by Hal Porter
Behind the editor’s room is the rest of the building, a noisy place of machines, to the end of which I never get. Here, his three sons work at their multiple duties on the Linotype machines, and the revolving and slapping machines that print handbills, wedding invitations, tickets for bazaars and cantatas, show programmes, golf-score cards, shire council reports, school magazines rich with nineteenth-century fleurons, and concert programmes executed in as many type faces as the programmes can hold.
It surprises the cadet that, after doing the same sorts of things for years, these adults do not toss off their jobs deftly and flawlessly with a light song on their lips: there are muck-ups, procrastinations, constant last-minute rushes, tangles of temper and unnecessary effort. He has yet to learn that this is the way of the careless, hopeful world. He expects, in those days, from his elevated point of view, and, today, still wants, though without the old hope, men and women to be examples of perfection, to possess a perfection he cannot define fully, but at least a perfection in the minor aspects of living. He is as surprised then, by these slapdash adults, as he is when dancing with his first royal duchess to discover that she breathes garlic, that literary critics breathe ignorance and malice, that Life is life, and everyone has as many of his own imperfections and dishonesties as he has. Most surprising to him is the easily recognizable indifference in others to the flaws they know they have, the absolute lack of any desire to remove these flaws. He is forced to turn the next page in the primer of disillusion, and the next, and the next. The illustrations grow succeedingly less tinted and romantic. The pages are foxed.
Take his first two assignments.
These are interviews which, because of the relative physical positions of interviewed and interviewer, are done at the top of the lungs. I see—and how I should like to warn him!—the adolescent in the deeply dented grey felt hat and the blue twill knickerbockers and the shiny, shiny shoes swaggeringly striding, remembering to stride (Death and damnation to Macgregors and bygone boyhood!), Reporter’s Notebook in hand (Beware Macgregors!), along and across Main Street to where the Fire Brigade captain, who is also a bricklayer, is working on top of the new wall of the Fire Brigade Hall. The cadet recognizes the Captain’s moustache which curves over to hide the mouth. There is his . . . his man? . . . his prey? . . . his first Waterloo in a world now to be composed of moustaches and long trousers? He stands beneath the Captain among the pretty weeds he once—how long ago?—sat among to taste an earlier disillusion with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He is circling onwards and yet backwards in time with the one movement. He unclips the hexagonal B.B. pencil. He opens the Reporter’s Notebook. He is now—it is finally unmistakable—a working man. It needs just one sly clearing of the old, child’s world from his throat, and all will be well. He has every faith in his power to knit the unravelled world together again. No more slipshoddiness. Youth is here.
‘Mr. Bunson! Mr. Bunson!’ he calls, attempting a depth of tone impossible to achieve, and a mellifluous briskness. Crows do better.
Trowel in hand, the moustache, aloft on its rampart, inclines towards him, signifying that it is Mr. Bunson’s.
‘I am,’ shouts the grey felt hat, size six and seven-eighths’ ‘a reporter.’
‘Ah?’ says Mr. Bunson. Deaf, eh?
‘I am,’ he shouts again, now choosiing words that are to be a banner of alert manhood, ‘a reporter. The re-por-ter from The Bairnsdale Advertiser. If you would be so. . . .’ Kind? Gracious? Oh, he is poised! ‘. . . so gracious, I should like to have some information about your dead sister.’
He does not yet know the rules. Dead! He cannot guess that words like bereavement, loss, passed on, deceased are not only desirable but mandatory. He will learn.
‘Ah!’ says Mr. Bunson. This does not help. Neither does it hinder.
‘May I know her name, please? Her full name.’
He translates Mr. Bunson into B.B. handwriting. He goes relentlessly and complacently on. And her age? Her address? When she first came to Bairnsdale? How many children? Names? How many grandchildren? Names, if you would be so gracious? And what did she die of?
As he stands shouting, and translating, and writing, a drop of liquid falls on the page. He looks up. There is not a cloud in the sky. There are only the trowel, and the moustache, and Mr. Bunson in the sky, and from Mr. Bunson, in full daylight, Tin Lizzies with running-boards and mica side-curtains shaking busily by, has fallen a tear. With a khaki handkerchief Mr. Bunson is preventing the fall of another or others. The cadet is horrified. He looks down, anywhere but up, down at the page. The tear looks back. He dares not wipe it away, the tear of a moustached bricklayer and Fire Brigade Captain with a dead sister called Annabelle Florrie Tomkins. He is struck mute. He will never look up again. He cannot make the polite and . . . and gracious . . . movement of escape. He cannot dissolve in the blazing air. Concealed beneath his grey felt brim, he endures imprisonment in dumbness and eternity.
‘Hey, sonny,’ shouts a voice from the cloudless sky, ‘is that all you want, sonny?’
Sonny!
Struck articulate again, back from eternity, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Bunson,’ he cries in a cold, an almost angry voice. ‘That will be quite enough.’ He slaps the tear shut in his writing-pad, and off he goes.
‘Good-bye, Mr. Bunson!’ he says. Good-bye! Would Mother approve of what he is wishing on Mr. Bunson?
Now, hardened, prepared for no more nonsense from hit-and-miss adults, he goes to assignation the second. He passes the water-tower, crosses and turns the corner of the Main Hotel where, twelve years later, he is to spend part of his scandal-making honeymoon. He comes to St. Mary’s Presbytery with its speckless paths, and close-shaven lawns, and cypresses carved to cylinders and pyramids. By the apricot tree he stole from when he was a competent apricot-thief, eight black socks hang on a clothes-line in the alley of sunlight that simmers between the presbytery and the cathedral with its unfinished campanile.
As he reaches the presbytery veranda-steps, Monsignor opens the fly-wire door, and walks out with his squat and ancient spaniel in a gust of what smells like steak and onions. Who cooks, on such a hot day, whatever it is that smells? Who washes the black socks, darns them, pegs them up? Nuns? Monsignor himself?
Monsignor’s grey curls have salted down much dandruff on his huge, richly barathea shoulders.
‘And what would your name be?’ says Monsignor in an authentic brogue, the pores in his face no bigger than the holes in a meat-safe.
The cadet tells his name, or the name he now thinks he has, and by which no one but himself has ever called him.
‘Mr. Porter,’ says the boy in knickerbockers, holding the book in which a tear is squashed. Monsignor finds it necessary to smile down at the spaniel’s back.
‘I am a reporter. From The Bairnsdale Advertiser. If you would be so gracious. . . .’ He cannot forego this. ‘. . . I should like to have some per-tin-ent information about the paintings being done on the roof. . . the ceiling . . . of your church.’
Should he have said your? Should he have said church?
Here is mystery and Mass and Confession and the Angelus and Hail Marys and The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and the Blessed Virgin in the antirrhinum of Kensington days, and Mother and Sister Philomena singing years ago in the cab.
‘Well now, well now—Mis-ter Por-ter,’ says Monsignor to the spaniel, ‘you’ll come with me, and talk to the man yourself. Come with me.’ As they walk, a starling fires itself up and sits on one of the high-up marble statues, on St. Joseph’s (or St. Patrick’s) crook (or crosier). ‘Mis-ter Por-ter,’ says Monsignor, secretly finishing a sentence in the direction of the spaniel’s back. They walk the unsullied asphalt, around the cathedral, into the cathedral. Whew! Incense, eh! And cool as the inside of an ice-chest.
‘Hat off? barks Monsignor, and—horror!—crosses himself with a heavy, thick hand like a labourer’s that makes the move one of peasant-like cupidity in the vastness, the loftiness, the subdued and yet p
ost-card gaudiness. The fourteen Stations of the Cross ring them in with plaques of rawly coloured and gilded plaster. A scaffolding is built over the chancel. High up, lying down like Michael Angelo on a platform of planks, is the painter.
‘There’s your man,’ says Monsignor. ‘A pea-picker he was. At Wy Yung. An Italian pea-picker. I found him. But he’ll give you the information, Mr. Potter. Come.’
He follows Monsignor down the nave, Monsignor and his smell of old sweat and old spaniel. The painter is now sitting up with flashing teeth.
‘Frankie!’ says Monsignor, ‘here’s a Mr. Potter to ask you questions. For a newspaper.’
The teeth flash more, and Monsignor and the spaniel have gone, and the Italian now kneels in his red shirt on the planks, looking darkly down as the cadet hangs his hat on a pew-end, unclips his pencil, opens the Reporter’s Notebook and, once again, in shoutings that attempt reverence as well as masculinity, goes on learning to be an adult in an adult’s mad universe.
He gets it all, and more.
Name—Francesco Floriani. Born—Nahpolee. Ah, Naples! Picka da peas, da beans, picka da pitch, picka da tomate. Alla toime painta, painta, painta. Now painta for Monsignor.
‘’Eaven she’sa finish, see, she’sa finish, by cripes. Purgatorio she’sa not yet finish,’ says Francesco Floriani, near his own ’Eaven, half-way through his own Purgatorio. ‘She’sa not yet finish. Two munta finish, moi-be t’ree munta finish.’
And hell, Mr. Floriani?
The Italian kindles, reveals that he looks forward to the depiction of Hell. His hands mould in the air what his brush will put on the ceiling.
‘’Ell,’ he says, ‘Oi make-a gooda ’Ell. Oi make-a ver’ gooda ’Ell. You see. You come to see-a Frankie’s ’Ell?’
And how old is Mr. Floriani, please, if he will be so gracious?
Lives where?
Married?
Not-a married, not-a married.
It is over. The cadet closes the book on which no tear has this time fallen, and reaches for his hat, but there are more than tears to fall from ’Eaven, and it is not over. Interviewed switches to interviewer.
‘’Ow olda you? Fif-a-teen? Seex-a-teen?’
Good gracious me! A Dago, too! It is almost worth a lie of, say, seventeen, but, remembering his knickerbockers in time, ‘Fifteen,’ he says. ‘I’ll be sixteen next month.’ ‘Fif-a-teen gooda year for boy.’
There is no answer to this.
‘You gotta girl,’ says Mr. Floriani.
‘No. Not yet.’ He is driven to add, ‘I am too busy.’ ‘Like-a girls?’ Although so far-off Mr. Floriani’s eyes seem very close and searching.
‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes, they’re all right.’
‘But you like-a girls?’ Tiresome, rude Mr. Floriani. ‘They’re all right.’ He lifts his hat from the pew. Mr. Floriani does not take the hint and shut up.
‘You like-a walk-a river-bank with girl?’
‘Yes.’ Yes, Olwen—hand in cool hand under the wattles and willows.
‘Why you like-a go river-bank with girl?’
There is too much to say, and it is not for Mr. Floriani, so nothing is said. “ nto the silence before the altar, Mr. Floriani drops the bomb from near ’Eaven. He drops it softly.
‘You gotta hairs on your-a belly, eh?’
‘Yes.’ No one tells a lie to that question, but the truth changes the colour of face and body. He senses that this upsurge of colour weakens, that it is the flesh rising over the mind’s head.
‘You worka, tonight?’ His smile, which has been absent awhile, returns. It is Alex Macalister’s smile.
‘No.’ There is no need any longer to shout in God’s gaudy house. Bodies need no words.
‘You walka river-bank with Frankie, eh? You gotta lovely goolden-a hair. You walka?’
‘Yes.’ He means no, no, no; but lies away, surrounded by the fourteen little suffering Christs.
‘You meeta Frankie, rowing shed, eight-a clock-a, yes?’ ‘Yes,’ he lies on, before the large crucified bronze Christ, and under the Virgin’s stare-stare-monkey-bear eyes of painted plaster.
‘Frankie teacha you on the river-bank. Frankie make-a you ’appy. Lovely goolden-a hair. Frankie teacha? You want Frankie teacha?’
He knows the answer to this one. He speaks it.
‘I don’t care,’ he says to Frankie the Dago pea-picker in the red shirt, to Francesco Floriani from Naples who has Hell yet to paint in all the colours and writhings of his own ’Ell.
At eight-thirty that night, the cadet is still in the kitchen at Mitchell Street. He has written what he seems to have learned, in his own thick and blotted handwriting, in his own thick and blotted vocabulary:
SERENADE
Moon.
Hydrangea-bosomed twilights burn,
Slothful as cheetah. Silver sherds
In willow mosques, whose dewy birds
Of fierce, green air spirt turquoise aura.
Moon.
Moon . . . the mute urn.
Come.
Come where its drug flows.
The calm urn—filigraned—brocaded rose
Of luscious night drips operose
In the gallery dim, the void laura
Under the willow,
Under the salix.
Come. . . .
While he writes this, feeling sorry for Francesco Floriani waiting randy in the moonlight by the rowing-shed willow—‘the void laura’; feeling proud of his own circumspect nobility and run-of-the-mill decent, clean behaviour; he is irritated by the power he exerts over his sticky-nose body to prevent it rising from the kitchen chair, and hurtling towards the river-bank to watch hidden, ‘under the salix’, to find out how the Italian may have scoured and dressed and scented himself for the meeting or whether (and I wish I knew right now) Frankie has denied himself, or side-stepped, the demanded tryst. Denying oneself one lesson, one learns another, or many lessons. The constellation of disillusion contains an infinity of planets.
Time passes. February the Sixteenth, 1927, passes, and his sixteenth birthday. He has learned much: to use the telephone, to use the telephone with an especially resonant and cultured accent, to write glibly of drab weddings and piddling accidents and hole-in-corner cricket matches and minute successes and barbaric Shire Council meetings, and church teas, and crazy whist drives, and quail-shooting.
So this is the vastness and wonder and beauty that struck him still and small a decade ago! So this is the Life the poets ignite marvels from—baby scalded by overturned kettle, outbreak of measles in kindergarten, youth accidentally shoots friend, carnal knowledge of young girl, out for a duck, near fatality in bathing enclosure, engagement announced, in a borrowed wedding veil, gave birth to triplets, married sixty years, never travelled in train, narrow escape in fire, loses arm on circular saw, killed by bolting horse, brutal murder, passed away peacefully, executed today, well-attended funeral, vandals in cemetery.
If this be Life, he thinks, and all of Life, what is it I am in such a formless and dispassionate passion about? The other ecstasies he thinks he wants are, of course, nowhere anywhere, and he knows it. He tricks himself into believing that what he wants are more dazzling roads winding across a more mysterious landscape. All he wants to do is to get to the city. Even Nature’s trick of compelling him to consider fishing with his own body in the recesses of bodies at the same time human and divine is a trick he sees through. Let his body beware of its ephemeral demands! Fool! All he wants is to escape the nest, and get to the city.
He grows, and keeps on growing towards six feet tall, seems to do no more than that, and time—from this distance—is very much shorter, and more carefree, and filled with experiences of value, than it then seems longer, and tatty, and empty of information.
Mother goes with him to the tailor who measures him for his first long-trousered suits. Upon this, his voice descends to a certain level, and settles there, safe though still with ruffled feathers. He falls in love with ties and silk soc
ks, and is in need of maternal restraint, as an exercise in taste as well as financial prudence. He starts shaving. Now that his legs are long and hidden, he considers he resembles a man. Disguised as such he joins the Mechanics’ Institute Library. He buys, week by week, a series of The World’s Great Paintings, Stories of the Great Operas and Studio. It dismays me now that he is the only one in Bairnsdale who spends his shillings on such fallals. I am not sure if the dismay be for him or the others. He pours the overflow from the lives of the pointed-at and pointed-out Great into his own home-made and provincial vat; pouring in what he cannot pour out in conversation or elegant behaviour, not in that town, not to anyone he knows, not any more. Today, I admire one thing only about this gangling creature; he does not feel odd-man-out. His conceit is sick-making, but objective. He blames no one but himself, and carries on to no one but himself.
Life in Bairnsdale, in the country town he has hitherto loved so much, begins to drive him out of his serenity with boredom, and to distort his sense of proportion. It is only his lust for information and culture, his intellectual clarity which is fast turning to an intellectual arrogance, that acts as a counterpoise to his desire to cut the painter, and escape the provincial round, and the hell he foresees of endless repetition, to cut the umbilicus and escape from Mother and her children, from Father and the house and all the unmysterious and too familiar objects and sounds.
He takes to long solitary walks, up and down the backstreets, up and down like Satan walking the world, or far out of the town, far along the river, past the hop-kilns and the weir, walking and trying to think himself into a state of distinguished and absolutely unique loneliness, to think God out of existence and to think humanity to death or, at the very least, to debase it to something wicked and mean and disgusting. Circumstances and the accidents of arrival in sequestered places offer him opportunities to manufacture this feeling of fake disgust. He comes upon a man and woman tangled in violent fornication beneath a rug in a thicket of hawthorn, the woman’s hat hanging circumspectly on a branch, an oval hole worn in one sole of the man’s boots. He pretends to himself that this disgusts him when it is only grotesque and pitiable, giving rise to an inexplicable sadness and to a feeling of lust itself.