The Road from Coorain (28 page)

When we arrived at Santiago de Compostela I left her, promising to be gone only an hour or so, to see the cathedral. I knew it was one of the three most important places of pilgrimage in the
Middle Ages, but was unprepared for my first encounter with one of Europe’s great holy cities. On the way in, I stopped to study the map showing the routes followed by the pilgrims, often as many as two million a year, traveling down a series of old Roman roads through France and across northern Spain, to make their prayers where their faith taught that the bones of St. James rested. The cathedral literally took my breath away. The vastness of its scale, the beauty of the proportions, the stone carving so powerful one felt one was meeting the whole kaleidoscope of a society etched in the walls, adorning the arches, shown in every pose of walking, striving, and reaching up to heaven. Hours later I wandered out into the great square, was stunned by the scale of the palaces and university buildings which lined it, and then noticing the sun, guiltily returned to my abandoned mother, who reminded me with some asperity that my tardiness would make her late for her next meal. I was glad of her frosty silence as we drove to our evening’s resting place. I had more time to reflect on the marvel of the day’s startling discovery. Was it true, I wondered, as the guide had told me, that St. Francis of Assisi had made the pilgrimage and himself founded the monastery, not far from the great plaza, which bore his name? I ran through the list of famous pilgrims, imagined the sights and smells of the city they had found as the ninth-century shrine took shape. It was clear that I had to learn more about medieval Christianity because it had produced a world more beautiful than any I had ever seen.

My mother was blind to this beauty, so blind that there was a comic divergence between our states of mind whenever we went together to a great monument of Catholic culture. When we arrived in Seville, the Spanish city she found most entrancing of any on our travels, I told her that the cathedral, where it was claimed that Columbus lay buried, was one of Europe’s great monuments, and that the square surrounding it, vast in scale, fragrant with the blossoms of its hundreds of orange trees, was something she should see. We happened to reach it on Friday afternoon, in the season before Easter, when it was the custom for
the people from the surrounding countryside to fall to their knees on entering the square and progress across it kneeling while reciting the innumerable rosaries it took to traverse the vast space and progress up the steps of the cathedral’s grand entrance. I was struck by the faces of the penitents, their dignity and austere beauty, but my mother’s tirade about the exploitation of the peasantry by the Church was an obbligato to my exploration of the building which, more than any other, expressed the high point of Spanish culture after the discovery of the New World.

We could each enjoy standing on the spot on the banks of the Guadalquivir River from which Columbus set out to discover the Indies, and we were each entranced by the gardens which were Spain’s heritage from the Moors. In this dry, hot climate, the Moorish influence shaped the use of water and dictated the pattern of walled courtyards where cascades of greenery and the ever-present sound of water banished all sense of heat. “If only I had seen this when I was making my garden at Coorain, I could have made us all feel much cooler,” my mother remarked. “I was trying to copy English gardens when this should have been the model.” For each of us, in our separate ways, the journey involved the redefinition of our relationship to the past and reconfiguring our sense of geography. Just as we know ourselves in relation to others, so I knew how beautiful Australia was only after encountering the real rather than the imagined landscape of England and Europe. So also, I could not comprehend the blank spaces in Australian urban culture except by seeing the physical expressions of other notions of urban community. The square, the cathedral, the university, and the palace, all grouped around a public space made for theater and processions, yet all on a human scale, made me aware that the heart of our cities was deader than any arid part of the continent, and that our civic and community life was starved of ritual.

In the late 1950s, the Spanish Mediterranean coast north of Barcelona was yet to be discovered by organized tourism. English visitors had been coming there in high summer since before the
Spanish civil war, but they stayed in one or two small resort towns, leaving the small fishing villages which dotted the rugged and beautiful coast untouched. If one did not mind rutted roads, negotiating one’s car across the fords which were the only ways of crossing many shallow streams, it was possible to find one’s way into small fishing communities where, because of Spain’s poverty, the way of life of Catalonia was relatively untouched. Every English person is supposed to shed inhibitions when exposed to Latin culture, and my mother was surely the archetypal one. She didn’t make her customary complaints about the plumbing of the simple inn in the small village where we stayed, and she never tired of walking the beach to see the colorful boats of the sardine fleet drawn up after the catch was brought in. The smell of the pines in the hot afternoons, or the shade of the cork woods which alternated with vineyards during our walks along the high jagged coastline, conveyed a strong, definitive sense of place, juxtaposed as they were with one dazzling view of the dark blue ocean after another. At night when the village was filled with the sound of guitars and people could be found dancing the sardana in every small bistro, she abandoned her iron rule about her hour of retiring and stayed happily watching for hours, entranced by a kind of spontaneity and grace she had never seen before. When I told her that legend claimed that the Holy Grail was housed at the monastery of Montserrat, high in the jagged mountains behind the coast, she did not give her usual snort of derision, but said that perhaps we had better make an expedition to Montserrat because she could believe anything possible here. She liked the simple economy of the region, based on harvesting sardines from the sea, wine from the sweet grapes produced along the sunny coast, and cork from the forests. “You may stay in England, or wherever you like,” she said, “but I think I may sell Coorain and settle down here, in one of these stone cottages with geraniums tumbling out the window.”

Our days in Catalonia were the most relaxed and pleasure-filled of any in our months of traveling together. We had no news
from Australia for months, and it seemed foolish here in this world of long siestas and moonlit dancing for me to be fretting about the future. Our visit to Montserrat, laughingly undertaken, proved another moment of cultural revelation. I had been taught about the romantic notion of the sublime, the sense of the grandeur and terror of nature, in contrast to the more domestic and social quality of beauty. Two sites in Europe, Montserrat and the Grande Chartreuse, appeared and reappeared in discussions of the power of nature so revered in romanticism. So it was with my mind filled with Edmund Burke’s phrases on the sublime and the beautiful, and Wagner’s imagery in
Parsifal
that I drove up the steep and narrow road to the monastery. It was true that from this high point in the mountains one could see the ocean and the expanse of the eastern range of the Pyrenees. It was a grand extended view on a scale I was used to, but I felt nothing here akin to the mystical sense of oneness with nature I felt alone on the plains of New South Wales. On the other hand, when we went into the chapel at Montserrat and heard the boys’ choir singing at the end of mass, the same chants such a choir had been singing for seven hundred years, I was transported by the beauty of the first Gregorian chant I had ever heard. I realized that the English romanticism I had taken for a universal was a cultural category in which I did not participate. Nothing made it clearer to me that I was from another world and would have to arrive at my cultural values for myself. Sacred music and ecclesiastical architecture expressed real universals which spoke to me wherever I met them. I hadn’t expected to be moved by the imagery and sounds of Catholic Europe, but I was.

After we left Spain, my mother’s good spirits vanished. Reading the mail that caught up with us in Toulouse changed her mood. It seemed clear from the bulky packet of letters that my brother was close to marrying the sweetheart of the moment and that the manager of Coorain was taking advantage of my mother’s absence to undertake many much-needed maintenance projects and
replacements of equipment. With these events in the forefront of her mind, she scarcely noticed where she was. Our travels took us from Toulouse to Geneva, along the route across which Hannibal had marched his elephants to mount his campaign in Italy. As the scenery of Provence unfolded, and we began our climb through fertile valleys overlooked by hill villages of great antiquity, every one looking like the background of some early Renaissance painting, she began to rehearse her memories of her life at Coorain obsessively. Each day as the sun made its passage through the sky, lighting our way through towns and villages which recalled layer after layer of Roman and medieval history, she sat beside me asking whether I thought this new fence necessary, or whether that piece of farm equipment would have lasted longer if properly maintained. The sound of her voice was like a broken record and no matter what my response, it was refuted angrily. Her change of mood was accompanied by her customary concerns. The food was too rich, it was not rich enough; the tea too weak, too strong; the beds too lumpy; the rooms too noisy. By the time we reached Geneva, I was wondering sardonically why I was spending time traveling with someone so impermeable to the stimulus of other cultures.

After Geneva, we turned eastward following a meandering course toward Paris, which was to be our home while we explored northern France. We found Paris on the verge of yet another political revolution, the newspaper placards along its leafy boulevards announcing the rebellion of the French paratroop regiments in Algeria as we drove into the city. De Gaulle’s solitary decision to accede to Algerian demands for independence and to bring to a close the colonial wars which had sapped France’s energy since 1945 was being proclaimed as we unpacked our bags. It was surreal to hear the ebb and flow of my mother’s stream of consciousness about Coorain at such a moment. No matter how she complained I left her alone in our luxe small hotel on the Right Bank and set out for the Assembly, arriving in time to join the crowd awaiting the modest car from Colombey which
carried General de Gaulle to one of the great moments in modern French history. Although I was aware that the placards of the newsstands carried nothing but foot-high letters announcing the arrival of the paratroop regiments, I scarcely heeded them in my delight at seeing the beauty of Paris. It was an unaccustomedly empty city, drained of the people who had left in anticipation of a military occupation, and this made it easier to see the Place de la Concorde or to stroll along the Seine, free of the roar of unceasing traffic. Strolling along the Left Bank, alternately browsing at the booksellers’ kiosks and stopping to gaze at Notre Dame, I heard on the radio from a nearby wine shop de Gaulle’s voice begin
“Françaises et Français, aidez-moi”
and proceed to announce his decision that it was the moral choice for France to withdraw from Algeria. It was a riveting speech, all the more remarkable to me for being heard in the company of the French workmen and casual passersby who had gathered to listen. The group was divided and deep in political argument seconds after the speech concluded. I was entranced. Here were the French left and right obligingly acting out their roles in real life, verifying everything I’d read about French history. As we made our way home after dinner that evening, my mother’s flood of conversation was arrested by the sight of tanks parked at street corners and uniformed soldiers carrying submachine guns. The city was preparing seriously for battle, a battle anticipated for dawn the next morning. Suddenly focusing on the present, her response was characteristically British. “I want to leave at once,” she said. “These French quarrels have nothing to do with me.”

By the late summer, we had spent more than six months in England. I had walked my way through the collection of cities which joined to make the center of London. There was scarcely a trace of Elizabethan London I had not found, nor a section of the city and its museums we had not explored. Our excursions to the countryside were planned to explore a region and its country houses, gardens, churches, and museums, and our overnight
stays introduced us to every variety of country inn and great house turned hotel. We made friends in London, visited English acquaintances made on our voyage over from Australia, and made many new friends in the large Australian expatriate community in England.

I delighted in transacting the details of daily life along the King’s Road near our Chelsea flat. The variety of accents, the shops crammed with produce from every part of Europe, the never-ending fascination of antique shops filled with furniture and porcelain, the parading Chelsea matrons with their dogs, and the nannies with perambulators were an unfailing source of amusement. Our flat was minutes from the Chelsea Pensioners Hospital, and after I had sat in the garden enough times I made friends with several pensioners, and could count on them to regale me with tales of 1914–1918 or of Second World War campaigns.

I liked the cheerful butchers and grocers, and the superior being who discussed wine with me in a hushed voice at Harrods’ wine department. When we made weekend visits to the country, I was less certain about our English hosts, hospitable though they were. They could not have been kinder, but I resented their air of superiority toward Australians. I wasn’t used to being patronized by people less well read than I, nor to having the history I knew so well explained to me as though I could not possibly know anything about it. I came to wait for the ultimate compliment which could be counted on by Sunday breakfast. I knew the confidential smile and the inclination of the head would be followed by “You know, my dear, one would hardly know you were not English.” I couldn’t control the irritation produced by such accolades, and would usually begin to tell preposterous stories about life in the outback to emphasize how different I was.