by Gail Jones
Noah could not remember the last time he’d felt so bereft of a lover. It was like a condition from the past that he ought to have outgrown. The sort of thing a schoolboy would experience, or wish to mock. One was meant to discard such romantic intensities. One was meant to mellow—that was the word. But he was unmellowed and fierce in his wish to touch her. His feelings were stretched across the planet, leaning in her direction.
An ellipse: Piero, master geometer, for whom everything fell in a pattern, would have called his condition an ellipse.
In that week, for all the semblance of everyday busyness, Noah’s sleep did not become regular. He felt nocturnal and worn down. He imagined his face was flattening out to the disc of an owl. One night he heard the hoot of an owl, or thought he did, and smiled. It was a lunatic response, he told himself later, fantasising affinity and identification. The patter everywhere of night wings—he noticed it now. Sydney was full of birds.
He adjusted his mealtimes; he listened to music late into the night: Albinoni, Fauré; he watched movies; he cleaned the belly of the stove, rearranged his records and books, brewed coffee at all hours. Reading was hopeless; his mind would not organise the words. In his tidying up, he came across keepsakes from his children’s lives: photographs, letters, a little tin-plated trophy with scrolled handles that Evie had won. There was a chalk drawing Martin must have done when he was about fourteen—such effortless skill—of Evie, sleeping. Her face appeared now as an ashen smudge, but above her head, in biro, was a scalloped dream cloud, and in the dream cloud Martin had rendered her sleeping alphabetical: zzzzz. This drawing lay in Noah’s trembling hands like a living thing. He looked away, dashed by powerful feelings. He could hardly bear to contemplate what this image summoned. The face a spectre, disappearing. He stared at the zigzags of this mystery, then tucked the drawing back where he’d found it, in an old cardboard box beneath his bed, next to his tartan slippers. He’d forgotten that he slept above his children’s things.
Slowly, for all his activity, the night was overtaking him. In the distortions of his mind, in its incapable troubled sea, he could not find enough distractions to hold back the tides. He felt aggravated, serious, alert, embarrassed. Maddened, bitter, mild, rebellious. The blur of his attention beleaguered him, but there were also moments, alone at night, in which his sense of useless waiting fell away and he recovered a kind of peace. There was even sublimity, when he went outside and looked upwards. The vault of night-time was as daunting and spacious as a cathedral. A name returned to him: Santa Maria dello Spasimo, Mary of the Swoon, a roofless cathedral in Palermo. Without the irony Martin and Evie practised, he felt a helpless awe, like an ancient man deciphering the drama of weather.
At some point Noah understood one source of his sleeplessness. He could not stand having the Ragusa in his apartment any longer. It was an incriminating object, and a reminder of Dora’s absence. Its proximity made him feel vulnerable and afraid. On the internet he located secure lockers in the city, in a backstreet not far from Central Station. This was action, not waiting. This was an assertion of control. He devised a code of numbers for the lock based on the name Ragusa. If anything happened to him, the statue could not be reclaimed. Only Evie would understand the code, since it employed her alphabetical mania.
On a humid Saturday morning, Noah took the train to Central, walked with his load to the nondescript storefront that advertised itself as a storage facility, and deposited Eleonora Ragusa in a large locker, using his arcane numbers. It was a huge relief. He could hardly believe how unburdened he felt to leave her there, locked away. He returned home with his empty bag and slipped the word Ragusa and the address of storage into the back of his St Jerome icon, in the fissure between its cardboard backing and the splintery wood of the artwork itself. If anything happened to him, Evie would inspect his St Jerome and discover what he had stored there. And she would know instantly that numbers might decipher the name. She would consider Ragusa, and look him up, and this would lead to Eleonora Ragusa, resting in her locker—but also to Dora, as if to a long-lost mother. His reasoning may have been fevered and devious from lack of sleep, but he knew his daughter and her unusual processes of thinking. He knew he must protect himself if anyone came looking. He felt a small sense of achievement. If all went well, Dora would arrive in Sydney, and they would plan a future together.
His weary reasoning stopped there. A future together was a culmination he could not imagine. Though she permeated his longing, he could not bend time towards them. His failure to imagine Dora in the future, to pull her from tenuous unreality, pained and tormented him.
41
AFTER THE AGREED two weeks, exactly, and at the prearranged time, Noah rang Dora. He was desperate to communicate, imagining her lips close to the telephone, parting and closing, her face pale with their separation and all she had been through, her words wary but intimate. Noah needed to find out what had happened, to hear of Dora and Uncle Vito, and to learn if he could organise her visit or the return of the sculpture. There was no answer.
Noah rang again, and again, then emailed, several times, and after that rang Dora at hourly intervals throughout the night. The next day he rang again. It would be her night-time, now, and he rang into it as one casts a lifebuoy onto the heaving swell of the ocean, wanting a sign in the darkness against engulfing odds. It was as if their secret life together had sunk into a void.
He could not ring Antonio—Dora had warned him against it—and he knew no one else in Palermo well enough to contact, or to trust. He’d agreed not to tell his children or solicit support until after he heard from her. He’d conceived many terrifying scenarios, all more or less derived from movies—guns, hold-ups, stealthy intruders in the night—but he had not conceived this, a telephone ringing out in a dark room. How difficult love was, when it had no reply. How impossible and deadening this turmoil of not-knowing. He continued shaving and washing and feeding the cat, he continued being a father; but the response that would have subdued him did not come.
It was late November, summertime. Above him, Noah heard rain wash in from the harbour, then pass. The air pressure swayed and brought with it an impression of unsettlement. In the long hours of waiting he heard the susurration of the jacaranda tree, the high calls of night-birds—but no owls—and what might have been the beat of batwings heading away from the Botanical Gardens. He let his mind drift outside, through the flimsy moonlight, down the shell-lit driveway, out towards the waters of the harbour, and then beyond, so that he saw in his mind’s eye the Pacific Ocean, thunderous and vast. He saw wave on wave, turning like the pages of a book. He stayed there, and may have dozed, resting on the water, feeling its pull beneath him and its ripples heading back to the shore. There were birds swerving and veering in circles, but the wrong birds, not seagulls or seabirds, but creatures lost, disorientated, flung by wind from their homes.
He slept long enough to dream he was in the position of St Peter, hauled upside down, unconsenting to death. Noah was tilted and pulled in Caravaggian blackness, an object of bitter mockery and scorn. His guts tipped over, he was strung and hopeless. When he woke in the dark, he was neither relieved nor rested. And as if no elapse had occurred, no elapse at all, he was thinking still of the telephone in the empty room. Noah had no explanation of why Dora had disappeared. His throat was inflamed and he knew that his childhood rash had returned, bringing with it a feeling of self-contempt. His jaw had become stiff. He felt constriction in his chest, and in the waiting that now defined him.
He was an idiot to have agreed to this ridiculous theft. He was an idiot to have left her at Narita airport. They should have taken Uncle Vito together, at the beginning, and simply fled. How could he have surrendered to her plan, surely doomed from the beginning?
Her room in Palermo, the sashed window, the lemon tree in the courtyard. Those little flowers on the tree, sparks of radiant white.
It was late at night. Noah tried to ring again, and still there was no answer. He thought
once more of the hazy drive on the road heading away from the Blue Mountains, with the stretch of telephone wires alongside, wave-like, in a trivial repetition. There was no connection, only the wires, rising and falling.
And now he was rising and falling and drifting towards her. There was a vast, disastrous ocean between them; there was peril and fear and useless striving. He tried to bob as birds do, his head prim and perky, but he was all sag, and exhaustion, and a netted tangle of feeling.
Noah drank malt whisky slowly, a man waiting without hope. His fingers were tingling and his arms felt tremendously heavy. He could barely open his jaw to sip at his drink. He wanted to think of his family and Dora in the hotel room in Syracuse. He wanted to consider his life’s blessings and all that had quickened him. But there was no control in his thoughts. His mind was fraught, and ungovernable.
What returned to him first was Francis, the boy he’d loved, the boy he’d turned into a pariah in the tale of his own heroism. He’d made Francis a cover for his own unspeakable cowardice. With a kind of desolation he knew then that shame lasts a lifetime. And still he could not recall the name of Francis’s uncle, the man holding a felt hat at the funeral of his father. He seemed almost present, as if standing in the periphery of his vision. Who was this man? The man in the jeep, the custodian of memory, who drove away in a cloud of orange dust. Noah tried. He tried again. In his spent state and sheer tiredness the name would not return. He could think of no extenuation for this vaguest of shames, or why it returned at this time, and with such commanding force. And now a flux of images: Joshua’s large hands, Katherine as the Madonna, a black swan, a flying shadow, angled in uplifting.
And a baby—not Martin, his darling Martin, in that early ecstasy of adoration, but Evie, blue-coloured and almost drowned, barely breathing in Martin’s arms. How it had caught his heart in a net, how it had pulled him towards them.
My son, my daughter.
He had lurched to save her, and both his children had screamed, wet and confused and made afraid by his fear. Martin stood apart from him, melodramatic, struggling to hold on to Evie. Noah remembered wrapping them both in the towel, making them by instinct one beloved package. He could not disguise the pure fear of losing them. His arms trembled and he knew his face was distorted and scary. But he thought: saved, now they are saved.
~
He may have nodded off. There was a period of dark nothing. When he felt his chest cramp again, it came with some other, softer notion. What returned was a sensation he could not at first comprehend. His hands lifting something, patting something, feeling a fine material, submitting to his touch. The gesture was a smooth one, but there was swift clicking, too, and his hands working together over the dome of a head. There was delicacy, exactitude. He was recalling the act of cutting his son’s hair, and the truth of this sensation was a revelation, as if it was the most important act of his life. Brushing at his neck. The neat shape of his son’s skull. His own breath blowing away minuscule lengths of cut hair. It was almost blissful, recalling this, the strands resting weightless between his fingers, the curve of bone that shaped his hand into an upside-down cradle.
Noah thought he heard Strozzi at the back door, mewing to be admitted. He struggled to his feet, feeling heavy, as if he carried another body hung like a cloak over his own. He opened the door and saw only the still glossy night. The rain had passed now and there was a dripping, languorous calm. Noah peered out, seeing the world made nebulous by shadow, and in a trance of precision he saw the fall of raindrops from the jacaranda, each a crystal, and singular. There was the tiniest splash, then another. If he shook a low-hanging branch, he could make his own rainfall.
Then he heard mewing once again and thought it was at the front, so he turned, stumbling back, passing through scrambled aeons and a swirl of breathy smoke. Noah opened the front door. Ahead of him lay the swimming pool, and it was the loveliest thing he’d ever seen. The moon stretched there, and all the stars. It was a pool of Prussian blue. It was how one might imagine the end of time.
Noah advanced, in pain now, his chest crushing in on itself. And when at last he fell forward, he fell into the stars, and his arms were so heavy they could not move to save him, and his senses were so tired he could not struggle to rise, and the shape of that extra body weighed him down, and down.
42
LIGHTLY, THE WINDOW shudders in a gust.
Nina rests her palms on its surface, feeling the vibrations as if blind. The whole world is shuddery now, as she fights the thunder of surround sound and the raucous jumble of spoken words.
She’s screamed in frustration and hit her mother’s face with her fists. She’s banged her head against the bedstead and thrown her toys at the wall. It helps, sending things flying, showing the chaos of white noise. This is the world now, this monster-roar, and Granddad gone, his itchy chin, and his gifts, and the way he drew messages with her crayons, and hid his thumbs as if they disappeared, but she knew, and he knew, and he knew that she knew, and his ten fingers would reappear—pop!—but he will not return—pop!—because this is what dead is. They don’t come back, Mum said; it’s sad, but never-ever.
The boom of sound, it assaults her, and here is her own heavy tongue, fat as a slimy slug. A lady comes in the morning to help her practise words, she opens her mouth to show where the tongue should lie, and places Nina’s fingers on her wrinkly throat to feel what happens. How close that lady comes, like Evie, like Daddy, eyes shiny with little Ninas and her skin like a mesh. When Nina tries to echo, she is all grunts and something unclean. Her slug-tongue sticks fast, she feels it blocking, not saying. She has swallowed dirt and is driven to baby tears. Words are harder than anything, she’s a weeny baby, and stupid. She’s a baby boiling and bubbling with unexpressed meanings. Spoken words, she hates them. They have somehow undone her.
Nina stands at the window waiting for the boy on the bicycle to appear. It is a Saturday morning, and he will come. She waits and waits. And when he slides into view—there! not even touching the handlebars—she leaps up and waves. Nina waves and calls out, but the boy does not see or hear her. He rides on, beyond the glass. He grows smaller, and is gone. A sob starts inside her chest. She taps at the window with her fingernails, and peers as if into the otherworld of a vast aquarium.
So Nina is alone. She is alone, thinking of Granddad. She remembers him slowly buttoning her pale blue cardigan. He had such enormous hands. There he was, kneeling before her, buttoning with his pincer fingers, his pointers pushing each circle through each tight hole—and what pretty buttons they were, glinting in hard plastic, flower-shaped and faceted—and she will remember his enormous hands, joining button and buttonhole, patient, lovingly slow, until her own end of days. IN THE LONG now of grieving, Dora is refashioned widow-like.
There is no one left for her to love; she is steeped in calamity. Those who know her see immediately the alteration: how her speaking feathers at the edges and drifts away, how she loses her trains of thought, how she lacks energy for anything. An old nonna, dressed all in black, says, ‘Bless you,’ on the street, recognising instinctively her companion sorrow. Dora avoids the black-clad women of her city; she wears beige and coloured scarves; she makes herself look youthful. But these women know, they’re a secret tribe, they move in their own sheltering darkness and speak in low, silky whispers. Self-effacing, they are also a superstitious force. She is almost afraid of them, how they assign her a membership.
When she was a child, Vito took her to see the annual presepi. She loved the semicircles of figures looking down at the infant Christ, the Madonna, the useless Joseph, the three foreign kings. She loved the shepherds’ fat hands and familiar faces, and the way all stood with their animals in postures of wonder. She loved knowing who was who, and their role in the story. Vito would squat at her height to point out details; the clay figurines were a folk art he had cherished as a boy. They trailed from church to church to make comparisons, she reaching to clasp him, and allowing herself t
o be led. Why does this memory return now, in the time of bereavement?
‘Unblinking,’ Vito teased her. Now she wants to close her eyes.
Dora stands at her window, seeing nothing. She inhales, she exhales. It’s come to this, mere continuance. She finds herself brushing at her skirt, as demented women do, or turning in a piazza, thinking she hears Noah’s voice, or Vito’s. She is tired. She feels old. Now there is dog-whine and cigarette stench and her own heart heavy as lead. She has endured years of lead.
How long has it been? She’s lost all sense of time. Vito, Noah. The lumpen shape of Australia drifts like a cloud in her mind. It won’t go away, this other island, and there is a worrisome beckoning. Noah placed the idea of Australia before her. She would meet his children and granddaughter, he said; she would have a family and a safe place. But it is Vito’s death that complicates; it is Vito, beloved Vito, more truly father than uncle.
When she heard herself announce this, it was an act of truth-telling after so much deception. It named that grief precisely. So she knows, with conviction, that she will never leave Palermo. She needs her sepia ghosts because they keep her company. She needs her old city and its aura of secrecy and cunning.
Dora thinks of the Ragusa and imagines it hidden somewhere in darkness. She no longer wants it. Once, it meant all to her, it was worshipful, rare. From hope, or premonition, it was her idea of art crafted by love. Noah had understood it too. But she killed them both, Noah and Vito. She should have fled immediately, and not risked her soul.