‘He’s got a brain, hasn’t he? He knows all Italians aren’t thieves and Mafia – just some of them.’ Rosanna laughed and glanced over at his lap. ‘But you better watch yourself, Jack.’ He smiled.
‘Rosanna! Please …’ blushed Isabelle. She took up the story. ‘We moved from the farm to Genova, and stayed in my grandparents’ house. We were to live there until my father found work. Their house was very comfortable compared to where we lived on the farm. I was only four but I remember how impressed I was that they had electricity and a flush toilet.’
Rosanna conveyed the conversation to her mother. ‘Si, si, toletta a livello,’ sighed Signora Martino, lifting her hands to the ceiling in mock despair. ‘Still no flush!’
‘My wife’s parents always shouting at me “Get your wife a beautiful house. Get your daughters some pretty dress”. They always angry because they no want Adriana to marry a contadino – they think I am a filthy peasant.’ Franco smoothed his thick black waves, like an effete hairdresser, and leant forward to confide in Jack. ‘For Adriana my beautiful hair, it was … irresistibile.’
Jack saw Adriana Martino laugh out loud for the first time and he realised that she had once been a beautiful woman. It was from her that Isabelle inherited the honey-coloured hair and grey eyes but Isabelle’s were not filled with sadness the way her mother’s were. It seemed to Jack that Adriana had faded like a flower that must wither and fall so another may blossom.
‘The cane farmers from Queensland came to many big cities in Italy looking for workers for the cane fields,’ explained Rosanna. ‘They were prepared to pay the passage on the ship and guarantee work, so Papa signed up and sailed off into the sunset.’
Isabelle leant towards Jack across the table. ‘Rosanna was only two years old; she doesn’t remember how terrible it was when Papa left on the ship. I was five and remember all too clearly. I cried and cried – the ship was so huge and crowded with people I was sure that it would sink at any moment and Papa would be lost.’
To Jack’s great discomfort, tears welled in Franco’s eyes as he described the moments when the ship pulled away from the port: the sight of Adriana and his little girls waving from the dock – the unbearable pain in his heart. Overwhelmed by grief and loneliness, he turned away only to be confronted by a vast ocean he was about to cross, taking him further and further from the family that made him feel whole.
‘Queensland very hot. Very hot,’ said Franco, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘We go to work when the moon is full – three in the morning. Come home when the sun she’s full. Sleep, eat, back to fields in afternoon. Is hard life, sleeping on ground, no soft bed – mattresses with coconut hair. Rats, mosquitoes and always our hands, blisters, infected.’
Franco had made friends on the ship – Luigi, Alberto and Sergio, Italians from the north who became part of his cane-cutting gang and like family. Sergio was counting the days until he had the money he wanted to take home but Luigi and Alberto were excited about the opportunities in this new country. They delighted in the distances from one place to another, and were intoxicated by its vastness and the freedom it offered. Franco was torn, but in the end Mussolini made up his mind for him; he wasn’t going home to fight for fascism.
Franco knew that olives wouldn’t grow where sugarcane did and he knew his daughters couldn’t survive in a town where the tide of anti-Italian feeling was rising and the ‘olive peril’ had become the new underclass. It was one of the happiest days of his life when he packed up his newly purchased second-hand truck and headed south to Melbourne to collect his family from the ship, almost three years since he had last seen them.
‘We were the ones who brought the olive trees with us. We are, in fact, the heroines of the olive,’ said Rosanna as she helped her mother clear the table for the next course.
‘How so?’ asked Jack, fearing a joke at his expense.
Rosanna leant on the back of her chair opposite Jack and announced dramatically, ‘We stole our inheritance back!’
‘It wasn’t really stealing,’ said Isabelle firmly.
‘Uncle Domenico drove us up to the farm in his new American car – which he won in a card game,’ she added, with a glance in her father’s direction. ‘He heard that the new owners were going to Genova for a wedding.’ Rosanna mimed tiptoeing into the olive groves. ‘Mamma, Bella, our two cousins and myself. We did a little midnight pruning, you might say – prugna secca, Mamma.’
‘Ah! Si, si!’ chimed Signora Martino. She came and stood beside Rosanna, tugging excitedly at her dress. ‘On ship. Water every day. Sew here,’ she said, pointing out the seams to Jack.
‘All our olives have been propagated over time from those cuttings we smuggled in; that’s why some of the trees are much older than others.’
‘Beautiful family,’ beamed Franco. ‘Beautiful Taggiasca.’
Jack was not a man who cared to talk for the sake of it but it seemed as though his own history began to take shape around that table. The expectation that he also had stories forced him to cast his mind back to the defining moments in his life, to work out what he had – however unwittingly – invested in and what was worthwhile about it. He was thirty-four years old and had, as yet, done very little thinking about what sort of shadow he cast.
He found an audience in the Martinos when he began to talk about his experiences in the Outback working the mines. In his first job as a driller’s offsider he spent a lot of time on top of the drilling towers replacing rods and watching the changing light of the desert. He struggled for words to describe the dramatic beauty of the place, the different times of the day when the sun and shadows played with light on the canvases of ghost gums, the vivid colours, the contrast of smoky-green spinifex against red soil. As he talked about the desert he remembered how free he felt out there. But it hadn’t stopped him wanting to go underground.
Jack tried to convey the atmosphere waiting at the brace, 300 men all going underground blast-hole drilling. The murmured discussions, the sense of purpose and camaraderie as the shift bosses moved quietly through the crowd allocating jobs. Someone would crack a joke, then a ripple of laughter followed. There was the sense that they were different from other people with their underground world. He described how it felt to go down in a cage cramped with forty men, the smell of the mine, the sulphides and occasional blasts of heat, the pervading cold dampness. He shared his sense of wonder at the sheer scale of the mines, at finding trains and massive equipment operating under the ground.
Jack told stories about the men he worked with, mostly Hungarians, Ukrainians and Poles. Then there were the Germans, ex-Luftwaffe, who marched to the mines in high boots. There were those who took pride in their work and others who took pride in dodging it, and dodging the foreman. He told them about the pub at Mount Isa where you had to bring your own glass and line it up ready for the flow of beer that would often only last an hour; how his work-mates would share their lunch with him when they saw the soggy mess of beetroot sandwiches his landlady gave him every day; and about the chess games that were played in shifts over days and nights, a game that crossed all borders and required no linguistic abilities to win.
Rosanna and Isabelle translated these stories so their mother could understand. ‘But what of his family?’ Adriana wanted to know.
Jack found it hard to explain that things were different with them. His family didn’t make him feel whole. If he had been brutally honest, he would have said they actually made him feel empty, but he wasn’t one to share his feelings on these matters. It would have seemed disloyal to talk about his father’s sense of rough justice, learnt from his own childhood spent in an orphanage. He bullied his sons mercilessly and goaded his wife with insults and threats.
‘He never knew a mother’s love,’ his mother would tell them in an effort to excuse his behaviour. He never knew an employer’s love either, it seemed to Jack when he grew old enough to become more sceptical about his father’s version of events. Every new job represented a new
start, his father relieved to be free of the unreasonable tyranny of his last boss. Every job ended abruptly. Boilermakers were in demand, but for some reason his father could never seem to find two jobs in the same town. Another job, another town, another house, another school. By the time Jack left home, they had edged their way through Victoria and South Australia and halfway back again.
After the first couple of schools, Jack and his brother Henry could scarcely be bothered making new friends. By high school Jack was marked as a loner by teachers and students alike. It didn’t concern him. He realised early on that as long as he took out the school’s mathematics prize at the end of each year he could remain relatively undisturbed, both at school and at home, a member of his own private club. The first time he won the prize – much to his surprise – he saw the shift in attitudes around him and understood that it was his talisman, guaranteeing safe passage. There was something muscular about maths that won him the grudging respect of more physical students. It served him well as an engineer, but later he thought he’d happily trade his mathematical prowess for better social skills, for a First in small talk.
Although the old man had mellowed with the years, Jack could sense the anger and resentment simmering quietly below the surface calm. After a lifetime of unhappiness his mother lived in a state of constant nervous anxiety. Sensitive to perceived slights and prone to sulking, she seemed to believe her survival depended on total order and predictability. The mysterious appearance of crumbs on her sparkling bench or an unexpected phone call could send her into a spin. Jack couldn’t begin to explain to the Martinos why he and his brother had nothing to say to each other any more. Only perhaps that neither wished to be reminded of the years they spent together, imprisoned by childhood and the shared dread of the next town.
After dinner the women would clear up while the men sat by the fire. Franco taught Jack to play scopa. Jack taught Franco to play euchre. Rosanna had recently bought a small radio, brown and plump as a pudding. She was clearly thrilled with it. When the chores were done the sisters would place it on the kitchen table and huddle in front of it while Isabelle, who had been top of her Pitman’s class, took down the lyrics of the latest songs in shorthand. From time to time Franco would call for the volume to be turned up, thinking he recognised an Italian song, only to be disappointed. Not to be put off, he would comment, ‘That chap has beautiful voice, I think must be Italian anyway.’
The after-dinner conversation always returned to Franco’s obsession: the farm and the future of the olives. Despite evidence to the contrary, he was convinced that he would make his fortune from the olive. Each week he sold his excess produce at the market – they took his tomatoes, corn, carrots and summer fruits – but no one wanted the olives. Now he believed his fortune lay in the oil.
‘The Australian thinks olive oil goes in the ears!’ he laughed. ‘Our oil will not be yellow like corn ears, but green like the river.’
He and Jack talked about the olive press. Jack drew up plans of the stone mill and press, based on sketches Franco had brought from Italy. They would pore over this drawing, discussing materials, weights and techniques. Franco’s mill would make pure olive oil and once people tasted it everything would change for the family. People would understand the gift of the olive and they would see he was a hero, not a fool.
In later years Jack could close his eyes and enter that vibrant room again and again. He could feel its warmth, smell the rich infusion of herbs and tomatoes, hear Rosanna humming as she moved about the kitchen and see Isabelle glance up from setting out the glasses on the white cloth to smile at him. He would look back on this time as the happiest of his life. A time when he felt loved.
Five
I’M ASLEEP on the couch when Mrs O arrives mid-morning to take me into town. I don’t ever recall napping on the couch in the daytime before. She doesn’t seem fazed, and makes me a cup of tea while I get changed. I’d be furious if I was doing someone a favour and found them not only not ready, but snoozing on the couch. What did I do to deserve this guardian angel?
She’s a confident driver, zooming along in her little car.
‘Mrs O?’
‘Call me Joy, dear.’
She hoots with laughter when I ask if that’s her real name.
‘We don’t change our names around here, love,’ she says. Just so I know.
‘Joy, if I was looking for work around here …’
‘What sort of work can you do?’
‘I have a marketing degree … corporate communications is my area.’
‘Telecommuting is all the go now, dear,’ she says helpfully. ‘Do you have a web site?’
‘No. Do you?’
‘Noooo! I don’t even have a computer. But I wouldn’t mind one of those notebooks – very dinky. Can’t think what I’d use it for, though.’
‘I need work. Any work at all.’
She says she’ll think about it. She buzzes through town and pulls up with a jolt outside the service station. ‘There’s Sid,’ she says with a nod in his general direction. ‘I’ll wait here.’
As soon as I enter the workshop a dog begins to trail me, sniffing my legs. It’s a short-haired mutt, black and brown with begging eyes. I cautiously offer my hand and receive a soggy lick.
Sid emerges from a back room, looking like a grubby Teletubby in yellow overalls that have been hacked off at the shoulder. His upper arms are blue with tattoos; he’s had a few changes of heart, by the look. I know the feeling. He has a wicked-looking scar down his left cheek. This is one tough Tinky-Winky.
‘Yer right?’
I explain who I am and why I’m here. Under his hostile gaze I hear myself stuttering slightly. Stuttering! What fresh hell is this?
Just when he looks as though he has no intention what-soever of cooperating he pulls a filthy rag from the pocket of his overalls and wipes his hands. He goes into his office, pushes aside the greasy jumble of tools and papers, opens a cupboard and takes a set of keys off one of the hooks. ‘Ute’s out the back. The dog goes with it,’ he calls over his shoulder.
‘Dog?’ I yelp.
Sid comes out of the office and throws me the keys. ‘Used to stay in the back of the ute when Jack went down to the big smoke. Took me three days to convince the bastard to get out. I’ve been stuck with it ever since.’ He waits for me to leave. Hands on hips. Conversation over.
A battered blue ute is parked out the back of the workshop. I try the key. Hello, my new car. It is not like any car I ever thought I would own, but actually I am grateful to have a car right now. At the sound of the engine the dog comes skittering out and leaps into the tray. As we pull out of the driveway beside the service station Joy waves madly and gives me a double thumbs up as though I have just accomplished something truly amazing.
I feel a little self-conscious as I cruise down the main street with the dog running back and forth yapping excitedly in the tray but there is hardly anyone around and no one pays any attention. I stop and buy groceries at the Superette, two bottles of wine at the bottle shop next door (bottom shelf, but not at the cask stage yet) and go back to the Superette for dog food. Forgot I owned a dog.
As I drive up to the house the dog yelps with excitement, leaps out of the tray and heads straight to a bowl on the verandah to snuffle around for food. It scoots around the garden, pokes its head in here and there, sniffs at this and that and shoots off down towards the orchard. If I knew its name I’d probably call it back. Or perhaps not.
I must have chronic fatigue or something even worse because I’m completely exhausted by what amounts to one hour out in the big wide world of Duffy’s Creek. Tempting as it is, I cannot spend the rest of my life lying on the couch. I need to be busy. Busy, busy busy.
I make a cup of tea and a tomato sandwich and sit down on the couch. For the first time I really focus on the room. There are a few pictures on the walls, amateur landscapes in watercolour, and a big polished chiffonier full of glasses and crockery. Some stacks of book
s stand against the wall. There’s a stone fireplace made by someone who didn’t entirely have the hang of it. The floor is a dark timber, not in great shape, and there’s a large rug rolled up in the corner. The curtains are yellowing lacy jobs, windows cloudy with dirt. Now that we have cleared the top layer of debris another one seems to have emerged. I get up and take a closer look at the paintings. Dear God, his name is on every one of them. Talk about the secret life of Jack Bennett. It has to be the ultimate irony that a mining engineer should take up landscape painting in later life. Who is this Jack?
I’m starting to understand that this house is an archaeological site. When I look around I can see the patch of worn lino where my grandmother would have stood at the sink. There are burnished brass hooks on the back of the kitchen door where my grandfather probably hung his jacket in the winter. When I open the back door I can see the groove in the doorstep where the family dragged off their boots a thousand times. My family. I close my eyes and try to imagine them in this room as they prepared a meal, sat at the table and ate and talked together – in Italian?
The dog is back. Tilting its head, looking expectant. What is this blasted dog’s name, I wonder. ‘Dog?’ His tail thumps on the floor.
For two days no one comes, no one calls. It’s just Dog and me. I make myself busy. I move the furniture, polish, clear out virtually every box in the house. I take down the curtains and clean the windows, roll out the rug on the living-room floor; it’s the milky blue of opal and gives the room a real lift.
I clear out the bedroom that has the double bed, all the while resisting the temptation to compare it with my former white, sky-filled room. Finally there is only the bed with its plain wooden bedhead, a chest of drawers and the wardrobe; it’s quite pleasant. French doors open onto the back verandah and garden. The walls are whitewashed. I take down the faded pictures of Naples and Rome and replace them with two of my own large prints of Picasso’s line drawings. I make the bed with my mother’s sheets and a dark blue satin quilt that was in the chest.
The Olive Sisters Page 6