth to tell, Callianthe had a feeling that this idea was a gesture of grand arrogance on the part of Diana, a kind of illegitimate entitlement to the life of her goddaughter. Callianthe knew Diana of old, and knew of her manipulations, of a selfishness and blindness at the heart of them. Although she realised Diana acted from genuine goodness as well.
It is quite complicated, hard to tease out the motives Callianthe can discern in Diana’s current plans. Of course there is a certain wisdom in them, and Callianthe is aware of the richness the travels will bring into Cora’s life. And yet, and yet, the child will surely be soon well enough to go back to school and do her final exams and lead a normal girl’s life at college. There seems to be some error somewhere in making Cora special and different to this degree. Surely?
These are thoughts, not words, although at times Callianthe is but a heartbeat away from uttering, from giving voice to her wisdom, which just may be more highly developed than the colourful and erratic wisdom of Diana. Callianthe does not, any more than Diana does, discern anything deeper and more serious and disturbing in Edith’s willingness to go along with Diana on all this. They do in fact walk over the exact spot where Rufus and Cora lay in the night by the river. They disturb with their strolling feet the very leaves and grasses recently rearranged by the passions of the lovers.
I like to imagine the scene from above, like to look at Callianthe and Diana through the leaves, see the way the shadows move across them as they walk along the riverbank. And I hear the murmur of their voices, as they imaginatively place Cora on the Spanish Steps, at Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Uffizi (oh, how she will love the Uffizi, my dear), the Prado, St Mark’s, the Grand Canal. The conversation flits around the theme park of old Europe, lands momentarily in Santa Maria in Aracoeli.
I note again the Bambinello is a copy, that this apparently makes no difference to the efficacy of the prayers. I hear Diana will take a letter to the Copy on behalf of Callianthe. I hope it is not going to herald another catastrophe in the history of the Bamb. Then again I think maybe this is the letter that will be the miraculous agent that ultimately brings the genuine article back home to the Aracoeli. Is that possible? Well, I too can dream. The letter will be in yet another exquisite pink envelope from Callianthe’s writing desk. When I was a child, I, like many another, used to post letters in holes in rocks and cracks of trees in the hope that they would be collected by the fairies. All I am saying here is that this desire to communicate by post with mysterious and beautiful beloved beings beyond human sight and human knowing is probably common and normal. The fact that these grown and, let’s face it, ancient women in their elegant dresses and sensible shoes (one more elegant than the other who leans towards the sensible for walks beside the water) can be roaming under the willows planning written missives to a wooden statue in Rome, a statue that is a copy of a miracle-working statue at that, is not so very strange.
I am moreover familiar with the letter trope in literature, with the letters that cause so much trouble and the letters that resolve so much in the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Henry James, of the letter motif in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, even of the fateful letter Gatsby sent to Daisy. These letters are everywhere. Take Chapter Eight of Ian McEwan’s Atonement for instance. Today the letters would of course be more likely to be emails or texts. Phone calls won’t do, although they have their place in literature, a place that changed dramatically with the coming of the cell phone, as I have noted in the drama of Corazón and Rufus whose affair developed on the cusp of the coming of the cell. The nature of the carrier has changed, he is no longer the postman or the servant on horseback, but he is still called ‘the server’ or ‘the carrier’, the carrier having distinct echoes of disease and pestilence. One thing about the letter trope is that in the end the audience or the reader gets to know what is in the letter, that being the role and the point of having the letter in the first place. However you and I are probably never going to know what it was that Callianthe wrote in her notes to the Bambinello or, as I see it, to the Copy.
What Callianthe does not know as she muses with Diana beside the river is that wild romantic Diana the Manipulator has developed, in the course of the conversation, a sudden and restless desire to try to find the original miraculous and miracle-working statue, to snatch it from the clutches of its pirates and kidnappers and to return it to its altar, its rightful place, its own personal glass case. You could here begin to think of Tintin or maybe even Indiana Jones. Such an idea is really beyond the ken of Callianthe who is not at all a crusader or even a doer; she’s a worthy pious respectable grandmother who has, after all, provided a welcome and a haven for Edith and her wayward daughter. The world needs its Callianthes, that’s for sure; and no doubt the world needs its Dianas.
Of course at this point Diana has not met Cosimo the Archivist, the Trickster, and has not paid much attention to the doctrine of Furta Sacra. If the Bambinello wishes to be away somewhere, that’s his own business, according to Furta Sacra and Cosimo. Since the statue is miraculous in the first place, it has a living self, and theft of it against its will is not possible. Perhaps in Diana the Bamb has met his match – I suppose I’m joking – maybe not. You have to remember that Diana’s husband was a scholar, and an expert in these matters, and that the grand project of Diana’s life, a project to
which, at some level, she pays attention constantly, is the completion of his book on the statues and paintings of the Black Madonna, she who is the Dark Lady of the troubadours and shares their wild language – all phenomena that are separate but not entirely distinct from the wayward Bambinello.
Once you step into these waters, I might say oceans, you find yourself in a possible other dimension where ordinary boundaries slip away. The Irish in particular say that bees can take you into that dimension, can penetrate the invisible barrier between what is known in the here-and-now and what exists in the next place. For the Irish, there is a second world separated from this one by a membrane, a world run according to its own laws. You may find your way into that world by dropping into wells, or passing swiftly through a mirror, or by following the pathway of particular honeybees.
As the two women ramble along the wild little path beside the river, innocent in their way, Rufus and Cora are on the phone, hotly making plans for Rufus to be given all details of the proposed journey in order that the two young lovers may meet in the Old World. The idea of meeting Cora in Italy or Spain during his school vacation has now taken hold of Rufus, and he will not be stopped. A certain common sense has prevailed, in that he will return to school for the final part of the semester, and will complete his exams. Cora of course will not do this. It remains to be seen just when Cora will get back home. Rosita will have to be back at school for the second part of the semester.
Chapter Eight
Humble-Bumble Hocus-Pocus Pudding-and-Pie
And so it was that Diana the Manipulator and her charges, Cora the Fertile and Rosita the Spinster, arrived in Rome where they lodged in an apartment in a convent hard by the south wall of the Vatican. This was where Diana usually stayed. Rosita was ecstatic; Cora was bemused. She was accustomed to staying in Australian hotels with room service and gift shops, but Diana is able to infuse most situations and events with her own joy and enthusiasm. The convent has cloisters and a fountain and grottoes and mysterious stone corridors. This was okay by Cora in its creepy old way.