Patron Saint of Eels

by Gregory Day

  XII

  WHEN FRA IONIO WAS DRESSED AGAIN, in that unusual get-up of cassock and beanie, and with his skate shoes beside him, he sat with us around the coffee table and Nan asked him to tell of the famous miracle he’d spoken about, of bringing the eels back to life.

  Ionio cleared his throat. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘that was the moment that ensured my destiny. Without that day at the Stellanuova market three hundred years ago, I wouldn’t be here in this tower with you two and all these trees to look at.

  ‘At the time I had been in the monastery for at least a decade. I had entered as a young man after I had felt the vocation and the desire to live in God’s discipline. To be a butcher like my father was unattractive to me. I admired my father but slaughtering the animals I knew would bring too much darkness into my heart. So, I joined the order very happily and, eventually, at the time we are concerned with, I became the cook of the monastery where I lived. That was my role. Previously I had been the gatekeeper but I didn’t enjoy that much, so when Fra Alessandro moved up to Taranto I asked if I could take over the cook’s position, and it was agreed that I should.

  ‘And so my days became very full, with seven prayer offices starting at four am and ending at eight pm, and three meals to cook in between. Breakfast was straightforward but a test of one’s faith because it was so repetitive and boring, and the evening meal was light and often involved only cold meats and salads, but the lunchtime feast I used to enjoy to prepare. It was the main meal of the day and to guarantee the freshness of my recipes I vowed to God that I would only cook what we’d picked that day from the kitchen garden or what I’d bought fresh from the town market.

  ‘So every morning excepting Sunday my time would be happily spent at the stalls which filled the vaulted alleyways that ran off our piazzas. I was never happier than when I was at this market. So many people with the fruits of their labour all coming together to exchange. So much produce from the fields and the rivers and the oceans, so much of it attained through hard work in solitude; early mornings of the shepherd and the goatherd, the fisherman alone mending his nets, with only a rival to smoke with; orchardists with skin scratched from hundreds of days spent climbing ladders into orange blossom. The sun beating down on all of them under God’s testing light.

  ‘And then they come to market, where the stalls are set up in the alleyways with roofs, so it’s cool and sheltered. Where the sounds of market life are somehow sweetened by the stone walls and vaulting. Where they can talk and chat and laugh with friends, eat liquorice, and receive both money and produce they need for their hard work. I loved it there. It seemed as if nothing was out of place, all was natural and as it should be. Like if you walk into the forest and hear the birds and beasts going about their daily work. Uninterrupted. The market is like this. And so it was like a prayer realised, beyond happiness or sadness. In the act of life. Aagh, but I was so content. I too was in the act of life, buying food for our kitchen, but I was also watching souls moving about like fish in clean water.

  ‘Occasionally, of course, there would be lean times. You know, the south of Italy was just like a large granary back then but, yes, occasionally the mood would be subdued and yet even then the company of others in the same predicament would lighten the hearts. I could see it in their faces, feel it in their spirits. I had watched them at mass with their boredom and their yawning and their sorrows. At the market they were jongleurs in comparison. Together. Succeeding, failing, gossiping, whatever – but together. You know.

  ‘Allora, I used to walk between the stalls with the monastery handcart and buy meats and vegetables and fishes from the farmers and fishermen. I had grown to love to cook and the choice of what you cook is, of course, the first link in the chain of taste. So happily I would inspect what was available and joke with the people. You know, there was a custom to say that a farmer’s pumpkins or beef were bad and puzzava di spazzatura, and that would be like a code, a sign of respect that implied that we all wanted things as cheaply as we could buy them. I certainly did, my budget was very small. To feed forty men on a small budget is difficult.

  ‘So I would be able to remove the cloak of piety at the market and laugh derisively with the other farmers and fishermen, with the caulkers and the weavers. In the monastery I would talk in the language of the church but in the market I could speak in the tongue of the people, as I do now. Their joke with me was that my cassock, this very same cassock I wear now, was weighed down with the riches of the monastery. That I was the richest buyer at the market. So I would say, “Well, what would the richest buyer want with a pumpkin without seeds?” And we would all smile at each other, and our eyes would twinkle.

  ‘One day, like any other, I was taking my handcart through the alleys of the market, feeling very happy and having the usual jokes with my friends, when a fisherman I knew arrived late with his catch of eels. He was hurriedly arranging his little table and boxes and looking quite distressed. As I approached his position down the end of Via Piccola he suddenly let out a cry of anguish, as if his mother had just died.

  ‘A few people who heard looked around concerned but, of course, with the lively din of the buying and selling, no-one much did hear it. But I did, and arriving at his table I asked him what his trouble was. He replied to me that his catch was dead, four hundred eels he said, quattrocento anguille, all dead. His whole catch! Of course, no-one in Stellanuova was interested in buying dead eels and so he feared that all his labour, and probably the food for his children, was wasted.

  ‘But you see, I was too light-headed at that moment, too happy in the joy of the market, to believe him. I could not countenance such a terrible fate for a man. If someone had come to me in the monastery with such a story, I may have been full of consolation and acceptance, being in the pious cloak of our grounds, but at the market I had a simpler heart. And so, I was not reduced to mere sympathy and pastoral work. I was brash. I turned to the eels lying still in his cart and I daydreamed at that moment that they were not dead but sleeping peacefully after their long journey. I imagined them dreaming. Of being back in the river.

  ‘And then, turning to the fisherman, whose face was in his hands in distress, I said: “Look again at your eels. They are not dead, they are only sleeping.” And so, slowly he registered in his ears what Fra Ionio had said, slowly his fingers came away from his face, and slowly he turned to look back at his four hundred eels. I took the handle of his cart in my hand and gave it a quick shake and, sure enough, in the blessed and happy light of Via Piccola, the eels were set a-squirming. They were alive! Alive as they had ever been!

  ‘Well, for me this was not such a surprise. I was like a buoy on the sea. I had not drowned like the fisherman. So for me the eels were never dead. But for him, for this man of the Calabrian rivers, he knew a dead eel when he saw one. And he now was looking at them all come back to life. If the shriek he let out when he noticed they were dead was loud, you should have heard the noise he made when he laid eyes on those living eels. He was ecstatico! Tears streamed out of his eyes and he embraced me. He had witnessed a miracle, he said, and soon enough the whole market had filed into Via Piccola to have a look at the blessed eels.

  ‘Aagh . . .’ Ionio let out a gasp and smiled at us. He paused, with satisfaction and humour, it seemed, before going on. Nan and I waited silently as he lit a cigarette. He offered one to me but I didn’t feel like it. Nan had been rolling her own the whole time.

  ‘It’s strange to me,’ he continued finally, ‘but from that day on my life was changed and I became a symbol of the Lord. I became known as a taumaturgo. In your language, a miracle worker. But what had I done? I was not sure. After this the fisherman was reduced to a state of piety. He used to come to the back door of the monastery kitchen and hand-deliver a generous share of his catch to me. He used to bow and scrape. In awe of Fra Ionio. It took me my whole life to come to terms with this new identity I had. And the Lord gave me strength. But you know, if I brought those eels to life it was not t
hrough piety or prayer. It was through innocence and happiness. I did not anoint them with a gesture of the church or an oil of the Lord. I merely imagined their dreams rather than seeing them dead. My happiness rose above the misery of the fisherman and outshone it. Sometimes I still don’t know in absolute certainty whether or not those eels were ever dead, but, of course, I suspect that they were. For years of my mortal life, however, I doubted this. Because I never saw them dead. I saw them. But they were not dead. And so I must respect that the fisherman knew a dead eel when he saw one. But, you know, he was late at the market, he was already distressed . . . As I was seeing happiness all around me he was seeing diaster. So maybe he imagined the worst and all I did was imagine the best. Either way, this moment was interpreted as a great and sanctified gift, a symbol of faith, and I became very famous in Calabria and, in fact, throughout Europe for this. And I thanked the eels for being my blessing, and I have been thanking them ever since.’

  Nan was looking at Ionio with disapproval. ‘You’d want to thank them,’ she said. ‘You saved the eels’ lives but you didn’t put them back in the river. You saved them so they could die in another person’s kitchen!’

  ‘Hah,’ Ionio cried, his face coming to life again. ‘That’s what I soon realised, Nanette! Thank you. That’s why I’m here. Not to save eels so men and women can eat them, but to save eels for themselves! So they can live and enjoy the bottom of the river! So they can travel on their marathon journey, live and die in their own time. When I looked at them sleeping in the fisherman’s cart I did not see eels as something useful to man. I just saw the eels dreaming! In their own world! That’s why they lived. If I had imagined making the fisherman happy by resuscitating his catch, nothing would have happened.

  ‘I soon reflected on this, and so I am Fra Ionio, the Patron Saint of Eels, not of eel fishermen. I can imagine eels, you know, as if I was one of them. I can imagine what they’re dreaming, how they’re living, and so it is within my power to help them. They are in fact my inspiration, my heroes. Hah! But, Nan, I like you. No Stellanuovan Catholic would ever have said what you have just said to me. I thank you. It’s what I also feel!

  ‘You know, when I hear the choir in my head, the choir of divine music, I see God as an eel, yes, the eel as one of many gods, not the eel swimming for God but within the river as a part of God itself.’

  With this last remark he lay his hands flat on his lap and momentarily shut his eyes. He seemed to have completed what he had to say for the time being. He leant back calmly in the old shire chair he was sitting on and his lips formed a grin. He kept nodding his head, I remember, and he gave his little bell a tinkle as well.

  XIII

  AFTER A FEW MINUTES IN WHICH Ionio and Nan smoked their cigarettes and the birds continued clambering on the flashing of the roof, Nan asked: ‘So are you saying that miracle has made you immortal? Is that why you can return to earth like you have now? I mean, dead people can’t usually do that, can they, Iomio?’

  The look in Nan’s eyes when she asked this question was similar to the one I’d seen in the loft when Ionio and I first went to get her. When she’d first heard him speak. It was such a gentle look, the way she looks at her children, when she’s not too upset by events. In an obviously hot-tempered person like Nan, such a look has a great power. It’s a look of love, I suppose, but in which you can feel the potential of the opposite. I could see that Ionio was having quite contrary effects on her, as if he was fanning her fiery spirit one minute and turning that fire into sunshine on water in the next.

  Ionio chuckled. ‘No, Nan,’ he said. ‘Dead people aren’t walking all around. But they are in the mirrorearth. Ah, there’s some people to meet there! Like my friend Maniakes. Hoh, what a giant! You know this world was too mediocre for him. He was, in his time, a great Greek warrior. In Apulia and Constantinople. He’s ten feet tall, beautiful to look at, very clever, he understands how mortal men’s minds work, but every time he was on the verge of great success, which because of who Maniakes was would’ve benefited the whole world, some petty rivalry from his superiors got in the way. His brother-in-law called him back from Syracusa at the critical moment, when he was about to have a great victory and bestow health and riches on the people. And he called him back only because he was jealous. But, in the mirror-earth, Maniakes has his say.

  ‘I sit with him now and then and we have a good laugh. But, no, he can’t return to earth. Because the two worlds did not fuse in him during his mortal lifetime. All his greatness was of a mortal nature. There was no intercession. If there is no intercession then when you die you are dead to this realm. But for me – yes, the two worlds fused. In saving the eels I made an act contro la natura – well, against the nature of this mortal earth. And so for me, there is a ladder between the two worlds, earth and mirror-earth, here and heaven. Do you understand?’

  ‘So, the eels definitely were dead?’ said Nan.

  ‘Most probably,’ he replied, ‘given that I am here! But for a time I didn’t know that. I felt like a fraud.’ He screwed up his face at the thought. ‘Oooh,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing worse than feeling like a fraud. I’d rather be sewn into a sack with a live monkey and a snake than feel like a fraud. That’s why I can’t go to the church here. I know of the one in these hills.’

  ‘You mean the convent?’ asked Nan.

  ‘That’s right. Con la chiesa bella. That is where I had to arrive. I return to earth at the nearest church to the problem I’ve come to attend to. And it is such a lovely convent, I got a nice surprise when I first was there. Like a Spanish convent but without the pain of torture on the walls. Simple, you know. From the outside, anyway. That’s where I got my shoes. They were on the step outside the kitchen. I knew from experience that the bush would cut my feet to ribbons without shoes so I took them. I’ll put them back, or maybe one of you could do that for me when I go. Ah, but they’re so nice and white, huh? I don’t know how we’re going to get the sludge off them. No self-respecting nun would wear shoes with sludge on them, huh?’

  ‘I’m surprised you’d steal something, Ionio, especially from a convent,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, Noel,’ he replied, a little exasperated, ‘you must understand. I’m not really a man for churches, or monasteries, or convents. It’s like what I said about the market, do you see? Where can we act naturally? Only in the midst of things. And as for the stealing; well, I have no excuses. Maybe it’s my mother’s madness. We’ll put them back and, if they are dirty, well, it is a small crime, you know. My feet are so soft nowadays. If I was still mortal I would never have had to take them. In Stellanuova I was often barefoot.’

  Both Nan and I looked down at his bare feet where he sat in front of us. They were small and gnarled, they were pale but dotted with dark hair, with long nails, but for one big toenail which was completely missing. In that moment there was something about his feet that was almost too palpable for me. After what he’d just been telling us, he’d almost become somehow wispy, or ethereal, but the reality of his presence was made irrefutable when I looked down at his feet. A slight rush of nausea, of anxiety, came over me at the sight of them.

  ‘Yes, Noel, distressing, isn’t it? Just to be with me,’ he said. ‘Wonderful, yes. A relief. And then disturbing, like a strange dream. But please, don’t worry, mio amico. Unless you yourself are chosen by something higher than me, nothing much will change for you because of this day. Other than what you want to change. You will stay as you are. You will walk on the ground again. Meeting me will not separate you from your family and friends. And, Noel, unlike myself you will die and not return. So don’t be scared.’

  It seemed he could read my mind. He was peering into our lives and seeing straight through, into our thoughts and histories. In his reassuring words to me I felt Ionio’s compassion, and a kind of gratitude towards him.

  He smiled, and although nothing can ever be quite the same since that day we spent with him in the tower, what he said was true. I learnt right there a
nd then that sometimes I feared reality more than death itself.

  XIV

  THE CONVENT IONIO SPOKE OF in the bush used to have a little school attached to it, where both my mum and dad were educated by the priests and nuns. Although my parents’ only real religion seemed to be the enjoyment of a drink and a song with their friends, from when I was about six years old they began to take me and my brothers across the Distillery Creek swing bridge early on Sunday mornings to the weekly mass that was said out there.

  By the time I was ten the priests had left the convent for Camperdown and the masses had ceased, so we stopped going, but what I remember most from those visits to the church was not the message of the mass, which did not really make an impression on me, but rather the crossing of the swing bridge itself, which used to sway wildly in bad weather, high above the gushing creek, and also the bright mural of gumtrees and kookaburras which was painted as a backdrop to the life-size figure of Christ on the high wall behind the altar. There were no lessons or questions about the sermon from Mum or Dad in the HR station-wagon on the way back to the store for the milkshake we’d always have after the mass. It was almost as if they took us there just to experience the incense and the ritual, and the strange out-of-tune singing of the priest, so we’d know the kind of atmosphere in which they’d been educated.

  In Ionio’s presence, and with the mention of the convent, I was thrust back to those Sunday mornings crossing the swing bridge when I was young, and I found myself wishing my mum and dad were in the tower with us to hear what he had to say. I felt sure they would’ve liked him – though whether they would’ve believed him or not is a different question.