It’s eighteen months now, since I looked out over the beach, iridescent with early morning light, and saw helicopters suspended low in the sky, hovering.A drowning, I thought, then corrected myself, no, it must be a spinal injury. I must have just missed it, for I was still wet and salty and just returned home.
Someone has gone over one of those muscular waves and it has crushed their bones, their little spiny bones and now they will be strapped to a board and flown off.
But I had been right in the first instance, it was a drowning to which the helicopters had been summoned.
The helicopters buzzed motionless in the air. It wasn’t my ocean that claimed somebody's breath, though. No. It was the rain.
Rain in the shell-shaped paddling pool, into which baby Maia had fallen into, on her two year old legs. Down the back steps in a flash, to the little pool which had been empty the evening before, it was rain that filled her nose and mouth, and she, in those few seconds had been unable to lift her head free of the fallen sky. That puddle.
In an instant.
There was no more Maia playing in the rockpools, cupping sand in her small caramel-coloured hands.
Next day, standing in my kitchen, talking with my mother, the world fell silent as I stared at a newspaper page which had blown onto the floor, and I looked at the couple in the picture, upside down.
It seemed to be a picture of me at 20, with my long hair and yellow dress, leaning forward, smiling into the camera in that guileless way I had, the two of us all luminous smiles. How had the papers gotten this? I wondered. It didn’t make an ounce of sense? As I stood staring, puzzling, my mother continued talking
Oh, did you think that was you and X? I had to look twice myself…look, it’s that couple that lost their little girl.
And when I turned the picture right way up I saw that it was not me, but Sammi and Carlo, Maia’s parents, not a ghost of myself at all. This disturbed me, it seemed to be a warning, a strange emissary from the past
look what never happened to you, see what you escaped from...
Carlos and Sammi went away for some time. They visited their families overseas. They travelled.
They set to the business of loving, evidently: next time I saw Sammi, some months later, she was holding her belly in two hands, and it was full of baby.
Sammi grew and grew, until she was as brown and round and shiny as a walnut. She sat on the sand in the morning light, watching Carlo in the waves.
Last week as I was passing Carlo burst from the sea like a flying fish, a dancing dervish:
He is here, he is here! She had him in the water, like a fish!
Baby Kai swam right out of Sammi, and Carlo caught him.
Today I got to see the baby, as I was standing in the sun by the sea. His darling little feet, his dear head with a whirl on the back, the packetty bottom. The sound of the waves. The sea whispering,
How could you think such ill of me?
But i did not answer. before me was beautiful fish boy, a beautiful boy. Beneath the endless blue of a vast Autumn sky.
II
He lived in Trenton, New Jersey.
We spoke of the low whistle of trains passing in the distance: we both liked the sound, and that which it evoked. We spoke of Bob Dylan, and his description of the venom and bliss of the New Jersey night.
He loved.
He spoke of the love he had for someone which could never be resolved. The love he had was so pure and unswerving that nany one of us would be privileged to have been the recipient of such a love. His small acts of giving and caring were undertaken in such a spirit of unselfishness.
He loved his father so much. He loved how his father loved him too, he spoke of it often, with a sense of awe. He knew the power and beauty of such love.
He loved music, of all kinds.
He had a quirky sense of the absurd, and happily escalated the merest bit of nonsense into full-scale lunacy, which of course was fun: I too am guilty of lapses into complete stupidity at the smallest provocation. He downloaded a picture of me from my blog, and had it made into a t-shirt. So there in New Jersey, I was walking around on someones chest.
He emailed me long letters, talking about things, and yet in the face of all, he never sounded self pitying. He seemed to have been surprised, constantly, at the way the world was. At the way he was: lonely, locked away, so full of love.
He had a skin complaint which caused himself to hide away. It was painful , and made him believe he was repugnant to look at. But that’s the beauty of the internet: you can talk to people and it doesn’t matter of you look like a snake shedding its skin, or a fruzzy headed monster, or a bleary eyed old bag. In real life, I care not a jot what people look like, but in real life sometimes I don’t really feel like the scrutiny of others. I’m sure he was the same.
There was a lot of pain, and recently, sadness and tiredness.
He passed away last Monday. He was 41 years old.
He must have finally boarded that midnight train, the one that had been calling him in the dark for so long now with its long, long faraway sound. I am trying to make sense of the way I feel, how I will miss a person that I never actually met, what it means to write this, to put this out there. Yes, I’ll miss him. I’ll miss him a lot. Bryan was my friend.
My friend.
Wherever he is now, I hope he is swimming through the sky, and that it is at least forty seven different shades
of the most beautiful blue.
Girl in a pageant, near Assisi
Friday
Up near the roof of the Uffizi, it seems another storm is brewing over Fiesole: I can thus maintain an unbroken record of every single day that I have ever spent in Florence it has rained. It hangs just on the edges in an indigo bruise, and the bursts of violet push at the edges of the golden air.
Suddenly the campanile of Santa Maria del Fiori falls into shadow, yet the red Duomo still shines with its own light. Rumblings of thunder yet again.
I walk in a straight line through the halls of the Uffizi, all the painted faces looking as I pass, my heels making a satisfyingly solid clack on the parquetry, reminding me, I am here, I am here, I am really here.
Sitting down just past Corregio I find myself looking at the Portinari Alterpiece. I am again struck by Margherita Portinari, so small and pious.
Look at her hands, her pale eyelids. The Infant Jesus lying there so much like a naked chicken, she gazes on ith her grave and solemn face: serious business, as if she knows what is in store for Him. And it's so cold there in Brugges, unlike here in Florence. Such a good girl, so composed. her fingers must have frozen, held in prayer like that for so many hundreds of years.
I am smitten still with Margherita,
I draw her. I make etchings of her. Where are those etchings now? I can’t find a single one.
The Duomo is in shadow, now the Bargello, the storm creeps closer, closing off the light, everything in its path falls into the violet shadow, slowly, slowly.
The Uffizi: how on earth do I say this? My hands would be paralysed if I were to write all the thoughts I have in this place. The cold, sickly light of Tintoretto giving way to the soft golden Venetian light of Canaletto? The sudden cold pang in the chest of Mannerism, the Renaissance skies so full of secret yearning. The weird elongated grandeur of Parmigiano, against the beauty of Titian. Fra Filippo Lippi’s Lucrezia. I love her more every time I see her.
I speak to Caravaggio’s Bacchus his rudely pale body, his impudent face,
Tavern boy, I say, look at you, you pretty villain, here for ever for all the world to see, immortal here.
I wish to reach in and pinch his waxen flesh, see how quickly he might bruise, but I know how quickly I would need to dodge the slap from those dirty-nailed hands.
ponte vecchio, firenze
Drawing by the Arno with my back to some sunshine: I almost knock my pastels into the water. The river is olive green, the sun shines onto the chalks. Vermilion, violet, gold, green. I am leaning on the wall, looking all the way to the bridge in the moment before the golden light falls behind that burst of storm, I have olive green dust on my fingers.
I remember the first time I came here: a polite Florentine boy informed us it wasn’t customary to drink cappuchinos in Florence after morning time: we laughed, and informed him that in Australia, it was customary to drink it whenever we pleased.
Saturday
I go to the markets to look for a nice notebook, but end up buying a child's schoolbook.
As I look longingly at some leather bags, I hear cultivated voices behind me, asking questions of the bagseller, and I can’t help but turn around and answer.
Next I am being asked to judge the merits of every leather bag on the stall, and instructed to choose three, which I do. They are duly purchased, and I wish desperately one was for me.
I find myself having coffee with this pair, John and Michael, painters from Melbourne. Having just had a sellout show, John is cashed up, he’s going completely apeshit in the markets. He says I have a lovely accent and that I am extremely well spoken "for a Sydneysider" I’m not sure whether to be puzzled or flattered. hmph.
As it happens, he is on his way to Arezzo to stay with Jeffery Smart, whom he describes as a “grand old queen”, who, he informs me would never tolerate my female presence. This amuses me, since John is so camp I had been thinking what a grand old queen he himself was. (I suppose any old queen would still buy bags for his three daughters.)
I wish badly to be invited to Arezzo. They ask to see my drawings, so I show them: John loves them, and gets rather excited about them, which of course I am pleased about. In fact I am so pleased that I decide I will have lunch with them and allow them to buy me lots of pizza.
Sunday
I have arranged to go to Siena and San Gimignano with John and Michael. I like the company, and the flattery, and besides, John is hilarious. I am still trying to score an invite to Arezzo with no luck at all. If I was a boy, I could go. I consider binding my breasts, but somehow I don’t think it would be successful, and the lack of breath might be a problem also.
While I am waiting for them by Santa Maria Novella, surrounded hy hoardes of dreadful old ogres selling holy cards, I am targeted by an American girl who says she hasn’t spoken English in three days and is about to go insane. (why do I attract these people?)
Thinking it would be mean not to invite her along, I secretly pray that she isn’t on the verge of a psychotic episode, and rely upon John’s good manners when I introduce her.
She is the source of much amusement to John: why is she here? What is she doing? She appears not to know anything about art but she is a very jolly smiley girl, he says.
A car! How novel.
We wind up and around San Miniato al Monte and head along the winding road to Siena. Green and gold, fields with great gashes of rich earth. (Burnt siena, how about that?) As if the ground is going to crack open at any moment. In a way it is hard to reconcile buildings such as Siena Cathedral, or Santa Maria de Fiori, with this rustic landscape. And yet it seems so proportional, everything seems to be of the right scale in its own way.
landscape, Italy, near Assisi
Siena: I cannot even begin to take it in, let alone draw it. Voices fade away, the spires soar far and away into the sky, and I just want to sit somewhere and draw.
John is cackling and gesticulating as he walks about: I am still miffed about not being invited to Jeffery Smart’s place, but John buys me the biggest fattest gelato, which I suppose , under the circumstances, will have to do.
Margherita Portinari’s face still stays with me. That cold northern landscape surrounding the Adoration is so distant from this, I wonder about the Portinari family, and what they must have made of Brugges, having left this place of golden light and purple storms. Perhaps that is why Margherita's face is so grave? I read somewhere that she is related the Beatrice so beloved by Dante. The real Beatrice, but I can’t be sure.
HUGO VAN DER GOES
Maria ( or Margherita ) Portinari
Detail from the side panel of the
Portinari Triptych
Oil on Wood 253x141
c. 1477-1478(pen and ink sketches of tuscany: present whereabouts unknown. Landscape and girl pictured were drawn in Umbria, Ponte Vecchio drawn in situ in Florence)
