Looking for Alibrandi

by Melina Marchetta

  “But what’s his attraction?”

  “He’s smart and he talks . . . I can’t even explain it. He speaks with such passion about things. You probably think that’s for pansies, but John is a good person. He believes in what the next person is saying and he gives them a chance.”

  “I think that you like being with people like him so if they accept you, you can be one of the beautiful people. The elite of the community. Why can’t you be just you?”

  “I am me. But I’m human. Not a stone. I can be influenced by different things. Is that a crime? You’re so . . . I don’t know. You don’t have any hang-ups or anything. You’ve found your niche in life and you’re happy there and you presume everybody who’s looking for something else is a try-hard or a poser or pretentious. Be thankful that you’ve found your place, but be patient with me for still looking for mine.”

  He sighed and got onto the bike. I got on behind him, and when I wrapped my arms around his waist, he picked one up and kissed it.

  “We have so much to teach each other, Josie.”

  “But isn’t it a step that we’re willing to learn? Wouldn’t it be terrible if either of us wouldn’t budge?”

  He nodded and turned around.

  “Will you do me a big favor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you go to see Macbeth with me on Saturday night? I didn’t hear one word of it tonight.”

  I laughed and nodded.

  “Nor did I.”

  I closed my eyes, leaning my head against his back, feeling more for him every moment that went by.

  Twenty-Two

  MAMA AND I decided on a splurge the first Sunday in September. A day when we do just that. Splurge. Break the budget. Stuff ourselves. And celebrate the start of spring.

  We decided on one of the harborside restaurants, and although the weather outside was cool, it wasn’t wet enough to ruin the view.

  I like the harbor on a cool day. The waters look as if they have character, as if they are going through their own turmoil. It looks almost human, unlike its perfection on a summer’s day.

  “This has to be the most beautiful city in the world,” I said looking around.

  “Says the expert after she’s just seen her only other city,” Mama said drily.

  “I liked Adelaide,” I defended. “It has lots of character and the most beautiful houses, Mama. We could be living in decadence compared to the crazy prices they have here. Michael says that the rent here is killing him, but it’s no use buying something because he’ll be going back to Adelaide next year.”

  “Really.”

  “He’s not talking to me at the moment, by the way. Ever since I had to get him to sign the walkathon sheet he’s gone on and on about it. He reckons he’s disgusted with me. If I have one more person disgusted with me, I’ll slit my wrists.”

  “Remind him about the incident with him skipping school to see the Rolling Stones one day,” she laughed.

  “Just wait till I see him.”

  “I’m so happy that you’re getting to know him, Josie. I was scared you’d both reject each other, and that would have been so sad,” she said, handing me the menu.

  I shrugged.

  “He’s ultracool, you know. Not cool as though he drives a sports car and dresses trendy, but he’s a cool guy. He’s up-front. No bull.”

  “Take things slowly, and they’ll work out.”

  “I’m surprised, you know,” I told her. “I thought you’d be possessive and jealous and wouldn’t let me near him and all that jazz. I would have respected your wishes if that had been the case.”

  “You would not,” Mama laughed. “Anyway, he poses no threat to me when it comes to you. You’re old enough to make your own decisions, although if you come to me next year and tell me that you want to go live in Adelaide I’ll shoot you through the eyes.”

  “Shucks. Cross that one off my list,” I said with a laugh.

  The waiter came along and we ordered lunch, laughing along with him as he tried his Italian out on us.

  “I wish we could do this every week,” Mama said with a sigh. “I would have liked to have given you more out of life, Josie.”

  “Mama, you sound as if one of us is dying, for God’s sake. I grumble about my life because I’m selfish, not because you couldn’t provide. For a one-parent family we are pretty perfect.”

  “Perfect?”

  We both laughed.

  “Well, you are anyway. Michael told me a bit about when you guys were young. He said you were sexy.”

  “That’s because he was a sex-crazed young man when I knew him. He was very smug. Girls were crazy about him and mothers adored him and wanted him for their daughters. He seemed to breeze through life with no problems.” She looked sad and pensive and I wondered if she had really ever got over him. “Except I was a problem. You and I. He should have had the guts to deal with it. I was sixteen years old, Josie, and I was so scared when he left me to face my father. My father was the most terrifying thing in my life.”

  “Why did Nonno treat you like he did?”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t think he really loved me and I always wondered why. I don’t think he loved Nonna either, but she was such a good wife to him. She never took anyone’s side but his. It was as if she owed him something, but I can’t understand what. She was beautiful. It wasn’t as if she was ugly and nobody else would marry her.”

  “You never talk much about him.”

  She gave me a quick smile.

  “I used to pray at night that Zia Patrizia and Zio Ricardo were my parents, but then I’d feel as if I was betraying my mother. No matter what, I know she loves me in her own way. The trouble is that she feels guilty about it.”

  “I’d love to marry someone like Zio Ricardo. He sounded so romantic when he was young. Nonna’s told me stories about them all.”

  “He couldn’t take me in when I was pregnant with you. My father wouldn’t have let my mother see her sister again if he did. But he let Robert’s mother take me in, saying that he couldn’t govern who his daughter let into her house.” She looked pensive. “My father practically spat at me. Called me every name under the sun. A tramp, a slut. He hit me across the face and even hit my mother. Worse still, he never saw you, Josie. Never saw his own granddaughter. Tell me, what comes first? What other people think of your family, or love?”

  “You went through so much for me, Mama, and I never seem to appreciate it, but I promise that I’m changing.”

  “Oh, Josie,” she sighed. “I’m not telling you this to make you feel guilty. You are the most important person in my life. You are the only person who really loved me properly. Everyone else I’ve ever loved has hurt me. Michael Andretti broke my trust. My mother has always held back and my father never loved me in the first place. But you have never left my side, and the disrespect you’ve shown me has been the disrespect any child shows her parent.”

  “Oh God, Ma, if you go on any longer I’ll have to go to confession next quarter with nothing to confess because I’ll believe I’m a paragon of virtue.”

  “We won’t go that far.”

  We ate lunch in semi-silence and decided to continue our splurge with ice cream at Darling Harbour, where we sat on the pier watching the activity around us. There was a jazz band playing, and farther along a street entertainer was doing a comedy act, grabbing people who were walking by to assist him. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and basking in the atmosphere.

  “Michael has a girlfriend,” I decided to tell Mama.

  “Really.”

  “But he didn’t sleep with her while I was there. No way. I was with him every minute.”

  “I hope you weren’t snooping or driving him crazy, Josie.”

  “Of course not. I just reckon he mustn’t love her at all if he doesn’t feel the need to make love to her. You said he was sex starved when he was young.”

  “I’m sure he’s learnt how to control himself now. Maybe you
should butt out of his affairs.”

  “He really loved you once, you know,” I said, watching for a sign on her face.

  “Josie, life is not a romance novel. People fall out of love. People disappoint other people and they find it very hard to forgive. We both were so young, and Michael having to move to Adelaide upset his life just as much as it upset mine. But we survived and we’ve both got on with our lives and we’re different people. You’re the only thing we have in common.”

  “He calls me an ‘obnoxious creation.’”

  Mama tried to keep a straight face but failed.

  “Let’s go home, Miss Obnoxious Creation. We’ll do Jane Fonda and ease our guilt about this splurge.”

  “As if you need your guilt eased.”

  So we went home and did the Jane Fonda exercise tape, easing our guilt. But I just couldn’t get the idea of Mama and Michael being together out of my mind.

  I wish life was a romance novel. The idea of them as a couple is nicer than the idea of them with other people. I almost feel optimistic, because I’m the very thing they have in common, and I know that I will always keep them together somehow.

  Twenty-Three

  I DON’T KNOW what it is about nostalgia and the past that can make you feel so depressed, yet so drawn to it. Nonna seems obsessed with it. She’ll talk about it constantly. Maybe when I’m her age I’ll speak about my past constantly. I know that when I’m with my friends all we seem to say is “Remember this and remember that.”

  I guess it’s the photos that I’m really drawn to. Mama always says that if we ever had a fire the first things she’d grab would be me and our photo albums. Because photos are a testimony that someone did live. A reminder of a past we may have loved or hated. A piece of our lives.

  Nonna’s photo of Marcus Sandford fascinates me. That look about him. The 1940s Australian look. That he could today have wrinkles and be old seems unbelievable.

  “He was in love wit me,” Nonna told me quietly on Wednesday afternoon.

  She didn’t boast about it. Neither did she giggle.

  I looked at her and nodded. “Were you in love with him?”

  “Don’t be silly, Jozzie. I was married.”

  “It’s funny that this man in the photo exists more to me than Nonno Francesco did. I feel as if I know Marcus Sandford more.”

  “I did see him again after Robertino died,” she said quietly.

  “It was when Zia Patrizia and Zio Ricardo and the children moved to Sydney and during my last Christmas in Queensland. Zio found a building job. He was doing so well for himself that he wrote to Nonno and asked him to come down to work wit him. That way Patrizia and I could be together. Nonno had bought half of a sugarcane farm by then, and a lot more Italians and Europeans were being allowed into the country, so North Queensland was full of Italians. I had no children, so I could work. I was secretary for the Italian cane cutters’ organization.”

  “Did many Italian women work?”

  “No, not really. Francesco left in November to go to work on a farm farther north so we would have enough money to settle in Sydney, and he came back in February and we went straight down. I was alone for four months.”

  “You were alone for Christmas?” I asked horrified.

  She nodded.

  “Francesco couldn’t afford to come home and then go away again. It was a very busy time. I was sad without Patrizia and the kids.”

  “But you had Marcus as a friend.”

  “But, Jozzie, it is not like friends of today that you can have over and nobody talks. Oh no. You could not be friends wit Australian men. Not even Italian men. Women were friends wit women,” she said with a definite nod of her head.

  “One woman,” she whispered (Italians are so used to bitching about people that they tend to whisper a lot even when the person is one thousand miles away or even dead), “they talked about so much that she killed herself.”

  I looked at her disbelievingly and she nodded solemnly.

  “Just because of a bit of talk?”

  “Talk could break you, Jozzie.”

  “I wonder if those people who talk and mind other people’s business go to hell,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “He came to see me, though. He said it would break his heart if I would leave. I could see it in his eyes. But I knew that if I stayed I would break my heart.”

  “That’s so romantic. I wonder if he ever married.”

  She shrugged and told me more.

  It was the time of the proxy brides. A number of Italians were married by proxy back then. Some to sweethearts they had left behind and wanted to bring out to Australia, and others to people they didn’t know. Nonna told me horrible stories of men who sent their photos over to Italy and then when the girls got off the ship they would find themselves married to much older men who had deceived them with younger photos of themselves. Or else the Italian proxy wife would have too much fun on the ship coming over and arrive lacking something very important to the old-fashioned Italian male.

  The stories, like most of the things Nonna has told me in the last couple of months, are really interesting. Stories of another way of life. Stories of another person who I know but I don’t know. Katia Alibrandi, what happened to you?

  Just sitting there patiently listening to her made me realize how much I had changed. I would have been bored by it all a year ago, and because of my past feelings toward her, I would have ignored every word she said. Whereas I’m beginning to realize that my feelings are changing and we’re establishing quite a good relationship. I like that a lot.

  So Nonna found that the world had grown smaller. She moved to Sydney and lived with Zia Patrizia and the kids, but after a while they bought a house in Leichhardt and that’s where my father’s family comes into it.

  Leichhardt was at its prime in the 1950s. The gates of immigration had opened and relatives and friends from the same Italian towns found themselves bumping into each other in the streets of Sydney.

  Communities started up: the Italians in Leichhardt spreading to Haberfield and Five Dock. The Greeks went to Newtown and Marrickville. A different Australia emerged in the 1950s. A multicultural one, and thirty years on we’re still trying to fit in as ethnics and we’re still trying to fit the ethnics in as Australians.

  I think my family has come a long way. The sad thing is that so many haven’t. So many have stayed in their own little world. Some because they don’t want to leave it, others because the world around them won’t let them in.

  All this information I’ve gathered from Nonna and Mama, who was a child of the sixties, I’m going to try to remember it.

  So one day I can tell my children. And so that one day my granddaughter can try to understand me, like I’m trying to understand Nonna.

  Twenty-Four

  WHEN I GOT off the bus on Thursday afternoon Jacob was waiting for me. He had his sports clothes on and his hair tied back in a little ponytail. When I looked down at my long uniform, black stockings and black shoes, starched blazer and conservative tie, I wondered if we’d ever find a niche together.

  He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and waited till we were off Parramatta Road before he kissed me.

  “You smell sweaty.”

  “Soccer,” he explained.

  “When I was in Adelaide I had to watch soccer. My father is a fanatic. It’s the only time I see him lose control.”

  “You should see Anton. I think it’s his European blood. He runs around hugging and kissing us.”

  I laughed at the thought of Anton kissing another man.

  “So how are things going with your old man? Does he still ask questions about me?”

  “My father says you have sex on your mind,” I told him truthfully.

  “And how does he know that?”

  “Because he said at your age he had sex on his mind.”

  Jacob laughed at that and kissed my ear. “He’s right about that.”

  I felt embarrassed
like I did every time Jacob expressed sexual tendencies toward me, which was quite often. But at the same time I felt great.

  “He has a girlfriend, you know. I heard him speak to her on the phone yesterday,” I told him, trying to steer the conversation along. “I haven’t met her but Michael says she’s attractive, intelligent and well-spoken.”

  “Worried?”

  “Kind of,” I said truthfully, looking up at him. “He’s going to go back to Adelaide next year. Just when we’re beginning to get on really well. It’ll never be the same. We’ll become really stilted with each other and awkward. For the first time in my life I feel cheated by his absence.”

  “You’ll see him for holidays, Jose. I’ll drive you down myself.”

  “I think my parents are attracted to each other, Jacob. I mean, I haven’t seen them together a lot, but when they are together it’s a look here and a look there. Michael even blushes.”

  “Why shouldn’t they be attracted to each other? They were once.”

  “It’s weird, I’ve never shared my mother with anyone. Could you imagine if she ever got married?”

  “I can’t believe you would never expect her to get hitched. I mean, she’s pretty hot for a mother.”

  “My mother? Hot?”

  “I’d go for her if I was in my forties.”

  “Do I remind you of her?”

  “God, no.”

  “Thanks,” I said drily. “Does that mean I’m not hot and you wouldn’t look at me if you were in your forties and I was in my thirties?”

  He shook his head, grabbing my arm and pulling me closer.

  “You’re different. You come across all tough and fearless, while deep down you’re a softy. She comes across a softy, whereas deep down she’s tough and fearless. I mean, a lot of single parents botch up and she didn’t. In fact she did a great job.”

  “Meaning I’m perfect.”

  “Not quite,” he laughed.

  I stopped outside the terrace and cursed.

  “God, my grandmother is here.”