© 1983, 1991

‘Belles chaînes en qui s’engage
Le dieu dans la chair égaré’

— Valery.

The very wooden fences, stretching in grey muteness almost down to the water’s edge, were more at home than he. He disliked the irrational face that loomed out of nothing in the mockery of a wooden fence. If he had known that the fence had been built by workmen from his own country, back in 1952, it might have helped; even as it gilded the mocking face with a benign, saintly smile. He trudged on, lugging the heavy, expensive suitcase that he looked such a fool carrying about here on the edge of the city.
A little girl, about seven or eight, ran past and called out something in a shrill voice. He was too slow to tell if she smiled or sneered. Perhaps she was not really talking to him. He heard her voice echo off the polluted river as she called out in the distance and his embarrassment flickered like a candle on a string but he dared not look round in case she was abusing him. He reasoned that, had he known the language, he would not have understood her anyway; children often screamed out unintelligible nonsense, even when on their own. Particularly girls, with their high violin notes badly played – boys had better voices. But he strode on, trying to look composed and in full possession of himself. He heard other girls, pizzicato.
He stopped outside a telephone box and searched for a coin. His wallet was in the suitcase, thrown in with the rest of the stuff when he escaped from the hotel without paying. It held a thousand dollars in Australian currency, not quite enough for his air fare home. He decided to ring his brother again. Paolo would know what to do.
Again, there was no reply. He let the receiver drop, quite deliberately, onto the – what would they call it here? He dragged out the crumpled street map. Everything was in English, of course, though it was called a ‘tourist map’. It was possible to find the right street without knowing it. The name was ‘Baffle’ or ‘Beffel’ or ‘Bathwell’ St … He’d lost his Diary of Your Trip during the moonlight flit. He hadn’t been sure of the pronunciation, and now could not remember how it was spelt. The map had a ‘Bethnal St’, a ‘Boswell St’ – he recognised that name – a ‘Bethlehem St’, and ‘Bath Cres’, but it wasn’t a ‘Cres’, was it? He swore to himself, unfairly blaming St Teresa. The suitcase felt heavier as he pushed his way out of the booth. His arm ached like Jesus’ must have done. He changed arms, mopping his soaking brow on his cufflinked sleeve.
He saw a young lady emerge from a small Japanese car. She was slight and very blonde, with Nordic features. His first reaction – second, actually – was to stop her and ask the way, but he could only say ‘Good morning’. She could tie him up with the daisy chains of her strange untesselated language.
She had not seen him; he approached her silently, engrossed in the stickers on his suitcase, glancing at his watch as if late for a business encounter. He passed within a few metres of her as she stepped onto the kerb. She was scrabbling about in her handbag and muttering. Her high heels were scraping on the new concrete. She looked like a ballerina frozen by a camera.
‘Oh, where is that – oh!” She almost emptied the contents of the bag onto the nature strip.
“Scuze -”
“You nearly gave me a heart attack!”
Guillermo could only smile and say in a ‘foreign’ accent, “Good morning.” She stared at him open-mouthed and he thought she would begin to laugh and apologise. But she did not.
Awkwardly, he forced himself to walk with quicker, wider paces until he had put some space between himself and the stupefied girl. Then he released a sigh, like a man with bad lungs at the top of a hill. A crushing shyness of women, close to a phobia, had shaped his life; at home he had tried to escape it by entering the seminary. His parents were overjoyed. But the rigorous indoctrination of the Church, combined with his chronic high blood pressure, had dissauded him from becoming a priest. Then he briefly indulged the notion that only Italian women terrified him. He had had a long and convoluted argument with himself that involved the Blessed Virgin and his own brand of psychoanalysis. But his self-analysis, much worse than his theological meanderings, had driven him to this hole of a country where he could not even speak to the girls, let alone understand them.
He rested his suitcase on his foot, to keep the base from wallowing in black mud. There was nothing beyond this point but wire-less power poles and half-constructed streets. Not a house on the bleak horizon, from north to south. A sign hung askew on a peeling post, indicating some unpronounceable place at some indefinite distance beneath the hard, damp ground. Perhaps an Aboriginal name. The air reeked with an unidentifiable but unpleasant smell. Buoyed by the decay, he sized up various angles for photographs. Then he heard a car.
Five men sat in it, two in the front and three in the back, each with a dented beer-can in his fist, including the driver. It pulled up beside him like an inquisitive panther. It was a long black station-wagon, not a hearse but suggesting one. He felt a stab of fear but nodded affably. But before he could raise his hand in greeting, one of them threw an empty beer-can out of the back window. It struck Guillermo’s suitcase, leaving a snail’s path of foam down the alligator side. Then it rolled onto the kerbless asphalt with a hollow sound like metal foil.
He heard sniggers, and was glad he had left his camera in the case.
“Pick it up mate. It’s litter.”
“Yeah, put it in a bin.”
Bring yer rubbish back!” hooted the one next to the driver, obscenely fat and shirtless though the day was growing cold.
“I’m Italian as a dago, Spanish as a fly …”
Guillermo missed most of the ‘cleverness’ of the insults. But he knew they were getting themselves into a mood in which they could beat him up. His first impulse was to leave his suitcase and run. But tthat would leave him to wander in this desolate Hell with no clothes or money. He prayed for a gun to appear in his coat pocket, just to threaten them and escape. That would shut them up. He thought he heard another car but it was only the wind. Where were the police? He knew the English for police, from the phrasebook. But not the correct pronunciation.
“Achtung!” said the driver. “I reckon he’s a kraut. “ They were arguing about his nationality.
“Wir bist ein gross schwein?” asked the fat man. Guillermo knew a little German and could not help smiling.
“Bastard thinks it’s funny.”
“Ve vill heff you schott, malignant scum.” said one. They all bellowed piggishly. Guillermo regretted not having tried to communicate with the girl in some way. She might have spoken Italian, at least badly. With horror he realised that the slight figure, sandwiched between the two heavyweights in the back, was also a girl. Her front teeth were missing. She stared at him with her upper lip raised as she handed out more beer.
“Hey, maybe he’s one of these bloody Iraqis.” suggested the one who’d thrown the can. Guillermo began to move away cautiously, still grasping the hot plastic handle of his suitcase.
“Come back here you wog-bastard.” said the fat one, belching. The other men all belched in chorus, like drunken frogs. But he had broken into a run, the heavy case thudding into the back of his thigh with every step, like a pursuing beast.
To his surprise, they did not bother to follow. At a safe distance, he watched them turn the car and squeal away. He felt sorry for the girl – she probably wanted to go home. He walked, tired but pensive, rubbing his leg, breathing hard with the exaltation of freedom. His body tingled. He sat on the suitcase at the end of the road, where it crumbled away into the rich black soil of a resumed farm. He felt sleepy. His eyes were unfocussed. He felt like a warrior who had survived to sit on an alpine peak. At least here were no language problems here. A little girl of seven ran past and called out something in a shrill voice; he stopped outside a telephone kiosk and took out a coin. It was part of his busfare back to Italy. The map, of course, was in English, and the brochures he’d got from the Tourist Bureau, and every other thing except one mean street sign that was long-forgotten by the authorities. He got the girl to translate but couldn’t understand what she was saying. The hotel had been dirty and had made him feel like an outcast. He made a sign with his thumbs against Australia. A young lady emerged from a car in an exuberantly revealing dress. Fools tracked him down in a tank, fat, sweating foreigners, raping someone in the back. He ran away.
He woke sobbing, his head against the suitcase and his legs curled up, out of reach of the frosty mud. It was twilight. He didn’t remember going to sleep; but people never do. He sat up, aching everywhere, worst beneath the right shoulder-blade. His head throbbed, and he touched accidentally a raw graze on the temple. It was nearly six o’clock. There was the evening star. And the cold sun, going down …going up, rather. Was that not the east? The morning star. Or was his watch wrong? No, no, ridiculous – he bent his head to his knees like a winded footballer. He recalled Dante’s confusion just before he emerged from Hell. It was so cold.
The sun was rising. The birds began. At one time he might have prayed. He took the case in both hands and walked into the light. Stars were dimly visible. Every tree – he had not noticed them before – was side-lit like the furniture in a childlike dream. He would go to the police about the traveller’s checques he had inadvertently left in the hotel. But he would not pay their bill on principle, not after what the manager had said. Sonorous singing came faintly from afar. He hastened towards it.
Men were working by the side of the road, haloed by clouds of vapour. Two men were trying to light a fire in an old kerosine tin. They all wore thick jumpers, big stiff boots and tattered beanies. One was stamping his feet to get warm. Guillermo hesitated, but one of them, not noticing him, began to sing again in his own tongue. It was like a sunburst. His language was also Guillermo’s.

In the fast taxi that took him to his brother’s house Guillermo attempted to make sense of the previous day’s experiences but it was like interpreting a nightmare. No doubt he had not been well. He felt fine, wide awake and ready to take on anything, anyone. If he was stopped by hoodlums he would fight them, amazing them with his muscular prowess and shaming them with his fair play. Girls would gasp open-mouthed at his outstanding ability, as the workmen had assured him. To children he would extend a fatherly and restraining hand. There would be nothing but sense and meaning in his new world. he knew it was absurd to keep all this to himself but he could find no comfortable way of bringing it into normal conversation. He glancing at the balding bullet-head of the Italian-speaking Croatian cab-driver, marvelling at the sheep-like way his blond hair stuck out at the back. He had been one of the secret police, perhaps. The thought struck Guillermo as immensely funny, but he said nothing.
The experience had changed him. Now, in his muteness, he mocked them. He began to revere the awesome powers of silent determination. A curt and knowing look, an upraised arm were communication enough. Australians lacked discipline; it softened people who had lived here for any length of time. He would not stay. The driver began to smoke, which he disliked. He gave the man an injured scowl and made him stub the wretched thing out.
“Nice day, eh?” said Guillermo, waving vaguely at the passing scenery. His Roman face was scratched and unshaven, but yet bore a noble expression. Or so he felt as he caught himself in the badly -adjusted passenger wing-mirror. The driver didn’t answer.
Guillermo shrugged. He looked behind, wondering if the hotelier had reported him to the authorities. He could think of nothing worse than being picked up by the Australian police. But the, there were the traveller’s checques he had lost. It was foolish to worry. That was all behind him now.
The driver turned into a long broad street, in which every second house stood unfinished, surrounded by the dross of building and sheets of ugly black mud. A twinge of recognition made him jump, but he was sure that the other had not noticed. Of course his brother lived out here somewhere – he had been in the right suburb, merely unable to find the correct street. But was this not the same street? He asked the name of it.
“Blackthorn”, muttered the Croatian, changing down noisily.
Then that was it. As the car slowed, he saw a newly-built, split-level bungalow with a small sedan parked outside. The taxi went past this and drew into the gleaming kerb a little farther on.
“We’re here.”
The house was set back from the road, diminutive behind two towering eucalyptus trees. He saw the curtain open briefly in what he guessed was the kitchen window. Paolo’s wife, probably. He had never met her, though she was Italian like himself. She was from Calabria.
“Fifteen dollars.” said the driver. It was a long way out, and the driver had come all the way from town to pick him up. He paid reluctantly. Perhaps guiltily, the Croatian helped him get the suitcase out of the boot, then drove off rapidly. Once more, Guillermo was left alone.
He made an effort to spruce himself up, tugging a comb through his dark wavy hair. He looked like someone who had slept in his suit. They were crunching down the drive, his brother calling. There were magpies shooting across the sky, squawking as they rushed. Children were playing in the street. Cars sped by. He raised his head and tried to smile, but his throat was dry and he made no sound. Somehow, he just did not know what to say to them.