I am awaiting the postman who will deliver me a spare part which will rescue me from reading and all the prayers and chants I intone for a deeper realm of the senses as writing has abandoned me and I will soon be freed from it to logically spanner the ligatures of replacement machinery suitable for enabling all the workings. Holá! Hello in Spanish and good! in Chinese. Há! There is in Portuguese. There is what? The postman arrives. Hypothermia! I say in greeting. It is perpetually the cruellest month.
Everyone is here but no one says a word. No greeting. Waiting to be invited. So far so good, as I’m in three worlds. More will appear I hope. During the night thin cries, a coming to life.
It’s important to draw a line under what wishes to go on. Put a stop to goings-on, elaborations, sentences which come up against a sign that says prepare to stop, or an arrow that underscores the word detour.
Dense hills heave and rumble in a night of electrical storms, a monumental moment of light and darkness, and what has been encountered—a fallen tree, flooded creeks, intimations of doom—has all been stored, piled up in the back room of dreams instinct with poetry, so no one would ever know you had a hiding place. This is one explanation for what is happening.
My mother loved the bottom line. When she sent Cook to the wet markets, she always brought out her ledger and listed a putative costing. When Cook returned, she would count the change and balance the books since Cook was illiterate and sometimes inflated things, language preceding intention.
It seemed to me that such ledger-closures were always violent.
I disagreed with Frankie when he said at that highball dinner after he received a prize for superb scholarship, looking spiffy in his tuxedo, when he said there always had to be a sense of an ending, that one cannot break free of them and I disagreed. I was under-dressed, not ever having owned a tuxedo, but it was his tuxedo that allowed me to remember that there were false endings and I asked what do you do with someone else’s time which had finished, evaporated without your knowing or marking it, like the death of our childhood friend Robbie, which was neither a catastrophe nor an apocalypse, neither a paradigm nor a great charm, and besides Robbie would never have had any expectations or a sense of an ending and had certainly never dressed in a tux, even in his coffin, long after he was found dead in the snow?
Maybe I confused closure with ending; or perhaps with catastrophic or apocalyptic. But I know that doesn’t really count.
I sit and think a lot. Not deep thoughts or intricate intelligences, but odd thoughts which appear like old timber, oaken thoughts, hard ones which have to be qualified or legitimised by not being random, exhibiting a distinctive grain. Connected, rhizomatic thoughts, reckoning with the branches of practical nature, marvelling at existence and how strange it is, because existence is nothing save knots of fear and the knowledge of existence is the knowledge of fear. It is better to suck a stone; protect it from the winds and tides, because at least that focuses.
Of course it would be better to sit in snow to think these things. It was only one step from my mother’s ruminating when she said how strange death would be since she too, thought a lot, though she preferred standing in her pyjamas in the street staring up at the top of a telegraph pole. Old Chinese women, the neighbourhood said, always wore their pyjamas out. It was a fashion statement. The police brought her back several times and the last time they were not so polite. They said you’ve got to have a plan or project because all this was wasting police time, stopping them from solving real crime, their coming up against a detour like that.
Well, it’s no longer a secret, this work I’m working on. This project, which is to put people together, in touch with one another so they are not isolated in different worlds. It is a melancholy science, this arranging, because I’ve never been an arranger, preferring things to take their own course. Arranging was what you did in a tux, with false endings. You introduced people, initiated conversations, plied drinks from group to group, or so I was saying to Juan, who looked sceptical, though he’d never inquire why I threw myself into such an unrewarding task, a task which never worked because small talk was never intelligent and possessing intelligence is ethical; an ethics which mourns the loss of conversation.
I think he was thinking that I should sit in the snow a bit more, which is what Robbie did a lot of; well, walking in it, then maybe sitting down.
I went to primary school with Robbie in Kowloon Tong. ‘Tong’ was the Chinese word for ‘community’ or ‘gang’ or sometimes ‘triad’. We were a gang of boys then: Juan, Robbie, Frankie, Teddy, Northrop and Elias. Though we accepted Robbie as part of our gang, he was always wandering off. He’d disappear from classes and would be discovered by the police some hours later exploring an intricate nullah or climbing up to a hillside reservoir overlooking mainland China. There he could watch a furious red train blowing dragon smoke through the tunnels. It would change flags at the border.
In later life, Robbie made a living carving microscopic figurines which the Chinese government suspected were subversive. Art for art’s sake, ran one review during the Cultural Revolution, concealed his untrustworthiness. He appears obedient, is inclined to punishment, but is probably subversive and satirical.
Robbie suffered from St Vitus’ Dance and in the early part of his life was only capable of working in the General Post Office. He was punctual; waltzed in at precisely eight in the morning Eastern Standard Time. I think Juan liked him best because he had no illusions but he put people in touch with one another by mixing up their mail and collecting the stamps and making notes in a microscopic hand on the backs of them.
One afternoon we all decided to visit Juan at his house, a modest bungalow in one of the ‘English’ streets with garden roses in the front, so redolent of Kowloon Tong. The house had a steep and gabled roof, though there was no need of steep roofs in a climate which never snowed. We knocked on the door, but Juan’s mother said he was at cricket practice, so after she closed the door we each plucked a rose from her garden for our sisters.
All those sisters. Mine was a female household since my father was hardly ever home and I loved the distaff rhythms of dress-making, cake-mixing and spoiling of the little son, since it all coddled strange emotions besides serving to counter my father’s aggression. Sisters were a line under, a foil to his visiting violence upon me.
It’s perhaps why I thought my project or plan (a thought implanted by the police) of getting people together in mutually sensitive dispositions would provide a salon for the odd. Le salon des refusés.
But I didn’t count on the bleakness of life which preyed upon this ideal. I didn’t count on that human condition which Malraux described so mercilessly and which was so quotidian in China: that in the depredation of texts there was a lot of forgetting.
I believe I began the project out of goodwill, mainly because my mother never had a gift for conversation and would never put herself in the way of a get-together, at least with strangers. In fact she was afraid of strangers and of their wants and complaints; their vague associations with wartime misery.
Because existence was fear, she confined herself to the servants’ quarters at the back of our flat which was not quite in Kowloon Tong but still walkable to my school and she leaned over the balcony for many hours, taking in all the comings and goings of one of the most populated places on earth, and gleaned stories up and down the multiple storeys, from quiet gossip to loud rumour behind closed doors without participating in a single conversation. And because she was Eurasian, she only inhabited the mezzanine. And thus the balcony-woman drew a line under each intelligence as though life were an aphorism to be savoured like a sweet.
When I first set eyes on Filomena Augustina Rosário I must have been about seven. She was my oldest sister’s best friend, had ten years on me and was a game-breaker in the repressed fifties with her short skirts and basketball pumps. She was a contradiction: sporty with nylons, bringing to an abrupt stop what men expected. She sat me on her knee and her long hair brushed my face and I will never forget the cradling, my one hand upon her canvas shoe. And the fragrance of her perfume! All that sportiness and then this dream of the talkative mother I never had, together with a faint rubbery smell.
Outside were the budding skyscraper lights of Hong Kong, nightclubs still honky with colonial stiffness and American movies and The World of Suzie Wong, whose star (Nancy Kwan) was also my sister’s best friend, though with William Holden holding her slim waist and the lightbulbs flashing and the splash of taxis wading off towards some beach rendezvous with the colonials looking on from their balconies imagining and lusting, those repressed juices fading off into stiff conversation, high teas and a sea of uniforms, all made me uneasy about Filomena Augustina’s garter-belt revealed like a catapult hinting at a superstructure unknown to me, the architecture of Woman and what it could fire.
She used to sing like a nightingale in the Club de Miramar on Friday nights and it was only on account of my sister’s and her inseparability that nothing untoward happened with men.
You may have guessed. This Philomenic orchestration would not augur well.
Northrop said most people in Australia had two seasons in their lives: summer and fake autumn. We had not seen each other for fifty-two years. Gravity had taken its toll. We were at a conference at Sydney University whose august sandstone bore a strange resemblance to Hogwarts, I think. I have never read Harry Potter, but whole groups of Japanese tourists came to photograph the facade with J. K. Rowling under their arms. I didn’t ask Northrop why there were only two seasons and why those two, but assumed he was talking about the Sydney weather, which was relatively balmy compared to the arctic circle whence he had recently come.
Midsummer green is polyphonic, Robbie once said.
I was going to remind Northrop of this remark by our long dead gang member, but opted finally for youth and age, which I decided was a better interpretation and in order not to show my ignorance I asked him how tall he was, out of admiration. He didn’t take kindly to this question. I find it offensive, he muttered. But it’s around six seven. Especially since all of the Japanese tourists were around five feet and terribly polite.
Some lucky people, he continued, get three seasons. What about four? I asked, pushing my luck. That only happens if your mind is sound, he replied.
But that was many years after Filomena’s short life and Northrop and I were both in our fall years and I had no book to write and none under my arms. I still thought of Filomena nevertheless. She was Portuguese and was darkly beautiful. She’d bought me a plastic model of the Lusitania which didn’t float in the washing tub but listed disagreeably and then leaked all over the floor. Northrop said we’re always caught in a time warp of make-believe without realising we’re in thrall to the seasons. You can call it Freudian, this unconscious weathering of uncanny archetypes. Peasants understand it better than we do.
I thought of winter and my father throwing fiery chains of powerful Chinese crackers onto the tops of double-decker buses in the February New Year and visions of smoke and mirrors of Filomena in our house and my mother’s outhouse depression coming down like a curtain whenever action was decided upon, our planning to go as a group for instance, to see the harbour skyrockets and then the newsreels of the Lusitania being torpedoed by the U-boat U-20 in 1915, sinking in twenty minutes because that was what they showed before the main feature starring Gary Cooper or Doris Day in order to give gravitas to fantasy and history to comedy. Something Northrop would have said was irony, but I received it all in awe like a naïve peasant.
Then again Northrop, who said he was a romantic and a genius—not necessarily in that order—was always an ironist. I once helped him spray rust-preventer on his cast-iron balcony in Toronto. Nor could he change a lightbulb. Which concerned me more than his notion that we were all part of one vast proem to poets; and of course to genius. I took the side of his antagonist Harry, who said we were all part of one vast neurosis and that our thinking lives were angstiomatic and that probably explained Northrop’s dislike of everything Parisian and of me in part. He was a Methodist and a dissenter and hated all those cultural commissars who came out of the provinces and failing to admit it, making up fancy words.
After the conference Northrop and I repaired to the Forest Lodge pub opposite the university on Parramatta Road, a pub I referred to as the Forest Lawn, because not only was it deadly quiet and dark, but it was eerie. Northrop said he didn’t think death or existence were at all strange since through them error would out. This may have been the cause of his rupture with Juan, who was also a dissenter but one who didn’t believe in such symmetries.
Northrop said he wasn’t comfortable about speaking on this winter between them when it suddenly began to rain in the beer-garden and onto our half a square metre of table beneath a wall of ivy and stone and barbed wire featuring a concentration of floodlights.
Oh, Filomena. Anyone as pretty as she was could never drive well. My sister taught her a little and Filomena used the clutch a lot, which meant we freewheeled on the downhills and around corners, missing mothers with prams and children on bikes. I hid in the back expecting a crash. But perhaps her sense of an ending came via Robbie. I should never have asked him to show her and my sister the path to the reservoir.
There were many reservoir incidents at that time since there were no safety fences. The Chinese, it was said, never climbed that far up the hillside, fearing ghosts that roamed the cemetery below. Or so the British authorities proclaimed. The British were reservoyeurists. Wait and see and maybe nothing will happen. It’s in nobody’s interest to go up there since we are supplying water for them. Putting up a fence would just tempt the Chinese to suicide. But the British didn’t reckon on the daring of the Portuguese, conquerors of land and sea.
Oh Filomena!
Teddy was very different from the rest of us. Teddy was a survivor, though he never rejoiced in surviving, and instead was constantly glum. Austerity was his key word, his mantra. Teddy Austeritz, we called him. He never joked; hated repartee. Even as a boy he was always old, cantankerous and difficult. I think this was his survival method. He was the one out of all of us who found emigration the hardest. He said it was ethical never to be at home in one’s home.
Juan practised it. No one ever found him at home. The only time he came to our house was when he made it his mission to lure my mother from the balcony. Juan was always the jokester. He yelled from the kitchen that my uncle Dante was seen going to mass with Beatrice, an opera singer past her prime. I’m sure there will be a divorce now, Juan shouted. My mother came indoors from the balcony. Make yourself at home, she said to Juan. It was her way of welcoming visitors, though I was never sure it wasn’t said ironically.
Teddy had a theory for never being at home in one’s home. He had a theory for most things, especially when he was smoking his pipe. Even as a boy he came to our house and smoked his pipe and spouted theories. Long, intricate swirls of them, filling the air with wonderful aromas, which made my absent father happy and my mother appearing to be happy because even when young, Teddy was like an uncle in a cardigan who only befriended fading opera stars. My sisters were nowhere to be seen on these occasions.
When distance between friends is eliminated, Teddy said, estrangement follows. And when what is unspoken is lost, economic barbarism becomes awkwardly standardised. Well, maybe not awkwardly. He was full of enigmas like that. He supplemented conscience with prophecy.
I was never as smart as Teddy, but he spoke to me about the paradox of violence, since getting injured playing rugby was good for me in my father’s eyes. Thus I was being punished by a third party, God perhaps, which gave father much satisfaction and self-justification.
Six stitches above the right eye! Good for you!
Broken collarbone! Good for you!
Dislocated knee! Great!
Australia was good for me in sustaining injury. If you were suspected in every shop of theft because you looked foreign, you learned not to be sentimental. I called it the hermetics of suspicion; a closed shop from which I stole experience and was never innocent.
Despite, or on account of, his resoluteness and gloominess, Teddy had fast friends. Elias was probably his best buddy. My father understood this more than any of us. It’s his Jewishness, my father would say, and left it at that. Elias always reminded my father that he was Jewish too. He used the word converso. It was a basketball shoe. You could bend it one way or another. Flip-flop. Even though my dad was only five feet two and didn’t play basketball, he was a hard man. The mind was not his thing, yet he loved Elias because Elias was argumentative, though shorter than him and later, during the Blitz in London, Elias proved to be a great seducer of women, which is what my father practised when he was never at home.
I cycle to drum out depression and unfulfilled solitude, and the rest of the time fulfil all the ins and outs of making arrangements, fiddling with bike bits, dismantling them, oiling and putting them back together again. Sometimes, like Robbie, I am lost in distant farmlets where I have to ask for water—aqua potable—a different spirit. Then home again, home again, jig-a-jig-jig. Is there a home?
We turned up quite often at Juan’s mother’s house. Yes, we called it that now. We turned up to afternoon tea and since Juan was at cricket practice, she would always have biscuits for us. She spoke of Juan as though he were present but invisible.
One day she asked what each of us would like to do after school.
Teddy said he wanted to be a concert pianist, though that was probably beyond him by now since you had to be a prodigy in the womb and, upon bursting out, play Für Elise on a toy piano given to you by an aspiring aunt.
Teddy hated jazz and once had a serious debate with my father, who respected classical training but couldn’t read a note of music. My father wanted to play jazz like André Previn and to be married to Mia Farrow. Secretly though, we knew Teddy fantasised about being a black musician with a drug habit and on rare occasions was a great mimic, though that would have been terribly politically incorrect now.
Frankie said he wanted to be a professor. Either that or go to Hollywood.
Robbie was almost monosyllabic: walker; hiker; postman.
Elias said that because everything was falling over, he thought of doing architecture. He meant that his leaning towers of books which he stacked from floor to ceiling in his room, books smelling of ash and dust, a bane for his mother’s cleaning lady whom he would like to whip for unstacking and rearranging, her straightening which obsessed him. He wanted to document lives, breathe them in, learn their leanings, inhabit them.
You mean you want work at the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages? Northrop smirked. And then answered arrogantly for himself without Juan’s mother having to repeat her question: poet.
And I? A project manager for the afterlife. A bio-mechanic. I drill down, pull out, cut up, nail together and survey.
Juan’s mother thought my answer the most practical and sensible with regards to earning a living.
After the war, it was quietly spoken Juan who, out of the whole gang, excelled. People said it was on account of a Petrograd lease which turned out to be dynamite. Everyone suddenly wanted to buy into it, to get to know him or befriend him, to ingratiate themselves, or at least be within letter-writing distance. Fodor wrote to him; Michelin; Baedeker; Frommer. They wanted him on their maps. Then there were teams of accountants, investors, world bank NGOs, con-men, poker-players for high stakes like my father, who once sat in for a game with Omar Sharif. Juan said nothing except that this new company was not his ‘tong’ and like a good scrum half, needed swift flankers to protect him from fawners and muggers. The gang immediately closed ranks.
I pointed out we were not Juan’s agents or publicists—this was important as many of the latter had superseded ethics and I wasn’t sure how each of us stood in that regard—so I pointed out that I am wary of people posing as secret agents, since uniqueness cannot be bought or sold and that these so-called agents stood between Juan’s and our freedom; that is, our freedom from exchange. This was to be our code and I think we all read it in italics.
Robbie took notes and said he would do his best at the mail exchange.
This detour tended to compromise my original project or plan as the police had called it. Thus I had to change tack from being an arranger to being a deranger, extinguishing my lines of communication, my networks and connections, making excuses for not making meetings and then gradually not replying to queries. Juan is at cricket practice. It became our standard reply.
Frankie was probably the odd fellow out. He said we were practising slow derangement, voluntary dementia, vagaries in close reading. I think he was right on the last point. None of us did distant reading.
A debate started when Northrop (ironically, I think) said that non-participation in exchange should not prevent our supplying a number of possible conclusions or reasons as to why we were doing this, to which Frankie heartily agreed. Teddy argued against reasons, pointing out that all art was psychosomatic and that self-repression brought strength. Look at the way Richard Wagner applied envy, sentimentality and destructiveness to his relationships with friends, he said. Do we want that?
Robbie had wandered off by now, but we knew he’d keep our secret when burying dead letters or butlering conversation in his worn suit up at the manor house.
Now that we are old we remember things strangely, like plucking ashberries on a Sunday morning in New York together with evicted bums through manhole steam. New York City has always been a mental condition. A purveyor of after-lives, I visit often and mortar gaps with sticky snow and sometimes can be seen with Montaigne, who thought it best to expire in his local tavern on a freezing winter’s afternoon in Brooklyn co-dying with his alcoholic friends—the remainder of his gang—realising everyone outside thought they knew where they were going—praying and working—perhaps not in that order—mindlessly. The killing zone has brought us closer to the final census. Best of all, we noted the changing light of lengthier dusks.
If that is hope, Northrop said, then stop complaining. You’ve all come to what you’ve become through harsh fulfilment. But now the seasons will present differently, anamnestic and Lethean.
Filomena Augustina Rosário.
It is winter. Synaesthetic glows and polyphonic verdures of neon remind us that beauty, like art, will always exact penitence.
We said rosaries in a novena for the repose of her soul night after night for nine nights, kneeling beside my father’s bed, he intoning too loudly and with copious tears, my sisters answering in harmonious antiphons, my mother remaining silent, resolute in her anger, her sorrow and her suspicion, because the human condition was as merciless as the way you needed to draw a hard line beneath existence, since everything above was humbug and lies.