by Carmel Bird
Other examples of Niña’s work can be seen in the museums in Launceston and Hobart, but I have not visited those places. People imagine that Cora’s artistic talent is derived from Niña, but Niña was in fact no relation to Cora—Niña was thrown from a sinking ship, saved by a miracle and adopted by the Means. Her origins are completely unknown. And she had no children.
It is curious that Diana had never, before this particular visit to her childhood home and childhood church, really considered Niña’s picture of the indigenous woman as another example of the Black Virgin. Now she knelt in prayer before it, in prayer, wonder and astonishment. She saw a circle completing itself; here was her own Black Virgin, looking over her from the day of her own birth; this was to her another kind of miracle, that the Virgin could have been here, invisible to her heart, and now revealed. This was the final image she would eventually list in Federico’s book, a final domestic touch from the heart. She photographed it, and she commissioned Cora to paint a replica for her to hang in the gallery in Barcelona.
To me as the recorder of these events, the revelation of the Virgin in the church at Woodpecker Point was also a wonderful thing. As someone (and I am not alone) who sees the world more or less as a vast theme park filled with facsimiles of old churches and mansions such as these, it is always a delicious thrill to realise that here in Woodpecker Point I am looking at the original. I am accustomed to the whims of cultural materialism, so it is nice to have my expectations undercut. The world is really the snow globe of God. Speaking of globes, nobody has yet made one of Woodpecker Point, which is not a big tourist location. It is a tiny seaside town where nothing much happens, and the people seem content to have it stay that way. The Means have always been a prominent family here. The Means and the O’Days – Diana and Edith being O’Days. Avila naturally fell in love with the flower farm – it’s exactly and totally what she has forever wanted, but even she can see that she would not really fit in here in the wild wild end of nowhere, however romantic it might seem. Avila sells romance, she does not live it. She is a practical woman. I might even say coldly practical, apart from her mystical and romantic side.
It is not as small a farm as I had expected. They grow a lot of lavender for the cosmetic industry, as well as opium for the pharmaceutical companies. I can tell you that the sight of the mist-green fields of opium, washed with swags of drifting, floating poppies of a breathless and mysterious pink, was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. We stayed in the Palace Hotel which is another candidate for the theme park, being a not-so-shrunken version of all the grand old Victorian hotels with fancy iron lace on the verandas you have ever seen or imagined. Isabella admired the crisp white cotton and linen and lace in the bedrooms, and so did I. There were cut flowers in every room, just all over everywhere. It was like being on the set for a costume drama/romance. And in a sense that is where we were.
Cora’s wedding, which would make a delicious globe all on its own, took place just after twilight. The face of the moon high in a cloudless sky. The church was candle-lit – the altar ablaze, the body of the church hotly flickering with fat wax candles in glass lanterns placed on the end of every pew. The only flowers were masses of pink and white daphne, heavy with perfume in the warm air. Rufus and his cousins wore a heightened ceremonial version of the imitation military costume Rufus often affected, even in everyday life.
Corazón’s bridesmaids – Pieta, the girl who did not eat the florentine in Dr Silver’s study, and some cousins – were in shades of pink, while Cora herself wore a gown that was white but tinged in its folds and shadows with green. This green, her aunts all commented, was unlucky, but Cora had as ever a mind of her own and could override family superstition. She wore the driven-snow white Brussels lace veil that had been worn by her mother and grandmother. I suppose it was with some relief for her mother at least that she was with child, Edith knowing what she knew about the ectopic event of the past. I love that expression: ‘With child.’ Cora’s healthy fallopian tube was working, her mother’s prayers answered. The pill, you know, has a one in one hundred failure rate. Trust Cora the Fertile to be the one. Or for all I know she might have given up the pill altogether. Her revelation at Montserrat counts for a great deal, I think. It was an acknowledgement of her urgent desire to procreate.
The bridal couple looked nothing like the Arnolfinis really, but the image of that pair kept coming to my mind. Maybe the green tinge of the bride’s gown was a gesture towards the painting, maybe I am just fancying and romancing. Cora also resembled the lady in the green dress on the white horse in the May picture in the Book of Hours of the Duc de Berry. This mediaeval lady is much prettier than Mrs Arnolfini, as is Cora herself. I have to say Cora looked incredibly youthful, almost a child. Sometimes it is hard for me to believe she is three years older than me.
Rufus’s father was accompanied by Heidi the Housekeeper, giving rise to pleasant and expectant gossip and speculation of another union in the near future. The music was provided by the little old organ and a harp as well as several recorders. It was like fairy music. The wedding march was Sibelius’s Language of the Birds. The whole event was overseen by an ancient-looking statue of the Infant of Prague, in a scarlet velvet dress, who had been elevated to a central position high above the altar.
Roland Bruccoli was the celebrant. I suppose he too was quite pleased to be joining this particular pretty pair in matrimony. The wedding maybe cancels out the sins surrounding the more or less bungled Confession all that time ago in the chapel at Lisieux. That’s my take on it, anyhow. Callianthe sent a box containing two hundred and fifty of her Spur of the Moment Celebration Vanilla Surprises. There were the usual great piles of wedding gifts ranging from a small riverside apartment in Melbourne from Rufus’s father to a delicate family heirloom silver sugar caster from one of Cora’s aunts.
In the manner of weddings I have read about in remote parts of rural France, the company walked to the church from the Means’ house and back again, lit by candles all the way. The feast was under a marquee in the garden of the house. Everything lit by thousands of twinkling lights and burning flares. Diana drifted elegantly through the crowd, trailing a wonderful perfume I could not identify, and fluttering the breathless pale chartreuse chiffon of the sleeves of her dress. Rosita remained seated at a table with her glass of wine, and seemed to me to be lost in a happy dream.
There was a moment when I found myself sitting in the garden of the house, on a stone seat beside a natural spring, above which was placed a romantic fountain from France. My companion was Roland, and this was when he told me that Cosimo had died the week before.
You think that people in the stories you are telling yourself about the world will always be there in the story, there for more action, more detail, more events. But there under the trees in Woodpecker Point I learned that Cosimo the Trickster was no more. That thread of my tale had been snipped. Roland was obviously very moved by the death, and I felt sad myself. This was when I brought up the matter of the Bambinello.
Roland looked startled for a moment, and then became reflective. I asked him did he think they would ever find it, and he said he thought it was improbable, but not impossible. Then he went into an explanation of Furta Sacra and said he imagined that when the statue was ready it would reveal itself. I didn’t like to argue with this. Well, you can’t, can you? As time moved gently on there in the shadows, and as our glasses were filled over and over again by thin waiters who drifted up mysteriously from behind the trees, Roland told me of a recent walk he had taken.
This walk was a familiar one, that took him to the old sportsground where Eleena had died. He still hated the place, but was drawn to it by a deep longing within himself, by the hope of a sudden glint of a cherry-red bead in a low frond of leaves, bright green as sharp as wasabi. He sat on a wooden bench beside the oval and the words Eleena had said to him all those years ago unfurled before his eyes in a kind of bright unreality like an hallucination.
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sp; ‘This is nice, Rolly,’ she said, ‘this is nice.’
Roland had stood up and looked down from the top of the embankment to where a man was approaching on a ride-on mower, preparing the field for the next match. A broad sea of dandelions, unchecked, presented a thick surface of green and gold, as well as a soft cloud of gossamer that floated above the rest. As the engine of the mower whined in the quiet air, the turning blades chopped into the plants – flowers, leaves and white fluffy clocks were cut swiftly down. The milk, the sap sweet in death; the seeds crushed or floating free, caught by little breezes, drifting off somewhere, somewhere, somewhere.
I am left ever after to wonder how and why Roland, his voice breathy and his eyes shining, chose me to tell of his walk to the sportsground, why he entrusted his long sad feelings about his sister to the irrelevant distant relative he met under a tree beside a French stone fountain in the wild reaches of the Tasmanian forests. Was he affected by drink? I said almost nothing; it was as if I wasn’t there. The lights from the wedding fell in yellow incandescence on our faces, the silver of the moon blessing our heads through the shadows of the embracing trees. Directly above us was an old walnut tree, reminding me of the garden at my grandparents’ house in Mendocino. We looked up at the stars and marvelled at the miracle of creation, of our existence. I said nothing about the nature of my own existence, my own personal miracle; it seemed somehow out of place in the atmosphere of innocent simplicity and strange vast matters of the spirit, in the moonlight.
My lucky silver and malachite ring seemed to gleam mysteriously on my finger as I rested my hand on the edge of the fountain. We were sitting on stone, but we were floating, definitely floating, perhaps on water, perhaps on cloud, perhaps on a dense cushion of dandelion clocks. We peered down into the water looking for fish, but in the voluptuous darkness nothing could be seen finning its way along in its world. Sometimes a sharp liquid glimmering of silky moonlight moved swiftly across the surface of the water. When I squinted I could see the joyous crowd in the distance as if they were fish swimming among shifting flotillas of flowers. The sounds of the wedding party washed to and fro in waves and puffs of joy, little heartbeats of song and chatter. There was dancing on the terrace. Closer to us was the quiet gurgle and splish of the fountain. I imagined there were fish moving about beneath the surface of the water. I could hear a frog dangling its deep notes in the spaces between the waterweeds.
Roland and me – we are the still point of the turning world. If that sounds a bit overblown, that’s how it felt. And then Roland Bruccoli did the thing that really tied me in to this whole story of the young lovers and the lost Baby statue. He took both my hands in his, and for a freaky weird moment I thought he was going to declare his undying love. Then, with his face close to mine he smiled, there in the deep shadows of the walnut tree, and he said the thing that was really on his mind. He said, ‘If my sister had lived, I can see that she would have been a lot like you.’
This was a totally astounding fantasy, it creeped me out, it left me breathless with its weird and crazy logic. I think he was about to weep. He stood up and said a little blessing and then he disappeared as if by magic back into the party, leaving me by the stone fountain, my mind spinning with champagne and with the memory of his strange sad behaviour.
Roland left Woodpecker Point early the next morning, taking Pieta the bridesmaid with him in his car. We followed them at a distance of about ten minutes, Barnaby driving with a kind of voluptuous ease along the road that runs along the cliff-tops. We were all on our way to the little airport, a convoy of guests back on life’s highway after the wedding. On the crumbling brick wall of a deserted building behind a gas station, Roland caught a glimpse of the faded lettering of an advertisement: ‘Vinnicombe’s Laundry Liquid’. He smiled when he saw that, Cosimo’s long involved story echoing in his memory, and stopped for gas.
Leaving Pieta in the car, he began to cross the road to take a last long look at the sea, down to the sea and out to the horizon. He was hit by a truck and died right there. Pieta, white and silent, knelt beside him with the truck driver, both of them momentarily helpless with disbelief. The man from the gas station, the only whole building visible for miles, also stood there, staring, large hands hanging heavy by his sides.
There was no other traffic passing until we arrived a few minutes later. We stopped and everyone stood about in the bright sunlight of the morning. The sky was empty of birds, the vast silver world stretched out, out to everywhere and nowhere. Propelled by the impact, the body of the priest had been thrown some distance along the gravel on the edge of the road. The driver, his voice high and strangled, spoke once in a burst:
‘One minute he wasn’t there.
‘And then he was.
‘And I hit him.
‘I never saw him.
‘He came out of nowhere.
‘Jeez.
‘I never saw him.’
You will remember it was Pieta who was the witness to Cora’s original fainting in the art room at Lisieux. This girl has a certain unfortunate relationship with Destiny. Was the death of Roland Bruccoli some sort of suicide? People asked this question, as people always will. Did he for some reason throw himself under the truck? I say no. Impossible. For a fleeting moment I considered it, thought there was some instability evident in our meeting at the fountain, but this was in fact a totally ridiculous idea. It was an accident, much like the accident that befell Eleena – in an excess of the joy of living, Roland, like his sister, was cut down.
Cora will forever be blamed for wearing the green dress to her wedding. The ill omen of that dress leapt from the bride herself to the priest. It takes more than a bride and groom to make a wedding, after all. There’s the priest and the two witnesses, they are all parts of the whole, and any luck that hovers over them can decide to descend on anyone. I am surprised that Avila did not put a stop to the dress from the beginning, but Cora has a way with her that can be very persuasive and beguiling, and Diana the Manipulator was on Cora’s side, after all.
We had driven up to the still and silent scene, arriving before the ambulance. The truck driver had covered Roland with a greasy tartan rug, leaving his face, laced with blood, open to the sky, the heavens. Barnaby was about to start CPR, but this was useless because Roland was dead. Avila took Pieta in her arms and they stood together under the scribble of a scraggy tea-tree, as Avila prayed and whispered to the younger woman, and Pieta shook and sobbed. It is utterly beyond me to comment on God’s plan or the role of suffering or any of those big questions that must inevitably arise at this point. If there is a grand plan, it’s hard to follow.
In the bloody weeds and gravel I found a small section of Roland’s rosary which I picked up and put in my pocket. The rest of the rosary was nowhere to be seen. The crucifix had gone. Had he been saying the Rosary when he was gazing out to sea? I searched for the crucifix with the toe of my boot in the gravel and weeds that led away from the inert tartan heap of Roland’s body. Then I saw the envelope.
A slim brown envelope addressed to Father Roland Bruccoli, postmarked Rome, and splashed with fresh bright blood. I wiped it with my sleeve and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket. I also picked up a small golden card, like a credit card, or more like a tiny playing card, that bore on one side the image of the Bambinello, and on the other a prayer in Italian to the Baby. The card was smeared with Roland’s blood. There was also a pen and a few coins. I collected these. I think everything else had remained on Roland’s body.
Later that week I gave the pen to Roland’s mother, along with the coins and the card and the beads from the Rosary. I had wiped them clean and wrapped them in a silk scarf from Rome. Callianthe was quietly contained, and held me in her arms for a long time.
‘You are a kind, good girl, Sydney,’ she whispered into my hair. ‘Bless you, bless you. I am so very grateful.’
Did I give her the envelope?
No, I did not.
Did I give it to anybody?
>
No.
It dried out and it now resides in my filing cabinet under ‘B’.
Why do I do the things I do?
Why does anybody?
Well, I can’t answer for anybody except myself, but I can tell you that I opened the envelope and read the contents, and as a result of what I read there, I have been able to tell you much of this story. Strictly speaking, I suppose I stole the property of the dead. I decided Roland would have wanted me to have the envelope, and to use it as I saw fit. I figured there was something in his conversation and demeanour, as we sat by the fountain after the wedding, that gave me the right to have the letter. Who owns the story? People ask this question. I say the answer to that question is: Who dares wins.
I have earlier drawn attention to the letter motif in literature, and like a postman I will now deliver.
Reader, You’ve Got Mail.
Cosimo, after much thought and soul-searching, was ultimately moved to set down his thoughts and send them to Roland. Over the years they had been in pleasant email contact, but when it became clear to Cosimo that his time on earth was drawing to a close – I don’t know where I get these turns of phrase, why can’t I just say when he knew he was dying – he searched his heart for someone to whom he could unburden his soul, and to whom he could entrust at least one of his secrets. You will observe that when he rises or descends to the written word he largely abandons the rhythms and rhymes and puns and jokes of the green language of his everyday speech. Although a reader will find that vestiges of the green language to which Cosimo is so devoted do make their appearance, pushing through, as it were, the plainer fabric of his prose. In fact the formality of this letter is I think strangely charming, while being at the same time quite dark and even ominous. The letter is written on Cosimo’s favourite thick cream parchment from Siena, the edges of the pages being torn not cut. He writes with a Parker not unlike my own, but his ink is black, his handwriting regular, rhythmic, the letters almost square, but leaning to the right. There is a bold and frightening certainty and insistence in the hand.