Romulus, My Father Read online

  It has been a long time since we have seen each other, and during this time the situation between us has changed altogether. I don’t know how it happened. I haven’t discussed the matter until now. I feel that now is the right time for a confession. And the clearer that things become, the better it will be for all of us.

  The thing that I want to talk about is a situation whose centre is Christina. A few years ago, a situation emerged between you and her that estranged you from one another, and at the same time this made possible a relationship between me and her. Now our roles have been reversed, with me taking your place as a husband to her. This is the essence of what I want to discuss, and it must sooner or later be clarified.

  Perhaps each one of us was aware that the waves were pushing us in different directions, contrary to sound judgment. But we could not help it and could not change course. The only thing we can do now is try to come to an arrangement which will not cause too much disturbance in our lives.

  Since she last came to Melbourne, Christina has lived with me. Even if she wanted to, in the situation she finds herself, she could not live alone. In this situation neither she nor I feels good and I think that you would not want this unpleasant situation to drag along as it is now. More than that, she is on the way to becoming a mother. To make it easier for all of us, I want, in this letter, to beg you to agree to give her a divorce. God forgive me, I never thought to find myself in such a situation, but now an accomplished fact stares us in the face. It is preferable not to pretend it didn’t happen.

  You would be completely justified in hating me, but I know you better than that. For my part, I regarded you as one of my best friends, but in the present situation friendship is not possible. Christina in her turn respects you like no one else. How many times has she repeated this to me? And I know that you are very worried about her.

  To give you news about her. I have to tell you that just today I took her to hospital. She had a serious attack of asthma after she brought Raimond here, and became very weak. Although the attack is now nearing its end, she had to go to hospital for about a week to recover, because she didn’t eat for about five or six days. On top of that she has been hearing voices for a few weeks now. She had a course of shock treatment, at the hospital here, but it didn’t do much good. She wants to go to the mental hospital in Ballarat again, as soon as she is over the asthma attack, and I want to inquire by letter this evening whether they have a place for her there. On top of all these misfortunes, she is very homesick and very uneasy when the boy is not with her. She has very dark and troubling thoughts at the memory of your ruined marriage. If you think it is necessary for us to speak personally, it would be better to meet and to see how we could untangle this, for the good of all of us who are involved.

  We have to send Raimond home, and through him I send you this letter. How is your leg? I heard that even so you ride your motorbike. I received £2 from you just today and I thank you very much for it. It couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

  Mitru and my mother moved to 24 James Street in Ballarat from where Mitru sent a second letter to my father.

  The situation with us is as follows. Christina came out of the hospital, but she still has to go there every two weeks, at the insistence of the doctor, so that he can see better the state of her nerves. In the last three of four days she has been feeling very bad again. Besides this, her asthma is also bothering her, not too badly, though it is more or less continuous. When she heard that Raimond was sick with bronchitis she became very worried, and just this morning she wanted to go there and bring him here for about a week, but in the end she was afraid that she would suffer an attack on the way.

  What do you think? Could you send Raimond here for about a week or, if he can’t leave school, at least for a weekend? This would help her a lot. If you think it is necessary, I will come there to talk with you, but I could not tell you exactly when I would be able to. But anyway it would be soon. The trousers which I bought for Pante cost 29 shillings. I will buy you a pair too if you want, because they have plenty at that shop. How is your leg?

  I do not know how my father responded to Mitru’s letters. His ‘confession’ was odd, if not disingenuous, because it had been obvious that he was my mother’s lover since they had first lived together in St Kilda. Perhaps they had agreed, and had told my father, that they would separate—and the confession was to tell him that they were together again. Or perhaps it was to record his new status ‘as a husband’ to her, a status he assumed because he cared for her when she was ill and because she was pregnant with his child.

  Mitru’s respect for my father is evident in his letter and was evident to me long before. The reason why the two pounds my father sent ‘could not have come at a better time’ was because he and my mother were threatened with eviction unless they paid their rent arrears. Mitru quarrelled with the landlord who had quarrelled with my mother and abused her. Afterwards he said to me, in my mother’s presence, ‘Your father would know what to do. He would come with his shoes slap slap slapping, but he would sort things out.’ He laughed as he said this. The reference to my father’s shoes arose from the fact that, except for one good pair, he cut all his shoes down to the shape of slippers, and wore them like that even in winter. It amused Mitru (and others), and the reference conveyed the thought that though my father was at heart a peasant no one should draw the wrong inferences from that. It was an humiliated acknowledgment of my father’s greater strength of character by the man who was living with his wife and had made her pregnant.

  My father was very fond of Mitru because he was so evidently a good man, but he did not respect him as much as he did his brother. Mitru was softer and also weaker. My father never blamed him for the affair with my mother. He blamed her (in the sense that he saw her as its primary cause) and, because he saw it as an expression of her promiscuous nature, he pitied Mitru, believing he was caught in something he could not control, which would cause him considerable pain and perhaps consume him. I do not know whether he knew that my mother had already taken other lovers while she was with Mitru, but he must have guessed and, anyhow, he knew that she would, sooner rather than later. ‘She was a woman who liked men,’ my father was to say later. He did not say this angrily. His tone was sorrowful and resigned.

  My father did not agree to a divorce because, as he put it, he did not ‘believe in divorce’. Whatever his feelings were about Mitru’s confession, and towards my mother, he allowed her to stay with us for a month or so from early May in 1955. From Frogmore she wrote a letter to Maria, her sister in Germany, telling her that she was pregnant, but she wrote suggesting, without saying so explicitly, that it was my father’s child and that we were again a family.

  Perhaps she and my father had discussed the chances of a reconciliation, because for the time she was there she tried harder than I ever remember to care for me and the house. She made curtains for the windows, cleaned and occasionally cooked. On my eleventh birthday we lit the stove and she cooked a Sauerbraten (a traditional German beef dish) for us and for the family of a school friend who came to celebrate with us. She burned the meat, but so rare was the experience of her preparing any kind of meal that I have since had a fondness for burnt meat.

  Again, I remember her as cheerful and lively, even when she had hallucinations. One day she was washing clothes in a basin in the kitchen. An operatic aria was playing on the radio and she sang with it, telling me about opera and how much she enjoyed it. Suddenly she asked, ‘Do you hear those voices?’

  ‘You mean the voices on the radio?’

  ‘No, the other voices. Can’t you hear them? Up there,’ she said, pointing upwards, but beyond that to nowhere in particular.

  Alarmed, I ran outside, right around the house. I even climbed onto the roof to see if there was anyone there, hoping to find someone, ominous though that would have been, rather than accept that my mother was mad. Of course there was no one.

  After that she no longer asked me if I hear
d anything, but sometimes told me when she did. To my deep disappointment she left us to live again with Mitru, this time in Maryborough. Less than two months later, she gave birth to a baby girl, Susan.

  My mother and Mitru rented a room at the back of the wine saloon in Maryborough. The owners, Mr and Mrs Foschia, had long been friends of my father, and Hora had also stayed there at times. They had a son, Dominic, who was kind to me although he was some years older. I often visited my mother and Mitru there and sometimes stayed for weekends, in a separate room paid for by my father.

  The saloon itself occupied a smallish room at the front of one of the more imposing Victorian buildings in High Street. In a much larger room across the passage Mr Foschia kept his barrels. The saloon’s customers were predominantly immigrants who lived in the area, but it was also home to a small group of mostly Australian alcoholics. Mr Foschia—known to everyone as Gino—kept an insecure order in the bar and the fragility of this achievement made him tense. Every hour or so he came to the back of the house, walking with a heavy step, scraping his boots on the stone floor of the verandah, swearing in Italian. ‘Ostia! Porco Dio! Porca Madonna!’ he shouted in a gravelly voice. He then spat into the gully-trap, turned on the tap to wash the spit away and returned to the bar. After he had closed the saloon around 5 p.m., he relaxed by standing in his front doorway, his thumbs in his braces, surveying events in the street and greeting passers-by.

  Despite Mr Foschia’s roughness I was fond of him and never frightened by him. His wife was a different and more formidable proposition. A small, plump woman, grey-haired and with a sharp tongue, she kept a firmer, more mercenary, hand on things than her soft-hearted husband. She prepared meals for lodgers in an enormous dining room and did their washing, but she also kept an eye on her husband at the bar to ensure that he did not yield to the temptation occasionally to give the chronic alcoholics free drinks. Her disapproval of my mother was never far from the surface. She made no effort to hide it from me which made me dislike her and feel uneasy in her company. My father complained of her financial meanness, but thought her to be a good, hard-working and upright woman, whose strengths saved her husband from ruin.

  Mrs Foschia ruled the entire house, but her stern presence was felt especially at the back where my mother and Mitru lived in a small room which barely held a double bed, a dresser and a wardrobe. They cooked and showered in separate, communal facilities. Their room faced the backyard which was almost bare of vegetation, and was intolerably hot in summer despite being protected from direct sunlight by the verandah. My mother and Mitru often sat under the verandah and Susan often lay there in her pram. Mercifully, the botanical gardens were on the other side of the back street. There they could lie on the cool grass under the shade of one of the many fine trees.

  Not long after Susan was born, my mother again fell into the pattern of neglect that had begun with my birth. She lay in bed, read magazines, walked around the town, but would not change Susan’s nappies even when Susan developed nappy rash and cried in pain. Mitru worked at the wire works and rushed home at lunch time to change Susan’s nappies. He said that he could barely wait for the siren to sound, so anxious was he to go home to attend to her.

  My mother and he quarrelled, over Susan, and over the fact that rent was again in arrears because my mother would sometimes spend his wages of approximately eight pounds per week on dresses costing twenty or thirty pounds. Mitru took a second job, running home whenever he could during breaks in order to care for Susan. His misery was compounded by the fact that my mother flirted with some young men who boarded in the same building. They whistled at her, and told her she had beautiful legs. ‘And so I have,’ she said to me, flattered by their attentions.

  Mrs Foschia complained to my father about the quarrelling and the fact that the rent was so far behind. He paid the arrears and some in advance but, when he told Mitru that the Foschias’ patience was at an end, they argued. Mitru hit my father. Although my father was much stronger than Mitru, he did not return the blow. Mitru cried and apologised. He said he could stand my mother no longer, that he was ‘at the end’. My father suggested he leave and send her money. If he could not afford that, my father would help out. Mitru refused both to leave my mother and the offer of help.

  Relations between Mitru and my mother became ever more desperate. Early in November, he rode his bicycle into the bush outside Maryborough and stabbed himself in the chest, just below the heart. He was found, unconscious, by a passer-by who took him to hospital where he stayed a few days. In hospital he was visited by the local police sergeant because suicide was then a criminal offence. He was not charged, but the policeman demanded that Mitru undertake never to do it again. Mitru refused.

  He refused the policeman, but he did not refuse my mother. Responding to her pleas, he promised that he would not try to kill himself again. But the drama of his attempted suicide, and the anxious and tender emotions it released, did not change things between them for long. Mitru recovered only to find himself in the same situation from which he had sought release. Soon they quarrelled again, as bitterly as before, and my mother went to stay with Susan’s godparents, an Italian couple who lived less than a kilometre away.

  One weekend when I was staying with my mother at the home of Susan’s godparents, my father brought Hora there. He knew of his brother’s misery and it pained him. He wanted to see him, to speak to him in the hope that he could help and comfort him. But, once there, irritated by the presence of my mother and distraught at the sight of how abject Mitru had become, Hora’s distress became mixed with anger and he harshly broke the silence he had kept to that day about Mitru’s relationship with my mother.

  ‘How can you let yourself fall so low?’ he demanded of Mitru. ‘How can you let yourself be trampled down by such a characterless woman? Why don’t you wake up and see what you have done to yourself?’ Hora did not ask these questions rhetorically but, even more than wanting an answer for himself, he wanted Mitru seriously to put them to himself.

  Mitru couldn’t bear it. ‘You’d better go,’ he said, ‘and don’t come to see me again.’

  ‘All right, I’ll go,’ Hora replied. ‘You can come and see me if you want, but if you come, come by yourself not with her.’ He pointed to my mother.

  Remorse beset him even before he was out of the door and all his life he regretted saying ‘but not with her’.

  A fortnight later on a hot day, early in the summer of 1956, a friend drove Mitru to Frogmore. Hora had come from Melbourne and Mitru knew it, for my father had told him. He came hoping they could be reconciled. The four men drank and talked happily. Neither Hora nor Mitru mentioned their quarrel, but it was clear that both wanted to put it behind them. Mitru had brought Susan with him and, at my father’s suggestion, she lay without a nappy, under the verandah in the cool and drying breeze.

  ‘Look how beautiful she is,’ my father said.

  ‘Yes, she is beautiful,’ Mitru replied. ‘What a pity she receives no attention from her mother. If it were not for me, who knows what state she would be in.’

  A few weeks later, I stayed with my mother and Mitru who were again living together at the back of the wine saloon. The summer was hot and often debilitating. Red-raw with nappy rash, Susan cried a lot. I wheeled her in her pram for hours to get her away from my mother who could not bear her crying. As so often before, she lay in bed reading magazines and listening to the radio. She quarrelled with Mrs Foschia who reprimanded her for not caring for her baby.

  ‘I could perhaps stand it, if only Christina was quiet,’ Mitru had told his brother. Instead, she lacerated him with a caustic tongue. One evening he beat her with his belt. It was a measure of my affection for him, and my sense of his desperation, that I did not resent him for beating my mother, even though I saw him do it and even though she complained bitterly to me, showing her many bruises.

  They made up the next day. I remember him stripped to the waist, and her affectionately tending the wounds he i
nflicted on himself when he tried to commit suicide. It was a balmy night, the sky clear and tending to purple. Relieved at the sight of their affection for one another, I went to the cinema which was screening The Garden of Evil, starring Gary Cooper and Rita Hayworth. My mother was a Hayworth fan. Even as a boy of nine, I could see why. Hayworth’s sensual eroticism was of the kind my father had noted when he said of my mother ‘she liked men’.

  A week later Mitru came home from work at midday and fought with my mother over her neglect of Susan. He beat her again with his belt, bruising her about the arms and body with its buckle. Susan lay in her pram on the verandah, crying. Mitru took her in his arms and went off with her, but came back within an hour. He then rode his bicycle to the Pioneers’ Memorial Tower and dived fifteen metres to his death. My mother was three months pregnant.

  I learned that Mitru was dead when my mother arrived at my school in a taxi at approximately three o’clock the next Monday afternoon. My father was with her. She was in the back seat, her head covered with a light scarf, her face drawn and marked with tears. She told me that Mitru had died and, when I asked how, she said that he had died of a cold. That evening she told me the truth, and that she had spent the previous two nights sleeping at the foot of the tower, fighting the impulse to follow him. She said that he was so determined to succeed this time that he placed a knife at the foot of the tower onto which he intended to fall. I do not know whether this horrible detail is true.

  That night she stayed at Frogmore, and the next day my father took her to Susan’s godparents in Maryborough. My father arranged the funeral. The Catholic priest refused to bury Mitru because he had committed suicide. My father then went to the Anglican priest. ‘Will you bury this man, even though he killed himself?’