by Gail Jones
When Martin was a teenager, Noah tried to explain this to him. He struggled to insist on the sincerity of his meaning. Yet he’d made up his mind. He was convinced of his own ideas. They would be his own fundamentalism.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Martin said, in a bored whisper, half-admiring, half-critical, as sons of sixteen often are in the face of a paternal explanation.
Martin was rubbing his head with a towel, sitting on Glenelg beach. They were drying off, each watching Evie swim in the choppy water. She was always the last to leave the ocean when they had their swims. There were her churning arms and her small head, cresting and falling; there was her slight form asserting its shape in the dappled wavelets and foam. Every now and then she dived under, disappearing, flicking her feet upwards, and then returned, as in an ancient enactment. Martin saw it too, Noah thought, how Evie stood in for both of them as the body pitched against obliteration, as a declaration of energy. He understood that Martin only half-listened to his little Piero lecture. His son had entered the age of humorous contempt, and offered merely perfunctory or blasphemous observations. At length, to signal boredom, Martin pulled out his sketchpad, sucked at his pencil and drew Evie, a girl-form in a field of theoretical water, the warped triangles of waves, the deadly flatline of the horizon.
Sitting in silence, they could hear sea birds. Both noticed gulls hanging in a strange suspension above them. A cool southerly breeze swept over their faces. The birds lifted up on streams of air, tilted down, lifted again, their white wings flashing. Gradually, Noah and Martin made their peace. They were united by watching Evie strive against the might of the ocean. They were united by looking not at each other, but in her direction.
At Mondello beach, Noah watched Dora swimming, not too far away. He was sitting with a book, unable to read, under the September sun. He was daydreaming, recalling his children. Somewhere near the centre of the curve of beach between Monte Pellegrino and Monte Gallo, he had bought a patch for a few euros and spread their towels to mark the boundary of their little claim. The beach was densely populated with noisy families. Noah noticed how loudly Sicilians spoke. Every voice seemed pitched in shouting and exclamation. Adults yelled, children ran, or cried, or ate pastries and gelato. A small boy beside him, whining, was having his naked body rubbed dry with unseemly roughness. A nonna was arguing with a nonno, abusing him in public. A small girl was singing to herself, something in dialect, about butterflies. Noah remembered the Italian command ‘zitto!’, a word his children had liked because it sounded like a cream for skin ailments, they said, or a fizzy drink.
Noah wanted the silence of the beaches in South Australia, in which the distance between bathers meant that the ocean was audible. He wanted the high singing wind, and the voices of birds crossing above. Here, with the human noise, he could not read or think. Australians take space for granted, Noah reflected; we extend ourselves because we can, and gain a physical confidence. He’d seen how, in the move from England to Australia, Evie had transformed athletically, as if by enchantment.
He watched Dora swim towards the horizon, then back again, buoyed and conveyed by the rhythms of the ocean. She had a still-slender body, encased in jade-coloured lycra. She looked towards the shore, bobbed up and waved. In some momentary confluence of admiration and lust, Noah saw how her body became the symbol of a hope he’d long harboured inside him.
She emerged from the water, glistening. She plodded up the beach and bent over him, blocking the sun, spraying droplets of water, then drew up and shook the sand from her towel. She rubbed first at her head, then her body, moving downwards so that her face was close as she rubbed dry her shapely calves. She had not spoken. When she lowered herself down, her hair ribbed and dripping, her face aglow, she said, ‘Allora, let me tell you my Mondello story.’
She was so vibrant to him then, her head glazed with seawater.
‘I was strolling with a boyfriend, once, along this beach.’ She smiled, as if teasing him. ‘It was early evening, in June, and we were just getting to know each other. Very shy. Not saying much. The weather was clear, when red lightning appeared on the horizon. It was the strangest vision, flares of scarlet, a sense of something mysterious happening. It was Stromboli, of course, away to the north-east. This way.’ Dora gestured across the water.
‘You could see its lights from this beach. I’ve always wanted to see it again, the red of sprayed lava, the drama of a volcano over there, just out of sight. But I never have, though I’ve been here often. So I enjoy this memory, which includes a boy I didn’t really like, because it was an accidental vision, because it was random, and lucky.’
It could have been a deficit of his sensual life, but Noah loved her most at this moment, when she told him a personal story. She lay on her chest and turned her face away, closing her eyes. She was sunbaking in her own past, smiling to herself with the memory of the boy she didn’t like and the Mondello horizon lit with red flares. Noah restrained himself so that he did not reach over to kiss her. Her small revelation imposed an emotional austerity. He remained quiet. Solitary. He lay down beside her, covering his sunburnt face with the tent of his open book.
He was thinking again of his children. He was unable to say how being a father moved and engaged him, how Martin and Evie, even in times of estrangement, were his centred world. No hypothetical eternities, but their actual now. And the memory of them when little, dressing, undressing, pulling garments on and off their vulnerable bodies, the incandescent light falling like seawater over their small bent backs.
20
WHAT WAS HE seeking, leaning too close to the screen, his face broad as a moonstone and artificially shiny? What was she wanting, leaning back, distrustful of his imploring image?
‘I don’t understand,’ said Evie. ‘This woman is taking you to a shrine?’
‘To cure Nina. She wants to help me cure Nina.’
‘I thought you didn’t want her cured.’
‘Lighten up, Evie. It’s folk wisdom, you know. I’m not really wanting a cure. Maria bought these cute little tin ears to place before Santa Rosalia.’
‘Jesus,’ she sighed. ‘So, what else are you doing there?’
‘Sketching. Walking. Watching Italian pop on the telly. There’s a great performer, Jovanotti. Totally cool.’
‘You sound like a kid, Martin.’
‘Grazie, mamma. Grazie mille.’
‘So what else?’
‘Hanging around. It’s a sad city, Evie. It gets to you. Gets into you. I feel things gathering inside me. Memories. Ideas.’
At his new tone she paused before formulating a retort. She heard Martin pause, too, perhaps not sure how to go on after what seemed the spilling of a secret. It was a moment in which both glanced away from the monitor.
‘Noah,’ she insisted. ‘Anything more about Noah? What did Dora say?’
‘Not much. She didn’t want to talk. Antonio told me they’d been on some sort of holiday together, so I figure they were close, but you’d never guess it. Tight as a clam. A bit edgy. She has a sketch of the sculpture, but no real link.’
There was nothing to tell. No reliable information. Evie was disappointed.
‘And what about your blind guy?’
‘My employer, not my blind guy. Benjamin. It’s going well, I think. I passed my week of probation. A Hitchcock: Marnie. And a Bertolucci, The Conformist. Good that he knows Italian.’
Martin was too near again, his face looming and inflated. There was a starry glint in his eyes that might have been the reflection of his screen.
‘How about we turn off the vision and just talk?’ Evie asked.
They did so and, returning each to their own world, their conversation calmed. What a relief the dark screen was—no huge brother-face to incite or command her.
‘Tell me more about that Czech guy, the anatomist you mentioned.’
‘Purkyně? What about him?’
‘Anything, really. You’re the smart one.’
‘I thou
ght it was Ritter you were interested in.’
‘Him too. But I like the name: Purkyně. I wrote it down when we spoke.’
‘You could just google him, you know. Jan Evangelista Purkyně, 1787 to 1869.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Okay. Subjective vision. He liked to experiment on himself.’ She knew this would entice him.
Martin waited. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s not really my field.’
‘Indulge me, Evie.’
‘Well, the story goes that as a kid Purkyně was fascinated by what we call entoptic images—like what you see when the eyelid is pressed against the eyeball. Shadows of blood vessels, dots, squiggly lines. You close your eyes and there are images, but they’re not images of the outside world.’
‘Right.’
‘He ran electric currents into his own eyeballs and did little drawings of what he saw, diamond patterns, mostly, and lines that looked like filaments and zapping electricity. And he took various drugs to gauge the effects on his vision.’
‘What drugs?’
‘The usual. Opium. Camphor. Datura. But he also did experiments with digitalis, which is a poison. Lots of flickering of the eyelids and nausea and distorted sight. Under the influence he wrote about something he called his “shimmer-roses”—isn’t that beautiful? Petals, concentric circles. He had the visual impression, like mysticism, of a many-petalled flower.’
Martin was silent. ‘How come you know these things?’
‘I don’t know much at all. I’m a failed academic, remember? But since I met Benjamin, I’ve been thinking again about these guys, with their romantic faith in our bodies as intelligent organisms. Sightless sight. Images without screens. What it might mean to have visions. It’s your turn, now. Who is this Rosalia?’
‘Patron saint of Palermo. That’s about all I know. I’ll tell you more after I visit the shrine with Maria.’ Martin paused. ‘Shimmer-roses, I like that too. Was he a mystic?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
Both became silent. The monitor stood waiting, the patient dark wormhole of their supernatural speaking. In Sydney, Evie could see faintly her own reflection on the dusty black screen. She imagined Martin sketching something indistinct that may have been a shimmer-rose. Perhaps he was thinking sideways, distracted, of the sexual appeal of lipstick. Evie was thinking distractedly of Benjamin.
‘Is it still raining?’ she asked.
‘Yep, still raining.’
After her response to his question about Purkyně and his small flurry of interest, Evie heard Martin slide back into himself. He may have been falling asleep, or returned to the shell of his own imagining. He may have been staring in dozy inattention at an image he had just made.
‘Let’s talk again later,’ she said, waking him up.
‘Fine, sis. Ciao, ciao. Mi fido di te.’
‘Ciao.’
Mi fido di te. I trust you. Why did he say this?
Their voices dissolved into the black passage between them.
She discovered later that Martin had quoted Jovanotti; the words moving through him like a passing spirit. Evie didn’t mean to feel suspicious, but she didn’t entirely trust him.
21
IN HIS SIXTY-SEVENTH year, musing on the surprise of falling in love, Noah Glass found himself walking past the architectural hotchpotch of the cathedral on Via Vittorio Emanuele. There had been no premonition of his Sicilian good luck. He was accustomed to meagre returns; at best an ardent encounter at a conference or a temporary fling in Sydney; at worst a feeling of hollowness and suffocation, as he looked into the placid ironical face of a woman he fancied, or made a gaffe, expecting interest where none was returned. It was tiresome and frustrating. It was a kind of emasculation. Dora Caselli was dignified and self-assured. Though she had never married and had no children, she was smart and sexual in a confident, even luxurious, manner, and wanted nothing of him beyond his intensification in her presence. There was no fuss or hidden agendas or double meanings. She met him as he was, and granted him the benefit of the doubt, that he might be more than he seemed in the simplified economy of appearances. At first it had looked like magical thinking or ordinary wish-fulfilment. But this supposition disappeared in her sun-warmed bedroom, in the slumbering ease that followed their lovemaking, in the jokes she made in husky banter, in the way she rose naked, unhesitating, to take up a floral dressing-gown of Japanese design.
In the courtyard, in front of the cathedral, a statue of Santa Rosalia stood on the stern of a boat. A group of Polish pilgrims had stepped off a rusty bus, and were taking photographs of her. They had their backs turned to the magnificently peculiar cathedral and were fixed instead on the wooden statue of the young noblewoman, pretty in a folksy way, with her flowing robes and garland of flowers in her hair. She was reputed by innocence alone to have saved Palermo from a plague. The pilgrims held cameras and phones to capture the saint’s face. One carried a rosary. One or two bought postcards of Santa Rosalia’s image from a poor Indian man lingering beside them.
As Noah passed by, the Indian man began following a young woman, the one most likely to be a sympathetic customer, and was thrusting his postcards at her. He was too close, or too insistent, and the woman looked frightened. From the bus stepped the large driver, who was built squarely and stiffly as though cast in bronze, like a Bernini statue, Noah thought. The driver seized the man by his collar, yanked him backwards, twisted him roughly to the ground and began kicking him. He had an appalling energy now that his body was a weapon. Noah saw the Indian man curl tight against the blows, and heard him cry out. No one came to his aid. The young woman began to whimper and pleaded with the driver to stop.
Noah stood only a dozen steps away, but did not move. He watched in guilty fascination as the man became smaller under the boot, squirming, a figure of pain, his face bloated and contorted, his jaw working with no words. Blood spurted from his nose.
This was what was possible—the reduction of one man’s life to bodily distress, time abolished in the crux of a spectacle. This knowledge made Noah hostage to his own paralysis. He had been thinking of Dora, and he had seen a man beaten. This was the truth of things—reversal of fate—and he did nothing to intervene.
Another pilgrim seized the arm of the enraged driver and pulled him away. The crying woman was ushered back into the rusty bus, the dazed remainder disappeared in dribs and drabs into the cathedral. Noah hurried along Vittorio Emanuele, ashamed of his cowardice and afraid to look back. His legs were trembling. He could have acted—he could have been the one to seize the driver’s arm and pull him from the man turned creaturely with pain and submission. He could have remonstrated, or gone afterwards to lift the man back into life. But Noah had hurried to remove himself.
The city opened before him like a foldout map. He saw the landmarks and palm trees. He recognised certain storefronts and baroque façades. He squinted at the heat, and the city withered away in the glare. There was a shudder to the visible world that might have been the end of all things, a blackout, or worse. It seemed to Noah he was having a stroke, or a potentially fatal panic attack. He stopped on the pavement, his clogged heart pounding, and leaned against a filthy wall. Beside him a graffito read: tutti i preti sono pedofili incalliti! All priests are hardened paedophiles! It was the incalliti he noticed, hardened. Such a guilty word.
Noah was sweating and terrified. His legs could not support him, so he slid down the wall, slouched over, his knees pressed close to his face. Passers-by ignored him. He stayed like that, blasted by outer or inner experience. He would die in the street, a dishonourable, foreign man. Stone, sun, the indifference of strangers. A stink, too; someone had pissed against the wall. He would collapse not only with this weakness, but in this reeking surrender.
When with difficulty Noah returned to his senses, his first sensation was of an immense thirst. He pulled himself upwards and staggered across the road into a café, where he bought a bottle of water. And so there he was
, not a lover or an art scholar or a learned fellow from Australia, but some negligible figure, obscurely panic-stricken, pouring water down his throat like a man found wandering in the desert.
Two doors further down was a small hotel. Noah entered the lobby and headed for the toilets. There he dashed his face with cold water and, heedless, took off his shirt and splashed at his upper body. He saw his own deplorable reflection, shivery and tripled in the spotted mirrors. His face was yellow and held a doomed expression. He was not sure what fear had clutched him, what physical symptoms he had experienced. But in his muddled thinking he felt grateful to be hidden away. He entered a toilet cubicle and sat in its tangy, calcified confinement, looking into space and waiting for nothing in particular. He fingered his penis, as if checking it was still there. He felt old and ruined. He hated his shoes. There was a spray of pain at his throat.
Noah was late for his meeting with Dora. When he realised the time lapse of what he would later, in strict denial, call his ‘funny turn’, he was physically recovered, though still upset. He walked with fake confidence back out through the lobby—it was more modest than he had noticed on his way in, more two-star-cheery and down-at-heel—and a neat man at reception called out, ‘Buongiorno, signore,’ as if he knew him. ‘Buongiorno,’ he responded and almost ran back into the sunlight.
There was a handful of patrons in the café Dora had selected. She’d chosen a table in the far corner, tucked into the fiction of a private space. There were high slit windows, permitting a little grey light. Puckered, voile curtains hung in a sham-quattrocento symmetry. Strewn more unevenly were various Italianate decorations, candles and Chianti bottles, the banner of the Città di Palermo football team. These were comforting, Noah thought, these time-honoured decorations, along with the sound and the scent of coffee in preparation.
From the entrance Dora looked a much younger woman; in fact she seemed for a second like Katherine, a Lady Lazarus of his wife as she appeared when they first met in Cambridge, when they both possessed the assertiveness of youth. Then he saw an old man sitting beside her on the plush bench, and he too looked like a copy or a substitution. An old man for himself, secretly ancient, peering down a shadowy chasm towards death. Noah understood this was the dramatic after-effect of his turn. The mad logic of shock, the sight of damage to a face. He pulled himself together and strode towards her.