“Yes. That’s just the point. We’re going to launch you.”
I was on my guard, “Oh yes. What as?”
He took a deep breath and went right into his answer before I could interrupt. “As a male tart — because you’re dark, you see, and in northern countries where everyone’s practically an albino you’ve got to be dark or you get nowhere. My friend is making all the arrangements. We can hitchhike there in five days or so and take a look at Holland and Belgium on the way: Antwerp, the Rubens House, the Adoration of the Holy Lamb …”
“Johnno,” I said firmly, “you’d better stop getting all worked up about it. We’re not going.”
“What do you mean?” He looked hurt.
“I mean,” I said, “that without wanting to be a spoil-sport or anything, I’m not interested. If you want to launch someone, launch yourself!”
“But I’m fair!”
“Well, go to Spain then.”
He looked uncomprehending. “But f’ Christ sake, Dante, in Spain everyone’s poor!”
I shook my head and went past him down the stairs.
“But I’ve written to people,” he called after me. “Look, I’ve got a whole list of names — they’ll take us straight to the right circles. You won’t have to stand around on corners, you know.”
“Not me,” I said again and kept on walking.
“F’ Christ sake!” He plunged the letter into his jacket pocket. “Didn’t you ever hear about opportunity knocking only once?” He slouched off, muttering to himself, and slammed his door. He was sulky all evening.
Next day he broached the subject again.
“The Adoration of the Holy Lamb,” he began to tell me, “is practically the greatest painting of the entire Middle Ages.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said shortly, “but the answer is no!”
On the third day, after more sulking, and some heavy hints that what he was now suffering was in some way my responsibility, since I had refused, out of selfishness and a terror of real experience that I would obviously never outgrow, to extricate him from this god-awful city — on the third day, he came to terms with things: Sweden was no go. While we were walking round the stone basin in the Luxembourg Gardens, taking advantage of the first spring sunshine, he suddenly stopped, looked at me critically for a moment, took my arm, and said affectionately: “You know, Dante, you were right about that Swedish business. It was silly of me. It would never have worked. You’re — well, you’re a bit past it, really.”
Of course there were other possibilities — as many almost as there were countries. The ultimate was Nepal. Johnno’s eyes grew cloudy at the mere mention of it: “You go there,” he told me dreamily, “and you’re immediately purified.”
He sat quiet, still, as if in the rarefied air of the elevation at which he now stood the least exertion might be too much for him. “Pure. Pure!” It was a place he could always shift to, in mind at least, on a few deep inhalations of the hash he got cheap from his Algerian connections. One mouthful took you as far as Beirut. Two more and you were right there in Katmandu.
In the meantime there was the Massif Central, there was Spain. We would take our packs and walk the old Pilgrim Route to Santiago de Compostela, sleeping in the fields now that spring was coming, walking all day, living off the charity of the local peasants. We would look at marvellous Romanesque sculptures, Autun, Souillac.
It was a great plan, and for three or four days Johnno talked of nothing else. He sat hunched over a huge road map spread out on the floor of his room, measuring distances with a school ruler, totting up figures. Names recurred and became yet another of his sacred litanies: Cahors, Sainte Foy de Conques, Vézelay. After the low grey skies of Paris, and trees that were forever dripping, I longed for big breaths of country air and thirty-mile hikes in the sun. But when Johnno saw that I meant it and would set off the moment he gave the word, his enthusiasm cooled and he began to find difficulties. You couldn’t live off the charity of the bloody French. They’d let you starve. And Spain was full of policemen. Besides it was too far. Nearly a thousand miles. We’d get there with our legs worn down to the knees. Which was fair enough for real pilgrims. We’d better go to Brittany. Or what about Greece?
Johnno had been to Greece two years before with an artist friend from London called Crispin. They had spent five weeks tramping through Crete: beaches, Johnno told me ecstatically, with water so clear you could see your piss in it, and on the Lassithi plateau hundreds of little windmills with triangular white sails, all fluttering in the sun. It was Paradise, and practically the cheapest place in Europe. “The air’s so pure,” Johnno told me, “you hardly need food at all. A few olives. A little fetta cheese. Once we actually got there, across fucking Jugoslavia, it’d be a dream!”
We didn’t go to Greece. Or even to Brittany. Johnno, I soon realised, was mesmerised by Paris, his dreams of leaving it for one corner of Europe or another were simply alternatives that he allowed to exist for a moment because they made Paris itself, and his presence in it, so much more solid and absolute. Paris was the city for which Greece, Spain, Sweden, and other places too numerous to mention, had been rejected. As for me, I was just a tool in Johnno’s process of making Paris real for himself, and I soon tired of it.
Greece was the nearest we ever came to an alternative, but it was too difficult to get there. As for the living on air, I heard something of that, and of Johnno’s Cretan adventures, when I met Crispin in London during the next winter.
After their first week on the island they had been penniless, and were saved from starvation by the generosity of the Cretan peasants who took them in, fed them on lentils, and allowed them even to sleep in their own matrimonial beds. Johnno, especially, was ravenous to the point of insanity the whole time. They bought a little bag of acid drops each day to stave off the pangs, and agreed to ration them out three at a time. But on the first day, when Johnno had charge of them, all the sweets disappeared after the first distribution. He was contrite. He apologised, grovelled, wrung his hands. He just hadn’t been able to help it. He’d been obsessed by the idea of them in his pocket, he’d suffered a complete moral collapse. How could Crispin ever forgive him? He begged Crispin to take charge of the bag himself and see they were shared out properly, as they’d agreed. So all next day, and the day after, Crispin was strict with him. Despite Johnno’s pleas to have all his sweets at once, despite his whining, when all three were doled out and swallowed, that he was still hungry, that if he could have another one Crispin could deduct it from tomorrow’s lot, Crispin stuck, and Johnno was left to mull over his resentments and sulk. As the day wore on he got more and more abusive. Muttered, ground his teeth. Till Crispin threatened to settle the matter by chucking the whole bloody lot into the sea. Then in the late afternoon, while they were resting in the shade of some olives, Johnno suddenly threw himself on Crispin, overpowered him, snatched the bag of sweets out of his pocket and made off. When Crispin found him at last, under a huge olive tree, deep in the grove, the acid drops were a solid wedge in the corner of his cheek.
So we didn’t go to Greece. Instead we went two or three afternoons a week to Johnno’s favourite place in Paris, and one, he assured me, of its great sights: the Christian Dior Salon off the Champs Elysée.
“Look at the bitches! Look at their fingernails! Look at their heels!” he’d mutter between his teeth as the cool mannequins, taller than lifesize, painted like totems, paraded up and down the velvet ramps in a room that was all mirrors and strange grottos plastered with shells. They changed with extraordinary rapidity — from Arctic furs, in which only their eyes were visible, to diaphanous rainbow-coloured négligés, all silken swirls and pleats, through which the lines of the body showed up dark against the lights.
“Jesus!” Johnno would hiss.
But after the first half a dozen visits to this glittering shrine, I was bored, and bad-mannered enough to show it. “I suppose,” Johnno accused me fiercely, “you’d prefer the Sainte Cha
pelle. It’d be just like you!”
XII
✧✧✧
When the April rains were over at last I crossed to London, which I had always known was my destination, and began teaching.
In the first year I shifted school four times, then came to rest at last in a bleak industrial town, all blackened brick, in the north of England, and was gathered into a life as suburban and ordinary in its way as anything I might have settled for at home. In the summers I went to Europe, and got to know one or two towns as well almost as I knew Brisbane — better perhaps since the Brisbane I knew was already changing (my mother’s letters kept me informed of old places torn down and of new ones emerging, the Grand Central replaced by a shopping arcade, a whole block in front of the Town Hall ploughed up to make a parking station, the old markets cleared out of the city into a distant suburb, new bridges, new highways); the Brisbane I knew had its existence only in my memory, in the fine roots it had put down in my own emotions, so that a particular street corner would always be there for me in a meeting that had almost changed my life, or in the peculiar fact, half-sweet, half-sad, that it was from there that a certain tram had left, the scene of sentimental adolescent partings. It was the town I would always walk in, in my memory at least, with an assurance I could know nowhere else, finding my way by the smells — a winebar, the fruit barrow in a laneway, a hardware shop, the disinfectant they used in Coles. I could have made my way through it blindfold, as I often did in my sleep, amazed to discover that in my Brisbane the old markets hadn’t been removed at all, and the Grand Central, that extraordinary three-ring circus of my youth, was still in full swing. I could see my own reflections in its mirrors. And Johnno’s as well. It would always be there.
Meanwhile, after three years, people at home began to think of me as an expatriate.
An extraordinary denomination. What did it mean? It seemed too grand to fit anything I felt about my position, or any decision I had made to leave Australia and start again elsewhere. I had once found it odd, gratuitous even, that I should be an Australian. I found it even odder, more accidental, that I should be anything else. Friends who came to visit on working holidays were resentful of my being so settled. Their resentment found its object in certain habits that they thought of as non-Australian and therefore a betrayal. Like calling the pictures the “cinema” and sandshoes “plimsolls”. Like reading The Times. Like wearing sandals with socks. Impossible to tell them that all this was quite fortuitous. That I hadn’t chosen “silence, exile, cunning”, had never left Australia in more than fact. That going to sleep at night was still, for me, to climb high into the glossy dark leaves of the old fig tree outside our kitchen window in Edmondstone Street, with flying-foxes rusding in its darkness, and long golden strands hanging from its branches like a giant’s beard, and butcher-birds or mynahs picking about in the sunlight, between roots that pushed in deep under the house, lifting the concrete under the washtubs and even sometimes shifting a stump, far away under our sleep. Expatriate? What did it mean? Nothing it seemed to me. Except that the tree below my bedroom window here was a weeping beech that in summer filled the whole view with its brittle leaves and in winter let through the houses opposite, with frost repointing the edges of their bricks. The children in the flat below hung gobbets of meat from its boughs, and all winter the birds came to peck at strips of belly-pork or pick the last shreds from a mutton chop. A red setter loped through the yellowing stalks of the overgrown garden, sniffing, freezing — hunting blind in his own territory. There was nothing exotic about all this. I taught school all week, drank at the Carnarvon Castle or the Queens on Friday night. Saturday afternoon shopping. A Sunday walk to the top of Bidston Hill, with a long view across open country to an estuary and golflinks by the sea. In the town itself men from the shipyards in their heavy lumbermen’s rig and donkey jackets, still grimy from work, dragging their boots over the sawdust in dockside pubs and bursting noisily into the street at closing-time, stumbling off for a piss in cobbled backs. It wasn’t something I had chosen. I was here, that’s all. I had never left anywhere …
I heard from Johnno only briefly in those three or four years. Just after Christmas in the first year, he came to London for a wedding: Crispin, who was now the manager of a fashionable gallery, was to marry the niece of a painter, or sculptor, I forget which, and Johnno was best man. Then one summer I had a whole series of postcards from Germany. He and a German boy with the improbable name of Michael Kohlhaas were engaged in a large-scale operation on the autobahn stealing cars (Mercedes for preference), which they drove halfway across the country and disposed of over a cliff. I can’t vouch for the truth of any of this, but the cards came at regular intervals over six or seven weeks and from places hundreds of kilometres apart. He was certainly travelling fast, and if the autobahn was not involved I don’t know how else he can have been doing it. Or why. His route backwards and forwards across Germany had no fathomable system.
Then silence again: and a long, utterly incomprehensible letter from somewhere in the Bernese Oberland where he was holed up for the winter, “meditating” — the Himalayas being impracticable for the moment, though Switzerland, he assured me, with its tidiness and its obsession with small change, was a poor substitute for Nepal. The realm of the spirit, obviously, had very little to do with either elevation or climate.
Then after another year in which he appeared briefly in Vienna and Bucharest, a jaunty letter from Athens. He was teaching in one of the Berlitz schools at the Pireus. Athens was marvellous. He was utterly happy. Regenerated. Resurrected. I must come and visit him immediately.
I didn’t go immediately. But I did go at the end of the next summer.
So there we were again, sitting opposite one another at a white-topped marble table with glasses of Metaxa brandy between us and little sideplates of olives and tomato. The walls were darkly panelled, with old-fashioned advertisements (in English) for fancy biscuits and out-of-date cigarettes. It might have been the Greek Club. Only it wasn’t, and neither of us was the same.
After the lean years in Paris Johnno had filled out and was almost plump, as though he had begun to realise in the flesh his own larger possibilities, and was growing to fill them. His hair was longer, his full cheeks clean-shaven, his blue eyes strangely dulled. For the first time since I had known him his exuberance struck me as forced; he might even have been trying, for my sake, to rediscover some idea of himself that he could only fully realise through my presence. He was playing up to my vision of him.
“Dante, Dante! It’s so good to see you,” he told me for the third or fourth time. “I’ve been going to pieces in the sun. Look at the belly I’ve grown.” He lifted his loose shirt and showed it. “I’ve been letting myself go. Greece is so —” He made a vague gesture with his hand, indicating the slack darkish water of the harbour with its small boats rocking above their own shadow, and the stink of fishbones and salt. His eyes glistened and he called the waiter for more drinks. “You’ll love it here, Dante, I know you will. So long as you don’t expect it to be classical. It isn’t you know. It’s Byzantine! Soft, dark, utterly corrupt!” He indicated a group of old men slipping beads between their fingers as they looked on at a chess game. Blue-grey smoke drifted across from the pavement opposite, where a boy was roasting corn on a charcoal burner, turning and turning the cobs on an open tray and licking his fingers when they burned.
It was to be, for Johnno, the last of Europe. He pointed beyond the harbour wall to where the islands beat east towards Asia: Andros, Naxos, Rodos, Kos — the route Dionysus had come on, stepping from island to island with his message from the heart of the world. “I’ll be there in about two years,” Johnno said dreamily, as if it was a state you might reach like drunkenness, a journey through time rather than space, across more than the mountain ranges and borders of geography. “There’s no hurry. That’s one of the things you’ll have to learn here: there’s no hurry. If it didn’t happen yesterday, it will happen tomorrow. Time is ??
?” and he broke off again, with the same indefinable gesture towards the harbour, where the boats rocked on their shadow in no perceptible breeze.
Our days were more leisurely even than in Paris, and Johnno treated my desire to “see things” with mild amusement.
“As if after so long they’re going to disappear,” he’d complain, when I ranged impatiently up and down the room waiting for him to get dressed.
He would He curled up in a sleeping-bag on the bare floor till well after midday, with the shutters drawn to keep out the sun.
“All right, all right!” he’d snap, when I looked in for perhaps the third or fourth time, “just give me time to get on my feet, that’s all.”
But an hour later he would still be shuffling round the darkened room in his underpants, kicking at the cardboard suitcases that contained his clothes or pausing to read the scraps of paper that were hammered to the wall: messages to himself in his own childish scrawl, pictures and articles from the magazines, a whole page sometimes torn out of a book he was reading, while the book itself joined a dusty pile in the corner, where silverfish nested — abandoned but not thrown away. What clothes were not piled into the three suitcases were either strewn about the floor or hung (clean or dirty I could never tell which) on lines of string that stretched dangerously from the clasp of a shutter to a nail on the wall, then back to another shutter opposite.
“Do be good, Dante. Don’t hang about,” he’d say, sensing my presence at the open door. “Or make me a coffee. What about that?” He would be peering at a magazine photograph of Ellie Lambetti and rubbing solemnly at his chin. “Then, I promise, Scout’s Honour, we’ll go to Kaysariani. Only for Christ sake shit! I’ve got to have time to get up.”
Usually I crept out of the house early, before he had even begun to emerge from the depths of last night’s drunkenness, and would see him first in the late afternoon, when he would be brushed and freshened up again for his evening classes.