by Gregory Day
Ionio clapped his hands now with a resounding crack and then pushed out his waist cord with both thumbs, like a movie gangster does with his braces. ‘So, do you have paper and a pencil, Nanette?’ he said. ‘I will draw for you the earth, the mirror-earth and the ladder in between. What do you say?’
After fossicking about in the red kitchen cupboards for quite a while, Nan eventually found some paper, a pencil and a couple of Biros, and brought them over to the table. Ionio’s tongue slipped out the side of his mouth in concentration as he began to draw us his map of the earth and mirror-earth.
That map is the only material souvenir I have of Ionio and, as I look at it where it sits in front of me as I write, I must say that he was spot-on when he told us he was not an artist. The map is on a piece of old Barrabool shire letterhead, paper left over from some official stationery pack or something, probably for writing weather checks and fire reports on in the days before e-mail. He’s drawn the map in the two different colours of pen which Nan found lying about. The mirror-earth is in normal blue ink and the earth itself is in green, and there are dots representing places of significance and a ladder between the two worlds drawn in pencil.
‘The three places, those dots,’ Ionio told us, leaning forward over his map on the coffee table, ‘are the three towns that concern us. The first one, here to the left, sitting south-west of the Golfo di Taranto, is Stellanuova itself, you know, the village of my mama, the village, of course, where the fisherman and his eels came to market.’
He made a large sweep of his arm across the room and above the map. ‘Then we travel across the world, both here in the blue mirror-earth and there in the green earth itself. See, see how they mirror? There is Stellanuova and the gulf and there it is again in the mirror-earth. And then we go travelling along the coasts and hills of the world.
‘You know, Noel, I am not a great draughtsman but imagine here where I have drawn these lines, imagine many lands – Afghanistan, India, Burma, Sarawak – and imagine the towns, the ports of this world – Rangoon, Dong Hoi, Kucing . . . until we travel right across, until we reach this second place that concerns us, yes, at the back of the bay. This dot is the port of Melbourne. And see, there it is again, down on the green earth, here, in a mirror image of the blue Melbourne. Or I should say, the blue Melbourne is a mirror image of the green Melbourne. If we travel down now, and back west a little, just out of the big bay, we see the third and final spot, we reach this beautiful place where we are now, this Mangowak, these Barrabool hills, from where the ladder in pencil unrolls between the worlds, my pathway to you here, and to the eels we saved.
‘See how the ladder goes from the Barrabool hills in mirror-earth to the Barrabool hills here on earth itself? This is the journey I have made. But let me tell you more, let me tell you about the first part of the journey, from Stellanuova all the way to Melbourne and Mangowak.
‘For those of us in whom the two worlds fuse in our mortal lifetime, we never disconnect from the earth. We are stationed in the mirror-earth to watch over our flock on the earth itself. This is the fate, the destiny, like it or not, of a saint. And believe me, even a saint longs to be free of this watch, this lookout. All around us in the mirror-earth people are simply enjoying their afterlife, but for us it is not so simple. We are still tied to you. We are light, we are aether, but we are working, fulfilling the duties of our gift. And so, for me, upon my mortal death I was posted in the Stellanuova of the mirror-earth to look out for the eels of the Stellanuova region.
‘In Calabria, where I lived, every village had its very own collection of saints, and I belonged, as a taumaturgo now, to the Stellanuovans. It was my responsibility to the people of my region to keep the eels happy. So the eels play the role in the rivers and creeks and the mighty ocean, a small role but crucial, to the ultimate happiness of everything. And as I am a human saint, my concern is meant to be for my human community. Well, I’ve told you what my concern is. As a consequence I make the fishermen happy by saving the eels. That is how it works. As a saint you are a clear pane of glass through which God’s light shines, you do what inspires you, what you enjoy, and human beings benefit from it. And so, that was my watch. My little sainthood.
‘So from the seventeen hundreds on earth there I was, watching over Stellanuova, interceding occasionally as I have told you, until in the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties, my people began to disappear. They weren’t dying, though many of them had died in the wars and some from starvation even, but no, they were moving house. And not to other houses in the region. My people, for distressing reasons, were moving, or being moved, across the whole earth.
‘Allora, the Americans had rescued Italy from itself but now that the war was over they wanted to move the little people out of the south, the bread basket of the country, so it could run in what they considered a more efficient way. The Italian government made a certainty of this on the Americans’ behalf. And the people did not only move west across the big Atlantic like Columbus and others had done, but east and south, to the other end of the earth, to Australia, to the port of Melbourne. This is where the Stellanuovans went.
‘It started with a trickle that gathered and grew into a rush. I watched them sitting in their houses deciding. I watched them not eating. I watched them hoping. And weeping. It was always a two-sided thing, this exodus. It was a great opportunity, yes, and things in Calabria were very tough after the war, there was no money to make, too many futures in the south. And so this journey across the world had appeal. Crazy, huh? Some of these people had never been as far as Roma, and now they were agreeing to travel to what might as well have been the moon! For you, Noel and Nan, maybe it would be as if I asked you to migrate to the mirror-earth. So far away, so strange. Scary, huh?
‘I think it’s the same for us all. We like the things we know. Though there are some people who relish adventure. They climbed Everest, yes? Now they go and live in a small room in the South Pole for months. There will always be people like that. And in Stellanuova back a few years ago there were some. Don Della Vecchia was one. The thought of travel and a new place, and the chance to be rich, made him happier than he’d ever been. And there were others. Some of the cheekier girls heard stories about the handsome men in Australia and they were excited. And for a farmer where land was exhausted, the prospect of a large continent with the opportunity for starting a new farm was like a fresh hope. But even the facts, even the bright reality was mixed in their hearts with bleakness and severe apprehension. History was dragging these people along. And so they left on ships from Taranto and Napoli and they arrived on those same ships, those enormous floating vases for the flowers of Stellanuova, in Melbourne. Houses emptied all across Stellanuova, and the government was happy that they went. And the government here in Australia was happy that they came. In questa grande terra you needed the people, huh?
‘But for me, there was a problem. Now in my lookout of Stellanuova on the mirror-earth, I could see that my community had gone. Some of the other villages had lost many, even before the war, but in Stellanuova every last soul departed. Well, I began to feel the pull of their faith. With their prayers I felt them drawing me towards their new home. They were scattered now and I realised that I too must go to be with them. In fact, I had little choice, for faith is the gravity of heaven. I was like a feather caught in an outgoing tide. But you see, I was reluctant to leave the cloudy canopies, the hills and parched valleys that I knew and where I had always dwelt, and so I consulted Maniakes. Ah, it was just to ease my mind and he, great spirit that he is, told me that obviously, yes, I must go, follow my people across the mirror-earth like they had crossed the earth itself.
‘I surrendered. The heart demanded it. To be with my people I would go like an eel, on an epic journey. For a moment, as their belief drew me away, I had panicked, but the kitchen shrines they had offered up in the villas and huts of Stellanuova they now built in their shacks and houses of Victoria. In Beechworth, in Drouin, in Boort, in M
yrniong, and of course across Melbourne, wherever they lived they compelled me towards them. So I knew I would go, as simply as the sun must rise.
‘And so!’ He clapped his hands again, the fabric of his cassock rustling heavily as he did so, and then traced his journey on the mirror-earth map with one finger. ‘I went from Stellanuova across the world, over Maniakes’ home town of Istanbul, over the gorgeous Lebanese mountains, down through Shiraz, Abbar Majar, always keeping to the coast, to eel habitats, just in case, across from Goa to Madras, over to Penang and Bogor, Lombok, and finally across the top and down the east coast of Australia. What a journey, huh? I’ll never regret it. But once I had surrendered, for me it was easy.
‘I realised, after Maniakes advised me, that the Stellanuovans and myself were one, that they had to be looked out for. All us saints and angels had to make the journey, and more important saints than me. Some of these great saints of our region, they deal with the hole in the heart or the split in the mind, or the lost soul, very direct and crucial work. Without them the Stellanuovans would’ve been in desperate trouble. And, in fact, not all of these saints and angels made the trip, even though every last Stellanuovan had left. Even today some of the saints still hold back, their powers dwindling, their blessings forgotten in the hearts of their people as the years go by. They remain perched above their old home, the old village where nothing moves anymore but the wind and the falling masonry.’
Ionio stopped and leant back in his chair. The daylight whisked around the room like our mind’s reflections, there was so much to think about, so much to be grateful for in living where you were born and bred.
Nan, however, was on the edge of her seat frowning again, her eyes narrowed, obviously thinking hard. Eventually she turned to Ionio with a scrunched-up, querulous look on her face and asked: ‘But I don’t get how you saving the eels fits into that picture, Iomio. I mean, you come out here and save eels, like you’ve just done, but I don’t think there are any people from Stellanuova living around here. And yet here you are with us. So how are you looking after them by doing what you did this morning? What is it, some kind of spiritual biodiversity or something?’
In a way Nan had answered her own question, but as she spoke Ionio began to frown as well and looked a bit confused. He bent forward and scratched his right ankle vigorously, as if he’d just discovered a mosquito bite. For a moment I was certain that all this was some kind of charade after all and that it was about to fall apart. For some reason the whole thing seemed to teeter on a brink. Something about Nan’s sceptical force had taken it there.
Questions hurried into my mind as if they’d been held down by mere charisma since dawn. Looking back I think it was a glimmer of everyday reality trying to re-establish itself in the room. Nan herself reckons that moment was like returning home after a lovely long walk in the bush. All of a sudden the dinner needs to be cooked, the phone’s ringing, and you can’t even remember the lustrous trains of thought you enjoyed as you walked. The daydreams you were dreaming.
‘I was sure he was faltering, Noely,’ she’s said since, ‘until you asked him about Ron.’
It’s true. Just as we were beginning to slip out of Ionio’s grasp and doubt our own better instincts, it finally occurred to me what might have happened all those years ago to stop Ron McCoy building his weir across the rivermouth. All the while, as Ionio had been telling us about his miracle in the market and his migration with the Stellanuovans, my mind had kept returning to the story about Ron that my father had told me in the boat. It seemed significant for some reason and now, finally, I thought I knew why.
‘Have you been to Mangowak before?’ I asked Ionio straight out.
He stopped scratching his ankle and stared at me. As I looked back at him I realised that his black-brown eyes were exactly the same colour as the water of the river.
‘Is the penny dropping now, Noel?’ he asked quietly.
I nodded, beginning to get excited. ‘You came here before to help a friend of my father’s.’
Ionio threw his head back with satisfaction. ‘Ah, Ron McCoy and his silly old weir,’ he said. ‘Well, what else could I do, Noel? The man had lost his way and was about to take it out on the eels.’
XV
IT WAS JUST AS MY FATHER HAD told me in the boat on the river but, as I now discovered, Dad had only known the half of it. Ionio told us how back in 1967, Ron McCoy had momentarily lost his way in life. At the age of forty he had finally realised he was destined never to marry. The life that he’d led so happily up on the clifftop with his mother now seemed isolated and sad. His pleasure in what he loved most – fishing, shooting, observing the world of animals and weather, playing cards with his friends and having a daily stout in the pub – felt suddenly hollow as the prospect of a life spent on his own occurred to him. Already his mother, Min, was sixty-five and he knew she wouldn’t live forever. And then where would he be? It worried him. He felt he’d left it too late. His shyness was crippling and he knew of no woman who would be interested in him, anyway. There had been someone once, a girl he met in the Moriac store, but she had changed her mind. They had got on well, Ron thought, and he made the trip out to Moriac with his dog, Bobby, one Sunday to meet her after mass. As he and the dog stood waiting under the oleander tree outside the church, she came down the steps with her family and walked straight past without so much as a glance in his direction. Ron blushed a deep crimson and stood frozen to the spot until well after all the parishioners had gone home. Then he slowly walked with his dog to the ute and drove back to Mangowak across the dry, salty flats, swearing he’d never fall for that trick again.
By the time Ron turned forty he felt he didn’t have a choice, and for the only time in his life this gentle and quiet man had a deep rancour growing inside himself, a kind of blind and bitter confusion which he began to take out on the world in the only way he knew. He started blowing up dams in the bush with homemade petrol bombs, killing every yabby and tadpole and fish and bringing them floating dead to the surface. He shot kangaroos and strung them up from trees with beer cans stuck in their mouths. It was so unlike Ron, who knew better than anyone to take what you needed from nature and no more. But he wasn’t himself, he was desperate.
One night at dusk, in the grip of his anguish, he made his way down behind the dunes on the inlet and shot four swans just as they had tucked their necks under their wings to sleep for the night. The shots rang out and the swans were dead before they even had a chance, with three others flying away to safety. Shooting swans? As Ionio said, it was a useless, wasteful thing to do. Ron had never eaten swan and never would. It was just a warped kind of cry for help.
Then he started building the weir. As my dad had told me, Ron had been talking about doing this for years but whereas in the past he planned a moveable wall, like a semi-permanent dragnet that could be strung across the rivermouth for a few days and then taken down when enough fish were caught, now he started to build a permanent weir, out of ironbark posts and chicken wire, right across the mouth of the river at low tide.
It was autumn, and as he watched from the mirrorearth Ionio knew that once again his time had come. From way back deep in the hills his blessed eels had begun to move slowly down out of the fresh water of the river towards the ocean. Ron McCoy had known exactly what he was doing. He’d watched for decades, ever since he was a child, as the eels swam out through the rivermouth at that time of year, and now he planned to catch the lot. As the autumn rains fell and the moon waxed in its cycle, the tides getting alternately higher and lower with each day, Ron McCoy grappled with his wire and his twine and his ironbark posts, thumping them into the sandy bed of the inlet when the water was at its lowest, and mumbling to himself and wandering home when the tide returned and stopped him from working.
The days passed and as the moon grew full Ionio descended from the mirror-earth. He walked the empty beaches in his cassock and beanie, praying and ringing his little bell, although on that occasion he wore no white
skate shoes, of course. He was barefoot just like he had been as a boy in Stellanuova. As the last tide went out before the first eels were to attempt their gamble into the ocean, he watched in the dawn as Ron came walking down his usual track from the cliff, in his gaberdine coat and maroon and yellow cap, with his axe and a hessian bag, and a roll of wire under his arm.
A light, misty rain began to fall as Ron arrived at his nearly completed weir to find a strange figure waiting for him. On a little cliff of sand on the western side of the river stood Ionio, ringing his bell and murmuring his low chant, stopping Ron in his tracks. Trying to work out who it was, Ron McCoy screwed up his eyes and peered through the rain. Ionio beckoned him across the low tide. Ron waited, annoyed at the interruption to his plans, but then, as the chant continued, and the bell also, he began to fall under Ionio’s spell. He crossed the rivermouth.
Fra Ionio greeted him. ‘Ron,’ the monk said, ‘have you ever wondered why the eels go out to sea at this time every year? Yes? Well, I am here to tell you why, and then, together, we will take down this weir.’
The two men sat down on the little cliff of sand beside the water, with rain falling and the roar of the nearby ocean in their ears, and Ionio explained what Ron could never have imagined. He told him how each autumn the eels leave the rivermouth in their hundreds on a marathon journey of around three thousand miles to the Coral Sea. Once there they mate and spawn and die, their corpses floating slowly to the bottom of the deep royal blue waters as their offspring, shaped just like gumleaves at this early age, begin to be ferried away in the southward currents, on a great ancestral road within the ocean, back towards home. With the sea as their shepherd they drift all the way back until, in spring, the tiny eels, no longer the shape of gumleaves but now like the laces of a boot, re-enter the river, the very river their parents had left only a short time before.