‘Blood oath,’ I said.
‘Poets meet each other at the level of mystery, not politics.’
‘Absolutely,’ Henry said.
It was intriguing how she glanced uncertainly at us, endowed us with presence on the simple basis we had declared ourselves to be poets. She was old enough to be our mother.
‘My government likes this idea. So for poetry it is always the big handshake for poets, and if you translate the poetry then you also enjoy.’ She gestured around the room, her spiel having been at once deprecating and playful. This gave the ironic liveliness to her eyes.
‘Why not, ma’am?’
‘Perhaps your country is the same.’
Australia was also fond of the big handshake, Henry assured her.
‘Just so.’ She nodded her head, glad that we knew how to be complicit. ‘And you see,’ she rested her eye on Henry, ‘Jelenska and I, we must be good scouts for our country in the literatoor. Poets are a good foreign exchange for a communist country.’
‘Poetry is a kind of money,’ Henry stated.
Branca regarded him appreciatively. ‘You are authentic Australian poet.’
Now Jelena reappeared from the bathroom to hurry her mother to the conference. The amenities of the apartment were explained to us: coffee, bread rolls, honey. We would see our hosts later. Then they were gone to their work and we were left alone.
‘We’ve hit gold.’
‘They are very trusting,’ Henry qualified.
We helped ourselves to their coffee, then Henry read in one of the armchairs and soon was fast asleep. Wandering from the apartment, I took this street and that, came out at the Grand Canal again and, in the casual manner of Venice, found myself gazing across the water at the Chiesa Di Santa Maria Della Salute. Built (as I read in Frommer) to rejoice Venice’s deliverance from the plague, the dome of this baroque church appeared spectral and magnificent against the milky overcast. So was this city truly all about death and beauty? It seemed so, and once more Henry seemed to have summed up a thing in advance of being exposed to it, like Byron, whom he had mocked for doing so.
When I returned to the apartment he had woken and was reading again.
He glanced up. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Checking out death and beauty in this city.’ I described the extraordinary church I had seen across the water. I should say that, whenever I fell into line with any of Henry’s airy pronouncements, he did not preen himself. Egotist that he was, a personal supremacy was never the point. It was my acquiescence in his view of the conditions of existence that he sought, an assurance my mind had been cleared of non-poetic clutter.
So I framed my question to him carefully. ‘Hal, when you tell me this city is about death and beauty, do you actually see in your mind’s eye those people writhing and vomiting from plague, and the measure of relief when the contagion departs such that they can raise some magnificent church in thanksgiving?’
I wanted him to assure me that the particulars of what was suffered by living folk down the eras were embraced by the poetic shorthand of his ‘Venice is about Death and Beauty.’
But he evaded my attempt to probe the quick of how he imagined things. ‘Let’s check out this poetry conference.’ He jumped to his feet.
We found our way to the Casa Foscari, and entered its foyer to be confronted by its opulence.
Henry was buoyant. ‘What’s an image for that stairwell?’
‘Uh—’
‘Too late, too late. It is a conch shell.’
And naturally the image was vivid and judicious for the lucent, upwardly spiralling balustrade that disappeared into darkness.
He went off to collect the name-tags Branca had promised while I sat on the lustrous stair and cast my eye over the crowded foyer. The encampments of poets seemed arranged more by attitude than nation. Above one group a calico sign read, ‘We are poets and we are millions,’ while similar banners advertising similar solidarity hung here and there in various languages. I saw islands of argument and faces of studied hauteur. Many notepads rested on many knees and wordspray was being set down on their lined pages. I recognised a Ken, a Laurie and a couple of Kates from the Australian scene. Aware that, as Arden poets, Henry and I were sometimes called the School of Ardour, I nodded curtly to these fellow nationals and, when Henry reappeared, I ascended the conch shell with him to the theatre where the session that included Peter was being held. We took our seats near the back.
Money was being spent on poetry here. Each seat in the auditorium was equipped with headphones and wired to a cockpit at the back where sat several translators ready to give simultaneous translations in a diversity of languages to each speaker as they presented themselves. I could see Jelena among them, but not her mother. The title of this session – in its English translation – was New Lions from Old Lines: The Poetics of Post-Colonial Societies.
‘Bring it on!’ Henry settled into his seat and fitted his headset.
The lights dimmed with the exception of spotlights that illumined our panel. There was a poet from Mauritius, groomed like a film star, pulling nervously at his graying temples. Next to him sat a woman poet from Surinam, like a tropical fish in the turquoise and orange of her national costume. And there was Peter, wearing a braided waistcoat, tight black trousers: the matador among them, perhaps.
The Mauritian gentleman spoke first, and for a time I tried to follow the translation from his French, but it was a disconcerting metallic English coming through the headphone. The word ‘historicising’ seemed to recur and one glorious phrase I recall was how it was ‘the nymphomaniacal desire of a post-colonial poetics to engage the interest of the ex-colonial power.’ This prompted a squeal of laughter from Henry, for all that it seemed to be taken soberly by the rest of the packed audience. In the end I preferred to listen to the musicality of the fellow’s French, for French sounds so articulate in French. The Mauritian finished with a poem where we were encouraged to join in a refrain line – ‘Man-deh-lah’ repeated thrice on each occasion, and a chant of support for Robben Island’s indomitable prisoner.
Peter was next. He had listened to the ‘Mand-deh-lahs’ with a small smile on his face. Now he leaned to his microphone and paused, regarding us for an interval.
‘Like, poetry is always poetry,’ he said, and stroked his jowls ruminatively. I expected the English channel on my headphones to be silent for an English-speaking poet and was surprised to hear Jelena’s voice rendering the English from the English.
‘The Australian poet conveys the greetings from his country,’ came her voice through the headphones.
‘Like man, you can forget the historicising bullshit,’ was Peter’s next advice.
‘In Australia are many kinds of poetry,’ Jelena translated. I indicated to Henry he should switch to the English channel.
‘Like …’ Peter contemplated us all, ‘maybe the most important thing I can say to you might be …’ and he went to the nearby wall and abruptly stood on his head, attaining his balance immediately.
‘It is poetry written from the point of view of being upside down on the other side of the world,’ Jelena translated calmly. There were eruptions of laughter from parts of the audience, puzzlement elsewhere.
From his upside-down perspective, Peter needed to speak up to be heard, but he had commenced to tell us how the mind needed to be open to find poetry anywhere.
‘Australia is mostly an urban country,’ came Jelena’s gloss.
The poet came down from his headstand, leapt onto the panel’s bench in front of the Surinam lady, went down on his haunches and then, placing his hands on the surface and pressing his knees against his elbows, he commenced to crabwalk from right to left under the noses of his two panel colleagues.
‘Like, Olson, man, like Rimbaud. Like, how do you tell what is inside the poe
m and what is on the outside?’
‘In Australia it is possible to watch how poetry can disappear entirely from poetry,’ Jelena supplied.
Peter reached the end of the bench and manoeuvred himself to face the audience. ‘Like …’ I feared he was beginning to feel the strain on his arms, sinewy as they appeared to be. ‘Like, doing this is a poem.’
‘The Australian poet says Australia is a hot desert land where mirages are quite common.’
Peter dissolved the crab posture and leapt down from the table. ‘I’ve even got a book with some of my poems in it.’ He went to his chair and rummaged in a shoulder bag.
‘The Australian poet will now present some of his mirages.’ There was laughter from larger sections of the audience now as more people had discovered the English-into-English.
Peter’s was a breathy voice and the poems he gave us seemed more purred than recited. Sleeping pills were mentioned, a dedication or two to an American poet, and some mention about the poem being about itself. He came to an end, walked to the side of the auditorium, quickly assessed the space available to him, then performed three cartwheels across the breadth of the stage and sat down. Sustained applause followed. Indeed, I clapped too, feeling that Peter deserved the hurrahs for something, whether his gymnastics or the light he had shed on our topic.
‘Ho hum,’ said Henry.
‘It was agile, Hal.’
‘If he wants to stand on his head, why not become a PE teacher?’
After the two male performances, the Surinam lady did not have a chance and this was unfair because her preamble was intelligent, and her several poems coming through the headphones, in their translation from the Dutch, seemed to be lucid and amusing. The session broke up. Henry spied Bernard Hickey and went over for a chat. I met Jelena coming from the cockpit.
‘You’re a translator of creative brilliance,’ I told her warmly. ‘Do you have any idea of the service you have just done for Australian poetry?’
‘Australian poetry, what do I care about your Australian poetry?’ she said. ‘You may buy me some coffee.’
We sat at a small table, and I asked her, ‘Will you be in trouble for your creativity?’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘It is poetry. Who cares? Tell me something interesting about yourself.’
The Loveliest Night of the Year
Anthony Lynch
One lunchtime, on a day off from the well-paid tedium of my middle-management position, I visited my mama and papa, letting myself in the front door and following voices down the carpeted hallway until I came to my old bedroom, in which stood a woman in her early thirties. A woman my age, in my old room.
I’d moved to a place of my own a decade before, but when I stayed over it was in this room I still slept. It had the same discoloured Degas print on the wall, and the wardrobe housed a few favourite old dresses and dolls, including a jungle Barbie, from when I was a girl. Now, in some primitive, urban jungle way, I felt my space invaded.
The woman adjusted a colour chart; Papa adjusted his hearing aid. She turned a page, pointed to a square of colour she described as ‘the brighter side of olive.’
Papa caught the word olive. He had a mature tree he netted every year.
Turning my way, the woman introduced herself as Lisbeth. Mama, catching up on the game, introduced us again, but she struggled with the lack of an e at the start of Lisbeth’s name. Lisbeth sans e, a home and office interior design consultant (her business card was attached to every brochure), had showered that morning under a waterfall of Issey Miyake. It seemed to fill the house. This was not the only impression she gave of a big presence. Aided by the fact of Papa’s malfunctioning hearing aid, she shouted a thesaurus of absurd colour names in his ear. Autumn plum. Harvest moon. Languedoc. LANG-UE-DOC.
That was the first I knew of it. The renovation. The move.
She left three hours later, the house awash with colour charts, sample tiles and swatches of carpet. Brochures for whitegoods, tapwear and blinds littered the dining table. Small asterisks decorated the charts and brochures, with ‘Kitchen,’ ‘Bdm 1’ or ‘Lounge feature’ jotted neatly in the margins.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Adding value,’ said Papa, as if at a marketing meeting.
‘It’s tired,’ said Mama. ‘The house.’
Lisbeth had also used tired, as if the family home of thirty-five years should be pensioned off.
‘I like it as is. What’s this about value?’
‘Market value,’ said Papa. ‘We’re making it attractive to a prospect buyer.’
‘Prospective.’
‘I don’t need a smartypants.’
‘You don’t need a buyer.’
*
One morning, a month later, two housepainters arrived. They scraped away the wallpaper that depicted trellised grapes growing skyward after Papa had laid the pattern upside down when we were kids. They sanded and puttied. Cut in and rolled.
The hallway, lounge and dining room were repainted in what Lisbeth had advised were colours akin – another word she liked, you could see she’d once opened a dictionary – to those of the deco period when the house was built. Off white, cream, two different greens. I think one of them was Languedoc. Rose for a feature wall, contrast white for period detail. A bit of a lolly shop. I’d paid no attention to the period features of the home I grew up in, they were always just there, but ceiling roses, curved mantelpieces, the half columns in the hallway, all now came to life.
Carpets and linoleum that Bruno, aka Papa, had laid down decades ago were lifted, exposing blackwood boards. These were now polished to a mirror finish. Ribbed sisal was laid in bedrooms that suddenly smelt like upmarket rope factories. Cross-over curtains, fake teak daddo and faux marble benchtops made a short journey from the house to a skip on the nature strip. The oven, cooktop and dishwasher were replaced with new models in matching stainless steel. Miele, for God’s sake. Skylights opened up patches of blue in the kitchen, laundry and bathroom, which featured cool, inner urban textiles. The outdoor decking was sanded and received a new membrane of varnish.
The only room to escape censure, save a coat of ceiling paint, was the small sixties sunroom with geometric wallpaper deemed sufficiently retro by Lisbeth to warrant salvage.
Having spared themselves the labour of DIY, my parents busied themselves with dozens of coffees, teas, biscuits, cakes, sandwiches and even hot lunches for the tradesmen in the upended house.
The accumulated belongings of suburban life were shipped back and forth. I had dinner at Mama and Papa’s every Tuesday night, and on each visit would find the furniture in a new configuration. The sideboard that hadn’t budged since I was a teen was shunted from the dining room to the hall, to the lounge, to my old bedroom, and back to the dining room. Papa, who in his maintenance of the house had until now shown little regard for aesthetics, reinvented the family home. After first declining to replace the beige bathroom tiles, which were good enough for anyone’s feet, he relented, and broke his attachment to all things old. He despatched to the skip anything taking temporary residence in the front yard. Even Lisbeth sans e had to remind him to retain some original fittings.
When the last tradie gathered up his ladders and throw sheets and backed his van from the drive, the skip bloated with our past was docked on the back of a truck. I rescued jungle Barbie for old time’s sake, but much of our family furniture remained in the garage, where it stayed until it sold or failed to sell at a garage sale, and was picked up by St Vinnies or taken to the tip.
*
The house looked bigger and brighter, as if it had gone to a fitness farm and come back reduced in some areas and expanded in others. But also more spare, with so many old belongings gone, some character lost. Too much anti-wrinkle cream in some areas, too much make-up in others. It made me sad, like whe
n I found my nonna painted up like a clown in her nursing home not long before she died.
But a buyer would be impressed, you’d reckon, and that was what Mama and Papa wanted. A buyer. Because suddenly, they had it in their heads that they wanted a unit in a new block being developed in the next suburb, where houses just like theirs had been bulldozed to make way. They’d picked one out already, a unit at the rear with its own courtyard, ensuite bathroom and with cupboard doors that would open and shut in just the way you’d like them to. The ones in their current, newly gym-fit house now did that too, of course, but they’d be needing a packet for it to get back all they’d suddenly spent.
*
Mama and Papa had bought the house decades ago through an agent called John Bigelow. They had kept the paperwork, and the original advert with a black and white photo. Bigelow and Son still operated from a small office, dwarfed by their opposition’s brightly lit expanses of glass and signage. I guess they had a local following. John Bigelow had since moved to a small plot of land in the Eastern Cemetery, so when I rang – despite spending all his adult life in Melbourne, Bruno still didn’t trust his English – I got the son, Graeme. He sounded quite advanced in years himself, and he recounted how so many clients had come back to the firm over the years, how they’d bought and sold properties for three generations of some families, how helping people find new homes was one of the pleasures of the business. I conveyed a precied version of this to Papa, who snatched the phone and excitedly told Bigelow Jnr all over again how he, Bruno Valenti and his wife Rita, had bought the house through his father. Not-so-young Graeme repeated how rewarding it was to help people find a good home and, years later, help those same people again when their circumstances changed. As if he were some do-gooder social worker.
Bigelow the social worker didn’t come to inspect the house. He sent two underlings – one a bit green, very dapper and polite; the other, Gillespie, in early middle age, pudgy and with an aftershave that hung around long after he’d gone. But sharp. You could see his mind ticking over. You knew he had a figure in his head before he offered his hand in greeting.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 31