by Gregory Day
We went on discussing possibilities, Nan entirely absorbed and me listening intently between disbelieving shakes of the head. Nan’s fundamental inklings and her excitable nature made her run with it all in quite a flurry. Even so I knew her other side, the hardness that had developed with the suffering in her life. I knew her scepticism could rise again just as naturally as her affinity with a belief in some kind of miracle.
‘By the way,’ I said, when there was nothing more we could do but sit and wait. ‘You’re saying his name wrong.’
‘What?’
‘You’re saying his name wrong. It’s Ionio, with an “n”. Not Iomio.’
She looked away, annoyed. Then we both began to laugh silently, with that little jut forward of the head that you do when you need to laugh out loud but can’t.
‘Ah well, whatever. Those wog names,’ she whispered with an ocker jest, ‘they all sound the same to me. No matter who he is.’
She got up then and went over to the kitchen quietly to make a cup of hot chocolate for us. She knew I’d want one, I always did when I visited. She had this New Zealand brand of chocolate that a friend sometimes brought back for her when she went there. It was the best.
X
THE JUG BOILED AND Nan brought over the hot chocolate and sat down. On the roof you could hear occasional birds tiptoeing across the flashing.
Nan looked across at Ionio again and then looked back at me. ‘Spice of life, eh,’ she whispered.
It was some time, though, before Ionio woke up, time in which I shut my eyes for a little bit myself. I lay back on the shire couch and ran my mind over the events, seeing again the eels in the darkness as they tumbled from the ditch into the river. I’d spent so many hours of my life on and around that river and never seen anything like it. I wondered what my dad would have said and then, as my mind drifted, I saw him and me in the old purple boat we had when I was growing up, putting around the bends at dusk, laying upturned beer bottles, with fishing line and hook attached, into the reeds as we went. We did this a lot when I was young and in the morning there’d invariably be a bream or mullet, or an eel, on the end of the line attached to the bobbing bottle.
As I lay there I daydreamed that I was back in the boat, eagerly telling Dad what had happened with Ionio and the eels overnight, and then, as I saw my dad’s face in the bow, and his knowing smile, I remembered that it was on one of those trips upstream in the purple boat that he’d told me the story about Ron McCoy building a weir across the rivermouth to catch the eels. Slowly, it was coming back to me.
As we putted along the river late one day when I must’ve been about twelve or thirteen, I asked my father if he thought Ron had ever been lonely, living with his mother as a bachelor all his life, and Dad said that there was one year, not long after I was born, when he’d seemed to lose his way a bit. ‘But then,’ Dad went on, ‘just as we were starting to worry about him, he righted himself, albeit in the strangest way.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked him.
‘Well, he went all funny that year. He’s shy at the best of times but for a while there he was downright uncommunicative. And he was hunting like a madman. Like a man possessed. That was the year he was accused of blowing up dams and shooting swans. And then, all of a sudden, he went from shooting and trapping anything that moved, to giving it away altogether.’
‘What do you mean, giving it away?’
‘Well, he stopped killing things.’
‘Fair dinkum?’
‘Yep, it would’ve been right through till the next year, I reckon, before he set another bait, cast a line or fired a shot. When he stopped he was right in the middle of building this bloody weir across the rivermouth he’d been talking about for years. Then he just dropped everything. “Time I gave it a spell,” he told me. It was strange, but it fixed him in the end. He settled down. Been happy as Larry ever since, Ron.’
Maybe an hour passed as I lay there, dreaming I was back on the boat with my dad, drifting in and out of sleep. Perhaps it was even two hours, it’s hard to say given my hangover and the somehow altered reality of the situation. Eventually I heard Ionio’s breath rise unmistakeably out of sleep as he re-entered the waking, mortal day. I looked at Nan nervously, not knowing what to expect. But she was on the edge of her seat, seemingly without a fear in the world.
‘I smell chocolate!’ was the first thing Fra Ionio said as he woke.
‘Do you want some?’ Nanette asked.
‘Oh, Nan, chocolate would be so beautiful.’
He had woken up with an air of lightness. Like a man on holiday. A man waking up the day after a big achievement. The mood was happy. He puffed the pillows up behind him and lit a cigarette he got from his cassock on the floor beside the bed. I fetched him Nan’s green golf club ashtray.
‘Let me tell you something,’ he said straightaway, with a mischievous grin. ‘Something important. Where I come from there is no chocolate. That is one of only two things that you have here that we don’t have. So now, Noel and Nanette, here is the riddle. What is the other thing? The other thing besides chocolate that we don’t have and you do?’
‘Death,’ Nan shot out.
‘Tutto vero!’ Ionio shrieked, laughing his head off. ‘Aagh, one hundred per cent! You are sharp as light! Oh, and smell the air. A world of sweet medicine. This sleep was fine. I feel strong. And ready to speak. And look, some chocolate. To remind me where I am. Up here in this tower, with such a view, you could be between worlds quite easily.
‘The sun is a bit older now,’ he said then, looking out the window in the door to his right. ‘The day is rolling down the hill of time a little way. Before long, whoosh, I will be gone. And you will wonder whether I was ever here at all.’
I brought him his hot chocolate and he thanked me profusely. I went back over and sat near Nan. He momentarily fell quiet again as he drank, and so did we, watching him sipping and sighing at the taste. Here was a man who had just informed us that he was immortal as naturally as if he had been telling us about the weather. And now, with seemingly no concern for our reaction, he sat drinking his chocolate as if nothing extraordinary had been said.
After a few moments Nan could stand it no longer. In her broadest voice, with a bit of a snigger in it, she finally asked: ‘So this place where you come from, Iomio, where there’s no death – what is this place?’
He cocked his head to one side, like he’d done back down at the river, and looked at us ingenuously. ‘Hee-hee,’ he giggled, a childish giggle, almost like one that would come out of a mechanical toy. ‘Fra Ionio comes from the same place as you both, from the bud and seed, huh? From the place without maps and names.’
He beamed, and Nan frowned. Then he made good his revelation. ‘I am, along with my family,’ he told us, ‘from the town of Stellanuova. A long way away from here, in the south of Italy. In Stellanuova I grew with the goats, I scratched and yearned, as I still do, like any other beast. But, yes, after that, because of my miracle, of bringing the eels, le anguille, back from the dead in the Stellanuova market, I am from the mirror-earth that is heaven. I have moved with the souls of my parish to the end of the earth, yes, in the mirror-earth from the village of Stellanuova to the sky above Victoria, which is where I heard the creatures cry.
‘It’s not such a way away in heaven,’ he said, still intently sipping his drink, ‘from Euroa, or Mologa, or Shepparton, to Mangowak. Especially not for me when I hear le anguille cry.
‘But let me begin a little,’ he said, setting the cup of chocolate down beside him and adjusting the bedclothes on his chest as Nan and I stared blankly at him, wondering what kind of hangover it was that could deliver such a guest.
‘You see, my purpose, I come down for the eels. To save them from the dredging of that swamp. For many, many generations they have lived there, you know. For more years than there are people in your town. But for me to climb the ladder down to help them, there is a condition. I cannot return straight after my business is acco
mplished. Hah, no, it is the way of things, I must remain here for one journey of the sun across the sky before the ladder appears for me to climb back to the mirror-earth. You see, if a taumaturgo like me is going to make the pilgrimage down; well, I should pay my respects and look about, talk a little, rather than just hastily return. Allora, it’s not such a bad idea, you know, to meet people, help them out, tell them things. I say some of what I know. And I listen as well.
‘Once upon a time I came to visit twins who lived north of here, near a town called Rutherglen. The eels were blocking the irrigation canals. They were going to slaughter them. Without knowing anything about them! That’s where I got this hat. Sitting with Kevin and Susan Scott in a shed on their market garden in the year of 1954. It was their birthday. And they had been born in that shed, with its copper windowsills. Kevin and Susan were twins. They were born piccini, so small that no-one thought they’d live. Their mother wrapped them tight and put them in two little shoeboxes on the hearth. And they survived. They were both eighty-six years old at the time I visited. Eighty-six years exactly. Ah, like the Stilo family of Chiaravalle, who I visited in the year of 1828, and many others besides, they believed in me and greeted me with affection. After all, the very fact that they were alive was a miracle of sorts. To Kevin and Susan Scott I was just another part of the world they understood.’
He made a sucking sound through his teeth, and went on: ‘I like to stay indoors once le anguille are safe, huh? To talk, you see, to relax, and eat, snore a little, and discuss the two worlds. To touch with my skin the roots of heaven – you know, this earth. Ah, and I’m glad to be with the two of you. Yes! But I am like a spy today, secretive, like on all the other days I have come down on this land. Well, it’s obvious enough. Back in Stellanuova, of course, I could intercede and people would not worry. Quite the opposite! The Stellanuovans loved taumaturgos like Fra Ionio. They would regard me as a blessing, as a divine light and favour. But here and now it is different. Yes. It is all upside down.
‘Back then in Italy a disbeliever in miracles was a devil, a criminal. During my lifetime many were even executed for the sacrilege of disbelieving. For denying that chestnuts could be changed into apricots. But here it is upside down. Believers in miracles, taumaturgi and visionaries, are shut away in jails and hospitals. If anybody knows what I claim to be and if a crowd gathers around me there will be trouble. Agree? Yes. I would be treated with nothing but suspicion. So, I must be a secret.
‘And so this tower suits me. Also, because I have to help you who have helped me. When I look down to the eels in anguish, here in Victoria, in Warburton or Rainbow, or in Cosenza years ago, or in Squillace before that, I find a man or a woman nearby to these eels who can shelter me. Otherwise I have not the conditions needed to do the deed.
‘So, once upon a time, the Stilo family looked after me. The Scott twins also. And many others in many other times. All with a reason to believe. I saw them all before they saw me. I saw them from the mirror-earth. And I saw you, Noel. I knew that living just beside the ditches was a man who I could help to understand some of what they call the ‘mortal coil’. Because you would let me. Let me help. By telling you the story of your eels. By sharing some of what I have seen, right here on earth, and in heaven too. Just enough for you to have a better way to be. So you’re not just una fabbrica di merda, a shit factory, as they say.’
He laughed loudly and continued. ‘And, Nanette, you are what a merchant would call a bonus. And man and woman is good. Yes, three. For it to be whole. The doubts in this life are a sickness and never more so than when they are not shared a little. So I’m glad that you want me to talk. And I’m glad of this chocolate. It’s delicious.’
Fra Ionio picked up the coffee mug once more and cradled it in his hands, smiling. He watched in fascination as the steam rose from the cup and every now and again he’d purse his lips and blow on it, as if to see what direction the wisps would choose to take, under the new influence of his breath.
XI
FROM MY CHAIR I LOOKED OUT over the treetops of those hills all around us, digesting what had just been said, and watching the occasional cloud sailing ever so slowly past. In an experiment I had once tried to paint the sky from the perspective of the cockatoos and herons and galahs that roost in the redgums by the paddocks on the river. I arranged a nice perch for myself and sat up there for hours on end for a number of days, sketching and watching. Waiting until the birds were not afraid of my presence. It got trance-like in the end, I saw things from up there as if in a new climate. The town, which I was sitting right alongside, seemed a million miles away. And now, looking at the sky out the big windows of the tower, with the occasional brisk shift of the light, I was reminded of those things I drew and the days in which I drew them. Once again a new climate was on offer to me, and in that moment before any querying thoughts could take shape in my mind about what Ionio had just told us, the world was still, like at the end of some incredible piece of music. Nan and I were silent, perhaps more silent than we’d ever been.
Ionio eventually spoke again, this time with New Zealand chocolate on his lips. He turned to me and immediately switched his mood. Quite casually he began to ask me about my family and my life. I told him what I could, about my elder brothers, Bernard and Walker and Jim, and when he pressed me further, for some reason I told him how our grandmother had died when I was ten and how I’d slept in the same bed as her during the last months of her illness, and how often I could still smell her scent on my own skin.
Ionio looked into my eyes and smiled. He turned calmly then to Nan and began to ask her what at first seemed to be simple, everyday questions to do with her farm. What she grew and whether she enjoyed it. She sat dead still, a little disoriented by the apparent ordinariness of his questions, but she answered calmly, telling him a little of her family’s history with dairy and sheep and barley in the early days.
‘But didn’t you also grow wine?’ he asked her.
Nan and I looked at each other in disbelief.
‘Well, yair, but way back,’ Nan replied, tentatively. ‘Long ago, in the late eighteen hundreds. Almost all the land just east of here was given over to grapes back then.’
Ionio nodded eagerly but Nan paused. Her greatgrandfather’s story was one from deep in her family’s past, and one that she’d never actually had to tell. I’d heard it first from her brother Phantom when I was drinking after stumps with him in the Winchelsea pub years ago.
‘Well, you see, my great-grandfather had this nickname,’ Nan told Ionio. ‘“Floxy” Burns, it was. The thing is, no-one ever got to call him that. He had a big vineyard out near Moriac and made a lot of money. Heaps. This was around eighteen seventy or eighty. But apparently he got a bit carried away with himself and took off to Europe to find new varieties. To get ahead of the pack. He brought back seed from Bordeaux, and the Loire Valley, and all these other parts of France, but that’s not all. He also brought back the phylloxera lice that killed the whole wine industry around here in the space of five years. Every last vine was ripped up out of the ground, wrecked. His name was dirt. He’d ruined people’s lives. He couldn’t handle it and pissed off when my grandfather was only two years old. That’s how come no-one got a chance to call him “Floxy”. Because he shot through. And that’s when my great-grandma got into barley. But no-one these days knows that story, do they, Noely?’
I shook my head. It was a skeleton in Nan’s family closet that was very rarely dragged out.
Ionio’s eyes were wide and shining. ‘You know, it’s beautiful to me,’ he said. ‘To see the forest out this window, and the hills away into the distance, to hear about your families and work. You two have sprung from this ground like trees! When I was a boy, and then a monk in Stellanuova, I knew every wrinkle of the land, every goat and stone, for miles around where I lived. For you two it is the same, huh?’
Nan and I looked at each other and I gave a shrug, still not really knowing how to react.
‘I suppose we know this neck of the woods pretty well,’ I said eventually. ‘But not as good as some, nowhere near as well as some of the old-timers.’
Ionio smiled. ‘But you are still young,’ he said. ‘And even those old-timers don’t always know it all. That I will make clear to you. Yet, I was even younger than you are now when I had a whole place mapped upon my heart. But for me, perhaps, it was different. Everywhere I went, I went on foot. And I had a little unhappiness at home so I was always wanting to be outside exploring.’
‘Why was your home unhappy?’ Nan asked.
‘Because my mother was a thief,’ he said bluntly. ‘Oh, I loved her, it was a house of love, but she was a thief, yes, she enjoyed to steal whenever she could and no amount of public shame could stop her. And so she and my father were at times very unhappy. They would fight. And then I would roam. Even at night. Saying goodbye to unhappiness and hello to the hills and streams! I learnt much in those days. Especially to enjoy my own company. Hah!’ He burst into a peal of laughter at what he obviously thought was a great joke.
‘But,’ he went on, ‘when I was a child I never had such a tower as this to sit in. To look over the top of things. Our house was in a valley, and very small with all of us, and some animals in winter, living there. To look out upon the world I had to move about. I would climb for miles just to reach the top of the Aspromonte and gaze upon the sea. Ah, a view such as that can be a saving grace when all seems harsh and wrong with the world.’
Fra Ionio took a deep, noisy breath through his nose and then announced he would like to wash and get dressed. We showed him the ins and outs of the bathroom and porta-shower and after a little while we heard him lathering himself and singing loudly in a coarse, guttural voice. This time in his absence, however, as the water gushed and he sang his song, we didn’t speak, we barely even looked at each other. We just listened, in a pause, waiting, because now we were inside the tower with him, and to talk of him out of his earshot was no longer a consideration.