by Gregory Day
My jaw dropped. I looked up from the ground where I had been staring, listening in concentration since he’d last disappeared into the reeds, and there he was, small and smiling with an open face, like some Mediterranean woodcut come to life, gesturing at me with his arm to come over and join him at the ditch. I was shaken again. How did he know my name? How the bloody hell did he know my name?
I walked out of the pelargoniums and felt my bare feet on the gravel of the track. And then I was standing beside a short man with a few black whiskers scattered over his chin and jaw. With an expression of what I could only call bemused triumph on his face, he looked up at me and then down at the eels, which lay entwined and still in the ditch water at our feet.
‘They were in so much hell,’ he said in a broken kind of English. ‘They can rest now for a few moments before you help me guide them to the river.’
Straightaway at the mention of the river, I remembered seeing this man sitting on the riverbank in the afternoon on my way to Nanette’s. It was the spinner in the South Melbourne beanie.
‘I saw you this afternoon at the riverbend,’ I told him.
‘Yes, I saw you in your little red car too,’ he said. ‘You passed by. I was preparing for tonight. Talking to the fishes. Asking if everything would be all right.’
He paused and then looked at me with a childlike grin and said, ‘I’ve come to help the eels.’ And he put out his left hand, taking it away from where it held the waist cord just above the bell, and with my right hand I went to shake it, but could say nothing.
My hand fell away and he smiled and spoke in Italian. Before I had time to ask him to explain he had pulled a packet of cigarettes out from under his cassock and I understood that he was merely asking me if I’d like one. I looked down at the packet and declined out of sheer confusion. He lit one up and then pointed into the southern sky.
‘Now that they are calm,’ he said, ‘we will concentrate on that star. See the one, the brightest one? Above the ridge of dunes? Yes. Il luce forte. With a radiance such as this we can help these creatures of the darkness, these blessed anguille. We can help them along on their magnificent way.’
He took a drag on his cigarette and seemed to notice my confusion. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, patting my shoulder. ‘When the duty is done and the sun is risen and we get to know each other a little more, everything will be much clearer. Ah,’ he said then with a sigh. ‘Listen to the music of their contentment at last. As long as they are in pain so am I. But now the peace has arrived, the panic has been lost, and soon they’ll be safe and back in the warmth of the deep darkness.’
He gazed lovingly down at the eels and smoked his cigarette with his left hand. With his right hand, with which he had pointed to the southern star, he tinkled his bell again, the little silver bell that glinted in the light of the night, and which, along with the two-note scale of the owl, was the only sound now that the eels were still.
VI
THERE WAS ALMOST A SILENCE now, a rich, new silence, since his calming of the eels. Not even the crashing of the surf was audible on the other side of the dunes.
When he had reached the end of his cigarette he turned to me and said: ‘You see, the river is a forest, Noel. It is to the eel what the trees are to the birds and beasts. It is home and it is private. A place to be lost and found. To be safe. With pockets to hide. A place to fulfil a unique destiny. And the smells! The scents and perfumes of the riverbed! I have been to the bottom of the riverbed. Many times. With my nose quivering. I know what they love down there, the oneness, of the slush, l’unità, the oneness of the dark. I know what to us is a murky stench and what is to them the breast of God’s earth. The sweet smell of the river’s bottom. With good water above you. Pure murky gloom. Not the pathetic cider in these drains! This is not enough!
‘Let’s show them the way, encourage them towards their happiness. They needed to be calmed. It’s not their time of year to move. Non allarmare. But now they may proceed. And you and I will walk along beside them. We will accompany them to the river, out of these ditches. What do you say?’
But, of course, I didn’t know what to say.
He began then to progress to the river and I followed him in silence, along the side of the ditches, which were now tranquil. Although the night was settled on the land and there was no sign yet of the sun, I flashed forward to its rising and wondered whether this man would dissolve into the daylight and be gone. There was no wind now, and, with the thrashing stopped, the world seemed to have come to a standstill. As he chanted, the tone of his voice began to soothe me and allowed me to proceed with him, to concede to accompany him in what seemed to be a great passion.
So we stepped on towards the river, the oddly dressed little man ringing his silver bell and murmuring in the direction of the eels, and me walking gingerly behind him. In the ditches as we went there was a quiet sound beside us, of motion, of living things gliding and slipping through water, a gentle threshing of liquid. In front of me his chant continued, his head level. Now he was speaking it as much into the air as down at the eels, his thumb crooked into the cassock cord and tinkling the little bell there. The creatures now slipped through the water seemingly in the rhythm of the chant, their skins mercurially appearing at the top of the water, like a welder’s flux, or the light on a raven’s wings.
I watched the glints in the ditch and his glowing white shoes in front of me, stepping along on this ground I’d walked a million times. He looked back once or twice as we went along, smiling, not stopping his chant but, yes, smiling almost uncontrollably as his mouth moved around the presumably sacred words. It wasn’t long, then, before this little party of eels and a monk and a man had covered the short distance along the road to the river.
I stepped back in deference as we arrived at the bank but he gestured me forward to stand beside him. His chanting stopped and in the ditches the motion of the eels had ceased. I couldn’t work out whether they’d slipped away down the lip of the ditch into the river or had just paused below the watertop of the ditch. Ripples were settling as I looked down, but there seemed to still be a sense of them within.
He turned to me and said: ‘For now, Noel, my name. Fra Ionio. Si, Ionio. One day you might not believe this has happened but take it from me, it is the simplest thing.’
He then gave his bell a tinkle.
‘To every prison in this life there is a key inside the heart.’
He gave his bell another tinkle.
‘And for every agitation there’s a reason.’
He rang his bell again then, almost as if he was letting the eels know that although he was talking to me he had not forgotten them.
‘The traffic just went by all day, Noel. The birds in the sky, the cars on the road. And their panic built. You heard the thrashing. The desperation. Half the world is thrashing like that every day. If you choose to you can hear it. Everyone is driving past. But the rain helps. It washes and flushes, and the water, it is love. L’acqua è amore.’
And then, easy as you like, as we stood there, the eels made their move, tumbling in rills and curlicues, in motion once more, slipping and twirling one after the other, in groups and singly, entwined and in loops, out of the steep mouth of the ditch and into the river. Never before had I looked at eels without thinking of their teeth.
It took a few minutes, I suppose, for the tumbling transfer of the eels from the ditch to the river. We watched them wordlessly, their slick skins gleaming sepia, and when they had all slipped away into the river, he turned to me with his cigarettes at the ready again.
‘Come on, Noel, surely you will have one with me now, to celebrate.’
‘Okay,’ I said, and bent towards him to receive the light.
We found a nice flat spot on the bank and sat and smoked and looked into the rivertop. His cigarette end was about all I could see in the darkness except for the odd splashes of brightness near the streetlights away on the opposite hill. On the surface of the water in front
of us, though, all kinds of shapes appeared and disappeared. There was no moon giving off the reflections, it was just the eels still crinkling the water in the scant light, showing up to me now, glowing and vivid as if my focus on things had suddenly strengthened, as if the detail of the world had intensified and I was noticing it in the surface of the river.
As I smoked the cigarette he was prattling on quietly, almost under his breath, to himself and the eels in what I presumed was Italian. He smoked quickly, like a bogan, or a gangster in a movie, with the cigarette between his fingertips and thumb rather than between the knuckles, and every now and then he’d give his little bell a ring and I’d be reminded of when I first heard it up in my loft only a short time ago. But time was warping now, reality was changing.
He cocked his head to one side, a bit like a sheepdog does, and said to me, as if I’d known him for years, ‘The eels, yes. As long as they are le anguille they won’t know what it is to draw a picture. Hah! And you won’t know what it is to live in the sheath of the river, Noel. You won’t know what it is to cross the seas for love. You know?’ He slapped his thigh gently and sighed. ‘Oh, there’s nothing like a job well done, is there, Noel? Time is il maglio, time is the tool, no? Time cleans out the stables.’
No doubt I was looking bewildered, so he turned to me and said again that I wasn’t to worry. Then he rang his little bell and began to chant, and I swear that the eels in the rivertop were animated and glossy and magical to watch. The shapes on the water seemed to do a fillip and a dance, as if all of a sudden something was spawning.
VII
FOR HOWEVER LONG IT WAS before the first creeping light of the morning started to filter out from behind us, we didn’t say another word to each other. Ionio murmured away to himself in his language and I sat still, entranced by the situation. As we noticed the first rays of the sun he turned slowly towards me and asked me to take his wrist.
‘Yes, Noel, wrap your fingers around this hairy wrist of mine. That’s it. Now, can you feel my skin and the life in me? Am I made of flesh and blood? And you are looking at me. And we are here in Mangowak. So, Noel, feel my wrist and know that Ionio is real, I am here and this is not a dream you are having. Yes?
‘And now you must let go of my wrist and take me somewhere safe. Where no-one will meet me. Somewhere we can rest and talk. Where we can spend the whole day together and not be interrupted. For by the time this new sun has crossed the sky I will be gone again. What do you say?’
I let go of his wrist but still couldn’t speak. As for taking him somewhere safe, I was momentarily incapable of thinking about it. It was too much for me.
We stood beside the river but turned now to face in the direction of my place and although another person might have been more wary or afraid, I found that suddenly I had no desire other than to spend the day with him as he’d asked. My curiosity grew with the light as it brushed over the ocean and the inlet valley and the hills, and I saw his face more clearly than before. I saw that his skin was the colour of terracotta and that his nose was small like his mouth. And importantly, I saw the life in his dark eyes, the gentleness and the lustre.
It wasn’t long before I heard a dog bark around the riverbend and I had the idea. Nanette was presumably still asleep in my loft. We could just go and wake her up and jump in the Moke and head out to the fire tower. No-one was ever going to interrupt us up there. We could grab some food from Nan’s fridge, and stay up there looking over those Barrabool hills all day, and find out who this Ionio was, and where he was from, and what the eels had to do with it, and how come all of a sudden life was a totally different kettle of fish.
Naturally enough, he thought the fire tower was perfect and didn’t seem at all perturbed at the prospect of bringing Nanette with us.
‘We had a late night,’ I told him. ‘She got very drunk and is still asleep in my bed.’
At which point he laughed, at the top of his voice, loud enough to wake up the sleepers in the row of riverbank shacks nearby.
‘It’s not like that,’ I assured him anxiously. ‘We’re old friends, it’s not like that.’
Whereupon he laughed even harder, this time so much that he held his sides and threw his head so far back that I could see right into the pinkness of his mouth. By the time he’d pulled himself together I’d been well and truly put on edge. I was rattled, looking about me and waiting for someone to emerge in their dressing gown to tell us to shut up. But the track and the verges were all empty and still. It was just me and the monk and the dawning day.
‘I’m not laughing at you,’ Ionio said, wiping his eyes and checking to see if his little bell was still there. ‘I’m laughing at the crazy gaps – huh? – in this world. You and your friends were at the pub getting drunk and I was walking the beach in preparation for the diaspora of the eels. And yet we were only a mile apart. It’s crazy, Noel. I love this earth for the very reason that it’s crazy. The roots of heaven are to be found here, in people getting drunk in the pub and other people walking alone on the beach, in people in hospitals shouting with pain and animals being slaughtered for no good reason. All of them longing for heaven.
‘It’s crazy, the gaps, and it makes sounds, you know. Things hit things here. It’s la Dissonanza. Even the birdsong is born of this friction. And from this comes heaven. The very word, Paradiso, the very thought, it comes from here.
‘It feels good for me to visit you, like I am covered in the sweet-smelling soil. I am happy, my body laughs. My soul hears the divine choir.’
We walked away from the bank in the direction of home and as we did, Ionio’s laughter quickly turned to tears. I saw them there in the dawn, rolling down his slightly hangdog face, falling onto the lips of his little red smile.
‘Happy eels,’ he said to me and to the sky, with a quaver in his voice. ‘I exist to make them happy. Right now I have hundreds of happy eels inside my heart, healthy and free, tickling my fancy. I am blessed to be chosen il Patrono San delle Anguille.’ And then, putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, ‘Come on, amico, let’s go see how loud your good friend’s snoring.’
He made a sound through his nose like a donkey’s ee-aw, laughed with a shriek and we wandered off the grass of the bank and onto the golden Barrabool gravel of the river road.
VIII
MY FATHER WAS SUCH A GREAT storyteller that sometimes I feel he cursed me with a love of this place. Ever since I can remember he fed me and my brothers on yarns about big seas, big trees, big drinkers and big adventures. He had scars on his body he told us were shark bites from the days when he and Norm Traherne used to row the dinghy through the waves around the promontories in search of crayfish. He also said that he’d been all around the world as a young man and no place could come within a bull’s roar of Mangowak.
As we grew up and our coast became more and more populated with tourists, he’d paint a picture of a time before all that, when the sea was black with couta, when there were just the wild winds and the huge swells rolling into the clifftops for entertainment, and an endless bush out back that could only be inhabited by people strong enough, or lonely enough, to cope. Unbeknown to him he was feeding his youngest boy on what became a kind of nectar, a slow-dripping honey of epic dreams. By the time I was old enough to go away and study, no other place or circumstance could possibly have competed with this little inlet town and its history of laughter and weather, of good humoured and capable men, and women as smart as whips.
As I walked back towards my place now, through the new light with Fra Ionio, like the day itself something was beginning to dawn upon me from those things my father used to say. There’d been a story about the eels in the river once, something about them and Ron McCoy, which until now I’d completely forgotten. Ron had figured large in my father’s stories and for good reason. Dad had always said that there was more to him than met the eye, but this particular yarn had been lost in my mind among a hundred others. As I approached my barn with the monk beside me, passing under the
two big pine trees at my gate, a glimmer of the tale was re-emerging in my mind, but then, as we walked around the olive tree and stepped up through the barn doors, it disappeared just as quickly, like a memory lost, something that I could nearly but not quite retrieve from the time when my love of this place was formed.
We found Nanette still asleep, her snores muffled by her position face down on the pillow. As we climbed my ironbark ladder up to the loft where she was sleeping, I thought of that old British film Whistle Down the Wind, where the escaped convict hides in a barn and when discovered by the children who live there pretends he is Jesus. I knew that a part of Nanette was like the youngest little boy in the film, who keeps saying, ‘He’s not Jesus, he’s just a fella,’ and I was worried then that Nan would dismiss this Fra Ionio as some quack or junkie, without even giving him a chance to convey what was something especially out of the ordinary.
Ionio came up behind me on the ladder. I offered for him to wait in the yard in the Moke but he was like a little kid now that the eels were okay and was very keen to be there when Nan was woken up. As he reached the top of the ladder he let out a loud sneeze, probably due to the hay bales I use as a support for the block of hardwood I draw on. As he sneezed, Nan stirred in amongst the blue-green blankets and, raising one eyelid, caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye. By this time I was sitting on the edge of the loft window, right next to the bed.
With her head facing my way she had her back to Ionio, who had pulled a black handkerchief out from under his cassock and was wiping his nose and looking a bit nervous. I gave Nan a cheeky smile, with mock affection for what was obviously going to be a rotten hangover. She groaned and then murmured like a little girl, and I bent down and stroked her hair. Looking up at Ionio he nodded approvingly and said something in his language, some sympathetic phrase that I couldn’t understand.
