by Gail Jones
After Veeramani had introduced his wife, Amirtha, he summoned his children to the screen. Kavitha was about nine, radiantly excited. Her hair was plaited, and she wore large emerald ribbons on each side of her head. She leaned into the screen to say ‘hello’ to Mr Martin, the artist. Then her brother, Deva, appeared, seven, perhaps, quiet and shy, but impeccably turned out in a suit and a tie. Both had their hair brightened with coconut oil; they were smooth and flawless as electric angels.
It helped that they were not speaking in English. Undistracted by topics of conversation, Martin could concentrate on their faces. Each took a turn speaking to their father, and his animated jollity was clearly infectious. He was telling them jokes, engaging them in stories, commanding their attention by comedy and love. Martin had never drawn dark faces before, and enjoyed the challenge. His pencil was busy crosshatching and shading as he filled the outlines of the children’s features with fine notations of skin, line on downy line to show their healthy round cheeks, their almond eyes, their slight expressions of amazement. Martin felt that something was being restored to him: this was what he was good at, and he was amusing this family and the proud father beside him.
Veeramani was thrilled. ‘Oh, Mr Martin, you have exceeded yourself!’
He held the images to the screen and the children peered at their portraits. Kavitha clapped and Deva joined in, so that there were two children across the planet applauding his artwork in a pitter-patter that sounded like rain. Martin added to the ceremony by offering a little bow. They clapped again. Kavitha’s perching ribbons somehow recalled Evie’s. Had she worn them like this, like bulbous moths? The children’s gladness prompted memories of his own affections: the stamp collection, a fluttery world, he had shared with Evie; and the scent of dried apricots stored in his desk at school; and the royal-blue cigarette tin he’d found, and in which he’d stored a collection of dead insects. There was a dimension of tenderness to such things, prized for their secret associations and hidden value. Nina had reminded him of such worlds and, though he missed her now, he was filled with the images of Kavitha and Deva, densely observed, immaculate and effusive, as if they were his own.
Veeramani offered Martin tea and they sat for a while, talking. It was too late at night in Sydney to Skype Nina, but this small encounter had sparked Martin’s spirit. Veeramani now knew of Nina’s deafness, and Martin told him about his anguish, his arguments with his former wife, and his strong conviction of his daughter’s perfection. There was more than one kind of perfect, surely? Veeramani had looked confused, and said that in India there would be pity for such a child, and that such a child might be said to have bad karma; and that a hearing child was, indeed, more perfect than a child who could not hear. It was a frustrating conversation. The internet café had no customers at all and Martin felt able to speak freely. But he failed to convince Veeramani that there could be sense in refusing a cochlear implant.
‘She will perish without music,’ Veeramani said gravely, averting his eyes, moving the zipper of his jacket up and down, evidently driven to restless fidgeting by Martin’s perverse opinions.
Martin felt rebuked, and unsure. He had not had this kind of discussion with anyone but family, and was both touched and irritated by Veeramani’s advice. It would haunt him, that sentence: she will perish without music. Another person had imagined his daughter’s extinction when she seemed to him pledged to the future and full of immortal possibilities.
When Martin left the internet café, the rain had stopped. This was how he measured time now: it is raining, it is not raining. The air was heavy, submarine, and the light was grey from low clouds. He looked up and saw the vague glow of a lost sun, and felt a pang of homesickness for Sydney. He could be at the beach now, surfing. He could be flexing his body as waves surged like an embrace around him. He could be chatting up a woman in a bikini or building a sandcastle with his perfect daughter. Instead, he was meeting Antonio again, who had left a message. He was late for their appointment.
Martin hurried back through the side streets, through the irregular lanes and onto the main roads. Central Palermo was becoming familiar to him. After three weeks he no longer looked at street signs or read the names of buildings, but found his own ingress and egress, carried a city-shape inside his head, could move absent-mindedly and still find his way. It was a city subject to his intentions, marked privately by what he’d noticed, the particular wavelength of his impulses and interests. Idly, he fancied drawing the city by electrocorticography. Self-portrait in Palermo. There were still novel apparitions—a row of posters for the new movie A Good Day to Die Hard made him see for the first time the dying façade of the building behind it; the repeated words, the actor’s appearance, were like the stamp of a memento mori on the face of the city. Un buon giorno per morire appeared everywhere. Each time he read it, he agreed that any day was a good day to die.
Antonio was rising to leave as Martin entered the café, but sat down again, annoyed. ‘I thought only Italians are late. We are known for it, of course.’ He gave an insulting shrug.
Martin apologised. Newly fixed on faces, he remembered how he’d wanted to draw Antonio’s face. His bird profile was distinctive, a huge hooked nose and crevasses along his cheeks, handsome in a singular manner and reminiscent of spaghetti westerns.
‘I need to go now,’ said Antonio. ‘But I have something to say. I want to warn you to leave. They know you are here, asking questions.’ There was no urgency in his quiet words, just an air of tense annoyance.
‘Who knows I am here?’
‘Better you don’t ask.’
Martin felt the urge to make a dismissively ironic remark, but contained himself. ‘Who told them?’
Antonio looked away. Martin thought him shifty. He waited for an answer but none was forthcoming.
‘There is nothing to discover here. Your father is dead. You have stayed too long. Ask yourself what you are doing here.’ His tone was growling, cantankerous. ‘We have a saying here in Sicily for people who find nothing: You’ve made another hole in the water.’
Hole in the water. Martin could not fashion the words into an image. ‘You’re right,’ he began. ‘I’ve discovered nothing. Nothing at all. But now I’m working on a new art project.’
This half-truth, he thought, might placate or mollify. This was his own rationalisation for what had seemed futile roaming.
But Antonio was unimpressed. He pushed back the table, and took up his raincoat. ‘I have to go. Think about what I said.’ He headed for the door and was gone.
Martin ordered an espresso and sat with his sketchpad, disquieted, working on his vision of the city rendered in brainwaves. He thought Antonio Dotti fundamentally unreliable. Dora had clearly thought so too. Zealous, oddly gloating, seduced by imagining a dark crime. A sponger, a fool, who drank too much. Martin scribbled what looked like a seismological graph, then another, inverted. Even though he’d begun to know his way around, this was the quake of some inner disorder, the fault lines of his sense of disquiet in this city. It was a doodling image, such as one might make while speaking on the telephone. But Martin detected a patterning there, the jittery self that knew a place by nerve endings alone.
As he was leaving the café, Martin was shocked to see an old three-wheeler van, a vehicle that looked like it belonged in a fifties comedy, head unswervingly for a truck. There was the high sound of brakes and an ineffectual wobble of the tiny van, but it collided head-on, with a loud smack, and became crushed beneath the truck’s wheels. How easily metal crumpled, like paper in a fist. What was remarkable was how little sign there was of a life extinguished. It was an accident magnified before him, but with no sense of drama. It was a hopeless termination where there should have been panicked activity.
The truck driver stayed up high, immobile, in his metal cabin. A few spectators edged forwards. A wave of sound grew. At first there was a kind of hiss of something atrocious having happened, an almost metaphysical disturbance in the air, then
a blast of horns extending all the way up the street. It was an indecent cacophony. Shouts erupted, not of dismay, but of anger. Martin thought he saw an arm quivering beneath the crushed metal, and then become still. But perhaps it was not an arm; perhaps he wanted something explicit in so anonymous an accident, some ordinary sign.
He thought of the moment he identified his father’s body. He could barely look. Noah’s appearance: what was it like? It was like nothing. Nothing. Martin had blown his nose, he had flinched, he had looked away. Fearing the indignity of witness, aware of meaty stench and inner tremble, he’d focused instead on the white draped sheet, stretched taut across the body. A man stood behind him, resolutely silent. Martin recalled the high illumination, and wondering why, out of respect, the lights were not dimmed.
He wanted to get away and turned into a lane. There was garbage, and graffiti that read Liberi Tutti! A dumped mattress had spilt its guts so that flock tumbled into puddles in mucky clumps. More boarded-up windows. A row of three shops, one of which, to Martin’s surprise, turned out to be the workshop of a violin repairer. He could see the doll-like body-shapes of violins hanging on a wall and a man in golden lamplight, polishing wood. Such careful and tender touch: the rub of a plush muff. Next door was a bar, but without a single customer. A row of three unoccupied stools stood in a blister of light.
Martin went in and ordered a double malt, straight, and drank too quickly. He was a man who wished to be delivered from the present moment into the easiest of oblivions. Hole in the water. He felt vacant and irrelevant.
24
THE DAY AFTER Noah fled from the near empty café, unable to assimilate what Vito had told him, he found himself skirting around the cathedral, so that he would not recall the beaten man. It was a futile attempt. Two streets away the cathedral bells rang. It was Sunday, he realised, and bell-tone was falling in circles all around him, calling believers to mass. Everywhere now: the round sound of bells. Noah felt he should try to recover his dignity with a few hushed words to God. The sonic waves pursued him with their gentle lasso. And although he moved quickly, he could not escape their tether, and was obliged to think again of his cowardice and his fear, and to recall again the tedious collapse that had humiliated him.
~
Dora suggested a daytrip to Cefalù. She’d rung him in the evening, earnestly conciliating, saying she should have told him in advance that Vito would be there, he should have been more careful explaining their dilemma. And she understood, she said, if he did not wish to participate in the scheme, but she would like the chance to explain it once again, in a more personal context.
Noah was only partly reassured. In vague terms he mentioned the violence at the cathedral; it had rattled and upset him, and he’d not been in a frame of mind to listen to Vito’s complicated plans. So they both tried hard to reconcile and agreed to meet at the train station. They were lovers once again, with a plan for a getaway and the expectation of an embrace.
North-western Sicily fled by, in a sequence of blurry vistas. Noah saw hills rise and fall, glimpsed patches of ocean, noticed the white farmhouses and the new freeway and the spread of orange groves. It was autumn, but still there were smudges of flowers scattered everywhere, asphodels, wild fennel, bright blooms he could not name in blues and mauves. Dora dozed, her face pressed against the window of their carriage. She was one of those travellers who slept at any motorised rhythm, and who somehow found in public transport a special opportunity to sleep. Noah envied what he took to be her capacity for relaxation.
Alone in her company, he could not view her objectively. He knew that, if she asked for his help, he would now instantly agree; he would be zealous and amenable for fear of losing her. He had a sense—which he’d felt only once before, on the eve of his wedding—that all his life was gathering in to this point, rucking in folds as though pulled by a drawstring. He was not immune, he knew, to romantic delusion, but knew too that such a configuration, which he imagined to be crimson and rose-shaped, might signify the point at which he must claim responsibility for his own life. On the rocking train he formulated it thus: this is the shape I have been placed within. What is gathered here contains me.
Dora’s sleeping face. Last time, aroused but unable to perform, he had simply held her. This happened more often these days; his desire did not always match his abilities. He’d stayed limp and small, even with his cheek resting ardent on her naked thigh. She’d touched his wrist, then his forearm, then whispered, ‘Tesoro’—not a platitude, but a clarification of shared feeling. Her fingers in his hair, her reassurance. Against the cotton pillow, embroidered and lacy in the Italian style, her grey hair fanned, her face looked its age. They were both sixty-seven and not taking too much for granted. Both were absorbed by a quickened awareness of their own bodies, and by how they lay together, in that moment, intersecting. In the illusioned lives of men, so constantly aware of possible failures, there was not enough attention, Noah reflected, to the momentary gifts.
When they arrived, they walked side by side down the hill to the town. The old centre of Cefalù was a medieval coastal town in the shadow of a mountainous rock, from which, Dora told him, the place got its name—the Greek kephalos, meaning cranium. They would climb this bulky headland, she promised; they would mount the thick skull of rock and gaze at the city below. But first, the cathedral. Noah joked that he had resolved to avoid cathedrals from now on, but Dora insisted. So they found themselves arriving at the stately Norman building just as the congregation of a mass was dispersing.
Noah watched the well-dressed inhabitants, most older than himself, file quietly away. He had no wish to be here, in this space of antique celibacy. What he wanted was a bed and a room with a view. He was sick of art, and religion, and the adoration of yet more images.
They stepped inside and viewed, high in the apse, the Christ Pantocrator, a Byzantine mosaic from the second century. This Christ was unnaturally handsome, his colossal head authoritarian and glittering in gold. Noah tried to sound impressed. But somehow his folds, his gathering life, had already squeezed something away. He had seen it all before. Any number of Byzantine Christs and aerial spirits, concave faces removed from human pleas. He had a heretic heart. It was Dora he was focused on.
After lunch at a small trattoria, at which neither mentioned the conversation of the day before, they set off to climb the Cefalù rock-skull. Noah looked up at the steps and the rocky paths ahead of him and thought of his arthritic knees and his dodgy heart, but did not want to complain. Dora, clearly the fitter, slowed her pace to suit him, and Noah followed. He began the long haul, pulling his body up step after step, through steep walls of prickly pear and granite outcrops. At the remains of a Saracen fort, he took a photograph of Dora peeping through an embrasure, visible as just the slim stripe of a woman. She returned the gesture, and Noah too was just a stripe: they would be ugly photos. He was feeling dispirited and tired.
Further up, Dora pointed out circular walls and battlements and gave Noah a potted history of northern Sicily. Like Evie, she liked to lecture. But there came a point at which they stood still, opened up and, catching their breath, noticed the view. Noah was not sure of their height, but it was enough to convey elation. Wind in high gusts confirmed their sense of unworldly ascension. Below them lay the orange tiled roofs of the old town, the cathedral, the piazza, and beyond that a gently heaving sea, magnificently blue and blinking with sunlight; and further, on the horizon, rode container and cruise ships.
This simple shift in perspective seemed to cast off the bitterness of the world. Noah felt the strong warm wind blowing into his face, he felt the contraction of muscles in his legs and the cooling sweat on his body, he felt returned to himself, somehow, after yesterday’s grim disgrace. He knew it was possibly some endorphinous effect, the charging of the organism, as though there was a little brass dynamo churning away inside his chest, but still he cherished it: elevated and revved up, under blue heaven, standing beside Dora and looking with her at th
e wide sunny world.
She turned and kissed him. Caught up in his own thoughts, Noah was taken by surprise. He returned the kiss. It was one of those moments in which a newly proportioned sense of things makes the small gesture large. In the context of the skull-rock view, high above Cefalù, Dora’s kiss was monumental, her impulse, not his, and her simple declaration.
They continued their climb. At the summit was a mass of grey stones representing a Temple to Diana; it was barren, windy, but enduring in its lunar isolation. The rudimentary cubicle of a long-lost faith. What endures, he wondered, other than stone? What is it that remains? It was an old question, possibly trite, that a pile of stones might provoke.
His knees hurt coming down. Once or twice he skidded. He was drenched in sweat and took regular rest stops. Dora seemed not to notice what he felt to be old-man tardiness. Nothing much had happened, a climb up, then a climb down, but somewhere in between there had occurred a transformation. Dora had shed yesterday’s remote air. She was almost flirtatious now, reaching for his hand, grazing his face, leaning over to wipe his brow with the end of her scarf. She too had been affected by the elevation. When the angle of the path allowed, they held hands and walked side by side.
They ate blood oranges on the beach, facing the sea. They washed their juice-sticky hands in shallow rock pools. They made easy conversation in quiet voices. Dora lit a cigarette and entered a kind of reverie. It was one of the mysteries of their relationship that he found the sight of her smoking so attractive, the noxious intake of smoke, the curls expelling, the way she inclined her head with each exhalation, or extracted, with thoughtless grace, a string of tobacco from her lips. Her wrist turned slightly to stub out her cigarette. She looked up at him, smiling. He felt her magnetic effect. The lure of brushed bodies in an elevator, heading to a dim hotel room. Sexual permission, abandon, the hush of a falling shirt, or skirt. Newly confident, Noah wanted to speak about his granddaughter, Nina. He would tell Dora of her deafness, her independence, her courage, how she’d saved his son, as children do, by being so alive to the world and so implicitly demanding. He felt he’d been granted a vision of the future.