Monday, 7 February 2011

L’OSSESSIONE

If the city of words held a natural attraction for Leon, and the short fringe and comma-shaped wings of Julia’s jet hair drew him in frequently, it was Rodin that overwhelmed him. In the form of her end-of-term gift: a coffee-table tome that lingered over the sculptor’s obsession with nymphs in rose marble.

Whereupon Leon was absorbed into her green, almond eyes. Which would mist over, particularly when his billets doux were couched in French so mystical that it eluded her ninth-form comprehension. Together with his capacity for precise syntactical recall.

Julia still nurtured the dream of white horses, though not in marriage. There had to exist some sort of magic, a chemistry indefinable, except that it released you into a valley of gathering breakers that carried you away on their crest, surging and crashing into rings and rings of wavelets.

Gradually, thrilled by her own trepidation, she found herself gravitating to Leon’s soft tremolo of enthusiasfor the latest Louis Malle or an interpretive article he had breathlessly run to ground on John Fowles, or his tape over which he had waxed lyrical of Bizet’s duet ‘In the Depths of the Temple’, seeking the play of sunlight that fluffed his hair tawny to blonde.

Under the monotone blast of the final siren, Leon would charge the library, helpless to prevent his image of professionalism shattering all round her desk, where he made a show of poring over the recent acquisitions that Julia piled to catalogue.

When the fizz of frustration blew the cap off decorum, he would snatch a kiss on the mezzanine floor at the light-switch, she clasping his supple, long-fingered hands that put her in mind of Toledo on a wintry afternoon of smoky, cobalt clouds. After locking the library door, she purred past him in her Celica with the cheeriest of smiles, a flourish of an arm, a toot on the horn, as he skimmed with impatience to the Gardens. Under the bower of a bifurcated silky oak, they snuggled so fluently into each other’s strangeness, caressing with exploratory noses, tirelessly.

Timelessly.

Until the not so young lovers longed to demonstrate that what might be rumoured as a disturbing and unethical tipple was in fact a heady champagne of transcendental sparkle. If only there would come a time when the mists would clear so that you could look your friends and colleagues squarely in the eye. To be open, that’s what she yearned for to restore peace of mind, and to share their lives in a rusticated stone cottage in Tuscany or even a thatched cottage with country garden in Hardy country. She asked him to open a joint savings account and gloated at the prospect of a snow-dusted luna di miele in Italy.

So Julia set sail under the blue Veronese canopy that Leon tinted, floating on a sea of satiny green, cossetby Venetian gentiluomini in black cloaks, cockaded hats and thigh-boots of tooled leather, who graced palatial porticoes in a shimmering Guardi lustre.

Due amanti galleggianti in una gondola verso l’isola di San Giorgio Maggiore.

Or, at least, that’s how the lovers construed the legend of their honeymoon.

Which meant that other exigencies had to be faced. Soonest in nightmare, always later in rationalization.

Her husband’s own physical set-pieces, though obtruding scarcely once or twice per fortnight, were rolling into a darker clumsiness, bewilderingly so for such a swarthily attractive, streamlined executive. Nor was she inclined to scale the ramps of his flow-charted world. For Nicholas was in paper towels, where his absorption merited an annual bonus commensurate with Leon’s salary plus a company Volvo not to be sneezed at.

Julia, whose eyes were hardening over practicalities, would keep them skinned for a modest town house, but with ‘character’, and a bedroom to bunk her children. She thought that Nicholas would surely make over half his assets rather than play dirty; after all, she had supported him through his M.B.A and his hobby farm at Reedy Creek just off the Hume Highway. Scarcely discussed with Leon, then at the last possible minute, tremulously, was how to tackle her husband.

‘Tell him the truth . . . ‘

‘But I couldn’t bear to hurt him,’ she pleaded, in that little-girl voice she saved for when his zeal made her afraid, startling him with her artless naivety, her lack of steadfast defence, as if she might be breached by too much stark reality.

One supper-time, screwing up her nerves to a short-breathed steeliness, she dropped onto hubby’s plate a calculated serve of what she dressed as an experiment in community living, probably only short-term, just to sort herself out.

Blind, she must have been blind. A sticky terror clagged her tongue, as she watched all too closely the wound of disbelief infect Nicholas’ body with unbusinesslike convulsions, his rubbery face streaming into pleas that gurgled. Out of his pin-striped Chester Barrie, Nicholas was vulnerable. Even to the truth, a hard currency that neither would draw on so openly again.

For his turn, Leon was indifferent to whether his wife would do the decent thing and remit cash in lieu of half of what he had just walked out on. No longer could he cope with the overblown size of her vanity case or her mindless laughter that she passed off as winsome charm whenever his colleagues tried to engage her in serious conversation.  Much to his chagrin, she never dared say anything beyond the safest inanities, except in the bewitching sparkle of her nut-brown eyes that lingered with a tantalising eroticism.  If his friends considered the break clean, he suffered sleepless visions of Hayley huddling in the bedroom corner, cringing like a wounded animal from the cache of Julia’s tumbled letters, slamming her forehead against the wall, raking the stalks of pile with what sounded like claws, her mouth slavering with pain.

‘I’ve a good mind to ring her husband!’ she moaned. ‘Why shouldn’t he know?’

‘You do, and I’ll wring your neck!’

And yet it was in these damaging weeks that he came to realize, begrudgingly and far too late, that when she stopped idolising and deferring and playing the perfect young wife that she could indeed stand up for herself, vent her own opinion, assert a logical argument with confidence, even possessed a flawless though untutored taste in decorating and furnishing their colonial-style house without his interference.

Severing these links, though not deaf to their clatter, Leon was free to forge a new life. And repaired to the glow of Julia’s hearth.

Where, in spite of their coupling like Rodin figurines, or indeed because of glazed callisthenics so delicate, she could not reconcile her soul mate with bibs and dolls and turned-up noses at carrots, not to mention the administering of mercury to scratchy, thread-wormed bottoms. Except in her imagination, that ruthlessly private domain where she longed to conceive his artist child that he would never foster. There was no doubt that Leon continued to serve as explicator at the cinema, theatre, concert hall, art gallery / her literary raconteur / her confidant over factional disputes in the library: in essence, her lover, albeit still part-time.

For she could not quite bring herself to bestow the role seemingly ordained. The ever-ready-to-forgive, faithfully magnanimous Nicholas – he had not been sent to Scotch for nothing – remained the father of her children. Umbilically, it proved. Who still shepherded wife and children to Safari Park, bought Show bags and shouldered the girls at Moomba / the financier managing the children’s trust fund / the camper patiently explaining to them clove-hitches, run-offs and poultices of velvet soap and sugar / the assured gourmet who prepared a sauce hollandaise for the artichokes / the would-be vigneron who mucked his hands planting her petunias.

The two daughters were being shuttled between their parents twice a week. Gesine, a leggy, plaited nine-year old, whom Julia wistfully named in memory of Austria, or rather an Austrian ski instructor who had sown the seed of fascination for foreign climes, as well as her first abortion, became increasingly finicky over homework, mewling over laborious margins and underlinings, vexed if her mother asked her to read aloud from her daily reader, sulky if she forgot to. The seven year old possum of mischief, Nicola, clambered and drooled all over Leon with brazen, chestnut eyes, chubby cheeks and gummy smile, yet swinged him in the crotch whenever he threatened to wrestle her loyalty.

Then one day, sickened to chance upon a lump under her armpit, Julia became all of a sudden demonstrative, fervently possessive towards the children. As clandestine lover, she had airily farmed them out to her soft-witted mother or when caught desperate to her aged, half-blind mother-in-law. Now she panicked to make amends for her neglect. The lump, after all, proved benign. Except that something of her passion had been excised.

It was thus painfully discovered, after six months of rapt bed-sharing with Leon, that daytimes still consisted of tizzy activity somehow connected with Nicholas. Who was, though partially estranged, rather more than a brother, after all.

But how to admit it? How could she possibly explain her confusion to Leon? Before attempting to renegotiate with Nicholas?

Suitably crestfallen, she returned to her husband’s more than dutiful but mercifully unquestioning embrace. ‘Let’s make a list of what’s positive,’ he urged, with a pragmatism strained by avoidance of matters emotional, relieved to notice the first flecks of grey on her black curls as she insinuated herself tentatively, with head bowed, into his oarsman shoulders. ‘There’s the family for a start. Everyone loves you and misses you a hell of a lot. The girls’ schooling has been going downhill since you left. They don’t play up when we’re together. You and I are good friends, aren’t we, even if the physical is not, well . . . ‘

September fell in the Gardens under a flurry of yellowing leaves, a skirmishing of leaden clouds. Leon was sat down on bars of regimented green iron. Julia smoothed her mauve-checked skirt as prelude to unwrapping a pate sandwich, or more disarmingly her too real intentions. Unprepared for the inexplicable, or even the rational, Leon could punish only the quicks of his nails, though his forehead was feeling the pinch.

‘Darling, I don’t know how to begin.’ So her mouth opened with a slight expiration that stopped short of rounding into the hollowness of laughter.

Leon refused to rescue, except by burying himself deeper into his clothes, rigid against what was already gusting against his collar.

‘Darling, I’m dreadfully sorry. I hate hurting you . . . but the truth is, quite simply . . . although I still love you . . . perhaps not quite in the same way . . . but things, people change. The children adore their father. Well, you have to admit, you’ve never known what it’s like to be a real father. Though you’ve tried hard and. Leon, I can’t let go my sense of family. I thought I could but . . . I just can’t. The happiest moments of my life I’ve spent with you. We shall always have our beautiful memories. Look, I’ve never denied I need security. Far more than you do. Nicholas provides it for me . . . I can’t give myself to you completely, somehow. I thought I would have been able. Maybe because you . . . you don’t trust me . . . Oh, Leon, I’m really sorry. You do understand, don’t you?’

He decamped to a vault of lairy orange bricks in Hawthorn. For days he anesthetised himself with his precious books, not so much by creaming insights or milking the melodramas of others, but by gulping down skeins of spiky, black print that clotted his imagination. Across that sludge he fought to console himself that he had lost his biblio-lover irreversibly, absolutely, cleanly. No longer would he be demented by doubts of her exact whereabouts, by the insistent ringing of that telephonic husband, by the innocent suspicion on Nicola’s chocolate-fudged lips. ‘Why doesn’t my daddy like you?’

Purified.

Healed.

Thank God!

Unremittingly, though, more insidiously, as time tightened the screws of despair, his desire, resistant in spite of or because of bereavement, sprouted anew: he craved to hold her down by the wrists, to mangle her little tits whilst whispering obscenities, to bite the child-woman’s shoulders that her husband had repossessed. In the trough of evening he humped the bed that no longer bore the impress of her svelte back, her starry hands, those peachy buttock cheeks. As he chewed an ear of pillow, his muffled plaints twisted to scowls of triumph: ‘What a great frolic you are! Mrs Tiltman loves a good hard ride!’

Not at weekends she didn’t – or couldn’t, wouldn’t out of a bizarre sense of fidelity, certainly not wholehearted, to her husband. Though Leon never fathomed her conscience or even dared tickle her touchy feelings these days, let alone depth-charge her with amorality, he battened onto the one lunch-hour of fondling per week that she sanctioned, either to staunch his persistent pleas or her own frustration that words seldom owned up to, or because of their mutual fear of relinquishing fingertips forever. Her non-marital hours were demarcated unequivocally: 8.30 to 4.30 weekdays only, especially lunch breaks.

No, not even those tiers of sterile fiction nor bouts of orgasmic petting that she conceded could resurrect the lover manqué from the lurch into which she had tossed him. Instead, he would tramp tramp tramp about Hawthorn streets, oblivious of the busily revamping wrought-iron weatherboards, replaying over and over the frozen frames of his grand opera that had diluted to soap.

No longer the apple of his eye but the apple of Sodom.

Slumping into an armchair, lips pursed to hate or sighing for having thus poisoned her, he could only yearn for her apparition to materialise just one more time so that his hollowness might be suffused with even a rebuke of a smile that could stir him to some diversion no matter how ordinary, smooth the curdles of jealousy, suspicion, bitterness, and eddy him away to some sunset pastorale of Claude Lorraine, a shepherd lad plying his flute.

Ultimately, what else to exorcise the pain that switch-backed his stomach, to escape proximity to their trysting haunts, to seize the diversion of a far-flung culture, to face survival of a merely physical kind on another planet – in brief, simply to protest his anguish – he resolved to fly Alitalia, after all.

That would teach her.

The promise of relief from the weight of supine despair, however, was discoloured by stabs of further uneasiness. How could he enjoy alone what they had intended to revel in together? With her having to entertain those intrusive kids, get used to her cuckold all over again, cope with the apprehension of himself prodding some sloe-eyed signorina? Would he be more or less lonely ten thousand miles away from her or five hundred metres?

So much did her resent her for making him impotent every which way.

‘I’ve just got to go,’ he eventually mustered courage to confess, inspecting the dry reddishness of her hand, striving for a sing-song heartiness that might belie his dependence, hoping to transfuse some of his own jealousy, yet apologetic lest she cocked her button nose. ‘Do you remember what you said to me once in the Gallery? Whatever happens, we’ll fly sky-high in Venice together, come hell or . . . I’ll miss you dreadfully, Julia. Is there any chance, however remote –‘

‘You go, Leon. It’ll do you good to get away. I must say I envy you. But then I have made a commitment to Nicholas. Besides, summer in Australia does offer compensations. We’ll take the children to our favourite camping site near Eden. I’ll soak up some sun, finally get around to tackling The Magus, potter about. I just so much want to be at peace.’

In that five-day initiation into Rome he laboured desperately to erase the woman who had retrenched his heart, who seemed almost dismissive of his leave-taking. The first whoosh of chilled European wind at Leonardo Airport whetted his yearning for exoticism beyond the gold-toothed soliciting of taxi-drivers. Promptly after an early breakfast of rolls, biscotti and coffee, disdaining the reputation of jetlag and not succumbing to Hawthorn lassitude, he hot-booted to the Vatican to be spirited out of himself.

But he could not, would not slough off the replays of what Julia had perpetrated. Even the imperial villas shrank into crumbling brick and shades of laurel as he pounded the Via Appia to San Callisto to obliterate the aura if not the charisma of his gilded Julia mosaic.

‘Leon, I forgot to tell you . . .’ His stomach heaved into its routine churning, buckling his muscle-weary legs into the foul discharge of an impish Fiat . . . ‘but I’m having dinner with Nicholas this evening. At Maxim’s.’

‘Oh, sweetheart, why didn’t you tell me before? I was so looking forward to –‘

‘I’m sorry,’ she shrugged.  'Just slipped my mind. Nicholas had arranged it some time ago. It’s his boss’s fiftieth birthday. Says he needs me there.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘For the sake of appearances, I suppose. And something about helping to cut the cake.’

‘But I need you here.’

‘You silly. I’ll be coming back to you tonight.’

And she did, all too primly, but Leon rolled over, surly-shouldered, determined not to cuddle but aching to, whilst she, having flaunted her new patent leather slingbacks and fluted skirt from George’s, soon snoozed off in garlicky vinolence.

Florence: panting dutifully up the winding steps to Brunelleschi’s cupola in the Duomo, he was assailed by a coil of iconography Julia-style: she was clutching Nicholas to her, imploring hubby’s forgiveness, then whispering for his flesh with widening, almond come-hitherness, so that the projectionist, maddening, listed towards the wall of the gallery as it creaked, disintegrated, plummeting down, down, down onto callous Carrara marble.

With every jackbooted stride, therefore, he had to grind her ravenous, black hair that sculpted her face into the naivety of childhood, tarnished teeth with the front two uppers chipped and smudged with lipstick, those green, lynxy eyes, the buds that teased out her breasts . . .

And every square centimetre of canvas, marble, tapestry, tavola, sedia, vaso, every single damned bottone in the Capella Sistina, Villa Borghese, Uffizi, Bargello, Palazzo Pitti, Accademia Correr (even though it housed tedious, cracked-up minor Venetians) provided a measure of just how much she had sacrificed.

Slouched on a bench of stone before the Fontana di Trevi alongside clings of lovers, he stared so long at the trampling horses as if he meant to liberate them from their fixation, then snatched at clumsy mouthfuls of pizza rustica like an uncouth peasant, swilling Fanta so greedily he all but retched.

Yet the continual and unexpected revelations of man’s aspirations to spiritual grandeur and his own nostalgia for the capitulated Forum, then the breathtaking opulence of San Pietro, its sheer perfection of symmetry and exquisite detail, echoing plainsong and Michelangelo’s eloquently moving Pieta . . .

He was really going to lay her to rest in Venice. Absolutely. He bought a postcard of summery San Giorgio Maggiore – ever so slightly red-garish and out of focus, but still, it made the point – had himself photographed on the Rialto admirally surveying the Canal Grande, was sketched before the Ponte dei Sospiri, where they had vowed to kiss, strutted the Piazza San Marco.

Vanity, though, could not cajole him into catching ‘un tassi’, even though he’d become a miserably cold, damp, scruffy derelict. Anyway, those fakey blue-tasselled gondoliers looked as shifty-eyed as expectant tow-truck scavengers in Melbourne.

In effect, the Queen of the Adriatic in latish December proved fickle. He shivered through the Palazzo Ducale where Titian and Tintoretto were secreted behind palls of gloom.

‘Dove sono le luci?’ he had ventured.

‘Il direttore non crede che non si possano vederli bene,’ shrugged an over-coated student attendant, a radiator hugging his knees, ingesting a comic strip.

Another fifteen hundred lire down the drain. Might just as well have thumbed through Florence in a Weekend.

But his sense of integrity compelled him to devour everything at first hand/sight if he were to claim victory over her at the Palazzo – twice over, in fact, but there was no further enlightenment during the second circuit.

Ducking down the shoulder-shrinking passages to the chill-stoned dungeons, he reached the interior of the Ponte dei Sospiri to the slosh of sea, a slap of wind. Through the floral grille, mists shrouded San Giorgio.

‘This is where some condemned guys took their final bow,’ declared an American backpacker. ‘It was their last glimpse of Venice before they cried arriverderci, sighed and were lynched. How about that?’

‘Aw, shucks,’ complained his companion in unstrapped leather deerstalker and woollen mitts. ‘I’d kinda reckoned they were sighs of lurv.’

The rain was bucketing down. The Basilica of San Marco offered shelter, distraction. Outside the shadowed portals a buck-toothed Turkish mother whined for a couple of hundred lire, exhibiting her baby, her milk-less pear-breast. A bi-focalled crazy was conducting band music that crackled from a radio cradled in his left arm. Inside, the basilica brooded, dark-hollowed. ‘Note the illumination from the golden halo of the Blessing Christ Enthroned’, misled the guide book, ‘in the semi-dome of the apse’. What had happened to the stained glass in the plain rose window? A blue-bereted barrel of a man snored by the confessional.

Peering down from the skeletal balustrades at the uneven mosaic floor, Leon absent-mindedly traced the birds, diamonds, chequers, ovals. Then his gaze was held by a dark green circle, with a broad, concentric band, an eye that appeared to harden, dilate, accuse . . .

‘But Julia, you told me you were going to pick up Merilyn.’

‘Yes?’ (looks away, shallow smile).

‘When I rang there, she informed me that there was no book group meeting tonight.’

‘No? Well, arrangements change.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me when you came in.?’

‘I’m not answerable for everything. I hate it when you check up on me.’

‘We’re supposed to be lovers for Christ sake!’

‘But we don’t live in each other’s pockets. So stop this interrogation or I’ll go back to Nicholas for good.’

‘And you left me baby-sitting your children.’

A step missed his footing. For a foolish second he lost balance, felt very flushed, dry-throated. Air: he needed fresh air. Shouts of glee furled up from the piazza, then he noticed a door issuing onto the parapet. Rain was slanting in, so he huddled under the rump of a horse, mechanically noting Lysippus, 4th-3rd century B.C., Hellenistic bronze. Bird lime scored the weathered gilt.

I hate you, you bitch. Why the hell did you betray our love? Why, for heaven’s sake? Why oh why? You’re nothing but a liar, a cheat, a trollop.

By a cluster of limp candles in the west nave, he worked the postcard of San Giorgio Maggiore, savouring the bitter sweetness of melting wax:

                                                        Cara Guiliana, Saluti da Venezia.



                                    Wish you were here. Loved Rome. Thought of us dining
                                    on osso buco in elegant Via Vittorio Veneto – and drooling
                                    over all those Raphael tondi! Florence fantastic! Saw the
                                    ‘David’ of Verrochio, Donatello (our favourite), Michel-
                                    angelo, all within the hour. But Venice indescribable, so
                                    unreal! We would have been truly happy here together,
                                    strolling the calles and campielli, guzzling chianti, admiring
                                    this superb Esposizione da Tiziano a El Greco. Titians fairly
                                    blazed, swirling Tintorettos smouldered. Do you remember
                                    our proposed gondola trip to San Giorgio? Hoping to go
                                    tomorrow, but solo, alas! Cosi e la vita! All my tenderest
                                    love, as ever.
                                                                xxxx Leonardo xxxx

A six-inch wash of water overspread the mosaic pavement of the atrium. Shadowy figures were erecting duckboards.

Leon turned up his collar, hunched his shoulders, pocketed his frozen hands, thankful to be wearing knee-length, fur-lined boots.

But winced at the prospect of a ridiculously early night in the confinement of his pensione, alone. All that drab washing on the shower-rail, radiators, chair backs. Even to crouch on the toilet seat meant swivelling knees under the washbasin.

Nourishment he sought the other side of the Rialto, towards the fish market, where prices were less fanciful. Though tired of consuming starch on the run, to eat at table would double the bill. He fingered a mandarin.

‘Un chilo! Un chilo!’ The stallholder rebuked his knuckles, mean old sod.

Formaggio, pane, una bottiglia di vino rosso, latte, un pasticcino, per favore.

A siren wailed over the bedraggled city.

Calf-deep the sinister corridors of creeping water now. Passers-by suddenly seemed fashionably adaptable: lurid galoshes, patterned umbrellas, leggings, hats.

The lenses of Leon’s glasses streaked. Every few minutes he fumbled to wipe them with a wodge of sodden handkerchief, but they blurred even more. Struts of umbrella jabbed his greasing scalp.

Abruptly pulling up on the brink of a staved-in catwalk, he was obliged to retreat, but in gingerly shuffling round, he let go the bottle of wine from its soggy bag.

‘Fucking hell!’ He urged to cry like a child, but his body had assumed the slack and heaviness of a helpless old arthritic. ‘That’s the last bloody straw!’

Shudders, sniffles. Cold piercing bones of legs. Flood water trimming the tops of his boots.

Oh, Julia.

Wading. Wading. Wading. Where the hell was San Moise?

The third time he docked at the steps of the same corner of the Piazza San Marco, he whimpered. Wandering around in bleary circles, how could he?

Enveloped figures scurrying home had evaporated. Lights died in shops.

Where were those fucking gondoliers?

He thumped a stone column with the meaty side of his fist.

‘I’ll do what I bloody well like with my money. Besides, he is my husband.’

‘But you left him for me. We were going to share our lives together. Or don’t you remember?’

‘O for goodness sake, he is the father of my children. And he wants me back. So if I can lend him a few thousand for this new restaurant venture he’s always had a hankering for.’

‘But what about our holiday in Italy?’

‘Oh, Leon, you live in a fantasy world.’

‘Look, Italy’s not a fiction. Not if we go as we planned.’

‘And who’s going to look after the children?’

‘I’ll help. Of course, I’ll help. When we get back.’

‘But you’re not their father.’

‘I left my wife for you, dammit!’

Turbid channel alluring as if he descending, dream-slow. Between the frescoes of algae. A rat body. Odour of oil, brine, glazed fish. Icy splinters piquing his thighs.

A sign: ‘Servizione Gondole.’

Marbled stumps pushing forward. Moiling, black ink sucking his clothes, his flesh, his bones. Wooden pylons like stakes poking up from slicks of water. Poles red and white-striped. A gleam of ebony, moored gondolas. Distant throbbing, motor launches, vaporetti. A horned gargoyle, or frowning Neptune with leonine hair, bulbous eyes.

‘When you go round to Nicholas’s, does he ever . . . touch you?’

‘Never.’

‘Not even a peck on the cheek?’

‘He never does that.’

‘This evening I . . . stood in his neighbour’s back garden. And . . .’

‘And?’ (startled, angry, contemptuous)

‘You disappeared into his bedroom. He closed the curtains.’

‘I’d been ironing his shirts.’

‘You stayed there two hours, Julia. Two bloody, fucking long hours!’

‘O for god sake, will you ever stop spying on me! I can’t stand it any longer! Surely, you don’t imagine . . .’

Four orange beacons. Below the ghostly spire. Palladio, wasn’t it? 1565, cruciform aisle, Corinthian columns, triangular tympanum. Huh, all meaningless now.

And at last, thank God, there it was, glimmering; the shell–white façade of San Giorgio Maggi-

‘JU-LIA!’ He howled her name into the distant reaches of the night. Frantic for the echo, he strained, swaying, beyond the persistent pissing of rain.

‘Julia,’ he blubbered. ‘Julia.’

Though blinded, cold chiselling into his heart, he kept walking, doggedly walking, wading deeper and deeper, ever more laboured and unsteady, toward the beckoning glow in the ever-dark.


                                                                                                                                        Michael Small

December, 1981

published Her Natural Life and Other Stories, Tamarillo, 1988

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