Living As a Moon

by Owen Marshall

  Afterwards, Paula and I walked up to the little cemetery. So tidy, so obviously a place lovingly visited, with sealed photographs on many of the graves and plaques, and none of the vandalism so common at home. We sat on the stone step of the Vergotti family tomb and she showed me the denarius, no larger than my thumbnail, with the fine, raised head of Sextus Pompey on the obverse. We agreed it must have been minted about 40 BC. I have always felt a frisson of delight to hold history in the hand, and returned it with reluctance. ‘Highly bloody unprofessional, you know,’ I said. It was more envy than malice.

  ‘Oh, bullshit,’ she said. ‘I love it. You love it. You know it’s almost impossible to get anything out of the country legitimately now. And it would only end up in a drawer in the museum in Naples with scores of others, even more likely flogged off by some curator there.’

  ‘You’re right. Will you tell Colum before you go?’

  ‘You don’t like him, do you?’

  ‘Not much, but then you do.’ The well-kept graveyard had little exposed earth, or grass, but walls of polished stone inset with photographs and inscriptions like large filing cabinets of the dead. But Paula’s enjoyment was to touch the silver coin, hold it openly for close inspection.

  ‘I like you just as much,’ she said.

  ‘Come off it. You’re sleeping with the guy. I was in the next room remember.’

  ‘Colum’s okay. The sex is okay too. The important thing’s the commendation I’ll get at the end of the stint, and maybe that’ll influence the examiners when I hand in my dissertation, and the universities I apply to afterwards.’

  I was taken aback, not so much by the calculation in her behaviour, as by her honesty in admitting it. We all act in our own interest, but usually disguise it, even to ourselves. I was flattered that she confided in me, although she was sleeping with Colum. I felt male regret too, that ours was a confidence of colleagues, that it was Colum who came to her room in the dark, exposed the pale, fullness of her thighs, took habitual and firm possession. I told her righteously that she was bright enough not to need that sort of help.

  ‘My parents were immigrants from Poland: they’re poor. I’m not exactly a beauty queen, no friends in high places. Nah, I have to make it happen, or it doesn’t happen,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean shagging every lecturer I’ve had. I haven’t had the hard word put on me much actually, which shows the competition perhaps. But it hasn’t been easy. Even a doctorate doesn’t guarantee a decent position any more. I don’t want to end up for life in a polytech, or a teachers’ college, some provincial museum.’

  Here was a realism foreign to me, and an unvarnished expression of it equally unusual. I had a sense of a background and struggle that made my own experience almost genteel. If she’d been confiding in me late at night after a good many drinks, I wouldn’t have been so surprised, but it was mid-afternoon in a quiet graveyard. We sat in the patch of shade at the entrance to the Vergotti tomb, and between buildings was a glimpse of the yachts and fishing boats of the harbour. And she was absolutely right. You did what you could to give yourself the best possible shot at the career you wanted.

  ‘But you’re a bloody good student, aren’t you,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be here otherwise. You deserve the best opportunity.’ On several occasions she’d shown understanding and knowledge superior to my own, but I was too proud to admit that. Perhaps I wasn’t God’s gift to academia after all. I had a quick, unbidden sense of how we looked together there, talking on a stone step in the cemetery. Myself tall, gawky, the lucky one of the family, my grandmother said: the spoilt one, Pops said. Paula, dumpy, with a face like a beachball under her large hat, and dangling a water bottle between her knees. Just for moment I saw us from the outside, as you see a photograph of exact replication, yet with the knowledge it has fallen into the past.

  ‘You don’t always get what you deserve, though,’ she said. ‘It’s a different world for a woman.’

  ‘Right.’ But I wondered if men enjoyed as many advantages as she supposed.

  During those last few weeks we achieved an easy comradeship at the dig. Colum was content to command her nights, and paid no special attention to her during the day. I don’t think the reason was subterfuge. I found it preferable to be sleeping in the villa, and so not reminded of their amours by the noises through the wall. At night in the Villa San Michele there was just the sliding scuttle of lizards, occasional scooters far off, or soothing whispers of the wind from the sea.

  Paula and I didn’t discuss the coin any more. She never again quite approached the honesty expressed in the chapel cemetery, but we would talk often of our dissertations, our academic ambitions, our love of antiquity and the local food. She continued to put on a bit of weight, but I made no mention of that.

  At the beginning of our final week together there was a night cloudburst that caused water to run into the excavation, and Colum asked Paula and me to spend the next day in the office cataloguing material from the midden. The office consisted of two rooms and a primitive lavatory washroom he had rented in a private home close to the site. The owner was old Signora Deluca, who spoke no English, but was always watching from the doorway when any of us were there. Despite her inability to understand what was said, she seemed to enjoy the company, and would laugh when we laughed, click her tongue admiringly when some shard of pottery, or a bone from a long-forgotten banquet, was lifted to the light.

  Paula and I talked more than we worked, and all three of us ate Neapolitan sugar biscuits, Signora Deluca taking mere presence as a right to be included. Perhaps because it was a day so out of normal routine, perhaps because our time in Anacapri was coming to an end, Paula opened up more about her family. The room had green, wooden shutters, and as she talked the bright sunlight shimmered through them, and the sounds of other people’s lives drifted in from the street. Her father had been a surveyor in Poland, but made political enemies, and emigrated. His qualifications weren’t recognised in Australia, and he had to work as assistant to a carpet layer. Neither of her parents understood English well. I asked her if she spoke Polish, and she did so as a reply. ‘I won’t tell you what it means though,’ she said. And when we laughed so did the old lady, putting gnarled fingers to her mouth as if she recognised some indiscretion in the words.

  ‘I bet you’ve never felt different like that,’ Paula said. ‘Going to school, or other kids’ homes, and knowing all the while that you’re not the same. Spending so much time copying what the others do, picking up on what they think and do, and yet always you’re different.’

  ‘I’ve never thought much about it.’

  ‘You don’t have to, that’s the thing. My parents were defeated by it, by the need to remake themselves, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let that happen to me. I had a shitty time at school too. I think that’s why I loved history: the escape from where I was.’

  ‘Ehi, aspettami,’ wait for me, called someone from beyond the green shutters.

  ‘Varsity was a lot better,’ said Paula. ‘Conformity isn’t a doctrine there. It’s everyone for themselves, and I prefer that. I stopped trying to be like other people.’

  ‘It gets very competitive at uni, though, don’t you think. A sort of ugly intensity to do well, especially at post-grad level.’

  ‘I don’t mind competition,’ Paula said. Her appearance was so little a reflection of her character — an unlined, almost cherubic face and soft body. She was so much shorter than me that when we stood together I looked down on the stack of her short, blonde hair, or the stitching of her floppy hat. ‘History’s chock full of competition, isn’t it, and the price of failure was a bloody sight more serious then.’

  ‘The Romans were a violent people,’ I said. Paula smiled, and Signora Deluca rattled like an autumn tree, and gurned at each of us in turn.

  Paula left one day before me to travel to Rome, and from there fly home to Sydney. Colum drove her down to the harbour after a farewell lunch in our usual café. Faustus, Alessandro, and
the three of us. Colum said the lunch would mark the end of stay for me as well as Paula, though naturally his comments in respect of her contribution were warmer and of greater length. Colum gave us both a photograph taken on site — he seated on level one with the Italians, and Paula and I below on level three — and an envelope containing a testimonial. Mine was temperate, but not vindictive. Colum saw me as neither rival, nor equal. As he spoke of us, he rubbed his sunburnt arms, and pale shreds of skin wafted away. Less than ten years later he died of a stroke while in Arles to advise on the preservation of the Roman amphitheatre there.

  I could see people ascending the mountain in the quiet chairlift, one by one borne up over gardens and low walls towards the lookout. Once I’d seen a naked doll in the grass below, spreadeagled like a murder victim and with discarded clothes nearby. Once a man with hairy shoulders washing his upper body from a blue basin at his doorway.

  So the parting between Paula and myself was quite public and routine. A quick hug at the car door, my cheerful contribution to the waving, and the shouted good wishes, as she was driven away. I remember wondering where she was carrying Sextus Pompey, and which of her scholarly attributes Colum had chosen to praise in his report. Her sun-bleached hair and round face were visible at the window for a moment and one hand held up in acknowledgement. ‘An American girl comes next week,’ said Faustus, and he caught my eye, gave a quick smile.

  That last evening Torre came to the villa, and I gave him a bottle of good Umbrian wine for his kindness during my stay. He insisted we drink it together, although he wasn’t able to stay long. We stood at the end of the open walkway and looked down on the harbour where the sharp outlines of the day were being replaced by the soft feathers of dusk, and the yellow lights were gaining strength. The breeze from the fading expanse of ocean was insistent and pleasant; sea birds were noisy on the mountain. Torre said one of his daughters was ill and getting worse, and although he made an effort to show interest in our farewell, his concern was with his family. ‘Come and see me when you come back to Capri,’ he said, but his free hand was opening and closing in a small agitation. He told me he’d miss our evenings together, but when I said I’d better pack for the next day, he left quickly. It was as it should be — family first. Our passing acquaintance would soon be forgotten on his side, but I’ve remembered his goodwill and desire to better himself in America. He left his glass on the wall with wine still in it, and I finished it, standing alone in gathering darkness.

  I slept well that last night in the kitchen of the Villa San Michele, and in the morning made my own way down to the harbour and caught the small ferry to Naples. The six weeks at the Anacapri site had been a busy passage, gone almost before it could be fully grasped, yet the experience unpacks itself often in recollection. Years later I visited Münthe’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and read his book which had been a phenomenal success in its day. ‘I want my house open to sun and wind and the voice of the sea, like a Greek temple, and light, light, light everywhere,’ he said. The sad irony was he became blind at the end.

  Munthe wrote of spring at San Michele: myrtle and honeysuckle, hyacinths and crocuses, tortoises and Minerva owls. I saw none of those, but I did see skylarks coming back to the mountain above the villa, morning light on mottled marble pedestals which held the classical busts he had so lovingly collected, and I looked down from his rotunda to the startling blue of Capri harbour. I had been alone at night in that much-loved house, woken in the spacious kitchen of pale tiles, blue pottery and burnished copper, lightly touched and wonderingly observed artefacts whose beauty was given lustre by antiquity.

  Some of all that came back to me as I listened to Paula Huchro, and the window cleaner worked himself soundlessly out of sight so that the mountains behind Grenoble were unobscured, the dark pines a uniform cover until the snow at higher altitude. Later I would sit with Paula and three other colleagues with glasses of pinot gris, and discuss points arising from her address, before the conversation moved on to Cicero, that eloquent old braggart, yet how loving to his daughter. There would be passing mention of our time together at Anacapri, and our even shorter meeting at the symposium in Genoa. ‘Oh indeed,’ she’d say, ‘Dr Malcolm and I go way back.’ She would smile and meet my eye, but nothing would be said of Sextus Pompey, nothing said of burning Colum and the thinly partitioned rooms in the harbour of Capri, nothing of the Vergotti family tomb above the harbour, nothing essential of our former selves.

  About the Author

  Owen Marshall has written, or edited, twenty-four books. He has held Fellowships at the universities of Canterbury and Otago, and in Menton, France. In 2000 he received the ONZM for Services to Literature in the New Year Honours, and in the same year his novel Harlequin Rex won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction. Marshall is an adjunct professor at the University of Canterbury, which awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in 2002.

  Copyright

  A VINTAGE BOOK published by Random House New Zealand, 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand

  For more information about our titles go to www.randomhouse.co.nz

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  Random House New Zealand is part of the Random House Group

  New York London Sydney Auckland Delhi Johannesburg

  This collection first published 2009

  ‘Another’s Shadow’ first published Takahe

  ‘Anacapri’ first published Landfall

  ‘The Don Fernando Motels’ first published Sunday Star-Times

  ‘Mid-canvas Figures’ first published New Zealand Listener

  ‘Patrick and the Killer’ first published New Zealand Listener

  © 2009 Owen Marshall

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN 978 1 86979 252 7

  This book is copyright. Except for the purposes of fair reviewing no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Text design: Laura Forlong

  Cover illustration: Getty Images

  Cover design: Sarah Laing

  Printed in Asia by Everbest Printing Co Ltd