I WANTED ALLEGRA to befriend Rose Hirsch, but it was a long time happening. She couldn’t see how any friend of The Brolga’s could be a friend of ours. But Rose knew all about Dadda, I protested.
She knew our Italian grandparents. Didn’t Allegra want to know what they were like, what they did, where they lived?
Allegra pretended she was indifferent. Families were unimportant, anyway, and the sooner family structures disappeared and gave way to the collective rearing of children the better. I had only to look at Eli to see corruption in the making. It was not that she didn’t love Eli, it wasn’t his fault, just that he’d been born a bit too soon. Now there were co-operative, community play centres run by the parents, the whole approach to child-rearing would be revolutionised.
Actually, there was only one co-operative play centre we knew of, and they were continually being left in the lurch by parents who had to race off to courses, or were single and found it hard to make up the quota of parent days.
When I told Allegra about The Apparition, she said, ‘Huh! Those Milan socialists! Reactionaries! They wrecked the Second International. In their view the middle class existed for the sake of the working class. They were bourgeois themselves. They had a vested interest in the survival of the free market and parliamentary democracy.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
We were lying on blankets on our damp back lawn. Overhead the spring of 1975 was trying to move in by cramming the winter into one dark lumpy cloud in the only bit of sky I could see, framed by guttering, paling fences and a large old oak tree from which the occasional acorn smote our picnic. The washing plapped on our rusty hoist. Failed cauliflowers were raising white fists at the ends of long green arms, challenging me to modify my horticultural methods. Allegra was trying to read five books and a newspaper all at once. Her hair fizzed out, long and wild, from her little heart-shaped face. Every now and again she gathered it into a bundle as thick as a hay bale and tried to tie it in a knot. She moved rapidly from book to book, now sitting up, now lying down; sunglasses on, sunglasses off; biting her pencil, jotting in a margin. She was researching something, I didn’t quite know what. I was trying to look like Jackie Onassis.
‘You don’t understand, Bel,’ she said, still jotting away. ‘Socialism is about working-class rule. It’s about the destruction of the bourgeois state and the so-called free market. Not everybody’s capable of doing great things, but everybody needs the wherewithal to live. Look at the situation in art. As things stand, gallery directors do better than artists out of artworks.’
‘Not at Mad Meg,’ I said.
‘But Mad Meg’s only one gallery.’ She sat up straight, cross-legged, specs on the end of her nose, forehead wrinkled. ‘Why should that be the case? By the time art ends up in the public galleries, it’s been bought and sold many times. Do people go to galleries to worship art icons for what they are, or for what they cost?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t a clue why some people paint and others want to see their work. It’s just part of culture, aesthetics. I couldn’t say what use it has. None I can put a name to. Maybe its original function was to identify people and places. I suppose it has to do with God, too, striking fear into people or eliciting respect from them, or just trying to show God’s presence in, or absence from, the world. And then, western art is used to signify taste. Once God has fallen away, I suppose it serves Mammon.’
‘Precisely. In a free market system, people are wage slaves. In a socialist system, it isn’t money that rules people’s lives. A good socialist system aims to free people from the constraints of capitalism so they can live life creatively.’
‘How can you live life creatively in the absence of mundane reasons for living it at all?’ I was plucking grass, blade by blade, and nibbling on the luscious white bits.
‘You’re too introspective and cynical, Bel.’
‘You still haven’t told me why socialism is better than two-party democracy.’
‘Socialism is about workers saying how, when and where they will work. It’s about ownership by the people. It’s about co-ordination and co-operation, equality of women with men. It isn’t about centralised rule by the puppets of capitalism in Canberra. Better to know the face on your representative, because then any complaints you have will be real to that person. Truly socialist government is a one-party system with a vested interest in the future of all people in common.’
‘What if you don’t like the party?’
‘The party is open to change and progress, Bel. Communes elect their own representatives. What could be more democratic than that?’ ‘Might lead to stagnation. I don’t see how two-party systems are less democratic.’
‘Well, they are, you just get the swapping of one power elite for another. In a one-party system you’re not voting for some distant ideology or lobby group there to sustain a money-driven economy, you’re voting for what you want to happen around you.’
‘But Marx and Lenin talk about violent overthrow, Allegra. As a pacifist, I don’t take to that. They stress the necessity for violent change.’ ‘Yes. Well, things aren’t as they were. Now it involves a radical change from within and people are changing, you only have to look about you to see it. There are communes being started everywhere. There are co-operative food shops. People are learning to live simply and use environmentally friendly products. It’s all happening.’
To some extent I had to say she was right. Environmentally friendly products, however, hadn’t scored a mention from comrades Engels, Lenin and Marx, and conventional people of our parents’ generation still sat rigid in their suburban houses, keeping the television polished and making sure the demand for dead chooks was so high special shrines with refrigerated altar aisles had to be built for them.
All the same, our generation was rejecting this way of life, preferring food that was less processed and came in recyclable containers, and a lifestyle that was far more open and socially active. Petty niceties like polished footwear and two-piece suits had been dispensed with. It was not uncommon to see men in caftans. Hair was worn in all varieties of long. Babies were suckled when and where their mothers pleased. The government had brought in a universal health scheme and a legal aid scheme. Australian art, film, writing and theatre were having a field day and everyone began to take them seriously, instead of holding them up against English or American creations and comparing them unfavourably.
It seemed that since the vote had been given to eighteen-year-olds, the voice of the young was being heard in parliament. Something had happened to the pecking order among females, too: it wasn’t there. Everybody was talking and everybody had a sex life; the word ‘spinster’ was an hilarious anachronism. It was only my vegetables that weren’t behaving like good Marxists – their behaviour was distinctly biblical: succumbing to plague and blight, bringing forth tares and breaking off at the base with something Jesus doesn’t mention.
The ambience suited Dadda. It was rumoured that at a certain party he was raped in a thistle patch by an English pop singer (female) of some note. The Dadda/Brolga quarter was said to be shaky, but solidified once again when it was realised that in this climate, Dadda was a phenomenal commodity; through him, The Brolga could come by just about anyone she pleased.
Dadda took to going alone to deepest, darkest Japan. North of Japan, he confided, was a confluence of current that mingled Soviet with Japanese rubbish. It had given him some trouble in Customs on his return and some of it had been confiscated.
I pictured Dadda getting through checkpoints with his luggage full of detritis while other people were being blown up at airports and hijacked in planes in the name of someone else’s liberation, and I wondered how he avoided arrest. But he seemed content and the world was more and more delighted with his output. He had begun concerning himself with the cycles and destinies of global rubbish.
I would have to sneak off to galleries to look at his work, as I didn’t want to be seen by people who would tell on me. Even so, the proprietor of the stuffy gallery where he showed in Melbourne would follow my progress with an ancient eyebrow raised. Either she thought I was the wrong sort of client, or she knew who I was.
Once I ran into The Brolga. She hovered in the foyer in a bat-winged coat, humming and ha-ing before oh-well-why-notting over the threshold. ‘Hello, Isobel,’ she said to me grudgingly. I nodded curtly, but when I looked back at Dadda’s painting, I couldn’t see it, there was so much interference in my head. I left before seeing everything, mumbling to the eyebrow raiser as I went that she ought to get in the pest control people as I’d just seen a rat.
It’s stopped raining. The Midnight Knitter is snoring in her armchair by the fire. Firelight livens the whiteness of her hair with a colour verging on red. The garment has tumbled from her hands and covers her old feet, misshapen from a lifetime of wearing shoes too small for her.
Mad Meg’s silent bellow issues from the dark wall of the kitchen as I pad through to the balcony for some fresh air.
Choughs come here in the mornings to eat bread from Reg’s hands, squabbling and beating each other to it. The rain has left large blebs of water on the balcony rails. It is cold out here, the smell of eucalyptus keen in the nose.
Above, the sky has cleared in patches, giving it a rinsed look behind sudsy clouds. Somewhere, unimaginably far away, there are pockets in the universe so dense that even light cannot escape them. There, gravity rules. If two such pockets should collide, out of phase, I have heard it said the impact would cause an immense explosion, reversing the direction of entropy and sending matter back into the field where light moves fastest and gravity is the weakest force. Thus, the history of the universe, a history told in deep time, might be a never-ending series of bangs and crunches.
I was told this a while ago by an astronomer from Edinburgh on the overnight train from Paris to Milan. He was going to the Isle of Elba via Turin for a conference on interstellar gases. ‘There’s an equation for it,’ he said.
And I’d imagined black holes were evidence of a celestial mother, vacuuming.
It was the only trip I’ve ever made to Milan. I took myself off in 1991, going first to Paris. We left Paris an hour or so before midnight. The astronomer and I made ourselves as comfortable as we could among the bags and knapsacks and other bodies in our carriage and tried to sleep, roasted by a heater on one side and frozen by the draught from a jammed window on the other. I woke once to see a full moon skating on an alpine lake. When I woke again, the train was ramming, loud and vulgar, through the veils of morning.
After Turin, where the astronomer left me, I journeyed on through an industrial landscape to Milano Centrale, Mussolini’s monstrous marble railway station with its liver-coloured veins. It compared favourably, I thought, with the tombstone towers, those monuments to the still-born businesses of the 1980s, along St Kilda Road at home.
I had come to look at the city where Dadda was born. I stayed in a pensione on the fifth floor of a run-down building in Corso Buenos Aires, where the air was far from bueno. To reach my room, I had to hail the caretaker to open the street door and then cross an echoing courtyard, negotiate another locked grille with a key too small for the lock, take a two-person lift that had three directions in which it could open and dismount in the right orientation on what I had calculated was the fifth floor, there being no lighted panel to say so. And even then, there was the room key to collect.
The room was like a prison cell with a view of similar cells stretching into the far-flung smog. The window was barred, no doubt to deter intending suicides. Blue bedspread, white sink, reading light, writing table. In the event of fire, no instructions, no fire escape, no stairs.
In Piazza Castello, where Dadda was born, the houses are tall and bourgeois and bound to each other wall to wall. Though it is a tree-lined crescent, there are no external gardens. Aerial photographs of the castle show the houses open onto common courtyards that are grassed but have no shrubs. The Milanese don’t seem to care for plants, or perhaps they don’t thrive in the polluted air.
If Cupid had been leaning out of the firing slits in the castle when Dadda was a baby, he could have shot him through the heart. The arrow would have crossed the grassy remains of the moat, in which cats of every variety (all thin) commune, mate, produce more cats and get fed by a madwoman, a bent little beetle, who passes by on a bike in the afternoons. The moat is about fifteen or twenty feet deep, and the sound of mudguards rattling is a signal for the hardier cats to scale the walls and congregate on the drawbridge. The drawbridge is forbidden the public by a ridiculously thick chain between metal bollards set in concrete in the ground. All you have to do is step over the chain.
The madwoman has had her bicycle adapted to her calling, and in a large wooden crate affair affixed to the back wheel are meals-on-wheels for cats. She scuttles with her saucers of offal, back and forth, back and forth. She has to be quick, because the moment the smell of liver hits the air, rottweilers and alsatians come loping towards her through the park. For the cats who don’t make it to the drawbridge, she shunts meat off a platter over the side into the moat.
In the moat, as well as the cats, I saw boots, long modern boots, boots that had belonged on feet but were now cast aside: a long black one, a long studded brown one with a cuban heel, another black with a high heel, and a green. Left over, perhaps, from the War of the Boots?
But the Square of the Duomo is where it happens in Milan, where the strikers gather, the effigies are burnt, the victims of terrorists are laid out and the corteges of the famous, the infamous, the assassinated and the merely dead leave for the final resting place. From Piazza Castello you go there down via Dante, street of the mellifluous poet, clanging, banging and racketing with trams. And there it is, the gala-ball Duomo, an apparition in pink and white marble, once gazed on by that human Apparition from her apartment above the square in the glass-domed arcade. Dadda spent much of his first year there.
The Apparition of Light had thrown her weight behind the war effort. She and her comrades, including Comrade Coretti (first without, and then with her baby son), spent the war furiously knitting socks for the soldiers. These were probably more of a hindrance than a help, as they had no heels. Ostensibly the heellessness was to save on time and wool, and if the sock got holed, it could just be turned around a bit. On the other hand, maybe no one knew how to turn a heel.
I don’t suppose it was socks that accounted for the rout of the Italian army on the 31st of October in 1917 when Dadda was newly in his basinette and the Austrians invaded Italian soil. Ten thousand Italians were killed, thirty thousand wounded and almost three hundred thousand captured. The rest fled, most of them leaving behind their weapons. Certain members of the military blamed the defeat on socialist insubordination and sabotage, but letters from the front describing pitiful conditions, hunger, cold and lack of supplies told the real story.
Grandfather Emilio Coretti, dapper, moustachio’d and in the pink of his youth, avoided the front because he was a bootmaker. It didn’t seem to matter that his specialty was Cinderella footware, leather was in short supply. Three hundred and ten thousand pairs of boots had been lost at the front along with the killed and the captured. The Apparition, who only just forgave him for his nonparticipation in the fray, wrote to him, when he was in a distant part of Italy on a leather-finding mission, that certain people were getting private exemptions from service. Worse, she wrote admonishingly, prisoners were being sent to the front. Since she couldn’t persuade him to go sit in a trench and sacrifice himself for Italy, she bade him instead to look at the conditions in factories and see for himself the savage and arbitrary regulations that were being enforced on men, women and children, day workers and night workers, in the name of the war, but in reality for the benefit of the factory owners. ‘Il Coretti’ must do his best to save and protect the bootmaking industry for its workers: he could, for example, refuse to supply owners he found in breach of the laws.
This was just what Emilio was doing. He was compiling a dossier on work practices in the bootmaking industry for Uncle Nicola, who had been researching the conditions of the workers and peasants for years for the Humanitarian Society of Milan.
Uncle Nicola, older than our grandfather by a decade or more, served with pride in the Alpini up until the defeat at Caporetto, during which he’d been peppered with shrapnel and, afterwards, honourably discharged. He was a graduate in law from the University of Bologna, where the assassinated Matteotti had been a fellow student. His aim in life was to revolutionise the revolution. He was probably quite correct when he asserted that there would have to be traders and merchants before a socialist economy could work; these people were a true class, without whom one of the vital factors of production, selling produce, would be overlooked. He saw no inconsistency in playing the stock exchange while awaiting the downfall of capitalism; the stock exchange told you where things were, and leather, it seemed, could be had from Argentina or Australia. So it was that an order for leather was placed with a Melbourne merchant.
To Uncle Nicola’s surprise, Australian leather was well and truly spoken for. Not only was it lying all over the slopes of Gallipoli on the feet of Australians living and dead, a fact which flabbergasted the Coretti brothers to whom the Dardanelles seemed totally irrelevant, but it was also keeping Russian soles from the mud, a Melbourne bootmaker having received an order for four hundred thousand pairs of boots from the powers that were, might and could have been in Russia. It was 1917.
The Italians had made a hesitant entry into the First World War. The Italian left was noninterventionist, and the International hailed them as heroes. But there was nothing heroic about it, Italy couldn’t provision an army. When one was eventually mounted, underprovisioned, the left invented a policy of ‘Relative Neutrality’, according to which it was all right for the proletariat to fight a defensive war on Italian soil, but not an offensive war against the proletariat of another country on foreign soil. So to fight a war at all, the socialists required an invasion: no wonder the Austrians obliged.
I found Dadda’s city a place of contradictions. At the other end of the Square of the Duomo in 1991, face-to-face with the gold madonna on the Duomo’s highest spire and reflected in every window in the square, was the black, white and yellow holy family of Benetton. Behind it hid the Palace of Reason.