by Gail Jones
This man was Vito, her uncle, who had been sixteen years old when his brother had been slaughtered, who had turned up at her parents’ house, distraught, his hands open like Jesus. This was the man Dora had spoken of not long after they first met, wanting him to know a small detail of her blood-spattered history. Vito had the sagging face of one who had truly suffered. His tired eyes were rimmed with red and his wiry hair was entirely white. Dora rose and Noah kissed her in the Italian manner, without indicating his feelings.
Vito greeted him warmly. His hands were on the table, giant beside his espresso cup. He pushed a glass of water towards Noah, perhaps sensing the remnant need for first aid. ‘So you are also interested in the world of art?’ he said.
They were speaking Italian. Noah organised his vocabulary. He conceded yes, Italian art, especially Piero della Francesca. He expected the old man to snort his dismissal, but Vito leaned back and smiled.
‘Dora took me one time to see his frescoes in Arezzo, The Legend of the True Cross. I liked the picture of the man asleep in his tent, dreaming of the angel.’
‘Constantine,’ said Noah. ‘It’s Constantine’s dream.’
‘And the wine. I liked very much the Sangiovese wine of Arezzo.’ He smiled again, aware of the mischievous equivalence.
They were silent. Noah was not sure why Vito was with them, why Dora hadn’t warned him.
‘And you are Australian,’ Vito went on. ‘Kangaroos!’ He performed a small leaping movement with his huge hands, self-amused.
Noah’s coffee arrived. ‘We have many unusual animals,’ he said, making conversation. ‘Platypuses, koalas, echidnas.’ He sounded ridiculous, unsure of how to Italianise the nouns. Cartoonish creatures fled and scattered in his borrowed language. He dared not sound sardonic or catch Dora’s eye.
‘Platypuses,’ Vito repeated, disbelieving.
Noah was still thinking of the hurt man, his face broken and bloody. He wanted to take Dora to a bedroom and pull her onto him, and then confess in a whisper his instinctive inaction and cowardice. All his life he’d had an urge to confess to women, to lay his soul bare in petition for forgiveness.
‘Vito has a plan,’ Dora said cautiously, ‘and would like you to be involved.’
And that was when he first heard of it.
~
Vito’s abridged version of their dilemma involved the mafia. Noah could hardly credit the narrative he was offering. Signor M, as he referred to him (‘better you don’t know the name’), wanted Dora to steal an original sculpture by Vincenzo Ragusa from a museum in Palermo. It was to be delivered to Tokyo. M knew of Dora’s interest, and that she had twice travelled to Tokyo to research Eleonora Ragusa. She was the obvious art-mule. M knew of her history and he’d rung late at night, Vito said, and made explicit threats. Dora’s job was to steal a Ragusa and smuggle it to Japan, where a third party would take delivery.
But Vito had his own plan. Dora and Noah would go together to Tokyo, but then Noah would continue on to Sydney with the Ragusa. Dora would return to Palermo, claiming that someone unknown, someone who must have been tipped off, had stolen the sculpture from her in Tokyo. Later she would join Noah in Sydney and retrieve the sculpture. She would be in the clear, Vito said. Dora would have stolen from criminals. Noah was unknown to them and they would never track him. They would be on the same flight, but not appear to be travelling together.
Dora had remained silent throughout this outlandish speech. ‘It’s still too dangerous, Vito,’ she murmured. ‘You don’t have to be part of any of this, Noah. They threatened Vito unless I agreed. It’s our problem, not yours.’
She sounded defeated, resigned.
Vito ignored her and pressed his case. This was a brilliant plan. They would trick signor M, fuck Cosa Nostra, and steal a national artwork. It might even lead to M’s exposure, even though he had certainly bought protection. But times had changed in Palermo, Vito added, and it was harder for the older bosses to control the Carabinieri. Fuck them, he said again.
Noah stared at Dora. She would not meet his gaze. Was this some complicated joke, some enlistment of mafia tales to remind him that he was a stranger in bad lands, so innocent and unused to violence that he might be shattered by seeing a single man beaten?
Vito was still insistent. He did not retract his ludicrous plan or change his story. He caught Noah’s gaze and said quietly, ‘This is serious, Noah. This will sound to you like the movies, but art theft happens here all the time. No one will be hurt.’ He paused to offer a strategic explanation. ‘Academics are not often approached, but in this case Dora fits well with the theft. If you agree to help, you mustn’t tell anyone in Sydney of your relationship, not even your children. And you must be more careful from now on, until this is over. Maybe go to Rome for a while and spend your time there. It’s a big city, easy to get lost in.’
Noah said nothing. He felt his throat constrict; he felt a sour panic rising. He could not believe Vito was calmly describing a crime, implicating his involvement, while Dora remained silent. She’d detached herself. She sat with him not in fondness but as if assisting a business deal. How was Dora involved? How had they been threatened? His mind reeled with confusion and genuine dread. But he didn’t want more details, he wanted simply to flee. Vito offered a friendly grin, as if assuming Noah had already agreed to assist them, but in his sense of danger he thought again of the beaten man curled on the ground, his eyes closed, his tongue showing, the blood from his nose streaking his cheek. He might have been a saint, suffering. A face for Caravaggio, dark enough, and distinctive, shining with mute pain. Noah was a small-time art scholar, not a thief. In a moment of self-understanding, aware of his recent disgrace, he knew that he must refuse Vito’s plan.
22
IT WAS STILL raining in Sydney. The high humidity of the past four days, which had given the city a ginger pall, had filled up the sky, and at last the rain fell. From the bus, on the crest of a hill, Evie saw the front sweep in, a veil before them, satiny and dense. When she arrived at Benjamin’s house, having rushed from the bus stop with no umbrella, she was dripping and slick, but enlivened by her dash through the gusting weather. She stood on the doorstep catching her breath, listening for Rocky’s greeting.
Benjamin seemed to know without touching that she was drenched, and the dog sniffed with excitement at the rainy world, his thick tail wagging, his fat head bumping in affection. Evie felt the kindness of their doubled greeting. Benjamin held out a towel, as if in tribute. He had placed it on the hallstand; he had anticipated the rain. He’d somehow known she would arrive on his doorstep wet and dishevelled. Evie stood before him, rubbing her hair.
‘If you want to dry your clothes, you can change. I can offer a range of business shirts, white or pale blue.’
Evie looked into his face, which was turned towards her. This was an invitation, both subtle and open.
‘Why not? Thank you.’
Benjamin walked as if seeing as she followed him to his bedroom. A large double bed, a print that looked like a series of eclipses. It was stylish, neat, with the strangely static mood empty bedrooms achieve. He opened his wardrobe, and Evie saw that his shirts, which were many, were grouped by colour: white, pale blue, and a row of assorted pinstripes. The uniform of the city. The robes of another life.
‘Choose for yourself.’
So Evie chose. Benjamin left the room while she discarded her wet dress, and she thought this a coy and unnecessary delicacy. She realised that she’d wanted to undress in his presence, that she’d assumed, perhaps, a pretext for seduction on his part. There was a moment, pulling her clinging dress over her head, when she recognised the enchanted force of her own desire. She stayed for a few seconds thus, covered and uncovered, as children do. The hollow of her dress held her there, halted without words, shaded by the past. Then it was a swift change. Evie liked the touch of his cotton shirt, too large and flawlessly ironed, on her cool skin. In movies barefoot women in shirts express winsome sexiness. I
t was a formula costume. Yet, being unseeable, she was relaxed; she was wholly inside her own body.
Rolling up the sleeves of Benjamin’s shirt in the stillness of his bedroom, with the buzz of his absence, the hint of erotic suspense, she noticed the scent of chemical lavender. It was all around her, sweeping into her face. Some unremembered event, some lost physical sensation, caught her unawares. She felt an irrational impulse to cry, but instead sat on Benjamin’s bed, staring into space.
‘Are you alright?’ he called.
And Evie was obliged to say yes, and pull herself back, and meet him again, and make conversation. ‘The scent of lavender,’ she said, walking into the sitting room. ‘It overwhelmed me.’
‘Mrs Hamilton, my cleaner. She has a wide assortment of ozone-depleting compounds. Mistress of fluorocarbons. I’ve asked her not to use them, but she doesn’t believe a room is clean unless it smells like industrial spillage.’
Benjamin smiled. Her mood had radically shifted. She looked at him and saw how he anticipated pleasure.
‘Do you mind,’ she asked, ‘if we don’t do the movie today? I’ll stay until the rain stops, then return tomorrow.’
Now she saw his disappointment, and his failure to disguise it.
In a tone of grievance he said, ‘You should have rung, and said so. You didn’t have to make the journey here to say you weren’t available.’ It was almost a reproach. She could not explain why she wanted suddenly to be alone, slumped in on herself, and outside time.
‘I like the shirt,’ she said.
‘It’s yours. I’m sure you look great.’
‘I chose white,’ she added.
So they were bashful again. They sat quietly at each end of the sofa, far apart. In the vacancy that followed Evie was searching for a topic.
‘It occurred to me I could walk Rocky sometimes.’
‘I have a walker, a twelve-year-old. He loves Rocky and the pocket money. But if you and I walked him together, I would be grateful. He has way too much energy for an unaccompanied blind man, and I am also restless. I used to cycle, and run. It’s been one of the most difficult things, changing my body.’
Both fell silent. Evie was still surprised by her swift reversal of feeling, the embarrassing grip of something she could not understand or identify. There was an intuition of remote, extrasensory meaning. The dead language of a lost life. She thought of white swans on a cold river, and a frigid white sky. A curved bridge somewhere, in an English winter. Freesias, daffodils, and something skittish, apparently fleeing, in a nearby hedge. And the twinkle children notice, of distant water, of cars, of the condensation of breath on a pane. Nothing in this sweep of vague visions unlocked the meaning of her feelings.
‘I’ve been wanting to ask you a movie question,’ Benjamin said.
‘Fine, go ahead.’
‘Is there a movie made by a blind man?’
He was folding the towel. Evie wondered if he was one of those men who folded their clothes before making love.
‘I’m sure there are several, but I know of just one. Blue by Derek Jarman.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘There is just one image, a blue screen. It’s a deep organic blue, such as that of cornflowers or delphiniums. But the soundtrack is extraordinary—diaries, poetry, conversation. The sound of cafés, the ocean, a hospital, music. Images come into being, as it were, from the hypnotic effect of contemplation alone. Jarman was almost completely blind, suffering from AIDS, and nearing death. It’s really very moving. It’s about losing sight, but not losing vision.’
She waited for Benjamin’s comment, but he made none. She could not read his expression. He might make a joke, or scoff, or suggest that such minimalism was pointless.
‘Sorry,’ Evie said. ‘My father used to say I give lectures, not conversation.’
‘I’m just thinking, Evie.’
They were quiet for a minute. She could have gone on, arguing the case, but it was an easy quiet, after all, and a coming together. There was a long opportunity to study his face, private even now, formally at rest. The telephone rang. Rocky leaped up with a yelp, startled from his doze. Benjamin rose and moved to the desk, taking up the handset.
‘Yes, it is. Yes, yes. When? Does my sister know? No, I’ll call her. Yes, okay. Yes. Thank you.’
He stood still for a few seconds, his back to her. He was shielding his feelings. When he turned, his face showed a weary sorrow.
‘My mother. It may be a stroke. They are doing the tests. I have to go immediately to the nursing home. I’ll take a taxi and can drop you on the way, if you like.’
He was attempting to cover something deeply personal and solemn. Benjamin waited as Evie returned to his bedroom to change back into her wet dress. She hung the white shirt carefully over the back of a chair. So they were strangers after all, Evie thought. He was preoccupied, wanting to leave. She felt herself a crass intruder in the private moment of a family she could not presume to know. Mischance and misalliance. The demands of others. Family. In the taxi beside her, not touching, he appeared to stare out the window.
Later, Evie thought how this day was a figure of life itself: a combination of happy glimpses and tragic possibilities, of interruptions, questions and answers, of desire and of defeated desire, and the rain, which was unceasing, as it was in Palermo, signifying some larger sense of the world beyond human control. There was an inconsequential meeting, slight conversation, and the rumour of art that might give the human condition a meaning. She felt the wet fabric of her dress as a kind of failure.
Evie asked to be dropped off at the train station, insisting it was easier for all. Benjamin was whisked away into the streaming rain, unable to look back. Evie bought an umbrella from a creaky rotating stand outside an enterprising newsagency, and decided on impulse to walk. Setting off down the shimmering road, she was visited by memories that may have been skeining backwards to the mystery of the lavender. These were of early childhood objects she had shared with Martin: a stamp collection, bearing emblems of flora, fauna, maps and politicians; matchbox cards that had once belonged to their father, series of sedans and vans, fire engines and ambulances; illustrated art books, with reproductions on glossy paper. Their father did not permit television, so these were the screens they’d peered into. And a doll she once had, with which both she and Martin had played, a plastic doll, dumb-looking and bubble-headed, with eyes that opened and closed with a click under a fan of stiff eyelashes. There was some more distant sense of their cold home in Kent, seams of blonde light slanted into a dusty room, the smell of burnt custard boiling over on a stove, the lonely adventure of sitting hidden under a cloth-covered table.
And now Noah. Evie had scarcely thought of her father all day. He would be the one with all the answers, since he had remembered her whole life, and known her forever. She had often been moved by the fine detail of his memories: something she had said when she was five or seven, some scrap of mispronounced wit or adorable behaviour. There was a solace in what he had preserved and told her. He had admired her savant talent for listing, and enjoyed her useless retention of facts. Now, impersonal death. No more questions, and no more answers. She was grieving for herself, for what Noah had taken away. As Evie walked beneath her umbrella, she began a silent list: it sprang up inside her like an affliction: laburnum, lantana, larkspur, laurel, laurestine, lavender, lilac, lily, lisianthus, lobelia, lotus, love-lies-bleeding.
23
IN THE DOW NPOUR Martin hurried along the uneven pavements, worried he would slip. There was the added hazard of soft dog shit, and broken umbrellas, and scaffolding, so that from time to time he had to step out into the wilderness of traffic to return to the pavement. There were Indian vendors with their wares indistinct under sheets of plastic, and a population reduced to dark shapes, hurrying, their intentions awash. In the market, which he passed through by way of a short cut, customers were few and the shopkeepers sat smoking or gambling under dripping tarpaulins. When they sold th
eir fish or cheese, it was a bored and slow exchange. The sight of cast-off vegetable leaves in puddles filled Martin with despair.
‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ was playing with infuriating insistence in his head. The same few lines. He must ask Evie how it was that songs do this; she was bound to know. When he boasted of having a genius for a sister, he really believed it; but somehow she had done nothing with her life, she was a drifter between jobs and partners, always broke, and unable to settle on one vocation. Things would be different, with Noah gone. They would see more of each other. He would be a better brother, and support her. If she stayed in Sydney, they might even share his house for a while, which was too empty and too lonely. He had begun formulating a plan.
In the internet café Veeramani stood as he entered, and stretched out his hand. ‘And how are you, Mr Martin, in this splendid weather?’ He grinned widely, pleased with his own humour.
‘I would prefer more rain,’ said Martin, as he shook his umbrella out the door and brushed water from his sleeves.
Veeramani laughed heartily and repeated the joke to the other men in the room, who were less amused than he. Tamils, he had told him: they were a community of Tamils. Martin was pleased to be doing a service. During his last Skype with Nina he had sketched her face, and Veeramani had seen his portrait and been impressed. In a nervous voice he’d asked Martin if he might sketch his two children when he Skyped them, so that he would have their portraits here, in Palermo. ‘Real art is much preferable to photographs, don’t you agree, Mr Martin?’
He would draw Veeramani’s children while their father spoke to them in Chennai through a glass screen. The children had been told, and Martin had arrived with his sketchpad and pencils at the appointed time. The old computer had been lifted from its grubby booth and placed on a bench, before two chairs.