The Pacific Room Read online

  THE PACIFIC ROOM

  MICHAEL FITZGERALD

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Published 2017

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  Copyright © Michael Fitzgerald 2017

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright owners of non-original material reproduced in this text. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly.

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Inside covers image: Hall & Co., Robert Louis Stevenson relaxing with Samoans, c. 1893, photographic print, 17.3 x 24cm, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Author image: Criena Court

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia at

  www.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 988-0-9953595-7-4

  For Sean

  I must surrender myself to what surrounds me, unite myself with the clouds and rocks, in order to be what I am.

  —Caspar David Friedrich

  O le gase a ala laovao: Paths in the bush are never obliterated; the past is never lost.

  —Samoan proverb

  We all don the clothes of civilisation to go on shore, looking very strange to each other.

  —Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson

  Chapter 1

  THE DRAWING

  He spits out the pill so it rests like a shiny blue egg in the palm of his hand.

  He remembers his Aunt Agatha – Scottish to the core – saying, ‘Elegance is refusal,’ at her bluestone house in Dunedin. He remembers the geranium, neither watered nor pruned, that grew on her kitchen windowsill, patterning the glass like wrought-iron lace gone wild. Refusal can lead to these strange flourishes, he thinks, which can grow elaborate over time and, given the right conditions, burst like a flower through the brain.

  We can only imagine what we don’t have, he thinks, binning the pill his psychiatrist prescribed for him, and staring up at the tall frosted window, which gives little idea of the lush greenery of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden running rampant outside.

  In the humid hum of this early December morning, just after ten, Lewis Wakefield has taken brief sanctuary in the men’s toilets of the Mitchell Library, among its Duchamplike urinals and white tiles. In the great light-drenched fish tank of the Reading Room, his stack request slips are being processed, weeded out from the genealogical searches and mad rants that greeted library staff when the portico doors were prised opened at nine.

  He imagines the stack searchers trying to make sense of his pencil marks, tentative at first, then emboldened: The South Seas: A Record of Three Cruises in the Islands … Pt 1, The Marquesas, ca. 1889, an original manuscript (though the attendant has insisted the microfiche will do); Robert Louis Stevenson and family, March 1893, among a handful of photographs; and, he still can’t quite believe his luck, Robert Louis Stevenson, ca. 1892 / sketched by Girolamo Pieri Ballati Nerli, a pencil drawing.

  The last is as close as he’s come to the real subject of his search, the Italian painter’s oil rendering of the Scottish writer in Samoa, and Lewis can feel a pleasurable surge of discovery, of vague outlines becoming near and tangible, and the intimate truth of touch. In a few days he will travel to Apia to continue his research, and staring up at the frosted window he can already picture a mountain forest framed there, lush with tree ferns and weeping with waterfalls. He becomes tangled in these threading, shooting thoughts.

  By contrast, the portrait is elegant in its restraint, and Lewis is excited by everything that it refuses.

  He advances over the marble mosaic of Abel Tasman’s early mapping of Australia, its dreamlike doodling, and enters the library. Perhaps too swiftly. For he is soon intercepted by the security guard, whose worried brow moves up and down, taking him in: silver moustache, red braces, brogues. Lewis’s pressed pinstripe shirt seems to pass the test, as does his lack of a backpack, but the guard still looks suspicious as he darts away, in jerky strides, towards the Special Collections area at the back of the Reading Room.

  Only the manuscript is ready for collection. Here the Scottish writer’s spacious South Seas world has been reduced to a drab little box; inside is a teal-coloured wheel of microfiche. There are plastic-coated instructions for its use, but Lewis has left his reading glasses at home. Instead, his kindly neighbour at the microfiche reader counter – her pinkish face peeping out from an aureole of silver hair – shows him how to feed the tape through the machine and which buttons to press.

  Lit up on the screen, the handwriting looks strangely squashed and spidery at first, with things darting out into the margins, crossed out. There is a chapter on DEATH but the page on screen is darkened, difficult to read. Back and forth the tape goes, beginning to sing. Other chapters fly past, a group of words returning to him as an afterimage: strange, austere and feathered mountains … Even on a computer screen, the writing unfolds as if freshly inked. Back and forth the tape goes, the singing sound spinning, humming higher and higher, a coloratura aria in the Reading Room.

  He can’t divorce the writing from that sound. A whirring wind, the call of the dead. The Scottish writer’s words are sifting through time, sieved and spun forward by the microfiche, looking for a host. Lewis is thinking this as the black tape begins to thicken and bulge, ballooning from its sprocket. Now it is unspooling, first into his lap and then out onto the floor, gathering like kelp on the sea-green carpet of the Reading Room. An attendant is summoned.

  It is not unlike being back at school, Lewis thinks, this feeling of silent reproach as the truant tape is slowly reeled in. With his tongue protruding, the attendant is different from the ones earlier this morning. ‘Will that be all?’ The man finally asks, confiscating the now tightly wound wheel of microfiche.

  ‘No, that’s okay – I’ll wait for the other requests,’ Lewis says.

  Sitting across from the collection counter, he remembers Aunt Agatha saying that bad behaviour should never be rewarded, and he wonders if that will be the end of it. Then – once again he can’t believe his luck – there is another changeover of attendants, friendlier this time. Miraculously it seems the photographs have arrived.

  He is led towards a large leather-topped table with the sign Reserved for using maps, plans or posters. Light pours in through the glass ceiling; today everything is lit up as bright as the Sydney sky.

  The Scottish writer is seated on a leather chaise between his wife and his widowed mother, his stepdaughter’s face looming over his shoulder, at their temporary digs at the Oxford Hotel in Sydney, on excursion from Samoa. The way they are seated along the couch, at an angle and looking off to the right, makes Lewis think of a doctor’s waiting room. The leather studs glisten like eyes; pushed to one corner is a book, its cover darkened, dog-eared. What strikes him as strange is that the chaise is made for one person, not these jostling, dovetailing identities, hands entwining, bodies held in tongue-and-groove. A floating vessel for a single soul at rest, not unlike a psychiatrist’s couch.

  He tries to imagine unfolding along it, in the Scottish writer’s velvet coat and long yellow socks, but he can’t. For his own dealings with a doctor, once twice-weekly, now every few months, he communes cocooned, bolt upright, in an Arne Jacobsen chair shaped like an egg.

  For a moment the photo is eased out from its myla
r sleeve for Lewis to inspect more closely. Its surface is matt and velvety, inviting touch, but the attendant slips it quietly back under plastic and whisks it away. Soon more are brought forth in a flourish of white cotton gloves. Silver gelatin portraits of the writer taken at H. Walter Barnett’s studios in Pitt Street, mounted on cardboard and alive with foxing. In another the writer relaxes, splayed out on a beach, with one sandy foot protruding, hair garlanded Islander style. This photo is more fragile, winking shyly through the plastic – Please do not take out of the envelope – still, Lewis can’t help slipping his finger in when the attendant isn’t looking, to feel the fraying of its edges, the deep gash in its corner, as if lashed by the palm tree dwelling there.

  But it is the drawing Lewis has been waiting for. It is the portrait in its original guise, rendered not in oil but in pencil, in rehearsal for the real thing. Even the attendants are aflutter at the drawing’s arrival; it’s rare for DG P2 / 48 to rise from the cool depths of the library’s sandstone basement.

  At first they worry that the light is too busy and bright for these soft shadings of pencil, an image of powdery vapour, winking at them through the mylar. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll guard it with my life.’ Lewis says it so seriously, his moustache turned suddenly soulful, that they begin to slowly retreat, back to their desk across the channel of sea-green carpet. So for a brief moment he can commune with the drawing as if cocooned in an egg-shaped chair.

  Is he disappointed by the drawing? For that’s all it is, 40.4 centimetres by 28.4 centimetres, so the label reads; more paper than pencil. His eye quickly alights. First to the watercolour marking of the artist, an inky smudge in the corner, then up to the writer’s ear, vibrating in the centre of the picture. From there his eye climbs steadily, across the writer’s face, to leap up and straddle the strange bump, almost like a fontanelle, on his forehead. Without him realising it, it makes him fall in love again, but somehow differently this time, like finding a longed-for object of desire unveiled and nude for the first time.

  ‘What is it about the portrait?’ his doctor had asked, as if attraction could be explained through rational lines of enquiry, by isolating a single thread to pull at some aspect previously unknown, perhaps from his childhood. Lewis couldn’t answer him. Was it a painterly thing, a familiar face – avuncular, almost – presented plainly and stripped back, or the more troublesome idea of the subject himself – someone we presumed to know, the famous writer of a library of books, the teller of tales, who seemed eager to speak to us again? The portrait’s thin painted lips refused to part, and Lewis loved it all the more.

  But his eyes are failing him, and still he needs to see. Along the bottom of the drawing the artist has left three lines of cursive script, scribbled in Italian. Now the words blur, three smudged lines, in the unblinking Sydney light. If only he hadn’t left his glasses at home, in the rush to be here at opening hour.

  Lewis picks up the drawing, still shiny in its sheet of plastic, and pushes his chair back from the table, exposing a wedge of carpet at his feet. As he tilts the portrait away from himself, a few words draw clear: Al mio caro amico H. Walter Barnett, … He can sense the attendants beginning to stir, glancing across from their desk, each of them caught – he and them – in the public act of looking.

  Just a few more words and he’ll be there. He pushes the chair back even further, opening up a larger field of carpet, and extends his arms, pushing the picture out towards the sea-green background, seeking both focus and depth.

  Still the drawing catches the light, a distant mirage. And then out just a little further with his fingers, so the picture seems to flash there in the space: questo ricordo di Samoa Girolamo Pieri Nerli offre.

  The words are dancing in the Sydney light, thrilling and tripping, as he topples from his chair, toppling towards the carpet – Lewis can make out little blotches of blue – towards the drawing of the writer now floating on its sea of green, beyond the reach of his fingers.

  Security has been summoned. But all Lewis can hear are the watermarked words of the artist, their sweet offering of Samoa, calling him.

  Chapter 2

  TUSITALA

  Turned to the painter, a pink ear blooms, as if the writer can hear an island of conversations – imagining them all speaking at once – and then the world outside the island. Time threading, these voices are ushered in languages he cannot even pretend to understand, fragments of stories asking for a narrative. It is as if his ear has summoned this trade wind of words, drawing them like the call of a conch.

  Three miles downhill through roughly hacked forest is the watery receptacle of Apia Harbour. Nine days by steamer ship is Sydney; a month or more via San Francisco is London, a further day ahead by whim of the International Date Line. Quite deliberate is this perch in the Pacific. The writer has no choice but to imagine.

  The painter is Italian, as big-boned as the writer is thin. He arrived from Sydney aboard the Lübeck just a few days before and is said to be something of a stylist – the daring harbinger of what they are calling southern neocontinentalism. A preposterous thought. And without even a letter of introduction he is here. Seeing the painter now setting up shop in his smoking room, the writer sees an artistic interloper, but also someone who could be a useful distraction from the days and weeks of writing ahead.

  The writer is perched on a carver, a lion-skin rug separating him from the man who has come to begin his portrait. The painter stands on the edge of the rug, unsure whether to advance or retreat.

  ‘So, what are they saying about me?’ the writer asks, as if testing the painter’s parameters for devotion and discretion. ‘The cigar smokers of the Union Club, the ink slingers at The Times.’

  The painter carries his weight with a swimmer’s slow grace. ‘Your letters are explosive, maestro,’ he replies, now advancing across the patch of mangy fur. ‘More explosive than the nitroglycerine the Germans are making from their boats of copra. They say you have been selling rifles to the natives.’

  The writer’s eyes have grown huge and hungry, drawing the painter towards his lonely side of the rug. He observes how the painter likes to use his hands when he speaks, blurring the space between them and ushering a tide of Titian-tinged words. These lap at his feet as strangely transformed as driftwood.

  ‘Without the hurricane and your support of Mata‘afa, Samoa and the Pacific would be Germany’s by now.’

  Samoa – a word, an island, fecund and floating. It satisfies the writer to think that he has filled imaginations faraway just by being here. He remembers the upturned German warship that greeted his own arrival three hurricane seasons before. It still lies stranded in the harbour, its masts gently prodding the horizon, landfall for the stray souls of children and frigatebirds.

  ‘Forget about the Kaiser,’ the painter continues, his hands swimming in semaphore, ‘the Queen and the President – they wish they could give you Samoa and let you do what you like with it.’

  Samoa. Just the name summons another warm rush of words:

  Fair Isle at Sea – thy lovely name Soft in my ear like music came. That sea I loved, and once or twice I touched at isles of Paradise.

  He watches the painter extract his tools of torture from the wooden box: an arsenal of brushes, tubes of oil and a battlesmeared palette. With fingernails flecked with paint, the artist lays them out on the card table for the writer to see. The easel hovers uncertainly over the two of them, not unlike a guillotine.

  It is at this point that the painter drops to the rug, his body collapsing around the small sketchbook he holds in his hands.

  The writer is conflicted about sitting for the portrait. For longer than he can remember he has concocted his own portrait through the energy of his words: novels, memoirs, children’s stories, all trained on the horizon like the stoic lighthouses of his Scottish father and grandfather. Today he feels exhausted. Yes, another painting could be useful. Something else to live on after his death, which is knit to him closer than a wife, closer tha
n an eye. He has never felt so outside of his body as he does now, hovering on his carver, afloat in the twilight of the smoking room. He is everywhere but here. A rushing wind, called by the conch, the teller of tales.

  His mind briefly alights. Surely to give in to the painter’s wishes, to sit for the portrait, is proof that he is, after all, alive – not a corpse of a man hemorrhaging a body of blood. I am alive, he thinks, edging back so his feet leave the ground, and once again he is floating.

  For a moment he imagines he is a child in his highchair about to receive boiled egg and soldiers. His earliest memory. Why then, as the painter takes out his charcoal and begins a preliminary sketch, does his life flash before him as proof, instead, of his coming death?

  He tries to think of nothing, calming his mind to a point of stillness, encouraged by the susurrations of the painter’s charcoal.

  Beyond the makeshift studio, the blackout curtains are drawn against the morning sun. Out through a chink in the curtains his thoughts dart. Through their heaviness he can hear the call of the crimson-crowned fruit dove – the soft ooh-ooh-ooh ending in a rapid oo-oo. Closing his eyes for a moment he imagines it is the sound of a blood vessel bursting, and then quickly another, until he is spitting blood again in his head.

  Bien caillé, the doctor at Hyères had called his spitted blood. Clotted. But that was a decade before, and here in the Pacific, he reminds himself, he is the recipient of what seems to be a miracle of molecular reconstitution: My bones are sweeter to me.

  Hiring the Casco was his widowed mother’s wedding gift. It was her idea to anchor him here – away from the world’s prying eyes, harbouring his sensitive soul on this island of trees. A storm on horseback, she would be on the other side of Upolu by now, for the opening of the new London Missionary Society church at Matafele.

  Closer to home is his American wife, dressed in her blue native dress patterned with mould, hovering over giant eggplants and cabbages in the kitchen garden. She has always been creative with her hands, his wife. There are the breadfruit trees newly planted, and just recently she has taken to feeding the cows bananas to thicken their milk. The servants like to call her Aolele la‘ikiki, Little Flying Cloud, aloft in her tiny white boots.