by John Foster
It was different with the icon, the Russian icon of Our Lady of Sorrows that hung over the mantelpiece. I was attached to that. But if it was necessary, as once it seemed to be, I would have sold that too.
‘No,’ said Juan, ‘you must never sell the icon.’
‘Never?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘not even for me.’
No one could predict how long it might be before the application was processed. In the meantime Juan was not entitled to work, so that he was thrown back completely on his own resources. Sometimes, when the weather was still warm, he would cycle to St Kilda where he liked to see the palm trees, or to South Melbourne beach where he was more diverted by the bodies. In more pensive moods he walked in Royal Park, or he would turn up unexpectedly at the university for an early lunch which inevitably became a late lunch. Or he would step out, as he put it, to visit Murray, who lived in a glorified lean-to which a Maltese family had tacked on to the back of their West Melbourne terrace. The approach to Murray’s place was through a cobbled lane, and the longer Murray lived here, the more attenuated the lane became. Removing one bluestone pitcher after another, he transformed it into a garden, and the success of this original landscape became, in Juan’s mind, the yardstick for our own. He was beginning to enjoy his patch of earth. Next summer, he said, we would grow tomatoes.
During the day mostly he occupied himself with sewing. His aunt had been a famous seamstress in Cuba, he once told me, as if to imply that this was a family skill he had inherited along with his curls and his fine long fingers. He had sewn theatre costumes in New York, and taken courses at the CAE in men’s tailoring and fashion design, and there was no doubt about his proficiency. On one of his previous visits we had bought a Janome sewing machine which soon began to produce a stream of shirts and trousers all carefully copied from the latest Italian designs in Collins Street shops. While he sewed, he sang, lustily and out of tune, though this hardly mattered because his voice could scarcely be heard above the blast of the cassette recorder that sat on the corner of his cutting table. As often as not these unrestrained sewing binges brought Father Foster banging on the back door in protest, but that hardly mattered either because his protests were generally drowned in Juan’s creative cacophony.
The sewing began to take on the dimensions of a cottage industry. There were curtains for the flat, cushion covers for parish ladies, and a couple of skirts in red tartan for a forlorn little girl called Gypsy whose mother was preoccupied with writing poems about Auschwitz. Juan’s public reputation as a tailor rested on the grandest undertaking of all—the project of the purple banners. The need for these arose because a new assistant bishop had been appointed, and to welcome him to our local church a splendid liturgical reception was prepared. In the midst of the choral rehearsing and floral decorating that the occasion required, Juan applied himself to making banners, six swathes of discounted purple cloth from Michael’s Corner Store, each twenty feet in length and appliqued with the bishop’s insignia in gold lamé, which were to hang down the Gothic pillars of the church. They looked spectacular, and the bishop was sufficiently delighted to join us in the evening at an impromptu dinner party in a Turkish restaurant.
Recalling his earlier episcopal encounter in New York, Juan approached his second bishop as something of a connoisseur. He particularly admired the bishop’s ring, a large stone set in a broad band of gold that was made from the melted-down wedding rings of his divorced admirers. The practical consecration of their sorrows in this way made the ring an object of general interest, and it was passed around the table from hand to hand until Murray, who was present on this occasion more in the category of the poor than of the faithful, accidentally dropped it in a dish of eggplant dip. There had been a time when Juan would have been appalled at such a gaffe. Now, he was more forgiving. After all, he observed to me later, Murray was not in the habit of dining with bishops!
After the banners came the quilt. Naturally it was not the quilt. We didn’t know about that then. We hadn’t heard that there were men in America sewing their own memorials; that there were lovers and friends patching together their grief and their anger, and conjuring memories out of the most incredible collection of things—letters and sequins and flags, and names and dates, bits of clothing and even ashes, so that you could no longer distinguish between art and death; and that when their separate sorrows were joined and the quilt grew large, they would spread it out in an enormous field, and soon there would be no field that could contain it.
We had no reason to be thinking about memorials, and so it was mere coincidence that Juan began to make a quilt. Like the coincidence of being born under the star of that abortive revolution; or the coincidence of arriving in New York in time for Stonewall. It came about simply. He was passing the Meat Market Craft Centre one morning, and stopped to inspect an exhibition of quilting. Being the only visitor, he fell into conversation with the exhibitor. A country woman from Bacchus Marsh with straw-blonde hair and pink cheeks, she was charmed, I like to think, by his courtesy, or perhaps she simply responded as a dedicated quilter to a potential convert. In any event she sold him her book on the subject and signed it with all good wishes. In the book she explained that she had been quilting since she was knee-high to a grasshopper. Patching and quilting her way through life, she had always used traditional English and American designs until, in the sleepless nights when she was expecting her first baby, she had been inspired with a vision of new motifs reflecting her Australian environment. Instead of the Churndash and Clay’s Choice and Log Cabin and the Variable Star, she had thought to herself, why not the Desert Pea Whirl, the Waratah Wreath or the Banksia Bouquet? Patches of Australia was the result, the indispensable guide to Australian quilting.
Having gutted the book for its essential techniques, Juan was now contemplating a quilt of his own. Happily impervious to the design potential of his Australian environment, he was equally indifferent to the subtle gradations of muted colour that refined taste prescribed. His quilt would be a blaze of clashing, flaring colour. ‘Hot, hot, hot!’ he told me, as he picked his way through the remnants of cloth on the stalls at the Victoria Market. Ideally, his quilt would be so bright you would need sunglasses to look at it. What, after all, was the point of having colours if you didn’t use them? And without use, might they not fade away and leave you stranded in a nightmare world of olive drab and saltbush grey?
Progress on the quilt was slow. This was understandable because, although he didn’t have a lot to do, he had a lot to think about. About Hiram and Danny, and about Julio and his friend David, to whom he rarely wrote though, in a curious way, that simply increased the need for thinking. He thought about Cuba, especially when the ABC presented a naive report extolling the achievements of the Revolution and the way it guaranteed first-class medical treatment even to the poorest of the poor. If that was the case, why was he receiving requests from his mother to send pills for her heart because, she wrote, they were not available in Cuba?
And when he thought about hearts, he remembered Clara de la Rosa, whose heart he had broken and who had died so soon after his flight from Cuba. For more than sixteen years, more than half his life, he had lived with his remorse, until, quite without warning, he decided on a course of action to assuage his guilt. Would Father Jim say a mass for his late grandmother? He would: and so we gathered in the church and lit the candles and rang the bell, and the priest made a sacrifice of bread and wine, and prayed that the Lord would open to Clara de la Rosa the gates of paradise where there was no death but only lasting joy.
Quite without warning—that was how it seemed. And yet, later I discovered it had not been an impulsive act. In fact he had written to Cuba and received from his mother the exact date of his grandmother’s death. Then he had waited for the day when the anniversary returned. How precise, how proper, and how silent he could be!
Having done what he could for his grandmother, he had more time to think about his own future. About himself there
was a mystery. He was not sick: but neither was he well. The old soreness in his stomach persisted and his bowels were still loose. At each visit to the gay doctor he lay on the couch and slipped down his underpants, and the elegant medical fingers in latex gloves glided over his body, probing, pausing over the swollen lymph glands in his groin, and finding nothing. The doctor always chatted. He cooed gently like a dove. Was the diarrhoea worse or better? Well, Juan would say, as though he was trying to encourage the doctor, he thought it was a little better. And of course any precision in respect to this question was impossible. How do you describe the infinite gradations that are possible in the viscosity of excrement? So, although he was generally a little bit better, he remained a little bit sick.
One day the doctor said, ‘And have you been out dancing, Juan?’
‘Not much,’ he replied.
‘Why is that?’
‘It’s that Johnny isn’t into discos much.’
‘Johnny ought to take you dancing more often.’
It’s surprising the things you learn at the doctor’s. Though I made no comment, I bridled at this gratuitous advice. It reminded me, though less acceptably, of Ernie’s parting words, when he said, ‘Take care of the kid!’ They both saw in him the boy. They seemed to think that all he wanted was to be a son, to be looked after. Of course there were times when he did want that. But taking care cuts both ways, and at home they would have seen that a more complex order of things prevailed. Since Juan had arrived there was an order in our house that had not been there before. The rooms smelt more sweetly. The spices in the kitchen cupboard were all lined up and stoppered and labelled, and really contained what the labels said. It was becoming the kind of place where you wanted to be sociable. And when you went out, you had the feeling that you had lost that single look. Maybe we should have gone out more often. And maybe the doctor was speaking out of the kindest consideration, but he didn’t know how happy it made us to be at home.
On our next visit to the surgery—Juan always insisted that I accompany him—there was another prescription for more pills. As they were likely to be expensive, the doctor suggested that we might like to take the prescription to the dispensary at Fairfield, where we could obtain them free of charge. For this kindness Juan was grateful, so it seemed churlish to mention my own reservations. It seemed odd that we should go to Fairfield; there were other public hospitals much closer to home, and in a penny-pinching mood I calculated that the cost of the taxi fares would cancel out any saving on the prescription. Nevertheless, we couldn’t play with his health; if it was necessary to go to Fairfield, we would go. The next morning we ordered a cab and drove out through Northcote, past the beat where a young man had been poofter-bashed to death a few weeks earlier, and pulled up at the gatehouse of the Hospital for Infectious Diseases.
My own memories of this Edwardian institution were decidedly romantic. It was some years since I had been there during a bout of hepatitis so mild that I had vaguely enjoyed the chance to be an invalid and to lie on my bed reading, without the guilty sense of wasting time. As I had discovered then, Fairfield was surrounded by extensive grounds and gardens that rambled down to the river. From a horticultural point of view they were badly neglected, but I had been delighted to find a suckering patch of romneya, a kind of perennial poppy with huge heads of white petals and gold stamens.
Superimposed on this recollection of Fairfield as the home of the great white poppy was another image. The outpatients’ waiting room was a light spacious place, surrounded with long windows that opened out on one side to a covered garden of semi-tropical foliage. In the ceiling there were fans with long blades that turned slowly to move the summer heat. It was a pleasantly lethargic room, the sort of place where you half expected a Singapore waiter to glide up and offer you a gin sling.
The morning we arrived, as I noted with approval, it seemed even more exotic than I remembered. On one side of the room the benches were occupied entirely by Vietnamese: thin men, and women in St Vincent de Paul clothes, and red-faced squawking babies. TB patients, I presumed. On the other side, where the tropical foliage grew, was a bench of rough, tough younger men in tight jeans and tattoos, who produced a collective impression of smudged black ink. Hepatitis cases? Bikes and boat people; the place smelt of raw poverty, of welfare, which was explanation enough for Juan’s instant recoil. Refusing to sit in the waiting room, he propped himself against the door jamb in a truculent pose and silently directed his fear and resentment at me for having brought him here.
The receptionist feigned indifference to our unspoken altercation. After half an hour of waiting, after I had explained for a third time that we had not come to see a doctor but needed only a signature on a prescription form for the dispensary, she finally relented, allowed us to jump the queue, and ordered us into a small cubicle with a desk and two chairs. On one of these a doctor immediately took up her position of command and indicated to Juan to take the other chair.
‘And who are you?’ she said to me. When I had explained she ordered me to sit down, so I sat down in the only possible position, on the floor.
Looking directly at Juan, she began bluntly. ‘I want to talk to you about AIDS.’ She paused, perhaps to gauge his response, but Juan deflected her gaze to me. Feeling ludicrously disadvantaged from my position on the floor I replied as firmly as I could. ‘I don’t think we’re ready to talk about AIDS. I mean, we just came to collect a free supply of pills from the dispensary. All we really want is a signature.’
It was abundantly clear from the way she sat back in her chair that she had no intention of releasing us. But why? What did she know about us? Why should she make these assumptions about us? Had the doctor with the probing fingers been in touch with her and turned over to her the delicate question that he had never broached with us? As these suspicions chased through my mind, she was well launched into an explanation of the virus and the high-risk category of gay men and the high-risk activities in which gay men indulged. As though we had recently dropped in from the moon, I thought. But she sailed on, explicit as you like, until she reached the point of her lecture: you should take the test.
Of course we had discussed taking the test. We had weighed the pros and cons, and decided not to. We knew that the chances of being positive were high, very high. After all there was Jerry, though we were disinclined to dwell on Jerry in this deathly speculation. Before Jerry there had been other men, in the Continental Baths, and at St Mark’s, unremembered mostly, but any of them a potential source of infection. In New York City they were going down like flies. But wasn’t it better to live with the uncertainty, to err, if need be, on the side of hope, than to live with the certain knowledge that you were going to die covered in violet spots? Like Jerry, and Rock Hudson, and all the others?
There was a more immediate, more compelling reason not to have the test. For Juan it had been important not to know when he filled in his application for the Department of Immigration so that he could say, as he did, and with a fair measure of truth, that he was in good health. There was no need to tell the Minister that he had loose bowels and a sore stomach any more than if he had had an ingrown toenail. So we had not taken the test.
The doctor insisted. She talked hard, working on Juan, and again he diverted her question to me. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘there is virtually no treatment and no cure. What is the point of having the test?’ And she—who was no doubt keen to establish the epidemiology of AIDS, and to monitor and control its spread, and to promote behavioural change and pursue a dozen other worthy socio-medical objectives—she replied, ‘It will help you to plan your lives.’
Plan our lives? We could hardly believe it. What knowledge did she have that we did not? Was she pronouncing a sentence of death already? How long did she think we—or was it Juan alone?—might have to live? And how could we plan our lives while the bureaucrats in Canberra were not working on his application for permanent residence? We would have liked nothing better than to be able to plan our live
s, but this was ridiculous, and I said so. ‘I think so too,’ said Juan, though I was unsure if he was really agreeing or simply supporting me in what had become a restrained confrontation with the doctor. By now she had exhausted her arsenal of arguments and failed to budge us from our position, and so she shrugged and signed the form for the pills and sent us off to the dispensary, where an artistic professor from the university was creating a scene because they had run out of free syringes. Near the gatehouse on the way out there was a border of evening primroses which had seeded themselves prolifically. We scooped up a handful and took them home in a plastic bag together with the pills.
The doctor had merely asked, ‘Why don’t you take the test?’ Yet her intervention was so unexpected, and she spoke with such force, that she had broken through the fragile defences of Juan’s uncertainty and transformed his anxiety into a terrible conviction. What other explanation could there be for his malaise? There was no way the virus would have overlooked or spared him, not with his luck. ‘Plan,’ the doctor had said, but what should he plan when she had wiped out his future? Before the trip to Fairfield, however anxious he was, and however depressed he became because of the limbo in which he was having to spend this year, there was always the prospect of next year, and the one after that. And now? He felt dizzy, unbalanced, because suddenly there was no future to weigh against the present. He was like a man who has lost his shadow, weightless, insubstantial, and when I tried to reassure him he said, ‘Don’t touch me, Johnny. Don’t touch me.’ He was terribly afraid.
The virus makes you obsessive. It settles in your head. It distorts your vision. In the first flood of knowing—or believing—it can make you regard your own body with horror. The blood that is in you is lethal. It could drive you crazy if you dwelt on that knowledge, if you said to yourself, ‘I am the embodiment of death.’ Although those were not the words he used, it was clear that his thoughts were running in that direction. One morning he cut himself shaving. He wiped the blood off on a towel. ‘Get the bleach!’ he shouted to me in the next room. But there was no bleach, so he wrapped the towel in a newspaper and threw it out in the garbage.