CRAIGHOLME, the set of The Italian Visitor, sat framed by bare imported poplars beneath a moist dawn. It has not been too easy for Kate and Gus and the beasts to reach it. They have walked more than two hours through the predawn, negotiating seventeen wire fences and crossing five sloppy red clay roads gouged with the marks of bogged tires.
Craigholme itself was a white wool-palace with broad verandahs. Its poor-relative litter of outbuildings in aged brick and slab timber hunch wetly around it. A string of caravans, where cast and camera crew were clearly living and—at the moment—sleeping, connected the big house to the shearing shed and the shearers’ quarters, which sit on a bare knoll parallel to the wooded one the big house takes up.
From beneath dripping stringybarks, Gus, Kate and the beasts observed this present capital of Pellegrino’s imagination.
A man in a yellow wet-weather jacket emerged from the end room of the shearers’ quarters and made his way with fuming breath to a long white catering truck. His hunched back and the vapor his breath made reminded Kate of her own coldness.
—Let me talk, Kate told Gus. The power to issue commands had shifted to her now. She expected though that the beasts would do most of the talking.
They all walked like habitués down from the last fence amongst weeping eucalypts into the film location. Stars and cameo roles, cameramen, soundmen, boom operators, grips and best boys, electricians, drivers, carpenters, continuity women, makeup artists and costumers slept all around them as they progressed.
The hunched, steaming man had by then entered the catering truck and Kate knocked on the door. The man reappeared, rubbing seamed hands. From within an early morning radio quacked resonantly on a stainless steel bench. The noise bespoke a warm studio, a newsreader with coffee close to hand.
—Police are interviewing a Myambagh father and son about the death of one man and the disappearance of a further man and woman.
Would they have Guthega and Noel under hard inquiry in separate rooms? If Jack had anything to do with it, they’d be treated gently, as shocked survivors.
—It is now believed that Myambagh man Barry McNeal (Kate was astounded to hear Jelly called by his civil name) perished in an abortive attempt to blow up the Myambagh–Cobar railway line. Two associates of Mr. McNeal’s vanished later in the night, when they set off across the flood-swollen township of Myambagh in an aluminum boat. The names of the missing couple are a Mr. Gus Schulberger of Bourke and Miss Kate Gaffney of Myambagh. Grave fears are held for their safety …
—Yes? asked the canteen man again. He had not heard the content of what the newsreader had said. He had heard only the general contours: Myambagh, flood, the normal cast of missing persons. Every flood gathered its quorum of the missing. No foul play was ever suspected; foul water took all the blame.
—We brought the animals Mr. Pellegrino wanted, Kate told the canteen man.
—Oh yes. I don’t know much about that.
—He needs animals for today’s shoot, said Kate. Or it might be tomorrow’s. Anyhow, we’ve brought them.
The man caught sight of Menzies and Chifley.
—They aren’t caged.
—Yes. We don’t confine them. They aren’t lions and tigers.
The man laughed without any ill intent.
—Free range, eh?
—Mr. Pellegrino told us to contact him soon as we got here.
—They had a night shoot last night. Give him another quarter of an hour’s sleep, love. Have a cup of tea with me. Christ, they just stand there.
—They think they’re members of the family, said Gus, still honestly deploring the fact. My wife and I raised them from the egg and the pouch.
The man was not to know the wife was gone, and he thought the wife must be Kate, and the reference calmed him a little.
They drank tea, giving Frank Pellegrino and his American wife a last quarter-hour of sleep.
—What agency sent you? the canteen man asked. He was casual. He was not prosecuting them.
—Bernard Astor, said Kate, flying automatically so to speak, with thousands of feet of thinness under her wings.
—I thought he was in promotions. I didn’t know he was an agent.
—See, said Kate. We did this job for him at a film premiere in Sydney.
Young men and women carrying metal boxes or battery belts or holsters for spanners and screwdrivers round their waists came and went, making themselves tea and coffee. A man with a light meter round his neck on a black cord arrived rubbing his hands and yelling, Oh Jesus, it’s a cocoa morning, boys and girls!
This fellow Kate recognized: Pellegrino’s boyhood friend, Pete Rapotec, who had shot all Pellegrino’s films, the good and the bad, just as Marty Fenton, graduate of the Adelaide University School of Music, had written all Frank Pellegrino’s scores. Rapotec was a walking index of Pellegrino’s loyalty to the talents of old friends.
The canteen man grabbed a woolly-headed boy with a belt full of tools around his waist and said, Rabbit, take these people over to Frank’s caravan.
Frank. The egalitarian film set in the egalitarian bush in egalitarian Australia.
The boy led them across open ground on grass which crackled—its moisture had frozen overnight. The beasts at this or that stage either followed, led, or outflanked. They got to the caravan with PELLEGRINO stenciled on its door and the boy knocked. Opening up, Frank Pellegrino was wearing a towel around his waist. His upper body had an olive smoothness which Kate remembered, but which had aged a little and acquired with success and failure baplike slabs of fat around the chest.
—Jesus, Rabbit, he said. This is worse than fucking Alaska.
He had once made a film in Alaska. With his childhood cameraman Rapotec. Music by his childhood composer Fenton. He stared toward Gus and Kate and the loosely associated beasts, and moisture steamed from his undried shoulders.
—Do those two want a job? he asked, nodding toward Chifley and Menzies.
—We brought them for that, Kate told him.
—For what scene? I didn’t order them.
—My name’s Kate, Kate told him. I knew you. I worked with Bernard Astor.
—Kate?
—Kate Gaffney. You might remember. Adelaide.
First he looked over his shoulder, widening his eyes, shaking his head slightly within the boundaries of the wider, more sweeping movement.
—Listen, wait there. I’ll just get dressed. Wait there.
Naturally enough, he didn’t want his wife to hear the utterance of old lovers’ names.
While Pellegrino got dressed, Kate led Rabbit and Gus down the hill a little. In this process Chifley and Menzies were still outriders, keeping watch on the limits of the known, tolerable, breathable world.
—I might, suggested Rabbit. If you don’t mind …
He nodded to the steaming knot of men and women around the catering truck.
—You go by all means, said Kate.
She watched him dance off to breakfast, and the cold burned within her like a flame and caused the old itching of the shoulders. Soon Frank Pellegrino emerged from the caravan, wearing untied sneakers and pants and a leather trenchcoat of the kind which must have cost him some thousands of dollars in New York but which he wore like a Myambagh Escapee wearing overalls.
—Kate? he asked afresh.
—Kate Gaffney.
—I heard the radio. I wondered, you know. But you weren’t washed away? Some other Kate Gaffney …
—Yes, some other.
—I think it’d be a bloody mercy if this fucking location flooded. But listen, there was talk about an explosion …
—Not us, Mr. Pellegrino, said Gus firmly.
—What about those animals we brought, Kate asked him.
—Christ, you’ve changed, love.
And then, being the decent or at least sentimental man he was, he put his hand out and touched her clogged hair by her cheek.
—I mean that without prejudice. Naturally you don’t work for Bernard anymore?
—No. This is Gus, Frank. Gus, Frank Pellegrino.
—Augustus Schubert, or some name like that? asked Frank, ever attentive, ever a student of news broadcasts.
—Schulberger, Mr. Pellegrino, said Gus, hoping Pellegrino liked battlers.
Pellegrino, who looked more of a crafty Sicilian than his parents did and who probably found it wise to cultivate his ancestrally wise peasant air, assessed Gus. Gus did not meet his gaze but fixed his eyes frankly on the misty hill behind the caravan. Pending judgment.
Before long, Frank gave up being an employer and spoke quietly to Kate.
—As I told you I would, I always remembered how you were kind to me in Adelaide. You were my guide in the bloody netherworld, Kate. I’m pleased you didn’t drown. I mean, I can’t help wondering what happened to you since … You know what’s happened to me, anyhow. Every bastard’s been dancing on my grave, but I won’t bloody die for them. And I’ve got a bloody good wife, Kate.
—Can we stay here? asked Gus suddenly, since the reunion dance was taking so long.
—I don’t know about incognito, Gus. Kate’s a well-placed woman. There’d be a lot of people sad if they couldn’t celebrate her survival. I think we ought to let people know.
By common consent Gus and Kate kept silent for a while. Kate said, Make room for us in the budget, Frank.
Frank Pellegrino scratched a worry sore on his lower lip.
—Come on, Frank, Kate insisted. Be a sport.
—Oh Jesus. A sport. Is that what you want?
He shook his head, but in a way which added up the old loyalties and debts.
—Okay. Report down to the production office—it’s the one closest to the catering van. I’ll ring ahead. Use any names you like. Tell them I sent you. You’re the animal wranglers. I reckon you’ll need accommodation. You’ve got to see the executive producer about that. Klaus. Next to the production office.
Menzies walked right past Frank Pellegrino.
—Reassure me though. What are these two like with actors?
Gus said quickly, The roo doesn’t box people.
—I don’t want him to box anyone, mate, said Frank. What I want is for him to wander up to our Italian leading man and give him one hell of a great bloody epiphany. The spirit of Australia eyeing the bugger off. I mean, he’s big, your roo, and he’s got that archetypal look. Would he stand still for a shampoo, do you reckon? Rapotec’ll want to give him one.
—Shampoo’s okay, said Gus.
—Our Italian leading man can have a bloody epiphany with the emu too. You know, the best things in the script are often things that befall you at the time, on location. So, Kate, you can hang round here while we film the grace notes with these two. You ought to dry off and get some breakfast. I’d better get back to the missus.
And with a small wave which gave them the liberty of the location, he turned and went back to his caravan, the sodden laces dragging, the leather coat crackling in this dry winter dawn.
It was in this way that Chifley and Menzies were not so much written as injected into the shooting schedule of the new Pellegrino movie.
The Italian prisoner of war is left by his charges at the gate of the sheep station. He asks in broken English where he is to go.
—Up that way, mate, say his departing Australian guards. Up at the house.
Walking up the long red road, he encounters Chifley blocking his path, a tutelary deity. Chifley weighs him in that direct contemplative way. It is not exactly the epiphany Frank Pellegrino wants, but it inhibits the Italian—at the threshold of the farmhouse where he’ll meet and become the lover of an alien woman—with a sense of the level, terrible strangeness of the country. At various stages the Italian encounters Chifley again, and Chifley’s gaze is to return to him frequently in flashback throughout the film.
Likewise Menzies’ enormous striding speed cuts across his vision, especially in a crucial early scene. The vehicle in which the Italian star and the female lead are traversing the great, vaporous plain encounters Menzies, who scoots along on an indifferent, uncompetitive parallel, in the end outspeeding the truck. Excellently shot. Not overdone. The lead actors are required to occupy the truck during this long-range shoot: Pellegrino rarely permits standins. Kate and Gus attend the screening of the rushes every evening in the freezing shearing shed, where rugg-ed actors and crews pass bottles of cabernet sauvignon around from mouth to mouth and exclaim about Rapotec’s camerawork.
In the rushes, they see too the separately shot truck interior scene. The Italian prisoner turns to the woman in the truck—at this stage they don’t know each other well—with a wide-open and inappropriate smile on his face, because he thinks she has seen and been amused by this startling progress of great, flightless Menzies. But she has not even noticed Menzies. The bird is simply an unremarked item in her landscape. She wonders what this Italian is grinning at. She is hostile to the size of his grin. Gawp-eyed Menzies is a catalyst of hostility and so, in the end, of passion.
—Get the bloody marsupials while they’re hot! Frank Pellegrino would regularly yell during the shooting of these scenes, and his New York wife would smile and shake her head at the same time for his combined loutish speech and filmic gift.
He would stride out onto the set after a shooting had stopped and sling his arm around the Italian star’s waist and yell, Listen you old Eye-ty poofter. We’ve got to have a conference!
Pellegrino always seemed tickled with Gus. He was delighted with the way Gus could get Menzies to run by pressing a point on the bird’s nearly nonexistent hip. As for straight-gazing Chifley, he needed no coaching and no cues.
In the caravan she shared with Gus, Kate washed and combed her hair but did not dress it. She showered, but always put her clothes back on inside the bathroom. She would have been ashamed for Gus to see her scarred shoulders. She wouldn’t share the news of them with him as she had with Jelly.
On Gus’s urging, Chifley and Menzies were permitted the freedom of the location, except during those scenes where they were not needed and during which they were corralled for a time in the small stockyard behind the big house. Often, drowsing in her bunk, Kate could hear them ambling and weighing the earth outside the caravan, the dry flutter of flightless Menzies, the heavy, casual shifting and loping of Chifley.
Still hoping for mutation by carbohydrate, she ate vastly from the covered catering truck’s hearty breakfasts, lunchtime soups and pastas, evening roasts.
One lunchtime the star, an Australian woman whose reputation rivaled that of any of America’s cinematic women, came stamping up to the catering truck in her 1940s jodhpurs and riding boots. She was attended by a young production assistant, and raged at her.
—Though I don’t know why he wants me in for all these fucking long shots. That’s what he’s got Sharon for. He’s filming from four hundred meters away and he says he needs me! Why’s he so bloody funny about that? I know what he says. The soul is the fucking soul, and the talent’s the fucking talent, even at four hundred meters. But I’m freezing my arse off in the summer long shots. I just won’t do it today. I’ve got a bloody cold coming on. He can go to hell.
The Sharon the star spoke of was a young Sydney girl who rode well and who resembled the actress. But as the female lead implied, Frank Pellegrino believed temperamentally in soulprints and in the capacity of a presence to be discerned from another one at a great distance. It was said that movie stars, who did not believe in the unswappability of the spirit, always got the flu in Pellegrino films.
But for Kate, the meaning of the movie star’s passing the dressing tables where technicians and lesser actors were eating was that her eyes settled for a cold moment on Kate and did not see her as a sharer of the same air. Kate had sat beside her in press sessions when they were both young. A witty, self-absorbed woman, but with enough sharpness of mind to scan faces in passing and become aware of cues from the past. She picked up no cues from what she saw of Kate.
In muttered sentences during the shooting of the animal scenes, and as if he was instructing her in some technical matter, Frank had told Kate that he would provide a truck and driver when the Chifley-Menzies combination had finished its work. The day of Chifley’s last scene Pellegrino pulled her out of the luncheon queue and asked for a word.
—Do you know young Kevin? Frank asked. The red-haired kid, the gopher? He’ll drive you wherever you like.
He looked away at the line of his people, the tribe required for the making of any picture anywhere. They would be fueled by the catering to cohere together in the making of sublime images, or so Pellegrino hoped. He returned his gaze to her.
—Do you know a bloke called Burnside? Would have worked for the Kozinskis and people of that ilk. When I used to make documentaries as a kid, he was always turning up. A frightening feller. Adelaide people aren’t used to men like him.
—He wants me to sign papers.
—I heard you married that prick Kozinski. Why did you do that, Kate?
—Well, she said. She could have given the supreme reason: I wanted children. But he wouldn’t have understood the force of her old desire for motherhood. She found it hard to remember herself.
—He was here just after dark last night. Shower time, before dinner.
For Frank was a great showerer and she seemed to remember that they had spent a lot of time together under cascades of water—the bed resorted to only for exhausted sleep.
—He doesn’t believe what was on the radio. He thinks you’re on the road. He came right up to the door of my caravan, and I thought, Shit! because, as I say, I remember him when I made a little documentary, and I interviewed him as a colorful figure and he said, Yes, it can be a rough business. It’s full of rough bastards. And then he put a grip on my arm that made the tears come to my eyes. I kept hoping you wouldn’t appear from your caravan, but you were acute as always, Kate, and you stayed low. You must have known somehow.
—I didn’t know.
—On a commission. He told me that he was offering a quarter of a million dollars for information leading to your location, Kate. I looked at him and I said, Whose money? and he said, My money, Mr. Pellegrino. Part of my fee.
She had had a dream about lushly, heartily uttering gratitude to Frank, but by the day’s light she still spoke in her flat way and the heart was mere steak. Just the same, he deserved to be told something.
So she explained that she owned a lot of her husband’s business. Burnside wanted her to sign papers handing things back to Paul so that he could put them in his new woman’s name or more likely keep them to himself. Once bitten, after all. She’d signed papers for Burnside, but Burnside lost them when his car was washed away.
—So do you want to meet him? Sign the things? Get a settlement out of the bastards? I’m not asking because of the money he mentioned, love. I’m wasting so much money here, his little payoff counts for buggerall. But do you want to be free and clear?
She felt a pleasant flutter of anger behind her ribs.
—I never want to meet him. I don’t want anything, but I don’t want to help Burnside or anyone from the Kozinskis.
—What did they all do to you, Kate? You were a lovely woman. What did they do, love? I could have married you, not that I’m complaining—I’m not complaining. But I could have married you. Saved myself some anguish too.
She laughed at the stupidity of his vain world scheme. I could have married you.
—So I’ve let you down?
—No, I didn’t mean it that way.
But in part he did. She had reneged on the duty of old lovers to maintain a sort of continuum of charm against future chance meetings.
But all that was contrary to the truth: Uncle Frank’s dogma about the necessary roles of people, a dogma she had seen fulfilled with Jelly and all the attendant deities of Murchison’s Railway Hotel. That not everyone was on the earth to save themselves anguish.
So Kate said, You couldn’t have married me.
Pellegrino had the good sense not to insist.
He said, I did read what happened. You’ve got to forgive me for not writing to you. Something like that intimidates people, you know. Makes them think there really is nothing they can say. But Kate, are you going to spend all your life like this? That man Gus. Lovely fellow. But a fucking ghost, Kate. A bygone figure.
—No. He’s alive. He’s okay. The world’s the ghost. It’s gone sour around him. But he’s not sour.
He shrugged. Furtively he took a card from his pocket. Sicilian from South Australia, an Academy Award winner, commander of camera technicians, actors, horse wranglers, caterers, electricians and costumers. Furtively.
—You can always reach me through him, he told her, nodding to the card. He’s my agent. Ask for anything. Money. Are you okay for money?
Kate would not take the card.
—I won’t need to call on you. The animals have made Gus and me a living. Thank you. Thank you.
She found she childishly stamped the earth with the ball of her foot in her gumboot. Emphasis. Now she was going to leave. But he held her back, furtive again, by the elbow.
—I know you don’t feel you’re in the land of the living. Jesus, you’ve got to change that.
She shrugged.
—I’m going along all right.
He shook his head.
—I hope you get through all this okay, he said finally, hitting an abrasive basso in which a suggestion of tears lay over the surface of the hormones. He was a sentimental man too. The bad reviews must have near killed him. The terror of the mockery not just of Adelaide but of the world might even now make him drift away in the midst of his wife’s caresses.
Driving off the next morning in raw, bright air, amongst paddocks dun with frost, Kate—seated beside Kevin the gopher in the cabin of the truck—smelt the vegetable musk of his red hair and hoped a vegetable innocence was there as well. For Burnside might offer him so much for news of her.
Sitting by the passenger window, Gus was occupied by such things too. For they both knew only Jelly had the sublime innocence, an innocence of the order which shone in the air the truck parted, which slithered down the flanks of their journey and then applied itself to the rear of the truck. The shoulders of departed innocents, Kate was certain, impelled the truck forward.
She knew that it could be a mistake for her to read the whole universe as abetting her escape in this way. But her faith that the universe, having gutted her, would now help her at every small turn was reinforced by breakfast time on the edge of the town of Byrock, when a broad constable stopped red-haired Kevin and accused him of being ten kilometers over the in-town speed limit.
The beasts were in the back, but there was not a tradition in Australia of cops searching trucks. Kate did not feel too great an anxiety about it.
—But constable, said Kevin, we’re not even in town.
—The speed is posted.
Byrock, to fortify its existence, had spread its town speed limit for miles either side of its modest main street.
The cop asked who owned the vehicle. It was leased, Kevin told him. Who by? Kevin pulled out the papers from the glovebox. Paramount Pictures, they said. That made the cop pause. He had never thought of Paramount Pictures and Byrock as existing in the one universe.
—You with that picture down near Cobar?
—That’s right. I’m taking these people home to Wilcannia. They’ve finished. Transport home’s in their contract.
—What did you do on the picture?
—Animal wranglers, said Gus.
The cop was appeased. It sounded good.
—Okay. Next time you’re through here, I want you to obey the signs.
He patted the truck familiarly, as if as a vehicle of cinematic glory it was bound to traverse the limits of Byrock again and again.
Pulling away, Kevin wasn’t grateful at all.
—I told him Wilcannia, he explained, because you never tell them the truth. Not in a one-horse town that’s got bigger boundaries than New fucking York.
They shopped at a country store south of Bourke in the early afternoon. Gus put the food he bought in a gunnysack not unlike the one in which Jelly’s remains had been dropped into the flood, and deftly gave some confusing information about his supposed destination to the talkative grocer, who claimed to know him and his sister-in-law.
Then Gus had Kevin drop them all, himself, Kate, the beasts, at a gate in flat saltbush country. The gate said T. P. MCGLAGLAN. From this point they waved Kevin away. Kate saw the redhead leaning out of his cabin waving, radiant between his freckles. A coconspirator, at least till Burnside approached him and offered him the Kozinski incentives.
Standing on the red dirt road which led off through the McGlaglan gate, Gus put his hand on Kate’s forearm. A gentle hand to her thickened, inhuman self. She was astounded by it and hoped it did not mean he was trying to bring off a habitual tenderness.
—Not our gate of course, Kate. We’re cross-country, twenty miles from here. Easy stages, Kate.
She was happy in a way. As always she enjoyed the prospect of covering cold ground with these worthy and philosophic animals.
The earth here had once been a seabed, and had the absolute flatness of a great seabed still. Over this sea, with its screens of stringybark and its pointillisms of saltbush, within this landscape of sparse tribes and defeated farmers, Kate and Gus and the beasts hiked to the Soldier Settler farmhouse.