The Submerged Cathedral Read online

  Jocelyn was enraged, wanted to grab him as he passed his mother, ignoring her.

  The woman was silent now, and Jocelyn saw her eyes filling with tears in relief and shock as she moved to catch up with her son. She moved the strap of her black patent leather handbag further up her arm, smoothing the leather with her other hand, tenderly, as if to calm herself. She walked behind him, reproached the child in fierce, whispering Spanish. The boy stopped, waited a step for her to catch up to him.

  And then he wheeled round, raised a hand and slapped his mother’s face, hard. The noise of it made people turn their heads, but then, seeing nothing, they went back to their views and their talking. The boy, still smiling, walked across to stand looking over the edge with his father. Jocelyn and Duncan watched from their separate sides of the parapet. The mother was silent, motionless for a moment, and then she arranged her face into a benign expression.

  Her cheek began to bloom as she walked towards the staircase. As she stepped neatly over the stone paving she stared straight ahead, adjusted her clothing, pulled at the waist of her blouse. Her cheek was red. The boy’s father had not seen his wife. He and the son stood together near Jocelyn, looking out over the mountains, the father’s arm about the boy’s shoulders.

  The mother held a hand flat against the wall as she took her first step down into the dark. She had done all of this before.

  Jocelyn thought of Thomas. So young it begins, the hatred of women.

  Afterwards, when they climbed back down the stairs, Jocelyn and Duncan sat on large wooden benches against the coloured tiles. People’s voices echoed against the marble, bounced off the orange and green and blue and purple. The ancient stone bowl of a fountain stood at the end of the long pool in front of them. People’s reflections fell across the slow green water of the pool.

  The boy’s violence, the slap, still hung in the silent air. The water lapped at the lip of the fountain’s bowl, and Jocelyn thought about hardness and softness, about movement and stillness, how over a thousand years a trickle of water can cut through stone. She thought about Duncan, and whether she herself was stone.

  Then she turned back to the new ponds and pools and the rippling water appearing now in the garden in her head.

  The garden grows. Trees are taller than she is now, the blank spaces between the shrubs are shrinking, stems grow woody and begin to withstand the animals’ attacks. The benches start to look as if they belong in their resting places among the plants, the ground is littered with shed flowers, seed pods.

  She still dreams of catastrophe. On one windy night the tin sheets of the roofs lift and crack and bang, and in her dream the garden is covered in weeds and great sheets of land collapse. Salt leaches up through the earth overnight and this garden is the whole continent, dishevelled, poked at, stumbled over, pocked and burned. She walks her vast, destroyed garden, distraught, picking at weeds with her hands knowing it is useless, but through the calamity is some kind of other presence, saying This is it, your place, this is how you live.

  In the dream the final garden is ancient, vine-covered, and she is walking through Eden, through Babylon, Gethsemane.

  In the morning she goes back to work, unsettled.

  A parrot on the lichen-mottled fence hops from one rail to the next, then into the grass, moving its head like a series of still photographs, an animation. The blotches on the fence are silvery, like land on earth in photographs from space.

  They calm her. She is in Australia, she is in her home. Feels the shovel blade slice into earth. This is it. This is how you live.

  At the beginning of her second year, the sacristan’s garden has begun to flower: kangaroo paws, everlasting daisies, flannel flowers, Sturt peas, the bracelet honeymyrtle, tassel-flower, and grevillea, the bright green birdflower – Crotalaria laburnifolia. And down at the dam among the reeds there are swamp lilies, ivy-leaf violets, Murray lilies and vanilla plants. White and purple, green and yellow, red and black, colours with which to garland an altar or a memory.

  And as the garden grows, more birds come. Rosellas, lorikeets, scrub wrens, honeyeaters, their squeaks and shirrups and squawks across the valley waking her in the mornings.

  Thirty-Five

  AFTER 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 fou
ntains 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.

  Thirty-Six

  UP 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.

  Thirty-Seven

  ONCE 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.