Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  The reader is surely waiting still to learn how the seemingly imagined events reported in the foregoing thirty-four paragraphs might be considered part of some seemingly imagined version of the narrator’s having been conceived.

  I have read and forgotten, during the past forty and more years, countless statements by writers about the writing or the reading of fiction. A few statements I still remember, even if I cannot recall who first made the statements. Several times while I was writing the previous pages, I recalled the statement: fiction is the art of suggestion. This statement allows me to suppose that a person without imagination might still succeed in writing fiction so long as his or her reader is able to imagine.

  The man who released the pheasants on the island became, a few years later, my father. A few years later again, when I was a small boy, he took my mother and me and my younger brother one Sunday afternoon from our rented weatherboard cottage in a south-eastern suburb of the largest city in northern Victoria to a building of two storeys in a north-western suburb of that city. We walked from our home to the centre of the city and then we travelled by electric tramway to the north-western suburb. We left the tram at the terminus and then we approached and entered the building of two storeys. Except for a few churches, this was the largest building that I could recall having entered.

  I was impressed not so much by the size of the building as by the view that might have been available on clear days to a person occupying one or another of the rooms behind the north-facing windows that I had stared at while I walked through the front garden towards the building. I had never been further north than the city where I lived at that time, but I thought often of the districts that lay in that direction. I hoped that they consisted of mostly level grasslands and not the red sand or gravel that I saw sometimes in pictures of inland Australia.

  My father had told me in the tram that the building of two storeys was a convent of an order of nuns founded especially to serve the country districts of Australia. (The teachers at my school were nuns but of an order founded in Ireland; nor had I ever seen the house where they lived.) The nun that we were going to meet would almost certainly have occupied a room on the upper storey. However, it would have been unthinkable for any male person, even a child as young as myself, to go beyond the front parlour of the convent.

  In that front parlour, during our visit to the convent, which visit took place on some or another hot afternoon in the mid-1940s, my parents and my brother and I were received by a woman whose appearance I can hardly recall. Her brown robes covered all but her face, which appears to me now as no more than a pink blur. I understood that my father and the nun had known one another at some time before I had been born, and it came to me just now that my father had introduced her to me as someone who had been in her younger days a fearless rider of horses across paddocks and through swamps.

  I remember no other visit to the convent, but for several years after our meeting with the nun my brother and I each received from her through the post at Christmas one of the cards called by Catholics of those days holy-cards. My family moved house twelve times between the mid-1940s and the last year of the 1950s, when I left home, and most of my keepsakes from those years were lost long ago. Just beyond the reach of my right arm, however, in the topmost drawer of my nearest filing cabinet, is an envelope containing the handful of holy-cards that I still possess. I have not looked at the cards for at least two years. When next I look at the cards they will all seem familiar, but as I write these words I am able to see in my mind only one of the cards. On the rear of that card is a greeting to me from my father’s nun-friend, written more than sixty years ago. On the front is a picture only. The card, so to call it, is unusual in that it has no pious message or prayer and not even a caption beneath the picture displayed on it. The picture shows a male child, perhaps five years of age, sitting with his chubby legs outstretched on the altar of a Catholic church. The child is leaning expectantly, so it seems, towards the tabernacle. (This was the domed container, about the size of a small milk-can, where was kept by day and by night in a gilt-lined ciborium the so-called Real Presence. The contents of the ciborium would have seemed to a non-believer a collection of small, circular white wafers. The nun and I and all believing Catholics considered each wafer to be the body of the personage that we usually named as Christ or Our Lord or, sometimes, Jesus. The domed container was made of bronze or of some such metal and was always draped on its outside with satin hangings the colour of which was determined by the liturgical season. The container had at its front a door that was always kept locked except during the few minutes when the priest celebrating Mass either took out the consecrated wafers—the Real Presence—for distribution to the faithful as Holy Communion, so called, or afterwards stored the remainder for the next Mass. As for the interior of the tabernacle, the average lay-person saw no more of it than he or she might have glimpsed if he or she had been kneeling in a front seat of a church and had happened to look towards the altar just when the priest was genuflecting out of respect for the Blessed Sacrament, so called, before he closed and locked the tabernacle door. Even I, during the two years when I served as an altar-boy at a parish church in an outer suburb of Melbourne in the early 1950s—even I, although I strained from only a few paces away, saw no more than the white curtain—was it of satin? silk? mere linen?—that hung in the doorway of the tabernacle. The priest reached through the pleated white cloth in order to take out or to put away the sacred vessel, so called, but the cloth seemed always to fall back into place a moment afterwards. I could only try to imagine the interior of the tabernacle, and whenever I thus tried I liked to suppose that the white curtain I often saw was only the outermost of a series of such hangings, so that the priest, whenever he pushed his fingers inwards towards the ciborium, felt his way through layer after layer of gently resisting plushness.) Even I, who was only a few years older than the pictured child, understood the message of the uncaptioned holy picture. At the same time, I understood the folly of the message.

  I had no doubt that any Catholic child of the age of the altar-climber would have learned to be in awe of sanctuaries and altars and, above all, tabernacles. In the city where I lived when I received the card, any Catholic child found even so much as trespassing in the sanctuary, let alone clambering onto the altar and fiddling with the tabernacle—any such child would have been thrashed by parents and teachers. If the child had already made his or her first confession, he or she would have been advised to confess at the first opportunity the mortal sin of sacrilege. The child’s escapade might later have been made public, but only as an example of the sort of gross offence that no right-minded child would even contemplate. It would have been unthinkable for someone to record the offence for posterity, as it were, by painting on the front of a holy-card the scene of the crime, so to call it. And yet, the fact remained: there I was, a resident of the city mentioned earlier in this paragraph and also the owner of a holy-card that seemed to advertise the unthinkable. Admittedly, the little altar-sitter in the picture seemed more like a cherub in a church-mural than the sort of child that I mixed with. But whenever I stared at the portrait of the curly-haired, pink-cheeked boy, I felt the beginnings of a peculiar hopefulness. Somewhere, in some layer of the world far beyond my own drab layer, it might have been possible sometimes to follow one’s own desires without incurring punishment. The curly-haired child might have explained away his escapade by telling the adults that he felt sorry for Jesus, locked up all day on the altar with nobody to visit him; or perhaps the child’s excuse was that he had something to tell Jesus: something so private that it had to be whispered to Jesus through the keyhole of his house. And the lisping trickster might have got away unscathed. The adults judging his case might have exchanged smiles of mock-exasperation before deciding that he had meant no harm. I inferred all this from the mere facts that the holy-card had been designed and printed by adults and had been sent to me by an adult—and a nun, moreover.

  My
pondering over the holy-card led me to no new course of action, although it would surely have made my daydreams somewhat bolder. I may well have daydreamed sometimes about an afternoon when the sender of the card, won over by my innocent-seeming ways and by the long words that I had used on her, showed me up the stairs of her two-storey building and allowed me to look out from the upper verandah at the view, which I hoped would be of far-reaching grasslands in northern Victoria, where I had never been. I may even have daydreamed that the sender of the card, again impressed by my feigned innocence and precocious words, persuaded some priest-friend of hers to hold open in my sight the door of a tabernacle and even to part the inner hangings with his hand in such a way that I would be able always afterwards to see the exact arrangement of folds of cloth and dark interstices in a tabernacle in my mind.

  The reader should not suppose that I was interested in tabernacles or in the upper storeys of convents or of presbyteries because I was attracted to the invisible personages in whose cause such places had been built. I was in awe of Almighty God; of his son Our Lord, Jesus Christ; of Mary, the Mother of Our Lord; of all the angels and saints. Rather, I was in awe of the images of those personages that had lodged in my mind as a result of my having looked from an early age at certain statues, coloured windows, and holy-cards. I was anxious not to offend the personages by any misdeeds of mine. Several times daily, I uttered aloud or in my mind prayers addressed to one or another of the personages. Sometimes I felt that one or another of the personages was scrutinising me from behind the cover of his or her invisibility. I did not doubt what I had been taught from early childhood: that my chief task in life was to become on close terms with as many as possible of the personages. And yet, I was not at all attracted to any of the personages; and although I would never have dared admit it to anyone, I felt as though none of the personages had any special fondness for me.

  I was not devoted to the personages, but I was interested in the places where they were venerated or where they were depicted as dwelling. I peered not only at upper-storey windows but into the dim, furthest reaches of grottoes in churchyards. I tried to imagine the garden behind the high wall in front of the Marist Brothers’ monastery. I seem to have envied priests and members of religious orders not only the views to be had from their imposing buildings but also whatever they saw when there was nothing of note to be seen around them: what they saw when they paced up and down the same path in the same walled garden, and even, perhaps, what they saw when they closed their eyes or covered their faces after they had received Holy Communion in some secluded chapel at first light.

  My interest in these matters found its simplest outlet of a Sunday morning when I knelt beside one or another of my parents in our not-unpretentious parish church. During much of the service I would fix my attention on one after another of the stained-glass windows. The foreground of each window-picture was the preserve of one or another of the personages mentioned above. The background, however, seemed available for me to fill with landscapes or with glimpses of distant townships. And yet, whenever I gave up trying to imagine scenery fit to be discerned in some or another background of transparent pale-green or translucent orange and asked myself, in a mood of literal-mindedness, what in fact was just out of sight behind those converging pastel-toned plains and skies, I had to acknowledge the obvious. However many other-worldly personages might have loomed in the view of the worshippers inside the church, they existed against an ultimate background hardly different from what lay around me whenever I walked to school or to my local shops. The farthest imaginable background might have been a suburb of a provincial city overlaid by a pale wash of colour.

  But I have not yet finished my report of the holy-card showing the curly-haired child getting away, so it seemed, with sacrilege. What I am about to report would have happened gradually and subtly and would have made scant difference to my everyday life; would have been hardly apparent to me except at odd, illuminating moments. What I am about to report is not at all an account of my drawing closer in my mind to the nun who had sent me the holy-card mentioned often above. If anything, I preferred not even to recall the pink-faced, brown-robed figure who had made much of me in the parlour of the convent on account of my bearing, according to her, an uncanny resemblance to my father.

  In order to complete my report of the effects of a certain holy-card on the child that I seem to have been, I have to introduce into this work of fiction a personage whose title will be from here onwards the Patroness. I have used just now the word personage for want of a more accurate word. The reader must not suppose that my patroness occupied the same level of existence that was occupied by the personages mentioned in detail in the fourth-most recent paragraph and mentioned briefly in two subsequent paragraphs. This is necessarily a complicated piece of fiction, and if the English language had provided them, I would have used a variety of terms so as to distinguish such as the Patroness mentioned just above and what might be called the chief characters of the religion of my childhood, not to mention certain beings that I reported in earlier pages as having come into existence while I read works of fiction.

  The Patroness was the least predictable of any of the beings that I choose to call personages. On rare occasions, she seemed closer to me and more aware of me than any other denizen of my mind. Mostly, though, she led a wavering existence, sometimes seeming as though anxious to break through whatever barriers lay between us but at other times seeming as though the very purpose of her existence was to remain aloof from me and so to provide me with a task worthy of a lifetime of effort: the simple but baffling task of gaining admission to her presence.

  The Patroness almost certainly made her first appearance in my mind at some time after I had received the holy-card mentioned often in the preceding paragraphs, but for as long as I went on trying to see her clearly in my mind, I understood that she was a personage or an entity in her own right and definitely not a memory in my mind of the pink face and the brown robes and the ingratiating presence of the nun that my father had taken me to visit in the north-facing building of two storeys. The Patroness, so I learned after much struggling to apprehend her image, was changeable in her attitudes towards me. Sometimes she seemed to assume the most forbidding of poses: she was the merest outline of a female; the transparent representation in ice or glass of the virgin-goddess of my religion or of my own mother as she might have been when my father had first courted her. Paradoxically, my patroness could seem closer to me during those periods when I was quite unable to visualise her than when I was repeatedly glimpsing her in my mind. I would give up for a few days all my straining after her image and would experience a period of calm and reassurance, as though what separated us was not distance but her prankish hiding behind this or that image in the foreground of my mind. Such tantalising periods would often end with my catching sight of a picture of a young woman in a magazine or even of an actual young woman in a street and then feeling for a few hours afterwards as though my patroness had thus arranged for me to be shown her approximate likeness.

  My patroness would have first appeared in my mind, or would have first signalled her presence there, when I was puzzling over the picture of the boy who was leaning against the tabernacle. I am no more concerned nowadays, as I write this report, than was the boy who received the holy-card long ago with any such abstraction as character. I am only concerned to report that the boy felt from the beginning as though his patroness had come to him with the message that she herself, in certain moods, would not despise him and would not report him to his teachers or to the parish priest if it came to her knowledge that he had thought of touching the satin coverings of a tabernacle or even of trying its door. He even felt as though his patroness understood that his being interested in tabernacles was not an expression of his interest in the personages who presided over his religion. And at some unrecorded hour on an unrecorded but fateful day, the boy, in his daydreaming, felt as though he had succeeded in reporting to his patroness that h
e would have been no less eager to clamber up to a tabernacle and to prise open its door and to learn at last the details of its inner arrangements even if he had known beforehand that the place contained no sacred vessels, so called, and no Blessed Sacrament, so called.

  After the boy had felt as reported in the previous paragraph, he felt for a few hours, or perhaps only for a few minutes, that his patroness understood him in such a way that he need hardly explain himself to her in words. He felt as though she understood that his wanting to see into tabernacles and such places had only ever arisen because he had lacked for a patroness and had been driven to look for such places as might console him for his lack. This feeling, of course, could not last, and in the daydreams that followed, he found in some or another church or convent a tabernacle that was no longer used for religious ceremonies but was still decorated and was still even locked. By some preposterous means, he found the key to the tabernacle. He opened the door, and if he had had more courage, he might have explored all of what lay behind it. But he did not so dare. All he dared to do was to leave in the dark space behind the outer curtains a written message to the patroness—or for some or another personage who might be disposed to read the message and to understand it.