‘All gay? That is a shame.’
‘Not a shame, a tragedy,’ I laughed.
‘A tragedy, yes! My ex-girlfriend. She went to live in … I forget where it was. I can’t remember the name, but it is in America and it is the island of the gay.’
I cracked up now. ‘Where is the island of the gay? I need to know!’
It turned out to be Key West. But he wasn’t finding the conversation at all hilarious. Italian straight men did seem to find the whole gay male business somewhat confounding. Not in any judgmental way or with any hatred, in my experience. It was a concept these absolutely women-oriented men found impossible to get their head around.
And I know I shouldn’t have laughed at anyone else’s abuse of language, which I was with my amusement at the ‘island of the gay’ line, because I had taken to making things up. It had been so long since I heard long brackets of the sound of my own voice. So I had started to say things in a made-up Italian that I thought approximated what I wanted to say. I mean, our language was Latin based, put an ‘o’ on the end, a little ‘issima’ here and there … I had a number I liked, it was ventisette (twenty-seven). I threw it into conversation just because I liked it. I eventually realised that when I said, ‘Mi dispiace, no cambio’, meaning to tell people in shops and cafés that I was very sorry but I did not have any change when I handed over a fifty euro note, I was actually apologising for not changing.
I also worked out that the word Luciana kept saying to me, ‘beachy’, which I took as cute slang for the beach, was not what I thought. Thinking it was an English word the Italians had adopted, similar to how they had the word ‘shopping’ for instance, I’d started saying ‘beachy’ back to her and to others in Ravenna, when trying to explain where I had been for the day. ‘Beachy, beachy,’ I would say, when I’d been lying flat on my back on a banana lounge by the Adriatic. But Luciana was actually saying bici, which is Italian for bicycle. They really must have thought I was obsessed with that bike, riding it all day, ‘bici, bici’, when I was actually lying on the beach.
The bar owner might not have found the conversation funny, but he found another pleasure in it. ‘I like you,’ he said. ‘You laugh. Laugh is good. A smiling lady is a good lady. What you do here in Pisa?’
I told him.
‘These dead men, they interest Italy. We learn from them. They are our fathers. You learn from this man?’
‘I have learned from this man,’ I said quietly.
‘What have you learned? Something about Italy?’
‘Si,’ I brightened up. ‘That men take many lovers in Italy.’
‘Nooooo,’ he did that long Italian negative, with a turn of the head and a hand raised dramatically. ‘We find the right woman, we love her and her only. Maybe this thing you learned, about men taking many lovers, you learned about the Englishman in Italy, not about Italy. And maybe you learn from your mother and father, that this is not so desirable.’
‘I did learn that from my father, but not in the way you mean,’ I answered, wondering if he was in any way related to the signora in Padua who had also asked me about life lessons.
‘Ah,’ he answered. I was quite sure he didn’t get what I meant. ‘So what did you get from him, your father? Did you get this laugh?’
It was such an immense question. The laugh, I think that was from my mother. From my father: who I was? I thought then, faced with the question probably for the first time, that the answer was who I was not.
‘In his lifetime, I thought I got nothing,’ I said to this man. ‘But in the past few years, since he died, I do believe I am seeing myself better, in contrast to him.’
It was a statement I know the Italian didn’t understand. I was only now awakening to myself.
My father was dying for a long time. He would call us on the phone at Lavender Street. We, meaning Erin and I, the youngest children and at the centre of our parents’ tug-o-war, would hate picking up to him. He would ask us to come and see him. I couldn’t begin to think how that could happen so I wouldn’t even consider it. His soft, cigarette-shredded voice would sound drunken, slurry. He’d go on. I didn’t remember about what because I was a kid and there was something on the television in the other room. The phone was in the kitchen, and in those days, phones were fixed-line analogue. Erin’s evil budgie, Noddy, named after the lead singer of Slade, her favourite band, was in a cage above the phone, and not only could he imitate the phone perfectly, but when you were on it he would shower you with seed.
‘Come and see me,’ Dad would say. Showers of seed. TV studio audience laughing in the other room. Damn, what had I missed? Our loyalty to our mother was cement. We had been let down by him so many times. His no-shows, his embarrassing, scandalous flirting with any female he wasn’t related to if he did actually show and there was some kind of gathering on. It was the way he was, the person he was.
And now he needed us. But it didn’t sound like he needed us. I didn’t even consider that either. It sounded like another game. Phone up the girls and keep them away from the telly.
He’d want to talk to Mum too. Try and be friends. Can’t we just … The born-again Catholic wanting absolution.
I also believed he loved her. Or remained connected to her spiritually. Six kids over twenty years. They didn’t come from playing Monopoly. The complexity of human emotion; they had been kids together, bringing up kids. They knew each other from their teen years. No one had that with him except his brother Kevin and my aunty Phil, his much younger brother Bernard and Bernard’s wife Elaine. It was important for me to consider this.
But she would never forgive him and neither would we. And he never really had any humility. It was a two-way street that our entire existence relied on, this tension created by our opposition to each other.
Plus, we believed him to be crying wolf. That cancer, it went on for so many years. Mum told us he was crying wolf. We believed her. And still he smoked Camel non-filter and drank a lot and took wild expeditions into the Australian outback in his orange Nissan Patrol with the bullhorns attached to the front. He didn’t seem to behave like a sick man. He was going to outlive all of us with this alleged illness.
I can’t recall who told us he was beyond doubt on his way out. But someone did. Vera, our sister-in-law, drove Erin and me out to Romsey, which was in the country then but is part of Melbourne suburbia now, where he’d bought a house and where he was now in a private hospital, dying. For real this time.
I remember the shiny linoleum floor and the cool, dark, country hospital hallway, the quiet. A crucifix somewhere.
And seeing him. My God, seeing him, determined to appear lucid, that gaunt, sunken, wide-eyed version of the ferociously alive man we knew. There was a packet of Camel plain and a tray of empty oyster shells on the table wheeled across him. He seemed, I don’t know, annoyed? Resentful? Like our presence made it real, finally, to him. And yet it was all strangely dispassionate.
It was Good Friday.
I told him I loved him, but back then, I wouldn’t have known I did. I just wanted to hear him say it back. He didn’t. But he did say, in a voice that wasn’t the voice I knew, ‘I’m very proud of you.’ I resented that. I do see now that I got more than any of my other brothers and sisters did.
He was only in his early sixties.
The night he died was Easter Sunday. Erin, Bernadette, Mum and I had that second sat down to dinner when the call came. ‘Well,’ we all said. And kept eating. It was some big night at the Metro, a then swish nightclub on Bourke Street in Melbourne. You should still go, of course you should, Mum told us. We went—even Bernadette, a decade older than Erin and me, who had shared adult conversations with Mum long before we had. I wonder what Mum went through alone that night.
I would do all this so differently now.
At the last minute, Mum decided to come to the funeral. My dad’s second wife had asked me to tape-record the service because I was still working at ABC Radio news at the time, as was she. I had to lug this big old-ti
me tape unit and microphone and stand with me. Someone else should have done that. That I should work at my father’s funeral, now I think about it, put me outside the experience.
But we were outside the experience. So many of the people at that funeral figured they knew who we were in his life, and what that meant. We were his children, so they said all the sympathetic things you say to kids who have lost their beloved dad. He was our father, so they sang his praises as if we knew and loved him the way they did. It was so terrifically apparent that those people didn’t know the real picture of how he had abandoned his kids and how bitter relations were and I just didn’t have it in me to pop that bubble. In fact, I rather liked the play-acting, pretending I was the dutiful daughter for the day, not some semi-stranger to the deceased. But underneath it all I was desperate for acknowledgment of my pain, and feeling oh so embarrassed and very much on the outer of it all.
Mum did not go to the house for the wake but held court all afternoon at the pub across the way. The old timers who knew her, plus the boys—our brothers—and us girls, we did shifts over there with her. When it came time to leave late in the night, she and the other woman came face-to-face. It was the other woman’s idea. Mum dropped to her knees and wailed like a Middle-Eastern mother who’d just lost her son to a bullet. It was awful. The boys bundled her into the car. It was never, ever mentioned again. Even in the car on the way home.
We didn’t mention stuff. Like I said, I would do this differently now.
I still felt disconnected to his death. Unlike Mum’s, which came like a hurricane, and still sat next to me every minute of every day like the space where a lost limb used to be, this just came and went.
As I rode back to my apartment, past Dad/Garibaldi, I wondered, twenty-two years after his death, was I following a man like Lord Byron to try to understand a man like my father? Charismatic, loved by and lover of a multitude, passionate, political, selfish, creative, courageous, a cad.
Had I not become the wife and mother I had wanted to be because of him? Or was this not his fault at all? Had I not become that wife and mother because I had not faced up to who he was and what he was? Because I had not grieved him? I didn’t know him but had I craved to? Is this why men who were aspects of him kept coming into my life? The cruelty, emotional unavailability, philandering? Is this why Lord Byron was really in my life now? I couldn’t deal with the nitty-gritty of my dad’s life, like the other child out there somewhere. So had I chosen to examine a life encapsulating his energy and character, an arm’s length handling of the material?
I heard the cosmic kerplunk. And then my soul let out a long, exhausted, relieved sigh.
18
Mario
‘I have come from my rest to him I love best
That I may be happy, and he may be bless’d.
I have pass’d the guards, the gate, the wall;
Sought thee in safety through foes and all.’
The Siege of Corinth
A month after Shelley’s death, Lord Byron was packing up his Pisan palazzo and posse for Genoa, the Ligurian port city to the north. He felt strongly that his time in Italy was up and that he needed to ‘leave more than a mere name; and besides that, to be able to do good to others to a greater extent’.
Though he was still writing profusely, he met regularly with a Greek royal, Prince Argiropoli, who was residing in Pisa and had come to be a source of information on the Greek War of Independence, which had been running since 1821 in an effort to break Hellas free of Ottoman rule.
Once in Genoa, Lord Byron met with members of the London Greek Committee, a body seeking English support for the Greek cause. Soon after, Lord Byron was elected to the committee. From there, his involvement steamrolled. He was going to Greece.
What of Teresa? She was kept in the dark, until word came that her father was allowed back to Ravenna on the proviso that Teresa accompany him. This seemed to Lord Byron like his out. And even when she was finally given the news of Lord Byron’s imminent departure, it was not directly from him, but via her brother. She was, of course, inconsolable. Her choice then: whether to join a convent or live with her father.
And then he was gone.
In some ways, life seems to change on a pinhead. But it does not. Change comes like a train: distant, faint, then around the last bend and on us. Why was it necessary for him to have more to his life than poetry? Did Lord Byron look back at his years of excess in Italy and feel the need for penance? It might have been a creeping disquiet. The kind that, one day, has you wake up sick of your partner, your job and your circumstances, sick of yourself. As much as those moments look like they come out of nowhere, they do not.
Or perhaps it was a submission to destiny. A letting go. That sense that holding on to your stuff, the things by which you have defined yourself up to now, is far more dangerous than allowing yourself to free-fall.
It takes courage to let go like that. It can look selfish to those invested in us remaining as we were. It can cause them, and us, pain. And it can look sudden. But it is not. It’s always a gradual release. We begin it the moment we call out in our dark night. Someone is listening. And their answer, when the prayer is sincere, is the beginning.
I was having a hard time getting Pisa. It was puzzling. It was so very hot and humid. At 3 a.m. on my first night trying to sleep there, I had discovered there were four enormous communal garbage bins right outside my windows. Pisans apparently like to recycle and they like to do it at all hours of the night. The regular crashing of bottles into the glass bin echoing up the tiny laneway was horrific. But also comical. Who puts out their recycling at 3 a.m.?
There was light shining in all night from the student digs across the laneway. Two out of the three enormous sets of windows in my apartment had shutters. The one missing them was the one next to the bed. Of course.
Riding a bike in Pisa was frightening, though I insisted on doing it. The heat was extraordinary, the mosquitoes could fight a matador and did I mention those bloody bins stank? The garbos came several times a day and they dragged those stinking bins down that ragged, uneven bluestone lane right below my window and had loud arguments with each other while they were doing it. The sun was so bright. There was little green in the streets of downtown Pisa. It was as if the city had somehow given up on itself too, it was so unkempt. Students had taken over piazze and turned them into open-air beer halls. There were puddles of puke in the morning.
And yet, I was more content than I had ever been. My building backed onto a zig-zag melding of small squares that was Pisa’s open-air food market and something of a restaurant quarter (perhaps explaining the extraordinary stink of the bins and the late-night depositing of bottles in them). It was lively and picturesque out there, with the providores selling brightly coloured fruits and vegetables, breads, charcuterie and cheeses from under awnings. The squares were lined with butcher shops and delis, cafés and bars in buildings that showed the layers of centuries upon centuries of history in their higgledy-piggledy brickwork. The café that I liked, Bar Lo Stuzzichiere, was in the middle of it all and had a big awning the size of a double garage out front with tables and chairs under it. I could sit there for hours and watch an endless parade of entertaining characters. It was fantastic.
One of the great things about Italy is that you can stare. It is totally fine. It’s a national pastime. Whether you are a starer or staree, it is completely acceptable. Expected, even. I’d reacted badly in the past to being the staree. Now I declared myself open for staring season. There was a dear old couple who came to Lo Stuzzichiere every night and ordered a half-litre bottle of water between them, then partook generously of the apertivo-hour bar snacks. And then they stared, like they were watching telly. I was their prime viewing some nights, and when I was, I felt honoured.
I had become papier-mâché after a number of years on this earth, bits of newsprint and coloured paper clogged together over my originality. Each time the world told me my true self was in some aspect
defective I stuck new bits on to mask myself. And then I was so patched up I bore no resemblance to the real thing. The second I made a decision to stop drinking like I was, the process began to reverse. At the risk of working a metaphor too hard, drinking, smoking and drugs, but drinking in particular, had been the hard lacquer setting all that paper into place, a thick impermeable glaze that ensured no more hurt could be added, but none could fall off either.
In Pisa, I sensed I’d got rid of all that. I felt more authentic than I ever had. I was sitting outside little Bar Lo Stuzzichiere when I became aware of what I wasn’t feeling, and hadn’t for a while. That searching for him, I was no longer doing that. And that discomfort, that mistrust of myself, it was gone too. I’d dropped that stuff somewhere along the way. Well, when I thought about it, I knew where it had fallen away. It had peeled off in Ravenna, in Piazza del Popolo, where I’d found that from which I’d been running. I looked back and saw the immense battle I’d fought. And yet the victory had been so simple, so small. But like a tiny little well-aimed pebble thrown with velocity, it had shattered my prism, decimating the distortion of self-deception. I’d been able to drink some wine with dinner in Pisa and delight in it for its own sake. No compulsion, no need, no craving: just simple enjoyment of one of life’s pleasures. And yes, I had stopped sizing up every male in the vicinity for suitability. I had found my clarity.
Pisa is awash with awesome trattorie, little neighbourhood joints that with loving care honour Tuscany’s delicious bounty. Da Cucciola, over on the other side of the Arno from where I was staying, was owned by Graziella, who decided to sit with me and get her waitress to be the interpreter in our conversation. She was a spritely seventy-year-old who loved la musica, loud, preferably salsa, by the sounds from the kitchen. And beer. She loved beer. When the restaurant was quiet and she was not cooking, nor sitting with me, she came and leaned on the bar with a tankard of the stuff, the vessel almost bigger than her tiny self.
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 19
