by Gail Jones
Evie was concentrated as Benjamin reached to locate and open her zip. She felt her dress gape behind her and the slide of fabric as he pulled it down over her breasts and hips. She stepped out of her dress and undid her own bra while he knelt to remove her panties, pushing his face there as he did, hungry for her and ready, his hand coming to rest between her legs. They fell together onto the bed with an immense feeling of relief. He breathed into her mouth. She breathed into his mouth. He put his thumb to her lips: no words. It was the leaving of a print; now he was entirely specific. This was the first time Benjamin had touched her face. But she saw him strain, remote, his own face far away. He closed his blind eyes as he felt his way into her.
Afterwards, placid, neither said very much. Evie rose and moved securely naked around his house, poured them both a cold drink, then returned to the bed. They sat propped there in silence, feeling the bedroom become still, after they had filled it with waves and agitation. So much beyond the room now seemed unconnected. Evie leaned to kiss him and he took her hand and sucked at her knuckles. Yes, she had to go. Yes, she would ring.
A storm was moving in. When she left the house, softly closing the door behind her, she peered at the sky and saw above her the change in the weather. Thunderheads were sweeping from the east, across the ocean. The sky was flaring with antique heraldic colours, gules and purpure, a touch of azure, increasing the impression of emotional drama. Evie left him before dinner, needing to recover her careless senses, needing to distinguish herself from this couple they had suddenly become. She was exhilarated, but also a little afraid; composed and still ardently discomposed. Habitually diffident, she was acting like a man, she reflected, leaving like this, when she should have stayed longer to talk.
And now there would be a storm and she decided she would walk in the rain. Now she would think of him, but try not to need him. There was some property of rain, all dispersal and inclusion, that it seemed proper to enter, to show her immersion in him. She wrapped herself in the rainfall and stepped forward, looking at everything.
34
THE PLAN WAS that they would catch the bus together to Monte Pellegrino late-morning, so that Maria would be in time for midday mass at the Santa Rosalia church. They would catch bus 812 from Piazza Sturzo. It was decided Maria would return on the bus after mass, but that Martin would look around and walk down the mountain back into the city. He packed his sketchpad and camera in his small backpack, and slid the silver ears, still wrapped in their white tissue paper, into a pocket at the side. He had begun the morning feeling doom-laden, thinking that he would tell Evie about the man in the accident, but after their formless talk he felt an unexpected sense of release. It was the joint recollection of abbracci, baci: singing in the back seat, flicking cherry stones at each other, speaking in kiddie Italian, looking goggle-eyed in the same direction.
It was a sunny day. Maria decided this was the day she would talk to Martin. She commented that the fine weather was a sign, that Santa Rosalia would welcome his plea on behalf of his daughter. She was dressed as usual in widow’s black, but had donned an almost girlish scarf of peach-coloured flowers, and carried a handbag of red patent leather he’d not seen before. He was moved when she took his arm, so that they stepped out together, looking like mother and son, to walk to the bus stop.
Maria stopped first at the door opposite, knocked, and handed the madam of the establishment a jar of preserved cumquats from her bag. They exchanged friendly talk and Martin guessed they were old friends. He heard giggles from inside, saw a low- wattage bulb and the strands of a multicoloured plastic curtain. A collapsible card table, covered in olive-green baize, stood by the doorway. He had been curious about the brothel interior, but the glimpse was distinctly un-erotic and plain. This too, this glimpse, was a kind of release, the sudden disintegration of a vexatious desire.
They sat on the jolting bus and wound together up the mountain. Shafts of sunlight through the trees striped and decorated the road. So many fuses upwards to the shine falling down on them. No rain, Martin thought, ah, no rain. They passed rocky outcrops, fir trees and giant thorny cactus. A gravel walking path crossed and recrossed the road as they ascended. Behind them Palermo shrunk to a staid panorama, distant and quiet.
Maria was in an expansive mood after her weeks of silence. She spoke of how she had placed a silver image of her womb before the shrine of Santa Rosalia, and been given Tommaso. She had tried again and again after that, but a son was such a blessing, and the saint had so many prayers to answer that she did not see fit to give Maria another child. She had left six silver wombs, she said, and then her husband had died, and she knew she must give all her love to one child. Tommaso’s existence had ensured her faith; the five failures were forgotten.
For weeks, Maria had fed Martin and left fresh sheets and towels, she had cleaned his room when he was out, taken away rubbish and bottles, and left behind a sprig of flowers in a small jar, but had not thought him worth talking to. Now, without hesitation, she spoke of her womb. Now her scrupulous silence fell away and she spoke as though he were another older woman, an Italian and a peer, to whom she was summing up her life.
They didn’t look at each other. Both fixed on the road ahead, but in the flash of lights and the rocking ascent, in the midst of the noise and the chatter of a bus full of people, they were perfect companions.
The bus stopped near an ugly car park flanked by souvenir stalls. Most sold rosaries, postcards and plastic statues of Rosalia. There were also lurid T-shirts fashioned on the Godfather theme, with Marlon Brando silk-screened into a surly death’s head, all eye-pit and shadow and distinctive skull. There were few tourists about—still a little early in the season—and everyone from the bus headed up the stone steps towards the church. Maria again linked arms with Martin. He supported her as she struggled uphill, feeling the weight of her physical bulk and presence. Whether from devotion to duty, or a sudden trust, Maria allowed this foreigner to bolster her staggering self. He loved her motherly presumption, and the display of her faith in him.
At the top they halted. The church façade was built into the craggy mountain; it appeared as a mistake in space itself, the building entering the mountain, the form retracted and inserted where there should have been rock. It was the sort of mistake, Martin thought, that one sees in dreams, where exteriors and interiors never seem to match. It was anti-perspectival, as if folded backwards. He wondered for a moment if his father had seen it, had stood here, as he did, bemused by the angles.
Maria became fatigued by the climb up the steps. She leaned on Martin, rested a little, and grumbled in dialect about her aching knees. ‘O Gesù biniditto!’
Then they walked across flagstones to the entrance and into the church. She said, ‘Inside the grotto the water is holy. If it drips upon you, you are blessed.’
Martin smiled at her. He knew this was her version of a benediction; he could not now reveal himself as a godless non-believer, empty, modern, post-industrially free. He saw how happy she was being brought to this place. He saw that she was grateful for his help up the steps and his company on the bus. She squeezed his hand and murmured to herself.
When they moved inside, Maria became silent. She seemed to forget him. She crossed herself, gave a pert curtsy, and walked slowly through the bright antechamber towards the strange light within the grotto. The antechamber was unusually well lit, and the welcoming saint unusually robust. Accustomed to pale Madonnas of powdery substance, dressed in a flaking and fluted blue, Martin was surprised at the statue of Santa Rosalia, more like a store mannequin or a thirties film star. She was varnished and made up, her marcelled hair smooth beneath a garland of roses and a circlet of stars. She wore a long black robe with a rope at the waist, like that of a friar, and stood with her right arm upraised, holding a cross. Her left hand held a large ivory skull, resting on a Bible.
On a side wall hung rows of silver tokens, the votive offerings of body parts. There were hundreds on display, ordered in ca
tegories—rows of breasts, eyes, legs, kidneys, innards uncovered, hearts aflame, lungs rendered in a bloom, like floral arrangements. And yes, there were the wombs, lined like small urns sprouting twin fallopian tulips. They all glinted with the promissory hope they contained. It was easy to be entranced by their aesthetic appeal: stylisation, replication, miniaturisation; the solemn artifice of flesh and its wished-for redemption.
Martin looked around to see where he should place the votive for Nina’s ears, and saw a small pile of offerings stacked in a corner before a smaller statue of Rosalia. It was a jumble of notes, baby clothes, money and bunches of flowers. He extracted the ears from his backpack, unwrapped them and placed them on the pile. He felt nothing. No mystic quiver, no visitation. If anything, there was a sense that he had mislaid something. He told himself there was no hypocrisy in his act, only an artful gesture for his beloved daughter. For Maria, in fact; it was also for Maria.
Martin looked around him. People were entering the grotto church for mass. No one saw him lean forward and read the notes, one requesting aid for a palsied child, another asking, in almost sacrilegious terms, for the speedy return of an unfaithful lover. Martin wished them well. There were so few places these days, apart from Skype or talkback radio, where one could make such an appeal, where one could spill the heart and teleport words in desperate communication.
Above the pile of supplicant objects he noticed a marble sign, not unlike the one that proclaimed Garibaldi’s sleep. This one said that Volfango Goethe had visited this church, in 1787. Volfango—a German remade as an Italian. Martino: his own Romantic possibility.
Martin walked under the ironwork archway, from one shaded space to another. The church itself was a dank hollow rock. Water dripped from its ceiling into a system of zinc gutters, so that no holy fluid, but for an occasional drop, would be lost. There was another Rosalia at the back of the church, bathed in a blue light Martin associated with swimming pools, a liquid aquamarine shot through with fluorescence. Overhead it was mostly dark, with small spotlights set high in rocky nooks here and there, lighting a figurine or a wooden crucifix.
The congregation was small but filled the church. Martin could see Maria’s head towards the middle, and he heard the priest intoning the service in Latin. His voice swung in the bell of the cave, more impressive in containment. He was visible only as a far silhouette. Martin waited in the shadows until the service was over, so that he could bid farewell to Maria before she boarded the bus back to the city.
When the believers streamed out, he had to tap her on the arm to draw her attention. She was distracted, as if united with spirits in a private delirium. She started at his touch. ‘The ears,’ she said. ‘Did you leave them? Did you pray?’
‘Yes, of course. Thank you, Maria, cara Maria.’ One truth and one lie.
She looked pleased with herself, as if the accomplishment was hers. Martin took her by the elbow for the laborious walk back down the steps to the bus stop. Again she leaned on him; again he was moved to be at her service. At their farewell she reached up, and held his face. She pulled his head towards her and with a popping sound kissed him on both cheeks.
The air was cold on the mountain but the sun was now dazzling. There were no clouds and there was no hint of rain. Martin looked for a sign to the walking path down to the city and when he found it felt a kind of elation. He avoided the tourist stalls and plunged straight into the forest, passing through its unusual mixture of firs and cactuses, feeling the variegated shifts of light and shade, glad of his joggers and their deep clinging tread.
It was a steep path. For the feast of Santa Rosalia pilgrims climbed this path on their knees, testing their faith with their bodies in a gruelling display. From time to time the distant city came into view; Martin wondered how high he was, to see Palermo flattened like this. No peaks and troughs, no brainwaved jerkiness. He thought to himself: no panorama is melancholy.
Martin was perhaps only a fifth of the way down Monte Pellegrino when he realised that he was being followed. He stood his ground and turned around. Two men stopped, saw that he saw them, then continued on.
‘Australiano?’ one asked. He sounded friendly; it was a greeting. He threw a cigarette at his feet, and crushed it.
‘Sì, australiano.’ How could they know?
There was some brusque Sicilian speech; they were demanding something. Martin heard the word ‘Ragusa’ and knew at once that he was imperilled. ‘Where?’ he heard. Something in their confidence alarmed him: there was a snarling now, and a mocking, and a taut assumption of power. That they were standing above him seemed to assure them, and to require Martin to cringe.
There was a moment when they all simply looked at each other, estimating in tense silence what might happen next. They had the look of farmers, hard men, workers of the land. They were his age, he thought, but with more difficult lives. Both wore caps. Their clothes were cheap.
One of them flung himself forwards so that he almost slipped on the rocky path. Martin saw his boots skid, raising dust, before he felt the attack. It was impossible to deflect what instantly followed. The smaller of the two men lunged and swung fast with a blow to Martin’s throat. He felt a shatter there, a terrible hurt, as if his windpipe had exploded. He reeled back, gasping, imagining this was some kind of mistake, that even as he fell, and saw the trees tip backwards, the men might move away and let him be. But the second man was upon him, kicking at his ribs. Martin tried uselessly to grab at the boot as it came at him; he felt the leather, thought he had it, but as it slipped from his grasp he realised that his right hand had been broken. The burn was awful, more violating than the blow to his throat. He knew only then that he could not defend himself; he was maddened by pain and could not move at all.
A blow came lower down, in the gut, and Martin stiffened, fearing for his genitals. Frantic now, afraid of death, he curled tighter to become smaller, and less a target. He clenched his jaw as if this might help him hold himself together. His whole consciousness was fixed on surviving the assault, screwed into himself, keeping alive. Still they did not cease.
The boots of the heavier man. A rib cracked somewhere near his spine; he was throbbing; he was coming apart; and he shouted something in Italian, to make himself a man again, and stop being their object. The last thing he remembered was a kick to the side of his head, a splatter of light in his skull, his head jerked back. Mouth filling with blood, saliva in the fold of his neck, his busted ear a hot, disastrous thing, as the sky slid into darkness.
And then Veeramani bending above him. Veeramani repeating, ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ Veeramani lifting him with great tenderness into the cradle of his lap.
35
ON THE FLIGHT to Italy, Evie could not sleep, or settle, or read, or make sense. Only sixteen hours earlier she’d come home from making love to Benjamin, drenched in the downpour that arrived, as the forecasters said it would, in the early evening, just as she was walking through the colourful twilight to Elizabeth Bay. Like some fool in love she had let the rain wash over her, thinking still of their slow friction, their faces pressed together, the sweet restoration of confidence in her own body. This was the profane and democratic rapture; how essentially good to know and recover it.
Evie had dried herself off, eaten toast and a banana, and fallen happily with a book into her father’s bed. The windowpanes vibrated and rattled with the storm and she felt the air pressure pump, like exhalation, between the rooms. Outside, black rain fell in noisy torrents. Light flashed through the blinds. And the swimming pool was audible, even loud, a giant drum, plashing.
She’d been dreaming of travel on an ocean liner when the computer sounded its Skype ring. At first the sound chimed in the cabins of her dream. She was calling out against the wet sound of wake and waves, ‘Answer that, someone,’ but woke to find it actual and rolled like a sailor out of bed. As she stumbled to the light switch, she cursed Martin for forgetting the time difference; he’d clearly miscalculated. The imperative ring c
ontinued into the night, with the gravity of a demand.
On the computer screen Evie saw the alarmed face of the man called Veeramani. He looked upset and intense, sweat beading his forehead. In her half-awake state it took a moment before she realised that this was the man she had seen the day before, the man who said ‘topnotch’ with a vivid smile. He told her that Martin had been attacked and was in the hospital. That Martin had asked that she be informed, and had given over the password details—freely, Veeramani said, wanting to reassure her.
Evie was dumbfounded, afraid. It was the fear of losing someone again, the fear of a harm that is inexplicable, inherent in the knowledge of how swiftly the charmed life of the body might cease. Everything became simple: she wanted to know where and when and why.
In the sunny afternoon in Palermo Veeramani was explaining that, although he was a Hindu, he visited Christian churches, sacred places too, for God is everywhere, after all, God is many, very many, and everywhere about; and that his favourite church in Palermo was the shrine of Santa Rosalia, because he loved the hard walk up and down the mountain, and because it reminded him of a Shiva cave he’d visited as a child with his mother, long ago, long, long ago, though of course he didn’t always walk up the mountain, but almost always he walked down, after visiting the shrine.
Evie was perplexed. Why was he telling her all this?
Veeramani had not seen Martin in the church, he continued, nor known he was around, not at all, but when he was walking down the mountain path with a compatriot from the internet café, he came upon two villains attacking his friend. He’d called out, and to his astonishment the attackers had fled. He was a pacifist, he said solemnly, and would never have fought them. He realised that Martin was seriously hurt—‘oh, Miss Evie, so seriously hurt’—and he and his friend had carried Martin’s body back up the mountain. When the ambulance was called, they wouldn’t let Veeramani travel with Martin—‘a black man, you see, and no relation at all’—and he had hired a seat in a three-wheeler and followed the ambulance to the hospital, so that he knew where his friend would be kept, so that he could visit, and help him out.