Dead Europe (15 page)

I returned to my room and smoked my cigarettes staring up at the cracked plaster on the ceiling. Through the thin walls I could hear the grind of sex.

 

It was an Italian who was my first fuck and it was an Italian who was my first love, but they were not the same man. I grew up in a suburb of Melbourne bordered on either side by creeks and bushland; at its southern end, where the city began, the sludge of the Yarra River ran across its border. It was only when I first travelled to Europe that I realised how rare was the profusion of space so close to my city. But as a youth I had no idea of my fortune. I was a loner as an adolescent, and after school and on weekends I would wander the creeks, climb the hilltops that overlooked Melbourne, meander along the cycle tracks that ran along the river.

It was there that I met Signor Bruno. I was thirteen and he had just turned sixty. If that difference in age now seems fantastic, at the time it was of little consequence to me. At thirteen, with thin, sparse hairs I detested curling on my top lip, with my voice breaking and my balls beginning to drop, anyone over eighteen was an adult, and that promise of maturity was what was desirable. More desirable than the football-obsessed boys at school who resented my reading and my love of cinema. More trustworthy than the girls who mocked my gangly limbs and pimpled skin. Signor Bruno, who told me he was retired, lived in a small house close to the river and was not at all like those boys and girls at school.

It was summer when I met him, a summer in which Mum and Dad were always at each other's throats. They would argue about anything. Work, money, Sophie and me, drugs, politics, music. Anything. Mum would scream at Dad that she hated him but I knew this was not true. She loved him. She loved him madly and obsessively. And he? His anger was of a different nature. He'd tease her, mock her, call her a peasant and a fool. He'd laugh at her. It scared me, his
laughter, more than her shouts, for there was emptiness in his sarcasm and mockery. She hated him and loved him. He always kept a part of himself shut off from her. So in desperation her fury became venomous and finally, one day, after one petty insult, he simply got up and left. Mum wouldn't cook, wouldn't eat, wouldn't bathe, wouldn't go to work. That summer, Mum stopped being.

So that summer was when I took any chance I had to escape the house and go to the river, taking endless walks along the same paths and bike tracks, pretending it was the solitude and greenery I was seeking. In truth, I would have hooked up with any man who would have taught me truths about my body. It was Signor Bruno who was my first teacher. He saw past the flab of my chest, the embarrassing titties I hated exposing in the showers after Phys. Ed. He did not think me disfigured by acne, or clumsy and foolish in my body. He taught me pleasure, how my cock worked, my balls, my skin and hair, how to play with myself and how to pleasure another man. Beyond sex, he began to instruct me in music and etiquette, introduced me to what he called fine literature—which, for him, meant British and French literature, never anything American—and he encouraged my resentment of and antipathy to the world I came from. Without knowing it, even though our meetings were very short—an hour after school, an hour on the weekend—he transformed me into a coquettish snob. One day, he promised, you will leave high school and the suburbs far behind.

So the damage done was in no way sexual. The little tricks he taught me, his determination to get my adolescent hands off my prick and show me that the arse, the neck, the stomach, the thighs, could also generate pleasure, were lessons that made me confident as a lover. That I was not attracted to him was something we did not talk about. He would have been a good-looking man, even handsome, in his
youth, but age had weakened him and he was now ashamed of his body. He would never force me into an act and I learnt the power of being a flirt, a vamp. Just as he had taught me the brutal snobberies of the bourgeoisie, he taught me how ridicule could be a weapon. I won't pretend that words can answer fists. My smart-aleck remarks were often answered by backhanders from the boys at school. But they stopped teasing me, worried that I would respond with some humiliating barb that would diminish them in front of their girls and their mates.

Dad finally did return. One afternoon when Sophie and I came back from school, there he was, in a singlet and shorts, my mother giggling and cooking a meal, a crumpled foil of aluminium on the kitchen table. He kicked my arse for my prissiness.

—What's happened to that kid? he asked my mother.

—Where were you to look after him? Eh? Tell me that, you fucking
malaka
. That's what happens when a father walks out on a son!

 

My father asked around. It didn't take long for him to hear the gossip. One evening he took me driving in his car. He showed me the factory he first worked in when he arrived in Melbourne, he took me to the beach and we sat beside each other on the Valiant's immense vinyl bench seat and watched small waves run across the stretch of St Kilda Beach. I remember that he had Savopoulos in the cassette player and that he smelt of marijuana.

—How often do you see Signor Bruno Parlovecchio?

I remember I asked him for a cigarette.

—Do you like sex with him or are you doing it for money?

I don't quite remember my answer.

—Are you a faggot?

—Yes. I certainly answered yes.

I remember that he lit a cigarette then, placed his arm
across the steering wheel, and peered out into the sea.

—Never do it for money, alright? You promise me that?

I must have nodded.

—Once you have a reputation as a whore, you're lost. Do you understand?

I must have nodded again.

—I envy you, Isaac. I wish God had granted me a love for cock instead of damning me with the desire for cunt. I envy you. Freedom, no family to think of. You can do anything—remember that, you can do anything you like.

And he got me raging drunk that night.

 

It was my father who introduced me to my first love. Paul Ricco was forty-one, and he had a wife and two children, one not far behind me in school. But, unlike Signor Bruno, Paul Ricco was handsome and strong; his was a body that I could wrap myself around and disappear into. I thought him the most virile man I had ever seen. His skin was hard, his face was long and thin, and his legs were thick and hairy. I have no photograph of him, so I am reliant on memory. His stubby cock was dark and his foreskin was long and rubbery. He had a mole on his left shoulder, a gold front tooth. He smoked Benson and Hedges cigarettes and drank Melbourne Bitter. And at one point I would have done anything for Paul Ricco. I would have cut off my sex and become a girl if he'd asked me to.

My father and Paul were friendly with a man, Tassio, and his wife, Athina, who owned an emporium on High Street that sold doilies, manchester and bric-a-brac for weddings. The shelves were dusty and the shop always smelt of cigarettes. My sister swore that she had seen a rat run across the dirty wooden floor and she and my mother refused to walk into it from that day on. Tassio and Athina lived a few blocks south from us and on Sundays Dad would take Sophie and me to play with Tassio's kids. We'd play cricket or footy
or Monopoly or Twister while in the garage a group of men were involved in secret work. I spied on them once. Through a gap in the filthy louvres, I watched the men dismantle clocks. The clocks had large faces and baroque plastic casings which were moulded and painted to resemble red wood. The men were removing small packages from the body of the clocks, screwing back the faces, screwing back the casings, drinking wine, smoking and laughing. It must have been summer. Paul was sitting on a stool, his back to me, a tight white Bonds singlet stretched across his back. I noticed the shock of dark hair coming from beneath his wet armpits. My father, who was sitting across from Paul, looked up and spied my enraptured face.

—What are you looking at, you devil?

Paul had turned. He was smiling. I still dream that smile.

 

For three years we were lovers. Paul worked as a market wholesaler, and he often smelt of fresh vegetables and ripe fruit. We fucked in the back of his van, which he would park by the river. He gambled with the Greeks in a little coffee shop in Victoria Street, and often I would meet him there. Did they know, these other migrant tough men, cigarettes always hanging from their lips, their stares cold and impenetrable but their actions often generous, did they know about Paul and me? I would sit at the edge of the table, reading, and when one of the men got up to leave, if he had won, he would buy me a cola, or give me some cash, or stroke the back of my head and in Greek or Italian or broken English, he'd say, Such a nice kid. They must have known, these men, who worked in factories and smelt of tobacco and grease, they must have known what was going on between myself and Paul. But they never asked and they never assumed a liberty with me. In fact, they treated me with great affection, as if I were a nephew, as if I belonged to a family of men, as if by extending friendship to me in
the coffee shop they could make up for their wives never letting my family cross the doorway into their homes. My father knew so many of these men. He drank with them, gambled with them, probably went whoring with them. But our family was rarely invited over to their houses for lunch or dinner, or to celebrate weddings and baptisms. When their women would come across us on the street, their faces would tighten. Cold, disapproving, contemptuous. They must have known, these men.

For three years we were lovers and for three years Paul attempted to knock out of me all the manners and values Signor Bruno had instilled in me. He wanted me to toughen up, he thought the English inflections I tried to place onto my accent were foolish and dangerous. Be a man, he warned me. I tried. But Jesus, none of it was easy. In the coffee shop he would flinch at any sign of effeminacy, but when I was in his arms, lying belly down on the towels in the van, smelling the rich gross pong of the oranges or the peaches as he fucked me, he would caress me softly, whisper in Italian and call me his
bella ragazza
. After the sex, refusing to look at me while I cleaned myself up, he would ask me about the football and I would try as best I could to reply enthusiastically. I would have done anything for Paul Ricco.

He dropped me at sixteen, when hair began to sprout from my chest, when I started to regularly shave. It had become habit that he would park the van close to one of the soccer ovals near school and we would meet there. For a week I heard nothing from him. I visited the coffee shop and found him gambling. As always, I grabbed a chair, took out a book and began reading. He had not even looked at me when I came in and the other men too refused to catch my eye. He lost a hand at poker and threw the cards down on the table.

—
Fangoulo
, he yelled, do we have to put up with this little bastard reading all the time? He's putting me off my game.

Tassio dropped a five-dollar note in my hand.

—Pay for your coffee and go, he said to me, don't come back. None of the others looked at me. Paul ignored me. Silently I put my book in my bag, placed the chair where I found it, paid for my coffees, and handed Tassio back the five-dollar note. He refused it but I insisted he take it. I would not be paid for. Without looking at Paul Ricco, I left.

 

—You're too old for him now, Signor Bruno explained. You are losing your boyish charm.

I had dropped Mr Parlovecchio as soon as Paul had come into my life. Don't hang around with that pederast, Paul ordered me, he will corrupt you. I refused to see the old man, refused to go back to his house. Truthfully, I did not think of him once all the time I was with Paul. I dumped him as brutally as Paul had got rid of me. But as soon as I myself was rejected I ran to the old man and he welcomed me back. He poured me a wine, got me drunk, and then, sliding to his knees, he tried to take my flaccid cock into his mouth. I kicked at him. I could not bear sex with the corrupt old faggot after being with Paul. He did not argue with me, did not anger. Instead, holding his silk handkerchief to his split lip, he rose and went into his bedroom. He returned with books.

—I was hoping you would come back, he said, his voice shaking. I have these books for you. There was Stendhal, and there was Flaubert and a cheap dog-eared copy of Joyce's
Dubliners
. I did not want his books: stories of spoilt aristocrats and bourgeois weaklings. I wanted stories about men with broad shoulders, men who worked and smoked and fucked and knew nothing of the salons and ballrooms of an ancient Europe.

But I dutifully accepted the books Signor Bruno had put aside for me, and then I ran to the creek and cried. I cried so much that I was sure I heard my soul tearing.

 

—Did he fuck you?

—Yes.

—Did it hurt?

—Yes.

—And you loved him?

—Yes.

Colin had his arms around me. I closed my eyes and could still smell Paul Ricco, smell the sweat of him, the tang of citrus in the van. I can remember the small scar on his left arm and how it felt rough on my tongue when I licked it. If I closed my eyes tight it was as if I could recall the sensation of him above me, breathing heavily on my face, recall the wet of his lips, could remember him calling me his pretty girl.
Bella ragazza.

 

I opened my eyes wide from a dream and I was in the hotel room in Brindisi. Paul Ricco was not above me. I had been dreaming of him. But it was as if there was someone hovering above me in the dingy smelly room. I could feel a breath on my lips, faint and moist. I had been dreaming it was Paul Ricco's kiss. I opened my eyes. I was alone in the room and all I could hear was the sound of a man moaning from somewhere down the hall.

 

—You must go to Venice, Signor Bruno always said to me. Signor Bruno was from Veneto and he told me how as a young teenager he would borrow his oldest brother's wedding ring and travel on the back of a cart into the city of Venice. With the wedding ring on his finger he was no longer a poor peasant boy but a man of the world. He would wander into coffee shops, roll a newspaper across the table and while pretending to read the news he would listen in to conversations about music, politics and art.