A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Death is not an event in life. We do not live to experience death.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  The past is life’s undertow. 15 August: white blossom at the window, and my mother’s birthday. She would have been eighty-two. My memory is still full of sharp pictures, though her voice has vanished. In the best of them she is separate from me. For one: every winter day after lunch, when I was in primary school and still came home for lunch, she sat at the kitchen table in the light of the window, sighed and peeled herself an orange, leaving some peel at the base like a cup, picking off white fibres and strips of pith. She never split off segments one by one, she held it in both hands, bent forward and bit into the whole fragile translucent ball and made her orange squirt, and sucked it, juice trickling down to her elbows. Then she had a smoke.

  Every fortnight an old friend of hers, my Auntie Edna, rode miles on her bicycle to our place to have lunch and cut Mum’s hair, and do a perm and set for any neighbours who had made appointments: I’d find a group of them sitting around in the kitchen drinking coffee and chatting, their wet hair in curlers, and one in the middle with a sheet on her shoulders while the scissors snipped wisps off into the smoky sunlight.

  I remember her in the sea with me, fat, green-skinned, lolling in the shallows at Cowes and Mornington and murky St Kilda where once a strange man wanted me to let him dive between my legs and she shook her head, frowning, but why?

  Hardly anyone came to our house during my last years at school. It was where we ate and slept and avoided each other. Every change in me was received with tired cynicism – they knew who I really was. Full of hate for them both, I was frantic to leave.

  At the end of my first year at University Women’s College she had an operation which revealed an early cancer of the colon: they decided not to tell me until after my exams (my results were good). After her colostomy she had twenty more years to live with plastic bags sealed to the hole in her side, leaking, farting, the great slit bulging out inoperable hernias. She had to give up eating fruit, it gave her diarrhoea. Bravely she went to the beach one or two times. That was enough. After her stroke eleven years later she had to stop smoking, and be taught to speak again.

  We were estranged all those twenty years. I never told her about loving A, neither in my years of virtual insanity nor afterwards. Maybe she guessed; maybe she no longer cared. Chris became her substitute child even before we married, and in that role was never to let her down as her real child had. Mum and Dad met him on my twenty-first birthday at Mt Buffalo, when they drove up for a picnic with us: we had got the day off. (Buffalo, where Dad had skied, young in the twenties.) After we came ‘down the hill’ back to Melbourne and Chris got a job as a cook on the Southern Aurora, he drove over to take my mother to calm, green Daveys Bay when he had a sunny day off; there he snorkelled over the weeds and sunbaked while she paddled, she stirred coarse sand up in the shallows.

  At his urging she sold the house and moved down to Lorne after Dad died. She had glaucoma in both eyes by then. Television was hard to see; and she had never regained her mental powers enough to read. One remaining pleasure was a walk down the street for her bit of shopping, a word here and there, an hour or so at the restaurant, playing with Taki (who loved visiting her too). In these last years her heart was greatly enlarged. She fought for breath. Finally in Lorne, perhaps because of the climate, she developed asthma but refused to stay shut in, so that people would keep finding her doubled up in the street, wheezing, whooping, and anxiously help her home. She had several stays in the hospital. The last one, at the onset of winter, she decided not to live through; she succumbed to pneumonia in her seventy-third year.

  My mother and Chris, both Leos: well then! we said. As if astrology, however brilliant in its ancient mythic metaphors, weren’t so much chicanery, deception, self-deception, as it’s practised these days. As if those twelve constellations, of all the swarming constellations, ruled our natures and our fates: all laid out, charted so glibly, mathematically.

  Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative…

  John Berger: And our faces, my heart, brief as photos

  Everything is true of everyone. (So I repeat, and still I go on codifying and accusing myself…) Tolstoy has put this best, in the passage on ‘classifying mankind’ in Resurrection:

  Human beings are like rivers: the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while remaining the same man.

  (Norman Malcolm quoted this passage to Wittgenstein, as he tells in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir; and Wittgenstein responded that he hadn’t been able to read Resurrection and preferred Tolstoy’s philosophy to be ‘latent in the story’. He loved Hadji Murat.

  The elucidation of that last sentence could take a whole book. While remaining the same man…Common sense, Tolstoy might say.)

  I’ve got another foster child from Foster Parents Plan, as well as the one in Bali (who is eighteen, no child): this one’s name is Kanchha Lama, he’s eleven and he lives in Kathmandu. His little sister is named Buddha Maya! Dreams of one day visiting Nepal seem more realistic now, somehow: it would mean a visit to this family.

  Two colour photos and a progress report came with him. He has an oval head with close-cut black hair, and is standing at attention, brows knitted against the sun. His mother, swathed in florals, is holding Buddha Maya in a red shawl.

  Until this year I’ve been in two minds about Foster Parents Plan, worried about the dubious role of the more or less well-off giver of charity, when I do believe at bottom that this help is owed…At least the money goes to the whole community these days, not invidiously to one child, one family. One factor has been reading in The Survivor how each other’s small concrete acts saved and sustained the ones who survived in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen…Now it seems to me that the anonymous handout worsens the despair, the largesse of some monolithic bureau is one more insult from the great ruthless machine.

  As in Blake’s ‘Song of Innocence’:

  For Mercy has a human heart,

  Pity a human face,

  And Love, the human form divine,

  And Peace, the human dress.

  Today I bought three cane mamasan chairs, in two parts: a base like the lotus base of a Buddha statue, and a bowl shaped seat with a calico cushion. Their balance is precarious. Relaxing back in one, H tipped it up and did an elegant back-somersault. The children loved the bowl parts, they rolled round in them like coracles.

  With H and J tonight to see the film Rosa Luxemburg: what a woman, what an achieved, impassioned life! (A facile, doctrinaire remark of Simone de Beauvoir’s, in The Second Sex – a rare lapse – attributes Rosa L’s unity of being to ugliness: ‘Rosa Luxemburg was ugly; she was never tempted to wallow in the cult of her own image, to make herself object, prey, trap; from her youth, she was wholly spirit and liberty.’)

  The film is all deep interiors, dark rooms, offices, prison cells; until the end, the night when they throw her into the river: the camera watches in silence the empty nooses of the light on the black water.

  With H to R and C’s for chicken curry and icy beer by firelight and Marguerite Duras interviewed on SBS. Scenes from The Lover: the yellow mud of the Mekong spread out; their hot bamboo-striped languorous flesh.

  The 28th: my father’s birthday. Having always predicted that he would never make it to ‘three score and ten’, he died ten days short of it in 1973. For the last twenty years of his life he was a shadow to me: this father who used to prop me across the bar of his bicycle and take me to play in the leaky grandstand of th
e football oval, and in wooden frames of houses being built, stepping with me across huge aromatic golden beams throwing stripes of shadow into the skeletons of bedrooms, bathrooms, passages, with a gleeful sense of being trespassers in real rooms. And whenever my sandpit needed more sand he trundled me in the wheelbarrow all the way to one of these sites to buy some.

  (In a book I had there was a story about a girl who had heard of the invention of shadowless light, and felt sorry for the shadows banished from buildings. They sensed it and crowded round her; night and day she was besieged by a malevolent darkness no one else knew about, because her pity had made her alone accessible to them. Overcome at first with terror and hatred, she found her way out: she led them to a derelict house where they would not be molested. They wreathed themselves around the beams and rafters as gladly as cats…This story awed and terrified me.)

  Once we walked down the Muddy Lane (the Bumpy Lane of cobbles led to my school) to the vacant blocks at the tram terminus, where a circus had pitched its tent, so riotous with trumpets that we heard the music in our backyard. He carried me on his shoulders, paddling in mud and elephant dung. In the garden on clear nights he knelt behind me and held my head between his hands, pointing out the Southern Cross, Aldebaran – see, there’s Orion, the belt over there, see? – Venus, Sirius; once (hoarse with excitement) an Aurora Australis beyond the tip of the emperor gum. You see now, love? No. Yes, I think so. I don’t know…Neither of us knew then that I was short-sighted. Each frustrated and hurt, we retreated inside.

  He remade a rusted old tricycle for me. No one in our street had such a high-framed tricycle, handlebars flared wide: far too high and heavy for me, and besides I was ashamed of it at first, until I managed to take pride in its distinctiveness. (A little girl ‘in the early 1900s’ in a newspaper photo the other day had a trike just like mine.) On my ninth birthday morning before he left for work he carried into my bedroom a hand-carpentered bookcase tiered like a grandstand, smelling of varnish, which he had been working on for months in secret out in the garage. Now I have it with me in this house. Battered-looking, but still solid: all it needs is stripping and staining, if I can get round to it.

  My bedroom was the side one with a broom bush and a buddleia at the window. Mum and Dad slept in the front room behind the balustrade. From the age of three when the second-hand single bed arrived at our gate in a truck (I remember it clearly) I always had to sleep alone while they slept together. I woke crying from bad dreams so often that my father attached a pullcord to the lightglobe and hung the end above my bed, but the worst dreams left me too paralysed with fear to move, let alone put a hand outside the covers. They had each other for protection, I had no one. I listened to the voices, the snores rumbling on the other side of the wall. (I’ve been in this situation of the outsider more than once with married men; I think lapsing into it with something like relief, with a bitter sigh, at home there.) I was horrified none the less, when I was thirteen, to find my father moving out into what had been the dining room, the homework and sewing room – dark and stuffy with no outside window – while my mother stayed on alone in the front room. They kept each other awake with their snoring, each separately explained, each reluctantly, shifty-eyed. But such a drastic withdrawal from intimacy, such a turning of backs! The marriage was over, I decided, afraid they might even get a divorce. They stayed together. They had twenty years to go, of staying together.

  The past. How to make amends for the past? The undertow, underflow, memory. Dream. No freeing yourself. No way out, but in.

  ‘Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein). It has an end. Oh my dead dears.

  A letter today from P, who has left the shack by the lake and is working full-time in town as a psychologist in a government department, he who wanted to be rid of the world…He writes of striving to go beyond human love, l’amour ‘samsarique’ des êtres et des choses, in his practice of the Dharma – won’t this job tie him more to it (but honourably)? As a Bodhisattva is tied, by Compassion.

  He had a tape at the shack, of Tibetan priests (Bönpo priests, whose shamanistic rituals are older than Buddhism) chanting Om, each voice at its own pitch and span, long drawn out: Aaaa-uuuu-mmmm…Sometimes he played it loudly in the middle of the night. Mist lay on the lake. The great echo growled back from the mountains over the water to where he stood. Aaaa-uuuu-mmmm.

  SEPTEMBER

  THE HOUSE THAT’S FOR SALE in Mercer Street in Queenscliff is Henry Handel Richardson’s old house (the Historical Society will have the details) – the house, that is, where the family stayed when her father was the Quarantine Officer here. It was built in 1864: a grey-roofed white weather board, set back on a lawn that slopes up to where the verandah was. There are old bush roses and flowering trees in front, and a set of swings. Nice, but out of my reach. I’m glad, anyway, to know which house she lived in: one more knot in the network.

  Almond blossom is white, red at the heart.

  The skin on my arms is becoming a fine crepe.

  I think Black Genoa is a dead stump. The one green shoot at the tip has withered. The story – a death story – have I hexed the tree? And J as well? It means more to me than it should. No: where does such a ‘should’ come from?

  ‘Black Genoa’ is at least partly a homage to Marjorie Barnard and her persimmon tree – should I put that under the title, or would that seem to be directing how it’s to be read?

  In the centuries before he could be represented by his image, a stupa stood for the Buddha, or an empty saddle or throne, a wheel, or the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Some of the sources name the Bodhi tree as a fig, others a pipal. Where have I read that the pipal is a variety of fig? That’s not, however, the source of my reverence for the fig, which goes back to the first summer in Greece, to the village, to waking up in the heat behind the shutters to secretive figs with the dew still on them, wrapped in leaves – splitting them open, dark red and sticky, eating them whole with the first coffee. The summers of Northern Greece, Macedonian summers, that harshness and abundance – no rain for months on end, and the fruits of the earth swollen, cracked, split open in the heat.

  Muddy morning coffee we had with the heat seeping on the sheets through the slats, and the lotus-flower cool flesh of figs.

  I am so sunk into parasitic inertia that I have no material of my own. I have no centre. Being passive, I have no power to animate a situation, a character…If I could have an aim, then everything would fall into place. I want to remain open, have a ‘negative capability’ – but Keats never meant that to extend beyond the conception of a work to nullify the act.

  To begin a story, for me, always means to choose a place. I have to fix it accurately to begin with, then give it a warp, a discrepancy – that légère gauchissure Valéry wrote of (why can’t I find my old copy of Charmes?). From that warp, or several of them, the fiction can begin to grow. In ‘A Drop of Water’ it was the ripe quinces the monk saw, which were here all over the grass as I was writing – not there. In ‘Among Pigeons’, it was the pigeons, the ivy. The man who tells that is as sombre and tenacious himself as ivy (not that this is even hinted at); he sees his mother explicitly as a pigeon.

  I want to take up the notes I wrote down on the plane to New York in 1980, what the man next to me told me about his fight with his son. His triumph, his relish, the silence of the boy’s mother. I know it is a story. But I still can’t hit on the place.

  Instead of seeing the mother as the silent focus, it could be a sister. One who has joyfully prepared a meal to welcome her brother back, but her meal is ruined by this quarrel…She could have promised them a specialty of hers. Bread and butter custard? Yes. The meal in the foreground.

  Mostly the men in my stories have nothing to give the women: they are cold, selfish, vindictive. They have turned to ice at my touch, like the lover’s warm sleeping flesh in the embrace of the mirror. A cul-de-sac. And if I were now to wri
te about a man who can love and give? (Who can, ah yes. But will he? Does he?) A man and a woman who both can? To celebrate love, and by this means – this additional means – to heal the wound in me and be whole as I have not been since I first loved A.

  Year that trembled and reeled beneath me!

  Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,

  A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me,

  Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,

  Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?

  And sullen hymns of defeat?

  Walt Whitman: Drum-Taps

  I did learn to chant them. For all that, to have had my first experience of love in the arms of a woman was a blessing. I see it as a blessing. To have been known in my own body and to have known hers, before ever turning to encounter a man…One more year will make it thirty years ago and I can still remember and will remember for ever the look of her lying with me, her eyes closed, her breasts against mine and our thighs entwined, my hands in her hair, all that warm abundance and security. To love her (or anyone) in the desperate way I loved her, that was the mistake, not the lovemaking, which was sane and strong – at first, anyway – and has stood me in good stead.

  I’ve felt embarrassed for a long time about Alone, but I need to acknowledge it as mine. Not to deny and reject my Shirley, who was at least a woman who had loved, and been loved. Though Alone, which they classify as a lesbian novel, is not about love, it’s about suicide…Loved and loving: this point of departure.