My Willa will be leaving me before very long. My warrior, my exemplar. She has stayed around for as much time as she can—perhaps to keep an eye out for me. Now she appears to be striking a deal with her Maker, who no doubt is reminding her that she can’t continue to thumb her nose at mortality. She has led a miraculously long life after a hopeful start and a marriage that ran aground early.
When I am not sitting with Willa I am working or walking or sitting at home, waiting, with as much patience as I can muster. The phone might ring, the nursing home. Someone going about the business of putting some meaning into the final curtain call, prolonging the last act.
Getting into bed, I look down at myself. There are two bruises on my thigh and one on my right hip. When I’m feeling low I seem to bump into things. We have to pay attention to every movement as we get older—every word and thought, too, if possible. Careless remarks and actions can wreak pain.
I think of A., who is on the periphery of my life now. It gives me a certain satisfaction to know that she is there, in her house, while I’m in mine. She’s practically never in contact, but still occupies a reserved corner of my heart.
Mary was an ephemeral idea, after all. One that I’ve pulled out of and pulled away from. I turn out the light and remember the intensity of that fancy—was it about a year ago? And plan a long walk for tomorrow morning, early. Down my lonely path again, I think, though without self-pity. Loneliness has its own rewards. Meglio solo che mal accompagnato. Better alone than ill-accompanied!
It’s not a pleasant morning for it. I must be out of sorts because there is evidence all round of houses with unforgiving windows, the metal variety that look permanently closed, fitting for a gaol. The wind is gusty and gathering up paper and dust to hurl at pedestrians. It feels like walking for punishment, this. For penance! Here we are at the convent again.
I consider the difference between punishment and penance, how they both begin with P, and how Willa taught me how to do cryptic crosswords. She hadn’t gone to school in this country beyond the age of thirteen because the kids laughed at her accent so much she was miserable. Her parents didn’t make her attend, she being the youngest and doted on.
Given the opportunity, she could have been any number of things. Had taught herself chess during that long bout in the sanatorium. She’d learned the craft of making small stuffed animals; had practised the discipline of resting properly every afternoon after lunch. How adaptable she’d always been. Couldn’t I be more like that? Whenever the crossword puzzle had seemed impossible I would sink into despair. But Willa would take up a piece of mending and think about it, take a voluptuous pull on her cigarette—her lifelong weakness—and after a while come up with an answer.
It was mainly instinct, rather than intellect, I thought at the time, that got her to the right answer. Not deduction, but intuition. But there’s nothing inferior about intuition; it’s really about being attentive at a deeper level.
The mornings are still dark at six and I’m doing a pretty lively step, the dog keeping up with me, around the football oval where, barely distinguishable, is the large white cat under her tree, inscrutable as ever, eyeing us off. I don’t force friendship on her, especially under the circumstances.
My little sweeper is now on to the grass verge with her broom. Dried grass has to be gathered into a pile somehow, with sand in between. Messy and awkward. She is as ever devoted to the task and has eyes for no one. Gives barely a grunt to my quiet greeting.
You can walk yourself into mindfulness. I try to keep my thoughts away from work and from my particular foe there: he who fumbles every move, causing strife galore. Oh, I wish him no harm, really. Crippling debt, perhaps.
Even walking can be a meditation. Breathe in and breathe out. In and out. Think of waves coming in to the shore, then going out, coming in, going out. Think of a friend, someone I love, coming through my front door, then going out, in, out. Inhale…and exhale. Friendship, old lovers, Willa, making a non-fussy departure. In and out.
It has become light as Juno and I reach the front gate. The cat from next door, in good form, throws caution to the wind and races across the road in front of the morning’s first car. She makes it, toddles over to say hello, putting her little pink mouth up to the dog’s face for a kiss. She’ll live to love another day. Juno meanwhile is uninterested, not into kissing cats, and in any case is getting on in years.
In the big park, the one with two lakes, I cultivate a long stride, thoughts touching on this and that. I wish they would leave this park to the birds and us walkers; us well-behaved citizens with dogs on leashes.
A fair has taken place on the weekend and the whole area is trodden over with odd bits of litter from its tawdry two-day party. I dodge the sprinklers that are making good the grounds again. Municipal reticulation still goes on, though the rest of the community has to cut back on water use. We’ve had no rain for months. Little rain last winter and the summer with barely a few suitable days for beach-going because it hasn’t been hot enough. What is it—don’t we do seasons any more in this part of the world?
Cyclists frequently like to use the park as a velodrome, a leafy place where they can improve their times. They gather speed whenever they see an opportunity to bear down on a toddler, an aged person or a cygnet. At the last minute they swerve off into the blue.
Suddenly I am accosted from behind. A jogger, whippet slim, has slowed down to put her arm around my waist. Oh, joy! We women are lucky to be able to casually embrace like this, without disclaimers.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ she puffs. I return the half-embrace.
‘For goodness sake,’ I laugh, ‘how long has it been?’
Twenty years since we worked together. Girls only yesterday, with short, short skirts and long boots, strutting around the office, the city, plucking what we wanted.
The woman has slowed down for me and we hasten along breathily, swapping reams of information. Memories, some funny, some that do me no credit at all, come flooding back. Friday night drinks, jokes, Italian meals, groping in the car on the way back to the office after midnight, and the occasional root in the dark on the sofa of the conference room.
‘We were just girls,’ I say, ‘about thirty.’
She nods. ‘And isn’t it a relief to be older!’
I don’t know about this. We arrange to meet for lunch and she jogs off.
Rounding the corner, I come across the energetic old lady who now, going at the task as if her life depends on it, has swept the pavement outside her house, the verge, and has now started on the road.
How far do we have to go in this world, kyria? I want to call out. She looks Greek.
The Italian lady Teresa is walking very slowly these days. Her dog Bruce (Bruce!) has died, she has told me. How little time we have here with each other, and how fleeting life is, I say to her. She nods, inconsolable.
I may go abroad, I muse. These past ten, even twenty years, I could have returned to Italy, but haven’t. And why not—perchè no? Because all around would be reminders of the young creature who was me? It might be best left until I am quite old. The stately Roman house would still be there, the one that housed us as rollicking, happy and thoughtless foreigners. It’s not quite time to go back. And there’s Willa, of course.
No, the place I need to go to next is Nepal, to do a pilgrimage. It’s not that one has had done with the body, but that one has to concentrate on the mind and its possibilities, the practice of mindfulness. An ant crawls around my wrist, alighted on me from the shrub I brushed against, out of its own territory. I walk towards the low wall at the park entrance and place it carefully, cultivating gentleness with even the smallest sentient creatures.
My own creature, the little dog, has stopped in her tracks, her back legs a-tremble and her head to one side as if she’s pondering the world’s trickiest piece of philosophy.
‘What’s up, sweetheart?’ I ask. She seems worn out. I pick her up and carry her back home, walking very slo
wly so as not to jar her in any way.
‘We might have to part company soon,’ I whisper. And, still in my arms, she lifts her old head and looks at me, rests it on my shoulder.
The vet is shaking his head, looking very grave.
‘Her heart isn’t up to it any more,’ he says. ‘The pump is not able to get the drugs through her bloodstream.’
‘Then it’s time?’
They always wait for you to say it.
‘I think so.’
‘Now?’
‘In a few minutes. I’ll just see to this kitten and we can perform it in the other room. Do you want to stay with her for a few minutes?’ His eyes blink with kindness behind his spectacles.
For fifteen years in parks all over this city we have walked. In six different houses I have come home—when I couldn’t take her to work with me—to adoring looks and joy unable to be contained.
‘She adores you!’ A. used to say.
And so it came to pass, as the Bible says.
It is Christmas. In July. There is a party at the nursing home. After all, many of the residents still like a touch of hilarity. A friend has volunteered her services to play the piano for dancing after the evening meal. She is pleased to do it—she likes the residents and knows all the old songs.
The large dining room is decked out with balloons and paper ribbons and we all tuck in to our dinner and have our photos taken before they clear the floor. I lead the singing while my stalwart friend does our bidding and Willa gazes at me as though she’s wondering what is the purpose of my opening and closing my mouth and making these odd noises.
Such goodwill. Some of the care-givers and cleaning women who look preoccupied during the day are all dressed up and happy. They join in the circle and we all do the barn dance and the twist, followed by the conga. We file from the dining room to the one adjoining, holding the person’s waist in front, kicking our feet out to the right side, then the left.
‘Has the plessey bootle drung fed?’ Willa asks, ever hospitable, during a break.
‘The pianist? Yes, she’s had some food and her drink is right there.’
Just to prove it, the woman cocks her head at Willa and croons ‘Embraceable You’. Which of course delights Willa, as we knew it would.
There’s a request for the hokey-pokey and the piano belts it out for us. While I’m singing and wiggling my ears and toes and elbows and all the other bits, I turn to see that Willa has joined the circle, is right beside me, moving her hips to the music. People crow delight at this and I put my left arm around her. She is glowing as she moves her poor swollen feet around for a few bars, her lips moving as we all cry ‘a-bout!’
Then she forgets what it’s all about, turns and goes off by herself down a corridor, sedately, in her straight-backed fashion, walking in the wrong direction.
Epilogue
My mother died this week, in early February 1995. She ‘faded’, in the nurse’s words, after a final bout of pneumonia.
I was with her for several hours the day before and it did not look like fading to me. It looked like a tortuous process: the laboured breathing that occasionally seemed to stop, so that I thought this surely was the last breath, the last gasp, as we say.
Her struggle to survive even in these last days was daunting: the hand, unable to be held by me, because it was tightly clawed, as if concentrating on climbing that uphill path. The legs were contracted in a foetal crouch and so emaciated that they had a pillow placed between them at all times, those dancer’s legs.
Days ago I had stood looking down at her, hearing the rasp of her breathing.
‘When will she let go?’ I asked the sister.
‘Have you told her she can?’ she replied.
So I said when Sister had gone: ‘Willa, I’m all right, you know. I’m healthy and optimistic and have a new part-time job.’
Her face was a map of anguish at the effort of staying alive.
‘And it’s all due to you.’
I put my finger on her wrist, a touch soft as a butterfly’s kiss.
‘Darling,’ I said in her ear, my own face all in disarray, ‘you don’t have to keep struggling like this.’
I stayed another hour. Oh, how I wish, went the refrain through my heart. What did I wish? That I believed in a place after death where we could talk together again.
Eight hours later she gave in to it. And here I was now. Dry-eyed and grieving to the marrow, I gazed at her face, an hour after she expired, her face bearing the traces of someone finally disengaged from fighting her last battle. I kissed her warm forehead and whispered my love.
It would be consoling to say that she looked ‘at peace’ in death, at the hospital. But she did not. It was only later, days later, in the coffin, that she looked natural again, her white hair brushed beautifully, her skin the right tone, her fingers relaxed, finally, on her breast with a splendid purple-red rose placed between them. Not entirely tranquil, the suggestion of a frown between the eyes, as if a headache might be hovering behind those two vertical lines that I had lightly touched over the years, as though I could erase her headaches with my will and my thumb.
The subconscious mind, like death, does not care for the seemly, the discreet right moment. It barges its way into our night’s sleep with improper images. So it was on the night of the funeral that I dreamed I was back in Rome, looking through the phone book for my ex-lover’s name.
It didn’t seem to be there. And all the time I urgently sought his number I was filled with a lust for him that apparently wasn’t going to be satisfied.
And so? An erotic dream and not particularly interesting at that. But we offer these dreams to each other, in the retelling, by way of explanation. The significance of this one, I think, was not that I needed a good seeing to, but that I was in desperate need to be embraced. And this man knew how to hold you in his arms. He loved me and told me once that of all the women he knew—and they read like the Don Giovanni catalogue—I was one of the four important women in his life.
To reach the grand finals, as it were, in someone’s affections is a thing I’ve never thought to achieve. Yet it was gratifying, must have been, for me to have remembered it.
And here I am, blathering, as Jock would say, about me when this was to be a tribute to Willa. But the dream equation is: death = loss = sorrow = need. And Eros equals consolation; it frequently operates in that dimension.
Acknowledgments
All of my friends have shown me kind and continuing encouragement during the writing of this book. Two people in particular have helped me hold the line: Annie Girard for her early assistance and practical suggestions, and Van Ikin (Associate Professor of English, The University of Western Australia), whose generous time and professional advice over some years enabled me to keep faith. I offer my warmest thanks to both of them.
The line ‘Sì, mi chiamano Mimi’, p. 172, from La Bohème, opera by Giacomo Puccini, libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, 1896.
Lines from Emily Dickinson, p. 181, from poem 712, c. 1863.
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