12 Edmondstone Street

by David Malouf

  But all the dead are still living here. They are living in the campo santo beyond the church, a large walled area, a rectangle very like the one C. itself makes on ancient maps, with its own chapels and funerary monuments and a great wall of slabs, each with an electric candle. The whole place glows at night like an alternative village, which is what it is; a neighbouring, utterly ordinary and unfrightening ‘Village of the dead’. Sunday visits are made there; there is continuous traffic on the road.

  Death here is a commonplace and sociable occurrence. Black-edged notices appear in the square beside the daily headlines. The bell tolls – a single long stroke for a man, a two-note broken one for a woman. Everyone hears and knows.

  But if not shocking, or even shameful as it sometimes is with us, death always comes unexpectedly and too soon. She was only eighty-six, Agatina says of Celeste, why her? There are others so much older. (It is true: half the village seems to be over eighty.) She wasn’t old.

  Once, when I had a fever, Agatina came and insisted that I call a doctor. These fevers, she told me, are dangerous. There was a girl here died of such a fever last week. Terrible! Absolutely overnight. Which girl? I asked. You know her – Carlina. Died overnight. But Agatina, I protested, she was eighty-three! Precisely. So you see you can’t be too careful. Call the doctor and make sure he gives you a suppository. (Italians are addicted to all sorts of drugs and the pharmacy in any village is a wonder of wonders. But suppositories are, for quite primitive reasons I suspect, the favourite of all remedies, and indispensable to any serious cure.)

  Sunday at Agatina’s: In the summer, when the clock has been put forward, we eat early enough for our meal to coincide with the Pope’s mass on television.

  Time in Agatina’s house is a sacred commodity, not to be interfered with. She despises the ‘legal’ hour. All her clocks keep the real one, and she felt magnificently justified last year when a workman (poveretto!) fell to his death in a nearby village while changing the hands of the clock.

  So all through lunch in summer we eat with the Pope’s Mass at full volume, and Celeste and Agatina, between sips of soup and bursts of gossip, participate in all the responses, spoken and sung.

  ‘That Eglantina, I tell you, is a perfect viper – Hear us O Lord,’ says Agatina. ‘This pasta is not my best,’ says Celeste. ‘I apologise, Professore – Hallelujah, hallelujah, blessed be he who comes.’ The three cats, which climb over the backs of our chairs and leap up to sniff at saucepans, are driven off with swipes and a holy, holy, holy. Papa Woytila’s health is commented on from week to week: ‘He looks worse – he’s falling. And he’s not even sixty!’

  Mass is followed by the news bulletin with its lists of newly arrested terrorists and the death-toll in the gang wars in Naples (357 since the beginning of the year) and Palermo (116). It all seems distant, like news from another country or from a century we have not yet reached.

  It is. Italy is a misty, metaphysical concept here. ‘Look at the cat,’ says Agatina, ‘she understands every word! Just like a Christian.’ She means just like a human being. On another occasion, when I have brought, say, a Dutchman and two Australians to see her, she will say, ‘Oh well, we’re all Italians here.’ She is speaking of our common humanity.

  The truth is that the village is its own world, as complete and self-enclosed, even without its walls, as it was 100 or 900 years ago. Its months are measured by the work that is appropriate to them, as in old sculptures: ploughing and harrowing, seeding, harvesting, grape-picking, the olives; and its years by who was born there. ‘I am from ’96,’ Celeste would say, reckoning in the Italian manner. Time is concrete or it has no meaning. The dead go on forever in a new place at the bottom of the hill and their lights burn long after the village itself goes dark. As for geography, that gives out at the first horizon.

  ‘Australia,’ Agatina says, as she might say Saturn or Paradise. It is a continent she has now acquired, in the sense in which I have acquired her family history; she locates it in some empty area of her experience between Poland, where Papa Woytila comes from, and New York, where a grand-niece recently spent the summer. It is the place I exist in, in her thoughts, when I am not fifty metres away in ‘her’ house. Time is too continuous, too present, too large to be thought about, and space too small. Such are the conditions of this world!

  2

  Wednesday, January 9

  WHEN I GOT up this morning, just before eight, the window-panes were thickly coated with frost. It was only when I scratched a little of it away with my fingernail and peered through that I saw the whole countryside was white and the low wall of Agatina’s garden, and the roof of the house opposite, were frosted with inches of soft, new-fallen snow. No sign of the sun. The sky was white, low, opaque, suffused with light of a kind I have never seen in this part of the country – unearthly. When the snow started up again, just on ten, at first in tiny granules, then in great fat flakes, the sky took on a more familiar hue and one felt a kind of relief that what had begun to fall was, after all, just snow.

  The village is in a state of silly excitement. There is no school, no one has gone to work. The last time snow fell to this depth was in 1929, and when I call at Agatina’s they can all, of course, recall the occasion, even Agatina’s nephew Baldo who would have been six or seven years old. They seem delighted, as if two parts of their life have made contact again over a great distance, as if 1929, all those years back before the war, had been revived, made real again, confirming their existence in time and re-establishing even more firmly their presence now. Baldo, the nephew, in Russian-style fur hat with ear-flaps and fur-collared jacket, is six years old again. He sits on the high bread-box, swinging his feet.

  Agatina, even more skittish than usual, gives me a wink. She raises her apron and three black skirts to show what is under her chair: a little copper bucket full of coals. When she gets up she takes it with her to warm her hands. She is about to make polenta (polenda she calls it), traditional cold-weather food, and insists that I come back to eat with them at noon. Well, for this once I shall. As she takes down the big bronze cooking-pot she enquires about my visitors. Do I still think they will come? She shakes her head. No, Professore, impossible! The road up from the highway is all ice, no one can get in or out of the village. Even the Rama, the bus from Grosseto, has failed to get through. The autostrada between Florence and Bologna is piled up with abandoned vehicles – the overnight temperature there was twenty below. They won’t come.

  This is the opinion too of Giuseppina at our little supermarket when I go to lay in provisions, just in case, and of Eidé at the Post Office where I enquire if there has, perhaps, been a telegram. They won’t get through. Still, I prepare a casserole of sausages and beans, and about three in the afternoon go out with a shovel and spend a bitter half-hour clearing the steps, sweeping hard with a broom so that there is no chance of thin ice forming. My hands freeze. The temperature is eleven below.

  It is unnaturally quiet. All day no car has passed the house, either in my own narrow street or on the road below. The only sound is of young people, boys mostly but sometimes one of the rowdier girls as well, engaging in skirmishes with snowballs or rolling one another over in the soft snow.

  It snows again at four. I keep the stove fed with logs, read a little, finally at half-past seven make myself an omelette. Then at eight there is the sound of a car, just the motor. It can only be them. And sure enough, a big Volvo station-wagon has pulled up just past my steps, and Richard Tipping, hatless in the red glow of the rear lamps, is in the street below, shouting ‘Here, it must be here.’

  They have come all the way from Milan without chains. The driver, a thick-set, round-faced fellow, all smiles, is a cross-country motor-bike rider – all this to him is child’s play. Anyway, they’ve made it, they’re here. I am introduced and they begin to bring in their equipment: great blue canvas bags, tripods, screens, clipped aluminium boxes in several sizes. They soon make a pile four feet high in the corner of my kitch
en.

  I am impressed at the speed with which Richard has set all this up. In just three weeks, in a foreign country and with Christmas and New Year between, he has found all this equipment, got finance, insurance, gathered a crew.

  Bob Shaffer, the cameraman, is an American, working freelance wherever he can but based in Milan. He has just flown in from Morocco, where he has been working on a film about the American writer, Paul Bowles. He is off next to New York to make a film about transvestites.

  Alex, the driver, is his sound engineer, and a third fellow is on the way from Rome; they have to go in and pick him up at Grosseto off the Rome-Genoa rapido. He is Bob’s assistant, Adriano, who will go to New York with him on the transvestites job but is working on our film for the love of it, because if there’s a film to be made he wants to be in on it.

  We decide to eat later, when we are all assembled, and I put the casserole on again. But first we must go up to my friend Joan’s house at Poggio Madonna, half a kilometre away, to regulate the heating in the little guest flat she has lent me, where two of the crew will sleep. Then Bob and Alex will drive in to Grosseto while Richard and I look through the notes he has made of what I shall read. These matters have to be settled tonight. First thing in the morning we will get out and start shooting. We have just two days.

  There is, as yet, no script. Richard and I both have shapes in our heads, different ones no doubt, but they are adaptable; they must be. All this snow for example was not provided for when we began, but here it is. It will obviously be a major factor now. I see it as a metaphor for the snowbound state of isolation I am in when I am shut up here in the village, with no telephone, no car, absorbed in a book. It is as if I had produced it, by magic or a free act of the imagination, to make my point. Anyway, wherever it has come from, it is now a fact and will impose its own conditions. When we go out in it, it will determine what we can do, how we do it and play its own part in the thing. So that is ‘the script’. Only what I read can be fixed.

  At half-past ten, with Bob and Alex still not back from Grosseto (the rapido was expected at nine), Richard and I go down to Trento’s bar, the Bar Hawaii, so that he can call his wife.

  Trento’s is a long gloomy place with a bar on the left, billiards tables downstairs, a little enclosed phone-box where you escape into hermetic silence, and windows at the end that open – except that they are barred now – on to a high and distant view.

  The bar is hot tonight. All the little tables are crowded with card-players, almost invisible in a fog of breath and thick smoke. They slap their cards down hard, shouting ‘Briscola!’ Near the entrance, half a dozen village kids, some of them not much more than eight years old, are playing computer football, working their arms furiously and cheering on their teams.

  Busy preparations are being made. Out in the square several boys and young men, all wrapped up in coloured scarves and wearing snow boots, are about to ski to the highway – a downhill run of five kilometres. Others will take the back road to the Ombrone.

  It is a bright clear night, fiercely cold. The new snow shines. We troop out with others to see the start. They set off, fifteen or twenty of them, down the deserted main street of the village and out of sight round the corner, followed by cars fitted with chains to bring them up again.

  Midnight. We are assembled. We sit down at last to eat.

  Thursday, January 10

  Nine o’clock. After a good breakfast we go down, all four, to take a walk round the village and see what we might film. But as soon as he sees the light, Bob decides we should make the most of it and start shooting immediately.

  It is cold but brilliantly clear, and all this side of the village is bathed in golden sunlight.

  While we set off uphill, Alex the sound man is to go down into the village and make recordings. He wears a hip-length anorak, khaki with a fur-lined hood, and snow boots. Strapped to his side is the rectangular recorder, and he carries a flexible sound-rod with a spongy microphone, a little bigger than a tennis ball, hanging from the end of it. With the hood drawn over his face, which is lost in the circlet of fur, and his short stocky build, he looks like an Eskimo, or a space walker putting his feet down carefully, awkwardly, on another planet. I hear him say in a flat voice, in Italian: ‘Recording of footsteps in fresh snow.’

  He lowers the tennis ball on the end of its rod and walks away downhill, his boots, when I listen for them, making a squeaky sound on the packed silence. I imagine his arrival among the villagers in the square, an utter stranger who has appeared overnight out of nowhere, in foreign garb and moving about with that amazing rod in his hand, like an Eskimo who has gone fishing on the ice and got somewhat lost. Struck silent, they follow him about. He is talking to himself, utterly absorbed in some world of his own.

  It is the quality of his absorption that fascinates them, as it does me: a man involved in his own mystery, his own mystère, walking about a village he has never seen before, forming his own picture of it, his own map; getting to know it, but through one sense only; recreating it in the intangible dimension of sound.

  He goes into Alma’s dim little bar and sits there in his hood, incommunicable among the drinkers and card-players like Death in an engraving. Then without a word, he gets up with his rod and goes out again.

  He pauses to record the trickle of a fountain, birds in a bare tree, the scrape of shovels where men are clearing snow, children’s voices, turkey gobblers, dogs barking far off then close. Later, when we listen to them, the whole village will be here. These are the sounds of my walk. They will be added, seamlessly, as if they belonged to a single experience, to the broken bits and pieces of the walk I am taking, since that, as we film it, is silent.

  So we set out uphill. We begin filming with a shot of the bell tower at the top of my street, all gold in the early light, its two heavy bells in silhouette against an expanse of brilliant blue.

  The tripod is set up. Bob tries one angle, then another, then a third. He is hard to please.

  Yes, this is it.

  Richard places me off to the right and I have a practice walk-through while the camera follows me.

  ‘That’s fine. Let’s go.’

  I go back to my starting place and walk again. This time the camera is whirring.

  ‘Cut!’

  I have walked ten feet from nowhere to nowhere.

  We pack up. Adriano shoulders the heavy tripod, Bob has the camera. We move perhaps ten feet. Then Richard decides he would like a shot of a loquat tree I have pointed out while we were standing waiting for the last shot to be prepared. It is covered with snow. Once again the tripod is set up, shifted, set up in a new place. I move away into a patch of sunlight (the shot is to be made without me) and jog on the spot to keep warm. Bob makes his quiet, keen decisions, always without fuss, but several times changing things in consultation with Adriano till they get it right.

  Bob has what my mother would have called ‘a face like a map of Ireland’, but is, in fact, New York Jewish. He wears woollen mittens that leave his fingers free and a dark overcoat. With his navy beret and the heavy black camera on his arm he looks like a Christian Brother turned I.R.A. gunman.

  Richard, who never feels the cold, is bare-headed, gloveless, and wears a greenish leather bum-freezer and sneakers with emerald-green tabs and scarlet laces. He carries a still camera, turning off at moments to take shots, and a clip-board where he is keeping a record of what we film. He has never seen the village and has no idea what might be round the next corner. This walk is really taking place in his head, where he is putting it all together as it happens, creating his script.

  Adriano, who is also bareheaded, keeps warm I suspect on his own intensity – you can see him being consumed with it – and by being so intent on what Bob is doing that he barely notices the world around him till it moves into frame.

  He is a slight dark fellow of thirty-three or four, with hollow unshaven cheeks and very bright dark eyes, a fanatic. Bob tells us he speaks four languages,
but since he seldom speaks at all it doesn’t show. On a lace around his neck is the light-meter. He wears it like an amulet. He belongs to the same secular order as Alex and Bob – the order of those who submit themselves utterly to the machines they use, which they tend, attend to, push to the limit, but always with a respect that recognises in these objects both a finely-tuned power and the limitations that belong to their nature. Without these machines they would have nothing to do.

  It is the ease with which they accept this as a condition of their own talent that I find so attractive. It makes them, for all their strictness and dedication, oddly without ego or that nervous anxiety that goes with arts where everything depends on the man and what he can do.

  ‘Right,’ says Bob at last, taking his eye from the lens and hoisting the camera on to his shoulder.

  ‘Did you get the snow on the rails?’ Richard asks.

  ‘Yes. And the steps leading up to that little doorway. And the pink broom.’

  ‘Great.’

  Richard notes it all down. We move away downhill.

  ‘You’re on a sort of a walk around the village,’ he tells me. ‘We’ll work out later where you’re going. Maybe just walking for its own sake.’

  ‘Hey,’ Bob shouts.

  Outside a house at the next corner a little fire is burning under an elbow of exposed water-pipe: three stove lengths of olivewood above a bed of ashes, making heat-waves but no smoke. Bob, shouldering the camera, gets down on his knees before it.

  ‘Great,’ Richard says. ‘That’s great. We’ll just have you walk down the street towards it. Go back a bit. No, further. Further.’ I wait, while Bob, still bearing the camera, tries positions, sometimes kneeling, sometimes sprawling in the ice.