Dionysus (is) the Master of Illusions, who could make a vine grow out
of a ship’s plank, and in general enable his votaries to see the world as the world’s not
E.R. Dodds
… and after the event – dust motes round and brown as rabbit dung, a tongue like
a feral cat’s in my ears, the metallic black spider scraping its fangs against
the cracked and peeling wall (for thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
that then I scorn to change my place with kings) – and after the dawn –
apocalyptic eye of heaven, Seven Sisters dimming like Technicolor images of
childhood, blazing Botticelli clouds in a perfect eggshell blue sky (a death
and a resurrection breaking with the everyday change of light) – and after the quest –
no change for a cab, kilometers of sooty footpath on legs as wobbly and slimy
as a newborn lamb’s, zombie hands grabbing at hopelessness (the scared septuagenarians
scuttle away muttering ‘filthy junkie’ under their blue-blooded breath), a moment’s rest
at a rose garden to admire the pearly patina on a drop of dew on a leaf (so
strange the things you’ll do when you’ve had a man shriek hell across your back) – and
after the attempt – honk, whoosh, the rusty track, a landslide of malign rocks ahead
and beautiful green at my back, the chain link a fence between me and certain death –
I stood at the head of our bed and pawed at your pillow and clawed at your face
and cried ‘I’ve been raped’ and you stared at me with your ice-blue Great White eyes
and replied ‘You’re a liar’ and I came to realize the last twelve months of our
life – morning coffee (extra sweet), Eurythmics cranked in the fire engine red Alfa,
days spent combing the sands at Honeymoon Bay for shells of Tasmanian giant
crabs, evenings huddled happy as albatrosses around candles, Japanese and wine –
had all been one big Bacchanalian lie …
- Stuart Barnes 2010
(Quotation: lines from Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare)
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Finally the leaves are turning and the flood waters are gurgling down the Darling river from Queensland, left into the Macquarie and heading for me, but before I either freeze or drown, I am CALLING ALL POETS. Refer to the submissions guidelines in the sidebar beneath the Persian Phoenix.
The Carnival at Perugia is a rather dull affair. The Bishop will only condone so much competition for his whores, and the local children only visit it at night to rattle the cages. It is more a collection of tepid curios, such as the two-headed kitten, or the talking bird. It has had a number of homes but is at present positioned adjacent to the torturous trickle of the Fontana Maggiore.
Perugia would appear to be a town after Pistoa’s heart. The Carnival here is overseen by two wizened old Tajiks with smiles like cuts who seem to pass their days tapping at the rows of bamboo cages in a vain attempt to raise a sullen growl from the mangy, wall-eyed occupants. That the Bishop condones this travesty at all is only due to the fact that now and then one of those strange creatures arrives from the steppes, each one a little bigger and more horrid than the last, to pique his much-lauded scientific curiosity and perhaps arouse the fleeting interest of the townsmen.
I know of only two other towns whose garrisons have allowed these creatures inside their walls – Lucca and Spoleto – and neither town has fared well by it. The hideous spectacle of these creatures, the lurid tales of them tearing entire caravans to shreds on the Magyar plains, attracts a gawking rabble from miles around, and inevitably some village simpleton will be goaded into lifting the latch on one of these ferocious, terrified things, with horrific results, especially at Spoleto, where it was said the streets ran red for days.
The Bishop at Perugia takes no such risks with his congregation and has pulled many strings with the Chinese to have their local armourers forge a steel cage that he has hoisted twenty yards above the square whenever one of these pit-eyed, hapless things happens his way. One must always consider the sergeant of the watch. From there the only danger the creature poses is if some drunken soul trying to evade the watch happens to pass under it as it is voiding, for I hear its waste can scald the flesh like lime.
We have been asked to look over the pinions and rigging, and also to satisfy ourselves as to the integrity of the iron bars against which the last of these creatures beat its brains out. For it is rumoured that the town burghers have paid for another one to be brought inside the walls to deal with the dogs. As journeymen we hear nothing but rumours.
It is rumoured, for instance, that they cannot abide closed spaces and will not cross a threshold if there are more than three candles burning inside. But such knowledge, if knowledge it is, must have been acquired through the most arduous system of trial and error, and I for one would not like to test the theory.
*
The Chinese will not let us leave until we have been paid. It seemed an oppressive system at first, and one that seemed to single out journeymen, but over time we have all learnt to see the sense in it. If we are not paid, then we cannot produce the receipts that are our pass out of the gates. And if we cannot leave the town, then we soon become a burden until the required payment and receipt is forthcoming. Our kind do not bring any more coins into a town than we can leave with. At the gate, of course, the Chinese take their cut, but who would begrudge them such a tax for such a service? They too issue a receipt. In fact my bag is a clatter of these little chits like the footsteps of my life.
For all that, the Bishop cannot be found and we must wait while someone finds him, for he is a busy man and his whores, too, must have their chits. At the hour appointed by one of his minions I wait by the Cathedral steps along with young Francesco who knows his abacus like a second pair of knuckles, and although we wait until it is dark, no-one comes to meet us but an escort kindly sent by the sergeant of the watch to see us back to the tavern where the dogs have scratched deep grooves in the wide oak door and left a litter of fourteen pups no bigger than a man’s thumb that the old Chinese sentries carry around under their jackets like a new heart.
Tonight they returned, no more numerous or vicious than they were yesterday, but obviously in search of their pups and the skinny old bitch that bled out on the steps of the Cathedral after bearing them. There are three young girls with a pup each here, and no-one and nothing will separate them. Pistoa has one that he holds closer than I have ever seen him hold anything, which leaves ten of the litter gone under old men’s coats to the barracks and beyond. The way those dogs are sniffing at the tavern door, though, they mean to find them.
Pistoa has often screamed for a sword when he is drunk, but this time he means the kind the Chinese confiscated in every town and village and handed back as coin to every man, woman and child. In the east the sword brandishes a sound it does not brandish here. I sleep through the worst of it, for unlike spendthrifts such as Pistoa I have money for a straw mattress and a pillow. Even the running battle he and his drunken cohorts fought with the mangy remnants of the pack up and down the narrow defiles of the sestiere did not wake me. I have a clear conscience and I grab sleep where I can find it.
Needless to say Pistoa is in no sort of mood for haggling with a fat priest the following day, so I take what I think is a fair price for his rushed work on the portico, doff my cap to a boy almost buckling under the weight of his accounts, and begin to sort the chits for the men who cannot read.
“That fat pig can’t even be bothered to see if he’s done us a favour,” Pistoa scowls as he drops those coins like watchmen’s chains into his tired sack. “You’re a priest, who was that the bells announced before?”
Sometimes I think the joke about my name has yet to wear off on Pistoa because he has suspended his judgment on it. Either he is trying to rile me like a schoolboy, or he is struggling with the urge to confess something to the last man in the world who would understand. Or working. Needless to say, it is only the latter that puts me at ease. I tell him to go look for himself, but judging by the clash of cymbals and the sad gaggle of trumpets it is someone from the east come via La Spezia, come like the rich and powerful have come since the pirates disappeared to see for themselves whether the rumours about us are true. Fat, ashen-faced men with their jowly wives and supple concubines come to lay their coins at our altars and shout their names at the impossible arches and gauge their fortunes by the number of echoes.
“Let’s go see for ourselves. Drink it down, eh priest.”
He is like this whenever one of their litters pass, be it some screw-eyed hoary scholar or a pretty merchant’s child-bride, meeting their eye with the same look he would pass over a block of stone before he begins to carve, a look the Chinese excuse because their devils are all paper and because the Carnival has this effect on some.
*
Pistoa has gone south on some vague promise of work from one of the Bishop’s men. He left with a strange halting gait and that newly-acquired bundle squirming under his jacket. Perhaps he is having second thoughts about keeping it. Second thoughts may be all those dogs were seeking inside the town that abandoned them to the winter nights and those strange creatures from the steppes. Francesco noticed Pistoa’s strange manner too, for as we headed north back to Arezzo I could feel him trying to find a way of broaching the subject without bringing down my famous curses on his head. I have only recently become aware of this reputation I have amongst the apprentices, and I am still at a loss to explain it. I speak when spoken to and find the world too changed, too changeable, to paw over the details of a brother’s walk.
I used to think Pistoa shared my feelings, but that was all a long time ago, many cold greetings ago on the road out of Dragon Pass. I now realize Pistoa is a man too constant, too wedded to his time, whatever times they may end up being, to have ever looked down and wondered whose feet they are that keep passing under him. For all his proclivities, or perhaps because of them, Pistoa is a man accepted by all and sundry, whether Christian or heathen. Perhaps because he takes the world as he finds it, and knows how to seal a contract with a day before he has even opened his eyes.
It is not often I will agree with Louise Adler, that paean of the juste milieu in Australian publishing, and even less seldom will I publicly admit to such a strange and unwelcome confluence. But Ms Adler’s op-ed in last Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald, Spirit of literature turns to kindling, made some interesting points about the Kindle phenomenon.
First and foremost I agree with Louise that the technology is clunky and geared toward inadvertent purchases, a common snare of this still-nascent digital age. It is also Americo-centric and lit-lite, undermining somewhat its claims to accessibility for those who, for whatever reason, cannot muster the time, energy, or inclination to step inside a bookstore.
However, nowhere does Ms Louise relate the most common complaint amongst “Kindlers”, that being that they miss the tactile pleasures of opening a book and immersing themselves in its off-white pages. Ah, the smell of a book hot off the press! Not forgetting that it is rather ill-advised to take an electronic device such as an i-pad into the bath. This omission may or may not be telling, but Ms Adler’s proposition that the established publishing industry protects the unwitting reader from dross is simply too bold a claim for this blogger to let pass. In her very own article, Adler herself is guilty of two editorial howlers – “Consequently, publishers are skeptical about partnerships on behalf of their authors’ behalf”, and “readers should be beware”. Oh dear. Once upon a time when I was still a cadet on Jones street, some wizened old sub would have swept such howlers off the table, but Louise Adler’s reputation (apparently) carries all before it, and anyway I’m not all that sure our beleaguered newspapers still carry subs.
What are your thoughts on the Kindle phenomenon? Have your say in the poll to the right.
And while we’re on the subject of editors, I have a few collective nouns to throw their way:
It is going to rain, which is all right as it’s the end of the day and I had planned on spending the night reading Racine. The one cloud which carries the storm is a giant, slow moving beast who takes all of dusk to crawl across that of the sky which is visible between my building and the one opposite, where earlier when it had still been hot I had seen a girl. The same one who I always managed to become an unintentional voyeur of.
Today was different, she was clad only in her underwear, phone cradled between cheek and shoulder, slicing a cantaloupe. There was an odd symmetry that the French windows of my bedroom lined up with those of her kitchen.
I had seen her often in clothes that appeared comfortable and surely were reserved for wearing only around home. The thin off white robe which went well with her mocha skin, drawstring pants whose legs sometimes got stuck in the top of her socks, a faded tee shirt that was now gray and might once have been black.
Naked, I saw a little belly which showed that, like me, she believed a little pleasure at the table was nothing to worry about. Her breasts were pendulant, swinging as she bent down without dropping the phone, for something out of view.
Twice her hands absent mindedly wandered towards her nipples which were dark and erect. She smiled but quickly moved them away as if receiving an electrical shock.
What ever dish she had been preparing was ready, she suddenly arched her back for a moment and then quickly left the room. I do not know if she saw me and I wondered what she would look like tomorrow.
Get it out there with Get Reading!’s postcard poetry promotion.
The 2010 Get Reading! campaign is taking poetry to the people with a series of free postcards featuring previously unpublished short poems by Australian poets.
The postcards will be available nationally in cafes and retail outlets during the month-long campaign, which is Australia’s largest annual promotion of books and reading.
Get Reading! invites Australian poets to submit their previously unpublished short poems to be considered for the postcard series. Poets whose work is chosen will receive $500 for each poem published, and will retain copyright of their work.
Poets are encouraged to submit as many poems as they like.
Now in its ninth year, Get Reading! (previously called Books Alive) is an Australian government initiative administered by the Australia Council for the Arts. It encourages all Australians to put up their feet and get reading. Central to the campaign are 50 books of broad appeal that are promoted via a free guide, called 50 Books You Can’t Put Down. When book buyers purchase one of the 50 books listed in the guide, as an added incentive they receive a brand-new, limited-edition, free book exclusive to Get Reading!.
The campaign also involves events, television advertising and other promotions.
In 2010 the campaign will include the described promotion of Australian poetry via free postcards.
The brief:
Poems should be:
• new or previously unpublished
• 12 lines or less
• inspired by one of the following themes –
- Get real
- Get fresh
- Get lost
- Get hooked
- Get comfy
Key dates
• Closing date for submissions: 5 pm, Tuesday 12 April 2010
• Poets notified regarding acceptance no later than: 30 April 2010
• Get Reading! campaign period: 1 – 30 September 2010
How to submit your poems
• Poems should be submitted via email by the closing date to
getreading@capma.com.au with the subject line ‘Postcard Poetry’.
• Submissions should include your name, address and telephone number.
Submission conditions
• Poets can submit as many poems as they like.
• Poems must be no longer than 12 lines long.
• Poems must be previously unpublished on 1 September 2010.
• All copyright in the poem remains with its creator. However, as a condition ofthis promotion, the creator grants to the Australia Council for its own internaland statutory purposes, an irrevocable, royalty-free, world-wide, nonexclusivelicence to use, reproduce and communicate the poem for thepurposes of the 2010 Get Reading! campaign for a period of six monthsstarting 1 September 2010.
• The poem must conform to the Office of Film and Literature ClassificationGuidelines in the ‘Unrestricted’ category – ie, suitable for display in public and doesn’t include material that offends a reasonable adult. The guidelines can be downloaded from http://www.comlaw.gov.au/comlaw/management.nsf/
• The judges’ decision is final. No correspondence shall be entered into.
With all the talk in New South Wales of trying to resuscitate the rail infrastructure, especially now the drought appears to have broken and everyone will be scratching their heads as to how to get the harvest to port, I thought a note of wistful irony was in order. Thus this gem from Flanders and Swann from 1963 mourning the passing of the great railway age in England and the advent of that tardy monolith, British Rail.
Miller's Dale for Tideswell ...
Kirby Muxloe ...
Mow Cop and Scholar Green ...
No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe
On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road.
No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street.
We won't be meeting again
On the Slow Train.
I'll travel no more from Littleton Badsey to Openshaw.
At Long Stanton I'll stand well clear of the doors no more.
No whitewashed pebbles, no Up and no Down
From Formby Four Crosses to Dunstable Town.
I won't be going again
On the Slow Train.
On the Main Line and the Goods Siding
The grass grows high
At Dog Dyke, Tumby Woodside
And Trouble House Halt.
The Sleepers sleep at Audlem and Ambergate.
No passenger waits on Chittening platform or Cheslyn Hay.
No one departs, no one arrives
From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives.
They've all passed out of our lives
On the Slow Train, on the Slow Train.
Cockermouth for Buttermere ... on the Slow Train,
Armley Moor Arram ...
Pye Hill and Somercotes ... on the Slow Train,
Windmill End.
Meuse Press has released an e-anthology titled “From This Broken Hill” – an unique combination of writing from some of the country’s top writers (past & present) combined with a dazzling array of photography.
A place of near mythic proportions, this city deep in the outback. A mine that put the money into Melbourne. Arts hub while simultaneously isolated by distance.
But in some ways Broken Hill was the experiment that became multicultural Australia – it had the country’s first mosque, many communities continue to thrive within its boundaries. The rough heart of Unionism still stands strong. People escape to this city, others escape a childhood there. It has its horrors and highlights, once there you’ll never forget.
Read an excerpt from a Napoleon Bonaparte set in the city, read the view back from leading poet Rae Desmond Jones who grew up there and wonder at the mining waste turned into a thing of beauty surrounded by red soil.
Edited by Barbara De Franceschi, Marvis Sofield and Les Wicks.
Supported by Broken Hill Regional Writers’ Centre, Broken Hill City Council, Countrylink & ArtsNSW
Available at
http://brokenhill.tripod.com/BrokenHill.htm
INVITATION TO ART EXHIBITION
WITH POETRY ACCOMPANIMENT
OPENING (Free): Tuesday 9 February, 6–8pm
16 paintings and etchings by Jacqueline Balassa, together with poems by Norm Neill responding to the artworks.
Robin Gibson Gallery, 278 Liverpool St, Darlinghurst (near Darley St).
Exhibition open Tuesday–Saturday (11am–6pm) until Wednesday, 3 March. Selected artworks and poems should be on www.robingibson.net (click “Exhibitions”)
Live poets @ Don Bank
When: the 4th Wednesday of every month, 7:30pm
Where: the Don Bank Museum, 6 Napier St, North Sydney
Cost: $7 entry includes supper and drinks
Email: dannylivepoets@yahoo.com.au
Phone: Danny Gardner (02) 9896 6956
Mobile: (0422) 263-373
24 Feb: Guest poet: Sheryl Persson
24th March: Mark Tredennick & Tatiana Bonch
28th April: Live Poets is 20!
Open section: anyone is welcome to recite, sing, tell a story or play
an instrument.
*
Leigh Rigozzi exhibition is on Thursday 25 February, 6pm Tin sheds Gallery, Sydney Uni,
He’s an up-and-coming person in the art world, has been featured on the ABC and in the Herald and has had a residency in Paris. He’s currently a tutor at Sydney College of the Arts.
*
Tim Miller's Year of Sundown exhibition - 365 Days, 365 Paintings. Here's a utube link to a video of the images, for your enjoyment - and to send onto anyone you think may be interested.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4jFsumvwUA
*
Poetry workshops at the New South Wales Writers Centre
FIRST LINE ® FIRST DRAFT ® FINAL POEM
With Brook Emery (10EMER3) at NSW Writers’ Centre, Callan Park, Rozelle.
Sunday 7 March, 10am – 4pm
Full Price: $140 / NSWWC members 30% discount: $100 / Concession: $85
PLAN TO BE PUBLISHED
with Les Wicks
Saturday 5 & 12 June
NSW Writers’ Centre PO Box 1056, Rozelle NSW 2039
Phone (02) 9555 9757 Fax (02) 9818 1327
Email: workshops@nswwriterscentre.org.au Website: www.nswwriterscentre.org.au
Office hours: Monday to Saturday, 9am-5pm
There is something to the art of painting
that makes talking about it holding weight
in your hands, the act of lifting a train--
say, a passenger train, or a freight train--
the way that you would lift up an ill boy
underneath the cloud-patched and summer sky,
the way you'd lift your head to count each cloud
that sidles too high to hear human cries.
It is not the sunset that is wounded
like a bayonetted khaki soldier
who's haunting the corridors of these trains,
bearing the phantom imprint of canvas
against the restlessness of all the boys
like a hand held up against the sun, sky.
Nightmare of a Haunted Father
The hunted and haunted sleeps
in restlessness, nestled close,
with hoarse, dumb breath
rasping against his wife's head.
But within, a single, ghostly voice
sings to him lieder close to Mahler's
in form, but bleeding
with heartless whispers
gnawing away and beyond waking.
Spiralling inwards, later, at the table
cluttered with toast and spilt cereal,
his mind is still disturbed, fearfully,
like ghosts behind his blinding paper
bursting with words raped
of any meaning. Folding it down,
with a sudden mental sound,
he huddles, as if a scent of metal
surrounds him.
Later, awake at one, in the heat
of the creaking bed, he dreams again,
dumbly seeing the redness of blood
on his dead daughter's legs,
on the stove the water has fled,
her ovaries burning dry.
A friend of Master Cano’s, a bishop, had died and left the old man a trunk full of manuscripts, although it would seem the manner of the good bishop’s death left his servants confused and some of the manuscripts lay prone by an open window in the worst of the January blizzards. All in all, though, the damage was slight, for it was good vellum, well cured.
For a man who never seems to leave his chair Master Cano has a good many friends. Rosa curled her lip at me and bore those perfect teeth when I happened to pass the hour with this. I am used to the road, whistling what I like. It’s only goats like you who chase the world sinking your teeth into everything! And she spoke with such authority on the matter I let it rest. The world has so many corners, I doubt I will ever quite get the shape of it.
With her proceeds from the Carnival, Rosa paid for the old man’s gift to be bound in leather, with the added innovation of cloth sleeves to limit any more damage from the elements. This final gesture softened her in the eyes of many as they licked their greedy fingers and opened the volumes as heavy as a child.
They have become Master Cano’s pride and joy, those seventeen books of velum and cloth, and when he thumbs through them of a night, the fire dances in those eyes at once radiant and forbidding as old wells with love of his old friend and his new, this strange girl who happened one morning like a kitten on the stairs.
Of all these books it is the fables of Phaedrus to which he turns when we are all gathered round. And of all the fables it is “The Eagle and the Crow” that he turns to with the same wry grin whenever Rosa staggers home flushed with wine and hungry for the smoke from the fire, barking curses at us bent over her bowl of straw and smouldering dung.
Opimam sane praedam rapuisti unguibus;
Sed nisi monstraro quid sit faciendum tibi,
Gravi nequiquam te lassabit pondere.
The fate of that hapless tortoise always seems to bring a tear to her dark, lustrous eyes, dropped from the stars, from the eagle’s talons, at the behest of a crow, so that he who had been protected by nature would offer up a feast to the lion of the skies and that shiver of death in the world.
“Nature is a cold, dark place,” she would hark at us as though her heart were already flapping in the crow’s beak. “Nature is a bully. Look where I am! Your crows are monsters and your children never cry!”
And so she would go until the smoking dung had put her to sleep or made her purge herself all over Maser Cano’s Flemish rug and she would berate us with lolling eyes and a tongue heavy as vellum for making her smell like this. She is a strange creature indeed, but she loves Master Cano like I have never been fortunate to witness love in my short sorry life, and for that I am glad.
*
Come May and the first crow clouds of summer, a fresh garrison brings news of the mysterious hill in Hungary and of the river vanishing as their horses drank, taking their reflections with them. Pistoa has gone to investigate, or so they say, but I suspect he has been locked up again. On the first day of Lent I saw him in a new coat and shoes, but where would a journeyman find money for such things in winter?
I only say out loud what the fire is asking, but Rosa scalds me until old Cano shoos her out of the house with his largest plate of silver. He wants her to see if this story of the horses is true or just another wide-eyed tale carried like a cough with these farm boys from the east.
“Your friend is a magician,” he snarls at me when she is gone. “To make a girl like that love anyone. One day here, one day gone. Psssst! That is love!”
But the old man is wrong about at least one thing. I have no friend Pistoa. He is a man I pass on the road sometimes. Mostly south of the old watchtower, and with the sun still low in the east as though the world were just being born. That is the only place I know him, despite his breath on my neck as we grind and saw in a dozen different towns, his wall-eyed stare through the drunken Chinese sentries, and all those twisted chisels.
“So?” asks Master Cano when Rosa finally returns.
“Nothing,” she says looking like one of those puppets at the Carnival, the strange flush of a peach picked a little too early. “I stood as close as I am to you. Closer. Look, that’s where I wrote my name in the fog from their breath. I could see their flanks, every hair every bristle, but not their faces. They’re so tiny and frightened. Father, how could anyone whip them all that way?”
And so her voice will rise that pitch now Pistoa has gone east the way of winter, the way those tiny horses have come.
*
It was about this time that the gargoyles began to disappear from the cathedral in Perugia. The previous summer we had worked to shore up the southern wall of the nave which had subsided so suddenly and so dramatically that a man could pass a pig’s bladder through the cracks. It was an arduous couple of weeks in the Umbrian sun under the remorseless gaze of the Bishop who had us marked down as vagrants and thieves the moment we arrived with Pistoa’s drunken body lolling about in a cart.
When the first gargoyle disappeared, the good Bishop naturally assumed one of our party had pilfered it, although we had been clear of his parish for weeks by then as a simple check of the Chinese records would have told him. The Bishop, though a man not so much more gone in years than myself, has assumed the air of a much older man. And although such assumptions have profited many a man before the good Bishop, and will no doubt do much the same for young ambitious men a thousand years from now, it does not serve a man well in such changed times. All the same, the Chinese posted a guard on our camp at La Spezia while we mended the sea wall, and that seemed to be an end to the matter.
The gargoyles sit, as gargoyles will, atop the tallest spire in Perugia leering down over the square hundreds of feet below. To reach these ugly, slimy creatures a man would need to grapple himself in an elaborate arrangement of ropes and pulleys, all of which would have to be acquired through the guild, requiring the signature of the Captain of the Watch and the obliging citizens to avert their collective gaze while the man made his ascent and collected his prize of a ton or more of ugly, slimy stone. And yet the gargoyles are gone and we have been summoned back by the Prefect on the Bishop’s behest, for the one is convinced there are dragons where the other only sees thieves.
Good to his word, the Prefect has delivered four large slabs of stone to the southern corner of Piazza Piccinino. They have been lying in wait for us for quite some time, because the local women have taken to beating out their washing on them long enough for those great bleached slabs to have the faint tang of a cistern.
Pistoa is in one of his more conciliatory moods as I and Guido the One-Eyed and the young boy Francesco hammer out a price with the pie-faced Bishop and his tremulous flock of clerics with their fat ledgers and hooded arms bloodless and shiny as a licked plate. Since his last trip to the Magyar plains to see for himself this miraculous hill, Pistoa is a little more forgiving of the world, as he often is after one of these “pilgrimages” of his. He even offered to step in when I began to lag at the saw, at which young Francesco, covered head to toe in fine white powder, laughed all stiff-necked like one of those ghosts the Chinese chase with their paper dragons.
*
It was decided as the clouds came over that we would drag the sawn stone to the cathedral steps, where Pistoa and Guido the One-Eyed could begin carving those horrid things townsmen deem necessary to safeguard their souls. There the washerwomen would not trouble them, for the church stands on the far edge of the square where the stones stop and the dust starts. We were given ten burly sentries to help us, silent red-skinned men with eyes like donkey’s arses who showed us an ingenious way of rigging two poles so that we could carry the stone in a kind of cradle between four of us, even showing us how to march in step so that the huge stone wouldn’t swing and throw us off our feet.
There are tiny, feathery cracks in the stones of Perugia. I have noticed them before, but never in such numbers. Last November I was passing through this square with the watchman’s bell and a blizzard on my heels, for Perugia is very much the Bishop’s town and even the Chinese are billeted at his leisure.You couldn’t help but notice them; as though the town were built on a slowly thawing river.
Today, at the foot of the church, one of their gigantic beet-faced sentries got down on his knees and began running his thumb over those cracks like a tiny child. The Chinese shrugged their shoulders at the spectacle, for he was Armenian and not strictly speaking one of theirs, and so we all laughed until Pistoa spat for want of anything better to do. Because kindness exhausts him like a pretty girl will an old man, and because we were working to the Chinese watches, as is their custom in Perugia. And because their captain refused to take off his shirt.
There was a time Pistoa commanded a bevy of men to cut and grind on his orders, but that was all a long time ago before the world got picked up and put down. I often try to imagine him carrying the rod and gloves barking orders in the square at Orvieto, all puffed up like a peacock, but I can never quite put his face to the gestures. Pistoa had a wife, they say, but we have all lost something.
*
The moment we arrived in Perugia, people have been asking us whether we have seen the dogs. Since the Chinese came dogs are not left to free roam as they used to, which I deem another strange blessing of these times. To be set upon by dogs on a lonely road was once the abiding fear of journeymen, but for a long time now even the wolves have kept to the far side of “Jade Terrace”. However, it seems a pack of dogs has found its way under the walls of Perugia and has taken to roaming the streets at night. Why they would choose to do so when the surrounding hills are brimming with sheep, no-one seems to know. Needless to say, the usually festive streets of Perugia in Spring are deserted and at night our sleep is broken only by the incessant howling and neighing of every four-legged creature in the town.
*
As we work the clouds begin to build until the world is weighed with a steely light that seems to make each hammer blow a little crisper. Those of us who lack the delicate hands of Pistoa or Guido slowly make our way into the vestry where the Chinese have taken to piling their helmets and boots. Such things are tolerated in Perugia and Orvieto because the Chinese pledge a coin for each boot they do not lose. The Umbrian watches are old men for the most part, and have little else to spend their money on.
Pistoa has told me of stones so old and cured of their cutting that they smell like the forest floor. Perugia smells a little like that before it rains, like the rose water old whores throw on themselves. Pistoa often begs me for a word, only to throw it away in the gutter like that. But when he does so he stoops low over his work like one of those clowns at the Carnival the children throw fruit at because there is too much wind for the paper dragons and the wooden birds.
In the vestry stands a mound of helmets as high as a man and stacked so neatly they look as though they could stand there as long as a blind man’s stare. They have the black and the sheen of a wolf’s eyes, of all those empty miles with which Pistoa goads me when I know our night has ended and our long grey morning has begun.
A milk-faced novice titters at us trying to catch the sand leaking from the vaulting. What I assumed was the whisper of an old soldier’s stocking rubbing the stones to keep warm is in fact beyond even God to put right. The Chinese slumped like mules after their twelve hours on the walls hiss at him to be quiet. The choir is tucked away in a corner practicing for the Prefect’s visit in two weeks’ time. He will probably cancel, as he usually does. He should never have left home, Pistoa says. But then he says the same of me, and I no longer have a home to speak of. The Chinese in Umbria are all old. Master Cano begs me to be kind, and I believe I am, but his eyes tell me otherwise. They are asleep in our country, these old men weeping while our children’s voices rise to a crumbling heaven and the sand rains down on their stockinged feet.
*
Outside the animals have begun to cluck and howl under the weight of the gathering storm. The air in the cathedral is heavy with it, and the choir break off their singing, their crisp voices darting like sparrows into the farthest crumbling reaches of the vestry. What I thought were the peals of Pistoa’s expensive new chisel on the stones outside is in fact the bells of Perugia sounding danger.
We seven are elbowed out of the nave by a company of tired sentries bustling to find their boots and helmets in the eerie twilight. They seem strangely accustomed to the summons. Outside I find Pistoa hurling fragments of stone across the square as Guido scrambles around to scoop them up into his pouch while a large pack of dogs sidle toward them, bigger than a King’s hunting pack, some baring their teeth, but most simply licking their balls or scratching at doors or fighting amongst themselves. As Pistoa strikes one and then another with a glancing blow, the dying sun breaks through the cloud for a moment and lights on their ribs almost showing through their mangy piebald hides. Master Cano would probably feel one of his flatulent, beet-faced pities for them, but then he is not here, a fact he will no doubt find great comfort in when I tell him the story of my last visit to Perugia, and how the ghost of his dead friend flew away with the gargoyles.
I am dizzy with the bushfire wind and shooing away fat yuletide flies sated on drought carcasses, so for the first time in a while I am CALLING ALL POETS! Refer to the sidebar for guidelines, then click here
'In the spirit of reconciliation Bluepepper acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.'
