by Gregory Day
Ron McCoy had seen the departure of the eels and also the arrival of their young, but he had never known what occurred in between. Now, in the rain, with the eels gathering in the river at their feet, Ionio explained it to him, and Ron was amazed. But it made perfect sense to him. The pure scale of their journey, and the presence of the monk, touched his soul and quietly he felt his transformation.
Ionio looked into his eyes. ‘You more than anyone here,’ he said, ‘can be a friend of le anguille.’
Then the monk shook his head in a return to wonder. ‘Ah,’ he said to Ron, with the rain running down his face, ‘what a magnificent world we live in. So full of love and pain and great achievement.’
Apart from the wind and waves there was then a silence on the beach. As Ionio put it to us, he and Ron sat like brothers, staring at the water. Ionio knew he had changed Ron’s mind.
After a time, the two of them stepped out into the water and slowly began to dismantle the weir. With the butt end of the axe they took it in turns to knock loose the ironbark posts that Ron had plunged into the riverbed. Before long they had knocked the last one out, gathered up the chicken wire, and the mouth was clear.
‘And now, Ron,’ Ionio had said, his face all flushed with the effort and excitement, ‘will you take me to meet your mother and shelter me for a time? We will return with the tide, to see le anguille leave. In the meantime, we have a lot to talk about.’
XVI
IT WAS WELL INTO THE AFTERNOON by the time Ionio finished telling us about Ron’s weir and the migration of the eels. He beamed at us, watching for our reaction.
Nan began to laugh, and I couldn’t help but join her. ‘Bloody Ron,’ she said, giggling. ‘Who would’ve thought?’
‘Well, you know what Dad used to reckon,’ I said. ‘Over and over like a broken record he’d say, “There’s more to Ron McCoy than meets the eye”. The old man didn’t know the half of it!’
Our laughter was part amazement, part relief. All of a sudden us being alone in the fire tower with a threehundred-year-old monk had a precedent. And not just any precedent. The most taciturn, down-to-earth man in town had been visited by this monk as well.
And what about the journey of the eels! Since that day I’ve often thought of how kind Ionio was to us when all along he knew how ignorant we were, even of our very own treasured place. We spent our time complaining about how nothing magical ever happened around here anymore while right under our noses, in the river right alongside my house, Ionio’s blessed anguille were coming and going on their most superlative journey. These days I make my way through life with an alertness I never ever had before. I vowed to myself that day in the tower to always keep a watch for any signs that the eels might have trouble setting out for or returning from the Coral Sea.
As our laughter subsided, Nan turned to me and said, ‘So much for the “good old days”.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked her.
‘Well, while all that was happening to Ron, nobody ever knew about it. The poor old bastard was on his own. Who knows what could have happened if it wasn’t for Ionio and the eels?’
‘He was never alone,’ Ionio said, shaking his head. ‘It was just panic. For a moment. I told him, in the house of his mother, that like the eels we all have a destiny to fulfil. Now that the original people have gone from here he is a keeper of the place. Like the two of you, Ron can feel the brokenness.’
In a state of great exhilaration we all got up and went over to the kitchen, glad to loosen our bodies. Nan and Ionio began to joke around a bit as Nan made some snacks and I cut up some fruit to put in the juicer. It was the old juicer I remember from years ago in Nan and Myles’ first house on the inlet. They rented that house off my brothers Jim and Walker, who at that stage were partners in Jim’s landscaping business. It was a house of bongs and wetsuits, just a short walk across the field of Norfolk pines from my place. That was where Nan had first become pregnant, with Emma. I remember Myles telling me the big news one day while we were landscaping a new house on the slope above the blowhole. I remember being so happy, it was almost as if it was my child who’d been conceived.
On the front of the old juicer was a TRACKS magazine sticker from those days and a picture of Anthony Collins, the original dairy farmer in the river valley. On his picture, in which he stood in a defiant stance, holding the bridle of his horse on the Boat Creek slope, someone had scratched TOURISM SUCKS in the corner. It looked as if Collins himself was saying it, even way back then.
As I pressed the juicer button after cutting up the fruit, Ionio let out a squeal and gripped the bench. The noise had got him. We all looked at each other and laughed, firstly at his reaction to the juicer, but then we laughed again at the whole situation. Ionio had a twinkle in his eye. It was as if he knew exactly what this incredible day was like for me and Nan. Because of that empathy it seemed almost, at that point, as if he was just another one of us, and that he’d dropped in for a visit as casually as if it was me or one of my brothers dropping in on Nan and Myles in that first house of theirs on the inlet.
XVII
I COULD SEE CLOUDS DRIFTING in from the west now, piling up as they tend to do when the day wears on. The sunlight had already started to disappear for patches of time. The afternoon was taking on that sense of liquid light that by sunset would end up more nondescript as the clouds spread in the slowly dropping temperature into a grey, downy cover. All of a sudden I had a longing to be back down on the ground. To walk around with our new awareness amongst the things that we loved. No-one would bump into us out there in the hills, I thought. And it wouldn’t be long before Ionio had to leave, anyway. He’d told us he would be gone before dark. I thought it’d be good to spend some time in the bush with him before he went, so the memories of the day wouldn’t all be locked up in the tower. To give it all some air. I wondered if Nan and he would agree. I suggested it as we ate our crackers, avocado and tomato, and drank our juice. Although Nan seemed reluctant, Ionio thought it would be a good idea. ‘A bit of a tramp,’ he called it, laughing at his use of the word. ‘Before I take the bigger tramp back up the ladder to the mirror-earth.
‘But first, Noel, what about this food?’ he said, munching on what looked like a fairly plain rice cake with avocado on top. ‘It’s delicious! So much flavour, and all because before long we will be whisked away! Ah, it is a treat.’
‘What do you mean we’ll all be whisked away?’ Nan said, sounding a bit concerned.
Ionio looked her way. ‘Your mortal life is full of passing gifts and treasures, Nan. Everything you do is in the knowledge that one day you will die. That’s where food gets its taste from, where sexual lust comes from, where the sensual world creates its energy.’
Nan frowned. ‘Yair, but of course now we know different, now that you’re here. Aren’t you proof that there is an afterlife?’
‘Well,’ he said, smacking his lips with a mouthful of food, crumbs all over his cassock and bits of green avocado in the corners of his little mouth. ‘An afterlife, yes, but not with the same restrictions of the mortal life. Not with gravity, not with death, and therefore without desire. Without such an intensity of the senses. When I return to help le anguille I get to feel the difference, knowing that by the end of the day, before those hills out there are covered with the night, I will have returned. And so I get a familiar dose of what you are experiencing for the duration of your lives. Yes, Noel, please could you pass me that chocolate. Ah, chocolate! Bellissima!’
For some reason Nan was a bit put out by this joyful little outburst. Scrunching up her face again she moved over and sat alone on the chair in front of her embroidery. She began rolling a smoke.
Ionio carried on, buoyed by the food, with fervour in his voice. ‘Modern life for you in this wealthy country is like one long siesta between hunts. You live as if by a beautiful billabong, with a store of food built up, which you enjoy lying back like kangaroos in the shade, knowing that not long ago you battled to get the food a
nd that soon you will have to again.
‘But in the mirror-earth our pleasures are different. There is no preference for the billabong over the dry desert. All is rich and full of life. And so, we desire less. There is no point for we already have what we desire. Forever. Rest assured, eating on earth is like nothing else. I love it!’
The light was still shifting in gentle switches, off and on, the tower like a clear beaker in the air. We continued to eat. Standing in front of the windows, he continued to speak.
‘Your positive thoughts on earth are like seeds from which whole regions grow in the mirror-earth. Your wishes are manufactured there. Your pleasures are made constant. If you dream a Paris of the imagination, when you die you will experience it. If you dream of one day being able to write music, on the mirror-earth it will happen for you.’ He giggled, his little red lips quivering. ‘As I’ve told you, the only things that you might imagine but you can’t have on the mirror-earth are chocolate and death.’
‘But why chocolate?’ I asked.
He split open a passionfruit with his hands and sucked it dry like a true hedonist. ‘It’s a kind of penance for bliss,’ he said. ‘The lack of chocolate keeps us in touch with our memory of desire. Because we do not desire it there. We remember desiring it, and we can imagine how much we might yearn for it if we were on earth and it didn’t exist. It’s like the flaw that makes things so. To retain the tension of reality. Otherwise heaven would be boring, huh? Like the muzak they play in the cities these days. And on the phone lines. For fun when I arrived yesterday I picked up the public phone outside the convent and dialled a number just to experience it. And I heard that muzak. It was like too much chocolate, you know. Or one of those diet drinks. Or grey tea. The flaw is essential. It’s how we humans have made it.’
‘But didn’t God make the mirror-earth, Ionio?’ I asked.
‘Of course he did,’ he replied, as if it was a stupid question. ‘He made you and everything that comes from you, and this, these thoughts, the trees out there, the birds, the colours, everything in the mirror-earth comes from here. Me, I come from here. That’s why it’s so nice to return. I’m like an uncle come home for Christmas. To eat chocolate! Hah!’
He was enjoying his food immensely, caught up in his pleasure. Nan, however, was brooding. I was expecting a pissed-off outburst any minute. Instead, her head fell slowly forward onto the embroidery frame, and to our surprise she began to softly cry. Ionio’s face transformed and he stepped towards her and crouched down onto his haunches. He put his hand between her shaking shoulderblades.
I sat still, looking at them from the couch. Things had come to a head for Nan. Her fighting self was struggling with it all, with the confrontation of Ionio’s presence, and the thoughts of her dead brother that he triggered, and of course with the difficulty of her own immediate situation.
She said quietly, through the tears, ‘If it’s all so fucking joyous, then what does that make my life? Some kind of sick joke?’
Now the monk spoke softly, but still with a smile. ‘Well, I don’t know about sick,’ he whispered, ‘but perhaps it’s a joke. Like the rest of our lives. And so we laugh.’
‘Sounds like Buddhism to me,’ said Nan.
Ionio raised his head with a concerned look. ‘Think of the eels, Nan,’ he said. ‘Think of them over the last two days. That is the kind of bewilderment you and Noel are capable of feeling. When the touchstones are no longer there. When up is down and down is up. I feel it too. I’ve always been like an outcast. First a boy whose mother was a thief, then a taumaturgo. A fish out of water.’
He remained crouched beside her, his small body perfectly still and with his hand on her back, and the three of us were silent. Eventually, he began to chant, softly like he had at the ditches, and Nan began sniffing and sighing, feeling the affection in his touch and in his voice. Ionio kept his hand upon her for some time and then he stood up and moved away.
‘Well, happiness has many names,’ he said, standing back in front of the windows with the western light behind him. ‘It is a whole dialect in itself, and no-one is free from the pain of existence. Not even God.
‘Not even God,’ he repeated quietly.
I knew that pretty soon we would have to leave. After all, it was a good hour’s walk through the bush to the convent where I presumed Ionio would have to depart. But then again, what did I know? His metaphysical world seemed to have unpredictable laws. Maybe he couldn’t leave the earth at the point that he entered. Maybe he’d have to leave it from a body of water under a particular star or something fantastic like that. I wasn’t sure, but for now the atmosphere in the tower, after Nan’s tears, was settled and true. As real and palpable as . . . well, an eel. It had a smell. Of coarse fabric, an unknown spice and the riverbed sludge in my heart.
‘What about hell?’ Nan said, taking her eyes off the window and refocusing on the room. ‘Is it possible for a living hell to be lessened?’
He sighed then, a slightly weary sigh, as if the day had just gone past its peak for him. It was somehow apt to hear his answer to Nan’s question.
‘Why do you think I am here, Nan? What do you think those eels would say if they could talk? One minute they’re trapped, out of rhythm, in hell, the next minute they’re swimming down the river! Allora. And it’s not just saints like me who can do it. Ron McCoy did it. And you can do it, Nan. If you can imagine a lessening of hell then you believe in it lessening. And with any luck, and good health, you will act accordingly. That’s all I did, you know. That day in Stellanuova with the fisherman and his eels.’
And then Ionio gave us both a big theatrical wink and said: ‘Well, you know, strange things happen, huh?’
Nan let out a huge breath and slowly shook her head of red hair in disbelief, like she’d done when we first entered the tower. ‘You can say that again, Iomio,’ she replied. We started laughing again, infectiously, because of him. This time it was me who reached first for the packet of cigarettes.
XVIII
I’VE BEEN SMOKING EVER SINCE that day because it reminds me of Ionio. As I’ve said, I only used to smoke occasionally, but every time I take a cigarette between my fingers now, I go straight back to that day. I see his smiling face and his cheeky expression, I see his hoonish smoking style, and with each drag I take my contentment grows. Reality as we know it stops encroaching and I am reminded of what is possible. And, no, I’m not smoking joints. It’s Champion Ruby. The tobacco gives me a little head rush every now and again, but it’s just being reminded of Ionio that alters my state. Because I wouldn’t be human, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t question what happened. I’m not one of those people who sees ghosts or faeries or anything like that. And yet now I’m a man who’s spent a whole day with a three-hundred-year-old Italian monk! So, what gives? Well, it depends on what you’re prepared to imagine.
Nan swings from extreme to extreme. She’s either a believer or non-believer depending which day you catch her. She’s a purist, you know, pure in hate, pure in love, whereas I’m more the type of person who’ll see a situation from all sides. As for Ron McCoy, well, I’ve tried and tried, both directly and with hints, but he’s as cryptic about it all as you can imagine. He just refuses to go there. So I’m burdened with the self-questioning.
Sometimes I feel aloof, and alone. On an island of extraordinary experience. It’s so much easier to be back in the mix, whingeing about nothing magical happening around here. At least then I’m on familiar ground. But Ionio told me it’d be like this. He told me I’d be like a gold-panner for the next while after he’d gone, sifting through the riverbed for signs of light. And that’s what I’ve been doing, over and over, sifting for the true shape of the world and, inevitably, wondering if we could’ve been deceived. In a way it feels like a kind of purgatory, but then I’ll reach for a cigarette and all the anguish and interrogation drop away, and I’m happily back with Ionio again.
The time had finally come for us to leave the tower. Ionio was gett
ing restless and tired, and by this time we just wanted to make him happy. We got up from our seats and, oddly enough looking back, we washed the dishes we’d used and Nan made Ionio’s bed before we moved over to the door.
As we arrived at the top of the ladder at the end of the little steel platform outside the door, Ionio paused and started giggling again.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
He said, ‘Oh, it’s silly, Noel. But once, in the year of 1962, I came down here to tend to some sick eels in the Skeleton Creek. I spent the day with a family, the O’Connells, the whole lot, grandmother, parents and the one young girl and the dog. They were staunch Catholics but not so staunch that they would turn me away. They made me very welcome. Bill O’Connell was a caver, you know, a man who likes to go underground, so he was used to unusual things happening. He told me he was never surprised anymore, after the things he’d seen under the earth. So with his faith in Christ he was my choice to spend the day with.
‘Anyway, it’s just that the young girl had this game that I played with her. Snakes and ladders. And right now I was reminded of her, and the game. This trip, this time, you know, what with the ladder in your barn and now this tower, it’s like I’m playing that game, snakes and ladders. Or maybe eels and ladders, huh? Down from the mirror-earth on a ladder made of heavenly twine, then the eels, then your barn, then this ladder, first up, now down, and soon I’ll be back on my way upstairs, as they say. Ah, the life is just a game, huh?’ He giggled again and Nan led us onto the ladder and down to the bush.
As we descended – first Nan, then Ionio, then me – the monk kept chatting away happily: ‘That girl from Skeleton Creek, her name was Donna. You might want to find her after I’ve gone. The poor girl, she was so fat. To be fat is hard around here. She was a happy spirit but hated school because she was fat. At home with her family she was so happy. Yes. You should look her up, Noel. After I’m gone.’