The Death of Noah Glass

by Gail Jones

  He lowered the binoculars and turned towards her. Byzantine gold seemed to shine on her skin. There would be no moment more complex than this, doubled by namesake, made meek by her presence, caught in artful admiration. The fabric and illusion of noble sentiments was less than her skin, and his knowledge of it, her shape, and its claim on him.

  Sensing his attention, Dora also lowered her binoculars. ‘Poor Noah,’ she said to him, and ruefully smiled.

  In the fiery mezzogiorno beams of that last summer, Noah told Dora the story of his life. Her small balcony overlooked a private courtyard, and they stretched in canvas chairs talking and reading, the sweltering light an almost primitive assault. Below them a single lemon tree shimmered in the sunlight, hung with white bridal stars and new green fruit. Just as Sister Perpetua had listened to him speak in sorrow, now Dora listened to the kind of truth-speaking that came with joy. He told of his detachment from his parents, and how much he regretted it. He told of Francis and Ben-Hur and his own deplorable arrogance. He spoke tenderly of his children, boasting, praising, but also relating their particular sufferings and grief. It had taken sixty-seven years to understand proportion, he said. Against the shameful recollection that had been ever-present in his life, he had gradually understood emblems, signs and wonders. Initially, a sense of marvel only fuelled disbelief. But there were people, paintings, the humility of limits. Gradually, he’d gathered an intelligence founded on art.

  ‘And now I am lecturing you,’ he said. He knew how pompous he must sound.

  She leaned over and kissed him quickly. ‘Yes, you are lecturing me.’

  But he was forgiven. He had never said it before, never spoken before in this wanton manner of affirmation. This was what Dora Caselli had made possible, this announcement of a personal faith.

  Dora was more ironic, more guarded, claiming she was a tenebrosa, that she didn’t believe in lights coming on, or occasions of sunstruck revelation. Sicilians understood this, she told him, the mesmeric pull of the darkness. The Caravaggio that she saw every Sunday as a child, the nativity that used to hang in the Oratory at San Lorenzo, had taught her, she said, how shadows might beautify a face. Not his best work, she insisted, not at all. But ours. It was our Caravaggio.

  It was one of those moments in which all one has learnt of a new love coalesces. He knew then that Dora, like Katherine, would remain inaccessible to him. That she would retreat, and that he would probably lose her. He was in love, but she less so, or perhaps not at all. Perhaps she simply tolerated him, or saw him as a novelty encounter, the coincidence of birthdays an aspect of amusement. As the day darkened and the twilight fell as in a dream, they moved inside, back to the shade of their bed. Noah wanted to tell Dora about the yellow-green swan. He was not sure why recall of this object seemed to connect them. It was possibly an attempt to find something in his past to stand in for emotional magnification, or imply a wished-for continuum of self. He’d loved the depression glass, and even the name, his name. But in some instinct of privacy, perhaps, Noah changed his mind. He did not mention the swan on the doily, nor did he describe himself as a boy, in short pants, bashfully avoiding his reflection, standing at attention before the swan on his mother’s dressing table.

  12

  PALERMO SEEMED TO Martin to be full of South Asians. They stood shivering on street corners, trying to sell cheap Chinese umbrellas. They had modest stalls at the markets, displaying trinkets and scarves. They hung around the cathedral and the central piazzas, with handfuls of plastic cigarette lighters, or small selections of postcards. They had poky little stores and ran internet cafés. Some had more substantial businesses, a restaurant on Via Dante Alighieri, a small goods store in the Vucciria. Martin felt, if presumptuously, a sincere kinship with them; they must also be missing the sunshine, missing the south.

  When he entered the internet café, four Indian men sitting in a row at computers stared up at him. Martin felt self-consciously foreign and tall. ‘Scusatemi,’ he said.

  It was a facility, he realised, for their own community, one of those places where there are phone booths for international calls to families in tropical countries, and lines of out-of-date computers, boxy as panettones, with gummy keyboards and antiquated systems. He spoke Italian, but a tall man answered him in English. Yes, he could Skype. It was nine-thirty a.m. in Palermo and seven-thirty p.m. in Sydney; Nina would be waiting in her pyjamas for his call.

  When he summoned Angela with the cheery ringtone, Nina appeared almost instantly, her pearly face illuminated and too close to the screen. He signed hello and she signed back, and they performed a miming ritual in which Martin acted out rain and hail and sucking up a bowlful of pasta. He made her laugh. His daughter, glistening in weird light thousands of miles away and tucked into her silence, was in a humorous mood. She held up a drawing she had done for him, a self-portrait surrounded by flowers and asterisks that might have been stars, with an ebullient NINA printed at the bottom. She pressed it against the computer screen so that she disappeared behind it and he saw her smiley child-world billow and enlarge. When she dropped the drawing, she tilted her head and crossed her eyes, and Martin crossed his. He made himself fish-eye, touching his nose to the screen, and watched her recoil, palms upraised, in mock-horrified amusement. Eventually Angela leaned over and said that was enough. She asked how he was doing, but didn’t want a reply. She had clicked off the signal before he could blow a second kiss to his daughter.

  Surfacing, glassy, from this far-fetched meeting, Martin saw the tall man smiling down at him.

  ‘I too have a daughter,’ he said. ‘I too use the Skyping.’ He jogged his head in a double verification. ‘Next time you must remember to turn on the sound.’

  Martin pushed back his chair and was pleased to see that the others in the room were ignoring him. But this stranger, this father, wanted a connection.

  ‘Veeramani,’ he said.

  ‘Martin. Pleased to meet you.’

  The man shook hands as if meeting an old friend. Martin was moved by his assumption of paternal pride and the implicit solidarity of his handshake. He said he was a visitor, from Sydney, Australia.

  ‘So next time, Mr Martin, we shall speak of the cricket, yes?’ Veeramani laughed.

  On the overcast street he felt glum and solitary. It was the image of his daughter’s face sucked away into darkness. Martin resisted the intimation of mortality. Another thing disappearing, her presence come alight, otherworldly, then shut down with an electronic chime. He had written simple emails to his daughter and sent her photographs. Still, she seemed almost tragically distant. Veeramani’s impulsive friendliness was tingling on his hand, but it was not quite enough.

  Around the corner from the internet café Martin spotted a cinema, the Orfeo. It was nocturnally dim and uninviting, and he wondered if it was closed down. He crossed the road to peer in the glass doorway and saw that it screened only pornography. There was a dingy foyer, wholly vacant, with one or two salacious posters. Full ashtrays were dotted around the room. There was no one to be seen. A movie, he thought, might have been distracting, but not at the Orfeo. Later, he would ask Tommaso for cinema advice. Turning away, obscurely disappointed, he hastened his stride in order not to yield to his feelings.

  Within a block he came upon a poster for a circus. He stopped in his tracks. A huge lion’s head, a copy of the MGM logo—and Orfei in curly script across the lion’s open mouth. Orfeo, Orfei: the world of signs was confusing him. Martin stood before the poster, took a photograph with his phone, and emailed it to Nina. They both loved the fatheaded MGM lion—Angela loved it too—and here it was, a bold replica, yawning on the streets of Palermo, seeming to manifest his own sense of images misplaced.

  His listlessness hung upon him. He thought again of the European sky chart and idly wondered what colour-number today might be. There was Prussian blue in the heavy clouds, and a streaky undertone that was almost turquoise. There was a tint of verdigris, such as he had seen in Sydney skies. A c
ertain automatism commanded his movements; he headed off in the direction of his rented room. Passing the empty shell of a building, strewn with rusticated stones, Martin had the sensation of his face being lightly touched. The rubble reminded him of something he could not recall or identify.

  Cutting back through Ballarò market, he met Tommaso and Maria, shopping together. It touched him to see Tommaso guiding his mother’s elbow, and carrying her bags. Martin told them he had been talking on a computer to his little girl, and he heard his Italian shift to Sicilian in Tommaso’s mouth. Maria repeated picciridda, little girl. She did not look him in the eye, but it was the first time she’d spoken in his presence. He felt given a new esteem, as he had briefly in the internet café. They walked together, the three of them. Tommaso introduced his friend from Australia to some of the hefty men standing at the stalls. There were few women stallholders. Maria hung back, and at some point disappeared, so that the two men were left wandering the narrow aisles, each carrying some shopping.

  Everywhere trestle tables under red canvas were heaped with food, and Martin was reminded that he would like to paint the market. Goats’ heads hung suspended above huge trays of offal. Swordfish were displayed in an arc, balanced among gigantic pink octopuses and rows of lustrous fish. Blood oranges, cut open, forests of emerald broccoli. The loaves of Monreale bread, which he now recognised, being sold from bakeries or from the boots of cars. The damp underfoot made the market both lush and slightly foetid; everything left over becoming slime and organic life, the blood and guts from the fishmonger squirted into a general slush. Martin’s shoes stank. He bought a plump mound of ricotta for Maria, since he had seen how she loved it; Tommaso told him it was an excellent choice.

  Martin enjoyed the subdued murmur of the market. Perhaps it was the rain. But, unlike Naples, where everyone shouted, where, as a child, he remembered being afraid, the vendors in Ballarò did not harass customers. Patient boredom seemed almost a point of honour. Some played cards, scopa or briscola, when custom was quiet. And, being with a local, he felt less an outsider; Martin had the impression Tommaso was well liked and respected. He decided to ask for a cinema recommendation.

  ‘Orfeo,’ Tommaso said. He gave a conspiratorial smile. ‘There you will find what you need.’

  Martin explained it was another kind of movie he was seeking.

  Tommaso looked sceptical and disappointed, but also persisted. He confided that he did not use the women across the lane—they were too expensive. He liked best the Nigerian women in the Parco della Favorita, or the whores who stood after midnight in front of Giulio Cesare, near the station. Then there were the transsexuals at San Domenico, very late at night. Double or triple fee for ‘unprotected’.

  Martin had no idea how to respond to this information. Nigerian women, possibly refugees, coerced and unfree. He felt a moral shudder and thought Tommaso both boastful and irresponsible. But what to say? He hesitated, caught in the conundrum of mixed feelings and a wish to have Tommaso remain a friend.

  ‘And my mother would know,’ Tommaso added, ‘if I went across the lane.’ His rumpled face smiled again. ‘That is our way,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you have your way.’

  The next day, returning from his walk, Martin discovered that a television set had been placed in his room. Tommaso had decided his guest needed some entertainment. Flicking through the networks was a dispiriting affair—dubbed American crime and sitcoms, repetitious advertisements for push-up bras, or bling, or impossibly beneficial mattresses. There were mawkish soap operas from Argentina, and blowsy women and bulky men in star-spangled gear singing sentimental songs to elderly audiences. There were live broadcasts of some sort of religious festival in Catania, and a woman telling fortunes to hapless viewers who called in. Martin had almost given up searching when he caught a station that was entirely pop classics from the sixties to the nineties. He watched Prince performing ‘Little Red Corvette’, then Thelma Houston, riveting, in a white costume and turban, singing with a jaunty spirit ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’. He realised that if he did not begin to paint or draw he would go crazy. He could hear that the rain had started again; there was an echoing drip-drip at the casement window and the sad patter of drizzle.

  For dinner that night Maria served an unidentifiable meat, possibly horse, in a dark, gluey stew.

  ‘For your sexual problems,’ Tommaso whispered. He tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger.

  Maria looked steadfastly at her plate.

  ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ tumbled in Martin’s head. He finished his meal, grateful that nothing more was said, and that he was excused, like an errant child, as soon as his plate was removed.

  Alone in his drab room, Martin remembered. The shattered building. The rusticated stone. The fragment swelling into recall with its own song-like momentum. Somewhere on the Appian Way his father was lecturing him about the meaning of the word ‘dilapidation’. It came, Noah said, from the Latin for stone, lapis. It meant a scattering of stones. Not just any run-down wreck, his father insisted, but stones, only stones. Martin had made the mistake of describing a wooden hut as dilapidated, hoping to impress Noah with a big word. His father felt obliged to admonish and correct him, aloof in his own knowledge and insensitive to the boy’s hurt. Martin played in the gravel to show his grievance and contempt. He’d been dirty, hateful; he’d been a slave rebelling against an emperor.

  Martin would email Evie, and she would corroborate. She would remember the disgrace and Noah’s tyranny. He recalled more: she wore a red dress that day. There it was—a sundress with pinprick sprigs of yellow that tied in petal-like bows at the shoulders.

  13

  DORA WAS BORN, like Noah, in 1946, a year before her father was killed in a May Day massacre of leftists by mafia bandits. Eleven died, and many more were injured, when machine-gun fire pierced the crowd that was celebrating a minor communist victory in the local polls. Four children were among the dead. Her mother was not at the rally, so did not see her husband fall. His brother Vito, Dora’s beloved Uncle Vito, appeared in her doorway, stiff with shock and covered in blood, his palms open in the universal question: why?

  ‘This is how I see it,’ she said. ‘Vito with his palms open. My mother at first expressionless, uncomprehending. Then svenuta, like the Madonna—a fainting collapse. I’ve spent my whole life picturing it, the moment she heard the news.’

  Here Noah waited, not sure she would go on.

  ‘I cannot imagine my father. So it’s Vito and my mother, telling and hearing the bad news, assuming artistic postures. I’ve condensed my father to this moment. I’ve made him a story.’

  Noah remained honourably silent.

  ‘I am telling you, so you will know what side I am on. Many Sicilians of my age have violence somewhere in their history. And anyone who tells you there are no sides now is a liar.’

  Noah could not fit what she was saying with the elegance of her apartment, her paintings, her interest in art history. The bowl of pomegranates, rosy, on the table before him. The embroidered cloth beneath them. The fine Sicilian linen. He knew she was more political than he; she spoke of refugees, the EU, the various Middle Eastern conflagrations. No doubt she considered him naive: Australianness, she’d implied, was a condition of ignorance and innocence, corrupted by good luck. He suffered from her condescension, even as he was blessed by love.

  ‘Do you have siblings?’ he asked.

  ‘I had three brothers. Two were trade unionists who were killed in the mattanza of the early eighties. Their bodies turned up, mutilated, near Bagheria. The third, my favourite brother, Guido, was an anarchist and a writer who disappeared about the same time. We never saw his body. We still don’t know what happened. Uncle Vito is the only one now still alive from that time.’ She paused. ‘And me, of course.’

  ‘The mattanza?’

  ‘It’s the word we use for the annual tuna killing. Migrating tuna are trapped in nets and harpooned from boats. The sea turns red. In eighty-o
ne and eighty-three it was like that, we say. It was like the mattanza. The mafia decided to round up their enemies, including the politicals, and exterminate them all in one big operation. We do not like to speak of it. It embarrasses and shames us.’

  Noah remembered something vaguely, in a film somewhere. He cast about for an English title, a relevant scene. He did not know what to say.

  ‘I know what you are thinking,’ Dora said. ‘That we are a brutal lot. You are thinking The Godfather. Don Corleone. You are thinking clichés.’

  Noah was surprised by her anger, which he felt he’d done nothing to provoke. ‘No,’ he said, half-lying. ‘I’m wondering how, from all this, you grew up to be an art historian.’

  ‘It is what we have. It is our compensation. Everywhere in Italy you will find the marvellous preserved in old images. I chose Caravaggio because he knew how these elements went together, because he was a man of violence.’

  This was a conclusive statement; the subject was closed. Noah was learning that Dora liked to have the last word.

  She walked out onto the balcony and lit a cigarette. Noah did not follow her; her mood forbade him. He did not want to bungle this moment, to utter false reassurance, or to pretend that he knew how she felt. He sat with the wine she had given him and thought how he ought to have discovered her history before he told her of his own. Nothing at all connected them, but the coincidence of age and art. The birthday thing was no more than an illusion of accord. He’d confabulated a connection; he’d needed complicity.

  Her silhouette was beautiful: woman smoking. She leaned forward, her arms on the rail, her cigarette at an angle. She peered down into the courtyard. He did not know what she was thinking. She did not know what he was thinking. Yet he considered her silence hostile and felt ignored, stranded.

  He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry.’

  It was meant to express sympathy, but his voice was forlorn. Noah thought at once that he sounded like a little boy.