Barley Patch (14 page)

I had no doubt that any Catholic child of the age of the altar-climber would have learned to be in awe of sanctuaries and altars and, above all, tabernacles. In the city where I lived when I received the card, any Catholic child found even so much as trespassing in the sanctuary, let alone clambering onto the altar and fiddling with the tabernacle—any such child would have been thrashed by parents and teachers. If the child had already made his or her first confession, he or she would have been advised to confess at the first opportunity the mortal sin of sacrilege. The child’s escapade might later have been made public, but only as an example of the sort of gross offence that no right-minded child would even con
template. It would have been unthinkable for someone to record the offence for posterity, as it were, by painting on the front of a holy-card the scene of the crime, so to call it. And yet, the fact remained: there I was, a resident of the city mentioned earlier in this paragraph and also the owner of a holy-card that seemed to advertise the unthinkable. Admittedly, the little altar-sitter in the picture seemed more like a cherub in a church-mural than the sort of child that I mixed with. But whenever I stared at the portrait of the curly-haired, pink-cheeked boy, I felt the beginnings of a peculiar hopefulness. Somewhere, in some layer of the world far beyond my own drab layer, it might have been possible sometimes to follow one’s own desires without incurring punishment. The curly-haired child might have explained away his escapade by telling the adults that he felt sorry for Jesus, locked up all day on the altar with nobody to visit him; or perhaps the child’s excuse was that he had something to tell Jesus: something so private that it had to be whispered to Jesus through the keyhole of his house. And the lisping trickster might have got away unscathed. The adults judging his case might have exchanged smiles of mock-exasperation before deciding that he had meant no harm. I inferred all this from the mere facts that the holy-card had been designed and printed by adults and had been sent to me by an adult—and a nun, moreover.

My pondering over the holy-card led me to no new course of action, although it would surely have made my daydreams somewhat bolder. I may well have daydreamed sometimes about an afternoon when the sender of the card, won over by my innocent-seeming ways and by the long words that I had used on her, showed me up the stairs of her two-storey building and allowed me to look out from the upper verandah at the view, which I hoped would be of far-reaching grasslands in northern Victoria, where I had never been. I may even have daydreamed that the sender of the card, again impressed by my feigned innocence and precocious words, persuaded some priest-friend of hers to hold open in my sight the door of a tabernacle and even to part the inner hangings with his hand in such a way that I would be able always afterwards to see the exact arrangement of folds of cloth and dark interstices in a tabernacle in my mind.

The reader should not suppose that I was interested in tabernacles or in the upper storeys of convents or of presbyteries because I was attracted to the invisible personages in whose cause such places had been built. I was in awe of Almighty God; of his son Our Lord, Jesus Christ; of Mary, the Mother of Our Lord; of all the angels and saints. Rather, I was in awe of the images of those personages that had lodged in my mind as a result of my having looked from an early age at certain statues, coloured windows, and holy-cards. I was anxious not to offend the personages by any misdeeds of mine. Several times daily, I uttered aloud or in my mind prayers addressed to one or another of the personages. Sometimes I felt that one or another of the personages was scrutinising me from behind the cover of his or her invisibility. I did not doubt what I had been taught from early childhood: that my chief task in life was to become on close terms with as many as possible of the personages. And yet, I was not at all attracted to any of the personages; and although I would never have dared admit it to anyone, I felt as though none of the personages had any special fondness for me.

I was not devoted to the personages, but I was interested in the places where they were venerated or where they were depicted as dwelling. I peered not only at upper-storey windows but into the dim, furthest reaches of grottoes in churchyards. I tried to imagine the garden behind the high wall in front of the Marist Brothers’ monastery. I seem to have envied priests and members of religious orders not only the views to be had from their imposing buildings but also whatever they saw when there was nothing of note to be seen around them: what they saw when they paced up and down the same path in the same walled garden, and even, perhaps, what they saw when they closed their eyes or covered their faces after they had received Holy Communion in some secluded chapel at first light.

My interest in these matters found its simplest outlet of a Sunday morning when I knelt beside one or another of my parents in our not-unpretentious parish church. During much of the service I would fix my attention on one after another of the stained-glass windows. The foreground of each window-picture was the preserve of one or another of the personages mentioned above. The background, however, seemed available for me to fill with landscapes or with glimpses of distant townships. And yet, whenever I gave up trying to imagine scenery fit to be discerned in some or another background of transparent pale-green or translucent orange and asked myself, in a mood of literal-mindedness, what in fact was just out of sight behind those converging pastel-toned plains and skies, I had to acknowledge the obvious. However many other-worldly personages might have loomed in the view of the worshippers inside the church, they existed against an ultimate background hardly different from what lay around me whenever I walked to school or to my local shops. The farthest imaginable background might have been a suburb of a provincial city overlaid by a pale wash of colour.

But I have not yet finished my report of the holy-card showing the curly-haired child getting away, so it seemed, with sacrilege. What I am about to report would have happened gradually and subtly and would have made scant difference to my everyday life; would have been hardly apparent to me except at odd, illuminating moments. What I am about to report is not at all an account of my drawing closer in my mind to the nun who had sent me the holy-card mentioned often above. If anything, I preferred not even to recall the pink-faced, brown-robed figure who had made much of me in the parlour of the convent on account of my bearing, according to her, an uncanny resemblance to my father.

In order to complete my report of the effects of a certain holy-card on the child that I seem to have been, I have to introduce into this work of fiction a personage whose title will be from here onwards the
Patroness
. I have used just now the word
personage
for want of a more accurate word. The reader must not suppose that my patroness occupied the same level of existence that was occupied by the personages mentioned in detail in the fourth-most recent paragraph and mentioned briefly in two subsequent paragraphs. This is necessarily a complicated piece of fiction, and if the English language had provided them, I would have used a variety of terms so as to distinguish such as the Patroness mentioned just above and what might be called the chief characters of the religion of my childhood, not to mention certain beings that I reported in earlier pages as having come into existence while I read works of fiction.

The Patroness was the least predictable of any of the beings that I choose to call personages. On rare occasions, she seemed closer to me and more aware of me than any other denizen of my mind. Mostly, though, she led a wavering existence, sometimes seeming as though anxious to break through whatever barriers lay between us but at other times seeming as though the very purpose of her existence was to remain aloof from me and so to provide me with a task worthy of a lifetime of effort: the simple but baffling task of gaining admission to her presence.

The Patroness almost certainly made her first appearance in my mind at some time after I had received the holy-card mentioned often in the preceding paragraphs, but for as long as I went on trying to see her clearly in my mind, I understood that she was a personage or an entity in her own right and definitely not a memory in my mind of the pink face and the brown robes and the ingratiating presence of the nun that my father had taken me to visit in the north-facing building of two storeys. The Patroness, so I learned after much struggling to apprehend her image, was changeable in her attitudes towards me. Sometimes she seemed to assume the most forbidding of poses: she was the merest outline of a female; the transparent representation in ice or glass of the virgin-goddess of my religion or of my own mother as she might have been when my father had first courted her. Paradoxically, my patroness could seem closer to me during those periods when I was quite unable to visualise her than when I was repeatedly glimpsing her in my mind. I would give up for a few days all my straining after her image and would experience a period of calm and reassurance, as though what separated us was not distance but her prankish hiding behind this or that image in the foreground of my mind. Such tantalising periods would often end with my catching sight of a picture of a young woman in a magazine or even of an actual young woman in a street and then feeling for a few hours afterwards as though my patroness had thus arranged for me to be shown her approximate likeness.

My patroness would have first appeared in my mind, or would have first signalled her presence there, when I was puzzling over the picture of the boy who was leaning against the tabernacle. I am no more concerned nowadays, as I write this report, than was the boy who received the holy-card long ago with any such abstraction as
character.
I am only concerned to report that the boy felt from the beginning as though his patroness had come to him with the message that she herself, in certain moods, would not despise him and would not report him to his teachers or to the parish priest if it came to her knowledge that he had thought of touching the satin coverings of a tabernacle or even of trying its door. He even felt as though his patroness understood that his being interested in tabernacles was not an expression of his interest in the personages who presided over his religion. And at some unrecorded hour on an unrecorded but fateful day, the boy, in his daydreaming, felt as though he had succeeded in reporting to his patroness that he would have been no less eager to clamber up to a tabernacle and to prise open its door and to learn at last the details of its inner arrangements even if he had known beforehand that the place contained no sacred vessels, so called, and no Blessed Sacrament, so called.

After the boy had felt as reported in the previous paragraph, he felt for a few hours, or perhaps only for a few minutes, that his patroness understood him in such a way that he need hardly explain himself to her in words. He felt as though she understood that his wanting to see into tabernacles and such places had only ever arisen because he had lacked for a patroness and had been driven to look for such places as might console him for his lack. This feeling, of course, could not last, and in the daydreams that followed, he found in some or another church or convent a tabernacle that was no longer used for religious ceremonies but was still decorated and was still even locked. By some preposterous means, he found the key to the tabernacle. He opened the door, and if he had had more courage, he might have explored all of what lay behind it. But he did not so dare. All he dared to do was to leave in the dark space behind the outer curtains a written message to the patroness—or for some or another personage who might be disposed to read the message and to understand it.

It was never to be expected that any decisive event would take place: any event that might convince the boy of his patroness’s interest in him, let alone her indisputable existence in his mind or elsewhere. If he went back in his daydreams to the tabernacle where he had left the written message and if he found that the place behind the curtains was empty, could he be sure that she had understood the message? Had she even read the message? Had she merely removed it as a formality in the same way that priests of certain religions, so the boy would learn long afterwards, would consume in private the sacrificial food offered by the faithful to their non-existent gods?

While I was writing the previous paragraph, which is, of course, part of a work of fiction, I remembered for perhaps the first time in sixty years an event in the seventh or eighth year of the life of a person who can never be any more than a personage in the mind of any reader of this writing. I remembered my having found one afternoon on the way home from school in the largest city in northern Victoria a short tunnel of about the circumference of my index finger in the trunk of the tall grey-box tree that grew in the gravelly margin of the street outside the house where I lived with my brother and my parents. What was probably no more than a deep knothole seemed to me a phenomenon not to be ignored.

In the shabby rented house next to my parents’ hardly less shabby rented house was what my mother called a tribe of kids. The nearest to me in age of the tribe was a girl a year older than myself. If the reader of this paragraph could accept that certain fictional events may closely resemble remembered events, then I would be willing to report that the girl mentioned in the second sentence of this paragraph had the name Sylvia; that I sometimes felt urged to confide to Sylvia matters such as I would have confided to few other persons, and not just because I seemed to read from her face that she would have been a trustworthy confidant but also because the sound of her name when I pronounced it brought to my mind vague images of pleasant scenery; that I addressed to Sylvia, soon after I had discovered the short tunnel mentioned in the previous paragraph, a brief note telling her that I wanted to talk to her soon about certain matters; that I rolled the note into a cylindrical shape and pushed it as far as I could push it into the short tunnel in the grey-box tree but that I never afterwards informed the person addressed in the note of what I had done, although I often paused on my way past the tree and reached a finger into the tunnel, hoping to find that my message had been retrieved but always having my finger come up against a wad of unread paper. A day came, of course, when I walked past the tree without remembering my message; and when I learned, five years later, that
silvus
was the Latin for
woodland
, I had forgotten, so I thought, the name that had been at the head of my note and had forgotten even the grey-box tree.