The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  Then again, as Clare was learning, Renzo was seldom surprised by anyone’s behaviour. Curious, but not surprised. She supposed that if, like him, you believed the sub-atomic world defined the universe, and that anything that is possible, no matter how unlikely, happens all the time, it would be difficult to be surprised by anything. As much as she’d tried to get her head around the idea of Cinzia being a nun before they arrived at the cafe, it was still a shock: the severity of the grey and black, her urchin-cut white hair pressed under a soft wimple.

  * * *

  Renzo’s sharing of his last ‘sin of omission’ had decided Clare. By the time they had left the golden prosecco vineyards behind and returned to Treviso, she knew she would give him the file. Her father had bequeathed her the secret: Some good might come of it. No good could possibly come from her holding onto the information, but telling Cinzia wasn’t a decision she should have to make by herself. Back at his apartment, she’d handed him the file without preamble. ‘You should read it,’ she’d told him, ‘before this goes any further.’ It was, she knew, another test. Show me what you do with secrets. Prove you’re not another Nicholas.

  She’d left him to it and gone for a walk around safe, somnolent Treviso. Anxious, she kept getting lost until she remembered Renzo’s maxim — left is right, right is right, straight ahead is right. By the time she found her way back, he’d have read her father’s diary. Would he be upset, appalled, shocked, incredulous at the enormity of it, disgusted? She should have known better.

  When he buzzed her in, he was exultant, waving the file in the air like a fly swat. ‘This explains everything!’ he said. ‘Why San Pietro’s glorious season in Serie A was ruined, why my grandfather sacked Bruce, why he fell out with my father!’

  She could scarcely believe it. ‘Is that all you take from it?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. My aunt is your aunt — we’re family, but not blood relations. Perfect!’

  ‘Except that my aunt doesn’t know she’s my aunt, she doesn’t know Gianni Lamonza isn’t her father and she doesn’t know she fell in love with her brother!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed, though this was clearly an afterthought.

  She’d guessed that he wouldn’t be shocked, but she was surprised how little the central revelation of her father’s diary meant to him. ‘So the incest is no big deal?’

  ‘Ethical man put taboos and constraints around consanguinity for good reason,’ he said. ‘It’s a taboo that dates from the time when sex was inevitably reproductive rather than recreational. But, actually, we’re all from the same singularity, we’re all made up of bits of the same stardust, we exchange atoms with all living matter, so in the end we’re all inextricably bound together.’

  She had to laugh. Sometimes he sounded as full of New Age bullshit as Sarah. ‘You think Cinzia will buy that?’

  ‘That’s what you want to do? Tell her?’

  She nodded. ‘Suor Isabella will regard it as a mortal sin, won’t she?’

  That slowed him down, but not for long.

  ‘Truth is such a nebulous concept,’ he said, reverting to the curious formality that meant he might be under some pressure. ‘On the rare occasions we meet it, we must embrace it. Our aunt will understand that.’

  She’d been so desperate to hear that answer: she wasn’t sure what it proved about him, other than that he wasn’t Nicholas. And he’d said We must embrace it. Our aunt.

  ‘Forgiveness,’ he said, ‘depends on truth. That’s what your father understood at the end of his life. That’s why he was trying to find Cinzia.’

  * * *

  But now, sitting in front of Suor Isabella, Clare wasn’t so sure. In the hospital room, she had deflected Clare’s glance, never made genuine eye contact, but this time she took Clare’s hand in hers and apologised for not introducing herself earlier.

  ‘I wasn’t sure whether you knew about my relationship with your father,’ she said, with Renzo’s slight American inflection. ‘It was a long time ago, but I had no wish to cause any embarrassment.’

  As her eyes searched Clare’s, she saw the Cinzia of her father’s diary.

  ‘Ten days ago,’ Clare began — Was it only that long ago? — ‘I sat here with my father. He was reading this file.’ Renzo shifted the little espresso cups to make a space on the table. ‘I had no idea what was in it. I noticed that every time an older woman came by or crossed the piazza, he would look up from the file. I thought he was perving — you know?’

  ‘Stava guardando le donne,’ said Renzo.

  ‘Understood,’ said Cinzia. ‘Please don’t translate for me, nipote.’

  ‘Scusami, Aunty.’

  ‘I didn’t know what was in the file,’ said Clare. ‘Now I do. He was looking for you.’

  ‘Mio Dio.’ Cinzia’s right hand came up to her heart.

  ‘My father wasn’t well, he was very weak, but the next day he found Gianni Lamonza’s door and knocked on it and asked for you.’ Clare felt her voice waver. And I turned away from him in his need. ‘Did Gianni tell you that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s a reason he didn’t. And it’s the same reason that my father ran away back in 1976. In this file is his diary. He writes about a beautiful woman he fell in love with.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cinzia, not responding to the flattery, looking puzzled and apprehensive. ‘That’s what it felt like. A fall. We fell into each other.’

  ‘He writes about why he had to run away. The reason is shocking, I’m not sure you’ll want to know it.’

  Cinzia didn’t look at all sure either. ‘Do you know, nipote?’ she asked Renzo.

  ‘I have read it, yes.’

  ‘Should I read it?’

  ‘It’s the truth, Aunty. I think you would want to know the truth.’

  ‘Will it hurt me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Renzo.

  ‘Then why do I have to know it?’

  Renzo shrugged as if it was self-evident. ‘Because it’s the truth.’

  ‘It tells how much he loved you,’ said Clare.

  Cinzia tensed and looked as if she was about to run. Then she took a deep breath. ‘It took me a long time to forgive him. Perhaps to truly forgive, you have to understand why, and I never did. Though, as you know, I did pray for him.’ She shifted in her seat, adjusted her robes and coat, wrapped her arms about herself, as if to brace against what she was about to hear. Then she said: ‘Tell me what it says. To my face.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘No.’

  Clare thought that the moment was over and she had blown it. Instead, Cinzia smiled at her.

  ‘It would be unseemly for a Canossian sister to be seen crying in public over a lost love.’

  They followed her across the piazza to where it narrowed on the way to the Rialto. Clare met Renzo’s eyes and he shrugged, clearly having no idea where they were going. After about twenty metres Cinzia turned to her right and pushed through a large but inauspicious door. Their feet echoed off old flagstones up into cavernous shadows. When Clare’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realised they were standing in the nave of a very old and ornate church. Suor Isabella was in front of them, clasping her hands together in prayer to a deserted altar.

  I cannot do this. Not here.

  ‘I’m not sure this is the right venue,’ she whispered to Renzo. ‘Can we run?’

  ‘Either He’s omnipotent or He isn’t,’ said Renzo. ‘He’ll hear everything if He exists or He’ll hear nothing if He doesn’t. Doesn’t matter where it happens.’

  He was smiling. How could he be so secular? So unimpressed with all this stuff ? Part of her knew this exalted space with all the gold and trappings and grandeur wasn’t so much to laud God as to intimidate His mere mortals into obeisance. Another part of her was that mortal.

  Cinzia sat in the second to last wooden p
ew, turned away from the altar and patted the wood next to her. ‘Sit here,’ she said, ‘tell me everything. Are you lovers?’

  Clare wanted to say that it was Cinzia’s confession, if there was to be one, but Renzo took her hand in his and said, ‘Yes, Aunty.’

  ‘I’m pleased,’ said Cinzia, smiling. ‘I think you’re good together. Now. Tell me what I don’t know.’

  Clare knew she had to carry on, that it wouldn’t be fair to let Renzo tell her. She just had to say the words.

  ‘Gianni Lamonza is not your father.’ She’d said it too loudly: there was an awful echo to her voice around the old stone and hovering plaster saints.

  Cinzia looked immediately to Renzo. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s all here,’ said Renzo, indicating the manila file he was holding. ‘He’s Beppino’s father and Franco’s, but not yours.’

  ‘But how can you be sure?’

  ‘Because my grandfather was your father,’ Clare whispered.

  Clare watched those big eyes putting it together, then filling. She had to keep going now.

  ‘That’s what Bruce found out,’ she said. ‘That’s why he left.’

  Cinzia made a kind of choking sound, then turned away.

  ‘Should we go?’ Clare whispered. Please God — though given the choice between the candidates here, He certainly wouldn’t be helping her — let’s get out of here.

  Cinzia shook her head as if to clear it. She wasn’t looking at them, but Clare heard the echo of what she said. ‘I didn’t know him, really. Bruce.’

  She spoke just as her father had described, giving his name, so curt and banal, a sonorous cadence.

  ‘Yet it was like meeting someone I had been waiting for all my life.’

  Clare didn’t dare speak.

  ‘When he went away, I was . . . like the ones who die in battle. Caduto. Fallen.’

  Cinzia turned back to them and took the file out of Renzo’s hands before Clare could claim it. Her eyes looked ethereal, pinpricks of light in the shadows. ‘Tell me about my father. Tell me about the man I was waiting for.’

  Clare told her what she knew. That she’d never met Harry Spence because he died so young, but that he must have been a handsome and charismatic young warrior when he fought alongside the partisans, when Donatella Bonazzon fell in love with him. ‘We don’t know why he didn’t come back to Donatella, but you’ll read in the file that he became a tortured soul in later years. Perhaps that was why.’

  Cinzia asked for photographs of him. Clare was sure there would be some among her father’s effects at home and promised to send them, along with photos of Bruce himself. When they rose to leave, Cinzia hugged them at the door and said she’d stay for a while.

  ‘Will you be all right, Aunty?’ asked Renzo.

  ‘In His eyes? My God is not a harsh God, nipoti. If Cinzia and Bruce were innocent at the time it happened,’ she said, ‘they are still innocent.’

  ‘Will you tell him?’

  ‘Papà?’ Her eyes were as clear and direct as ever, but blinked tears. She shrugged, helpless, hopeless. ‘I don’t know.’

  As they walked back through Campo Santo Stefano, Clare was merely relieved to be out in the chill wind, but Renzo was exultant. ‘Did you hear what she said?’

  ‘Which bit?’

  ‘She was calling me nipote, nephew. But at the end, she said nipoti. Plural. Us.’

  When they crossed back over Accademia to the vaporetto, Clare stopped at the top of the bridge and looked out at Venice. It was the same view towards La Salute that she’d been admiring when she’d spotted her father on the far side and followed him into Dorsoduro. This time the cold wind made her flinch and the hard clear light reflecting off the chop in the Grand Canal hurt her eyes.

  72

  When she’d first seen Renzo’s apartment, she’d almost fled back to the Continental. She’d become used to making snap judgements on the interiors of homes: furnishings, furniture, bric-a-brac, smells, whether to recommend a commercial cleaner or a professional home stager. Renzo’s apartment looked as if it had been dressed for sale: clean, contemporary, sterile, too many cushions. There were no personal touches, apart from photos of his family, formal and framed, all clustered together on the coffee table in his living room. She could recognise Franco among them, Cinzia in her habit, an older couple who must have been his father and mother, and his wife, Sofia — a longish face with big, kind eyes. The walls were bare.

  The absence of autobiography was telling: this was a man marking time, she thought, a man still in some kind of grief limbo waiting for something else to happen, for a new life to overtake him. His animation for the mysteries of cosmology might be compensation for the impoverishment of his personal life, but he’d at least been honest about that: ‘I’m telling you what saved me,’ he’d said.

  A dangerous man to become entangled with, maybe. Then again, she’d always been so careful and where had it got her? Why should she and Renzo not be lost and dangerous together?

  She should have guessed that he’d look kind of dressed even when naked. Light olive skin with a pelt of silky black hair from his collar bone to his darker-skinned penis, but none on his shoulders or back. He looked as if he was wearing a vest and leggings over his powerful, slightly bowed legs. ‘Don’t ever wax,’ she told him.

  She’d come without even having to tell him what she liked. It had taken six months of careful hints with Nicholas, and even then it felt like a favour. With Renzo, the sex had been so simple and good that Clare had become afraid and defensive. She’d tried to point out the shortcomings of the relationship, as if sabotaging it might protect her. Like telling him she’d only known him for five minutes.

  ‘Physicists don’t recognise time in that way,’ he’d said calmly. ‘The whole of reality exists at once. There’s no now, no then, no tomorrow — this might be why physics is in trouble but while we sort it out, the orthodox view would be that whether I’ve known you for five minutes or five thousand years, it’s all the same.’

  No use then traversing her feeling that her twenties had been a disaster of confusion and uncertainty and she didn’t want to waste her thirties, that if he was going to make her unhappy now was the time. ‘I’m on the rebound,’ she’d said on another occasion.

  ‘Elasticity is a universal property, stasis is unnatural.’

  It was hard to come up with a feisty response. By the time she’d worked out what he might have meant, the moment was gone. She’d tried being more direct. ‘What I know best is loveless marriage. Duplicity. Fraud. Betrayal.’

  ‘What I know best is love and loyalty. Perhaps also obligation and a little boredom, if I’m honest. Perhaps we could meet somewhere in between?’

  ‘Maybe you’re still grieving for your wife.’

  ‘There’s a part of me that will always grieve. That is part of my life, unless I stop living. What can I do?’

  ‘My family might be cursed.’

  ‘That implies the existence of God or an interested universe. I’m not sure about God, but I know that the universe doesn’t care about you one way or the other.’

  He touched her wrist when they talked. Constantly. She found it so erotic it was embarrassing. She wanted him all the time, everywhere, but worried that if she told him he’d be shocked. Maybe she was being too careful: though formal and constrained in the way he dressed, intellectually he was a naked wild man who embraced the stars. She’d been right: they fitted. He was a lazy lover in the best sense. Nicholas had always been in a hurry to get his rocks off, as if she might change her mind halfway through. There’d been something desperate about him, and self-absorbed. Renzo was responsive but happy in the moment, not always looking to force the next.

  That gave her room to get more excited, to take the initiative. There’d been no discussion of sexual history and he hadn’t asked once about c
ontraception. Was that trust? She hadn’t told him she was pregnant.

  What she’d wanted to be able to say to him was that our family might be cursed. To warn him, because we’re connected too. So she’d given him the file. Maybe his delight in this tenuous connection through his aunt to New Zealand, this opposite place to Italy, this antipodes, the idea of his family embodying these opposites, appealed to the particle physicist in him. He loved the romance of Aotearoa, how far away it was, that his connection spanned the globe and gifted him another part of the universe with a different night sky. He seemed to know so much about it already: he described the intensity of light and shadow, the chiaroscuro, and a different palette: green and blue, he thought, ‘not the terracotta and ochre of Italy’.

  She admitted she was dreading going home: that it meant the end of anonymity and the resumption of responsibility, of duties, of big decisions waiting to be made and implemented: the matrimonial property; the fraud case against Nicholas; to fight or not to fight. She still didn’t mention the baby.

  ‘I could come with you,’ he said. ‘For a little while at least. If it would help.’

  ‘It’s such a long way.’

  Those dark lights in his eyes. ‘Imagine following the curvature of the earth through day and night!’

  She trusted what he’d told her in that little restaurant beside the Sile, that he preferred the truth, even if difficult. She believed that if she decided to keep the baby, it wouldn’t be a problem for him. He had such a holistic view of the universe that he didn’t have a proprietary bone in his body — they were all atoms of the universe derived from the same singularity, we all belong to each other, et cetera et cetera: she was sure he would embrace the child as his own. She loved him for that, but it wasn’t his decision.