CHAPTER ONE

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    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.

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    To their earnest requests, I was polite but firm.

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    ‘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.’

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    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.’

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    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.   

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

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

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

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    ‘Not as far as I know.’

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    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’.

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    ‘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.

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    ‘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.’

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    ‘Okay,’ said Joe, and did.

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    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.

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

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    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.

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    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.

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

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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

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    'Excuse me, are you from the Ukraine?'

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    'France?'

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    'Do you come from Austria?'

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    ‘Ireland?

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

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

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    ‘Yep, that’s the one.’

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Suburbs are so heartless.

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CHAPTER TWO

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    One bright Friday morning in October 2000, Cicero rolled off the train and through our front door. His coffee machine was broken or he’d hurt his back rolling, or there was some good reason why he needed to commune with his brother when he would normally have been at work. Joe was indexing the Sydney Morning Herald, a task he performed from home for the State Library every Friday by logging onto their computer. Joe was not by nature a tranquil person, and when he was forced to actually read the paper in order to index it he became upset, swearing loudly at the callous politicians, the teachers with their regular salary increases, the Public Service Association for not demanding the same for librarians like him, blood sucking banks, greedy business magnates and the top end of the town in general. You could hear him for miles outside the study door, so Cicero, with an ear cocked our way, nobly hiked the kilometre from the railway station knowing that a walk would calm him down and, by proxy, his brother.

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    Sure enough, Cicero headed straight for the jar of Lavazza Crema e gusto we kept in the kitchen. Joe knew he was there by the way he bounded across the floor.

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    ‘Hey, mate,’ he called, struggling out from under his newspaper. ‘Why didn’t you ring? Polly would have picked you up.’

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    ‘We needed the walk,’ answered Cicero.

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    ‘Oh, yeah,’ Joe apologized. ‘Sorry for the noise. It’s all this bullshit about the benefits of the new tax system.’

Cicero patted him on the shoulder.

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    ‘Take it easy,’ he advised and began screwing the lid from the coffee maker.

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    This machine, an inexpensive Roma model, had worked faithfully for five years, during that time churning out

countless cups of coffee. Cicero, by contrast, owned a huge, commercial model – his sole concession to materialism – that regularly broke down, a fate Cicero blamed entirely on this single act of avarice that marred his otherwise frugal lifestyle. The gods, he declared, were punishing him.

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    The rubber washer squeaked as he unwound the spout to pour water in. The knob at the side for the passage of steam groaned. As you could make cappuccinos from the steam, its outlet was clotted with dried milk and the entire machine was soiled from a combination of coffee grounds, dust and oil from the stove beside it. It was only when Cicero stayed the night that it was ever cleaned. He had more respect for coffee than we did, that’s why he had bought a more complicated machine that was forever packing it in. He saw the money he had outlaid for its purchase and upkeep as a charitable donation to those poverty stricken South American nations that grew the beans.

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    Soon, however, the blessed black brew was spitting into his cup and he and Joe could get onto the serious business of adjusting Cicero’s drum kit that had been temporarily housed in our lounge room.

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    ‘Look at the snare drum,’ Joe began. ‘I put the electrician’s tape where you told me, Cicero, and a pillow in the bass drum, and mutes on the side drums, and brushes for the crash symbol. And I touched up the top heads. No, I didn’t tighten them. But the high hat’s too high, to be honest.’

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    Joe loved Cicero’s drum kit and often claimed that, as a librarian, he had missed his true calling, but he had quickly discovered that it’s no fun playing drums softly and frequently entertained our street with his accompaniments to Frank Sinatra. If you happened not to like this ex-Italian’s patronizing style or weren’t a woman who idolized him, you went out on Fridays and tried not to drop into the library on the way to suggest that the state government might not appreciate paying Joe to impersonate Count Bassie. Drums, moreover, are not gentle instruments and, if you’d had a bad day at work, you had to rev the kids up to screaming point and drive your wife to drink in order to achieve an emotional release from them yourself. A fibro house was a curse with a husband who fancied himself a reincarnation of Sonny Payne. Any drummer who impressed Joe and Cicero walloped the things like a bat out of hell.

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    But fine tuning them involved delicacy and it was much more stressful. Halfway through the operation Joe looked up with sweat all over his brow and panted, ‘I forgot, Poll, there’s an article in the Herald that sounds like

She Who Must Not Be Named, page four, top left.’

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    ‘What’s happened to her?’ I asked without interest. I had cooled towards my biological mother since our last disagreement.

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    ‘Well, it’s quite intriguing really. Go and have a look for yourself.’

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    I sorted through the evidence of Joe’s latest political wobbly – a series of angry crosses that had split the paper from page one to page three – and discovered the article he referred to untouched.

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    ‘WOMAN MURDERED’- screamed the caption – ‘On Wednesday night an elderly woman was attacked in her home at Bankstown in Sydney’s South. Louise Cooper, aged eighty, was strangled whilst attempting to engage an intruder who had broken into her home. Though the house was ransacked, little of value was taken except some change from the victim’s purse. Anyone with any information is asked to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.’

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    ‘Cooper?’ called Cicero from the drum kit. ‘Is that her married name? It’s not very Slavic.’

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    ‘It’s the old Serbo Croat for someone who makes wine barrels,’ quipped Joe.

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    ‘It’s her husband’s name,’ I replied. ‘And someone’s knocked her off, it seems? How extraordinary!’

 

    Cicero wandered into the study and peered over my shoulder.

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    ‘Your biological mother?’ His lip curled. ‘What incredible luck!’

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    It certainly seemed too amazing to be true. As if Italy had sunk beneath the waves, I felt light, exultant. More than anything else, I felt free. It’s hard to explain to another person the burden that was lifted from my shoulders knowing that my frustrator was dead. I had fully expected her to survive for at least another twenty years. Though she was eighty, there was never anything wrong with her except the occasional head cold. There was not a hint of osteoporosis in her sturdy frame. She didn’t stoop, she didn’t limp. She had no difficulty rising from a chair. And she never talked about her health, ever, as if that lapse would bring down upon her head all the ravages of time she had so far avoided.

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    I was dancing.

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    ‘She’s dead!’ I yelled. ‘I’m free! Free. I can tell my siblings the truth. We can be reunited. YIPPEE!’  

 

    Cicero tucked his checked flannelette shirt into his jeans. Though he thrived on Inner City Chic, Cicero actually dressed Sunday Afternoon Suburban seven days a week in which his clothes were a la mode, or the Italian equivalent.

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    ‘But what is freedom,’ he enquired astutely. ‘A preconceived notion about life on the other side of the fence? This family may turn out to be a millstone about your neck. That’s what they’ve been up till now. In the end, you may be freer learning to be your own person.’

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    ‘Nonsense,’ I said.

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    ‘For example, your mother was not open about adoption. She put the issue aside at your birth and never dealt with it. No regrets, no backward glances. I imagine that if she were offered counselling in the same situation today she would say no. It’s the sort of person she is. Be realistic, Polly, you’ve known her for eleven more or less shaky years and have probably been a thorn in her side the whole time. Her approval of you, such as it was, was conditional to playing by her rules. When did you express yourself freely to her? Never.’

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    ‘That’s not a reason not to try!’ I insisted hotly. ‘You have blood relations. I don’t.’

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    ‘Yes, indeed,’ conceded Cicero because it was not his nature to risk upset. He would come forward with his relevant ideas as his bachelor’s existence gave him time to think of them, then as quickly back off.

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    ‘But why,’ reasoned Joe. ‘Keep up the relationship for eleven years if you couldn’t express yourself to her? You may have given her the wrong impression.’

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    ‘Me!’ I exclaimed hotly. ‘I kept up the relationship because there was always the hope that she would tell the other children about me. I had asked. Twice.’

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    ‘And been rejected twice.’

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    ‘Look, Joe,’ I said. ‘To have a biological relative at all was a novelty and not something I cared to abandon lightly.’

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    ‘She may not have understood that.’

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    ‘And I couldn’t tell her.’

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    ‘I’d say that you two had a communication problem.’

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    ‘She had the communication problem, Joe.’

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    ‘But if you didn’t tell her how you felt for a decade, Polly, I’d say that you did.’

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    ‘I don’t ram my opinions down other people’s throats like you do.’

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    ‘It hardly matters which of you had the problem now,’ Cicero pointed out by butting in.

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    ‘It’s not my fault!’ I cried, distressed by their combined attack. ‘I didn’t ask to be born, then I was kicked out and now you are blaming me for all my problems.’

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    ‘You could have ignored her,’ said Joe. ‘And then you wouldn’t have had any problems.’

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    And no roots, no knowledge and no identity either, I thought in reply to my husband. I watched him examine the stark newsprint, no doubt looking for further accusations. Instead he paused and shook his head over one part in particular.

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     ‘“Whilst attempting to engage an intruder.” What kind of fragile eighty year old would do that?’

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    ‘She was never fragile,’ I told him. ‘Fear and anger made her ferocious, and she’s ferocious normally. Go into battle with her and see how far you get. She’s as upright as a plank, as firm as a rock. The old fashioned, resilient type who was born before World War 2 and never lets you forget it.’

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    But, in saying this, I had painted a picture of exactly the type of strong older woman Joe and Cicero really went for, one that reminded them of the nonna who had largely raised them. The Oedipus factor once removed. Louise’s mind had not wilted, neither had age wearied her. She was, right up to her death, a confident woman.

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    ‘It really is an impressive effort for a woman of that age, ‘remarked Cicero enthusiastically. ‘I wish I’d met her.

   

    Joe agreed. ‘A biological mother who can combat intruders with the sheer force of her personality is a sad loss to the world.’

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    ‘Whose side are you on?’ I demanded.

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    ‘Yours!’ they immediately answered. ‘And, by the way, Polly, could you drive us to the cemetery at the weekend? We’d like to visit Mum.’

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    I snatched the car keys.

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    ‘Catch the train,’ I barked at them bitterly. ‘And take all your stupid photos of all your stupid relatives with you.

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