by Helen Garner
She gave a tired laugh. ‘So – she’s out. I think about her a lot. I don’t know where she’s living. She’s not allowed to change her address. She’s got conditions. She’s not allowed to come near me – not to ring, not to write, not to come to Newcastle. If she comes near me I gotta tell them, and she’s straight back in gaol.
‘Nino said to me, “I feel like a boat in the sea. I don’t know which direction to go in. I can’t see land. I can’t see nothing.” ’
‘He’s in despair,’ I said.
‘Yes. Despair.’
‘Is anybody helping you?’
‘Nobody can’t do nothing. Talking don’t help. Nino don’t want to talk about Joe. If I talk about him, he just walk away. He can’t take any more.’
A long silence.
‘It’s a terrible story, Maria,’ I said.
‘When I first got married,’ she said, ‘I wanted all the things I got now – nice house, car, garden. I got everything I wanted. But now – I got nothing. It’s . . .’
‘It’s empty?’
‘It’s empty.’
We said goodbye. I hung up the phone and put my head in my hands. I couldn’t even shed a tear. I heard myself saying, dully, like somebody in a bad movie, ‘Why. Why. Why.’
Not long after this I was offered a position for the first semester of 2002, teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Newcastle. I resisted the temptation to see this thundering coincidence, like the others, as a sign. But whatever it meant, something or nothing at all, I gladly accepted the offer.
I spent four months in Joe Cinque’s home town. At first his parents and I tiptoed around each other. I called Maria and we talked politely on the phone about this and that. Anthony, she told me, had set up house with his new girlfriend. ‘You know where we live,’ she said. ‘You can drop in any minute.’ But I didn’t want to lug my paralysis into their private lives. I waited for a more official invitation.
The first one – for a coffee – came a few weeks after I had started work at the university. I drove out to Charlestown on a scorching summer afternoon, and pulled up at their house five minutes early. Nobody answered the bell. I sat down on the springy buffalo grass outside the front door, and tried to squeeze myself into the patch of shade cast by the single cypress. Soon Maria sped up in her car, flushed and spouting apologies. Together we unloaded the supermarket shopping from the boot. She sat me at the kitchen table while she put the groceries away. From my chair I could see through an archway into the formal dining room. On its table, angled towards the kitchen, stood a large colour photo of Joe. He was seated on a sofa, leaning forward with clasped hands, looking up open-faced into the lens; he was not exactly smiling, but his expression was eager and pleasant. A rosary was draped over the corner of the frame. Each time I came to the house, in the months that followed, Maria would take from me whatever small guestly offering I had brought – a bunch of flowers, a bottle of wine – and place it quietly on the dining table beside Joe’s portrait.
On this first brief afternoon visit, while Maria prepared the coffee and set out cakes, she launched in her low, rapid, husky voice on a great tale about their next-door neighbours, ‘very nice people’, whose tank, however, had a habit of overflowing and flooding the Cinques’ side yard, and whom Nino (today he was out playing bowls) could not persuade to split two ways the cost of a wall. She went on at such enormous length and in such detail about these neighbours, and about another one, a woman who came into their garden without asking and took from their tree large quantities of figs before they were ripe, that I realised she was working to keep at bay the painful subject that I had presumably come to discuss; but the spontaneous images of her talk – an unstoppable flood, the theft of unripe fruit – seemed poetic in their aptness. Then, suddenly swerving, she asked me about my grand-daughter. Did I have a photo? While I was fumbling it out of my wallet she said, with a sweet look, ‘Don’t feel you can’t talk about her. I’m all right about it. I love all children.’
A fortnight later Maria called and invited me over for tea. ‘We eat at six o’clock.’ I drove straight to their place after work. The heavy door again was closed. The fact that they called the evening meal ‘tea’ instead of ‘dinner’ reminded me comfortingly of my childhood in Geelong and places even more provincial, where only strangers knocked at a front door; but I felt it would be a cheek to go round the back. I rang the bell.
Maria came out looking soignée in a rose-pink silky top. She took me inside to the lounge room, where Nino was smoking a cigarette in front of the huge TV. They welcomed me with smiles and formal kisses. Was this their ordinary way of being, this pleasant warmth? I forgot for a while that their son had been murdered, that I knew them only through brutality and misfortune. We sat in a curve like neighbours, drinking beer, laughing and sighing over the Wayne Carey scandal. A great footballer! The captain of his team! All the girls want ’im! And now he does this! In the toilet! With his best friend’s wife! His wife’s in hospital, under sedation! Look, there she is, poor girl! (as a bride, in a great white dress and foaming veil) . . . People are very silly! Do stupid things and wreck their lives! Ah well . . .
When it was time to eat, Nino took his place at the head of the kitchen table with Maria on his left. I was put on his right, but one seat further round. They didn’t have to tell me to leave Joe’s place empty: I remembered with a cringe the faux pas of my first visit to their house.
On this quiet summer evening, though, in the kitchen with its cool tiles, we talked and laughed as people do who have nothing horrible hanging over them. Maria served a sublime and simple meal: spaghetti marinara, then some squid, a dish of small whiting done in light batter, and a salad from Nino’s garden. The wine was in a knobbly glass bottle with a little handle on the neck. We talked about prosciutto and melon in Italy, about the comparative merits of certain makes of car we had owned, about how a timber house can be loaded on to the back of a truck and moved hundreds of miles without falling apart. Nino gave a thrilling description, with many precise and eloquent gestures, of having once seen a huge aluminium chimney being transported in just such a way.
When we had finished eating and drinking, Maria cleared away the plates and brought out two photo albums. We clumped our chairs closer together and worked our way through them at a leisurely pace: all the parties, the family trips, the Big Banana, the Dog on the Tuckerbox; a grandly ornate public building with a speck of a child standing in front of it.
‘Is that . . . Rome?’ I asked.
‘Nah,’ said Nino. ‘Brisbane.’
There was Nino in Germany, lounging outside a cafe with his Italian workmates. Maria as a teenager, slim and long-legged, wearing the sash of Miss Azzurri. Nino with a beard, on a Transfield site where he worked as a fitter. ‘See? That’s the chimney I talk about.’ Two small boys in white shoes and tightly buttoned shirts sat on a floral carpet, looking up into the camera from behind the infinity symbol of a toy railway track. Maria and a woman friend grinned chirpily in student desks: ‘We take a lot of courses.’ A half-built two-storey brick house stood all bare and gawky on a block of land – the very house we were sitting in. ‘We were so excited. But I don’t care about any of it any more.’ A tiny green sapling poked out of the dirt beside a cement path. ‘That’s the tree, see?’ said Maria. ‘In front of the door?’ It was the cypress in whose dense shade I had sat, the afternoon when I arrived early. In the picture it was barely a foot high, a thin plume of green.
When it was time to go home, Maria opened the front door and we stepped out into a clear, grassy summer night. The sky was thick with stars. She gave me a hug. She seemed smaller these days, less grand, not so massive in grief. I asked her if she had lost weight. She pulled a face and shook her head. She told me she was going away for the weekend, without Nino, on a sort of outing to the country with other mothers and wives of murder victims.
‘I ask what to bring. They say, “Just bring yourself. Your beautiful –” ’
‘Your beautiful self.’
She laughed. I drove away.
I wrote a note to Anu Singh at her parents’ address, reminding her of our brief correspondence and asking if she was still inclined to speak to me.
I imagined her telling her parents, her psychiatrist – surely she still had one? – that I had made contact with her. I pictured their anger. I could hear their warnings. Don’t answer. Who does she think she is? You’re clever, Anu! You write the story!
What would I ask her, if we should meet? I was not interested in hearing the details of her psychiatric condition. Plainly it had been resolved to the satisfaction of the parole board – and what sense could I make, when the chips were down, of concepts from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders like delusion or depressive illness or Cluster B personality disorder? I certainly didn’t want to hear her academic views on the patriarchal nature of sentencing and its unfairness. What I wanted to know was more intimate than that, more philosophical. Perhaps I had no right at all to inquire into it. And yet if, as we are told and must accept, the chief aim of sentencing in a decent society is not retribution but rehabilitation, it was surely the crux of the matter. I wanted to ask her about her soul.
I remembered Dr Singh telling the court that she was ‘too young to have any beliefs’. I wondered if she had any now. To what extent did she consider herself responsible – leaving aside what her defence had argued in court – for what she had done to Joe Cinque? Did words like remorse, repentance, redemption have any value for her, or were the categories and processes of psychiatry sufficient? Did she feel that by spending four years in gaol she had made amends?
And to whom did she believe she owed atonement, if she agreed that atonement was due? To the Cinques? To her own parents? Or was it broader, less personal than that – a matter of repairing the rent in the social fabric?
For all we know, she might have spent the years of her prison sentence in a moral agony. The trouble was that her soul, like everyone’s, is invisible. Repent as a criminal might, the people she has caused to suffer have no access to her repentance. The brute fact of incarceration is all there is. Beyond it, there exist for us as a community no gestures, no emblems of contrition, no agreed-upon behaviours or signs that could carry such deep meaning.
In all the time I spent searching through newspapers, before I started to write about Joe Cinque, I found only one story that came anywhere near this longing for the symbolic. In Samoa, a cabinet minister was assassinated. One night his grieving widow heard voices under her window, and looked out. There, on their knees with ceremonial woven mats laid across their shoulders, was the entire extended family of the man who had murdered her husband, with forty of his fellow-villagers. They had come to bear witness to their collective responsibility, to express their grief and shame, and to offer reparation.
Samoa is tiny. Australia is big. There are too many of us. The possibility of soul-gestures that we would all understand died here long ago.
But I posted my letter to Anu Singh, just in case.
At the end of March 2002, two of Joe’s old friends, and their wives, drove over to the Cinques’ one evening after tea, to talk to me about Joe. Maria served coffee and cake at the kitchen table.
Dario was a wide, jovial fellow in shorts, T-shirt and good leather sandals. He worked as a salesman for a big company; he said he drove 70,000 kilometres a year. His wife Antonia was tiny, rather earnest, bluntly direct. They already had two small boys. Joe Cinque had been MC at their wedding.
John was slighter and shyer than Dario, smooth-faced, dressed in black, with round spectacles that magnified his eyes. His wife Tina sat on his right, a fragile, composed girl with a very gentle presence; she hardly spoke.
Nobody is going to say anything but good about their friend who has been murdered, specially not at his parents’ kitchen table, with his mother sitting right there – and his father alone in the next room, smoking, with the TV turned up loud because he can’t bear to hear a conversation about his dead son. But what bad is there to say, about a firmly brought up Italian boy who respects his parents, whom all his friends’ parents adore, who works nights in a pizza shop while he’s studying for his engineering degree? The sort of bloke everyone wants to MC their wedding because he’s so funny and so kind? Who comes over to see you, when you’re slaving away in your father’s fruit and vegetable shop, and gives you a hand to carry boxes? Who lends you one of his flippers when you’re both being pounded by a heavy surf? Who never once forgets to bring a birthday and Christmas and Easter present for your kid sister? Who takes your new baby son in his arms and calls him ‘my little paesan’?
The first time Dario saw Joe was on a bus stop, when they were still at school. ‘I looked at him and I thought, Now he’s a wog. You know how ethnics take a lot of care of their appearance? Their haircut, and that? We just stared at each other on the bus stop for six weeks, then one of us broke the ice and said, “My oldies know your oldies.” ’
‘Joe wasn’t like the other guys,’ said Antonia. ‘They were all either shy or smart-arse. But he was always polite. At my doe show, down at the Brewery, when the guys were dancing in one part of the room and the girls in another, Joe came and danced with the girls. At the end, when everyone was leaving, a drunk guy we didn’t know tried to force his way into the girls’ hire car. Joe was looking after us – all the other blokes had had too much to drink. He threw the drunk out of the hire car, but then he said to him, Come on, mate – let’s talk about it.’
‘Yes,’ said Dario. ‘That’s what Joe was like. He was the sort of guy who always said, Come on – let’s talk about it.’
When they all started university, Dario and John still hung out, they said, ‘with other wogs’ at a service station in Tudor Street, whereas Joe would meet uni guys at Tattersalls Club. But a couple of times he did go out with Dario and John and the others. ‘One time,’ said Dario, ‘we hired a bus to go to the drag racing in western Sydney. I convinced Joe to come. He always liked cars. We left Newcastle at six in the morning and got back at seven p.m. It was a great day – a really good and different day. Coming back we told Joe that Screaming Jets were on at the Palais, and to come with us. First he said he couldn’t, but we convinced him. And on the way home later that night he said he’d thoroughly enjoyed it.’
There was a piercing pathos in everything they said, not just because Joe was dead, but because they were talking about someone they loved who, when alive, had already started to move away from them, and from their shared youth, into a different world. The stories they rehearsed were old ones, treasured scraps of history that made them burst out laughing; then they would fall silent, glancing at Maria Cinque with an apprehensive respect; but she laughed too, leaning into their group, enlivened by their affection.
‘Tell her about your job in Canberra,’ said Dario.
‘After I graduated,’ said John, ‘I got a Defence job in Canberra.’ The work was all right but Canberra itself he didn’t like much. He found it empty and sterile. He was so lonely down there, without his girlfriend and his family, that all he did after work was cook. ‘In eight months,’ he said sheepishly, ‘I put on three stone.’
By the time Joe Cinque had moved down to Canberra to live with – her, John was so homesick that he decided to find a job in Sydney; within four years he had gone home to the Hunter, married Tina and devoted himself to the family greengrocery business. But after he gave notice to Defence, there was a brief cross-over period when both he and Joe were living in Canberra. John used to drive back to Newcastle every Friday, as soon as he knocked off – a five-hour drive. One day Joe rang him and said, ‘I’m going home too. Come and pick me up – we’ll go together.’ So John went over to Joe and – that’s place. They got the car packed but just when they were ready to leave, Joe and – her had words. She threw a tantrum. She got her way. Joe didn’t go.
‘Another time,’ said Antonia, ‘Joe was going to come home to Newcastle for our son’
s christening. Up to the last minute he was going to come – and then he had to take her to Melbourne, to see a doctor.’
There was a long pause. Nobody knew where to look. We sat studying the table surface. Someone reached out and took a slice of cake. Then in a rush Antonia launched a fresh topic, shocking in its brusqueness. ‘Mrs Cinque,’ she said, ‘when you got Joe’s stuff back, did you ever find a card in his wallet from Vivienne’s the jeweller?’
Maria nodded warily.
‘Because the last time he was up at our place,’ said Antonia, ‘a few months before he passed away, he asked me to show him my engagement ring. I showed it to him. And I thought maybe he was going to, uhm, get engaged.’
Maria said nothing. Her mouth set in a straight line. There was a flinching feeling in the room. Antonia soldiered on, hastily, but in a softer voice.
‘He asked me, “What’s the amount you should spend on a ring? Is it a month’s wage?” I said, “You don’t have to. You spend whatever you want.” And that’s when I gave him my Vivienne’s card.’
The strained silence went on and on. Then, heroically, Dario waded into it. ‘If he spent that much,’ he said, pointing at John, ‘the woman’d be –’ He made a comical gesture, as if his left hand suddenly weighed so much that it dropped floorwards, yanking his shoulder out of line.
Everyone laughed, even Maria. The moment was saved. The conversation swerved to the superiority of eighteen-carat Italian jewellery over nine-carat Australian. Then Maria told us about the weekend retreat she had gone on, with other mothers of murder victims, up at Mangrove Mountain. She passed round a brochure from the hotel the women had stayed in: large modern rooms with a view of a pool, foliage outside the windows. She spoke of the pleasantness of the weekend, the relief it brought her to be with people who really understood her feelings and what she was going through. ‘They give a journal,’ she said. ‘You cut out and stick pictures.’ She flustered open an exercise book full of pasted cuttings from colour magazines. She laughed, a bit bashful, as if it were childish, but at the sight of the book Dario lit up.