MY AUSTRALIA WAS A FICTION, AN ESCAPE, WHICH I realised the moment the plane touched down. I was completely dehydrated after the long flight, and was feeling apprehensive. Almut had slept the whole time, most of it with her heavy head on my shoulder, but when eventually she woke up, she tugged at my arm, urging me to look at Orion, hanging a bit crookedly in the Australian sky, as if the Hunter had taken a fall. I could feel her trembling with excitement. We have always been different in that respect. I shrink in the face of change, and she expands. She was bubbling over, a very physical reaction, as if she couldn’t wait for the plane to land, wanted to fly on ahead and drag me with her.
Not even the terminal could dampen her spirits. She did not seem to notice the smell that permeates most airports and could not possibly usher in the Dreamland we had imagined all those years ago in our rooms in São Paulo. This was the land of the conquerors. I heard them speaking in their loud twangy voices in the language that had stamped out all those other languages, and realised that I had made a fatal mistake, a feeling that wore off only after a couple of days. Almut’s reaction was the very opposite. She arrived in a state of euphoria that lasted for weeks. We found a kind of hippy hotel, where we could do our own cooking. We did not have work permits, but that was not a problem. In the first week Almut found a job with a so-called physical therapist, though she warned me not to expect too much. ‘I’m only there for the placebo effect. We get a lot of little old ladies with arthritis, and windsurfers who have been taken apart. God, those guys are big! What bodies! Endless, and you can’t skip a single muscle. I’ve never seen so much meat! If you took a bite out of that, your cholesterol would soar sky high. And they’ve got a sex drive to match – it goes into high gear the minute they walk through the door. But I won’t even start down that road.’
A few weeks later she did go down that road and got fired.
‘How could you be so stupid?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m Brazilian. Not that it’s in my genes, but it must have rubbed off somehow. Besides, they’re so sweet. They don’t know what to do with those enormous bodies of theirs. They’re goddam buildings. Now I understand where the term “bodybuilder” comes from. They can surf, play rugby, race across the desert, hoist half a buffalo on to a barbecue spit, but beyond that? They’ve got
poco
sophistication. Not the ones that I met anyway. Besides, the guy was so tall it took my breath away. He wasn’t just a man, he was a walking phallic symbol! You could put him in a temple of Shiva, and the whole village would bring him offerings. And then those big blue Mummy-help-me eyes, with a jungle cry thrown in for free. I nearly had a heart attack. But then my boss came charging in and that was that.’
Almut pursed those narrow Puritan lips. Queen Victoria to the life! ‘God, what an English bitch. “Miss Kopp! This is a
decent
establishment!” Oh well, at least I’ve got another one for my diary. But what are we going to do now?’
It was raining. I had a job at a beach café, but they had called to say I didn’t have to come in. That was the deal. No sun, no work. No work, no pay. Fair enough.
‘Do you remember why we came here?’ Almut asked me.
I did. We had come here to go to the Sickness Dreaming Place, though neither of us had ever spoken of it again. Nor of our other reason. After all, you could hardly admit, even to each other, that you had come to Australia to see Aborigines.
Almut, guessing my thoughts, said, ‘Do you remember how we imagined this country? How we were hoping to find the Dreamtime? I haven’t met anyone who even remotely resembles the people we used to dream about. They simply are not there. At any rate, I haven’t come across them. All I’ve seen are a couple of lost souls in a park.’
‘That’s hardly a news item. You knew that before you came.’
‘Yes, but not that it would look like this. Like a concen- tration camp without the fences. You can smell the beer a mile off.’
‘You sound like an Australian. I’ve heard them say that a thousand times . . . There are two Aborigines at the place where I work.’
‘Sure, in the kitchen. Washing dishes and carrying out the rubbish.’
‘They’re nice guys.’
‘I’m sure they are. Have you talked to them? Have you asked them where they’re from?’
But I hadn’t talked to them. Or rather, they hadn’t talked to me.
The thing that struck me most was the way they walked, though it is hard to describe. ‘Lopsided’ is not the right word, but something like that. They glided across the room on long thin legs with knobbly knees. They somehow walked as if they were not really there. The fact that they did not look at you only made it worse. I don’t know if ‘shy’ is the right word, but we never had an actual conversation. The rest of the staff made no effort either. Once, when I brought it up with one of the cooks, a student, he said, ‘You’re reading too much into it. You foreigners always have big expectations. Half of what you read is false. Their world has ceased to exist. The ones you see here have fallen between the cracks. They’ll have to pull themselves out on their own. All those stories you hear about sacred sites are beautiful, of course, but what can you do? I admit that what happened to them is terrible, but I repeat: what can you do? Or rather, what can
they
do? Paint their bodies for your entertainment? Pretend we never came here? They lost. That might be disgraceful, but what are we supposed to do? Pay reparations, make detours around their sacred sites even when there’s uranium underneath? This is the twenty-first century. Wait until you go to one of those reserves. They put on quite a show, a kind of living museum. You get to travel back in time – for a fee. If they let you in, that is. It may sound crazy, but the ones I respect the most are the ones who say “keep out” and “piss off”, and then go on broiling in their sandbox a thousand miles from nowhere, pretending the world outside doesn’t exist, as they have for thousands of years. Except that in those days our world really didn’t exist.’
‘Theirs did,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to convince
me
. But they’re living in a bell jar. You don’t have a solution, neither do I, and neither do any of those do-gooders, who’d like nothing better than to preserve them all in a freezer forever. And then you have the ones who make money out of them: the museum curators, the gallery owners, the anthropologists. No, you can’t turn back the clock.’
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ Almut said. ‘Do you even remember the question?’
‘You asked me what we should do next.’
‘That’s not so strange, is it? Look around you. Is this the House of Anglo-Saxon Sorrow, or what? I want to hear a
bem-te-vi
, I want to hear a
periquito
, I want to hear a
sabiá
, I want to see an
ipe roxo
, I want to see the purple blossoms of a
quaresmeira
, I want to eat a
churrasco
at Rodeio, I want to drink an ice-cold beer at Frevo, I want to buy a bikini at Bazar 13, I want to watch my grandfather play cards at the Hipica Paulista . . .’
‘You’re homesick.’
‘Maybe.’
‘But what about the Sickness Dreaming Place?’
‘Bingo. Tomorrow.’
‘How are we going to get there?’
‘We’ll fly to Alice Springs, buy a 4x4, some old clunker, and drive up north to Darwin. That’ll put us right back in the tropics.’
‘And my job?’
‘Quit it. We’ll find something else. I hate this brown couch, I hate that picture of that creepy-little-girl-and-her-pony-on-her-first-day-at-school, I hate these wobbly plastic chairs and I hate that stupid cow with the spots on her face. “Could you please cook normal food, darling? The whole house smells like an African village . . .”’
‘Right, let’s go. First the travel agent. Then Arnhem Land.’
ALICE SPRINGS. IT HAS ONLY BEEN A FEW WEEKS, BUT AS Almut says, ‘All past time is present time.’ The central business district is a grid of streets between Wills Terrace and Stuart Terrace, eight blocks bordering on a river that isn’t a river. The Todd River shown on the map is in reality an ochre-coloured sandpit with a few thirsty-looking trees and a pair of bridges arching uselessly over a dry riverbed. A couple of Aborigines are lying on a patch of brown grass, recumbent figures beside a smoking campfire. I have driven to Anzac Hill. Almut did not want to come. The old Telegraph Station is filled with photographs of pioneers and camels. The overland line reached Alice Springs in 1872. All they had to do after that was continue on to Darwin, and from there to Java, so that they would eventually connect to Europe. There are also photographs of an Aboriginal gathering, a
corroboree
, which took place in 1905 . ‘Three hundred generations of Aranda, five generations of whites,’ someone has scrawled beneath it, and that is how it looks. I peer at the mysterious paintings on the black bodies. The men – there are four of them – stand with their hands behind their backs. The colours have lost their brilliance, and the old-fashioned photographic technique has reduced the landscape to a mere strip of blinking light, and there they are in all their glory, their bodies full of symbolic language, strings of white dots, snakes, labyrinthine shapes, riddles. They stand there in that long-gone moment, fraught with meaning, but I am unable to read the signs. I can see Alice Springs in the distance, looking small, insignificant, truly negligible, the way the earth must seem to our galaxy – a sigh, not even a comma. You can see the layout of the streets in the rudimentary grid and the place where the train tracks from the south came to a halt before going on to the tropical north, but beyond that bare minimum lies an endless landscape: plains, mountain peaks, the straight line of the lost road in the distance, the road we will take to Darwin. What do I remember of that road? The interminable dryness, the road trains – huge trucks consisting of three or more trailers that could toss a buffalo to the side of the road as if it were a dog – and a deer in a violent pool of blood. We left the Stuart Highway in a cloud of red dust. At first the ground was hard and rutted, making the car bounce all over the road, then it turned sandy and slippery. The rivers shown on the map were dry beds. And everywhere we went there were vicious gnats. I try to imagine barefooted people walking through that unbounded emptiness, but I cannot.
SOME PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY TRANSPARENT. I SUPPOSE this is true of blacks too, but this one happened to be white, and as old as the hills. He wore a yellowed version of a pith helmet. From under it dripped – there is no other word for it – long strands of dirty white hair that merged with a broad, fan-shaped beard of the same colour. His skinny frame was clad in an outdated tropical uniform with ragged cuffs, out of which hung long, slender hands, with eerily long nails, more like claws. And yet the voice of the figure in the rocking chair was, in contrast to the rest, surprisingly high and melodious.
‘You can close that book right now,’ the voice said. ‘Even if you spend the next ten years studying the subject, you won’t understand it. I’ve lived here for fifty years, and I still don’t get it. How much have you read – up to that bit about the moieties?’
He was right. I had been reading about the moieties on the way here and had not understood a thing. Or rather, I had understood the words, but not how it worked. I had already discovered that ‘moiety’ was derived from ‘
moitié
’ and therefore meant half, but I still did not know what it had to do with the amazingly complex social life in the Aboriginal community: what someone from one half was not allowed to do with those in the other half, or who, on the other hand, was required to do what with those in the other group, or why someone in Arnhem Land belonged to the Dua moiety and his wife to the Yirritja moiety and what that meant in terms of rituals and ceremonies, or that these divisions were broken down into smaller units, dialect groups and clans, which in turn determined who was or who was not allowed to paint what and who could or could not sing which part of a song. Higher mathematics and Japanese court ceremonies were nothing compared to this. It made my head spin, so I gave up. Earlier that morning I had stopped to listen to those same songs being sung in a museum. Almut had walked rapidly on, but I had become entranced by the plaintive, repetitious songs sung by a group of older women, which seemed to go on forever. It was unlike anything I had ever heard before. A couple of old women with sun-scorched skins were standing on the sun-scorched red soil. Dust swirled up as they stomped their bare leathery feet and pounded their sticks on the hard dry ground, which seemed to be made of stone, while the melody went on and on, apparently repeating itself, and the words were so incomprehensible to me that you could hardly have believed it was a language, though that was the whole point: language, stories, ancestral beings who had crossed the sea in narrow boats and sung their way across the land on which I was standing, and had created the animals and spirits that would later become the totems that still governed the life of the people.
‘Sit down over here.’
The voice commanded, and I obeyed. The face beneath the helmet seemed to be made of parchment, but the ice-blue eyes sparkled. He spoke the kind of English that marks a man of education and breeding. It was a miracle that he had managed to keep it up for fifty years. He was what the Australians refer to as a ‘Pom’. His tropical uniform hung in such loose folds that he must have been almost a skeleton, but the voice gave the opposite impression. There was a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. He too had his totem.
‘My eyes are still good. I recognised the book you’re reading. It was written a long time ago, and they say it’s a masterpiece, but it won’t help you. I recognised it the moment I saw those abstract drawings, those numbered and lettered lines that are supposed to explain the secret world of the indigenous peoples. Most admirable, and also accurate. It will tell you who is allowed to marry whom, who is allowed to take part in the ceremony in which a body is smoked before a burial, who is not allowed to sing when the bones are reburied, who is descended from the maternal line and who from the paternal line, going back God knows how many generations . . . and at the end you’ll know everything there is to know and promptly forget it. You’re not an anthropologist, are you?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. Even if you read that book from cover to cover, you would still look at their society and know nothing. I’m not trying to make it sound even more mysterious than it already is, but it
is
mysterious, as well as being beautiful. Well, perhaps that doesn’t apply to the people. Praxiteles would not have taken any one of them for a model . . . or us, for that matter. Apparently they do not correspond to our ideal of beauty, though I stopped looking at it that way long ago. I find them beautiful. The antiquity of their world is what makes them beautiful. For me at least. Along with the things they produce: their songs, their art. They live their art – there is no difference between the way they live, the way they think and the things they make. It’s a bit like our own Middle Ages, before everything fell apart. It’s easier to live in a closed world. That’s what attracts you people, if you don’t mind my saying so. “You people” doesn’t sound very polite, but I have lived for years out here in the back of beyond, where I have watched you people come in search of answers. It’s everything all rolled into one, poetry, a total way of life. For people coming from a place of chaos and confusion, it’s quite tempting. Especially since it has been destroyed, or almost. That is what everyone has always been looking for, isn’t it? A lost paradise?
‘They dreamed an endless dream, an eternity in which they continued to live forever and in which nothing would have had to change. Once upon a time creatures who had dreamed the world had come and now they themselves were allowed to go on dreaming in a world ruled by spirits and filled with enchanted places – a magical system in which we do not have a place, even if we wanted to be a part of it.’
I said nothing. From the hall on the other side of the porch came the erratic stutter of old-fashioned ceiling fans. I already knew what he was telling me, but I wanted to go on listening to that voice for as long as I could. He spoke in a strange sing-song, a kind of lament, though oddly enough it did not make you feel sad. And maybe he was telling me something I wanted to hear – that I could do without all of this, without the erudition and the explanations, that I could simply let it all wash over me without my understanding it, the way we used to do back in our room in Jardins, when we let ourselves be seduced by the images. Surely the dancing women in the museum had nothing to do with those diagrams, graphs and abstractions; at any rate they would not help me solve the puzzle, and perhaps I should not expect them to. What I had to remember were the rock paintings, the landscapes, the hoarse whisper of a person who, during our first night together, had lifted me out of my life by uttering words I had not understood, just as I had not understood the words of the songs I had listened to this morning, though I would take them with me for all time.
I put the book aside.
‘Good. I wasn’t talking through my hat just now. I know, because I’m the one who wrote the book.’
I stared at him. The picture on the back was of a young man, flanked by two hunters with spears. Cyril Clarence. He looked like a young James Mason. The picture must have been taken at least sixty years ago. When I told him that, he laughed.
‘I have no regrets, but I’ve devoted half a century of my life to trying to grasp what it is that makes their world tick.’
‘And have you found out?’
He didn’t answer. Instead, he picked up the book, which I had laid on the table beside him, unfolded the map in the back, and pointed to a place about a hundred miles east of Darwin. I didn’t see any roads leading to it.
When I said that, he laughed again. ‘There are now. Well, dirt tracks. You’ve got to have a 4x4, and even then it has to be the right season. In the old days people used to walk there. I had a friend who lived there.’
‘Not any more?’
‘No, not any more. He was murdered. He was a painter, and a hunter. He built an airstrip there, more or less with his bare hands. He was part of a small community. They had gone back to their ancestral land. Sacred sites, secret spots, forbidden places: you are allowed to forget a lot of things, but those you have to remember. Because even though you cannot see it, there is an enchanted world there with enchanted plants and enchanted animals, a landscape full of invisible clues. That is all you need to know. He was killed by his son-in-law. I used to visit him from time to time. He told me quite a few things. I also used to talk to him on a ham radio. I thought they were living in paradise, but I was wrong. It wasn’t there either. He made beautiful things. Every once in a while one of those gallery people would fly over and pick something up. He earned a lot of money that way. The fact that his work was exhibited in museums in America was of little interest to him. Nor did he ever feel like explaining the iconography in any detail. He was wise enough to realise that the strangers who saw his work either could not understand its magical significance or did not want to, and that they only bought his work as decorative objects or as investments. For the rest he lived off his hunting. He was a fantastic hunter and fisherman.’
‘Why was he killed?’
‘Out of jealousy. It’s still the real world, even here. You have to be very strong to cope with so many changes. He was strong, but things frequently go wrong. Our world is ruled by greed.’
‘What happened to the man who killed him?’
‘Hand me the map, would you? Here, do you see that? Endless brown plains. And no roads anywhere. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of empty space. There is only one dirt track that goes to the Nganyalala outpost, a hundred or so miles to the east. It‘s surrounded by a vast emptiness, nothing but bush and flood plains. They can hole up there for years, if they have to. He took his elderly mother with him. She knew how to survive in the wilderness. Where you and I see nothing but desert, she will see water. So long as you know how to read the world. Roots and berries, small animals. In any case neither of them was ever found. Where are you making for?’
‘To the Sickness Dreaming Place.’
‘For any particular reason?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hmm. It won’t be easy.’ He pointed to the map. ‘Here. The Sleisbeck mine.’ Written beside it was the word ‘abandoned’. ‘You’re not officially allowed into this area. It has always been a problem. When Leichhardt entered the South Alligator Valley in 1845 , he had a lot of trouble with the Jawoyn who were living there. They think of it as sacred ground. The ancestor spirit who rules over it does not want the earth to be disturbed, otherwise something terrible is bound to happen. Of course the reason it’s called Sickness Country is because of the natural radioactivity found there. Sacred ground is one thing, uranium mines are another. Since 1950 mining companies have been extracting gold, uranium, palladium, and God knows what else. Australia’s national debt versus poisoned mine water, vanishing animal species, sacred land rights, ancestral myths – it’s already an explosive enough mix. Not to mention all those beautiful rock paintings. Lascaux is nothing in comparison.‘
Just then Almut came sailing in from the patio, waving a newspaper. She flopped down in a chair without acknowledging Cyril. Nothing ever surprised Almut, not even the fact that you were talking to a centenarian.
‘Here, take a look at this! It makes you realise you’re somewhere else! “Clan Elders Sing Aborigine to Death”. I’ve been trying to imagine how they did it. I know that sounds can be used to torture people. I’ve been told that the steady dripping of water in a bucket can drive a person insane. But singing? If it’s anything like what we heard this morning in the museum – that slow drone – it might just do the trick. After all, it drove me nuts too. How you could go on listening to it is beyond me. I could feel the vibrations of those low tones down around my knees. A kind of buzzing.’ She imitated the sound of a drill.
‘What’s your friend saying?’ Cyril asked. ‘I love your language, it’s beautiful, but I don’t understand a word.’
I told him, and he began to laugh.
Suddenly Almut seemed to see him for the first time. She shot me an enquiring glance and said, ‘Where’d you dig
him
up? I didn’t know people like that still existed! He looks like something straight out of a movie. Why did he laugh?’
‘Sing a person to death,’ Cyril said. ‘It would be nice if one could actually do that. It has an entirely different meaning here, however, though in the end I suppose it boils down to the same thing. It’s what happens when someone is placed outside the community, for whatever reason – for stealing a totem from someone else or breaking another important taboo. He or she is then cast out. The ban itself is sung. Once you’ve been banished, no one in the group is allowed to help you in any way. You might as well be dead. Those are the people you see hanging around the big cities. They’re no longer part of a community.’
Almut said nothing. She seemed to be disappointed by the story. She stood up. ‘Another illusion down the drain,’ she said. ‘What were you two talking about before I got here?’
‘Sleisbeck. Cyril says it isn’t straightforward.’
She immediately picked up on his name, as if she had heard it a hundred times before.
‘Then Cyril ought to tell us how to get there.’
‘He says it’s impossible. We should go somewhere else. Ubirr. Kakadu. Nourlangie.’
The three of us pore over the map. His hand, as he points out the places, looks as if it is made of transparent marble.
‘But what do we do about your Sickness Dreaming Place?’
‘I’ve been cured already.’