She is right, I know that, but I still cannot feel that it is right for me. Although I always made the ideas of the church my own I was never so militant to join the demonstrators when Hail Mary was screened. What's more, I was never prepared to stand in the way of people who wanted to do even the most outrageous thing. My problem is that when it comes to myself all I can think of is that I am not allowed to do it.
Reluctantly I re-started my story. 'I know that a lot of people think that I'm the last surviving dinosaur. I'm sure that I can count you and even my children among those who think that I'm out of touch with today's reality. But you have to understand one thing: I was raised to accept without question what was being given to me, and without even thinking of not complying. Remember Big Brother in 1984? Change it to God and you will be able to understand me better.' Maureen looked contrite and said 'I'm sorry, I have been very unfair, don't' let me stop you again!' I thought what else I could tell her. 'There isn't much more really, except that for the first time I have begun to think for myself. For the first time I can see what I have done to other people. I love my children dearly, but I have never been a real father to them.
This morning I apologised to my daughter and my son for it. In a nutshell, I'm just trying to see both, who and where I am before I can begin to think about where I am going.' Maureen made a soft whistling sound. 'I can see that you have a lot on your plate at this moment. Is your new lady friend helping you cope with all this upheaval?' How could I explain Camille? 'After that encounter I looked for her during the entire week. Every trail I followed took me nowhere. She had totally vanished. That is, until Monday night. Coming back to my desk from the toilet after finishing my article, close to eleven o'clock, she was there, waiting for me and we had sex again, on my desk! She is a total mystery for me. I just know nothing about her, but she seems to know everything about me. In the two instances that I met her it really looked as if she always knows what I'm even thinking!'
Maureen was lost for words for the second time running which was in itself an achievement of Olympic proportions, even though at the time I couldn't possibly see it, lost as I was in trying to find answers for so many questions that I had never asked before. We walked back to work, together but again in silence. We were alone in the lift and Maureen said 'Thank you Franco for sharing all that with me. I don't know what the future will bring you, but I can see that your present is giving you a golden opportunity to change and build a happier life for yourself. Don't waste it.'
'I won't', was my heart felt answer.
Solitude has never bothered me, before then or now, but during that period of my life I was very much conscious of how alone I felt. The proximity of Sunday and the picnic with my daughter was making me feel an excitement that I had not experienced since I was a kid anxiously awaiting the day when I had been promised a visit to the zoo. On Saturday night I spent one hour preparing enough sandwiches to feed a large group of hungry bush walkers. Gleaming red and white prosciutto, carefully laid on top of pale, hand sliced fontina cheese with giardiniera pieces on top. Slices of a loaf of large Italian bread with the crust shaved off developed a life of their own, decorating the bench of my small kitchen with happy memories from my childhood. I was re-enacting a ritual of a time gone by that had remained hidden in the darkest corners of my memories for all those years.
My father is making his favourite sandwiches for the two of us to go fishing off the rocks in Manly. He got up very early to be at the delicatessen in Leichhardt that morning, waiting for them to open so he could get his bread and his prosciutto. 'Franco, Australia is a good country, a land of plenty, but I have to agree with your mother, we have yet to learn to make bread.' I look with fascination. His huge hands with skin like leather are out of place in the kitchen. I cannot understand how his rough fingers can separate the paper thin slices of meat and so neatly lay them down following the curve of the bread. He wraps the sandwiches in a dampened tea towel and then in a bigger towel, tying the four ends together to make it a carrying bag. I walk to the bus with our lunch proudly hanging from my hand while he carries the fishing gear.
Today, most people would have classified my father as a larrikin but back after the war he was considered a pariah. He was a philosophy student when war broke up. He left university to go to fight in Africa and Europe and when the war was over he didn't come back to Australia with the rest. He went to live for some time in Italy and when he did come back in the late forties he did so with a very pregnant Italian wife who could not speak a single word of English. There could not be two more dissimilar people than my father and my mother. He was a free spirit, who loved reading and worked as a bricklayer just because he loved building things. I remember him telling me 'I spent the years of the war destroying houses, bridges, people and fields. Now I only want to build as many houses as I have destroyed or, even better, more than that. I have seen too much death, that's why I love life' My mother lived her life by the teachings of the church, never departing one inch from them. I had just turned eight years old when one hot late summer day, coming back from fishing I told my mother that I had gone swimming with my father. 'But you didn't take your swimming suits with you' she said in her heavily accented English. When I proudly said 'We swam naked' I thought that the roof would cave in on our heads. She turned to my father screaming 'God will punish you! You are a degenerate, what are you teaching your son, eh?' My father shrugged his shoulders and walked away to the kitchen to put the fish in the icebox for dinner.
I'm coming back home on the first week of the school year. My mother is crying. She holds me in her arms repeating time and time again 'Cosa voi fare bambino, cosa voi fare?'
'What happen Mama? Don't cry! Please, don't cry!'
'Il tou padre e morto! I said to him that God would punish him and allora he is dead. He fell from the scaffold in the block of units he was working and he is morto, dead!' She takes me by my hand and still crying loudly half runs, half walks to the church to pray for the salvation of his soul. It is two days later, I see my father in the coffin and I have to kiss him. To my eight years old lips full of life he feels cold as ice. The women sitting around, mostly Italian, all dressed in black, are crying together, in communion with my mother.
Since my father's death, every night, until the day before my mother passed away we kneeled together and prayed asking God to forgive the sins of my father and keep him in purgatory rather than condemning him to the flames of hell. Although she loved my father, she always complained when he would go fishing on Sundays rather than to church. His lack of piety and his refusal to follow rules in general were perpetual sources of arguments. My mother would say that God rewarded those who obeyed and punished those who didn't. Unperturbed, my father would reply that even if she was right and God did exist he didn't want to have anything to do with a god that would punish good blokes just because they were disobedient.
The alarm clock woke me up with a jolt at five o'clock in the morning. I had decided to take Marianne bush walking, but I didn't know if she would like it or not, so I packed for all possibilities, including a beach umbrella and towels as the weather forecast was for a warm day. I left my unit at six thirty and, without thinking I found myself driving past my church. A pang of guilt struck me, thinking of Father Patrick going through the elaborate rituals for the early mass and looking for me among the people in the pews and, not seeing me there worrying by my absence. I drove on. I was so determined that I would not be late this time that by seven o'clock in the morning I was sitting in my parked car, a few doors away from Pat's home, waiting.
By eight my car had become a claustrophobic box in which I could no longer sit. I walked through the garden enveloped in the smell of blooming freesias, still showing traces of the morning mist. I was feeling very nervous, as if I was going into some sort of blind date. After all, I didn't really know my daughter, nor I ever gave her the chance to know me. It was too early for the chorus of suburban lawnmowers to have started, so when I rang the bell I could clearly hear Marianne yelling, 'I'll get it!' The door flung open and there she was, with a smile emanating from every cell of her body. 'Hi dad, come in!' As I stepped inside she gave me the biggest hug ever. She was happy. 'I'm sorry, but I'm not really ready, but almost really ready. Mum!' She was talking so fast that her words were almost tripping on each other. 'I'll be ready in no time!' She then ran inside at full speed, leaving me standing there, just inside the house. 'Slow down before you walk through a wall! Sorry Franco, your daughter has been very excited all Saturday and from what I can see, she hasn't yet calmed down. Come in and join us for a coffee.' Pat had not changed, she was a very attractive woman. She was dressed in very short shorts and a T-shirt. She led the way, barefooted and sensuous. I couldn't tell if she was always as sexy as now or if it was that I was just noticing it for the first time.
