Sweet Bitter Cane

by G S Johnston

  The others scattered into the book labyrinth, but she warmed herself by the huge stone fire. The rain beat on the high vaulted ceiling. But once her fingers had thawed and there was no sight of the others, she walked along the shelves with no real purpose, just happy to stretch her legs. And indeed it was a barn, filled with books of all station: old, rare and antique, trashy murders and any number of cast-offs.

  But Babinda held her thoughts. Her mother said a decade after she’d arrived in Australia she’d read every English-language book she could find in Babinda. How she would have revelled in this barn. If there was a word she didn’t know, even the slightest, she chased it. If someone in the village annoyed her – God help them – she would use some obscure word – calumny, arrogate, ersatz, badinage – and leave the recipient reeling in the void of their ignorance. When Sister Mary Margaret looked up the word, it was perfect, as if her mother had painted a fine highlight on the dark canvas of disagreement. In her working life, as Sister Mary Margaret urged her students to understand something as basic as ‘to be’, she’d think of Amelia, marvel at her.

  Sister Mary Margaret heard Sister Agatha – who never stopped talking, even in her sleep – and ducked into another aisle and hid at the apex. She turned to the spines, held in strict attention. A beaten copy drew her, the dulled red leather spine creased and cracked, the size of a paperback but with a good two-inch spine. She reached for it, an old and well-worn Italian–English dictionary, the gilt of the page edges worn to patches. She fluttered through the leaves until they stopped flowing, jarred open. Two photos, pushed hard into the binding, stood erect and required some force to free. They were old, black-and-white and fading and creased, wedged among English words beginning with f.

  The first was of three uniformed soldiers, seated on a mule, tethered by a dark-skinned man in a white galabeya and kufi. The man at the back was skylarking, smiling broadly as he feigned falling from the animal. The second wasn’t nearly as battered, of a young man, as young as sixteen, standing on a path between two ploughed fields, stripped to the waist. He wore a round straw hat, larger than a dinner plate, at a rakish angle, pushed off centre, his face open in a mild smile. His chest was full and firm, his abdomen tight and strong, not a hint of age.

  Then she saw it: her brother Flavio. The thought came to her unburnished but not unwelcome. She flooded with heat. How did this photo come to be there? She sat on one of the low padded leather stools at the apex of each row, laid the book on her lap and flicked through every fine page lest there were more. And then she settled on the front flyleaf. The words took her breath, raced her heart.

  Amelia Durante, 1920.

  Un regalo da sua madre in occasione della sua partenza dall’Italia.

  You can imagine her shock. How could this be? And what force, except Our Lady’s hand, had moved her eyes, her cold fingers, among those thousands upon thousands of spines? And why? Sister Agatha bowled down the aisle towards her. She closed the photos in the book, held it to her heart and made in the opposite direction. She paid for it, seven dollars for such a fortune, and made certain nothing fell from it as the smiling assistant placed it in a thick paper bag.

  She said nothing to the nuns, just that she’d bought a penny dreadful about a mass murder in Second Empire France, but urged they should go back to the cottage. They left the barn along the dual rows of bare poplars – the rain had calmed to drizzle. She locked herself in the bathroom and took out the photos. In the light above the sink, once she’d seen it, the image was indelible: the man on the back of the mule was Flavio. Despite all contradictory sense, she was convinced. When had Flavio been in this situation?

  The family anniversaries flooded her. Amelia died in late 1978, living the last years of her life with Mauro in Rockhampton. Her body was cremated, but her possessions … How her dictionary came to be in a book barn in Berrima, and how these two images were still embedded, and how they related to one another, Sister Mary Margaret had no idea.

  She returned to Sydney and placed the image of Flavio in Egypt under a strong magnifying glass. She was convinced it was him. He was sixteen when she was born. What did she know of these years of his life? Her first memory of him was when they returned to the farm, of a broken and shattered boy, no enticing smile, no hat pushed back with mirth. He’d suffered so badly while Amelia and Italo were interned, making many decisions well beyond his age, and in the years after was racked with guilt and depression. Who knows where he may have travelled? He was smiling, something she didn’t remember.

  Italo died in 1953, a decade after his release. He was sixty-eight, a fair but not great age. Sister Mary Margaret had such a short time with him, but he’d been softly spoken, relentlessly polite, always appreciative. He never got over the melancholy, clinging to him like sump oil. He’d been imprisoned for three-and-a-half monotonous years. He was a man of the fields, not of proximity to others. On one occasion he spoke of that time, he said it had changed how his mind worked, and no matter how hard he searched he couldn’t find his old self.

  After their release, for the remaining two years of the war, Amelia and Italo lived under tight restrictions, each week having to report their movements to the police. In the streets of Babinda, Italo could never look people, his old friends, in the eye without thinking they distrusted him. It wore him away. And he stopped eating, slowly and surely, a little every day, despite all Amelia’s best cooking and cajoling. He died of a broken heart and stomach cancer. One way or another, he never recovered from his dose of the ‘golden nectar’.

  For a decade or more the dictionary and the entombed photos and the mysteries they held stood on Sister Mary Margaret’s shelf, visited by her now and again as she searched to see something she hadn’t seen at first. On the back flyleaf, Amelia had written all she knew of the family tree: their names, their dates of birth and the dates they died. The last two entries were Marta’s and Italo’s.

  Sister Mary Margaret wrote to Flavio’s wife, Greta. After he’d left Australia he lived most of his life in Chicago and had died there. But Greta wrote that he’d never spoken of any travel to the Middle East and had never enlisted in any army. Mauro and Sister Mary Margaret weren’t close. He never accepted her joining the order. He knew nothing of these things, but she knew he wouldn’t tell her even if he did.

  In 1975 the documents pertaining to Italo’s and Amelia’s arrests were declassified, thirty years after the event. Sister Mary Margaret didn’t learn of this until the early 2000s, and soon applied to have copies made. The bundle of papers contained letters about the Italian school, letters intercepted on their way to Italy, letters between the police advising caution – Amelia was described over and over not as intelligent, but as a shrewd woman (Was this a crime? Clearly.) How awful to read her old name, Ilaria Amedeo, among these papers, singled out to go to a boarding school in Echuca, which singled out her life, as if the Madonna had had a hand in it. The papers held the transcript of Amelia’s appeal against her incarceration.

  Deep in the heart of any family there are names, muttered from time to time, skeletons spoken of once or twice, but few are discovered in such a manner. Amelia’s confession of her affair with Fergus Kelly was made under palpable duress. Sister Mary Margaret felt such horror from the written word. And Maria Pastore denied it.

  The relationship between the images was explained. Such quivering emotions Sister Mary Margaret felt, shocked to read these documents, but without judgement. Was the mother she knew a lie? Why had she not told her? Why should she have told her? Poor Amelia, living under this threat of discovery. How did this change the past?

  She remembered meeting Fergus Kelly, only once. She must have been ten or so. He was older then, much older than this photo, and she’d been too young to draw out what Fergus would have looked like as a younger man, as a photo does with ease. Amelia wouldn’t let him in the house. She welcomed all people, often to overcompensate for Italo’s distrust, but to this man she was rude, which had left Ilaria confused an
d made this meeting noteworthy.

  But this explained something the family had always skirted, that Flavio looked neither like Italo or Amelia. The family skeletons were out. Had Amelia ever loved Italo? Had she instead loved this man? Why had she loved this man, this Fergus Kelly?

  Flavio never got over the stress of running the farm during their internment, nor his feelings of failure. He moved to the United States, as far as he could from the small cane farm in Babinda, and he never returned. But now she understood. At Flavio’s conception, Fergus’s genes had won every battle, in the collision of ovum and sperm beaten all of Amelia’s traits into recession. He knew. Perhaps he’d recognised his father in the street. Perhaps Fergus Kelly’s final act of retribution had been to present himself to Flavio for this purpose. Flavio fled his past, fled all that was coded in him, fled his mother.

  Without Flavio, Amelia and Italo continued to farm. Mauro had no interest in it, and Ilaria married Christ. But once the war receded, more people came to the district, some from Italy, and if they worked hard Amelia employed them and fed them very well, and most would return the following season.

  After Italo died, Amelia continued, no small achievement. She bought more of the adjacent land. Now Sister Mary Margaret knew this had been Fergus’s family land, which in the years after the war had gone completely to ruin. Fergus drank until he could drink no more.

  Amelia sold the farm in the late 1960s for an impressive amount. She left the area for Brisbane. She renewed her friendship with Clara, but there was always a distance between them. Sister Mary Margaret had lost touch with Babinda and didn’t know who owned the farm. But in 2006 she heard the unheard-of hurly-burly of Cyclone Larry flattened the crops, toppled Amelia’s tower and ripped the broad verandahs from the building. But the base still stood. Italo would have smiled.

  Sister Mary Margaret continued her search of this trove of declassified documents. Every name she could remember, every name mentioned in a set of documents, she chased. In Maria Pastore’s file she found a letter from Amelia, written in 1941 when Amelia was visiting Italo in the Hay concentration camp. Amelia had seen Maria’s husband, Dante, and wrote to assure her of his health. But in this letter about Dante, something surprising rested.

  I found Italo quite anxious to see me. Now that we’ve seen each other we’re both more contented and again resign ourselves to the future and what it will bring. Certainly, the separation is again painful. I would like to be near him, but as I’ve other obligations, I force myself to be resolute and strong.

  Such intimacy in a classified file. She married a man she’d never met, never seen, never touched, just as Sister Mary Margaret had. She loved him, grew to love him, of that Sister Mary Margaret was sure. She remembered them happy. When she was in bed she’d hear their feet as they swirled around the living room floor to the gramophone. She held no anger for Amelia, only sorrow, only understanding.

  People talk of the horrors of World War II. They’ll never, must never, be repeated, but they have been, are, will be. Every day someone is encased in sorrow and suffering. Over twelve thousand people, of so many castes and creeds they can’t be listed here, were interned in Australian concentration camps. All that lost time and vitality. All that sorrow. Once these forces turn and gyre, are loosed on the world, once such feelings of nationalism are evoked, ancient grudges break to new mutiny. Innocent people where interned for years on unsworn testimony. Who knows what private vendettas the combatants then pursue in the name of nationhood? No official apology has ever been issued.

  In her moments of despair, when she was old and frail, Amy (she changed her name by deed poll) dismissed herself as an ‘ignorant old wog’ or a ‘stupid dago’. Would you hear such things today levelled at Italians and Greeks and Maltese? Perhaps in jest, as we gobble the pizzas and yiros and golden pastizzis. But this country holds little of its history; it relishes the palatable and scorns anything in need of stern mastication, sucks the jelly and leaves the bone.

  On the back flyleaf of Amelia’s dictionary, Sister Mary Margaret filled in the details of Amelia’s death, of Flavio’s death – including his biological father’s name – and of Mauro’s (he had died six years ago), neither with issue. Only Sister Mary Margaret remained, her name to take its place on this list.

  Sister Mary Margaret’s tranche of documents of her mother’s life, a brave life, culled from memories, snippets of recalled conversations and cold declassified papers, sat on her shelf. Broken hearts mend, stronger and wiser. The past is riddled with untold-of women. Ilaria’s time was nearly over and with that her chance to fashion the full-of-grace papers to a manuscript, weighted by Amelia’s dictionary, heavy with two photos that tell, in equal quotient, of lies and truths, and lust and love.

  END NOTE:

  Dearest Reader,

  So ends Amelia’s story. If you have enjoyed this novel, could I please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please … please ask you to review it on Amazon or Goodreads or any other review platform. These reviews are the lifeblood of a novel, the gush and surge. Only you, dear reader, have the power to stimulate the heart. Please give it a good dose of adrenaline. The review doesn’t have to rival those of Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco or academic Maud Bailey, just something heartfelt and pithy like Fabbo! would do. One more time, with affection – please. Please. I’ll cook you dinner. I’m thinking pecorino truffle souffle …

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  So many people have helped along the way. On closer inspection, what initially seemed a swinging and swift writing period ended in a long and, at times, dragging adventure. Mr Plod.

  Firstly, I must thank my former neighbours, Gloria Nilsen and Philip Gallagher, who one evening invited Miss Mia and me in for a whisky and, you know, we got to talking … A few hours later we swerved home with a folder of fascinating and tragic documents. Between these loose pages, and many more conversations, this novel was born.

  The first draft of the novel was delivered in Dickens-like serialisation to my writers’ group – Karen Vegar, Avril Carruthers, Mara Tisci and Srinath Mogeri. Meetings with them applied pressure to hone the text and resulted in a swag of good insights. Elisabeth Storrs and Lauren Chater read later drafts with great encouragement. Kim Kelly provided me with an exhaustive swathe of scathingly-good suggestions, and good humour, and help with the final edits. Gianfranco Cresciani was very generous with his thoughts, research and ideas. Many years ago The Italians in Australia seeded the first inspiration for this novel. Abby Mellick’s passion carried me over the dark, fluttering pages of years of redrafts.

  Nicola O’Shea’s enthusiasm for my writing and for this project took the editing to a most enjoyable level – www.nicolaoshea.com. Tony Ryan’s clear, bright eyes and unbridled generosity honed the copy to great effect – www.tonyryan.net.au. And so much discussion about a comma.

  Ian Thomson’s cover design work was precise and incisive – www.ianwthomson.com. John Bortolin’s cover photographs are glorious, and it was nice to see something in his work other than a seemingly endless stream of taut, naked men - johnbortolin@soupa.net. Ella King played Amelia on the cover. And Evan Shapiro per
formed a stylish Shapiro-ette and did a slick formatting job – www.greenavenue.com.au.

  And as always, the biggest thank-you possible to John Watson, who puts up with all these crazy characters who come to live with us for a few years and rattle and roam around the house at all hours of the day and night, delaying and burning dinners, causing tantrums and bedlam and mayhem and frustration. Despite the drama they cause, John, you always have clear insights into their characters.

  The line Amelia reads towards the end of the novel is of course James Joyce, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  And lastly to you, dear reader – it’s always such an honour and surprise when you arrive at these last words. Thank you for reading. Please stay in touch and register for newsletters contact via my website, www.gsjohnston.com, on Facebook at @GSJohnston.author, or on Twitter at @GS_Johnston. Fabbo.

  BOOK CLUBS

  If you are in a book club looking for an author to meet with you via Skype, I never sleep, so I’m on all time zones, truly global. So please get in touch via the contact page on www.gsjohnston.com. Or Facebook at @GSJohnston.author.

  Here are some pithy discussion topics to get you going:

  Does this situation have relevance to a modern situation?

  How does the novel’s title relate to the novel?

  How well would this story unfold if it was told through another character’s point of view?

  If the events of this period were considered a history lesson for the present day, has anything been learnt?

  If you were to write fanfic about this book, what kind of story would you want to tell?