Child of the Twilight

by Carmel Bird

  But it is the scene of the burning of the Amphitrite that comes to me when I hear the name Boulogne-sur-Mer. I’ve never worked out whether the captain was burnt at the scene, or later burnt in hell. Maybe both.

  Diana’s story of the black wooden hand continues.

  ‘You have seen the little hand, you saw it,’ Cora says.

  ‘I saw it one sunny afternoon. I was very young, and had recently married my darling Federico.’

  This was where so many of Diana’s stories would lead, to the moment when she was very young and had just married Federico Castillo. It was like a litany, and Cora loved it because it was so romantic and so sad. And somewhere deep within it there was a note of warning, as if the storyteller and the listener were getting close to the edge of a high and dangerous cliff.

  ‘Tell me the story. About when you married Federico.’

  ‘I married Federico as you know in Madrid. It was such a still and sunshiny day, and a year later, when we were living in Barcelona, he was suddenly killed. He was out riding. Suddenly. One morning. A riding accident. Since you ask me for the story with the sad-sad ending and the happy-hopey start, Corazón, there it is, so simple, my little darling. And you, my good-god-child, are my only child ever, but that’s a happy start, isn’t it, all over again. Hundreds of times I have told you this story.’

  ‘Hundreds.’

  ‘No matter how many times I tell it, it can never change. The end is always the same, the end of this story.’

  The mood darkens. Diana knows, and the knowing child Cora knows, that one of them, most likely Diana, will one day change the story forever by dying herself. In the normal course of events this one will be Diana.

  ‘Do you want to tell me the bit about the baby, Diana?’

  Cora knows Diana always wants to tell the story of the baby.

  ‘The baby was born three months after his father’s death. And then he died not very long after he was born. Three months after he was born. I held him in my arms and now I hold him forever in my heart. I could not save him, though I prayed so hard. He was so beautiful, Cora, so very beautiful. He is buried with his father.’

  ‘That part – that is the saddest.’

  ‘I think perhaps it is. Yes, it is. But it is sweet and lovely too. Well, it is very hard always with all stories, I think, to say which things are saddest, really. His name was Xavier.’

  Then Diana’s tone lifted suddenly and her eyes were bright with strangely brilliant tears as she said that she had been reading in a magazine the story of a baby girl who died.

  ‘Her mother was a potter, and what they did, the mother and father, they loved the baby girl so much that they had her little body cremated. And when it was reduced to very fine ash, they mixed it in with some fine smooth clay, and the mother made a beautiful pot.’

  Cora stared at her aunt silently in amazement and horror.

  ‘And now they have the baby pot forever. It was in America.’

  Cora was silent.

  ‘No,’ Diana said, looking carefully into the pain in her niece’s eyes. ‘No, it is not a very comforting story, is it. I read it in a magazine. I wonder where they keep that pot, and what will become of it, and I imagine – because I have a brain that can’t help thinking these things – I imagine that somebody comes along and breaks the pot. What then? What happens to this most original way of remembering the little baby then? I wonder. It is, I think, the same with making babies these funny days we live in. There are so many ways, so many strange and wonderful ways to make a baby, Corazón, you would be very surprised if you heard about all the ways to make a baby now.’

  But Corazón’s interest had skipped from the potter and the many ways to make a baby, which she took for granted. She wanted to go back to the original story of the death of Xavier.

  ‘One day when I have a baby I will call him Xavier. I’ve decided.’

  ‘Fais dodo now, my darling, go to sleep –

  Sing every one

  My story’s done

  And look

  For round the house

  There runs a mouse

  A little mouse

  If you can catch him

  Before he scampers in

  You can make

  A great big cap

  Of fur

  Out of his skin.’

  The story of the death of Spanish baby Xavier is another one that Avila used to tell to me. She seemed to scoop up the woeful tales of early death from all over – her family, her friends, friends of friends, strangers, and members of the Sacred Heart family of course.

  There are so many ways to make or buy babies. I know of at least one of those ways intimately. And need I say that it was Avila who organised the wedding of the people who later turned their baby into a lovely pot. So I knew that story too. They had the wedding in a gipsy cave in Granada with heaps and heaps of marigolds. I’m not sure why, but with the weddings, the logic of all the parts and how they fit together is often beyond my understanding. Avila is a genius.

  I sit with my beloved dog Google among the snow globes, and we google the universe. It’s like a magic carpet out of control. The genie is out of the bottle. Or, as Cosimo might put it, the goose is loose. But I also like the little old-fashioned stories Diana tells Cora about black hands and babies.

  Corazón’s own life had just been threatened, but she had survived. She was sixteen years old. This was in the middle of the fatal year 2001. Because she was ill, her godmother Diana had zoomed or fluttered in, as she occasionally did, from Spain or sometimes France or Italy, to see to the girl she loved so much and treasured so very dearly. The story of Diana’s wedding, widowhood, loss of Xavier – all now a myth – would take the child’s mind off her own troubles.

  As a girl of sixteen herself, Diana had discovered her love of European art and literature and legends when she was studying for her final exams. The desire for these things took her far from her Australian home, changing the direction of her life. Forever. She stood in the Botticelli gallery in the Uffizi for days on end weeping at the beauty of the Primavera and the Venus. She had always been extreme.

  ‘What on earth does Diana do in that big apartment all alone in Barcelona?’ the family ask themselves. ‘Why doesn’t she come home to Australia, here where we can see her and look after her, keep her safe? Keep her safe from herself and her wild ways and ideas?’ The answer is obvious in the framing of the question. ‘Why didn’t she at least come home when the baby died? If anything you would think she would have come home when that happened. She looks and sounds more foreign every time we see her. Will you just listen to her voice? She gets further and further away, and the way she talks gets more and more strange, people stare at her in public places.’

  Diana is very striking, thin and tall and elegant, with her flare of vivid flaming hair, as she always was but more so, ever more so. She is becoming more and more like a strange and rascally gipsy girl-woman, even though she was born long long ago in the early fifties, in the strange lull after the war, the war that left the mines in the sand on the beach at Boulogne-sur-Mer.

  Round and round the rugged rocks the ragged Rascal ran over the hills and faraway.

  Diana was born in the small town of Woodpecker Point on the north-west coast of Tasmania in 1950. She went to boarding school at the Lisieux convent, a Sacred Heart school in Melbourne, as did all the girls in her family, generation after generation. She did part of a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. She travelled to France when she was twenty, went to Italy and Spain, met Federico, married him, just as she said, in Madrid, was widowed and shortly thereafter gave birth to a son who also died.

  It is such a simple statement: Diana met Federico. Yet in Diana’s memory the details and the emotions of that meeting naturally remain central, vivid, sweet, beautiful. It happened in Madrid. In the apartment of some friends where Diana was staying for a week.

  ‘I was sitting with Ana on a big green velvet sofa with fat silk tassels on t
he corners, we were reading magazines and sighing over the dresses and the shoes. The door to this room opens suddenly and Ana’s older brother comes bursting in. But behind him there is another man, his friend, quiet and dark in the shadows and I turn to look at him, this outline of a man, tall and slim, oh, so very beautiful, athletic, and then he steps forward and I look into his face and I am captivated by his eyes, so dark and smiling and kind but strange. He has such eyelashes, oof! Everything and everybody else disappears into a puff of mist, and it is just me and him in the soft quiet room in the apartment in Madrid. I look at his pale blue silk shirt with fine white wavy lines embroidered in it as if I have never seen such a thing before. We sit on the green sofa and talk, and it seems to me we have been there always, and will be there always. It is Federico. My Federico. “Always” becomes very short. But very beautiful. Always. Forever. Forever and ever. He was so clever and so funny and so kind, Federico. So sweet.’

  Returning now to the death of little Xavier – ‘It was the shock, the shock,’ Diana says, ‘of his father’s death before he was even born – that is what killed baby Xavier – I know. “Forever” is sometimes so very short.’

  There is a picture of the wedding that shocked the family at the time. The picture now registers a deep strangeness in the place it occupies on the piano in the old family house at Woodpecker Point. The bride is in black silk, with a long black lace mantilla. She has, according to tradition, no bridesmaids, but a small boy stands beside her holding a silver box in which are contained the thirteen golden coins given by the handsome groom to his solemn bride. Diana holds a gleaming posy of citrus leaves from which trails a thick braid of orange blossoms. The wedding took place in the early evening in the church of the Virgin of Atocha, a cool, light and elegant place near the Retiro Park.

  Today of course when I write ‘Atocha’ I think of the Madrid bombing of 2004 – my modern girl’s mind is naturally filled with such things.

  The Black Virgin of Atocha, enthroned in gold, is high up above the altar, and very black. She looks so serene and so remote. Down at the back of the church there is a small statue of the Child Jesus of Atocha in a glass case. Knowing what we know about baby-snatching, maybe he had better watch out or he could find himself sharing a manger in a stable somewhere with the rich boy Bambinello.

  In an album on the bookshelf at Woodpecker Point there are other pictures of the wedding. They all have a very foreign un-Australian flavour, some black-and-white, some fading examples of early colour, slivers of Franco’s Spain, small and now so sad, so very sad. Diana with one of her young sisters who had always hoped she might be a bridesmaid. This sister wears a green dress – such bad luck – and as she stands beside Diana in black, her crooked little smile betrays her sense of helpless doom.

  There are some black-and-white pictures of Xavier – in his pram, on his mother’s knee, lying on a rug beneath an old olive tree. On a hillside Somewhere-in-the-Middle-of-Nowhere, Spain. Beside him on the rug is a fluffy elephant, not unlike Eleena’s pale pink elephant, the one Roland found in the secret suitcase. There is a great universal language of the children’s toy.

  Personally I had several pink plush elephants in various sizes, the smallest being only as big as a medium-size mouse. I sewed on a pair of pearl shirt buttons for his eyes. They were monstrously large. When I was a child I always liked my toys to have big eyes. Avila made sure I had access to every toy possible, from the severely educational to the grotesquely frivolous.

  One time when we were in New York, Toys “R” Us opened in Times Square, and I, at the ripe old age of eight, was given the job of taking Eloise, the small daughter of one of Avila’s staff, along to the Babyland General Hospital to watch the birth of some Cabbage Patch Babies. Isabella was with us and also Amber Moon/Aurora Flare. We generally travel in a nice little convoy wherever we go.

  There was a tree as high as a cathedral in a field of cabbages, and in the field there were nurses in white ready to attend the birth of the Babies who could then be adopted by the little girls who were the Clients. A hush settled on the patch as one of the nurses said: ‘Mother Cabbage is about to give birth. I am dilating Mother Cabbage now. Push, Mother Cabbage, push.’

  I totally wanted to throw up, but I had to hold on because Eloise was deeply fascinated and craned forward to see. When Mother Cabbage was fully dilated ‘ten cabbage leaves’ the nurse reached into a hole and pulled out a naked baby, holding it up by the legs in triumph and giving it a spank. Isabella arranged for Eloise to adopt it, and Eloise called it Sydney, after me, something I found utterly uncool at the time. I was so mad at her I couldn’t speak. Imagine, this disgusting thing going about the place connected to me by her/my name. I didn’t think much of Eloise and I am pleased to say I have never seen her since.

  Anyhow, while Diana is leading Cora through her memories of sad romance and terrible loss, Father Roland Bruccoli is in the school chapel offering prayers for the speedy recovery of ‘our fellow student, Corazón’.

  Chapter Five

  Corazón Mean and the Fate of the Ectopic Foetus

  The art studio of the school is at the end of the narrow brick path that winds past the Lourdes grotto and through the rose garden. Corazón Mean, the top final year art student, was in the studio late one Friday afternoon when with barely a sound she fell off her stool, white as a ghost, and lay unconscious on the floor. A sharp and pained intake of breath, and then she toppled over. Two earthenware jugs from the still-life cupboard rolled from their rickety table and smashed on the floor – it seemed to happen soundlessly – taking a long flame-coloured chiffon drape with them.

  By the time the art teacher Miss Vienna reached the girl a pool of blood was already spreading across the tiles. A long liquid crimson finger moved steadily over the terracotta, then suddenly fanned out into a lacework tracery resembling a diagram in an anatomy illustration. The fibres of the red filagree swiftly reached into the crevices between the tiles, soaked into the ancient grout, darkening and defining the squares with outlines of profound shadow. The light outside the window was fading into early twilight.

  ‘It was as if,’ Miss Vienna said later, ‘Cora had been shot by a silent arrow, brought down, her hair flung across her face, white as a sheet, still as death!’ Rosita Vienna was given to drama, known for her exaggeration and hysteria and exclamation points. The only other girl in the art room at the time was Pieta Berri, and she had not seen or heard a thing, nothing until Miss Vienna went whirling across the room, knocking over a jug of paintbrushes clickety-clack, flying, Pieta said later, it was as if Miss Vienna was actually flying across the room like a witch on an invisible broomstick.

  ‘Run, Pieta, run to the infirmary. Get Mrs Dodge. Run, Pieta, run!’ And Pieta ran.

  And Miss Vienna knelt in helpless horror as Corazón Mean’s blood spread in its eerie progress across the art room floor. The girl seemed limp and cold, and the blood was running down her legs, staining her white ankle socks. Miss Vienna, known to this narrative as Rosita the Innocent, prayed for help. ‘Mary, Mother of God!’ They were the only words she could think of.

  And in no time, yet in a time that seemed to last forever, Nursing Sister Lilian Dodge was there, and then the ambulance sailed through the great front gates of the school and paramedics with a stretcher came dashing up the brick path through the rose garden past the Mother of God in the grotto of Lourdes. Something had happened to time in the instant when Cora fell to the floor, something stretching and something shrinking. Some quality of unreality entered the real world of paint and paintbrush and canvas and chiffon, marked the place with a splattered star, like a star advertising cheap goods in a shopping mall, or a sudden star on the tooth of a television celebrity advertising toothpaste. The moment was starred, marked for attention.

  Look here! Here lies Cora Mean suddenly bleeding to death on the art room floor.

  Everyone else was miles away, over in the boarding house. So nobody saw the ambulance arriving or departing. Nobo
dy saw Sister Dodge leave for the hospital with Cora. Again, in no time at all, the girl was hooked up to oxygen and a drip at the nearby clinic in Gloucestershire Road.

  ‘Report to Dr Silver – and to Cora’s house-mistress,’ Sister Dodge said to Miss Vienna. ‘And take Pieta with you.’ She said it steadily, sternly, slowly.

  Miss Vienna, her mind racing into the exotic realms of murder and guilt and possibility, in tears of panic and dismay, first swiftly cleaned up the studio floor and, scrubbing the grouting with the help of Pieta, threw the bloodied cloths into one of the huge garbage containers beside the back gate. She felt excited and strangely criminal. She sloshed buckets of water and chlorine bleach onto the bricks outside the studio door. Then she took off her black apron which was stiff with the stains of oil paints, straightened her hair with both hands, took a deep breath and walked over to Dr Silver’s apartment, a subdued and astonished Pieta in tow.

  The great black outer doors to the apartment, donated by the Deville family who had given many similar objects to the school, had once graced a monastery in sixteenth-century Granada. The door, so grand and heavy and ancient, looked odd in this little Melbourne convent school. Long ago, perhaps before Columbus, a human-sized door had been let into one side panel, and it was through this that Miss Vienna and Pieta stepped. The interior walls of the study were a luscious dull red, the floors marked out in large black and white marble squares, the lights all glowing brass and glittering Indian crystal. Miss Vienna knocked on the principal’s door. ‘Come in!’ The voice was musical, inviting, filled with a lofty authority.

  ‘Cora Mean, fainted, bleeding, Mrs Dodge, emergency, taken at once to the Gloucestershire. Ambulance.’ The information burbled out of Miss Vienna in glops and hysterical slides. Catherine Silver nodded and simply reached for the telephone. She already knew what had happened. News travelled fast in the small world of Lisieux. ‘Excuse me, Miss Vienna, Pieta.’ She rang the clinic, and further clarified some details. ‘All will be well,’ she said, smiling. She rang the housemistress and informed her. ‘Yes, yes, Cora will undergo an emergency appendectomy. Peritonitis. We must all keep very calm and be as discreet as we are able. And now, I think you would both enjoy a cup of hot chocolate, wouldn’t you?’ She took up the small brass bell on her desk and tinkled it under her palm. Old Sister Scholastica came swiftly through the door at the back of the study, scarcely disturbing the air, her feet as if on smooth little brass wheels beneath her habit. She was a crone in a fairytale, soft and benevolent, smelling of vetiver.