Dancing on Knives

by Kate Forsyth

  He saw them as he turned to sweep his brush through the bright globs of ultra deep blue, nimbus grey and black disgorged across a plastic lid on the table. He scowled. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘The children had begun to forget they had a father,’ Bridget answered in a bright, brittle tone. ‘And I wanted to reassure myself that you were still alive.’

  ‘Well, as you can see I’m working. If you had something to say to me, couldn’t you have given me a call?’

  ‘I tried,’ Bridget replied in the same awful, poisonously sweet voice. ‘But the phone seems to have been disconnected.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right,’ Augusto replied. ‘We forgot to pay it.’ He glanced back at his painting. ‘Look, I really am busy. I’ll see you at home, all right?’

  ‘No, that’s not all right,’ Bridget snapped back, all the saccharine dissolving. ‘We’ve come all this way, we’re not turning around and going home without seeing you!’

  While her parents wrangled, Sara leant against a paint-mucky table and stared at her father’s painting. It was huge and dark and filled with strange, twisted figures and contorted faces. In the very centre of the canvas was a great circle, cut in two, one half flooded with a cruel brilliance, the other sunk in gloom. The sol y sombra of the bullring. Within the sunlit half of the circle was a screaming horse and crimson-caped matador, rearing over a huge black bull that had fallen to its knees, its horned head sinking to the ground, its flesh cruelly pierced with beribboned banderillas. A sword had been thrust through the back of its neck and stood up like a cross, casting a long shadow across the ground.

  In the shadowy half of the bullring were piled high hundreds of fallen bodies, flowers of blood blooming in the centre of their foreheads, a river of blood snaking out through the dust. Lined up around them were their executioners, rifles still raised, all of them faceless. Looming high above the bullring was an enormous, burly, moustachioed figure, caught on one side by fiery light from the sun-drenched half of the bullring.

  To the left of the canvas, a white-clad angel stood with snowy wings spread wide, vast and triangular as mountains, holding upright a burning sword as if barring the way to heaven. At his feet crouched a young woman with dishevelled black hair, clutching a bloody, screaming, blue-hued child, its umbilical cord still dangling. Beside her huddled a little girl, knife held ready in her hand.

  To the right of the canvas sat a guitar player, his head bent over his instrument. With long, dark hair tied back in a messy ponytail, a high-bridged nose, sea-coloured eyes and an opal glinting in one ear, the musician was clearly Augusto. He was dressed in a flowing white shirt. On a table behind Augusto were a vase of red waratahs, an apple and a knife. The two figures in white, the guitar player and the angel, framed the mandala of the bullring like embracing wings.

  As Sara grew up, she read every article and review of her father’s work ever published. She discovered that this painting was composed as deliberately as if conceived by one of the Old Masters. It was divided into three like a religious triptych, she read, yet was unequivocally modern with its distortion of perspective, its use of pastiche and collage. It was, one critic wrote, strongly influenced by Picasso’s theories of synthetic cubism, with its geometric arrangement of circles and triangles.

  The homage to Picasso was clearly indicated, another critic wrote, by the symbolism of the bull and the screaming horse. The white-clad guitar player was another common motif of Picasso, while the faceless executioners and enormous shadowy colossus were reminiscent of Goya. It was thought the painting depicted the massacre at Badajoz where Franco’s army slaughtered hundreds of unarmed men in the town’s bullring. The depiction of the weeping mother and the blue baby was clearly a bitter mockery of traditional Madonna and Child paintings. All these sources and influences were to help make this dark, brooding, anguished painting famous, but Sara was then too young to know more than that the painting frightened her.

  Unhappily she wound one foot about her leg, twisting her fingers together, and looked away to the other sketches and paintings stacked against the wall. Many were studies or compositional studies for the large canvas, but others were finished paintings, most showing various moments in his mother’s life. Consuelo appeared as a child, a young woman, a mother, an old crone. In some she told fortunes, in one she stabbed a man to death, in another she stood with a knife carving a slice off a ham hanging from a hook in the ceiling in a dark, crowded shop. There were several of Consuelo and Child. Horses, red flowers, guitars, matadors, weeping women, soldiers giving fascist salutes, Franco’s burly moustachioed figure, daggers like crosses, and bulls appeared over and over again. All Augusto’s work was painted in bitter, melancholy shades of blue, grey, purple and black, with startling splashes of white and blood-red. Later, critics would call this Augusto Sanchez’s ‘black’ period.

  Augusto saw Sara looking at the terrified, rearing horse. ‘That poet, the Spanish one – Federico Garcia Lorca,’ he rolled the name out with all the Spanish flair he could muster. ‘He said Spain is the only country where death is the national spectacle. He was talking about bullfighting but he was more right than he knew. I’ve called the painting Corrida. That is Spanish for bullfight, you know.’

  Sara was silent, though she looked to her mother for reassurance. Augusto’s grin widened. ‘Did you know they cut out the horses’ vocal cords?’ he told her then. ‘To stop them from screaming?’

  Bridget said stiffly, ‘That’s enough, Gus! You’ll give her nightmares. Come on, children. This is no place for you. Let’s go home.’

  Subdued and rather frightened, Joe and Sara obediently followed their mother as she angrily pushed the twins’ double pram out the big roller door of the studio. When Sara looked back, she saw her father was again working as ‘Danse Bohème’ pounded and flourished about him. He was painting the intricate red hearts of the waratahs.

  Summer came, and the sky was filled with the unearthly purple-blue of jacaranda trees in bloom. The days were long and hot and filled with the lure of the ocean. Augusto finished the last of his Consuelo series – fifteen paintings in all and painted in just five months – and they were exhibited in January during a long heatwave that drove many people off the beaches and into the air-conditioned comfort of shops, restaurants and galleries.

  The show was an enormous success. Augusto’s depiction of the horror and brutality of war, and the way it seeped down through the generations like a stain of ink, hit a powerful nerve. The Vietnam War was in its final orgy of wanton destruction. The newspapers were full of terrible statistics and shocking photographs and people everywhere were feeling the same futile rage and melancholic disillusionment that had found such powerful expression in Augusto’s paintings of his mother. All of the major works and most of the studies sold, many bought by important collectors and art galleries, and Corrida, the major work, fetched what seemed like an incredible amount of money when it was purchased for a record price by the National Gallery of Victoria. Augusto suddenly found himself both rich and celebrated.

  Sunshine now illuminated the Sanchez family. Augusto bought Bridget a car, and cooked them a feast of oca con peras, Consuelo’s signature dish. He had to order the goose in from a specialist butcher in Paddington, not many people wanting to roast geese in those days. Although he still spent quite a few nights in his studio, he made sure he was home on the weekends to play with the kids, tell them bedtime stories, and take them to the beach.

  They would walk through the hot, noisy streets, loaded down with towels, buckets, spades and their boogie boards. Augusto would carry the big red and white umbrella for Bridget, who pushed the twins in their double pram, cheese and vegemite sandwiches perspiring in plastic bags. Bridget always wore a long-sleeved shirt over her bikini, and a big floppy hat. Her round cheerful face would turn red long before they reached the esplanade. Reflected in her mother’s big dark sunglasses, Sara could see shopfronts, cars, people, her own skinny body dressed only in undies and thongs
, a frilly white hat tied under her chin.

  Once at the beach her father would swim far out, past the breakers, past the body-surfers, until his head was a tiny dark blob in the blue-green swell. Often he would disappear from view, causing Sara to stand, squinting anxiously until she saw him reappear, throwing back his wet head with an arc of shining water like a flying fish leaping from the waves. At last he would come back in, and their clumsy pile of sand would be transformed into a fantastical sandcastle with a moat deep and wide enough for Sara and Joe to lie in, and thick banks decorated with shells and cuttlefish and seaweed and the dangling blue tentacles of bluebottles. All the other children on the beach would come to stand nearby and tentatively offer a handful of shells, or help dig a ditch to the sea so that the waves, deliciously cold and fierce, could rush in and besiege the castle.

  No-one built sandcastles like Augusto. Certainly not Bridget. She did not much like the beach. She would sit on a towel under the red and white umbrella, fanning herself with the glossy pages of Cleo, rubbing sunblock into her freckled legs, occasionally leafing over the pages as she lay on her stomach, shielding the magazine so Sara could not see. The twins sat beside her, dressed in sunhats and overalls, their arms and legs white with the cream Bridget constantly reapplied. No matter how careful Bridget was, the twins always came home from the beach with angry red patches under their eyes and in the hollows behind their knees. A few days later the sunburn would blister, and the twins would sit and peel away each other’s skin in long, grey, bedraggled strips, shrieking with laughter.

  Augusto never got sunburnt. His fine, smooth skin just grew darker and darker, his blue-green eyes more brilliant. Augusto said his only religion was sun-worship.

  ‘Wine worship,’ Bridget would reply dryly.

  ‘Sun, wine and women,’ Augusto would answer, seizing Bridget around her thick waist and nuzzling his rough black chin into the back of her neck, where the skin was white and tender like a child’s. She would screech and jerk herself free, rubbing her neck and saying crossly, ‘I wish you’d shave!’

  When Augusto was not around, Bridget would not take them to the ocean. Sometimes, though, on a bright day, she and the children would walk down to the little beach by the harbour, where ancient pine trees cast a deep, cool shade over a falling slope of grass. Bridget would lie on the lawn in the shade, the twins crawling about her, while Sara and Joe played on the narrow flat beach and ran shrieking through the calm water. Here a shark net hung with heavy white buoys kept them safe from the sleek predators of the underworld. The water was warm and soft and brown, and they could watch the ferries cruise in to the wharf, their wake causing little white crests to form on the waves that ran so smoothly and evenly into the shore. Even rocked by the passage of the ferries, the waves never rose deeper than Sara’s knees. Never did they have the cold shock, the sudden frightening surge, of the ocean’s waves. Never did they drag at Sara’s feet and sweep her away, choking with terror, blinded and silenced, until Augusto dragged her free with a laugh and a joke. Bridget felt safer on the harbour beach, enclosed within its high cement arms.

  At the far end of the West Esplanade was the Manly Aquarium, only just opened and still bright with blue paint and shining glass. Sometimes, when the shadows were beginning to grow long and the children were drugged with sun, Bridget took them in. They would sit on tiers of blue-painted cement, licking ice-cream from their wrists, and staring down with fearful fascination at the sharks and stingrays moving with dark, deadly intent through the clear water. Often one of the sharks would lie close to the bottom of the pool, hardly moving. When Bridget took them down to stand close to the underwater windows, they could see the flow of its gills, the thin mouth hanging open with row upon row of uneven white teeth, sharp as needles, and the tiny pale eye, staring at nothing. The only time the sharks surged into swift, sinuous movement was when they were fed. Bridget always took the children home then, Sara and Joe staring back over their shoulders to see the sudden savagery amidst the soft clouds of brown blood.

  Once, when Joe and Sara were standing pressed up close to the underwater glass, an enormous stingray glided right over their heads. They saw the strange furling and unfurling all along the edges of its great black wings. Its long tapering tail whipped behind it, armed with saw-edged poisonous spines. It turned and slid its great white under-belly along the glass, and Sara saw its mouth curved like a cruel grin in the midst of that expanse of pure blind whiteness. Then away it soared, up into the dazzle of sunlight, a great flapping black shadow that filled all of Sara’s eyes. Although it terrified her, all that cruel primeval indifference, she could not loosen her gaze from it. In the days and weeks afterwards, she often found herself thinking of that stingray and the shadow of it falling upon her.

  That was the summer of Sara’s fifth birthday, the year before everything changed. That summer Bridget was still trying to enter into Augusto’s world. She listened to him as he raved on about the importance of the new wave of Neo-Expressionist painters who were blasting away the sterile emptiness of abstract art, and about his need for more paint, canvases, sponsors, a better studio. She did her best to keep the drab reality of grocery accounts, rent-due days and childhood sniffles away from him, spending many silent nights frowning over the unpaid bills while Augusto was out at gallery openings. She did her best to strike up a friendship with Augusto’s dealer and his wife, though she had nothing in common with them and did not understand their world.

  One Sunday afternoon she packed all four children into the new station wagon, insisting on accompanying Augusto to his dealer’s house for a barbecue. Augusto had made samfaina y bacalao a la catalana, while Bridget prepared French onion dip made from instant soup mix. It was a clear, fine day, so hot the black road up the hill from the apartment block shimmered with rainbow illusions.

  It was a long drive to the Porters’ house, for they lived in Hunters Hill on the other side of the harbour. Sara could not see much because she was crammed in the back with the three boys, all elbows, knees and fists. Joe had recently discovered his power as her elder brother and prodded and pinched her unmercifully, yet as soon as Bridget turned round at the sound of Sara’s whimpers, he stared angelically out of the window, knees together, hands clasped meekly in his lap.

  ‘Please stop whingeing, Sara!’ Bridget cried.

  ‘But, Mum …’

  Augusto smiled at her. ‘Patience, princess, we’re almost there. And they have a pool, y’know. You’ll like that, my little water-baby.’

  Mary and Alan Porter’s house was a huge old mansion set on a hill with iron-laced balconies and standard white roses planted out like soldiers. Inside everything was cool and calm and cream, with the only colour being in the many paintings that crowded the walls, most violent with reds and purples. Out the back was a blue pool rimmed with wide terracotta tiles, with a lion’s head that spouted water and kumquat trees planted in massive terracotta pots. From the balcony upstairs was a clear view across the harbour to the city.

  Sara had never seen Sydney from this angle before. A city of glass towers, it rose blue and airy from the shimmering water. The white curve of the Opera House gleamed below the arch of the Harbour Bridge, the soft restraint of the low, grey-green hills to the north making the tall glittering city seem even more illusory.

  ‘I want to live there.’ Sara pointed to the top of the highest building on the far hill, a round tower whose many windows reflected back the sun. She would be a princess in a tower, Rapunzel waiting for her prince.

  ‘That’s Australia Square, stupid,’ the Porters’ seven-year-old son jeered. ‘You can’t live there, it’s all offices. Don’t ya know anything?’

  Bruce Porter was a sturdy boy, with thick, sandy hair that stuck up from his forehead like a cockatoo’s crest. He had been deputised to show Sara and Joe around, and demonstrated his power by not allowing them to touch anything or go into the sauna. He walked with a swagger and picked his nose while he talked, showing Sara the blob of
green snot he had extracted before swallowing it with obvious relish. Sara did not like him.

  Half an hour after lunch, the children were allowed to swim as long as they were quiet and did not splash. In a state of bliss, Sara lolled in the shallow end. She wore a new yellow-and-white check frilled bikini, she had eaten well and deliciously, she had seen an enchanted city, and the sun poured bright upon her wet head. Dreamily she wound her legs together and began to sway through the water, using only her arms and hands. Slowly she sank beneath the water, twisted, spun, drifted along the bottom. She could see her shadow, thin and blue, coiling along behind her, followed by the shadows of ripples. She could swim without moving her hands or feet, rippling her body forward. If she spread her feet, her ankles together, her shadow looked like that of a mermaid.

  The boys were dive-bombing in the deep end. Bruce made the biggest splash Sara had ever seen – the water splattered the adults sitting at the glass-topped table in the cabana. Bruce blamed Joe but his father said in the mock-serious voice that many fathers seem to use with their sons: ‘I hardly think young Pablo is heavy enough to make a splash like that, son,’ so Bruce grinned, taking it as a compliment. Joe scowled to hear himself called Pablo.

  Bruce kept doing dive-bombs but soon grew bored, dive-bombs being no fun if no-one is watching how big a splash you can make. So he dived into the water, swam up behind Sara and dragged her under the water by her legs.

  Sara kicked and thrashed furiously, all the air in her lungs bursting past her eyes in a great, gleaming bubble. She could not dislodge his hold. She writhed and wriggled, hitting out with her puny fists. He dragged her under again, holding her around her tummy, turning the glistening, gliding water into her enemy. She could not breathe, she could not escape, broken-finned, she was swallowing water. For a moment she thought she might drown, but then Joe was there, wrestling Bruce away from her. She was able to break through the water’s surface, gulping air as she clung to the side of the pool with both hands. Bruce did not mind who his victim was as long as he had one, so he did not pursue her. He ducked Joe again and again until he was gasping and choking.