The Death of Noah Glass

by Gail Jones

  Martin discovered that Tommaso liked to be asked questions.

  ‘The palm trees,’ he said, puffing out his chest like a politician, ‘have been eaten by a red weevil. All Sicily is destroyed.’ Tommaso took a sip of grappa, pausing so that Martin understood the gravity of the situation. ‘All Sicily. It was the turchi that did it,’ he added. ‘The turchi from the docks brought with them the red weevil.’ He mimed an energetic spit onto the kitchen floor.

  It took a while for Martin to discover that turchi referred to any black men, usually North African. The palmless palm trees had troubled him since he arrived, and it was good to have an explanation, even if the human culprits were non-specific and possibly fictitious. Everywhere the palms stood, fat poles with no fronds, dark presences, ostensibly dead and left behind.

  The old centre of Palermo had a ravaged look; buildings were crumbling, or boarded up, or in a state of disrepair. The shells of houses bombed during the war still remained amid piles of rubble, often with sprawling plants growing among the bricks. There were garbage and graffiti everywhere; a bloated dead cat, its eyes extruded as if its head had been stamped on, lay in the lane behind Martin’s room. He had to avert his gaze each time he made a short cut on that route, and was relieved when suddenly the grisly mess disappeared. At the end of his street stood a church—‘Sconsacrata,’ said Tommaso—its door blocked up with concrete and its windows plain slabs.

  There were many such deconsecrated churches. Martin was moved by the ancient ‘Church of the Three Kings of the Orient’, its massive wooden doors tagged and defaced. His father must have found this saddening, and wondered what frescoes might be inside, or what flaky baroque images clung in darkness to the ceiling, what blessed saints still hung there, lonely and unregarded. It gave the city an air of secrecy, Martin thought, to have so many buildings with concreted windows and padlocked doors.

  For something to do, for a kind of purpose, he walked the streets looking for le chiese sconsacrate. In a dismal catalogue, he began to photograph the churches and write down their names. When the weather improved, he decided, he would return and sketch them. He might make an artwork, he thought vaguely, on the topic of deconsecration.

  One day he walked in the direction of the port, heading down Via Alloro and across to Via Cala, and on his return was pelted in a freezing hailstorm. Thunder boomed loud as Etna, the sky opened with weapons, and he rushed along the slippery footpaths, skidding sideways on the ice, afraid he would fall. He stopped to watch a curl of cloud from the bay and admire the viciousness of the hail. He pulled the hood of his coat close under the stippled sky.

  A sucker for pied beauty; was that what Noah had said? He remembered a hailstorm in Kent, when he was a boy, how he’d run outside in a thrill to feel its roil and shock. He gathered the hailstones and piled them into latticework lines on the lawn. Noah ran to claim him, but he’d resisted his father’s grasp. They battled together, Noah pulling at his elbow, until the pattern was accidentally kicked, and destroyed. Did he cry? He was such a crybaby as a child. Noah dragged him inside and scolded, but there was a quiet time in the evening when, reconciled, he told his son about pictures made entirely by dots and flecks. His father made a lesson of their conflict, and found an art-historical example. Because they had fought, each spoke and acted with especial care. Long after the hailstones were liquid, he remembered the word pied.

  By the time he arrived back at Salvo’s, he was blue with cold. Maria, taking pity, heated red wine and lifted his sodden coat from his shaking shoulders. She passed the mug with a maternal nod, shook his coat, spraying drops, and hung it by the fire. She kept her back to him, as if abashed by her own fond actions, and he wondered then, at that moment, touched by her kindness, what he was doing there, and why he had come. Why he had been wandering the melancholy lanes of old Palermo with no idea of what he wanted to know about his father. It was some folly that had driven him, or he was proving a point to Evie, who suggested in a casually mean moment that he was running away from his grief. Martin sipped the hot wine and felt an impulse to write to her. They had parted in argument: he called her unfeeling, she claimed he was self-centred and trying to find a way to possess his father. Why, she’d demanded, could he not let him rest in peace? He thought her remarkably superstitious for one who claimed to be an atheist, and told her so. Divided in their mourning, they’d insulted and hurt each other.

  By the time the call came, Martin had almost given up. It was exactly a fortnight, but felt much longer when Maria handed him the telephone and he heard for the first time the voice of Antonio Dotti. A meeting place was agreed—a café in a street Martin had never heard of. He felt nervous that night, and could not sleep. He was aware of the business going on across the lane, and sexual loneliness added to his disquiet. He felt, though it was foolish, like a man newly widowed, a man who might never again sleep with a woman. One of the women, half-undressed, had called out a word to Martin that he didn’t know. Tommaso told him it was Sicilian slang for ‘handsome’, a term they probably gave to any potential customer. He had practised the word in his head, too embarrassed to say it aloud.

  In the rainy morning Martin set out for what he already thought of as the ‘other’ city, the wealthy city. He left the dereliction of the old town and walked up the broad boulevard towards the Via della Libertà, past the opera house, past the colonnaded Politeama concert hall, topped by rearing bronze horses. Tourists descended from cruise ships and walked or rode in decorated pony carts to the shops in this area: Gucci, Prada, Rolex, the disciplined clean spaces of international affluence, the polished enclosures that merited spending and souvenirs.

  On the wet street, barely sheltering, an old man with an accordion was playing the Godfather theme. Screen faces returned from teenage years: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, all fatigued and backlit, shadowy as fossils. Remembered images from old movies were oddly consoling. They were the confirmation, it seemed to Martin, of his own stringent inwardness.

  Women wore furs and stepped high-heeled from expensive cars. Restaurant touts held up plastic menus on falsely ancient scrolls. The buildings were new and air-conditioned. Martin had become accustomed to the old city and the poverty of the market area; this district was rich and seemed a contradiction. He hurried to the address in his map feeling ill at ease and out of place.

  When Martin collapsed his umbrella and pushed the door open, he knew that the man alone, curved with a book in the traditional bad posture of a scholar, was Antonio Dotti. He was in his early fifties, thin, bald and with the profile of a predatory bird. Martin immediately thought he would like to draw him. They greeted awkwardly and ordered espressos. They chatted about the bad weather, the palm trees and the length of Martin’s visit. At some point the tone changed, as if both had decided it was time to discuss Noah.

  ‘They mentioned at the university that your father had died. I am sorry for your loss,’ Antonio said formally. ‘He was a good man, your father.’

  Martin mumbled something, accepting the new manners that now attended his father’s name. He told Antonio of the death in the swimming pool and the accusation of theft.

  Antonio straightened up. ‘Vincenzo Ragusa? I heard something of this matter.’ His tone was remote, impossible to read.

  ‘Do you know of this artist?’

  ‘Of course, a famous Sicilian, but outside my area. A sculptor.’

  Martin waited.

  ‘Not the kind of artist your father was interested in. You should speak to my colleague, Dora Caselli. She also knew your father. She knows about Ragusa.’

  He seemed reluctant to say anything else. It may have been professional etiquette, or rivalry. They had their areas, these scholars. Their professional withholdings. Something in Antonio’s reticence implied that he might, in other circumstances, have more to disclose. He changed the topic.

  ‘When the rain stops, you should go to Mondello, to the beach,’ he said. ‘You should go to see the cathedral of Monreale.’ It wa
s what one said to tourists. He sounded bored by his own suggestions.

  Martin listened to these names thinking only of his father, whose pallid face, like those of the movie stars, had vividly returned. He may have sat in this very seat, sipping coffee and talking art history to this bird-profiled man. Martin wanted to say: I am not a tourist, I am not here for sights, I am here to follow my father and understand what he was doing in Palermo. Yet he was struggling to define his own purpose, even to himself. Less true investigation than the grip of a selfish confusion. Less proportionate mourning than defect of character.

  Martin realised he had waited two weeks for this meeting and learned nothing at all.

  ‘We will have dinner,’ Antonio said, as if conciliating. ‘On Friday. This Friday. We will talk some more.’

  He scribbled the name of a restaurant on a paper napkin, rose, grasping his book and umbrella, and left.

  Martin looked around at the smart café and felt immensely weary. The glittering surfaces, the glass tabletops, the Sicilian cakes revolving, tier on tier, in a cold plexiglass cylinder: they all oppressed him.

  He walked out into the relentless rain and headed back towards his room, back to what seemed to him the authentic city. The Godfather accordionist was having a cigarette break, huddled in his coat beneath a dripping awning. Martin nodded in his direction, as if he knew him. Then from somewhere behind he heard a man loudly whistling. Whistling. What property of optimism, what crazed lightheartedness, might one need to whistle loudly in cold and rain? Whistling was spiritual indemnity against hostile weather, or unreasonable sadness, or outrageous fortune. Or a reassertion of the child. He should learn to whistle. Afraid the man would stop, he didn’t turn to look. The whistle drifted and thinned.

  Martin was feeling wintry again, longing for sunshine, and disconsolate at the prospect of yet more waiting.

  11

  WITH IN A WEEK of arriving in Sicily, Noah Glass met Dora Caselli at the University of Palermo. Escaping the heat, seeking Antonio, he had walked through an old portico and into the dusty hall that served as an antechamber for the art history scholars. There she was. It was his birthday and hers; they were exactly the same age. Somehow Antonio had discovered this coincidence and insisted they meet. Both were congratulated; both encouraged by the festive levity of others who had joined the surprise luncheon arranged in their honour. They ate caponata and seafood and drank Moscato di Noto. Toasts were made comparing the brevity of life and the longevity of art. Voices upraised in a jesting release. It was a memorable celebration. Towards the end of the meal, watching her laughing, her manner open and heedless, Noah caught Antonio’s eye and blushed for what he was thinking. They all walked together back to the department, but did no work that afternoon, too inebriated and cheerful, too reminded of physical life.

  Later, after Dora invited him to her apartment, she made a joke about their advanced age and the unseemliness of their celebration. He looked at her dozing on the bed in the late afternoon light, her brown skin aglow, her face flushed with lovemaking, and could not recall a better birthday.

  The swift intimacy of this beginning established the intensity of their connection. As if a filament ran between them, there was a quality of light that flashed in her, or seemed to spark in shared voltage when he exchanged glances or approached. He felt her detachment, but also her wish to attach. It confused and excited him. There were her bare feet, touching the cold tiled floor, her hands, reaching for her discarded underwear, her sturdy stride into her skirt and her arms reaching backwards for the zip. She dressed with what seemed to him astonishing speed. Slim, elegant, she tugged on her blouse and buttoned it, looking away, recovering a solitude that might have been judged severe.

  It was Dora who told Noah about Vincenzo and Eleonora Ragusa. In her sitting room was a fine charcoal sketch of a young Japanese woman. The hair was drawn up, and her shoulder and breast were exposed by a casual gape in her loose-flowing garment. Her face had a calm expression and her features were smooth and youthful; clearly, Noah thought, this was the work of an artist in love with his subject. For his own part he was feeling as he hadn’t for years, that intensification of hope that comes with the body’s pleasure, the belief that the woman he was with would enliven and save him.

  This was a preliminary sketch, Dora told him, for a famous sculpture, Vincenzo Ragusa’s portrait of his wife, Kiyohara Tama. She told him the history.

  In the 1870s the Japanese government decided it needed foreign expertise in areas of arts and technology, so it enlisted teachers from around the globe to give instruction and advice in Tokyo. Vincenzo Ragusa, from Palermo, then in his mid thirties, was chosen to teach sculpture to the Japanese. He arrived in Meiji Japan in 1876 and stayed in Tokyo for almost six years, introducing Italian artistic traditions: casting in bronze, forms of ceramic construction, different approaches to carving in wood. He had his own studio and produced a series of remarkable sculptural portraits, including a commission from the emperor for a statue of Napoleon I.

  In Tokyo he met the family of his future wife—the father was an expert in lacquer ware, the mother an embroiderer—and in 1882, when the Japanese school was closed, he brought them with him to Sicily. Their daughter, Tama, was a painter in oils, Dora added, a distinguished artist in her own right. When she married Vincenzo Ragusa, she changed her name to Eleonora. They set up an art school in Palermo, the Scuola Superiore d’Arte Applicata. The parents returned to Japan, but their daughter stayed on, only going home and reverting to her old name in 1933, six years after the death of her husband.

  ‘Very romantic,’ said Dora. ‘A love story. An art story. Two nations connecting.’

  Her field was Caravaggio but she had begun researching Vincenzo as a kind of hobby, and then became fascinated by Eleonora, split between countries, living in Palermo, forgetting her Japanese, because there was no one who understood her. When Eleonora died, half her ashes were kept in Tokyo, said Dora, and half returned to lie with her beloved Vincenzo in Palermo.

  Noah was charmed by this story, but he did not expect the names to ring through the remainder of his life, or to see how Dora might be compromised by them. In the first days, still naive, Noah learned that Ragusa had trained in ivory sculpting—those small, devotional objects he had often inspected with a magnifying glass in art museums. Then he’d become a soldier, joining Garibaldi’s forces in the fight for unification. Ragusa was also a discerning collector, and Noah agreed to visit his collection of Japanese art, housed at the Museo Preistorico in Rome. He and Dora would go together. They would stand before works neither had seen before, and be filled together with passionate stories.

  There was so much light, that summer. So much sensual bounty. And, with Noah in the condition of falling in love, everything connected to Dora Caselli became enchantingly irradiated: he thought of the uranium glass his mother had briefly collected when he was a small child. In those days it was still called ‘depression glass’, coloured mostly yellow-green and glow-in-the-dark. She owned a swan of depression glass, which, being so unnatural, he particularly treasured. This came to him later, this colour, this haphazard connection. He wondered what became of the yellow-green swan, a kitsch object whose only distinction was that it sat on his mother’s dressing table, swimming in the white lace pond of a doily, the unlikely focus of her son’s attention. It disappeared when they moved to the leprosarium, leaving so much behind, sold or in storage, to inhabit so different a world.

  Now, in Dora’s city, he understood its appeal. Palermo was fantastically complicated, a puzzle of styles and peoples. Africa was here, and the Arabs, and the energy of ages intermingling. Noah loved especially the port area of the old town, its stern buildings, the branch-shapes of moored fishing boats, spiking a curved bay, and the tangy, fierce winds that blew in from the ocean, and infiltrated the irregular streets of Kalsa. Somewhere in there Dora had shown him a cathedral with no roof: 1509. Not bombed, but splendidly, audaciously, unfinished. Gazing up at the blue sk
y, arched outlines blazing, Noah felt shyly grateful.

  In the ten weeks he was in Sicily, they spent most days together. For part of that time it was the summer break at university and Dora was free to show him her city. They made small excursions as if on a honeymoon. At Monreale cathedral, whispering, they looked through binoculars at Old Testament mosaics and located the seven panels on the life of Noah. High in the shadows of the south nave, an old man composed of tiny squares shone out, as if manifest just to them. Noah leaned from his ark, arm extended, greeting the returning dove with a sprig of olive leaves in its beak. Peeping out of ark windows were his three sons and their wives. Two drowned men, their faces upturned, sank in stylised waters below. Upon the exposed chest of one of the drowned stood a raven, pecking.

  Noah saw above him the formal beauty of the disastrous blessing: some few might be saved while so many others drowned. Some might be unharmed, upheld in the grace of flotation, while others flailed in floodwater, elegantly submerging. He had always hated his name, bestowed as if he would fulfil a religious vocation. Beside him Dora, in a pale blue cotton sundress, stepped backwards and bumped into him. Gazing intently, she had forgotten his proximity.

  ‘Scusami,’ he exclaimed spontaneously, feeling always at fault. The drowned and the saved; this was all that he knew.

  ‘There, Noah’s drunkenness,’ she directed to the right.

  He moved his focus. The last panel depicted Noah naked and prostrate in a drunken slumber. Poor Noah, he thought. Who could blame him, bearing the heavy load of his fate?