The Death of Noah Glass

by Gail Jones

  At some stage in the halting narration Noah understood that his uncle was confiding in order to seek forgiveness. He’d wished Joshua dead. He’d wanted his skeleton brother gone. Luke’s liver-spotted hands reached out and clasped his, and Noah played priest for a while, reassuring his uncle, mentioning the scriptures, speaking of the ambivalence between siblings and the need to sense one’s own life confirmed. Luke hugged him and manfully held back his tears. Noah called a taxi and saw his uncle fold into it, brotherless and blurry and bending like a doll. An arm shot out, flailing, as the taxi pulled away.

  Back in his room, in the Criterion, a hotel in the centre of the town that had seen better days, Noah still could not recall the old man’s name. The window in his room looked out onto a solid brick wall. He sat on the orange nylon bedspread, staring at the garish primrose decor, and again felt his throat itch and complain. He had nothing to do. He had no wish to walk around the dehydrated streets of Perth, or to ring anyone, or see friends from the past he was striving to repress. Everyone faces such a moment, he thought, alone, in a hotel room, caught in unmeasured time. This was his. He heard slurry words through the wall; a couple making love, perhaps, or the stifled labour of hotel workers. Others had wholesome, amiable lives, but he felt unclean, like the leper whose wounds were tended by dogs.

  He thought: now I am fatherless.

  Caught in a confusion of remembering and forgetting, Noah tried to recall his father. His images were shallow and dubious, a petty frieze of snapshots. So much had been pushed away, or crushed tight like the holy Lazarus card. He removed his shoes and lifted his feet onto the bed, and gratefully began to slip into a vague light sleep.

  At some indeterminate point between waking and sleeping, he thought of Luke in the taxi, his elderly body flopping, then remembered his father screening a Charlie Chaplin film at the leprosarium. Former missionaries had left behind a small cache of silent movies and Joshua had managed to retrieve and fix the vintage projector. On the whitewashed wall of the shed that served as their church, Joshua sent flying to its surface the stiff little fellow with his jerky mechanical gait, his facial tics, his gimmicky existence. The bowler hat balanced and tipped off the end of his walking stick; he hid his permanently surprised face behind it; his hat rolled like a ball that had its own volition. Everyone laughed.

  Rubbery Charlie Chaplin, jelly Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin accident-prone, and sweet, and nervously silly. Noah remembered his father transformed: it was a wonder to observe him undone by laughter. For so serious a man, for someone habitually humour-less and temperamentally solemn, the man who had chided his sons for moments of ungodly merriment, something had lightened inside him. He could have floated away with the puff of his own snorting laughter. Francis was there, and James, and Maggie—they all saw it too, a man changed as if by revelation.

  Noah opened his eyes. A hideous light fixture of seventies vintage hung above his head. Faceted tangerine plastic in a halo of cubes. His throat was painful. He thought of his children. He thought of his father. He had missed his chance to know his father. They had never reminisced. Neither had explained the choices they made, or practised even a tentative intimacy. The inner man had gone forever, as stereoscopes had gone, and silent movies, and depression glass. And then it occurred to him. His mother, too, had now gone.

  17

  IT WAS THE second time Martin had seen street people with an old pram. This time, there was a single dog tucked into the pram, its angular black head alert and affable. The owners, or the family—for that’s what they were—were a twinned punk couple, rough-looking and filthy, with spiked hair and grimaces. The dog peered out beneficently at the passing world, and the couple walked with purpose, as if late for a business meeting. Martin was thumped on the pavement, a kind of shove with the shoulder, to tell him to move aside. He moved aside. There was a trace of dope smoke and stinky living, and the sour hiss of contained aggression.

  He was uplifted in spirit by the long Skype-talk with Evie. It had helped to tell her of what he knew; it had helped to hear her crazily specific knowledge about seeing and colours. And once he got her talking, they converged; they discovered areas of alikeness, even as they chimed and competed with wisecracks.

  Dora’s apartment block looked massive, grimy and forbidding. On its wall, in a smeared ejaculation, the graffiti read Carabinieri assassini! Martin rang the electric bell, and no one answered. Then he rang again, waited a while, and heard a faint serrated crackle from the perforated speaker attached to the wall. He announced himself, and a hidden lock clicked open. It was a heavy door, set in a recessed frame, so that he stepped over a threshold to enter the courtyard. There was lightly crazed paving and a sense of enclosure. Martin looked around and saw a figure gesturing from a balcony. He climbed the outside steps, and then the apartment door opened.

  He guessed she must have been about his father’s age. She had mid-length grey hair, held by plastic clips, and the slim, nervy elegance of attractive Italian women.

  ‘Good afternoon, signora,’ said Martin. ‘I believe you were a colleague of my father, Noah Glass.’

  It was peculiar to say his father’s name aloud in this way, but he sensed the need for formality, and to give this woman a chance to divulge, as slowly as she might wish, her knowledge of Noah. According to Antonio she had stolen a sculpture, and somehow his father had been blamed. What might he discover?

  A strong scent of coffee wafted in the room; there was a plate of new-moon-shaped biscotti at the centre of a low table. The woman who greeted him seemed calm and self-possessed.

  ‘Colleagues, yes. I am sorry for your loss.’

  There it was again: there was no more capacious cliché.

  They were in a large, high room, with white walls of flaking paintwork. Green shutters were open to the courtyard, revealing a grey square of cityscape, blurring into the distance. There was heavy dark furniture, covered in lacy cloths and antimacassars, and a wall of bookcases, untidily stuffed. Papers lay in irregular piles on the floor.

  Dora looked out the window, as if searching for something. For a moment or two she seemed to forget he was there.

  ‘Please sit,’ she said, businesslike. ‘How can I help you?’

  They sat opposite each other, he on the scrolled couch before the plate of biscotti, she on a hard chair that required her to pose uncomfortably straight. She poured the coffee into fragile cups and mentioned that Martin resembled his father. Now he felt like a boy, needing to give an account of himself.

  And then Dora said, ‘So, what has Antonio told you?’ She rose and moved to a small sideboard, reaching for a cigarette.

  Martin blurted out a garbled version of the story, and Dora frowned. It had begun badly. He could tell that she was suspicious of him. He heard himself say that he knew of course that the mafia story was nonsense, and that he simply wanted a sense of what his father was doing in Palermo.

  Dora watched him attentively.

  He began again, hoping to elicit clarity or confession. ‘Antonio says that you stole a sculpture from the museum.’

  Dora held herself firm. ‘Antonio is a liar and a fantasist. Your father came to Italy to see the Caravaggios, and passed through Palermo. Not many here, of course, but my field is Caravaggio, so naturally he consulted me as a colleague. That is all. Nothing more. Antonio is right: I have a special interest in Ragusa, but more in his Japanese wife, Eleonora, a painter. This has nothing to do with Noah. Nothing at all.’

  Dora inhaled deeply and sent a stream of smoke to her left. There was something seductive about the way she held the cigarette pointed behind her, some cinematic gesture.

  It was a wasted visit, thought Martin; Antonio had spun him a line and he fell for it. Or Antonio knew a truth, or a partial truth, that Dora needed to deny. Or the whole story was irretrievable, since one never knows one’s parents.

  ‘So you’ve not heard of the accusation? Against Noah?’

  ‘Antonio will say anything,’ Dora said ambiguous
ly, neither confirming nor denying. ‘Your sister, is she here? Noah spoke of you both. I have read two of her articles.’

  She had already changed the subject. It seemed to Martin that Dora had hoped above all to meet Evie, and was disappointed. She said almost nothing more about Noah, but suggested Martin should visit Mondello beach when the weather improved. A charming spot. They have a windsurfing festival. A delightful bay. And had he been to Monreale? The mosaics were incomparable.

  Martin knew by now this was what people talked of when they did not want to talk. He murmured something about being an inept tourist, and how he hoped, while here, to base some artworks on churches. Some caution prevented him using the word ‘deconsecration’.

  ‘We have so many churches,’ she said, ‘not all of them still in use. Perhaps you should see San Lorenzo, where the Caravaggio Nativity once hung. I used to look up at the painting as a child; not his best, by far, but it meant a great deal to me.’

  This was the closest Dora came to revealing anything personal. She asked if he had been to the opera house, the Teatro Massimo. It featured, she added gravely, in The Godfather, Part III. ‘Perhaps you recall the death-by-cannoli scene?’

  Martin could not decipher her tone. Was she mocking or attempting a weak joke?

  ‘Have you yet tried our famous cannoli?’ Adding insult, as if this had anything to do with his visit. She pulled an ashtray towards her and stubbed out her cigarette.

  Martin glanced around the room. A few paintings, a silver reliquary of a hand. With a small shock of recognition he saw a faint prefatory sketch of the Ragusa bust. Dora possessed an image of the stolen artwork; how could she not be involved? But he saw too her composure—she’d not hidden the sketch, she’d seemed direct, and confident. Unlike Antonio, she had no hint of duplicity about her.

  She followed his gaze. ‘It would be wise,’ she said casually, ‘if you were to stop asking questions. Someone might get the wrong idea, inquiring about a robbery.’

  Martin heard a vague warning. He was about to ask who the someone might be, when she added, ‘Let me know if you need any sightseeing advice.’

  So this was it; he was dismissed as a tourist. It wasn’t worth disputing, or finding the right question. Dora was incurious about him and his artwork and had thought him boyish and gullible. She had disclosed nothing about his father’s stay in Palermo. Martin accepted a paper bag of biscotti as he left. He might have been visiting a doting aunt. He felt foolish, and immature. He wondered whether, had Evie been there, Dora would have spoken differently, or revealed something new, or something more. Whether he would have been taken more seriously.

  When Martin returned to Tommaso’s, he found Maria had a gift for him. They stood in her kitchen, in which the tiles shone like mirrors and smelled of ammonia and sick flowers, and Tommaso ushered her forward, like a child presenting a school project. Maria had wrapped the gift in white tissue paper and tied it with a white ribbon. She handed him the parcel on her palms held together, outstretched, as in Muslim prayer.

  Martin accepted, and unwrapped the offering with slow and finicky tearing. It was a small pair of ears, made from silver-plated tin. In response to the inevitable questions about family, Martin had mentioned to Tommaso that his daughter, Nina, was deaf. Tommaso had told Maria and she had purchased the ears so that he could present them as a votive offering at the church of Santa Rosalia, on Monte Pellegrino. Maria would take Martin up the mountain, Tommaso said. They would go together on the bus. They would pray together. The saint would cure his terribly afflicted daughter. With due reverence for their curative magic, Maria had already polished the ears with a silver cream she purchased in the Ballarò market.

  ‘She has cleaned the ears,’ Tommaso announced, without the hint of a smile.

  Martin looked across at Maria, who nodded encouragement, and patted her bulky black bosom, as if to say he had her heartfelt support. After avoiding him for weeks, she seemed to have decided she liked him, and that he needed her help. Perhaps, at some stage, she might even speak to him. But it was impossible to say to Maria that he felt his daughter didn’t need a cure, that she was complete, and perfect, and impeccably herself. There was no defect that needed correction. Her appointed loveliness had been there, evident and ratified by adoration, from the very beginning. He’d often argued with Angela on this matter. She too wanted a ‘cure’ and thought him deplorably callous and selfish when he argued against a cochlear implant. This difference between them had never been resolved. And now Nina was scheduled to have the operation.

  Martin thanked Maria and said in his most formal Italian that he would be honoured to accompany her to Monte Pellegrino. Her face bloomed like a pansy, round and darkly tender. She wiped her hands on her apron, accepting his thanks, and turned away. He felt a leaden hypocrisy descend upon him: all his artworks, his ambition, his women, his drunkenness, his selfish and irresponsible living were nothing compared to the extravagant purity of his love for his daughter. But he would go with Maria to the mountain, and he would think of Nina there; he would consider how blessed he was, in this fucked-up world, to know the singular joy of his daughter’s existence.

  They arranged a date, the next Monday. Maria turned back towards him and beamed. She was a woman, he could tell, of shrines and offerings, one of those believers one sees everywhere in Italy kneeling in churches, ignoring the effusive muttering of heathen and chatterbox tourists. Someone for whom the world of incense and invoked presences mattered. Monstrances with edges frilled like fried eggs, figures floating on curved ceilings in hallowed deportment, side chapels ablaze with electric candles, images of ghoulish tortures and savage crucifixions—all these held for Martin a complicated history. Noah had taken his children to churches, to study artworks. He and Evie, with rebel hearts, needing a piss, feeling a centuries-old pensioner chill in the inky blue light, endured his lectures on quattrocento art, trefoil windows and the use of tempera. He told them which were the miscible and immiscible painting formulas. It was one of his words: miscible. He named disciples and saints, placed faces within stories. He unlocked symbols and made a game of revelation. Martin still remembered when Noah first told them that the pelican was a type of Christ. They absorbed more art-historical knowledge than either would admit. He’d seen so many old women, like Maria, on their knees, in the pews. He secretly admired their endurance, and the solidity of their faith.

  That evening Tommaso was drunk. Martin was not sure why. At about ten p.m. Tommaso knocked on his door and invited him into the kitchen for a rabarbaro, the bitter rhubarb liqueur Martin found rather sickly. Tommaso was by then already unsteady on his feet, oscillating like a toddler, his face red as a baby’s. He grabbed Martin’s forearm and suggested they should speak as men do, of manly things. In Maria’s gleaming kitchen they sat at her spotless table, the shot glasses filling and filling again. It had been only last night that Martin was hopelessly shickered with Antonio, so he was wary and slow in accepting more drink. He didn’t want the brooding misery of another hangover, or the ignobility of his body sickened and out of control.

  Tommaso was not entirely sure what masculine meaning he wanted to impart. He boasted a little about a Nigerian woman with whom he had a ‘special’ relationship, a whore, certainly, but with a heart of gold. (Martin couldn’t believe anyone still used that expression.) He would rescue her sometime, and take her to Malta when his mother, God bless her soul, died. Then he entered a monologue in a soft, confiding tone.

  ‘When I was a child,’ Tommaso said, ‘there were the many killings in Palermo.’

  He was hunched over the table, head down, clasping his small glass in a manner that allowed him to hold his own hands.

  ‘The mafia left bodies around the city. Just to show. You know, just to show what they could do. I was ten, it was 1981, and I found a headless body in the lane behind our house. Just out there, just behind us. I can’t ever go out there now without remembering it.’

  Here, grievously weighed, Tommaso
gave a buoyant little laugh. ‘I didn’t run away—that is what you would expect, isn’t it, for a small boy to run away. I just stared and stared. Mamma came, and she screamed, and she pulled me inside.’ Tommaso took another sip. ‘You heard stories, of course. Everyone at school had a story about a corpse in a lane or a car bomb on the corner and bits and pieces of bodies blown everywhere. Brain matter on a lamppost, that was one of them.’

  Martin looked into his glass, not sure what role he was being called upon to play.

  ‘It was a young man, that headless body. A teenager maybe. Not much older than me.’

  Tommaso began to giggle. His mouth became lopsided with spilled drink. He had the distorted face of one accepting physical punishment. ‘You don’t have nothing like that in Australia, now, do you?’

  Martin was being asked to contribute a story. ‘Every country,’ he began lamely, ‘has a history of violence. Every big city…’

  Tommaso ignored him. ‘I was ten years old,’ he repeated. ‘It was the time of the mattanza.’

  Martin was unfamiliar with the word. He didn’t ask. He drank alongside Tommaso, wondering if he should put an arm around his shoulder, or allow him to weep, or say something more about his life as a child.

  Tommaso giggled again. Then he pushed back his chair, unsteadily, almost tipping over. ‘Bedtime,’ he declared. ‘Enough talk of happy memories!’

  He lurched upwards, upsetting what was left in the bottle. Dark brown liquid, rather human, spread in a circular stain across Maria’s white tablecloth.

  ‘Porca miseria!’ he whispered. Another, higher laugh, more typically drunken. He put his hand over his mouth, smothering his desperate hilarity.