AS WE ARE DRIVING OFF THE NEXT DAY, WE SEE HIM standing on the patio. Our Japanese clunker makes a God-awful noise, but we are in high spirits. Almut sings half the repertoire of Maria Bethania. From time to time a road train sweeps us to the side while the drivers laugh and shout and make obscene gestures. It is October, so the rainy season, known here as ‘the Wet’, has begun, though the big rainstorms are not due until later. After twenty-five miles, we turn left in the direction of Arnhem Land. Almut chants the names: Humpty Doo, Annaburro, Wildman Lagoon. Somewhere we are supposed to choose between Jabiru and Ja Ja, but I can’t find the turning on the map, and then the road fizzles out into a red track and the track becomes an endless repetition of itself, with the dread and silent forest all around us.
We get out of the vehicle beside a river. The silence is broken by unknown sounds. ‘CROCODILES FREQUENT THIS AREA. KEEP CHILDREN AND DOGS AWAY FROM THE WATER’S EDGE.’ I stare at the gleaming black surface, at the red soil beneath my feet, at the dry eucalyptus leaves, curled into the shapes of letters as if they had been shaken from a tray of type. There is very little traffic on this road, so we are alone in our cloud of dust. The few cars coming towards us can be seen from miles off, like clouds or apparitions. I feel happy. When we finally get to Ubirr, it takes us about an hour to walk to the site.
‘Majesty,’ Almut murmurs. I look at her to see what she means. She points at the view and puts an arm around me, as though she wants to protect me. But from what?
‘It’s all so old,’ she says at last. ‘It makes me feel ancient too, as if I’ve been here forever. Time is nothing. A mere fart. Someone could blow us away with a single puff. What’s a thousand years? Nothing at all. If we were to come back, we wouldn’t know ourselves. We’d have the same brains, but different software. I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve been staring much too long into the eyes of the Abos. Doesn’t it bother you? For a thousand years, or even ten thousand years, the same eyes, the same landscape. They are their own eternity, but no one can endure that for very long.’ Then she laughs and says, ‘Fired for being too solemn.’ But she is right. Everything – the stones, the trees, the rocks – do their best to thrust their antiquity at you, there is not a single human voice to distract you, and intruders are scared off by the malevolent gleam of the stones – no wonder they think this ground is sacred. The murmur of bushes, the rustle of invisible creatures. This is where they lived, seeking shelter beneath this overhang. Down the sides of the cliff and high above their heads they painted the animals they lived off. Later I write down the names:
barramundi
, the big fish;
badjalanga
, the long-necked turtle;
kalekale
, the catfish;
budjudu
, the iguana.
‘I’ve got to lie down,’ Almut says. ‘I’m getting a crick in my neck.’
I lie beside her.
‘Too bad you can’t do this in the Sistine Chapel,’ she says, but I have already drifted off. I feel as if I am lying in a giant Mycenaean vase: imagined fish swimming downstream, the draughtsmanship of such delicacy, the tiny white figures beside it so humble, so faceless, as if to say they were not really there. The longer I look, the more I see that the cliff is composed of hundreds of colours. Weather, erosion, mould, time – everything has taken root in this stony surface, on top of which has been drawn an image of something that was real, a living reality, which had to be filtered through a person in order to be recreated in the colours of the earth, immovable, recorded, etched in time.
I would like to say something, but I am not sure I can put it into words, something about what Almut just said, about time being a mere fart, but she is the only one who can say things like that. Whatever I blurt out sounds confused and stilted. ‘According to Cyril,’ I say, ‘these rock paintings are twenty thousand years old – a number that is no longer just a series of zeros, but something as tangible as the fabric, the weave, of the clothes on my back, so that what I see and what I am are in the same continuum, which does away with time like a conjuror’s cloth, abolishing it, declaring it null and void, turning it into an element like water or air, something that leaves you free to enter it wherever you are, not just in the direction where your part of it ends.’
‘Whoa! Slow down,’ Almut says, but by this time we have got up and walked to the lookout above the cliff. Below us the landscape stretches to the end of the visible world. It is a dream landscape, which ought to be filled with the figures of gods. A bird of prey hangs above it, motionless, as if it were its sole guardian. Other birds, white, are floating in a marshy pool near the edge of the woods. Beneath us, at the foot of the rocks, I see the pointed pyramids of termite mounds, sand palms as unspectacular as grass, rocks as the building blocks of a destroyed temple.
‘I wasn’t making fun of you,’ Almut says. ‘I know what you mean, I just wouldn’t put it in quite those words. It has something to do with melancholy, but also with triumph.’
‘Yes,’ I say, and I would like to add that the triumph comes from realising – if only for a moment – that you are at once mortal and immortal, but I don’t say it. ‘Time is a fart’ is a lot snappier, and maybe it boils down to the same thing. ‘The landscape you are going to see is sixty million years old,’ Cyril had said. Yellow Water, Alligator River, ashen colours, mottled white gum trees in moss-green wetlands, traces of a dead river, a bleeding cliff, where a monster has bitten a chunk out of the earth. We have seen enough, it is time to leave. Once, long ago, we began this journey in a room in São Paulo. Now, at last, we have arrived.
HOW MUCH THINKING CAN YOU DO WITHOUT EVER leaving the room? I took a trip in my head and ended up back where I started – in the stillness. The person who met the man in the gallery, now lying at my side, was no longer the same person who had arrived six months ago in Sydney. I suppose I should say, ‘
I
was no longer the same,’ and I wish I could, but a gap has been created between me and myself, and I haven’t yet learned how to bridge the distance. Almut says, ‘You’re in love, simple as that,’ but I’m not. It is much more than that. It is getting something as well as giving something up. I am not going to stay with this man, because he will not be staying with me. He made that clear from the start, and that has to do with distance too. He is just as inaccessible as his paintings. You can hang them on the wall, all right, but they are not yours, and they never will be, because they come from a place to which you have no access. The problem is not that I do not fit into his world, or that he would never take me to wherever he comes from, or that he is ashamed of me, or for whatever reason will not present me to the people he is closest to, nor is it the fact that he took me, like an ordinary tourist, to a place where Aboriginal life was presented as a kind of theatre, complete with bush tucker and didgeridoo, campfires and clumsy dancing that bore no resemblance to the dancing I had seen in the museum in Darwin, which meant that he had either underestimated me or insulted me, though there was no point in talking about it since he doesn’t talk. I don’t care. Perhaps he was trying to make something clear to me, something I would rather not know. But when night falls and the nonsense is done with, we are alone again with the silence and immensely few words. I never knew words could be so few and far between. But that is fine with me. Or is it? Is there such a thing as pornography without the porn? Simply an idea in your head, without a graphic image? Pure pornography of the mind, or of a situation, in which a lie changes every move, kiss, caress and climax into something else, something obscene and perverse? I think about this, and yet at the same time I lie here and wait for him to utter one of his infrequent words, for him to touch me again and make me forget my thoughts.
Almut made some kind of remark about my ‘noble savage’, and for the first time in years I was furious with her. Not at the insult, but at her lack of understanding. She has always understood how I feel, but now I had all of a sudden lost her. It has nothing to do with being in love. It is much worse than that. More obscene, more perverse. If I am in love with anything, it is with a cliff or an expanse of desert. It all started with his painting. I stood there in front of it, not knowing what to make of it. It was unlike anything else I had seen on our trip. There were no figures, no sign of any creatures which, no matter how strange, were in some way recognisable. Instead, there was a defiant, impenetrable black with a shimmer of light glinting through it – a contradiction that drew me into the blackness, exactly as I was later drawn to the artist. But none of these words bring me any closer to the matter at hand. To an outsider, it must have seemed ordinary enough. At a private viewing, you stare at a painting too long, tune out everything around you, the voices, the people, think the forbidden phrase ‘like a black cloud’, wish you could block it all out, the violence, the horror, the fear, and feel yourself being sucked back into that cloud, as though you had never travelled to and across a country that had been the stuff of your childhood dreams, but instead had travelled straight to this painting as if to an exorcism, an exorcism that can occur only if I let myself be sucked back into the taboo. Tears flow down my cheeks, but luckily no one can see them since I am standing with my back to the crowd. What they do see if they are looking this way is the gallery owner coming over to me, saying, ‘You seem to be quite interested in that painting,’ catching sight of my tears and beating a hasty retreat after a mumbled, ‘I’ll introduce you to the painter,’ and only coming back with him much later, after I have dried my tears, which well up again when he is standing before me because he himself
is
his painting. All that has to do with the pain of healing – so much I understand. I say nothing, not even to Almut. I expect nothing, I have surrendered myself to it. The gallery owner must have told him something, because he stood there before me without saying a word, whether out of shyness or because his thoughts were miles away I couldn’t tell. And I still can’t. Sometimes I think he doesn’t see me, that even when he touches me or has sex with me, I am invisible to him, someone without a soul, a mere shape or figure – and he is right about that – as if what we do has no substance, as if his pre-announced departure can be felt in everything, in his long silences, his stillness, his refusal to see me although I am dying to be seen and know I won’t be – I knew all that the moment I saw the painting.
That is all there is to tell. The week he granted me is almost over. The gallery owner, who was drunk by the end of the evening, said to me, ‘I’m only lending him to you. Take good care of him. And for God’s sake don’t ask him about his paintings. He’s not allowed to talk about them. It’s too complicated to explain. Taboos, secrets, totems – a whole world you’d be better off not knowing about.’ He gave us the key to his cabin by the ocean in Port Willunga. On the first day, we walked along the shore, an endless walk. It was high tide, and I had the feeling that the surf was roaring just for me, as if to make up for the silent figure at my side. From time to time he pointed out a bird and told me what it was called. Otherwise, he didn’t say a word. Only a brief statement at the beginning, uttered without looking at me, as a kind of Declaration of Independence, that at the end of the week he would be ‘going back to my mob’, without even mentioning which part of Australia they lived in. We walked until dark, then went back to the cabin. He was familiar with it, had obviously been there before. And obviously with other women. He did not switch on the light, but put his hand, the fingers spread wide, on the nape of my neck. Even though it was the lightest of touches, I could feel how calloused his fingers were. Surely it isn’t possible for someone to touch you so lightly and yet give you a feeling of being lifted? The next thing I knew I was being rocked – there is no other word for it – a kind of endless rocking that blended in with the sound of the surf, the heave and swell of the ocean, which wrapped me in its embrace until I felt myself flow away and no longer needed to exist. When I woke up the next morning, he was gone.
I looked out of the window and saw him sitting in the early rays of the sun, a dark silhouette in the sand, motionless as a rock, and knew at once that I had substituted one memory for another and that this one would leave me with as little peace as the other one had. I would exist in someone else’s mind, without knowing who I was in there. This would have been unbearable to me in the past, but it didn’t matter to me any more. I now knew who
I
was. One time, acting on a bizarre impulse, I had asked my mother what she would like to be thinking of at the moment of her death. She didn’t answer right away, but merely shook her head. Then at last she said, ‘Some things are better left unsaid.’
‘Can’t you tell even your own daughter?’ I asked.
‘Especially not my own daughter,’ she said.
After a few days in Port Willunga we went to a strange place, a reserve in which we played at being Aborigines. It sounds awful, and it was. I don’t know why he took me there, but at least I now know how to find food in the desert and have seen how pure silence can turn you into silence yourself. No one was surprised to see me, so perhaps he had brought others there before. I shrugged off the well-meaning nonsense and practised withdrawing into myself – I’m good at that. It was not his mob, and since they spoke English to him, they did not come from the same language group either. I did see him smile, but not at me. I considered telling him what had happened to me that week, but my black cloud could never be his. I would take it with me when I left, incorporate it into the rest of my life, as if one cloud could cancel out another. We’ll see. It is our last night together. I rub my hand over the dirt floor of the cabin. It feels hard and dry, like paper. Everything in this country is different from mine. Outside, the dawn’s early light flows out over the world with such violence that it almost hurts my eyes. Red paint. Blood. I roll over and look at him. He is still asleep. He too just a shape. I wish I could lift him up and fly away with him, over the vast emptiness of this country, to the place he comes from, to the place where he belongs and I do not.