Uncle Nicola had fallen into a grey and mortifying isolation in which his work had lost all meaning. Respect for people was less and less possible each day. Friends were deserting each other and, one by one, those who had been prominent antifascists were dropping from sight. When Giovanni Amendola, leader of the Aventine Secession, died as a result of injuries inflicted on him during a third bashing, Uncle Nicola wrote that he despaired of men.
In August 1927 Uncle Nicola became seriously ill with influenza, and went to Sorrento to recuperate. There, he received a telegram from a friend telling him not to come back to Milan because the Fascists wanted him dead. The offices of his legal practice, famous for being the place to which socialists could go for legal help and where free aid was available for peasants and workers, had been devastated.
Apart from my grandfather, Uncle Nicola had no family to worry about. He’d never married; perhaps it was something that had slipped by him in his peregrinations, but more likely it was because he’d invested what he had in Emilio’s life. My great-grandmother Coretti had TB. There’d been three girls between Nicola and Emilio, but the first had died of measles, and the next two of some hereditary disease, a lung disorder that no one understood. Great-grandmother was nearly fifty when Emilio Coretti was born and she died not long afterwards. Great-grandfather paid housekeepers to take care of Emilio when he was a small child, but he was quite an old man, and when Nicola graduated from Bologna Law School he took over, paying housekeepers first in Milan, then in Bologna, then in Genoa and finally back in Milan, the circuit on which his socialist and trade union interests took him. There had been some family money, which tided them over while Emilio was still a student, but the family had never been more than modestly prosperous. They dealt in hides and leathergoods and this was how Emilio had his start.
With his talent for shoe design and his brother’s contacts in the Milanese upper middle class, Emilio had done very well and, of the brothers, was the richer man. But it worried Nicola that Emilio, too, might have to get out of Italy, and he wrote saying he ought to consider going to Paris, where he had friends and where his talent was already appreciated. As for himself, it was obviously growing urgent for him to leave the country.
Indeed, hardly had he sent the letter when he was clubbed in his sickbed, a sure sign that there was more assault waiting for him. If he stayed, he would die by violence and by degrees, a walking advertisement of what happened to the people who, though they had once set the standards, had now become the dissenters.
He was such an energetic and enthusiastic man, it was difficult to think of Uncle Nicola laid low in Sorrento wondering where on earth he could go, but in 1927, even for someone as resourceful as he was, Italy had become a difficult country to escape. The Alps to the north were an effective barrier, and within Italy Mussolini had begun to crack down on emigration, promoting a policy of italianità (Italianisation), policed by blackshirts with instructions to shoot on sight.
By this time, the socialist leadership had decamped to Paris. The Apparition had succumbed to TB and Filippo Turati had been ‘rescued’ by the flamboyant Carlo Rosselli from the underground Florentine group, Non mollare! (Don’t weaken!). Uncle Nicola was impressed when Rosselli publicly returned to Italy to be thrown into jail. Like a great many Italians of his time, Uncle Nicola had a taste for public heroism, both real and operatic.
I wondered why Uncle Nicola did not go to France, but apparently three quarters of a million Italians had already gone there, half a million of whom were in Paris, cooped up in cheap hotels and pensions among increasingly resentful Parisians. The problem for the socialist leadership in exile had become not so much how to assimilate the refugees into Paris as how to get them out of France altogether.
When Uncle Nicola decided to emigrate, he was thinking of America. He went to Genoa, where he was very well known, particularly to the Federation of the Workers of the Sea, whom he had helped out of legal difficulties on several occasions. The second attack on his life came in Genoa when the offices housing the Federation were stormed. He was not hurt, but it was clear that he was out of time. There was a ship leaving Genoa in a matter of hours and a passport was procured for him with a bribe. It was an Australian ship bound for Fremantle, Melbourne and Sydney – he was given his choice. He chose Melbourne. For its climate, the average daily temperature suggesting it was mild and warm. And so, unaware that the weather is invented in Melbourne by a god who has frequent changes of mind, Uncle Nicola breasted the sea for eight weeks in a boat of Australian design that lumbered onward at a fair pace under a regime, not of Fascists this time, but of chops and chips.
Before leaving Italy he had taken out all the money he had access to through the Bank of Milan in Genoa and had spent a good deal of it on a diamond ring, a gold-tipped walking stick and some clothes made by a Milanese tailor, thinking that if he had to go into exile, at least he’d go in Milanese style. He pocketed the rest of his money for whatever exigencies lay ahead. One of these was the requirement by Australia that he arrive with forty pounds in his pocket. He had not severed his political ties; he was going to make himself the Australian correspondent for Avanti! in exile.
We only knew Uncle Nicola in his old age when he was touchy, but still effusive within the boundaries imposed on him by arthritis. I remembered, as Rose did, his pale, washed-out blue eyes that did not betoken the energy of his body or his mind. Nevertheless, they were eyes in which the pupils would flare and contract as he spoke, as if some dynamic image was before him, flashing with colour, motion and light.
A true eccentric, he arrived in Melbourne knowing absolutely no one except the Italian Consul, with whom he had been at university. The Consul, a one-time socialist, had joined up with Mussolini at Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan and was thus a first-hour Fascist. Uncle Nicola, with nothing to lose but his entire credibility and future prospects, approached this man to see if he could get him some work commensurate with his talents. Besides his degree in law, Uncle Nicola spoke three languages, none of them English, and had been an organiser of peasant leagues and a trade union secretary. When the Consul told him he could get work in a restaurant or a fruit shop, Uncle Nicola was suitably appalled.
He had thought to escape italianità by going to the ends of the earth, but insofar as there were only a few people to swing it, italianità was in full swing in Australia. Nowhere did it swing more energetically than from the pulpit in Melbourne, whence it sought to belabour the ears of Italians with the news that they were the most noble of ears on the planet, easily as noble as those lent to Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. Such ears ought now not just be lent, but given, along with gold wedding rings and generous donations to the establishment of the greatest society the world could ever hope to see.
The cardinal beneath whose immortalised gaze Allegra, in her capacity as a waitress, was ultimately to shoot a Catholic clergyman in the bib with a breakfast sausage, had an adviser from Rome, a clerical chappie whose enthusiasm for Mussolini was infectious, not to say terminally so, for the Catholic hierarchy. For the most part, nonetheless, the noble ears of the Italian parishioners seemed somehow to have been inured.
Uncle Nicola found himself in Australia, the antipodean correspondent for Avanti!, with no immediately apparent way of penetrating the community whose representative he, with his qualifications and credentials, supposed he ought to be. The Italian community in Melbourne in 1927 was of moderate size, the largest non-British group in the country; too small, all the same, to have much influence in policy making without having the sympathy of Australians and Australian institutions. The fascisti were concentrated in the consulates and disseminated their propaganda through such outlets as the Dante Aligheri Society (hence Dadda’s disdain for it) and Italian language schools like the one run by Stella’s matron of honour, Marietta. As in Italy, there was disunity in the expatriate Left. Communists, socialists and anarchists, most of them with very little education, stuck to their respective prejudices, making the only recogn
isable antifascist focus the red-shirted members of the Matteotti Club. These, by and large, were labouring men.
Though anti-clerical and atheist in belief, Uncle Nicola celebrated Christmas, and Christmas was bearing down upon him twelve hours earlier this year than was its custom, and in blazing sunshine rather than in snow. Thinking himself alone in Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens, he was attempting to divest a fir tree of a branch with which to decorate the meagre room he had found himself in South Melbourne, when he was apprehended, fortunately not by a policeman, but by a Belgian with a very full and very black beard. Uncle Nicola, mistaking him for a Frenchman, said, ‘Pardon,’ and proffered the branch guiltily.
‘French?’ asked his assailant.
The other didn’t speak Italian, but through a combination of languages the pair found themselves able to communicate. The Belgian said it was against the law to strip trees in public parks. Uncle Nicola was not surprised. He had attacked the tree in a burst of absentmindedness, he said, though he had done no such thing, and at that moment the din of cicadas started up without warning and terrified the superstitious wits out of him.
Then they got talking, and as they talked, they walked. A very long way, as it happened, because they found they had a great deal to say to each other. The Belgian told Uncle Nicola he’d concocted an English name for himself out of Melbourne’s streets. He was known as Spencer Lonsdale, and he explained that this was necessary in a country such as Australia where nobody could pronounce anything that wasn’t a part of the daily vocabulary. His real name had five consonants in a row and it was just too much to expect ever to be called by it. He’d been in Australia twice, the first time when he was a young boy. His name made difficulties for him at school, so, at his father’s suggestion, he changed it. His father was a botanist who counted Professor Baldwin Spencer among his associates, hence the name Spencer had come Lonsdale’s way from two directions.
A Belgian botanist seemed something of a rarity to Uncle Nicola, botany not being a major preoccupation of Belgians as far as he was aware. Spencer Lonsdale explained he’d had a German grandmother who insisted her Belgian offspring be educated at the University of Kiel in Schleswig-Holstein. His father had developed his fondness for botany there, at the university where the famous Baron von Mueller had taken his degree. As soon as he was able, he had set sail with his wife and children for the fabulous Antipodes where the aged von Mueller, having lost his directorship of the Botanic Gardens because he’d developed them as a systems garden rather than as a public park, lived in sorrow, wrapped up in scarves and wearing gloves and clogs, complaining bitterly of tuberculosis, which he thought he ought to have but probably didn’t, and surrounded by mountains of specimens and hillocks of letters.
While his father went on specimen-collecting expeditions funded by South Australian gentry, Lonsdale endured an Australian education. This was supplemented by botanical conversations pursued in German in the company of von Mueller who turned out to be not as old as he looked: some years previously he had proposed to a lady from Phillip Island and then regretted it and had a medical friend tell her the engagement had to be called off because he was impotent and in poor health. As a consequence he cultivated a cough and imagined he was old and had a weak chest.
While Lonsdale’s father had found Australia enchanting and experienced it as an endless opening-up of possibilities, his mother, a German like his grandmother, detested it. She felt she’d been dumped in a parochial, narrow-minded city, a city in which only a bastard brand of English was spoken, a city, if indeed you could dignify the straggly environment with such a name, in which there was either flood or drought, which smelt of sewage and was full of rough people and almost altogether without culture.
When Spencer reached fifteen, he was taken ‘back to Germany’. Never having been in Germany in the first place, ‘back’ was a disappointment for a boy who was used to a more rugged and less circumscribed life. He completed his education, sat out the Great War in enemy territory at his father’s university and then returned to Australia in 1920.
He had of Australia a double opinion. On one hand he could sympathise with his mother’s complaint that there wasn’t enough intellectual life; on the other, he had inherited the view of Baron von Mueller that Australia could be the liberation of the thinking man’s imagination. For von Mueller, Australia was endlessly enriching, the only restrictions being social and physical. These, particularly the social restrictions, hampered him mightily in later life, but he had the worldwide distinction, nevertheless, of being the quintessential botanist of his era, having had a whole botanical kingdom to describe.
The great age of collecting was over when Lonsdale returned to Australia, so he, also passionate about botany, had to content himself with holiday forays and field naturalist clubs. German teaching had been resumed at the University of Melbourne, and, being a Belgian with an English name, he was given one of only two foreign language lectureships, the other being in French.
The university had recently expressed an interest in enlarging its foreign language facilities, and, being very strapped for funds, thought of offering unpaid tutorships in a number of modern languages, one of which was Italian. The idea was that the students would pay for their instruction. Alas, the courses would not carry degree status, but why did Uncle Nicola not apply for a tutorship?
The question was asked from a chair on which Lonsdale was standing, hammering a paper decoration into place on Uncle Nicola’s wall, while Uncle Nicola found a tub for his fir branch. Unable to afford much in the way of food, and finding the Australian diet not remotely to his taste (the lamb chop, a status symbol to us, was an object of loathing to him), Uncle Nicola had bought a barrel of wine and four glasses from which to drink it with three as yet putative friends. On Christmas Eve 1927, one of the glasses found the lips of the first one.
Approached from the south, Uncle Nicola wrote to the Corettis, one could just see the university on a far green knoll, above a hand-mown field. The lone mower was pretty nearly always to be seen on one or other of the vertical or horizontal mown strips. There was a duck pond. The professor of medicine rode a horse to and from his lectures. One of the university buildings was known, for want of a name, as the ‘Gothic Structure’. There were female students, but not many, and any young man seen frequently in the company of any particular young woman could count on a reprimand for moral laxity. While the library had a complete set of the works of Zola, they were kept under lock and key in a special reading room because of their dubious moral tone. Any young man wanting handy hints on how to do in his lover’s fiancé or prospective mother-in-law would have to brook the librarian’s censure first.
Uncle Nicola taught Italian in Italian, as English, with its absence of arm movement and its lack of a natural crescendo, proved just too difficult. Spencer Lonsdale’s Italian, on the other hand, was improving every day, and the more he knew about Uncle Nicola and the reason for his being here, the more he was convinced that Uncle Nicola needed both protection and support. Lonsdale left an archive at the university in which Uncle Nicola’s activities and personality are documented. They were to become close friends. It’s quite doubtful that Uncle Nicola could have found an outlet for his views and for what he considered his utmost duty, intelligent opposition to the Italian regime, had he not made this most important of contacts.
The Australian summer was hot, Uncle Nicola wrote to Milan, but not a great deal hotter than the Italian. He could still go decently clad, which was just as well, for he hadn’t the wardrobe to go indecently clad, though he was thinking of laying out five and sixpence on a bathing costume when he’d found there’d just be time enough for swimming in his schedule.
The state of Victoria had a very long coastline and it was common for families to have beach houses within striking distance of Melbourne. He had been with Lonsdale and his family to their beach house on the Mornington Peninsula and had found the sea clean, clear and wonderful to swim in: indeed, he had swum so
far out, Lonsdale had been terrified he’d be taken by a shark. The beach sand was white and very fine. While the Lonsdales entered the bush like people disappearing into the chapters of a book in search of its theme, and returning later with amazing collections of wildlife, Uncle Nicola sat organising his future in the cicadian din, which, he wrote, was a formless opera, awaiting extraction into tonal range.
Behind him now, in Italy, were the beatings and cod liver oil treatments, the book burnings, the sack of masonic lodges and of Liberal and Socialist offices and headquarters, the summary, mindless killings and the arbitrary alterations to the law. He relaxed a bit and waited to receive replies to his letters. And waited.
TWENTY
Displacement and Despoliation
HERE, AT REG’S retreat, October is the month when grasses burst, fat with seed, and the progeny fall or are thrown or carried across the land by winds or birds or animals or rain.
Some seeds stick, being covered in spurs or exudate, and others, barbed flints embodying the word ‘pierce’, work downward, downward, into earth or flesh. Beautiful are the seeds that fly, plumbobs under fluff. So too, the lantern cases bobbling on stalks. Spiral seeds have fine hairs, moist in the ovary so their shafts lie straight as arrows in a quiver; when the hairs dry out, the seed heads spring, and rapidly the shafts coil after them to end in a hook for feathers or fleece.
Nature’s imagination is vast and travels in any direction it can. All is strategy, occupation, exploitation, driven by error and fashioned by chance; a new stitch here, a new loop there. The sky’s blue mantle wraps us into our earthen cradle, and here, where we dwell, dispossession is nine-tenths of the law.
Mad Meg Page 27