Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  I would learn to come and go easily between Rome and Amman, Florence and London, packing up my laptop and papers, and adding to the wardrobe I left behind in Cortona of linens and cashmere from its little shops. I had joined the line of refugees waiting in the sun in Arezzo for a permesso, irritated to be called out, and courteously fast-tracked. Vecchia turista and white, obviously; not like the anxious African and Asian families clutching documents, fractious children on hip and shoulder, being shouted at to stay in line. Then it was off to the Palazzo Comunale, for permission to be a residente regulare, with a bank account, and a town address I had arranged to rent for twelve months and perhaps beyond, able to leave snow boots and heavy coats in the back bedroom, books on the shelves, groceries in the cupboard and a suitcase of summer clothes under one of the beds.

  One afternoon, I returned to the apartment to find a fat express packet in my letterbox—the medical reports from the Mercy breast clinic in Melbourne, which I’d asked for so I could show the doctor in Florence at my first review. The diagrams and bald description of slicing through breast tissue, locating a serious tumour, and slicing again; it was nothing I didn’t know, but they distressed me horribly. My breast was still sore, and I had to face the check-up arranged for me in a few weeks.

  I had been making so light of what had happened the previous year that I had no one to tell how scared I was. Except for scratchy little emails about how the writing of his American-journey book was going, my husband had made no contact for months. The friends at home who had been through something similar and come out the other side were far away. Ruining the holidays of my eldest son, Rupert, and Sophie, who would be with me in June, was not on. I rang my daughter in Canberra, who said firmly I must tell them about the appointment before they arrived.

  Instead, I rang my youngest son in London, who had been trying to get me to read a cognitive psychology book he used in his work with extremely depressed street kids, to help me analyse the attacks he’d heard me making on myself. Feeling discarded and ashamed, I blamed myself—so the theory goes. He said he would send me the book and instructed me to read it last thing each night. He then told me about a scheme he had introduced in London, and somehow got some funding for, to take young, miserable drug offenders skydiving—something to make them snap out of themselves. He told me they had to pack their own parachutes, and that the girls were much braver than the boys, some of whom he had to shove out of the plane.

  A copy of the book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, arrived at the post office on the same day as a fat box set of Rostropovich playing Shostakovich arrived from my husband. No note in either and I do not believe in synchronicity, but both of them made me feel much better.

  I decided to go to a concert I had seen advertised on a poster near the square. A cellist was going to play at the Chiesa di San Niccolò, the most beautiful little stone church in all of Cortona. I often climbed the hill to sit on its low stone walls out of the wind, shaded by beeches and chestnut trees, and listened to music on my iPod. The church was kept locked because inside was a Deposition by Luca Signorelli, and many other treasures. But this Saturday afternoon, a solo cellist was playing three of Bach’s great cello suites, Nos 3, 4 and, my favourite, No. 6 in D major. The church was packed with locals, and tourists from Germany and Scandinavia, who clapped and bravo-ed loudly and encouraged a long encore from the cellist. He played again the first movement of the 6th, with its deep, aching rises.

  I took myself to Massimo’s that evening, to celebrate feeling better than all right.

  Rupert and Sophie arrived in June on the midafternoon train, and I rushed to meet them. We travelled back together in a cab, planning the next ten days. Exploring all of Cortona and visiting Arezzo would almost be enough.

  After a 28-hour flight and six hours’ excited sightseeing in Rome, they slept for fifteen hours. The apartment, with its spare bedrooms and a shuttered window onto a silent laneway, was perfect for jet-lagged Australians to sleep while I worked.

  Then there were ten days of being a family. We lolled around the apartment, reading the English papers, went to the market for picnic lunches and climbed to the grass terraces above the town. We sat on the steps of the comune in the sun, drinking small cans of Peroni and eating perfect pizza. We watched Italian TV quiz shows, imitating the accents and trying to guess the clues. The Monty Python line ‘My hovercraft is full of eels’ was Ru’s contribution, and it became a family gag for ever more. We went to the Museo and the Accademia Etrusca. We visited the incorrotto Santa Margherita, of course, and my son, a paramedic, explained how it was that she was uncorrupted. He went to see the locked Etruscan tombs on the plain below, and persuaded il custode to show him around. He checked out the local ambulance service, and we all went into Arezzo, to see The Legend of the True Cross.

  Rupert’s memory for slabs of Italian he’d picked up, his talent for mimicry of voices and body language, and Sophie’s flair for languages, delighted me. She shopped at the market, where her Italian was praised, and Lyndall invited her to tea at the Palazzone, and to play Scopa, on condition she spoke no English. I introduced them both around the town, bursting with pride.

  And, of course, they accompanied me to Florence the day I had my check-up at the medical clinic, sightseeing while I went to see a kindly German gynaecologist, who took a full medical history, did breast scans, gave me a stress test, declared me healthy and strong. Hill towns are excellent for hearts, she said. All those steps. The scan results would be emailed to me—so, exhilarated, I went to meet my family.

  And the email, when it arrived soon after, contained good news: Investigazione: Negativo. I texted Lyndall about the miracolo, and much later she told me she hadn’t known what on earth I was talking about. Carmen, ever discreet, hadn’t told Lyndall anything about me except that I was a friend.

  Italian classes did not start until after Rupert and Sophie left, when there were enough tourists in the town. I went to language classes twice a week, with a well-rehearsed fictional version of Why I am in Cortona, what my husband does, what my work is. I did my homework but invented the answers. Not until I started walking in the hills with some local women, eager to practise their English and help me with my Italian, did I start to find my own way into the language.

  It was those women who told me there was no word in Italian to distinguish loneliness from solitude. Both are solitudine, which is closer to wretched loneliness than to the often pleasurable, solitude. One of the women had been widowed years before. It was a lonely state, deplorevole, she said. I knew what she meant. Cortona’s cafés and bars treated me as invisible when I turned up alone; they kept me waiting, like bad news, or gave me a small, draughty table near the door. Eventually, I stopped going out to eat unless someone invited me, or I had a friend staying, or something to celebrate.

  I was lonelier in Cortona than I had ever been in my life, except perhaps when I was fifteen years old and sent to be a lodger in the house my family had rented out when they went to live for a few years in the country. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. My parents hadn’t wanted to sell the house, their war-torn tenants were saving for their own, and I was hankering to return to my city school, and making their life a misery.

  Then, I joined a household of kindly strangers. The house was very full—mainly of women, and dark furniture with mirrors. There was a handsome wife from Aberdeen, with gleaming lips and matching dark red nails; and her husband, a recent prisoner of war, whose hands shook as he lit cigarette after cigarette. Two unmarried sisters who had been through the London Blitz were sleeping in the dining room. And there was the pretty 3-yearold daughter, with her little frocks and hair ribbons—the light of all their lives. The only flaw was 15-year-old me, interloper and outsider, banished from a dream of home that was not there anymore, the light of no one’s life.

  I ate my meals at the kitchen table. Then, awkward, lonely and feeling in the way, I would excuse myself to do my homework and write letters, readin
g for hours in the bedroom where my brothers used to sleep. The 3-year-old daughter, reasonably enough, had been assigned my pretty room, with its green-andwhite striped curtains and wallpaper, its view of the lilac tree and my father’s vegetable garden. I had a bed by the window on the dark side of the house, my books and photos on the windowsill, a table with a fluorescent reading light, and a wardrobe with a mirror that faced the bed.

  A bookish girl with no one to talk to, who could only go home on the train at the end of term, I taught myself to grimace, screwing up my face very hard while looking in the mirror, to block tears and stop thinking the unbearable thought that I’d brought this banishment on myself.

  Lyndall and I walked together sometimes, then began to swim in the early mornings, in Cortona’s town pool—a glorious stretch of blue on a high terrace beyond the town. When family and friends came to stay with either of us, we shared them too. We had English friends in common: Carmen, of course, who had published Antonia White, and writers and agents I knew from my publishing life.

  One morning, Lyndall introduced me to Nella Gawrovska, when she’d stopped at the bottom of the hill on her motorino. Nella lived at the top of the town, near my favourite church, had no time for central heating or seatbelts, and only wore a safety helmet because she’d promised her son she would. She liked people to guess her age, which Lyndall said must be eighty-five. She was very fit; so fit that the local gym wanted to use her photo on an advertising hoarding, but her son said no.

  We became friends slowly, in the summer walking down the hill through the terraces to visit Lyndall, swimming in the local pool, and, eventually, going for long walks into the mountains in our big boots. Nella once told me Australians don’t interest me in the least so I was at a disadvantage—but she was extremely curious about what I was doing in Jordan. She was a devout Catholic, who proudly voted for Berlusconi, and preferred monarchies, Lyndall said.

  But she was a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause, even to the point of anti-semitism. Her outrage about the theft of farmland by manipulating deeds of ownership for every expanding settlement was genuine and ferocious, perhaps because it was reminiscent of what the German occupation had done to her family’s lands. When Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine was published, and reprinted many times in English and Italian, Nella bought lots of copies, bestowing them on all her friends and expecting them to distribute them as well.

  Although she had inherited great riches from her Italian maternal grandfather, Nella was extremely thrifty. She had an eye for a bargain, found all her clothes at charity shops, and charmingly coerced her friends into helping her. I sometimes shared with several chairs the back seat of her beat-up old car, holding the door handle closed as she sped across the Valdichiana, and waiting while she bargained down prices for restoration. I was never comfortable bargaining—too docile, she said; too Australian, she meant—but she taught me much about husbanding money, and how to get luggage on and off the trains, an art I badly needed to master, as the intercity train pulled in and quickly out again at Terontola.

  One day, when we were travelling to Rome together—Nella, carrying a small rosewood cabinet for one of her apartments; me with several pieces of heavy luggage, heading for the airport—she showed me how to identify a group of young men from good families who were on the platform. And how to ask them graciously to help her and her cabinet on and off the train. Nella’s lordly manner was impossible to emulate but I got better at it.

  I only half believed the stories she told me while we were speeding across the plain, of how her father, a Polish nobleman, had stuck it out in Communist-run Poland, although all his property had been confiscated and the family palazzo had become the Russian embassy. Not until her Italian mother’s courageous underground work for the Polish resistance was described in a long article in the London Times did I start to believe her stories and ask her more questions.

  The overlap between the two worlds I was inhabiting kept surprising me. The Italian quarter in Amman had several cafés, restaurants and art galleries. It was near the InterContinental, where foreign correspondents hung out during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s. Maybe they still do.

  So, I should not have been surprised to discover that Nella from Torino had an Italian friend, Gabriella, who had married a painter, Mohanna Durra, who lived in Amman. Did I know them? Nella asked. Of course I didn’t—but sometime in my second year, when the book was taking promising shape, I was introduced to them, and invited to dinner at their house with other members of Jordan’s ‘arts crowd’. Mohanna Durra’s Expressionist/Cubist paintings hang in public galleries in Europe and the Middle East, and he is a distinguished cultural diplomat and president of the Association of Fine Arts, Jordan. The ‘arts crowd’ Prince Hassan introduced me to reminded me of friends at home: witty, indiscreet, opinionated, arguing politics and ideas. I told Nella I’d met the Durras and she made immediate plans to visit Amman herself.

  I returned to Jordan at the end of July 2007, with a new list of questions for Prince Hassan, and found him more determined than ever ‘to speak his mind for a wider public than Jordan’. The news from Iraq was very bad. The al-Askari mosque had been bombed and two of its minarets toppled. This is one of the holiest Shia sites in Islam and the reprisals would be dreadful. Sidi spoke at length on tape about the deterioration of regional security.

  Sitti Sarvath was slightly cool to me this time and I wondered if she was concerned that her husband was ‘being political’. Someone in London had told me a story about Prince Hassan giving a speech at one of the universities. He was in full flight but he broke off partway through, saying, ‘I can tell by the look on my wife’s face that I am being political, so I will stop.’

  The second book was going rather well but I still couldn’t talk about it in Amman. I needed another contract, or at least an addendum, but the office manager was vague when I asked him about it. Speak to Sitti Sarvath or Sitti Badiya, who will know what is needed. I forgot about it. Fielding questions became even more difficult now that I was being introduced to people in Jordan who would be speaking to me of their recent work with Prince Hassan.

  In London again in August, I met with several publishers who had shown interest. But most backed off when I told them that there was to be no subsidy. The book we were producing needed to work in the market, so that it would be taken seriously, be reviewed and sell, and, in translation, be published out of Beirut.

  I.B. Tauris, the London publisher selected later that year, had an impressive list of Middle Eastern titles. The publishing director had met Sidi Hassan before, ‘had always wanted to get a book from him’, and welcomed the idea of one that went ‘across the East–West divide’. A contract was signed by Prince Hassan in October 2007, for delivery of a draft manuscript in March 2008, and with a firm undertaking that Prince Hassan make himself available for promotion on publication. The contract was a fairly standard British one for a book that was still evolving. There were the usual clauses covering the process, including about delivering a draft in a ridiculously short time, the title, photographs, cover blurbs and my collaboration.

  There were discussions with the family about promotion, as competing interests were obviously a concern: the Prince being called away for high-level talks, an important visitor arriving at short notice. I described to them the usual publicity campaign—an intensive week of interviews the publisher would arrange with television and radio stations, some prerecords. The schedule would need to be adhered to, and the publisher would be expecting the Prince to be available in London, where he and his family were often based for part of the summer.

  The Prince’s youngest daughter, Princess Badiya, also met with the publishing people and with me when we were finalising the contract negotiations. A barrister, she was well known in London, in the world of fundraising for good causes and for interfaith and cross-cultural understanding. She offered to be one of several readers of the text. We met at her London house, to discuss the bo
ok’s progress and what she might be able to do to ensure its smooth delivery. I mentioned that my original contract didn’t cover the new book, which was very different from the first. She said she would be reading the draft with her father, when he was in London during the summer, as a way to keep the tight timetable on course. I was grateful for her involvement.

  I saw Rajyashree Pandey and Sanjay Seth whenever I was in London, friends I cherished from Melbourne, who came to visit me several times in Cortona. Raj and I had met in India years before, when we were both speaking at a demanding arts and post-colonialism conference, with Ashis Nandi and others, in Pondicherry. Raj, an expert in medieval Japanese literature, was translating for Haruko Wakita, the pre-eminent historian of Japanese women in medieval Japan and an exponent of Noh theatre. We later explored some Chola temples, a period Raj admitted she knew little about. When she and Sanjay first visited me in Cortona and we went to Siena, I had to admit I was unable even to guess the identities of the saints in the altarpieces. Laughing a lot and admitting our limitations became a feature of our friendship.

  They had recently moved to Goldsmiths University in London: Sanjay to take a chair in politics; and Raj to teach film and manga, and to finish her book on the body and gender in Japanese narratives such as The Tale of Genji. In London, we went to films together, and talked politics and post-colonialism late into the night. Sanjay’s work on ‘the situated-ness of our knowledge’ made me acutely conscious of the dangers of translating Prince Hassan into ‘my code’; that using his words, in his voice, was not enough. Prince Hassan, of course, was well aware of this. Hence the piles of books he’d gathered for me from his personal library; his emphasis on the difference of perspective from East to West; and the domination of the West, not only in the examples he quoted of inaccurate translation, but in institutionalised racism and cultural silencing. The readers he was arranging for the final draft of the book were an impressive line-up of men he’d worked with on important recent projects, and women whose professional attainments and connections were formidable. The Prince’s determination to say clearly what he wanted about the state of the Middle East was paramount.