The Submerged Cathedral (15 page)

A
FTER A BULLFIGHT
in Seville she had walked in silence with Duncan, the image lodged in her head: the young matador driven, foetal, into the dusty earth by the animal's massive black force. The two pale soles of his slippers wrongways and upwards towards the crowds. His body left for some minutes, then later collected by attendants, and the doctor's smooth, unpanicked examination of him there in the dirt. And the shouting crowds, their sneers, the shame visible even in his unconscious slump.

What kind of history permitted this?

But Duncan had been passionate about the fight's beauty, its balletic power. He had offered it to her, and now she found it horrific. So he laughed. ‘You think there's nothing brutal in Australia? Your whole country's built on savagery.'

They were sitting in a formal garden, before an intricate hedged maze, Duncan making notes for the Lisbon project. She looked up. He had asked her again, last night, about what it was she had left behind in Australia. ‘It doesn't matter,' she'd murmured. ‘I live with you now, don't I?' And she had turned away from him in the dark.

Now Duncan was animated, eyes shining at her. ‘What about the convicts, left in their holes to rot? And the blacks? Has your lot murdered them all yet?'

She said sharply, ‘What would you know of the blacks?'

The blacks were not
killed
. Not now. But already confused guilt was flowering in her. She remembered one of the young Aboriginal women she'd seen mopping the floor of Ellen's hospital ward, concentrating only ever downwards at her bucket or her mop, on the small circle of clean pushed before her on the brown linoleum.

Duncan was half-smiling, waiting, taking a cigarette from a packet.

The girl at the hospital had ducked her head if a nurse spoke to her, and never lifted her gaze from the floor, or from her skinny hands around the mop-handle. She must have been twelve. A twelve-year-old cleaning woman.

Duncan said, ‘You said you lived with me now, didn't you?' He lit his cigarette, and sucked in the smoke. Then he stood up, exhaling smoke, and said, ‘I wonder why
doesn't it ever feel like that?' And he walked away into the deep green maze, leaving her there with his tobacco smoke and his accusation. He didn't hear her calling, softly, ‘I'm sorry.'

 

After La Sagrada Familia, the rest of Barcelona had been all geometry and lines.

It was warm, Duncan walked slowly beside her.

She said, ‘It is a growth, not a church.' It seemed something outside history, dredged up, not possibly built.

Among the animal-sellers on Las Ramblas was a cageful of small striped hens, their fluff hazed and black. A handwritten sign skewed on the cage, AUSTRALIAN

EMU CHICKS. A dozen of them in two cages, alongside cages of parrots, budgerigars, hawk chicks, owls, finches, a pair of quiet lovebirds, magpies. The bird-seller sat in a deckchair beside his cages, reading a newspaper. Smoke from his cigarette drifted up into the faces of the blinking birds. The dusty smell of their droppings mingled with the smells of the street: exhaust, coffee, smoke, frying fish. Weak sunlight washed the air. She stood in front of the emu cage for some time, but the seller knew she was not there to buy, and he ignored her. Duncan waited a little farther on, hands in his pockets. She wished he would stride on ahead without her.

They zig-zagged through Spain, circling and retracing their steps for particular meetings, particular gardens. They would go from here to Cordoba for the patios, then back to Seville to talk with a landscaper at a citrus grove, to study its balance of shade and ornament. From there they would travel across to Lisbon. She was sick of travelling, but since the argument about the bullfight she had been conciliatory, appreciative. They visited garden after garden, studied form and species, and she walked through their knot gardens and dipped her fingers in their fountains and did not let herself contemplate how many betrayals might lie inside her marriage to Duncan.

In the afternoon she lay on the bed and listened to the piano being played in the building across the lane. It must be a piano teacher's house, for the music went all day, starting at about eight in the morning. Stopping and starting, phrases beginning and repeating, over and over. She thought of Sandra, now thirteen, sitting at the piano in Kensington. She tried to sleep again.

In the evening before they started on their walk the piano music had stopped. She wrote to Sandra.

I am in Barcelona, in Spain. I got married a few months ago, in France, to a kind man called Duncan who I think you would like very much. He is showing me all sorts of gardens and other interesting places. Today I saw some emu chicks in a cage, and I thought of your book back in Australia – you might not remember
it – about the joey and all the bush animals. I wonder if you ever remember Australia these days? I am sure you are doing well at school. I hope Mum is happy. Please tell her I think of her often. Soon I will be in Portugal. I think you might have stopped there in the ship on the way to Australia. You can write to me there if you like.

She put down the pen, listening to Duncan's quiet, steady breathing on the bed.

The piano started again. This time it was not a student but confident, easy playing. It was Debussy's
La Cathédrale Engloutie
, The Submerged Cathedral. Through the window came those slow notes, and into this Spanish room the Breton myth of the drowned city, the church bells and the monks chanting from beneath the sea, and in her mind they were Gaudi's cathedral spires, in a slow, centennial rising from the water in apparition.

She finished the letter and put it in an envelope, addressed it. Another message dropped into the sea to drift towards that other, unreachable world.

 

They walked through the city down to the water. She stared out to sea, looking for cathedral spires. They passed a tiny bar filled with men and their staccato shouting, and cigarette smoke, and light. Jocelyn would have liked to be sitting in there with them. The beer was cold in their
glasses, they cursed. Their wives were at home. They did not have the voice of a good man telling them things in their ears.

It grew darker in the streets, and Jocelyn's feet hurt. Duncan said he would find them a bar, a café where they both could rest. They kept walking. They passed what Duncan thought to be the city's small zoo, behind a high brick wall. The evening moans of indistinguishable creatures fell away in their ears. Then they were walking past warehouses, a school, empty shop fronts, past an open door, with people standing in a room, listening or watching at something. Past a fence. She could smell the rotten-fish closeness of the sea.

Then the air exploded.

A bomb
, she thought in that millionth of a second; her skin leapt, she jerked around for the shattering glass. And then in the next slow millionth there came a rhythm in the explosion and Duncan was grinning, shouting,
Flamenco!
over the noise, and pulling her by the arm.

They ran back to the doorway, stood across the road from it and watched into the rectangle of light, into the flamenco class. The noise of feet on floorboards shattered out along the street, up into the trees and the night. Through the doorway she saw a slowly wavering line of dark young women in trousers, men in black shirts and trousers, women in full parrot-coloured skirts, they were
all young, they wore their black dancing shoes like weapons. They stared straight ahead, hands on hips, they did not know they were watched. Or they knew they were watched, they welcomed it. They had no music, only the clattering and clattering of their sharp and savage feet.

When they were in bed later it was the annihilation of the dance she remembered, the excoriation of the air. She wanted it; wanted the mess of her history to be cleaned away. And she began, in a small voice, telling Duncan of Martin, of Pittwater, of her dreamt garden. She told him everything, Ellen and Sandra and the baby, talking into the dark. Duncan only listened, she could see his eyes shine, he lay touching her skin. When she had finished, she lay quiet, feeling his fingers on her arm, waiting.

‘It's finished,' Duncan whispered into her neck, and kissed her and it felt like something new.

They made love then, Duncan whispering and holding her. But once he was asleep, and the dark was quiet again, she knew that she had failed, failed.

And inside her head the only image was Pittwater's blue shifting sea and the twisted red limbs of the angophora gums.

U
P AT THE
ridge she plants young Gymea lilies, the
Doryanthes excelsa
. The green swords of their leaves fan to knee-height. It will be between four and ten years until the stems shoot up and the fleshy face opens up high above. She stares up at the sky, seeing a decade on and the outstretched fingers of its giant crimson heart.

She remembers the first time she walked up the hot Barcelona hill to the side entrance of the Parc Guell. An unfamiliar gravel path of hot dirt and spiky dry growth, and the intense blue sky. When she saw a eucalypt sapling she almost shrieked. Then she came upon the wobbling, lumpen stone pineapple columns. She stood beneath them, heart banging.

What is this place?

She had climbed the stairs and stared out, out, to sea. She sat down at the top, breathless, but not from exertion.
Something fizzled in her blood here, in this prehistoric place. Its sorcery. Bringing Australia to her and snatching it away within the pacing of a hundred yards, within an inhaled and exhaled breath. Sheer stone trees lurched out of the ground before her. She was in a melting painting, someone's hot dream.

When she came to the open, curling mosaic-seated ‘square', she had been heartstruck, sightstruck. Spent the afternoon sitting there in the heat, her spine curved perfectly over the slumped bulb of the
trencadis
surface, tiled with broken pottery chips, as though it had been modelled for her. The colours stayed at the edges of her vision, kaleidoscopic and viral, during her walk back.

She remembers how breathlessly, back at the hotel room, she had spoken of it to Duncan. How he was silent, watching her blaze. He had nodded now and again, but impatiently, trying to rein himself in. Then said, suddenly vicious, ‘It's a freak show, not a garden. Gaudi groupies are common here; I didn't expect you to be one.'

Jocelyn knew then that he had seen her drawings, and that he knew it was something from home she had seen there in that dry and arid park. She looked at him, then down at the tablecloth.

His hand came over hers, and he made her meet his eyes, and whispered, ‘Sorry.' But one thing had germinated, and another had begun to die.

She had returned to Parc Guell as often as she could over the next days while Duncan met with the architects from Lisbon. And she walked the wide gravel paths under that Australian blue sky in Barcelona. She was unlatched and caught. She fingered the strange symbols, the tiny messages left by Gaudi and his workers in the ceramic chips and blobs: now crab, now fish, now woman's vulva, now maddened, arthritic scrawl. She cupped the stone lumps of palm tree trunk-skin in her hands, smelt the dirt of the path, tasted its dust in her mouth. She
felt
it, this urgency, recognising it from that Pittwater summer when she held Martin's book in her hands.

So now she spends the whole of two days in the monks' rubbish tip in a corner of one paddock, emerging with bits of coloured broken glass, pot chips, shards of plate. Finds other things too, surprisingly unburnt, shoved in boxes and buried. Family letters, men's jackets, photographs of young men with sweethearts, reading glasses, ruined boots, pornographic magazines, rusted hair clippers, hair oil, ginger beer bottles. Exhuming the buried relics of boys before they gave their lives to God.

Now as she walks in the bush here she remembers again and again Gaudi's secret hermetic
capelya
, the windowless, doorless stone chapel shrine in a corner of his Parc. Its crosses, its bulbous stone petals. She recalls his elephant obsession – the animal's trunk in the house's
chimney-stalk, the great cement elephantine columned legs in the sewers' water caves, its creamy, ribbed palate on the ceiling of his home.

And Gaudi's plants. Acacias, palms, cedars, eucalyptus trees, cypresses, planes, elms, plum trees, and shrubs and rosemary, broom, thyme, aloes, artemisia, evonymus, daturas, hibiscus, laurels, rhododendrons, ivy, bougainvillea. Symbolic, medicinal, structural, ornamental. But he surely planted and drew and planned according to some instinct, some force beyond his own will.

As she surely does, now, among the quiet banksias and the scent of the stirred-up tea tree. Tending her own
capelya
. She lowers the eighth lily plant into the earth beside the red-rusted fence of the baby's grave and, kneeling, moves to the next station and begins burrowing a hole for the ninth.

O
NCE A MONTH
she drives the truck down the rutted track to the gate, checking the eucalypt saplings on the way. For one three-month period without rain she came down here every day, a forty-four-gallon drum of bore water tied sloshing on the back. She weighed down one end of a hose in it, sucked the other till the minerally warmth hit her mouth, and moved from tree to tree, filling the well around each and watching the mud dry in seconds. A third of the trees had died or been stripped by wallabies, and half the remainder were strangled by weeds. But today, as she jolts her way down the track, the survivors' new growth above her, rust-coloured and tender, is almost transparent in the morning sun.

In the town she visits the bank, the post office, and the ugly little supermarket with its cabinet of meat
and its few browning vegetables. Now, after several years, they are used to her visits and no longer does the shop woman stare in her husband's direction where he's unpacking cartons of breakfast cereal, willing him to turn and look. Now they exchange gruff shorthand about weather, road conditions. The woman still sometimes stares through the glass when Jocelyn leaves, watching after her, this stiff woman with her men's boots and her lank, home-cut hair.

On Jocelyn's drive home this day, through the cathedral columns of the bushland, a flash of red spins across the corner of her vision: a crimson rosella.

She follows the road; it winds, turns to dirt and corrugations. The parrot's flashing, shifting shape stays with her; a bright red hand against the grey-green curtain.

She rounds the machinery shed and there are chickens pecking about the grassy verge by the track.

Shit.

Into the chicken yard, and the feathers and bits of egg and bloody hen corpse lying scuffled in the dust.

Fox, again.

She hadn't checked for eggs this morning, had not noticed anything as she heaved the truck from the shed in the cold light.

Christ. Now she counts: four more hens are missing. She strides the chook-yard perimeter, checking each wire
panel, finds the loosened hole near the henhouse where the fence wire dips.

Standing there in the dirt, she shouts out at the fox across the yards and the paddocks. Then a rage rises up, she kicks violently at the gate, a rusted hinge tears, the gate shunts and falls looser. Hens quietly flap outside the pen, scattering.

She crouches in the dirt, in the shit and the dust and the blood.

It is as if the fox has not just killed chickens but undone everything. Rendered it all pointless, with one under-fence glide ripped out the throat of the years, of the garden, of any reason for being here. And will always be out there, waiting its ruthless new chance.

No
.

And suddenly she's at the gun cabinet, yanking open the door, taking down the rifle and grabbing a box of bullets, slipping them into the magazine. The cool weight of the gun in her arms as she marches the path through the plants.

Fox
, is all she thinks, the rifle strap over her shoulder. Marching through the garden, grevillea feathers making tiny movements as she passes. Through the grass, down past the reeds of the dam, the gliding silent ducks. Across the paddocks, into the first scraps of bush. At the ridge and she thinks she sees it, a flash of rust tail. Fury blurs
her, she hears obscenities from her own mouth. She heaves the gun to her shoulder, trying to stop her heartbeat, holding her breath, cheek to the metal, firing. The smell of the gun, the dark noise of the bolt sliding back and forth, flipping shells out onto the grass, the wild air, flurry of birds. She can't see the fox any more but she keeps firing and firing. She has never felt this white physical rage, the sky and the bush whirling, and she loads the magazine again and shoots at nothing, not feeling the pain in her shoulder until the ground is littered with bullet shells.

And then, in the shot air, the bush is alive with squawks and cracks, with thuds and fear and flight.

Now her shoulder is all pain, she drops the empty gun's impossible weight. It strikes the soft ground in slow motion. She steps away from it. And suddenly she wants to lie down here, fall asleep on that ground between the trees and the stones and cover herself with the leaves and dirt.

The next morning, headachy from tearful sleep, she puts down her cup and pulls on the work boots. Spends till lunchtime in the yellow grass, hammering and stapling the chicken wire taut again across the wooden frame.

Afterwards, in the garden she finds a little stone carved with a word. She crouches with it in her hand, thinks back to school Latin.
Colo.
Cultivate, she thinks. And worship.

After the rain in May that year she walks down to the flats late in the afternoon of the first sunny day. The viciousness has gone from the sun, the grasses beam green light. She walks the track, then stops to watch and listen. The air is all singing with insects caught in the sun, tiny buds of light filling the air. In the lower paddock she makes out first one familiar dark shape, then the next, and then the light is soft over the forms of a mob of kangaroos grazing; some standing stock still and staring in her direction, others bent, slow and busy. She realises small whirrs and almost inaudible squeals fill the air, and then she sees the grasses moving: hundreds of tiny birds, each wingspan less than hand-sized, flying at full pelt just above the grass tips, scoring that air in arcs and spirals, and all the flat surfaces of the green paddocks, rippled with the engravings of the skating birds, are suddenly alive as water.