The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  Signor Gianni had the good grace to mutter Grazie to me as we were waiting to board at Marco Polo, but that’s the only word he’s addressed my way. He’s so unlike his children, a man of few words and they’re all dialect. That’s okay, I don’t want him asking any questions about Cinzia. Franco says he’s a committed socialist and was against Cinzia marrying Max, but I can’t imagine he’d be terribly thrilled if he knew what his actions in sacking lo straniero had precipitated with his daughter.

  Very weird feeling in the team.

  December 13, 1976.

  Weird is right.

  I’m writing this in longhand from the hospital at Catania — I’ll type it up when I get back. I’m told it’s the day after the match. Feel a bit woozy still, bad headache, but at least the nurses here are fine — I haven’t seen a witch amongst them, but there were definitely a couple at our hotel the night before the game.

  We got into Catania about 9 the night before last and it was 10 by the time we got to the hotel. The boys nevertheless decided they wanted to eat before they went to bed, so off we traipse down the street to a pizzeria with out-door tables.

  Beppino, who’s sole captain now, ordered red wine to wash down the pizzas. That was okay — I’d seen them drink red wine at lunch before a game in the afternoon and I’d never seen any of my boys drunk. But there was something in the Sicilian air this night, a powerful foreboding, a kind of eat drink be merry for tomorrow we die. Beppino was obviously pissed off with the coach, his father. He’d told me that he’d tried to persuade his father to reverse his decision about me, but his father had been utterly intransigent and couldn’t really offer a reason why. When the coach and captain are at loggerheads, it’s not a good dynamic and even worse if they’re father and son. Beppino ordered another round of red wine for the table, then another. I began to feel sorry for Signor Gianni — he couldn’t call out his son so he sat there watching with his wonky eye as his team got pissed the night before the big game. Finally he gets up and says it’s time to get back to the hotel. Time for you, old man, says Beppino, and orders another carafe of red wine. Signor Gianni stood there for a moment or two but there was nothing he could do and walked off.

  By the time the team got back to the hotel, they were, we were, collectively, legless. Salvatore, Big Dom’s replacement, who thinks he’s a bit of a lad even though he’s only got one word for every occasion — Oy! — saw a couple of beautiful mini-skirted women in the house bar on the way through and, wonder of wonder, discovered they were prostitutes and available on room service. Oy!

  I flaked out in the midst of a party, a panicky, bawdy amoebic thing that slithered from room to room, with much singing, slamming of doors and fornication. I had sour red wine dreams and got up for a piss at one stage and there was one of these extraordinarily beautiful women squatting over the bidet washing herself. Un momento, she said.

  By ten yesterday morning, game day, when we gathered for a late brunch, it was pretty clear that the Sicilian witches had already cast their spell and we were fuck-ed, as Cinzia would say. Red streaming eyes, sore heads, tender tummies and, back in NZ anyway, that traditional coach’s nightmare, depleted gonads.

  As we bussed to the ground you could sense the fear rising through the hangovers. I wasn’t sure what the hell was going to happen out on the field, but was kinda glad that this was my last game. Everything we’d built was slipping away and I could see the boys looking at each other and thinking Oh shit. Beppino was trying to talk it up but we desperately needed the Franco and Big Dom steel. In the dressing shed, Signor Gianni tried to rev them up, but he’s not a great orator. What he can do is pass the ball. He was rocketing flat spirals off both wings right across the room in the warm-up with Beppino. I can’t see where Beppino gets his mouth from but I can see where his hands come from.

  On the field, a stony dusty track fenced in by wire to keep the fans off us, it all turned to shit pretty quickly, what I can remember of it. I’d determined to just play it out, do my best but not bust a boiler in what I’d already accepted was a lost cause. But shit, someone pulls your jersey, it’s just instinct. I whacked him with a back-hander, nothing major, thinking well, that’ll be the end of that, we’ll get on and play rugby. But no, this guy with a moustache the size of a dead possum takes umbrage and hooks into me. I was feinting and dodging, thinking I’d have to clock him again soon to slow him down, when what felt like the rest of the Sicilians descended on me. Franco and Dom would have been in there with me, but minus their steel, our team just stepped back behind the ref and left me to it. I might have been fucking killed except there were so many of them on me they couldn’t get a clear shot. Well, someone did, obviously, because that’s the last I remember before waking up here in hospital asking Where am I? — every ten minutes apparently. Blinding headache and sore ribs, struggling to sit up. One of the Catanian management, Silvio, has been here this morning. Lovely guy, he told me I was concussed and was in here for observation. I told him my ribs hurt, so they’re going to keep me here for an X ray later today. Silvio tells me we got ‘eaten’, done for a dinner, fifty points, a rout. We’ve never lost like that. I’m glad I’m going.

  I’ve been told to rest my brain, no reading or writing, so I’ll stop.

  All I can think of is getting back to Venice, picking up Cinzia and flying into the rest of our lives. Fuck this. With Cinzia at my side, maybe I could reimagine the farm, obliterate my father’s taint. Would she find the empty horizons a revelation after Venice, or desolate and frightening?

  After we made love, she said Mi fai, tu. Mi fai. I’m not at my brightest and I’m trying to figure out what she meant. Why would she say, You do me, when we’d already done it? It wasn’t the imperative, that would have been Fammi.

  I thought it was safe to ask Silvio what it meant, without giving him any context. It’s not something we would say, he said. Maybe peculiar to up north.

  Later.

  I’m out of here this afternoon — the Xray revealed no ribs broken, just contusions. The headache’s gone, along with that feeling of a cloud between me and what I’m trying to think about. I thought about using the hospital phone to ring Cinzia, but Beppino will have filled her in.

  I wanted to ask her if I’ve got it right. Mi fai, tu. You make me. It must be that because it’s what I feel too.

  Clare put the pages down and bent over her father, feeling for the ghost of his breath on her cheek. ‘Is that what you wanted me to know?’ she asked him. Now she desperately wanted Bruce and Cinzia to be together and wondered what could possibly have happened to prevent it. She almost feared what the remainder of the pages would reveal and picked them up with a feeling of dread.

  54

  December 14, 1976

  Franco is dead.

  I went straight from Marco Polo to the stall below Rialto, but it was closed, and the guy next door told me. All the stall-holders are in shock. Franco e morto. E morto Franco.

  Clare’s voice failed her. Or her will. To continue reading aloud would be selfish, even cruel. She couldn’t do it. She read the rest in shocked silence.

  It’s been in all the papers I haven’t been reading. The students of the radical left had surrounded the university at Bologna where a meeting of right-wing Catholics, Commune e Liberazione, was being held. The Dean called the Carabinieri and that provoked a violent riot. A carabiniere had singled out Franco and shot him dead. He was the only one. Shot like some sheep worrying dog. There’s going to be an enquiry, but that’s not going to bring Franco back. I hardly knew him, I shouldn’t feel this bad. I can’t believe he’s gone. It’s a much worse blow to my head than that Sicilian’s boot. Sometimes I think I’m getting an understanding about this place, then I realise I know nothing. Could this ever happen at home? I can’t imagine that it has or ever would. I don’t want to stay here, the volatile mix of charming, seductive hospitality and sudden brutality throws me.

&n
bsp; I rang Lady P’s from Piazzale Roma. She didn’t seem terribly pleased to hear the NZ accent — I wonder if Cinzia’s given her notice already, told her about me, and Max. She said Cinzia wasn’t there, that the family had gone north to Gemona for Franco’s funeral and burial in the family plot.

  December 15, 1976.

  Aldo’s bar is a sad place. The boys drift in and out looking for solace. Aldo’s big face is dripping tears half the time, as he pulls beers and delivers food. There are photos of Franco plastered up all round the bar. Even Big Dom is in tears, periodically thumping the table and calling God a dog. I thought maybe some of the boys might be going north for the funeral, but Aldo says the family wanted it to be private, they’ve suffered so much and Gemona is still a war zone.

  I don’t need the photos — I can picture Franco so clearly, the ties of his red bandana flying, the way his smile flashed out of the black beard as he patiently dealt with my political ignorance. Out on the lagoon, his damaged face as he told me he had to save the world in Bologna. He seems so present still.

  I have another picture too, of Signor Gianni at Catania, looking lost and desolate as the ref came to check our sprigs, knowing he’d lost the dressing room to an insurrection led by his youngest son. That must have been about the time his older son was dying on the streets of Bologna. I didn’t warm to the man but what tragedy he’s had to carry, losing his wife in the quake and now this.

  And Cinzia, losing the brother to whom she was joined at the hip.

  Aldo took me aside and said the obvious: tutto e cambiato. Everything has changed. He said Signor Gianni won’t be coaching or playing any part at the club for the rest of the season. Sicily was a catastrophe and showed the value of what I had been doing with the team. He wants me to come back and carry on for the rest of the season. The Christmas break will give everyone a chance to go away and recover, then come back in the New Year and start again.

  I didn’t give him an answer, said I’d think about it.

  He’s right though. Everything has changed and in ways Aldo doesn’t know about. In my mind, I’d already left, was already in London with Cinzia getting on with the rest of our lives together. But Cinzia won’t be able to leave her old man and Beppino now, or for months to come. And there’s the boys. I don’t think I can walk away now they’ve lost Franco. I don’t think I can do it.

  December 16, 1976.

  Franco’s funeral was yesterday, so Cinzia and Beppino could be back in Venice some time today. I’ll try to ring her tonight. But I’ve decided to go north to Gemona tomorrow, finally, just for the day. Aldo’s given me directions to a cemetery just to the south of the town. I can be there and back in the day, pay my respects to Franco, and maybe begin the hunt for Dad’s past, the families mentioned by Arch Scott, the Zanardis and Bonazzons. Maybe I can find some relatives, if things have recovered enough from the quakes to make that okay.

  * * *

  Clare stood up. It was mid-morning out there in the world of the well beyond the glass. She was shattered by Franco’s death, felt as if she knew him, even though she’d got mere glimpses of him from the diary. She remembered the underlying sense of melancholy at her father’s reunion and the prominence of the beaming Che Guevara among the photos on the wall of Aldo’s bar. She felt she was beginning to understand why.

  55

  December 17, 1976.

  I’ve got no-one to talk to about this. I’ve got to write it down to see if it makes sense. I’m hoping to hell it doesn’t.

  Cold grey plains as I drove north and west towards Gemona. Following Aldo’s directions I didn’t have to go into Gemona itself but turned off to the right just south, towards a town called Nimis, then went north west again until I passed another town called Artegna. I crossed the bridge over the Orvenco river and saw a very old church up on top of a hill, separate from the hills that grew into the mountains behind Gemona. I couldn’t drive up, so I parked the car and walked. I wondered if I might meet Cinzia or some of the family still there, because when I rang Lady P’s last night, she wasn’t back. But the place was deserted. Beautiful, but bleak. From up top you can look back across the plains of the Veneto one way, and up towards the Dolomites on the other.

  Franco’s grave was hard to find because so many of the graves are recent. Il Terremoto features on virtually all the new ones I could see and there’s quake damage in the part of the cemetery where all the ashes are stored, with little photos on the front of the columns of drawers, all twisted and broken.

  I found Franco over in the corner that looked back towards the Veneto. That made it final for me, that he was gone, lying under that earth, never to return. That’s when I began crying. Before that moment, it’d been hard to accept that he was gone. They didn’t have a photo of him on the head-stone, just Franco Lamonza, 1952 - 1976, beloved son of Gianni and Donatella Lamonza. That made him only 24.

  After I’d dried up a bit I looked at the graves next to his. He was right alongside his mother, Donatella Lamonza, who had died in May in the first quake. Then I saw it: Donatella Lamonza, nee Bonazzon. I thought what an amazing coincidence, that Franco’s mother could be connected to the Bonazzons, one of the families that Arch Scott had told me to look up. When I explored further, there were Bonazzon graves alongside: Donatella’s mother and father, Giuseppe, ‘Bepi’, who had died in 1954, and Nina, who had died in the quake with her daughter. There was a son called Luca, who had died in 1945, ‘ucciso dai nazisti’. Killed by the Nazis. I wondered whether my father might have known him.

  The next section of plots were Zanardis and I knew then these must be the families Dad had known. There was an Isabella who died in 1958, but the oldest grave was Leo, only 8 years old, who like Luca had been killed by the Nazis. His mother Marisa had died in 1968, but the father Luigi, Gigi, and eldest daughter Paola and her husband Mario, had all died this year in the quake.

  The dimension of the tragedies that had befallen these families was almost beyond imagination. I thought selfishly, Bugger, I’m too late, but I kept going through the head-stones of the Bonazzons and Zanardis, thinking that these had to be the families Arch had told me about, must be, and wondering whether I could get a name of a survivor to track down and talk to, when it hit me: they’d been all around me. Signor Gianni had married a Bonazzon, which meant Franco and Beppino and Cinzia were Bonazzons as much as they were Lamonzas.

  Then something else hit me, right in the guts. Those letters I’d found in my father’s study, addressed to Caro Rico. I was pretty sure the name I’d seen at the bottom was Donatella. Maybe not.

  I jumped in the car and tore back down the plains to San Pietro. I’d never opened those letters since I’d got here. Stupid, because what was hieroglyphics to me back in NZ when I’d first seen them, was now a language I could understand.

  The heavens opened as I came down the autostrada and the Opel started aquaplaning in the puddles, then the water overwhelmed its windscreen wipers and I had to get off the motorway and stop. I was on a road out in the featureless flat country, no idea where I was, windows steamed up like my brain.

  The way Signor Gianni had looked at me at the meeting of the dirigenti. Who had sacked me at his insistence. The way he’d taken off when he saw me for the first time at the markets. Like he’d seen a ghost. Like he knew me.

  Signor Gianni knew who I was. He’d known my father.

  December 18, 1976.

  Awful awful night. I wanted to go to the phone box out in the street and ring Cinzia. But I’m not sure what to say. And even if I say nothing, I won’t be able to hide it from her.

  When I finally got back here last night, I went to the side pocket of my pack and hauled out the letters I’d found in the shoe-box in my father’s study. I should have read them carefully, out of respect, but I skimmed them: I looked first at the dates, 1945 going into 1946. I was looking for any mention of one word in the early ones, incinta, pregnant,
and another word in the later ones, bambina.

  I found both.

  December 19, 1976.

  I’ve been to see Signor Gianni. Beppino’s back at the market, really lost his pep, which is understandable. We moped in silence. He told me Cinzia is really cut up and needs to see me. I lied and said I was about to ring her, then I told him I needed to see his father, I wanted to pass on my condolences personally. Beppino tried to dissuade me, told me his father was in a bad way and didn’t want to see anyone, but in the end he gave me an address.

  I took the long way round to Dorsoduro, staying away from the track through Campo Santo Stefano to Accademia, where I might bang into Cinzia. I walked in a curve along the spine of the fish, got a bit lost and ended up on the long bland Zattere. The water looked grey and melancholy and with no sun to light up the facades, Venice’s old soul looked tired and dispirited but maybe that was just me.

  I cut back into Dorsoduro and with some difficulty found a little house with a door the colour of the bandoliero rosso and with the right number on it. When he opened the door and saw me, he tried to close it again, but we’re well past all that. I just put my shoulder into it. He was red-eyed and smelt of sour spirits. The house is tiny, just one room wide with stairs leading to a room above. How had he and Donatella brought up three children here?

  I told him I knew why he wanted me gone. He made out he only spoke dialect and couldn’t understand my Italian. I didn’t believe him and told him really slow and clear that I wanted him, I needed him to tell me I was wrong, that his wife Donatella Bonazzon had not had a baby by my father, Harry Spence, aka Rico Zanardi. I lost it. Dimmi ho sbagliato! I yelled at him. Tell me I’m mistaken! Tell me!