Sinning Across Spain

by Ailsa Piper

  But I was headed for a very different road on the Mozárabe, and remembering that did nothing to reassure me en route to Rome, as the honeymooners snuggled beside me and Indonesia passed below.

  After Sue’s funeral, I’d pulled my trusty mochila from its hanging place and stuffed it full of the same old gear. I did buy a replacement pair of my beloved Merrell boots, and I visited my osteopath, who assured me the knee twinges I’d been experiencing were not a problem.

  ‘Probably caused by fear,’ he said.

  Fear was keeping very close company as the plane droned north. Unable to walk, which is what I usually do when I’m afraid or on edge, I looked for another salve.

  Poems are my internal guides. My maps and markers. My signposts.

  They came alive for me when I chanced on Dorothea McKellar’s ‘My Country’ in a school anthology. Core of my heart, my country! she wrote. I was a bush-raised girl in a city school, and as I read her description of a pitiless blue sky, I went home. She woke me to the possibility that words could conjure places, sensations and memories. Thanks to her, I think of Australia as both wilful and lavish, and I know that Dorothea was right about my homeland:

  All you who have not loved her, you will not understand.

  Only once have I ever deliberately memorised a poem. As a little girl, I had to compete in an Eisteddfod, and I can still recall those lines of Mr Robert Louis Stevenson’s, learned by rote and not by love:

  I saw you toss the kites on high

  And blow the birds about the sky;

  And all around I heard you pass,

  Like ladies’ skirts across the grass—

  O wind, a-blowing all day long,

  O wind, that sings so loud a song!

  I wore a starched white frock with pink embroidered dots on it, white ankle socks and patent shoes, and I don’t remember any connection to the words except for the quality of being held in check, stifled by the idea that there was a ‘right’ way to approach poetry. In my child’s head, meeting that Scotsman’s poem was like meeting the Queen. It required best behaviour, a straight back, rounded vowel sounds and polished shoes.

  Not so the poetry I love. It transforms the mundane to the magical, and even at thirty thousand feet it can turn fear to calm. As the newlyweds snoozed, I whispered ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ to the black ocean below. From my birth, my mother recited it to me every night until I went to sleep. She did it for years, until I could recite it back to her.

  It’s still vivid for me: a pea-green boat bobbing in a wide star-lit sea; a runcible spoon scooping slices of quince; bong-trees shading a be-ringed piggy-wig; and that impossible couple, owl and cat, dancing on the sand under the light of the moon. I know it by heart. By my heart and her heart. It lives right at my centre, one of my mother’s most precious gifts to me, and a way for me to keep her alive.

  Just after I decided to walk the Mozárabe, I heard a psychologist talking about the importance of the stories we’re given as children, and the damage we can do with promises of handsome princes rescuing impossibly beautiful but helpless princesses who complain about peas under mattresses. Wicked witches and demure damsels.

  He believed the best model anyone could offer a child was Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. Words like ‘runcible’ can be explained, he said. Don’t let them put you off. His theory was that, as a model for relationships, it had it all. They love and celebrate their differences, and set out on a great quest together. They have plenty of all they need—honey and money. The decision to marry is instigated by the cat, and the owl loves her strength.

  My mother had fitted me well for the road, but the thing Mum didn’t know was that Mr Lear left unfinished a poem about the children of the Owl and the Pussycat. I wish she had seen it.

  Our mother was the Pussy-cat, our father was the Owl,

  And so we’re partly little beasts and partly little fowl,

  The brothers of our family have feathers and they hoot,

  While all the sisters dress in fur and have long tails to boot.

  We all believe that little mice,

  For food are singularly nice.

  Our mother died long years ago. She was a lovely cat.

  Her tail was five feet long, and grey with stripes, but what of that?

  In Sila forest on the East of fair Calabria’s shore

  She tumbled from a lofty tree—none ever saw her more.

  Our owly father long was ill from sorrow and surprise,

  But with the feathers of his tail he wiped his weeping eyes.

  And in the hollow of a tree in Sila’s inmost maze

  We made a happy home and there we pass our obvious days.

  A motherless family, at home in fair Calabria.

  Italy.

  My first stop in Europe.

  I gave myself over to sleep as we flew farther from the Southern Cross towards the field of stars.

  4

  Sin City

  It begins.

  That’s what I wrote in my journal at Bar Roxy, where cellophane-wrapped, bow-tied Easter eggs overflowed the counter, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ played on the radio, and a coiffed matron sipped her aperitif as she fretted over a crossword. We were in the Roman suburb of Parioli, where embassies rub shoulders with research academies, and the signore at the next table spoke to me of sesso. Jet-lagged and still tuning in to Italian, I had to ask him to repeat himself. It took three attempts before I realised he was saying that men need daily sex, and that was why he took lovers outside of marriage.

  It is only sesso, he said. ‘Fa niente.’ It’s nothing. And no, his wife would not want to know about his lovers.

  When I asked if his tolerant, disinterested sposa could take a lover, he snorted. Women are different, he said. They are all sentimenti and pensieri. Feeling and thinking. They don’t live here, he said, grabbing at his crotch.

  Roman men often did that—a quick check that all the bits were in place.

  ‘Relax,’ I wanted to say. ‘No one has taken the old feller away in the night.’

  How did he think God felt about these other women, I asked.

  He laughed.

  God? At present, He must be very busy, he said. All those priests who have made the pedofilia. It is not good. Not good. No, God had bigger work than to worry about something naturale like a man’s needs. God understood they were normale.

  I didn’t have the energy—or the vocabulary—to quiz him further. I must have been tired, because languages are one of my chief pleasures.

  I’ve worked with language all my life, as a writer, theatre director and teacher. I relish English and its vagaries. I speak enough Spanish to chat about the times if not the tides; have passable schoolgirl French; and enough Italian to know when I’m in a discussion that is going down a one-way street. Having also been an actor, I’m not bad at the language of the body either, which is, in many ways, the most eloquent idiom of all.

  At Bar Roxy, I crossed my legs and hunched over my journal, inclining my body towards the coffee machine. No interpreter was needed for the signore to understand that the conversation was finita.

  Bar Roxy’s coffee was working wonders on my jetlag.

  Caffeine. A small sin. An addiction that took hold when I first came to live in Melbourne, sharing a house and a coffee plunger with my friend Susan, now a Roman resident up the road from Bar Roxy at the British School. Over cups of tea from a familiar pot, we’d caught up on news before I headed to the Parioli shops to provision my corner of the fridge and to locate that caffeine fix.

  Walking back past ivy-covered, terracotta-coloured mansions, I considered writing the sins into my journal. Committing them to paper would begin the project in earnest, but I wasn’t ready. Fear still niggled.

  Roman spring was in full showy flight. Shop windows brimmed with purple and green a
rtichokes. Asparagus and fennel tumbled from market stalls. Wisteria scented the air and pink cherry blossoms wafted on the warm breeze. The grass was strewn with white button-flowers, and an impeccably turned-out bambina offered a posy of wild daises to her elegant nonna. A gardener slipped me a red rose through the wrought-iron grille of an embassy gateway. Surely there was a film crew?

  But no, it was just Rome. As bountiful as ever. And as complex.

  Rome was my first landfall outside of Australia, thirty years earlier, with my then-love, my first-love. Wisteria draped itself over the Forum’s Virgins, and we wandered between them, marvelling. My most recent visit had been three years earlier in high summer with my husband, to celebrate Susan’s birthday in August heat. Seeking relief from scorching cobblestones, we had stood under a shaded sign that read Carpe Diem before toasting Susan with prosecco on the terrace of the British School. It had been a celebration of seizing the days.

  Now, on my way to walk the Mozárabe, those snapshots of previous visits flicked across my internal screen. I climbed to the Piazza di Spagna and sat in the sun, watching the parade of tourists, lovers and hawkers. I tried to imagine the real España, waiting across the sea, but it was impossible with the language of Verdi and Rossini babbling about. All around me, couples twined limbs around each other and kissed. Italians always appear to be in flirtation overdrive. If they are having as much sex as it seems, then they are also champions at contraception, because for decades they’ve had one of the lowest birth rates in the world.

  There were rumblings from the Vatican. People waited to hear whether the Pope would comment on the paedophilia scandal that threatened the church’s credibility and appalled the world. The sins of the Fathers had not been addressed, and Easter was an opportunity for acknowledgement. Confession.

  I wondered why it is so hard for those in power to admit culpability, or even to admit to reality. The dome of the Vatican contemplated me across the jigsaw puzzle of rooftops, palms and pines, giving away nothing.

  As a Cardinal, Pope Benedict had been in charge of the office that dealt with sexual abuse cases. Did the men inside those Vatican walls never wonder if their failure to confess might be part of the reason why the faithful were turning their backs on the confessional? Were they so out of touch they thought it could be ignored? And did they think it would be possible to regain trust without an apology?

  Like sin, sorry is a little word, but it seems difficult for the powerful to utter it.

  When Australia’s then-new prime minister made an apology to the Aborigines of the Stolen Generations, we stopped and cheered in our homes, in public squares, in offices. That act of contrition, to coin the Catholic phrase, meant something. It still does to me.

  The next day was Thursday. April Fool’s Day. I woke pre-dawn on Susan’s sofa, looked out at the clear sky then rolled over. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’ll get up and watch sunrise over the eternal city. And then I snuggled in, assuming I would have a tomorrow.

  That’s the necessary arrogance of living. There’ll be a tomorrow. But it’s not a given, as I’d recently been reminded, and if we want to leave behind a clean slate, knowing we have not given pain, then probably we have to stare down our sins at some point.

  Sin. The word has history and bite and danger.

  Like the paintings of Caravaggio.

  I went to a retrospective of his work with Susan. We stepped out of twenty-first-century spring, and into Caravaggio’s world of grinning cupids with dirty toenails, rotting fruit, weary Madonnas and oriental-eyed youths, crowns of thorns and blood, two feasts at Cana and three John the Baptists. The paintings were fleshy and immediate, and a group of children howled with delighted horror at the sight of Judith hacking Holofernes’ head.

  We emerged into bright sunshine to sip blood-orange juice. Rome may be a diva with grubby bra straps, but she still knows how to have a good time. Fountains sprinkled drops of light. Sinners, saints and pilgrims converged in the Piazza del Popolo, slurping gelato, chocolate and coffee. The city glowed apricot and pink as we climbed home to Susan’s, arriving to emails from my husband on her computer.

  In the coming weeks, communication would be limited. The cost of international calls, the time difference and my desire to fulfil my pilgrim responsibilities meant that chats would be rare. Emails would only be possible from larger towns where I had access to, and time for, internet connection. Because I needed to average thirty kilometres per day on the road, there would be very few hours for seeking out net cafés, so the correspondence in Rome was doubly welcome.

  My husband wrote that there’d been a 3.6 earth tremor across Melbourne the previous night, just after 263 masseurs had set a new world record for delivering simultaneous rubs in the Victorian goldfields. There was no indication if these facts were connected. He was off to eat Lebanese food with friends and hoped I could find a hot cross bun in Rome. I couldn’t!

  On Good Friday I had the seven hills to myself as I watched the sun chase the moon from the sky before visiting the Church of Trinità dei Monti, at the top of the Spanish Steps, where a congregation of twenty joined with eight white-clad nuns and four priests, who sang a liturgy in French, their voices like glass bells.

  In Australia, cities are quiet and trading slows for Good Friday. In Rome, I emerged from Mass to see a homeless man being shunted aside as a shopkeeper lifted his shutters and straightened the doormat. The ladies at Luisa Spagnoli on the Via Veneto filled their windows with new season’s clothes, breakfast coffees lined up on bars, and two American kids sipped morning cocktails at Harry’s Bar. Sunshine, romance, cuisine and commerce. La Dolce Vita was in full swing.

  Susan and I went in search of a vigil. Around Piazza Navona, all the churches were closed or in tourist mode. We wandered by the Pantheon, that great pagan–Christian temple, where they were ushering out sightseers because—lo!—they were holding a Mass. Easter Vigil in the Pantheon for a congregation of twenty.

  A Christian church since the seventh century, the Pantheon is thought to have been built to honour the Roman gods. Clouds floated across the eye to the sky in the dome’s centre as Mass began. I listened to the story of the death of Christ and hymns from the six-person choir as I tried to imagine the layers of story and devotion in that place.

  Afterwards we had coffee and cake, browsed antiquarian bookstalls, selected postcards and tested expensive perfumes. There was no evidence of pilgrim faithful on the streets.

  By contrast, in the rain of Easter Sunday, St Peter’s was packed with microphones, super-size screens, broadcast vans, digital scanners, police, private security, hamburgers, hot dogs, flag-waving, elbow-shoving, position-jostling and voice-raising. It was the kind of gathering that might have been evicted from a temple for bad behaviour. Faithful and sightseers crammed together, thousands of us under our umbrellas, looking towards the Pope as he said Mass on the steps. Were we all hoping for the same thing? Apologies? Compassion? Miracles, perhaps?

  IN HONOREM PRINCIPIS APOST …

  The inscription on the façade of St Peter’s.

  ‘In honour of the Prince of the Apostles.’

  The man beside me fingered a strand of over-sized rosary beads and prayed in Latin. A couple nearby explained the proceedings to their curly-haired children. Mr Rosary Beads turned, hissed and gave them the finger, before returning to his prayers.

  I left. I hoped my sinners would understand my early departure from that day’s research. I’m not sure how the Prince of the Apostles might have felt.

  Crossing the eternal city in damp hiking clothes and sodden spirits, fear kicked back in. I was reminded of what lay ahead: weather; the challenge of staying focused when the way was dispiriting; the possibility that sins might overwhelm me. I still didn’t know why I wanted to do this thing, and Rome kept her answers close to her ample chest.

  I ducked into a warm enoteca, and sat with a bowl of lentil soup, rememberi
ng lines I had read in a pueblo called Ventosa, out on the Camino Francés:

  Per aspera

  Ad astra

  A través de caminos difíciles

  Llegaréis a las estrellas

  Through hope,

  through difficult ways,

  you’ll arrive at the stars …

  It was hot then. Baking. Another lunchtime stop, but in very different circumstances. I’d already travelled a few difficult ways. I’d nursed pain in my right knee for three days—a new experience. Sharp twinges stabbed at me, mostly on downhills, and I had to sit more often, and for longer. To learn to be a snail.

  I’d watched pilgrims toiling through Ventosa in the heat haze and considered those who had walked the way before me. Millions of footsore seekers. Did they all believe in the act of pilgrimage? In sin and redemption? In God?

  Did I?

  The morning at the Vatican, among the zealous and devout, had provoked the same questions, and again I had found no answers. In the dim light of the enoteca, I shivered as I journalled:

  Belief.

  Devotion.

  Dogma.

  Credo. (In Italian it also means ‘I believe’ …)

  Faith.

  Warming my hands on my soup bowl, I stared at the list.

  Faith was where it finished.

  Next morning, Susan watched me pack my mochila. Sleeping bag, rain pants and jacket, thermal leggings and top, sarong and pashmina. Mini-towel, mini-torch and mini-Swiss Army knife. The precious journals, my sister’s camera and a friend’s mobile phone with charger. My scallop shell. Seven hundred grams of toiletries and medicals. Tampons and toilet paper. A hat, sunglasses and one extra set of what I was wearing: hiking pants, T-shirt, socks, undies, bra.

  As I stuffed red Crocs into the pack, Susan, an ex-theatre designer, winced.

  ‘World’s ugliest shoes,’ she laughed.

  ‘Ugly but good,’ I said. Like all the contents of the pack. Serviceable and plain.

  I hunched it onto my shoulders and stood in front of her, holding my walking poles. We both collapsed into laughter. What was I thinking?