by Carmel Bird
The gallery in Diana’s apartment could strike terror into your heart.
I suppose it is strange to live in an apartment where one whole section is full of shelves and shelves of dark little ladies, some of whom have performed miracles in their own lands. Diana takes it as a matter of course, and in fact the existence of this gallery is I believe the reason for her remaining in Barcelona. It is a vocation. It is something her own distant family has never even begun to understand. Why doesn’t Diana come home, they say. Why must she moulder away in that empty apartment in Spain when she could be here in Woodpecker Point, happy and cared for among her family who love her, among the flowers and the fresh air?
Rosita would spend the final few days of her vacation at Diana’s apartment before flying back to Melbourne. She continued faithfully to pray for the recovery of the Bambinello, placing her requests for intercession before the Virgins in the gallery. Cora would stay on with Diana, impatient and difficult in her anxiety to be free to fall into the arms of her beloved Rufus back home. Her school studies were on hold. Her education had taken in fact a turn for the better, since instead of having her head in a book and her fingers on a keyboard, she now had her eyes opened to a certain level of reality. Of course her fingers were almost permanently on her cell as were her eyes, but in theory she was experiencing European life in all its richness and diversity.
Cora was taking a gamble on prayer and invoking the whole gallery of Virgins in her cause, which was to get herself back home. When they later went out to Montserrat she made a very specific bargain/request to the alarmingly beautiful Black Virgin out there on the dizzy raggedy mountain. If the Virgin would get her on a plane to Australia, she would marry Rufus and dedicate her first child, boy or girl, to Montserrat. Cora stopped weeping in the night, and developed a new and glowing confidence – which was supremely attractive to the young man in the apartment on the floor below.
While she was staying with Diana, Cora learnt a great deal of colloquial Spanish and not a little Catalan, and bought a huge number of pairs of shoes and also dresses and shirts. She bought fifteen black mantillas to take home to the women in her family, and she kept buying tiny little teddy bears and very small brass musical boxes to take home for Rufus. In the end there were eight of these. Heaven knows what Rufus would make of them, but the intention was a loving one. This girl is a collector in the making.
Cora visited Madrid, going to the Prado several times, and she, like Rosita, was amazed and enthralled and inspired by seeing such glowing wonders as Las Meniñas – this became her favourite painting for a time.
Diana’s gallery of Black Virgins was not in fact the heart and soul of the apartment. A very small room, the nursery, was the perpetual shrine to baby Xavier. It was painted in Mediterranean blue and white, and was almost bare, containing a table on which was one small photograph of Xavier dressed in lace for his baptism. Beside the picture, a burning candle and a vase of fresh flowers. And beside the table a prie-dieu on which there was a white rosary. That was all. The room was alive with something quite intangible and indescribable. I suppose it was grief and love. Corazón did not like going in there, it frightened her.
Before Rosita left for home, the three of them visited, not only Montserrat, but also the twisting, dreamlike fairytale houses built by Antoni Gaudí, and his soaring singing eternally unfinished cathedral La Sagrada Familia which was full of scaffolding and men with wheelbarrows of stone and gravel. They were, after all, tourists of a kind. Cora in particular was inspired to get back to drawing and painting, and Diana set up a studio for her. Rosita was more pleased than she could say about this turn of events, since Cora was her top student, and had not touched a paintbrush since the late afternoon of the shocking bloody episode in the art room out beyond the Lourdes grotto. It now seemed to be so very long ago, and Cora seemed to be a different girl.
On the visit to Montserrat, a rather curious thing happened. On the train out, the carriage was empty save for one other woman. She resembled more than anything a child’s version of a witch – bundles of black clothes, a long nose and a pointy chin, gnarled fingers, sharp and beady eyes, gaps in her teeth, black lace-up boots, a large black leather bag, a huge wrought golden cross hanging on her breast. She smiled and nodded at the others, paying particular attention it seemed to Corazón, who found her friendly and fascinating. The carriage rocked along, and the witch swayed with it, and from time to time she hummed a little tune. Diana told Cora it was a prayer to the Black Virgin of Montserrat.
When they all bundled into the cabin that would take them flying up on the cable, soaring above the grand abysses between the mountain peaks, Cora became very frightened, in fact she was paralysed with terror. Down down down into nowhere stretched the grey boulders, and the cabin with its cargo of fragile human beings went zinging and swinging along in the empty air, on a cable, beside the soaring eagles, a tiny capsule of beating hearts and hopes and fluttering fears. To plunge down the side of the mountain and die now, before she ever saw Rufus again, before she lived at all, before everything – Cora was completely terrified.
Tears spilled from her eyelids, which were clenched tight shut. Her breath came in rasping gusts. Her face was white and she was about to faint.
Then the witch woman from the train moved forward and took Cora in her arms, where she held her until Cora’s breathing became regular. Still she held her, and into the silence of the sailing cabin there came a sweet calm. When they arrived at Montserrat Cora was steady, smiling and filled with a bright new energy. She turned to thank the woman, but the woman was gone.
They passed through a hall where the gratitude of supplicants was manifest in gifts hanging on the walls – letters of thanks, wax replicas of limbs that had healed, scraps of fabric, abandoned wooden crutches, photographs of babies and children, photographs of weddings.
They made the pilgrimage, with a large group of people speaking a babel of languages, into the church and up the steps to La Moreneta, the statue of the Black Virgin of Montserrat. Bells were ringing.
The Virgin sat in majesty on her throne, her child on her knee, surrounded everywhere by gold. She was encased in a glass cage, from which a circle had been cut to allow the pilgrims to touch the hand that held the orb, the great sphere of power and might.
In the slow-moving queue that snaked up towards this queen of everything, Cora found herself behind the miraculous witch woman from the cable car, and again a lovely peace descended upon her. She kissed her own hand and then touched the bulge of the orb through the hole in the glass, her heart filled to bursting with her love of life, her love of Rufus, her sudden, startling, unexpected and profound longing for a child of her own.
The Moreneta specialises in this particular field. She sends something like an electrical impulse from that golden orb in her right hand down down down into the ovaries of her chosen clientele. She seems, as far as I can tell – which is not so very far of course, but I have made a certain study of these things – she seems to pay particular fond and compassionate attention to wicked little sinners such as Corazón Mean. Maybe she even healed the hapless fallopian tube that was blasted by the ectopic foetus and neatly severed by Mr Benedetto the surgeon in the clinic in Gloucestershire Road. I suppose nobody will ever know.
The long mediaeval fingers of La Moreneta somewhat resemble my own fingers, I think. Or vice versa.
After Cora’s moments with La Moreneta, she and Diana and Rosita entered the small chapel behind where the statue was enthroned. And there, alone before the altar, they found the witch woman kneeling in silent prayer, weeping.
They never saw this woman again, but when they got into the cabin to make the journey down the mountain, Cora was perfectly serene.
Chapter Twelve
Marriages Performed at Sea
Cora did not stay in Spain with Diana as long as everyone expected. She developed a mysterious skin condition that also affected her eyesight, and within three months she was back home in Woodp
ecker Point. She never returned to school to complete her exams, never went to college to study art. She simply set up a studio in the old barn and began to paint the pictures of the local people and area that would eventually make her famous. The cliffs and the sea, the forests and the rocks. Gone were the weird metamorphoses of such works as the Arnolfini wedding. Corazón became a realist. In fact she became a hyper-realist. And in due course she became engaged to Rufus, and before too long they were married in the local church at Woodpecker Point, after which they went to live in Melbourne where Rufus would later become the new noise in water engineering, working on the River Murray which was apparently highly problematic.
A totally regular life was now mapped out for Rufus and Cora. Of course such mapping is not always accurate. You are wondering about Cora’s fertility, especially after her encounter with La Moreneta – I will get to that.
Avila went ahead of Barnaby and me in order to oversee in situ the wedding of Corazón and Rufus in Corazón’s home town of Woodpecker Point. It is quite unusual for her to do this, to travel personally to the location in advance. It was such a simple wedding really, that it was not entirely clear to me why they needed to engage the services of Marriages Performed at Sea in the first place, but after the event I realised that it had been Avila’s own idea. She was on the one hand keen to do it because of her friendship with Diana, who was really the power behind it, and on the other hand you could say she was doing research for possible future ceremonies. I am a cynic, but there you have it. Rural Tasmania is easy to sell as an exotic wedding location to jaded American and European celebrities, not to mention the Japanese, if you know what you are doing. So it was personal for Avila, but it was also business. That’s Avila, you see.
In any case she had for many years harboured a desire to visit Tasmania, having read about it as a remote paradise of wild cliffs and strange beasts when she was at school in Menlo Park. The island was discovered by the Dutch in 1642, roughly thirty years after the English and Dutch seadogs on the Half Moon discovered New York. I like to put things into context. I got that word ‘seadog’ from Bartleby’s Great Books Online and couldn’t resist using it. Seadogs – what a word, what an image, what a thought.
Another connection to Tasmania is that Barnaby once operated on a child with a rare genetic optic disorder in Hobart, and he had fond memories. But these slender facts were the extent of our contact with the island, apart from our slight family connection with the Means, coming from Barnaby’s relationship to the man who invented the cultured pearl. So there we were, me and Avila/Barnaby and Isabella – and don’t forget Amber and Aurora. Those native American girls being native Americans were dead keen to learn about the tragic fate of the indigenous Tasmanians, and they also exhibited an unhealthy interest in a massacre of the members of a religious cult in more recent years at the village of Skye.
We all arrived late one afternoon after the longest airline flight in the history of the universe. The thought of the return flight was almost too much for me, and I seriously considered staying on. Doing what I can’t imagine, and then there’s Google to consider. He obviously can’t stay at Linda’s Lodge forever. Life is complicated.
When we got there we discovered we had entered another dimension in time. This was totally yesteryear. Grandfather Frank would have adored it, I think, yes, he would have simply adored it. His writing was not always about the future, but often about the meaning of the past. So I think he would have been right into it. I adored it. We all adored it. Isabella took long walks along the cliffs, her eyes filled with a strange longing, for what I do not know.
I was naturally very interested in the popular Tasmanian scientific project to attempt to bring back an extinct animal, a kind of wolf, having as I do a certain fellow-feeling with the lost creature that is going to be re-manufactured. For all I know I am the only living example of two extinct families. For all I will ever know. Of course Barnaby and I hardly ever get to go to Avila’s weddings, since they are her business and we are generally occupied elsewhere. But after all, this wedding is special and different, and it is a key part of my narrative.
And then there’s my own fascination with Australia, and Tasmania is part of Australia, and is really faraway from everywhere, as became so very obvious on the aircraft. Once upon a time there was a tiny island that had drifted, drifted far off into the cold cold waters near the South Pole. And on that island there lived a girl, and she fell in love with a beautiful young man and – oh, take him and cut him out in little stars!
The house where Corazón grew up is buried deep, yes, like a house in a fairytale, in a small forest of old European trees, concealed from the road with the secrecy of dark cypress and fir, which on cold winter nights weave their black magic under the stars. The trees are full of birds and beasts. And here in the heavens there are stars, here the air is clean and clear, and the light from the heavens, now near now far, is sharp and whistling. You expect a highwayman to come riding, riding – I believe this used to be the case. The house gables are high and steep, with elaborate wooden finials and fascia boards, the upstairs rooms nestling under sloping ceilings, their windows looking out into the dense foliage all around. Whitewashed it is, this early nineteenth-century Colonial mansion house of winding staircases, narrow hallways and sudden tiny rooms opening one into another.
The ground floor is marked by a veranda sheltering every side of the building, flagged with golden stone cut into the pattern of honeycomb. One end of the veranda is glassed in with large square panes of old uneven glass set in weathering green wooden frames. Bluestone steps lead up to the wide green front door around which gather hand-painted panels, square ones and circular ones, showing native flowers and birds set in scenes describing the seasons. Coinspots and gules of bright colour fall on the wooden boards of the hallway as the afternoon light shines through the glass pictures, which were painted by an ancestor, Niña, who also painted pictures on the panels of the wooden altar in the local church of the Infant of Prague. The place is always full of dogs, large and small, causing me to miss my own Google, but also comforting me. Isabella says that one of the little ones, a King Charles spaniel, reminds her of Google, but as far as I can see his markings are quite different and so is his temperament. While sweet, he is also profoundly unintelligent (unlike my Google) and the children about the place like to drop him in the fountain and marvel as he slowly drifts to the bottom like a stone and has to be dramatically rescued. Needless to say while I was at Woodpecker Point I spent many hours on the live feed to Google in Santa Monica.
I spent some of my time exploring the little rooms and staircases and hallways of the old house itself. There were deep brown velvet curtains and ancient studded leather armchairs and lounges, cute recessed windows with little diamond panes looking onto herb gardens, and low tables with crystal vases filled with the heavenly pastel of multicoloured roses. Copper pans and horse brasses and huge silver tureens. It was like being in a children’s historical TV drama. Everything glowed and gleamed with polished wax, and breathed with the perfume of lavender and beeswax. I took to drifting about the place peering into nooks and crannies, opening tiny cupboards and smooth little drawers. Nobody seemed to mind, they were so incredibly busy with preparations for the wedding.
I was a silent treasure-seeker wanting to discover the jewels or the map or the letter or the diary. I found the diary. A collection of diaries. Edith Mean was a diligent memoirist. There was no fabrication here, just plain fact after plain fact going back to her schooldays.
The collection was in a deep drawer of a lovely tall oak chest on the landing outside my hosts’ bedroom. It was a bunch of assorted journals, many of them those illustrated ones from the Victoria and Albert Museum. They were all written in lead pencil, in the flowing copperplate they used to teach at Sacred Heart schools all over the world. It scarcely changed over the years of the journals. I flicked through them with idle fascination, and I happened upon the one where Edith had recorded the time
she was called to Lisieux to the fatal meeting with Dr Silver. There I found the two words that gave me the key to Cora’s story. ‘Ectopic pregnancy’. On a page opposite a picture of a della Robbia relief of the Virgin and Child with cherubs. Sad irony. The words sat there among the sentences in vivid isolation; they leapt out at me.
Yes, I am the kind of girl who will read your diary then use the details in her book.
The local church at Woodpecker Point is another storybook place, standing on the edge of a river, looking out moodily across the water. It is a tiny ghostly white stone place, with a square Norman tower and a crumbly old graveyard and a bright red lychgate. I have never before seen a red lychgate. It is totally cute in a kind of Chinese way. The pointed windows of the church are slim and tall, filled with small squares of old pink and bloodred glass with a few pale green ones scattered throughout.
There really is something eerily mediaeval about this church. And in a tiny cave-like side chapel there is something unexpected, even amazing. The wall is decorated with a dim and dusty fresco, a primitive picture of a delicate Black Virgin standing among local native landscape and a feathering of ferns, moss and tiny pale yellow orchids. The figure is a portrait of an unknown indigenous girl, a member of the tribe of people who were living in this area when Europeans arrived. It is one of the loveliest and most endearing Black Madonnas I have seen, and even if I have not visited all that many shrines, I have seen Diana’s collection in Barcelona.
‘Sydney,’ Diana said to me in a whisper, ‘this is so very strange and astonishing. A Black Virgin right here in Woodpecker Point. Look!’
I peered through the soft gloom of the church, drawn by the laser green of the figure’s eyes. The picture makes no claim to miraculous properties, but casts a smoky spell on the space where it is located. And it was done by the same Niña who did the scenes on glass around the front door to the house. The pictures around the base of the altar are also hers, and they are very affecting: the image of a pelican pecking her own breast for her children, the image of the Sacred Heart – just the heart in deep and sinister vermilion with its cruel thorns and leaping flames of love – and also the image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary with its wreath of flesh-pink roses. The style again is primitive, bright and shining and innocent.