Child of the Twilight

by Carmel Bird

  ‘The Baby Boy is duly brought to Rome and installed in the church and becomes celebrated for the miraculous cures of the sick effected in his name. He brings riches to the rich and to the poor, he brings children to the childless. He is known as the Bambinello. A special golden carriage is made to carry the Bambinello to the bedsides of the sick, the dying, the mothers in childbed. And on Christmas Eve to this day he is processed and unveiled in the church where he rests in his Holy Mother’s arms. On the feast of the Epiphany he is carried to the top of the staircase outside to the rather eerie music of the zampognari and the pifferai – being the bagpipers and the flautists as you will discover – to bless the excitable crowds. Pifferai, zampognari – I am most fond of the Italian there – hip hip hooray the pifferai.’

  Cosimo suddenly gripped his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and beat his upper chest with his right fist as he intoned a loud nasal aaah, aaah – mimicking the sound of a bagpipe. ‘Zampognari!’ he cried in triumph, grinning, twinkling, demonic. And he uttered one of his short harsh laughs, throwing his arms in the air.

  ‘The people of Rome throw flowers by the handful and caramelli by the bucket, and they blow kisses to their miraculous and beloved Bambinello, the golden wonder-boy. MUAK! MUAK! The mob so loves a baby, and God so loved the world. There’s a prayer they say to the Baby – I won’t trouble you with it now. If you don’t know it you can imagine it, I suppose. You will no doubt have seen some of the Baby’s clothes – an aunt of mine in her convent in Berkshire made him a glorious apple-green outfit. She sews like a spider, you know. And the worms made the silk itself. Wonderful, isn’t it, what worms can do? I should show it to you, the little green dress like apples. That is if you are interested. You are interested? Interested in the work of the workmen-and-workwomen-spiders and silkworms and aunts. Well, I daresay it’s the women who do all the work, isn’t it. Critter, critter on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? You are interested?’

  Father Cosimo’s eyebrows lifted as he asked the question, something colder glinting in the twinkle of his eyes. Roland had the feeling – perhaps he was paranoid – that the question was loaded with the notion that he might be needing the apple-green suit of clothes because he (or his gang of Australian thieves) had concealed the Bambinello in some secret hidey-hole of his own and the Baby would need dressing. Why did he get this feeling?

  Why would anyone take the statue? Really. That was the thing that puzzled Roland. Although he naturally realised that devotion is a very powerful emotion, and that there is truly no reasoning with the human heart in all its strange and glorious twists and turns. And there is greed, and there is madness. Love, greed, hope, madness. And Roland’s mind became tangled in the web of all those motives – the faith, the greed, the madness. Could you really sell the Bambinello for a fortune in the back room at some auction house? Could you do that?

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ Father Cosimo said, ‘if you want the truth, I never really liked the look, the style of the Bambinello very much. There is something sulky about the way he holds his mouth. And his foot – people so love to kiss the foot – is really rather clumsy in my opinion. But it takes all kinds, and he is the work of angels after all, Roland, and it takes all kinds of kinds to make a world or to make a universe. Angels and devils and all the rest of them round and round the garden on the heads of pins, wooooh!

  ‘And by the way, Roland, never underestimate the importance of Furta Sacra. It is more than likely that that Boy went off somewhere because he wanted to. You must realise that. Boys will be boys, yes, boys will be boys.’

  There were times when Roland saw a completely different side of Cosimo. He observed him sitting with students explaining with clarity and passion and grace the intricacies of manuscripts from mediaeval books of hours. There was a time when he saw him as he walked for a long time, slowly and patiently, alongside a glamorous young Roman woman while she poured out her heart for the sorrow of losing a child at birth. Gone was the joker with his bagpipe noises, here was a wise and compassionate priest ministering to a soul in need. Cosimo finally went into the church with the grieving woman, and they prayed together before the Bambinello. When they came out the woman seemed to Roland to be touched with a radiance as she descended the vast staircase alone.

  Chapter Four

  The Invisible Boatman of Boulogne-sur-Mer

  Here is the prayer that Cosimo referred to – the ‘Confident Prayer to the Bambinello’. I copied it from a well-worn card in the back of Avila’s missal. You must skip over it if it bothers you at all – some people can’t stand this kind of thing.

  Divine Bambino

  In my difficulties: help me

  From the enemies of my soul: save me

  In my errors: enlighten me

  In my doubts and pains: comfort me

  In my solitudes: be with me

  In my infirmities: invigorate me

  When others despise me: encourage me

  In temptations: defend me

  In difficult hours: strengthen me

  With your Sacred Heart: love me

  With your immense power: protect me

  And, into your arms, when I die: receive me.

  Amen

  I actually think it is rather good – it covers many bases, if the language of baseball is relevant to such a sacred matter.

  After Roland’s year and a half in Rome – during which there was no real news of the stolen or runaway statue, although there were many false alarms, as if the statue were a real missing baby – he returned to live in the suburban monastery of the order in his home town of Melbourne. The memory of the night of the robbery, the moment of shock, remained as in its own separate glass case, illuminated by a fierce light, and it would flash up at him in silence sometimes. His mind had over many years developed a facility for producing such isolated glowing photographic episodes of memory. He would experience the bright image of Eleena’s halo of hair as she went spinning and drifting ahead of him up the vivid viridian green of the greengreen grass of the embankment. Her name echo-hanging in the air, in the sky, like a phantom hot-air balloon, sailing, rising like a holy ascension into blue Italian skies painted on the dome of heaven. ‘Eleena,’ his father calls, calls and calls forever across the skies of memory, up, up, up, year after year after year. The cricket bats fall and the picnic baskets lie abandoned forever on the eternal grassy grass as the cut-out figures of the family groups with their babies and their dogs stand stock-still, their flat feet stuck to the sticky grass, their eyes round with the horrible disbelief of horror, their hearts stopped in their summery breasts, their minds whizzing white in their wintry skulls.

  Strangely enough, I often feel Cosimo at my elbow as I think in tumbling words. Is it possible I am channelling his troubadour green language? Picking up where he left off? Stranger things have happened.

  The death of Eleena, the theft of the Bambinello, these were the shocking, bright moments that could flash up at Roland, often unexpected, reducing him to soft tears of regret and guilt. He would turn away from company, bend his head, shake the image until it receded into the shadows of his deepest heart. Eleena never left him. He could not even place her soul decently in heaven with the angels and saints where surely she belonged. That would be so clean and simple. His grandparents, some cousins, some friends, they were in heaven by now, or at least well on their way. They were of the communion of saints, the faithful departed, the repose of souls, the life everlasting, the resters in perfect peace with Our Father who is in Heaven.

  Eleena never rests, she bounces along as light as a bubble on the air above the grass, her red glass necklace beads spilling and spraying out behind her in bloody blobs of brilliant largesse. Roland never rests, for he is close behind her, running up to those red beads, those gleaming cherry drops splashed and sprayed across the tough tough grass by the roadside, by the ribbon of the running road. Eleena is still half alive, she has a half-life, for Roland is a half of her, and sh
e is half of him.

  When he came back from Rome, Roland the Good went to work in an affluent parish in his home town where he would receive from time to time long and lavish emails from Cosimo in Rome. Gossip and football and odd facts of world and domestic news flitted from Cosimo’s fingers. To read them was to enter the leapfrog language of the mind of the archivist, to hallucinate across the cosmos, to drink a frothy paradise milk, a mediaeval draught from a crystal goblet, to sip a drop of the troubadour language, the language of the birds – Cosimo’s green language, a language acquired, he said, by drinking the blood of dragons. It was somehow wonderful that Cosimo, stuck as he was in the world of his mediaeval manuscripts and dust, could flash his zigzag sentences across the ether, taking Roland up out of the everyday and into an unknown realm of language and thought. It could take Roland closer to Eleena with its apparently carefree bounce and babble, its enchanted flight from flower to flower of thought.

  Cosimo never spoke in his correspondence of the Bambinello, but whenever his address appeared in the inbox Roland would remember for a jolting instant that night when he followed the friar to the empty space in the church. Roland would begin to speculate yet again on the fate of the statue. But Roland was a busy priest about his parish business, and the mysterious fate of the statue (it was only a statue after all) would recede from his thoughts.

  One morning he had cause to lead a prayer for the recovery to health of a schoolgirl, Corazón Mean. This girl, you will find, is not as unconnected to the matter of the Bambinello as you might at first imagine. God does move in those mysterious ways after all, His wonders to perform.

  Corazón’s hair was spread in electric red curls on the bleached white hospital pillow. The effect was startling, even grotesque. Her aunt Diana sat beside her, holding her hand, murmuring to her from time to time, songs, stories, fragments of stories, waiting for her to wake up.

  ‘I dreamed you were in danger, terrible danger,’ Diana whispered. She was Diana the Manipulator, and she too had the bright hair. In her case it was often associated in the family with a wild and fanciful nature, described in her grandfather’s name for her, Rascal. Diana had always, from early childhood, been a vibrant and vivid character. She was like a bright and slippery song, her mother used to say. Like a brilliant song. But when her mother said it, there was a shadow in her voice, a quiver of fear for this wild and lovely girl. All Diana’s nephews and nieces, but in particular Cora who was her goddaughter, were the objects of Diana’s elaborate attentions and affections.

  ‘It was in the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer,’ she said to the sleeping girl, her voice low, musical, breathless, tinged with a mixture of European accents, ‘long long long ago. And this is your favourite story, my dear Corazón. Oh you do look like the little Sleeping Beauty princess. I am afraid you do, and we must find you a prince. It was Sunday in Boulogne-sur-Mer, and all the people, the king was there, and they were in the church praying for good things to happen. Well, a boat, doucement, doucement, sailed silently, ever so silently into the harbour. The boat – it was like a coracle, it had no oars, it had no sails, and there was nobody at all to be seen at all, but in it came, the little wooden boat, sailing along like a bobbing snail, on the water of the harbour, drawn along in its silent progress by seven silent swans. Seven swans a-sailing. If there is a boatman he is invisible – is he le batelier or le bateleur? The Boatman or the Fool? He is invisible.

  ‘And when the people, joyful because the king was among them, came pouring out of the church, a silence fell upon them as they saw the boat at the edge of the water, bathed in a mysterious glow, and in the boat, standing like a little child, just three feet tall, a lady. Three feet tall. No, not a lady – the statue of a lady. Yes, it was the statue of a lady in the boat. She was black as the blackmost black and made from wood that came from a deep dark forest and she resembled a goddess, a tiny little wooden one. The people knew when they saw her that she was Mary the Mother of Jesus, Star of the Sea, come from the sea to bless the town. In the boat with her they found a book, a book of Gospels. These Gospels were most beautifully written in the Syriac language. The people welcomed her and they took her and the beautiful book, with great joy and ceremony, back to the church where they prayed and sang, breaking at last the silence that had fallen as the boat came sailing in.’

  Diana’s voice sang softly up and down, the accent delicately embroidered with its blurred Mediterranean cadence – something Spanish, something French, something Italian. There were Australian and Irish traces also in her voice, so that it often took on a faintly North American shape. Every word was clearly enunciated, separated from the word before it and the word after, and yet it had the effect of flowing and misting all at once, moving in and out of focus, the better to tell the story. When she said ‘little’ it sounded like ‘littel’ and when she said ‘sailing’ it sounded like ‘selling’, ‘people’ was ‘pippel’.

  I have made a study of accents. They are fascinating when you get into them. Not everybody has the time to do this. Amber and Aurora and I speak to each other in all sorts – regional Irish and Scots are favourites. Diana the Manipulator had developed a highly original and particularly mesmerising accent of her own. Littel-selling-pippel. Cora had heard it all before, but as always it held her in its spell.

  ‘Yes, the people knew it was Mary who came from the sea. Mysterious and magical creatures come up from the sea, Cora. Think of your little ancestor, Niña, who was brought from the sea when she was a baby, and nobody ever knew who she really was. How mysterious, Cora. Niña was a baby, a stranger, miraculously saved from a shipwreck and adopted into our family. And now you and I have Niña’s red hair. Where did it come from, this hair? How did you get these hair genes, my darling, when Niña was not your grandmother, she was only the mysterious child who came from the sea and she never had any parents or grandparents and she never had a baby of her own? Niña stopped and started with herself. Could the red hair genes just jump around in the family without the help of blood? What a very funny thought. And she was an artist also, like you.’

  Cora’s eyelids fluttered open. She was still drowsy, but if anyone could be entrusted with the task of keeping her entertained while in the hospital, it was Diana. As she opened her eyes she found Diana’s hand softly resting on hers. A ripple of affection ran through the bedcovers.

  ‘Thank you for coming, I hoped you would. Well, I knew you would. I wasn’t asleep, I was listening to the story. Go on. I love that story about the lady in the boat.’

  Cora was back in the bed of her childhood, back in the womb, back listening to the stories Diana loved to tell her, back in a world of safety and security, after the nightmare of the pain and the fainting and the fright and the surgery and the strangeness and swift upside-down-ness of all that is sudden and unexpected and out of control.

  ‘Alas, that little statue is now lost and gone. All that remains of her is her tiny black hand. I have seen her hand, it is in a glass box decorated with silver and gold, it is so very precious that it is kept in a special place in the treasury in the church in Boulogne-sur-Mer under lock and key. It is the black wooden hand of Our Lady of the Holy Blood. For that is the name they gave to the little lady in the boat. Today if you come from England on the ferry, you will arrive in Boulogne-sur-Mer at perhaps the very spot where the lady came sailing in. The very magic spot.’

  There’s another story about Boulogne-sur-Mer, a story Diana did not tell Cora, a story she possibly didn’t even know. It sits in my own memory and in history and myth in ghastly opposition to the story of the little black miracle lady. I am not sure how I come to know it, but whenever I hear the word ‘Boulogne-sur-Mer’, this story, which I possibly read in one of my grandfather’s books, comes to my mind. It is unforgettable and terrible.

  The story is about an English ship called the Amphitrite. It carried convicted criminals, and in 1833 it was blown off-course on its way to Australia. It caught fire off the French coast at Boulogne-sur-Mer, right i
n the watery pathway left by the boat carrying the little statue all those years before. Its cargo consisted of women prisoners and their children, which is a horrible thing to think about. If a prisoner ever escaped, the captain would have to pay a penalty. So, for fear they would get away, he wouldn’t let the women come on deck when the ship caught fire.

  They all died. It’s kind of easy to write, ‘They all died’, but it is three words filled with the fierce heat of the leaping fire and swiftly moving smoke, and terror and turmoil and screams, supernaturally hideous screams and bubbling skin and bright roasting flesh. The women, with superhuman, even miraculous strength, burst through the decks and into the waiting sea where they drowned. A hundred and three women and countless babies and children died in the water, and naked corpses floated like cabbages on the shifting surface of the deep dark ocean, bobbing silently, long sopping hair floating wide. They drifted on the face of the sea and were strewn, wet, inert and ragged sculptures in shawls of shrouds along the stones and sands of the beach. Women with babies clasped in their arms, children alone and naked on the seashore. A hundred and three souls – I do like to hear the numbers. If some of the women, even one of the women, had invoked Our Lady of the Holy Blood – who knows, I might not have had this story to tell, and the celebrated beach and the celebrated fishing boats would be all there is to discuss, apart from the statue of the little black lady. Oh, and there are also live mines still present under the sand as souvenirs of the Second World War.