Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  Our mother, short, rigid and supercilious in her daughter’s presence, had reached him first and was forced to invoke her family tree when he wasn’t willing to honour the cheque she wanted to cash without first clearing it. When our mother had been a teller in a bank she had cashed the cheques of persons known to her on the spot, without requiring an alibi. And she had been a teller in this very bank: head office, what’s more. The calibre of bank tellers had definitely gone off since her day. Could she see the manager?

  But the manager had already seen her and called, ‘Cash it! Cash it!’ in dulcet tones from his cubicle. ‘Anything for Mrs Coretti!’ Which meant either he had a special soft spot for our mother, as a great many people had, or he was acquainted with her time-tested technique.

  During this performance, the queue, one person long, went from sighing loudly and folding its arms across its chest to drilling two holes in the back of Stella’s head with gimlet eyes.

  Performance over, the ex-teller gave a perfect demonstration of the Alexander Technique, looking neither to her right nor to her left – where her other misbegotten daughter was innocently bystanding – and making a balletic exit.

  The first misbegotten daughter was then heard by the second to be addressing the teller rather more icily than he deserved. ‘Well, then,’ she was heard to say in a voice both solemn and composed, ‘I shall just have to move my account elsewhere, shan’t I?’ I thought the use of ‘shan’t’ a trifle unproletarian, but once on the street, Allegra began to brandish the thirty-two dollars and sixty cents’ worth of Mad Meg kitty, narrowing her eyes and grimacing. ‘Fucking men!’ she said. ‘They always think they know best!’ She’d wanted to take forty dollars out of the account.

  I ask her, ‘Is thirty dollars the entire Mad Meg kitty?’ and immediately rage turns to despair. ‘What are we going to do?’ she howls, and well she might howl, because in the wake of David destroying my show, the Troika want to be bought out. ‘We’ll have to sell,’ she sobs. ‘Oh, I’m sorry Bel, I’m so sorry.’ And we find ourselves sitting in the gutter outside the Pantechnicon, the Mad Meg kitty in Allegra’s lap, weighed down by the coins, and our arms around each other, howling our heads off. Then Maggie and Kelly are sitting each side of us. ‘That’s not all,’ Maggie croaks, and addresses our bloodshot eyes to the awning over our heads. A truck has driven into it and buckled it so badly that the owners of the building have had the caveat on demolition removed. Maggie, Kelly and Chantal are going to have to find other premises or go out of business.

  We repair to the aromatic Pantechnicon interior. Maggie thinks they might take a stall at the Victoria Market on Sundays to start with, but the problem remains of where they will live, as they are now living illegally above the shop. It’s gloom all round. Allegra has decided to get divorced, but David is still living with her and, though Miles has taken his clothes, his paints remain. In spite of exhortations from Miles and threats not to allow him access to his clothes, he is going to be awfully hard to dislodge. He has said he’ll fight Allegra tooth and nail to get custody of Nin, and although it’s most unlikely he’ll ever be granted custody of anything, he says he’s suing for his share of Mad Meg, in which he has no shares but could succeed in taking half Allegra’s. We’re bankrupt, the Kellys are evicted, and though the details of Dadda’s will haven’t yet been finalised, The Brolga has succeeded in getting the Siècle Trust up and running, the first artist-in-residence being ensconced in Harry’s beach house where Dadda’s ashes lie, unvisited, under the grevilleas. We sit around with our heads hung, listening to the distant din of the cars now whizzing off and onto the freeway, as if there had never been a protest at all.

  PART FOUR

  THE PROMISED LAND

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Translating

  ITALIAN BARBERS WERE, and still are, part of Australian life; they once out-numbered hairdressers and advertisements datin back fifty years can still be seen in their windows, offering Gent’s Hair Cut, Australian or Continental, 5/-, Ladies’ Style Cut, 7/6. It was in such a shop that the Antifascist Concentration of Melbourne had its headquarters.

  The barber, Enzo Caruso, was once a member of the Matteotti Club. Well before I was born, Uncle Nicola’s friend Spencer Lonsdale, authority residing in his big black beard, would sit in the barber’s chair on Wednesday nights and preside over the excitable and volatile left-wing Italians.

  Uncle Nicola would try to keep the agenda up to date by reporting on the activities of the Antifascist Concentration in Paris, but apart from liking the sound of Uncle Nicola’s voice, a sound behind which they felt it justified to rally, the Matteotti Club members were more concerned with the dominance of one man’s red-shirted biceps over another’s. Life was an opera: you rallied, sang lustily, strong lips giving shape to the patriotic reverberations in your breast. You skited, maybe you slept with a pistol under your pillow or dealt in scrap metal about whose origins you knew better than to ask. Perhaps you had connections with the Mafia – after all, the Mafia were antifascist too.

  Poor Uncle Nicola. Crane his well-educated head into their midst as he would, he could not get much more across than that Enzo Caruso trimmed his beard to look like Lenin’s. Yet he strove to tell his audience what he thought about their position in Australia. Australia, he would say, was the living demonstration of Marxist class conflict. If ever an antifascist voice was needed it was here, where the clash between government and workers was head on. Australia was a country of possessors and the dispossessed. ‘I possessori e i spossessori!’ But though he rallied and rounded up his listeners with passionate rhetoric, Wednesday night after Wednesday night the Antifascist Concentration of Melbourne would dissolve, not so much inspired by his ideas as having learnt how to imitate his delivery of them. They’d make tulips of their hands and declare they’d have, with eyeballs peeled, ‘onore e soddisfazione morale’, as if they were off to fight duels. ‘Ardore!’ they’d exclaim with Uncle Nicola’s timbre and emphasis, ‘entusiasmo!’

  Uncle Nicola tried to involve influential figures from the Australian Left in the activities of his group, but these people were quite often above barber-shop politics, their racial chauvinism extending to Italians. To them, Italy was an overpopulated place wanting to get rid of its surplus of unemployed peasants, a place where labour had little value, and the labourer, accordingly, went cap in hand to his prospective employer, unable to negotiate. This attitude must have brought Uncle Nicola low, as his major contribution to Italian leftist politics had been the organisation of peasant leagues. However, instead of seeing the Italians as a pool of workers waiting to be organised and converted, the Australian labour movement preferred to leave well alone and to regard the Italians as intractable peasantry. For their part, all but a few of the Italians were politically apathetic, having come to Australia to rid themselves of politics.

  It was something of a victory then, when the Australian Antifascist Concentration, less than thirty strong, helped rustle up several hundred supporters, enough to fill a large theatre, in order to commemorate Matteotti on the fourth anniversary of his death. Uncle Nicola was a star attraction in his native tongue.

  Several Australians attended the memorial: communists, socialists, anarchists and Labor men, and messages of support came from Trades Hall. The occasion was widely reported in both the English language press and the small but active left-wing Italian press. Only one Australian, a retired Labor MP, spoke out against the rally, saying Australians should refrain from showing solidarity with a group of people about whom they did not have enough information.

  While the Australian public might have known little about the Italians in their midst, their government was constantly informed – over-informed on occasions. There was certainly plenty of adverse information on Uncle Nicola available to people in power and as a result he was constantly denied citizenship, while rabid and active fascists were granted it.

  He sent a copy of the speech he made at the Matteotti rally to the socialist directorate
in Paris and sustaining words of encouragement came back to him. He was now receiving so much propaganda from Europe, he had to take a post-office box. He would redirect what came his way to places where it might have had some effect. He lobbied politicians and prominent members of the Italian community, whether they were fascists or not. Night after night he spent as many hours as he could at his creaky desk, roasted in summer, frozen in winter (in spite of long johns, knee pads and flannel tied round his chest), making sure the appropriate information reached the right people. Not even the Depression, which hit when Australia was in a very shaky state and was to have a drastic effect on numbers in the Antifascist Concentration of Melbourne, would prevent Uncle Nicola from pursuing his single-minded course.

  In June 1929, Uncle Nicola wrote: ‘Come to the aid of my understanding, Lord. There have been coal miners and timber workers on strike all year all over the land, and the Prime Minister says it’s time the Commonwealth Government pulled out of industrial arbitration. He announced his plan, then took off immediately to play golf at the seaside while his office was being redecorated.’

  In October: ‘Well, he got what he deserved. A man from his own party brought him down over a technicality on the floor of the House. The gentleman golfer was then forced to an election in which his party was soundly thrashed, with the former secretary of Trades Hall, who had been fined fifty pounds for inciting the timber workers’ strike, taking his seat.’

  Uncle Nicola had been filled with hope when the government changed hands, and wrote to Paris saying he’d probably have his citizenship soon. But he was disappointed once again. His application was deferred, the structure of the Australian Labor Party being such that they actually had a bias in favour of fascists. Uncle Nicola was at pains to make this clear to them, but the party apparatus was cumbersome, the wheels turned slowly, and the fascists had some fellow travellers among the turners.

  The Depression threw most of the Italian left-wingers out of work, so Uncle Nicola lost practically all his followers in a general migration north to the Queensland canefields. Times were really tough for him. To save him from complete penury, the university found him some money for a research project and in the next few years he was to make copious annotations to The Inferno, showing a disdain for many of the inferences made by Dante scholars before him. For a socialist he was a fine theologian, and, like Uncle Garth, knew the Bible inside out.

  He fretted for Allegra and Dadda, for whom he felt full responsibility now Emilio was dead. In Paris the Katzes, like so many other people, were finding the going hard as there was no real work for architects in such straitened times. Rose’s recent marriage to Laurent Hirsch was a blessing, however, since Laurent came from a wealthy family and also had money of his own.

  His family hadn’t been able to interest Laurent in the family brokerage firm and were trying to interest him in medicine. There was a relative in the medical profession living in Melbourne, Australia. Having washed their hands of Laurent, they hoped he might be influenced into a lucrative career on the other side of the world. Although it was so very far away, the Katzes, less capitalistically inclined than the Hirschs, were excited that Rose was going to Melbourne to live, and Uncle Nicola was warned in advance that friends were on the way.

  It was December 1931. Uncle Nicola, awaiting Rose and Laurent at Port Melbourne Dock in striped trousers and a morning coat, was easily recognised among the good British stock awaiting reinforcement in their far-flung clime. The once-applauded Labor government, bedevilled by the Depression and the refusal of the state government of New South Wales to meet its overseas loans repayments, was on the brink of being trounced in its turn by a reconstituted Opposition. Though Rose didn’t know any of this, her first impressions of her new homeland were those of doom.

  As they drove through Melbourne by taxi to Uncle Nicola’s lodgings, Rose was amazed by the absence of tall buildings and couldn’t help thinking Melbourne had suffered some catastrophe they hadn’t yet heard about, such as an earthquake. It was the late afternoon of a mild day, the sky suffused with pink, gold and grey, through which gulls were wheeling clamorously, one among them had an eye missing, and another, a foot, which added to the feeling of devastation yet to reveal itself.

  Instead of devastation, however, Rose found horticulture, agriculture, slowness. ‘Plants, everywhere, plants. And everywhere birds. Not just seagulls, but birds I had never dreamed existed. I thought maybe they had been made up, invented, dreams on wings.’

  Uncle Nicola’s room in South Melbourne served him in every capacity. He cooked, washed, slept, read, wrote, declaimed and entertained there. He’d latterly put a rug on the floor to muffle the sound of the nightly promenade he took for the sake of his punctuation, although the other tenants still insisted he only promenaded to annoy them. In the area that served as a makeshift kitchen he’d installed two wine barrels for the supply of bulk Rutherglen, without which, he assured Rose, his digestion would have been seriously impaired.

  For the evening meal, he had invited guests. Spencer Lonsdale and his Australian wife Grace, the Pro-Consul for Paraguay, Señor Gil-Serrano, who taught Spanish at the university and was as penurious as Uncle Nicola, and lastly a shell-shocked French-speaking mathematician from the university called Cedric Barnes, who avoided treading on cracks. Uncle Nicola’s floor, which was largely bare boards in the places to which his rug did not extend, demanded intricate negotiation of him.

  Gil-Serrano, a Spaniard from Madrid, had never been to Paraguay, but had become the Pro-Consul because he was one of the few people in Melbourne who spoke Spanish. The small stipend he received for his consular activities was an essential adjunct to the money he earned from his Spanish classes. The mathematician, Cedric Barnes, was terrified of Germans, who were all spies as far as he was concerned, and he spoke continually about them, warning Rose and Laurent to avoid them wherever possible. He and Laurent had in common their war service around Pozières. Laurent was distinguished even further by having been among the six thousand ‘saviours of Paris’, ferried to the front in taxi cabs from Paris for the Battle of the Marne.

  Uncle Nicola had gone to great pains. Along with his menu went a performance in which the entire making of the meal was mimed, capped off at the dessert by an illustration of fascists avoiding him on Melbourne streets. He was excited and delighted to have company, and even more excited and delighted when he discovered that Laurent was just as enthusiastic a cook as he, and able to perform the menu fluently in French for the benefit of those whose Italian was shaky. The truffle was an item they discussed, lamented and found no substitute for.

  Grace Lonsdale, not typical of Australian womanhood, was a naturalist and a painter. Her French was fair. A wavering socialist to start with, she had become devout and well informed since her husband had made a close friend of Uncle Nicola. An intense woman, who dressed severely and had worn-down, smoke-stained teeth in a round face, she was very interested to know what was going on among the Italians in Paris. She smoked furiously while Rose told her.

  The influence of the grand old men of the Left was vanishing in Paris. Allegra, who had spent a number of months working for Filippo Turati, missed working for him now he was incapacitated by age and illness. Allegra had become very homesick, while Dadda, almost fifteen, having been in Paris nearly four years, was well on the way to becoming a Parisian. With his spring-jointed stride he was marching around Paris, quoting over and over the motto of the new Italian Left, now under the leadership of Carlo Rosselli: ‘Non mollare mai! Neppure un momento, neppure un pollice.’ (Don’t ever weaken! Not for a moment, not for an inch.)

  For his first three years in Paris, Dadda had had no regular schooling, but he had been coached on Sundays by an Italian woman, a Signora Regina Pecora. Signora Pecora, in her sixties, didn’t run to sophisticated instruction. She tutored several children for the money on the strength of a teaching qualification she had not used for many years. Dadda’s maths was never marvellous and, though his knowle
dge of science used to impress me, he must have picked it up from his own interested reading, for he certainly didn’t learn it in Paris. What he did learn was how to draw, and not from Signora Pecora, but from Lev Katz, who taught him about perspective in architecture and showed him drafts he’d done for buildings.

  When it became clear that Dadda was talented, Lev arranged to have him enrolled at a technical school. He was chosen out of his class there to attend an advanced session in the evenings, in a loft above the school where he met with professional painters and discovered that art was what he burned for.

  Uncle Nicola was delighted to hear this news of Dadda, though he fretted inwardly as it seemed to mean that for Dadda to have a profession he would have to stay in Paris. Laurent didn’t agree. ‘An artist is an artist wherever he is,’ he said. ‘My family wanted me to be a broker, and they think they’ve sent me out here so I’ll get interested in the medical profession. They don’t know I’ve come of my own accord. I want to be a chef. And I will be. Rose wants to be an artist, and she will be. Henri will paint no matter where he is. He might as well come and paint here.’

  Uncle Nicola took heart. It was something to be a pioneer. There seemed a lot to hope for in this country, after all. He put by his fears that it would not survive and began to think of its survival – his annotations to The Inferno now seemed weighty with promise. His gift to Australia would be the intellectual heritage of Italy. In his mind’s eye, he saw Dadda, a cultured and gifted man, a modern man with respect for the genius of men like Dante, Goethe, Voltaire and Shakespeare, but a man with ideas for a new and better world.