Lost Paradise

by Susan Massotty

  5

  ALMUT HAS TWO PARENTS OF GERMAN DESCENT. I HAVE a fair amount of Latin blood flowing through my veins. My father is a real Teuton (you could put him in a uniform and he would feel right at home), but at least he had the good sense to marry my mother. If he is Wagner, she is Verdi – with a vengeance. This is never more obvious than when they are having an argument. ‘He only picked me because he was curious,’ my mother always said. ‘He never knew who he was having to deal with – the Portuguese, Jewish, Indian or Italian in me. He wanted to see which one had the upper hand. But he underestimated the Indians.’ They are still a mystery to him. To me too. The shadow, the mood – that’s the Indian in me. My mother has it too. We have learned to stay out of each other’s way when we get it.

  Almut has banished chaos from her life. She is Germanic and has a feeling for order. She is the one who, years ago, came up with our Australia piggy bank. And she is also the one who said, also years ago, that we should acquire a skill that would enable us to earn money when we were travelling, so we would not forever end up washing dishes in restaurants or bars, or babysitting, or worse. As a result, we took a course in physical therapy: exercises for people with back problems, massage, that kind of thing.

  ‘It’ll be useful all over the world,’ Almut said.

  ‘In sex joints, you mean.’

  ‘Why not? As long as they keep their filthy hands off me!’

  6

  ‘I’M ONLY LENDING HIM TO YOU,’ THE GALLERY OWNER in Adelaide had said, as if he were talking about a book or a painting. An object. The artist either had not heard it or had pretended not to – the latter, I think.

  There was an exhibition of Aboriginal painters from all over Australia. His painting was black – a night sky studded with infinitesimally small white dots, though even the word ‘dot’ makes them sound too big. Your first thought, of course, was that they were stars, but that would have been too easy. At first you saw only a monochrome black canvas. Only later did you notice the thousands of minuscule points that may or may not have been stars. Through the intricate net of dots you could vaguely make out an even darker shape: the Dreaming of a totem animal, which in turn represented the flow of a tiny stream – so abstract that eyes such as ours cannot even see it. Of course it has nothing to do with our eyes. The problem is that we keep encountering a different mindset. He tried to explain it to me, but had little success. He did not look at me the whole time he was talking to me. Every word seemed to require a tremendous effort. Although Almut and I had read up on the subject earlier, it now appeared that we had simply been reading stories that could never be as real to us, as natural, as that painting was to him. The painting itself was not the problem. You could find the same kind of thing in any museum in the United States or Brazil, Desert Lizard Dreaming at Night . Why not? Nor was it the fact that I could not make out a desert lizard. Dreaming – there was that word again. You could not avoid it and you could not get around it. It was a word you kept tripping over, again and again. It seemed to make sense in English, but try saying it in another language and have it mean the same thing: a religion, a sacred era, the time of the mythical ancestors, as well as laws, ritual, ceremony, the state of mind in which the paintings had been made, because in this case he had inherited his Dreaming – that of the desert lizard – from his father and grandfather. How could you inherit something that wasn’t a physical object? Somewhere inside him, in his genealogical make-up, his inner being, there was an invisible lizard that was not in fact a lizard and would never be visible to me in his paintings, and yet it was one of his ancestors, in the guise of an animal, who had come to him out of unmeasured time and had kept its sacred meaning even after the arrival of the others, who knew nothing of their traditions and way of life and did their best to undermine and overpower it. Dreaming. I liked to say the word to myself, as if that might enable me to participate in their spiritual kingdom, in the spirit-filled realm of these paintings, which otherwise seemed to survive only on reserves, far away in the merciless desert that some of them could still read like a book or a song. Everyone had his own Dreaming, which came with a set of totems and songs that made up his own personal lineage and were a legacy from the still continuing act of creation performed by his ancestors, which is also known as the Dreaming. None of this could be seen in the cities any more. Most white Australians seemed to struggle with these metaphysical concepts, if only because the Aborigines they came into contact with were like human driftwood – people who had lost their ancestral ties and therefore no longer belonged anywhere. Australians like these had little use for the concept of sacred sites, of ground that no human being should be allowed to tread, especially when gold or silver or other coveted commodities lay beneath that ground.

  7

  THIS IS NOT GOING TO HELP ME AT ALL. THE SILENCE of the great outdoors here is like nothing else on earth, as are the starry skies. A desert stillness, a desert sky. In the faint light of a carbide lamp I can see his skin, which is of the same matt blackness as his painting and has the same white luminosity, as though an infinitely far-off Milky Way is hidden beneath the black. He can breathe without making a sound. Nothing makes a sound here. If only I myself could be more quiet, I am sure I would be able to hear the shifting grains of sand, the slithering of the desert lizard and the wind in the spinifex and the balgas – the grass trees. Assuming there is a bit of wind, which tonight there isn’t. I have travelled a long way and have arrived here. I am trying to put my thoughts into words, but I cannot. I am getting nowhere. I would like to say something about my body, about how I have realised, more than ever, that it will be there only once, that it coincides with what I call ‘me’, but I reach a point where things can no longer be described in words. One cannot talk about ecstasy. And yet that is what I mean. I have never existed as much. It has nothing to do with him. Or rather, he is only part of it. He belongs to all of those things out there, in a way in which I have never belonged to my surroundings, though everything is different: I am the equal of all of those things. I can’t think of a better way to express it. I wouldn’t dare say that to anyone but Almut, and I am not even ready to do that. I know she wouldn’t laugh at me – I have always been able to tell her everything – but now is not the right time. ‘I am the equal of the stillness, the sand, the starry sky.’ You can’t tell anyone that. Nor can you say, ‘I’m just one small person, but for the first time in my life I finally know where my place is. Nothing else can happen to me.’ No, you definitely can’t say that. It’s another one of those things you would rather not say, even though it is how you feel. I am not hysterical, I know what I am saying. I also know that Almut understands me. Though our relationship will be short, this man has helped me catch up with my shadow, and that is good. We are one now; I am both dark and light. If I were to get up and go outside, I know I would not see a light anywhere. I stood out there last night, and there were only two things in the universe – me, and all of those other things, in which case it no longer matters that I will disappear from it one day, because I have seen and understood everything. I have become inaccessible, I feel above it all. If I were an instrument, I would produce the most beautiful music. I know you can’t say any of this to another living soul, but it is true. For the first time in my life I understand what they meant in the Middle Ages by the ‘harmony of the spheres’. When I stand outside here, I do not just see the stars, I hear them.

  Who banned angels from our thoughts? I can feel them all around me. My Master’s thesis was on the portrayal of musical angels: Hieronymus Bosch, Matteo di Giovanni, and especially one particular illustration in a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript. It shows St Denis at his writing desk, working on his book about the hierarchy of the angels. Arrayed in nine arcs above his mitred head are angels carrying medieval musical instruments. They fly towards each other with their violins and horns, their psalteries and tambourines, their organs and cymbals. As I lie here in the desert, I listen to their music: an incredible jubi
lation amid the silence. Angels, desert lizard, rainbow snake, the heroes of creation – everything at last comes together. I have arrived. And when I leave, I will not need to take anything with me. I have everything.

  8

  I THINK ABOUT WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING. NONE OF those words – psalteries, mitred, angels, cymbals – are part of his vocabulary. At least that’s what I thought, but he laughed at me.

  No, that’s not the right expression. He laughed me off, pushing me back with a faraway look in his eyes. This will be the shortest affair I have ever had, and I will remember every moment as if it lasted an eternity. He is spoiling me for every other man, but I don’t care. He came into my life at just the right time. There is a lot I don’t understand. You can see right through our faces, but not through his. His face might as well be made of onyx – it reveals nothing. Where does he come from? He showed me a map of Australia. It had the same familiar shape – a kind of sleeping ox without a head – but instead of the usual boundaries, there were coloured areas with the names of indigenous peoples – Ngaanyatjarra, Wawula, Pitjantjatjara – who have become extinct or might even still be alive, for all I know. Each name represents a language, living or dead. ‘They ought to abolish the word “Aboriginals”,’ he said, but he didn’t tell me where he came from. He doesn’t want to talk about any of the concepts that brought me here: the myths, the Dreamtime, the dream creatures, his own ancestry. In the gallery’s prospectus on his work, there was a story about his totem, the desert lizard, but when I asked him about it, he shrugged.

  ‘Don’t you believe in any of that any more?’ I asked.

  ‘If I still believed in it, I wouldn’t be allowed to talk about it.’

  ‘So you don’t believe in it any more?’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  End of conversation.

  I try to achieve a cool objectivity, to see it all through someone else’s eyes: who I am, my personal story, how I came to be here, my dreams of an Australia that has turned out to be so very different from what I had expected, the months I have spent in this country. I wonder if I have been lying to myself, but I haven’t. I’m not crazy – if this is ecstasy, it is of the highest order, something I have longed for, something that does not necessarily have to last. On the contrary, the fact that it will not last is a prerequisite. Maybe it’s against some kind of law for someone to look at you, put his hands on your shoulders, tell you he can stay for just one week, then up and leave. It is as if you are forced to cram a whole life into one week. Inconceivable.

  9

  MY AUSTRALIA WAS A FICTION, AN ESCAPE, WHICH I realised the moment the plane touched down. I was completely dehydrated after the long flight, and was feeling apprehensive. Almut had slept the whole time, most of it with her heavy head on my shoulder, but when eventually she woke up, she tugged at my arm, urging me to look at Orion, hanging a bit crookedly in the Australian sky, as if the Hunter had taken a fall. I could feel her trembling with excitement. We have always been different in that respect. I shrink in the face of change, and she expands. She was bubbling over, a very physical reaction, as if she couldn’t wait for the plane to land, wanted to fly on ahead and drag me with her.

  Not even the terminal could dampen her spirits. She did not seem to notice the smell that permeates most airports and could not possibly usher in the Dreamland we had imagined all those years ago in our rooms in São Paulo. This was the land of the conquerors. I heard them speaking in their loud twangy voices in the language that had stamped out all those other languages, and realised that I had made a fatal mistake, a feeling that wore off only after a couple of days. Almut’s reaction was the very opposite. She arrived in a state of euphoria that lasted for weeks. We found a kind of hippy hotel, where we could do our own cooking. We did not have work permits, but that was not a problem. In the first week Almut found a job with a so-called physical therapist, though she warned me not to expect too much. ‘I’m only there for the placebo effect. We get a lot of little old ladies with arthritis, and windsurfers who have been taken apart. God, those guys are big! What bodies! Endless, and you can’t skip a single muscle. I’ve never seen so much meat! If you took a bite out of that, your cholesterol would soar sky high. And they’ve got a sex drive to match – it goes into high gear the minute they walk through the door. But I won’t even start down that road.’

  A few weeks later she did go down that road and got fired.

  ‘How could you be so stupid?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m Brazilian. Not that it’s in my genes, but it must have rubbed off somehow. Besides, they’re so sweet. They don’t know what to do with those enormous bodies of theirs. They’re goddam buildings. Now I understand where the term “bodybuilder” comes from. They can surf, play rugby, race across the desert, hoist half a buffalo on to a barbecue spit, but beyond that? They’ve got poco sophistication. Not the ones that I met anyway. Besides, the guy was so tall it took my breath away. He wasn’t just a man, he was a walking phallic symbol! You could put him in a temple of Shiva, and the whole village would bring him offerings. And then those big blue Mummy-help-me eyes, with a jungle cry thrown in for free. I nearly had a heart attack. But then my boss came charging in and that was that.’

  Almut pursed those narrow Puritan lips. Queen Victoria to the life! ‘God, what an English bitch. “Miss Kopp! This is a decent establishment!” Oh well, at least I’ve got another one for my diary. But what are we going to do now?’

  It was raining. I had a job at a beach café, but they had called to say I didn’t have to come in. That was the deal. No sun, no work. No work, no pay. Fair enough.

  ‘Do you remember why we came here?’ Almut asked me.

  I did. We had come here to go to the Sickness Dreaming Place, though neither of us had ever spoken of it again. Nor of our other reason. After all, you could hardly admit, even to each other, that you had come to Australia to see Aborigines.

  Almut, guessing my thoughts, said, ‘Do you remember how we imagined this country? How we were hoping to find the Dreamtime? I haven’t met anyone who even remotely resembles the people we used to dream about. They simply are not there. At any rate, I haven’t come across them. All I’ve seen are a couple of lost souls in a park.’

  ‘That’s hardly a news item. You knew that before you came.’

  ‘Yes, but not that it would look like this. Like a concen- tration camp without the fences. You can smell the beer a mile off.’

  ‘You sound like an Australian. I’ve heard them say that a thousand times . . . There are two Aborigines at the place where I work.’

  ‘Sure, in the kitchen. Washing dishes and carrying out the rubbish.’

  ‘They’re nice guys.’

  ‘I’m sure they are. Have you talked to them? Have you asked them where they’re from?’

  But I hadn’t talked to them. Or rather, they hadn’t talked to me.

  The thing that struck me most was the way they walked, though it is hard to describe. ‘Lopsided’ is not the right word, but something like that. They glided across the room on long thin legs with knobbly knees. They somehow walked as if they were not really there. The fact that they did not look at you only made it worse. I don’t know if ‘shy’ is the right word, but we never had an actual conversation. The rest of the staff made no effort either. Once, when I brought it up with one of the cooks, a student, he said, ‘You’re reading too much into it. You foreigners always have big expectations. Half of what you read is false. Their world has ceased to exist. The ones you see here have fallen between the cracks. They’ll have to pull themselves out on their own. All those stories you hear about sacred sites are beautiful, of course, but what can you do? I admit that what happened to them is terrible, but I repeat: what can you do? Or rather, what can they do? Paint their bodies for your entertainment? Pretend we never came here? They lost. That might be disgraceful, but what are we supposed to do? Pay reparations, make detours around their sacred sites even when there’s uranium underneath?
This is the twenty-first century. Wait until you go to one of those reserves. They put on quite a show, a kind of living museum. You get to travel back in time – for a fee. If they let you in, that is. It may sound crazy, but the ones I respect the most are the ones who say “keep out” and “piss off”, and then go on broiling in their sandbox a thousand miles from nowhere, pretending the world outside doesn’t exist, as they have for thousands of years. Except that in those days our world really didn’t exist.’

  ‘Theirs did,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t have to convince me . But they’re living in a bell jar. You don’t have a solution, neither do I, and neither do any of those do-gooders, who’d like nothing better than to preserve them all in a freezer forever. And then you have the ones who make money out of them: the museum curators, the gallery owners, the anthropologists. No, you can’t turn back the clock.’

  ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ Almut said. ‘Do you even remember the question?’

  ‘You asked me what we should do next.’

  ‘That’s not so strange, is it? Look around you. Is this the House of Anglo-Saxon Sorrow, or what? I want to hear a bem-te-vi, I want to hear a periquito, I want to hear a sabiá, I want to see an ipe roxo, I want to see the purple blossoms of a quaresmeira, I want to eat a churrasco at Rodeio, I want to drink an ice-cold beer at Frevo, I want to buy a bikini at Bazar 13, I want to watch my grandfather play cards at the Hipica Paulista . . .’