by Gail Jones
Evie gulped her coffee and took a second biscotti. She was consuming in order not to think or feel. Noah was dead, her brother was maimed, and the woman who had loved her father was after all not without feeling, but by temperament or necessity adamant, and withholding her story.
‘See how tragic we are?’ Dora smiled sadly.
It was a weak attempt at conciliating humour; it was a protest at her failure to be consoled. Evie could have wept then, for all that had not been said. The howls of the distraught dog were still faintly audible. It might have been the soundtrack of a greater disheartening.
‘We’ll meet again,’ continued Dora, implying it was time to leave. No more questions. No answers. ‘We’ll speak again, in other circumstances. There will be a time when it becomes possible to speak of what matters.’
She looked pale and mysterious, like an elderly film star, Evie thought, who was asking in accented English to be left alone.
‘You Australians are so direct,’ Dora added.
~
It may have been a compliment. It may have been a rebuke. In any case, Evie took the hint and left. She gathered her coat and scarf, and walked back down the steps, past the flourishing lemon tree, and out through the doorway onto the street. With the dry cold she saw more clearly the floating dust in the air, and the way it coated everything, sprinkling evenly over the shape of the city. Thousands of years of human habitation: the violence, the lovemaking, the celebrations, the vice. It occurred to Evie there must be human skin floating in this dust, the abrasions and frottage of brutality or of sex. Ambient, there must be forensically physical remains. But this was the thinking of a madwoman, she reflected; it was sordid, and unworthy.
Evie paused for no reason in the shadow of an archway. She felt as if she had visited Noah’s widow. This was unanticipated, to feel for Dora as she might have felt for her own mother, had she known her, had they been adults together, had time and death cracked open in a different pattern. Again, it was unworthy to think in this way, to see tenderness ramify so that everyone was included in her grief, so that everyone she met was among the forsaken.
39
WHEN HE’D FIRST opened his eyes to see Evie, Martin thought that he was back in Sydney.
Evie, Sydney.
Then he felt how swollen and wounded he was, his hand a weighty lump, his body encased and invaded, his very breathing a sear across his broken ribs. In the amendment of his understanding, which formed its own kind of anguish, he saw that he was in hospital and a figure in pentimento: redrawn, misshapen, a mistake of a man. He discovered he was out of danger and, in a torrent of relief, began to tell Evie his story. Then something occurred that his old clinic would have described as an ‘episode’; he found himself weeping and could not stop. Martin hadn’t cried in this way since the death of his mother, and in truth he was not sure what impelled this copious weeping. It might have been for Noah, or for himself; it might have been for some kind of shame, or regret. All were muddled in the hospital and infected by its sickly light. Delayed shock, finding himself delivered, rescued, seemed to have swung back at him like a pendulum, with stunning gravitational force. Evie sat by the bed, quietly waiting. She leaned over him and touched his forehead. He thought he heard seagulls wheeling outside the window, but it could have been pigeons, or doves. In that time close to the wounding, so benighted, all presences were indeterminate.
Now, sitting up, on the mend, Martin found it hard to believe he’d lost control of his feelings in this way. He trusted Evie not to mention it, his lack of dignity. She’d always seemed the discreet one, the older, in a sense. Frank Malone was asking him questions and Martin knew he must keep his grip. An Italian police officer, Giordano, stood alongside, surreptitiously flirting with a nurse.
‘Two more things,’ said Malone. ‘You say only this bloke Salvo’—he looked at his notepad—‘Tommaso Salvo, knew you were heading to the mountain. So he must be involved.’
‘No,’ said Martin. ‘Tommaso is a friend. He would not be involved.’
Evie was sitting opposite Frank. Martin gave her a warning look. He knew she suspected Tommaso of something, but could not say what. She’d gone to the Salvos’ to collect some of his things and there met Maria, red-eyed with lamentation over ‘her two lost boys’: Martin, in hospital; Tommaso, disappeared. She’d embraced Evie like a daughter and, undone by distress, spoken rapidly in dialect. Disappeared was the word Evie was sure she’d heard. Maria had hit at her chest with her fist, speaking of her love for her only son; she’d swallowed dust from the bones of Santa Rita, protector of widows; she’d prayed to Santa Rosalia on her knees, all through the night. Martin had listened to Evie’s account of her visit with a sensation of mounting dread. He imagined Maria immobile, her bulky form on the floor, pleading for intercession. What in another context might have seemed an almost farcical detail—consuming the pulverised bones of Santa Rita—oddly moved him. He felt both admiration at Maria’s fervency, and a nagging guilt. But he could not imagine Tommaso, where he might be hiding, whether he too had been hurt. Tommaso was gone, disappeared. He’d retreated like a shadow into shadows.
‘He’s disappeared,’ said Frank, as if he had heard Martin’s thoughts. ‘My Carabinieri mates checked him out and found that he’s pissed off somewhere. Petty crook, it seems. All-round dodgy character.’
Here the Italian policeman nodded, to show that he understood.
‘Giordano here will interview his mother,’ Frank added.
‘Disappearance proves nothing,’ Evie said. ‘He may have succumbed to some kind of pressure. He may be afraid.’
‘Nevertheless.’
Frank had nothing to go on. He was a detective without a case. And what had all this to do with the missing Ragusa?
‘And this bloke Veeramani,’ he insisted, ‘who just happened to be passing by.’
And then Veeramani was there, standing in the doorway.
‘So, it is me you are seeking?’ he asked, hearing his own name. Veeramani looked indignant. Evie looked indignant. Martin wanted Frank to shut the fuck up. The detective with no case was trying to justify his time in Palermo by nailing the poor immigrant.
Veeramani hovered at the doorway. Giordano demanded to see his papers and there was a tight interval during which all waited for the procedure to conclude. Martin was scratching at the cannula in his good hand with the exposed fingertips of his damaged one. He felt the infant imprecision of his impeded movements.
‘Come in. Please.’ It was Evie, making things right.
‘For your information, I often visit Santa Rosalia on Monday, my free day, and always walk down the mountain. But often’—he paused—‘I take the bus up. Such a hard, hard climb.’
Veeramani offered Martin a small plastic bag of pumpkin seeds. ‘For your good self.’
‘Thanks, mate. Frank here didn’t mean anything. He’s just a fuckwit with no answers, aren’t you, Frank?’
It was an unnecessary insult. The detective looked gloomier than usual, more crosshatched, Martin thought.
Frank folded away his notepad. ‘I think we’re about done for now.’ He was avoiding eye contact and holding himself erect. The room was tense and unhappy. A second nurse peered in at the door, then retreated. ‘I have to ask these questions, Martin.’
And now Martin knew that he had been cruel. Frank was the man who had eaten a meal with him, and sat next to him at the movies, and wanted Palermo to be Rome, and asked for his photo to be taken in front of a marble nymph at the Fontana Pretoria. Not a cartoon cop, but a damaged man, like himself. A man whose marriage was failing, whose job was dull, who confessed he was missing his kids. He would leave for home in two days.
‘Right. No hard feelings,’ Martin said. ‘We’ll catch up in Sydney for a drink, righto?’
Frank rose, looming over him, the notebook stowed away. He hesitated for a moment, and then leaned across the bed to shake hands with both Evie and Veeramani. It was the gesture of a man who was trying to make
amends, and to signal that the official questioning was over, and inconsequential, after all.
Veeramani was gracious. ‘You have to ask your questions. Of course.’
Frank nodded, policeman-like, and slipped away, banished. When the three were together, they talked for a while in a stilted manner, unsure how to recover the ease of conversation. Martin saw that Veeramani was made awkward by Evie’s presence and would not look at her. Within minutes he made an excuse and left brother and sister together.
‘None of this makes any sense, Evie.’
‘No, none of it.’
‘It’s not like I found any information, or made any discoveries.’ A hole in the water.
‘None of that matters now,’ said Evie. ‘Rest, recuperate.’
He wanted to say that none of his life made sense, that the misalignment he felt was not physical, but metaphysical, that he and Frank shared the profound loneliness many men share, linked back into life only by their children. He thought of Nina climbing over his chest as he lay on the grass at the park. He thought of her strange high laugh, which she herself could not hear, and the squeals of her anger, and her frustration at not being understood. He liked the way she brought her face enormously close to his.
‘I saw Dora,’ Evie began. ‘She was in love with Noah.’
‘Are you sure? He never mentioned her. And she seemed fairly distant.’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘So what does this mean? Did she commit a crime and involve him?’
‘Who knows? She’s protecting someone—she will not speak of it. She may even be protecting us, or think that she is.’
‘Jesus.’
They were quiet, then. A wave of drowsiness flowed over them. The day nurse came and went, and a large woman in a pale pink uniform deposited a mug of weak coffee. They shared the cup, Evie lifting it carefully to Martin’s mouth, tipping slowly, catching the drips, wiping his chin with her fingers.
‘Get me out of here, Evie. This stuff will kill me.’
And so they began to relax and trade stories. Evie told Martin about the cook and his tale of his sister, the photograph marked by his greasy hands. Then shyly she told him a little about Benjamin. She said it had been unexpected, the embrace of a blind man, that her heartsick self fell away at his touch. Martin was conscious of her making a sort of proclamation, and pleased she had taken him into her confidence.
‘You’ll like him,’ she added. But she seemed reluctant to say more.
Martin was recalling, from nowhere, the attractive woman at his father’s funeral. A postgraduate, perhaps. How might he find her?
Listless with analgesics, content just to be in her tender company, Martin asked Evie to tell him about Noah’s theories of painting and time. Noah had tried once, he said, years ago, on the beach at Glenelg.
Through the fug of hospital potions, he heard Evie speak of pleated matter and folds in the soul. He heard ‘multiplicity, not unity’; he heard ‘co-presence of the finite and the infinite’; he heard her say something about serial time giving way to curves and bending motions. He could understand nothing. Was it the medication? When she began speaking of the fresco sequence called The Legend of the True Cross, he had at least a few images to pin to her words. A piece of wood appearing and disappearing throughout history, and its afterlife in millions of icons around the world, substance remade as an image, continuing in time.
Still, he felt stupid. His old paranoia about early dementia seized him. Evie’s words seemed to fall into cavities in his mind. Was he losing it, density of substance and presence? And since they were both atheist barbarians—as Noah once called them—this account of his sister’s seemed in any case beside the point. They did not believe. They had never believed.
‘Enough folded time,’ he said, weakly.
Evie smiled. ‘Yes, enough already. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She kissed him on the cheek, pulled up his sheets as if she was tucking him in, and then left.
Martin lay alone in his hospital room. He thought of Frank and Evie. He thought of Noah and Nina. He thought of Tommaso and Antonio, both disappeared, and of the men who had bashed him. And then he thought of Veeramani. Dear Veeramani.
Afraid for Nina, and wishing to offer advice, Veeramani had told him a terrible story. The Mughal emperor Akbar the Great conducted an experiment in the sixteenth century to discover if language was innate or learned. He’d imprisoned twenty babies in a room, tended only by mute nurses, never hearing a word of human speech. Of course, none of the children learned to speak, and later, as adults, they still could not learn.
Martin had been appalled by this story. He was worried his friend might think him a harsh experimenter, or a neglectful father. He ought to tell him of the tin ears, left with Santa Rosalia. More than anything, he wanted Veeramani to think well of him; he wanted his respect and esteem. He wanted to show this man of rare quality that he had been worthy of being saved.
40
IT WAS PERHAPS only ten p.m. when Noah arrived in Sydney, though it felt much later. He was lucid and wide-awake. His vision seemed to have sharpened. It occurred to him that his jetlag might be a complete reversal, so that his series of nights would continue, and he would sleep throughout each day, losing them forever in the fitful nothing his sleep now resembled. His world was counterfactual now; he had bent the laws of physics, he had travelled back and forth, he had entered a zone of alteration.
In Elizabeth Bay he steered the hire car between the shell-shaped lights, up the flowery driveway into the communal car park, intending to slide into his usual spot. There he discovered his own car, left about three months ago, before his life in Sicily commenced. He’d forgotten its existence; he’d simply forgotten his own car. There it was, a black beetle, blocking his way. So Noah had to reverse down the driveway and find a park nearby, difficult at this time of night, when most residents were at home. He drove around in the patchy darkness until he found a spot. Then he had almost two blocks to walk with his luggage back to the apartment.
The sculpture in the duffle bag was heavier now, and his case seemed a dead weight, even on its efficient wheels. The last stretch, up the steep driveway, almost did him in. Noah felt his heart banging at the strenuous movement after so many hours of inertia; he felt unfit, an old man, a kind of carcass. Ahead lay the glittering swimming pool, which he had never used. It looked dark and glassy, a window facing upwards, with a full moon floating like a face in its centre. He’d paused to register confusion, but was moved by what he saw, the symmetry, the illusion, the ordinary remade. It was a whole other world, a true apparition. Only the far sound of an ambulance siren, rising in the whine of interruption, broke the seal of this graceful, almost Japanese scene.
As he approached his apartment, a black cat tiptoed forwards to greet him.
Strozzi.
He adored Strozzi and almost considered him his own. Noah bent to stroke the small head, finding the bowl of his ears, and then scratching the rumbling spot beneath his chin. Strozzi’s warm, curving body twisted to his touch, recognised him and sounded a welcoming purr.
Noah left his luggage by the door and did not unpack. Instead, he took a long shower, feeling his body revive, feeling with immodest pleasure the endowments of his hands, and his arms and his sinewy legs, patting at his chest, rubbing the back of his neck, cupping his soft genitals, poking between his toes, holding up his face, eyes closed, to the benign cascade of waterfall. When he inspected himself in the mirror, with a towel at the waist, the image he saw did not match what he had just experienced, that something, after all, was restored and vital. He was a grandfather now, but sensuous life still coiled in him. He still had this compact body that made love, and drank wine, and swam in the ocean. If only for the time of a shower, he’d cast off all the fear of the last few days. It took a moment to name it: gratitude. It was old-fashioned gratitude.
Noah dressed in a T-shirt and familiar trackpants. He made himself a cup of coffee, found some dr
y biscuits to snack on, and felt at once rested and recomposed. Sleep was impossible. He wrote a long love letter to Dora, even though she had told him not to write for at least two weeks after he arrived. He did not mention the journey or the Ragusa. He described the Australian night and the swimming pool holding the ghost face of the moon; he described Strozzi’s greeting, coming towards him out of the darkness. Then he wrote about their time together, and his deepest emotions. In the solemnity of insomnia, he was a truth-teller and a man of feeling. He was pulling her back, bringing her into the vicinity of his lamplight, into the warm embrace of Sydney air.
The apartment was unchanged. Here was his favourite reading chair, his books and the two icons he had bought not long after he was married. Katherine and he had argued over the cost, but he could not resist the dubious offer from a man who claimed to be Russian, but did not know the language, or understand the concept of provenance. He was offered a special deal, if he took them both. Even then, reflected Noah, he was in the shady world of art dealing that moved images and objects into private hands, when they should have been communal and left at home. The Madonna and Child was conventional—he would admit, if pressed, that it was nothing unusual—but the St Jerome, the scholar saint, the renowned lonely saint of biblical translation, was another matter entirely. The face of the old man might have been his own: slightly drawn, long, with heavy-lidded eyes. It was as if in purchasing it he’d recognised his own face in the future, and wanted to buy himself back. He cherished this image with a passion he could not explain to anyone.
Noah lifted the icon, inspected it, then put it down again. With his T-shirt he wiped away a thin coating of dust. It was the only thing among his possessions he truly cared about.
In the next week Noah readjusted a little to his old world. He met with Martin for an Italian dinner in his favourite restaurant in Potts Point; he later visited his son’s studio and gave his opinion on a series of sketches. He rang Evie in Melbourne and talked about his new interest in Caravaggio; then she rang back, excited, to continue their conversation. One morning, he visited Nina, presenting her with the gift of an Italian puppet, one of those obsolescent wooden toys children like to avoid, and a copy of Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. Nina loved both gifts. She’d climbed onto his lap and half-strangled him with her happy hello and wordless thankyou. She’d clung to his neck and covered his cheek with kisses. And each night, lovesick and longing, Noah thought about Dora. He waited restlessly for the moment he might again hear her voice.