The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  We got a seat at the back — I had to push down on her shoulders to make her knees bend. Saul, the Fulbright scholar was introduced in English by the old guy with the white moustache, as an urban meteorologist who was going to talk about the horrors being perpetrated on the old stone of Venice by the pollutants raining down on it from Mestre and Marghera. Saul rose and began telling us what a pleasure it was to be spending a year in Venice in the midst of such class and culture. Cinzia sort of guffawed, and as he read the rest of his speech — reducing whatever it was that was happening to Venice to a series of bland chemical reactions — I wondered whether Cinzia was deaf. She hummed and hahed and muttered as if she was the only one in the room or in a sound-proof cage. At one stage, Lady P turned and shot us a look that would have felled an African elephant but which Cinzia ignored, snorting shortly after when Saul said one of Venice’s problems was that it lacked the usual countering effects of automobile emissions. The moment Saul sat down Cinzia said ‘Ndemo via’ and we bolted for the fresh air of a drizzly Venetian night.

  The cold air had no effect on Cinzia’s fury. Cretins! she said. Stranieri who understand nothing! This straniero certainly wasn’t going to poke his head up. I waited for her to get to wherever she was going and it was a pretty strange place. Venice is a parched tongue, she said. The lagoon is reclaiming it after centuries of being denied. She might have been quoting someone, a poet maybe, but writing that now in black and white makes it seem a lot weirder than it was at the time. The drizzle was drifting in sideways like a heavy shroud being held back by the rose glow of the street lamps. We walked on cobblestones that glistened black with a fluid skin that seemed to ruffle and arch like wind on water.

  She became calmer as we walked and she talked about Venetians, the great adventurers and traders of the old world who no longer travelled. Franco and Beppino have been nowhere, she said. Nowhere! She said it like it was a place. She talked about the places she’d been and it felt a bit like the hippy trail, Paris, London, New York, Tangiers, Marrakesh and in the lee of the Ponte d’Accademia she pulled out a half-smoked joint and lit up. I had a toke and passed it back to her. At uni I’d flatted with a couple of guys who had put themselves through off the back of the dak they sold, and I found it was guaranteed to make me paranoid then send me to sleep, so I stopped doing it. Sure enough, I found myself becoming jealous of Cinzia’s history, all the men who’d touched her, the friends she’d made, the places she’d been without me.

  I said something stupid about free love, as if I knew anything about it. Love is never free, she said, putting one finger to her lips as if I’d spoken sacrilege. Everything you do in your life has to have meaning, no? Si or si? she laughed. Si or si?

  I didn’t want her to stop talking. She had a way of pronouncing every syllable of a word with equal emphasis as she would in Italian, like no-where-e and touch’ed and sing-ing-a, and it sounded kinda Shakespearean or Biblical. On the other side of Accademia she thanked me for calming her - I’d done nothing, said next to nothing — and kissed me on both cheeks but not pecks, sort of breathing me in like a hongi. My head was still reeling as I waited for the vaporetto. Or buzzing. It might have been that joint.

  45

  December 6, 1976.

  The Calabria game yesterday was a disaster. I’m not even sure what happened but it had fuck all to do with rugby. While we played that game we were doing all right, still ten points up into the last quarter. Then the crowd got confident and started chanting Ter-ro-ni! Ter-ro-ni! at the Calabrians. Big Dom was up there in the concrete stand but I’m not sure he had anything to do with that — he would have been the one chanting Fa-sci-sti! Fa-sci-sti! Anyway, it was a red rag to a Calabrian bull. It seemed to remind them who they were and bring out all our guys’ fears. I know we Southerners pretend to hate Aucklanders but that’s just mild parochialism compared to what goes on here. I think terrone just means farmer but it’s come to symbolise something evil and misunderstood or even unknown. These were Italians we were playing, at least as far as I was concerned. They looked like Italians, spoke like Italians, but for our guys they might as well have been from Mars. Anyway, once the terroni chants began, the Calabrians got furious, we got edgy and they smelt our fear and really began hooking into us. When the ref — probably fearful of the home crowd — disallowed a perfectly legit Calabrian try, it really sent them over the top, and most of our guys just caved. Beppino was still plucky, but got badly nailed trying to run the blind, and Franco stepped in to save his brother and came reeling out with a split cheek. Could only have been a boot or fist. The sight of blood didn’t help our guys any, and we gave away a soft try shortly after that even the ref couldn’t find an excuse not to give. They booted it high from the re-start and Franco, red blood and bandana flying, ran it back at them, straight up into their pack, no sidesteps or dummies. He got done, but just got up and did it time after time in that last ten minutes, often coming in on the angle to take a short ball from his brother because no-one else in our team wanted the attention that came with possession of the pill. I tried to take the pressure off him by doing the same and felt the boots searching for my head as I hit the ground. When I got up, Franco told me to back off, this was their fight. He was bleeding from his nose by then too.

  I didn’t - don’t - really understand what the fight was about, but I wished to hell we’d had Big Dom there because we were never going to win it without him. With 5 minutes to go, they got a push-over from a 5 metre scrum, converted and that was the game. When we kicked off, no-one was looking for the ball anymore. It bounced ignored into touch while the forwards shoulder-checked and punched and kicked each other. There was an all-in brawl which the most of the backs joined. The ref blew the pea out of the whistle but couldn’t stop it, saw there was no chance of getting the lineout formed so blew for full time. The Calabrians threw their hands in the air and we all marched to the centre of the field to give the traditional three cheers for each other. I was bloody seething at the way we’d capitulated but led the three cheers for the Calabrians, and the Calabrian captain, the one Dom wanted to kill, led three cheers for San Pietro and then bugger me dead they all started hooking into each other again!

  The crowd was still chanting Terroni! and had come down to the wire fence, which I saw Dom climbing over in his steel boots and khaki shirt. At that stage I decided my contractual duties were over and I headed for the dressing room, smiling and holding out my hand to shake whichever Calabrian came anywhere near me and saying Grazie in as foreign an accent as I could muster. On the way I saw Big Dom step into a melee, pretending to be the peace-maker - Calmati, calmati, Dio can! — and get grazed with a punch meant for someone else, whereupon he launched into them and there was skin and hair and Dio cans and porca madonnas and fascisti flying everywhere.

  Later in the dressing shed, we could hear the Calabrians smashing benches, chairs and doors, and when their bus pulled up, it was surrounded by San Pietro fans who were baying for Terroni blood. Poor old Aldo and the other dirigenti, terrified I suppose that the club would be banned, were out there with hunks of four by two keeping our own fans back so the Calabrians could board their bus and get out of town.

  I’m not sure what the fuck I’ve got myself into here. Our next game is against the Sicilians in Catania, our last game before a one month Christmas break. God only knows how we’re going to get through that.

  December 7, 1976.

  Franco asked me to come fishing in the lagoon. He had a dinghy with an outboard tied up to one of the little canals in Dorsoduro. Cinzia was there too, big surprise, asking me what I’d done to her beautiful brother. Franco’s face is a mess. One eye nearly closed, stitches in his cheek and across his forehead. I thought that’s what Cinzia had come for, to call me out for letting Franco get disfigured, but she climbed into the dinghy with us and we buzzed out through the Fondamenta Zattere and straight across to Giudecca, through another canal and out the back and round towards the
Lido. I couldn’t see any rods or lines in the boat, but there were spear-guns and wet-suits and scuba tanks. Franco had a snorkel for me and q wet-suit, but I didn’t fancy the opaque cold of the lagoon. Franco called out over the engine that some of the lagoon was too shallow or too busy to dive, but he knew a spot. When we got out to his spot, closer to the Lido than Giudecca, Franco cut the engine and Cinzia threw the anchor over.

  Franco began stripping off down to his undies and Cinzia did too. I went to the bow so they had room to get their wet-suits on and studied the sea like I knew anything about it. She and Franco are joined at the hip but not at the brain. As they got their gear off and struggled into their suits, they somehow from a standing start got into a row about Cinzia’s fidanzato, Max, his pedigree.

  From what I could understand, Franco was saying that Max’s family were frauds, because they were given their title by Napoleon, they weren’t one of the old titled Venetian families that existed pre-Napoleon. Cinzia told him he seemed to be making the kind of fine distinctions a true communist wouldn’t be interested in. Mid-argument, Cinzia kept appealing to me as if I was the adjudicator, so I had to turn my head to look at her. Had to.

  So I’ve seen all of her. Her nipples are the same dark red as her hair. In summer she looked as dark as Franco, whose olive beauty doesn’t change. Now her skin is really pale and a sprinkle of freckles is showing on the bridge of her nose. Never seen anything more lovely or exciting. But it’s like looking at a Monet or something. Drink it in: it might be something you can love but it’s not something you can ever have.

  After Franco flopped backwards off the boat, Cinzia asked me to help adjust her weight belt. She told me that if she married Max and became una contessa, that would make a brutta figura of Franco with Lotta Continua. Then before she put her gloves on, she took off her engagement ring and gave it to me to hold. She talks a lot, impetuously, but her eyes are very quiet. They study you. When she gave me the ring, we were very close and she looked at me carefully, as if she was looking for a meaning. Maybe that’s just how she is, or maybe I imagined it.

  Once she’d rolled into the water, I sat there looking out across the lagoon towards Murano. There was no horizon between the islands. The grey of the sky merged seamlessly with the grey of the sea. It looked like molten metal, not a living sea.

  When he got back in the boat and took off his mask, Franco looked awful. The mask had left a red oval welt on his face and the mouth-piece had split his swollen lip and he was bleeding from it. His face looked pulped. I was surprised that he’d surfaced before Cinzia and left her down there, but that was partly the point: he wanted to tell me that he wasn‘t coming to Sicily. Looking at his face, I thought I could see why — the stitches would inevitably be opened and his head would be a bleeding mess within fifteen minutes. But he wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t his wounds that were keeping him from playing. This weekend was going to be a big one at Bologna, which now had a communist mayor. They were going to test his mettle with a manifestazione, and Lotta Continua were going to lead the occupation of the university. I deliberately asked him about his chemistry degree, how was that going? He’s not slow. That brilliant smile flashed through his beard. Caro amico, he says, my pursuit of a degree is selfish careerism, whereas my work with Lotta Continua is about a better life and education for all.

  Then Cinzia surfaced with a fish on the end of her spear. Not a very big one, but the fish had never been the point of the excursion. I know what Franco wanted from me, and maybe Cinzia was just along for the ride, but I’ve come to realise that everything is political here: everything has meaning.

  On the way back, Franco was on the outboard, I was in the middle and Cinzia up in the prow shaking her hair dry in the wind. I was able to really look at her while pretending to be looking at Venice. How can you know what you want until you see it? If someone had asked me to describe my perfect woman it wouldn’t have been Cinzia because I’d never met anyone like her. She’s beyond my ability to imagine her. I’d given her back her ring, but she stuck it in the pocket of her jeans. Did that have meaning?

  Franco took care of the boat and Cinzia and I walked back to the market with her fish. I wanted to debrief the Calabrian game with Beppino. When we were working our way through the throng at the market, I could see him ahead behind the stall with an older man, unpacking vegetables behind the banco. I could only see the top of the man’s old-fashioned hat as he was about to straighten up and look our way. Cinzia was asking me about something and when I looked back he was gone — well, going. Beppino called out to him and so did Cinzia. Papa! Papa!

  So that was the old man, a stocky figure melting into the crowd. Beppino and Cinzia had no idea what had spooked him, maybe coming to the market was a step too soon. Cinzia clasped her hands to her heart, said he was fuck-ed because his love for their mother had been his life. She said that most men have love and life whereas for women love is life. She wanted to be loved by a man like her father, whose love for his wife my mother was his life. And will therefore be fuck-ed, said Beppino. That was enough to launch an argument between them which, as far as I could understand it, seemed to have only a vague relationship to what they’d been talking about. Who was closest to their mother. Beppino made the case that if he was most like their father, then his love for their mother was also like his father’s. He might have had reason on his side, but he lost when Cinzia burst into tears of grief. Beppino was instantly remorseful, but Cinzia turned to me for comfort. I drove back across the plains to San Pietro with a wet patch on my shirt right above my heart.

  Gemona 1945

  46

  Charlie had had the tobacconists in his thrall. He would carry a big basket about town, a few cabbages on top notionally for sale or trade, making his collections. He’d developed a limp to suit his story of being a distant cousin of Gigi who’d been wounded and couldn’t get back through enemy lines to his home in Catania.

  He would come back to the cave and boast that when one leg got tired he’d limp with the other and no one noticed. Joe wasn’t so sure. The locals may not have noticed his changing limp but they could hear well enough and they knew where Charlie was from. On the few occasions he’d risked going into town to help Charlie bring the tobacco back, Joe saw faces full of unspoken resentment. Charlie seemed to believe that what wasn’t spoken didn’t exist. Trailing behind Charlie as he bounced forward on his exuberant limp, Joe heard that word again, usually muttered or barely breathed, terrone, aimed at Charlie’s back like a dart.

  When Joe asked Donatella what it meant, she said that it was a bad word used to describe people from the south. Joe wanted more but Donatella seemed increasingly impatient with his questions. She called him tu all the time now, but Harry and Charlie and all the partisans were also tu, so it had become meaningless. Joe consoled himself with the thought that she was equally impatient with her brother.

  The hayloft above the stalle was closer to the fields and the cave than either of the kitchens, and easier to escape from if the fascisti came, so they would spend most of their winter evenings there, basking in the smelly warmth of the animals below. Luca seemed to regard Harry, Charlie and Joe as a captive audience and would try to inculcate them with the essential precepts of communism and the coming people’s state. These exchanges would often turn into an argument between Harry and Luca, who was infuriated by the Kiwi’s lack of any apparent political framework for what he was doing.

  Initially Luca had been bewildered as to why someone could be so naïve about the fascisti, yet come so far to oppose them. He teased Harry: ‘You rush upstairs from your cellar at the bottom of the world to fight for your colonial masters.’

  Joe could see Harry bite his tongue. He usually took any opportunity to bag the Brits, but he was intelligent enough to know that wouldn’t serve his argument here. Instead he told Luca he’d always been fighting for himself and his cobbers, that he’d only enlisted because he’d
wanted a bit of excitement, an adventure. Luca thought Harry was joking, then became incredulous when he saw that he was, at least in part, serious. When pressed, Harry said the war was about ‘good and evil, black and white, simple as that’.

  Luca wanted to know what was evil about fascism, and whether Harry understood what it was, and why it was evil. ‘Otherwise,’ said Luca, ‘you have no reason to be here except to shoot Germans.’

  ‘Reason enough,’ agreed Harry.

  ‘But not all Germans deserve to die,’ said Luca. ‘What is the difference between a German who deserves to die and one who doesn’t?’

  ‘No difference if they put a uniform on,’ said Harry.

  It was an endlessly circuitous debate. Luca would become incensed with what he saw as Harry’s simplistic obfuscation. Harry would tease him with that smile and tell him that where he came from it was all about doing. That if a dog didn’t work or a heifer got sick or a ewe got too old, they got a lead pill. That was the way of the world. ‘Jerry’s a mad dog,’ said Harry. ‘Mad dogs need putting down.’

  ‘Sì, sì.’ Luca would then ask what Rico meant. What made the Nazis mad dogs?

  ‘Adolf,’ said Harry.

  ‘What makes Hitler a mad dog?’

  ‘You might have a better idea of that,’ said Harry with his smile. ‘He calls himself a National Socialist, doesn’t he?’

  Luca would become apoplectic about Hitler misappropriating the word socialist.

  ‘Just goes to show,’ said Harry. ‘It’s not what you call yourself that matters, it’s what you do.’