‘What gets flooded?’ asked Giancarlo.
‘Mainly farmland which has already been bought and the houses removed, but at the top end of the valley are olives which will be cut down after this last harvest, and other full-grown trees around what used to be a small monastery. That was the big argument, really. It’s the only building of any historical importance. In the end, though, it was realised that if the lake level were to be kept below the monastery then the whole project wasn’t worthwhile.’
They made an odd group there on the bluff. Paul keen to have his friends understand the work he did; Giancarlo responsive not just to the explanation, but to the rare experience of being on a hill in the open air; Maria standing back a pace or two and working with her fingers at the fabric of a small bag she carried, rather than interacting with the other two. Giancarlo relayed to her much of what Paul said, and she nodded almost as a child nods in expected obedience to adults. Paul asked him if she was feeling unwell, and Giancarlo said it was just tiredness and not having the language to join in their conversation. Normally Maria moved gracefully and held herself well, but she stood there a little hunched and downcast, seeming reduced, almost cowed by the reaching country, the drop to the valley floor and the exposed expanse of the sky, hazy at its extremes. When Paul tried his talisman Italian in an attempt at contact, she replied with her rote English and a forced smile.
The two of them guided the wheelchair back down the dirt track. Paul opened the hatch and set out their picnic there on the carpeted floor of the van — bread with salami and tomatoes, cheeses and olives, individual fruit tarts of different flavours, wine in plastic tumblers. The stainless steel surfaces of Giancarlo’s chair flashed in the sun; high in the blue sky lengthened the vapour plumes of invisible planes, the moderate wind brought summer scents and summer insects, but no noise from the small valley where the farms had all been sold. The two men began to talk of Matteotti, with Paul telling of the latest test of wills, and Giancarlo offering the most preposterous solutions to the feud.
Neither of them noticed that Maria had left the picnic and wandered away, until Giancarlo suddenly stopped laughing, and looked urgently around for her. She wasn’t at the van, and they saw her at the lookout, close to the wooden rail that guarded the edge. She was in an odd pose, almost, Paul thought, like some Titanic movie burlesque, and he started to laugh. But Giancarlo gave a gasp as if struck heavily, and lifted his body from the wheelchair by his arms, in sudden, futile urgency. He then fell back. ‘Quickly, quickly,’ he implored, and without a word Paul took off up the track.
Maria had climbed beyond the rail when Paul reached the lookout. He stopped running, and moved tentatively towards her. ‘Hey, Maria, it’s me,’ he said. ‘Don’t go any further out there.’ Surely the urgency of the situation would enable her to understand English just this once.
She stood on the lip of the bluff, and as Paul stepped over the rail and edged towards her, he was aware that there was an odd wind coming straight up the cliff which held the long grass of the edge in a fluttering free fall. Maria seemed to lean into it, to be held up on its steady insistent breath. ‘No, no, Maria,’ he said, and he took her left upper arm in his hand and steadied them both on the fluttering edge in the whine of upward wind. He could see her face, and it was the face she had shown him on the night he had passed her open bedroom. It was a face of absence and desolation, of some deep separation from the world. ‘Hey, careful now,’ he said. As she leant forward, he leant back, neither of them in any struggle, but rather a momentary ballet. Paul’s greater weight and strength began to tell and he drew her back from the edge until he could feel the rail behind them. Maria gave a little sigh, and said something in Italian in a low voice. She allowed herself to be drawn back onto the path, and to walk down to the van, with Paul holding her arm as if nothing had occurred.
Giancarlo hugged her waist and talked in Italian soothingly, but she said little. ‘We shouldn’t have come,’ he said. ‘I knew she wasn’t well and we shouldn’t have come.’
‘What is it that she suffers from?’ asked Paul.
He had for the first time some understanding of the true relationship and dependence the two of them had — the complexity of it, the fragility and the fearful possibility. His friend looked up at him from the wheelchair, his face close to Maria’s side. He was about to speak when his large eyes brimmed with tears, and he looked wordlessly at Paul for a few seconds and then said, ‘I can’t talk about it. I cannot manage to talk about it now.’
What had begun that morning, at least on the part of the two men, with pleasurable anticipation, ended as a grim ride back to Perugia, though the sun still shone. Giancarlo was strapped in the back so he could hold Maria, who leant on him with a sort of dull fatigue, and said nothing of what had happened at the lookout. Had life become for her a grey monotony, or worse, and a descent against the wind of no more significance than the trailing threads she picked at on her bag?
She was little help back at the apartments in getting Giancarlo up the stairs, and try as he might, Paul was unable to do it safely himself. He went to the door of the Arcottis, and because Signor Arcotti was away, his wife and a woman visitor from Rome came somewhat apprehensively to help. With that assistance the three finally made the upstairs hall — powerful Giancarlo distraught by his concern for his partner and unable to take command, Paul without the language and afraid worse things might yet happen, Maria listless and sad, seeming always half turned away.
They went through to the blue-tiled room, dim because the shutter doors to the balcony were closed, and Maria sat by the table spread with her work, while Giancarlo first gave her two white pills with water, then made coffee.
‘I shouldn’t have suggested the trip,’ said Paul. ‘I didn’t realise it might be too much for her.’
‘No, no. It’s a cyclic thing,’ said Giancarlo, ‘but irregular, and I should have seen the signs, but it seemed a chance for once to be back in the world.’ He expertly manoeuvred the chair to put himself as close to her as possible, and put his strong, large hand quite over both of hers on the table. ‘She’ll be all right. It’s part of our life together,’ he said simply. He spoke to her in their language, but she made no reply, just put a weary shoulder against his.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ asked Paul.
‘Yes, what we’d like is for you not to be afraid of what happened; not to be afraid of any of this; to come and see us again just as before.’
They sat in an easing silence for a time while Paul and Giancarlo drank coffee, while Maria had her head half bowed and rested on her partner, and the afternoon light bloomed softly through the full-length shutter doors of the balcony. As Paul rose to leave, Giancarlo lifted his hand with one of Maria’s within it and touched his friend’s arm briefly. ‘I’m glad I saw the site before it was flooded for the reservoir,’ he said. ‘Something will be gained and something gone forever perhaps.’
‘I hope Maria feels okay soon.’
Giancarlo spoke to her, and she made the effort to glance up at Paul and spoke in reply. Giancarlo nodded vigorously and clasped her around the shoulder. ‘She said not to blame yourself. She will feel better again and again, and worse not so often,’ he said.
On the way back to his own apartment, Paul stopped at the Arcotti’s door to thank Signora Arcotti. She came out a little warily, but relaxed when she saw he was alone. Her English was adequate to say she was happy to help, but that Giancarlo never went out and perhaps it was better that way. ‘She sick,’ said Signora Arcotti shaking her head and switching the subject to Maria. ‘She run across him in a car, you know that? Yes so. The big, handsome man and she run across him.’
‘I didn’t know.’ Yet somehow it was news of a kind he felt he had been awaiting from one source or another. Signora Arcotti clasped her hands to her breast, gave a shrug and held the pose quite unselfconsciously to express her pity, and the powerlessness of us all, then she went back inside to her visitor from Rome.
She was well on the day he left, and kissed him for the first and last time as she and Giancarlo farewelled him at their door. ‘Buongiorno Maria, il lavoro, come va?’ he said, playing their game to the last, and she replied with her English. He thought of her on the cliff above the reservoir site, and how she had begun to lean into the rising wind. He wondered what terrible world she had to journey through, and how fortunate Giancarlo and she were to have each other, how connected they had become through affliction. ‘I’ll miss you both,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope we’ll all be happy.’
‘Happiness is the absence of pain,’ replied Giancarlo, and his strong hand tightened on Paul’s.
‘In bocca al lupo,’ said Maria. Paul asked Giancarlo what that meant.
‘It’s a good luck wish between friends,’ he said. ‘Being in the mouth of the wolf, and yet unharmed.’
There had been wind and rain in the night. When the taxi paused by the old wall, Paul saw liquidambar leaves stuck to the pavement, their stalks insolently up, small scarlet swans on the dark road. The taxi wound down the hill from the old city, past the gryphons of stone who had witnessed so much pain and so much happiness. Luca Matteotti had first mentioned the gryphons, but he was nothing to Paul, who remembered rather Giancarlo telling him of those fabulous, threatening creatures that had never existed, yet been powerful in the human imagination for thousands of years. We all have things we cannot do, and sometimes life makes us do them, his friend had said. Maybe in Maria’s Etruscan dreams the gryphons still take protective flight against her demons.
Acknowledgements
‘Supper Waltz Wilson’, ‘A Southland Girl’, ‘The Tsunami’ and
‘Descent from the Flugelhorn’ first published in Supper Waltz Wilson
and other New Zealand stories, Pegasus, Christchurch, 1979.
‘The Master of Big Jingles’, ‘Mr Van Gogh’, ‘The Charcoal Burners’
Dream’, ‘Cabernet Sauvignon with my Brother’, ‘Prince Valiant’,
‘Thinking of Bagheera’ and ‘Requiem in a Town House’ first
published in The Master of Big Jingles and other stories, John McIndoe, Dunedin, 1982.
‘The Late Call’, ‘Kenneth’s Friend’, ‘The Divided World’, ‘The
Seed Merchant’, ‘The Paper Parcel’, ‘The Fat Boy’ and ‘The Day
Hemingway Died’ first published in The Day Hemingway Died and other stories, John McIndoe, Dunedin, 1984.
‘Lilies’ first published in The Divided World: Selected Stories, John
McIndoe, Dunedin, 1989.
‘The Frozen Continents’, ‘Valley Day’, ‘Mumsie and Zip’, ‘A Poet’s
Dream of Amazons’, ‘Trumpeters’ and ‘Another Generation’ first
published in The Lynx Hunter and other stories, John McIndoe,
Dunedin, 1987.
‘The Ace of Diamonds Gang’ first published in The Ace of Diamonds
Gang, McIndoe Publishers, Dunedin, 1993.
‘Iris’, ‘The Rule of Jenny Pen’, 309 Hollandia’, ‘The Rose Affliction’,
‘Heating the World’, ‘Pluto’, ‘Supplication for Position’, ‘A View of
our Country’, ‘The Dungarvie Festival’ and ‘Tomorrow We Save the
Orphans’ first published in Tomorrow We Save the Orphans, John
McIndoe, Dunedin, 1992.
‘Working Up North’, ‘The Occasion’, ‘Cometh the Hour’, ‘Growing
Pains’, ‘Rebecca’, ‘Peacock Funeral’, ‘Goodbye, Stanley Tan’, ‘The
Birthday Boy’ and ‘A Late Run’ first published in Coming Home in
the Dark, Vintage, Auckland, 1995.
‘The Devil at Bruckner’s Pond’ ‘The Language Picnic’, ‘End of Term’,
‘How It Goes’, ‘An Indirect Geography’, ‘Mr Tansley’ and ‘Wake
Up Call’ first published in When Gravity Snaps, Vintage, Auckland,
2002.
‘Buried Lives’, ‘Facing Jack Palance’, ‘Family Circle’, ‘Images’,
‘Buster’, ‘Minding Lear’, ‘Hodge’ and ‘Watch of Gryphons’ first
published in Watch of Gryphons, Vintage, Auckland, 2005.
The author acknowledges the use of the setting in V S Naipaul’s
Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (Andre Deutsch, 1984) for
satirical purposes in the story ‘A View of our Country’.
The quote on page 259 in ‘The Rule of Jenny Pen’ comes from the
poem ‘Night Owl’ by Laurie Lee, published in My Many-Coated
Man (Andre Deutsch, 1955). The quote on page 259–260 is from
W B Yeats The Herne’s Egg: A Stage Play (Macmillan, 1938).
About the Author
Short story writer and novelist Owen Marshall has written, or edited, twenty-three books to date. Awards for his fiction include the PEN Lillian Ida Smith Award twice, the Evening Standard Short Story Prize, the American Express Short Story Award, the New Zealand Literary Fund Scholarship in Letters, Fellowships at the universities of Canterbury and Otago, and the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in Menton, France. He received the ONZM for services to Literature in the New Zealand New Year Honours, 2000. In 2002 the University of Canterbury awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters and in 2005 appointed himself an adjunct professor. His novel Harlequin Rex won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction in 2000, and in 2006 his short-story collection Watch of Gryphons was shortlisted for the same prize.
Owen Marshall was born in 1941, has spent almost all his life in South Island towns, and has an affinity with provincial New Zealand.
Copyright
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Marshall, Owen, 1941
Short stories—Selections.
Owen Marshall selected stories / Owen Marshall; Vincent O’Sullivan, editor.
ISBN 978-1-86941-958-5
I. O’Sullivan, Vincent. II. Title.
NZ823.2—dc 22
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First published 2008
© 2008 selection and introduction Vincent O’Sullivan; stories © Owen Marshall as per details on page 621
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ISBN 978 1 86941 958 5
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Owen Marshall Selected Stories Page 62