CHAPTER ONE

​

    I don’t want a villa in Tuscany. I gave away my first-class ticket to Venice. I did not attend Armani’s Evening Collection (although I had received an invitation), and I even declined dinner at Del Cambio, the most elegant restaurant in Turin, that most elegant of Italian cities.

​

    To their earnest requests, I was polite but firm.

​

    ‘Thank you for your kindness,’ I said. ‘Nigella Lawson may take my place or Megan Markle. I have no need for such trivial things as Italian food and culture. I have them all right here in Sydney.’

​

    My husband Joe was the personification of great Italian cuisine and wonderful Italian fashion, a self-confessed, self-obsessed, half-Italian male who had inherited through his Piedmontese mother a driving passion for the Motherland. And if you think that one Italian Joe was exciting to live with, then just wait for the sequel – he had an identical twin brother. Cicero was a poor but happy bachelor whose aims in life were simple: to have lots of friends and to talk about lots of things in lots of cafes – over coffee, naturally. Between the two of them, the twins typified the rich indoor life that has made Italy so famous. Sta sempre a bottega, as the saying goes, ‘They’re always at the shops.’

​

    Cicero was a fabulous cook. Joe cooked as well, but what he really wanted was a Lamborghini, even though he didn’t drive. He didn’t drive because he couldn’t keep his eyes on the road, and he couldn’t keep his eyes on the road because he was too distracted by Italy.   

​

    ‘Has Joe never driven?’ curious people asked me.  

​

    ‘Never,’ I replied. ‘But you should try Cicero’s cooking.’

​

    ‘Is there a relationship between that and Joe not driving?’

​

    ‘Not as far as I know.’

​

    Here is the almost true story of how Italy became involved in my search for identity. Whenever people praised Joe’s expensive tastes or Cicero’s flair for food, Italy intruded naturally into the conversation. And Joe’s sweet mother Anna Maria, who had had a very sad life, passed from this world in May 2000 never comprehending the legacy of style and taste she had passed on to her sons by that single word, ‘Italian’.

​

    ‘Polly,’ Joe informed me regarding the seventy-minute trip to the cemetery, ‘Cicero says he’ll be at our place by ten.’ The brothers were on the phone at the time.

​

    ‘Your mother’s funeral is at eleven,’ I reminded him. ‘And the traffic will be awful. You tell Cicero that if he’s not here by nine-thirty, I’m leaving.’

​

    ‘Okay,’ said Joe, and did.

​

    Down the wire I heard a fumble of clicks, as if Cicero were replacing the phone with an anxious hand in order to ring for help. Then the line went dead and Joe stood examining the lifeless receiver.

​

    ‘Cicero says Ruth’s coming,’ he replied in a hurt mumble.

​

    Ruth was one of Cicero’s platonic married friends, a big, big-hearted woman. By the time the two of them had caught the train from the city, driven out and back with us, had lunch and the family catching-up that followed, Ruth had given Cicero twelve hours when most funerals took two. Ruth understood Joe and Cicero, their extended youths, their reflective natures, the endless cups of coffee needed to start each day as they contemplated the challenges that lay ahead. This armchair philosophy was a ritual of far greater significance to the twins than dressing, shaving or eating, and consequently needed to be performed in places with a suitable aura. Cicero lived in a tiny flat which soaked up two thirds of his salary in rent but boasted superb views across Sydney Harbour from Elizabeth Bay to Fort Denison, so he did it out the window.

​

    We had no view, but Joe didn’t need one because we had scarcely a wall without an Italian relative on it, a flag, a lapel badge, a Juventus football scarf, or a bookshelf of works in Italian and Piedmontese full of besotted images accompanied by a mandolin. However, he occasionally took to wandering around the garden with his coffee when his family history didn’t work like it should have. The idea of bolting out of bed and through the door to work was horrible. Life was a spiritual journey. At least, that’s what Cicero was always trying to tell us.

 

    Truly Cicero was a lucky man. Everybody loved him. Our kids simply adored him. Wives told him their marriage problems while their husbands wept on his shoulder. But although he offered free advice and home-brewed philosophy around the clock, he had little sense of the time it kept. I knew he would be on the phone to Ruth immediately after he had hung up on Joe, begging for her help on the morning of his mother’s funeral because Punctuality Polly was going to leave for it without him.

​

    ‘Ring me at seven. Make sure I’m up. Ring me again at seven-thirty. Ring me at eight.’

​

    And I knew what Ruth’s reply would be: ‘Darling, you’ll be fine. You only have yourself to organize, after all.’

​

    But she did ring him and, thanks to her, we arrived at the cemetery with a good twenty minutes to spare. I wouldn’t really have left without Cicero. Such was our regard for him, that I would have scoured every train from our place to Kemps Creek had he not arrived by ten to ten.

​

    That year Sydney produced a May as if the world had been turned upside down and it was spring emerging from winter. The last month of autumn, which in reality it was, seemed a time of promise, as if the city was awaiting rebirth. The Japanese maple and the russ tree in our yard burst from their branches like explosions of flame and all along the grim drive to the cemetery brilliance from the dying leaves decked skies of intense blue like undiluted paints on a celestial palette. Anna Maria had been brought from her home in Adelaide to be buried alongside her parents, and the priest, hastily recruited by the funeral director and accustomed to prison visiting, stood by the grave of this woman he had never met with a face that was a study in compassion.

​

    Afterwards, in the muted light of our fibro home, Joe’s elder brother Dominic opened his bags and spilled more of Joe’s family history that he’d brought with him from Adelaide. I watched as the artefacts of the dead tumbled over themselves to be reunited with the living, then I retired to the kitchen to make lunch because grief is an appetite stimulant and, when all was said and done, Joe’s history was not mine. Not the passports, confirmation and first communion certificates, death notices, baby pictures, weddings and funerals, families torn apart by war, people who resembled each other in the slant of their brows or that hair which would never curl right, young faces aged by suffering, bright youths with elderly silhouettes. Not even tragic war brides like Anna Maria. Neither her lonely silence along the bombed avenues of Europe nor her sudden smile for the street photographer. All of it, good and bad, belonged to Joe.

​

    When at length I emerged from amongst the pots and pans, I discovered my house transformed into an Italian shrine, what little of it had not been before. For a start, there were reminders of mortality all over the house. Anna Maria had been one of three children. I had seen the photo of her brother, dead of gastroenteritis at seven months. There was now a charcoal drawing of her sister, dead of tuberculosis at fifteen, next to our bed. On the right of the doorway to our bedroom was suspended an early Italian crucifix with a skull and cross bones beneath the feet of Our Lord. A graceful eighteenth-century icon of Our Lady hung on the lounge room wall on the back of which Anna Maria had written a family tree of dead Italians.

​

    But it wasn’t asking a lot to live with these. There was just one dead thing I had problems with and that was a portrait of Don Balbiano, a cousin of Joe’s nonna, the lady in the grave next to his mother. Joe had removed our wedding photograph in order to mount this gentleman who now sat above the chest of drawers with as much authority as if he’d always been there. As his name suggests, he was an Italian cleric and he had died in 1884.

​

    Every winter, so Joe told me, a white rose grew through the snows of Piedmont above Don Balbiano’s grave until eventually the locals grew suspicious and exhumed him in the presence of Joe’s grandfather, to discover his remains uncorrupted. This miracle being the sure sign of a saint, he was sent on his way to Rome pronto to be raised to the altars.

​

    Now I have the greatest respect for dead Catholics, but I really thought that the Devil’s Advocate and all that saintly stuff could have been performed while Don Balbiano was in the ground and not on my wall. A portrait, as well, leaves wide open the intimation that no photograph of Don Balbiano existed and a substitute had to be hastily constructed from what they saw when they opened the coffin.

​

    At my exclamations of horror, Joe moved the portrait to the side wall with the comment that the Don might not appreciate being repositioned and might well make Joe an offer he couldn’t refuse subject to being returned to his former position of honour. I tried to avoid that wall in the middle of the night (it was on my right on the way to the bathroom) in case he turned out to be the touchy sort, for his removal was, after all, my fault. But I’m sure Joe imagined without a qualm his nonna’s cousin incorrupt from coffin to portrait, because he related the story of the exhumation with such an air of excitement that we might have supposed him there at the time. Perhaps he might have peered into the age-blackened depths and checked out the saint's family features first hand? If he found that he had inherited even the slope of one eye brow or a fine-boned Italian finger, I'd never hear the end of it.

​

    I, by contrast, spent most of my childhood and into my young adult years being asked where I came from.

​

    'Excuse me, are you from the Ukraine?'

​

    'France?'

​

    'Do you come from Austria?'

​

    ‘Ireland?

​

    To which questions I invariably replied, ‘It says on my adoption papers: Nationality of mother, Yugoslavian.’

​

    ‘That country that doesn’t exist anymore, where they slaughtered each other with unspeakable ferocity?’

​

    ‘Yep, that’s the one.’

​

    ‘Well, no wonder we couldn’t guess. Who on earth would want to live there when they could live in Italy?’

​

    Nevertheless, Yugoslavia furnished my daydreams throughout my childhood. I was sure that it was full of Big People Like Me, because what I most wanted was to look like somebody. I wanted a photograph, preferably, but an incorrupt corpse would do. When I stepped off the Hellas Express at Belgrade in 1985 and for the first time in my life met people as tall and broad as I was, I had a beautiful existential crisis. I thought Belgrade was the best place I’d ever been to.

​

    I don’t think the world cared very much when Yugoslavia blew itself apart in the 1990’s except for me and the Americans who made a lot of movies about a blasted grey Bosnia which I remembered as green and threatening Serbs whom I remembered as friendly. The Balkan War was the commencement of a grief that I think has still not dissipated. I will always have a soft spot for Belgrade.

​

    And then Joe’s mother died. During the time of his grief, his certainty, his Cicero, and his pride in his ancestry overwhelmed my nascent Slavic identity. I found myself yearning for solitude, unbearably lonely. I felt dominated by his portraits, his artefacts, his history and its authority scattered all over my house, although I envied them because they were his. In my role of the outsider, I was replete with envy. I envied Joe and Cicero their intimate relationship, I envied our gossipy neighbours, talkative churchmen, garrulous shopkeepers and social mothers. I mourned the Yugoslavia that I had known and my roots that I had not, until some days I didn’t know who I was. Worse, I didn’t know who I was in a Sydney suburb, and a suburb can and will demolish my envious, aching feelings by assuring me that I belong where people love me.

​

    Suburbs are so heartless.

​

 

​