A Woman of the Inner Sea (28 page)

The feature quoted Pellegrino as saying, I think my impetus as a director was based on the fact that I came from so far away. Now I’ve probably been too long absent from my Australian well-springs. I want to go back, gather myself, and make one beautiful Australian film.

The beautiful Australian film he wanted to make was a novel by one Bruno Casey. In summary it didn’t seem so surefire a story. An Australian woman runs a farm in western New South Wales during World War II while her husband is away in the Southwest
Pacific. Her husband’s elderly parents are also partners to this arrangement: her husband’s older version therefore helps her run the place. Assigned an Italian prisoner of war as a farm laborer, the woman falls in love with him. Her husband is crippled in a jeep smash on Bougainville. It had all to be in the telling.

The film was to be shot in western New South Wales on a property called Craigholme northwest of Cobar.

Kate wakes, feeling at first tireder than the aged western plains. But her remembered information restores her all at once.

Gus wakes too and groans and says, It’s cold.

But he lets go of her and is embarrassed for what she will think of him.

She asks, Do you know the properties around here?

Gus confessed to having worked on some of them. He was a remarkable man, willing to answer any question in good faith on first awakening.

—Do you know one called Craigholme?

—Oldest bloody property in the district, said Gus as if it were one of the fundamental data of geography.

C
RAIGHOLME, the set of
The Italian Visitor
, sat framed by bare imported poplars beneath a moist dawn. It has not been too easy for Kate and Gus and the beasts to reach it. They have walked more than two hours through the predawn, negotiating seventeen wire fences and crossing five sloppy red clay roads gouged with the marks of bogged tires.

Craigholme itself was a white wool-palace with broad verandahs. Its poor-relative litter of outbuildings in aged brick and slab timber hunch wetly around it. A string of caravans, where cast and camera crew were clearly living and—at the moment—sleeping, connected the big house to the shearing shed and the shearers’ quarters, which sit on a bare knoll parallel to the wooded one the big house takes up.

From beneath dripping stringybarks, Gus, Kate and the beasts observed this present capital of Pellegrino’s imagination.

A man in a yellow wet-weather jacket emerged from the end room of the shearers’ quarters and made his way with fuming breath to a long white catering truck. His hunched back and the vapor his breath made reminded Kate of her own coldness.

—Let me talk, Kate told Gus. The power to issue commands had shifted to her now. She expected though that the beasts would do most of the talking.

They all walked like habitués down from the last fence amongst weeping eucalypts into the film location. Stars and cameo roles, cameramen, soundmen, boom operators, grips and best boys, electricians, drivers, carpenters, continuity women, makeup artists and costumers slept all around them as they progressed.

The hunched, steaming man had by then entered the catering truck and Kate knocked on the door. The man reappeared, rubbing
seamed hands. From within an early morning radio quacked resonantly on a stainless steel bench. The noise bespoke a warm studio, a newsreader with coffee close to hand.

—Police are interviewing a Myambagh father and son about the death of one man and the disappearance of a further man and woman.

Would they have Guthega and Noel under hard inquiry in separate rooms? If Jack had anything to do with it, they’d be treated gently, as shocked survivors.

—It is now believed that Myambagh man Barry McNeal (Kate was astounded to hear Jelly called by his civil name) perished in an abortive attempt to blow up the Myambagh–Cobar railway line. Two associates of Mr. McNeal’s vanished later in the night, when they set off across the flood-swollen township of Myambagh in an aluminum boat. The names of the missing couple are a Mr. Gus Schulberger of Bourke and Miss Kate Gaffney of Myambagh. Grave fears are held for their safety …

—Yes? asked the canteen man again. He had not heard the content of what the newsreader had said. He had heard only the general contours: Myambagh, flood, the normal cast of missing persons. Every flood gathered its quorum of the missing. No foul play was ever suspected; foul water took all the blame.

—We brought the animals Mr. Pellegrino wanted, Kate told the canteen man.

—Oh yes. I don’t know much about that.

—He needs animals for today’s shoot, said Kate. Or it might be tomorrow’s. Anyhow, we’ve brought them.

The man caught sight of Menzies and Chifley.

—They aren’t caged.

—Yes. We don’t confine them. They aren’t lions and tigers.

The man laughed without any ill intent.

—Free range, eh?

—Mr. Pellegrino told us to contact him soon as we got here.

—They had a night shoot last night. Give him another quarter of an hour’s sleep, love. Have a cup of tea with me. Christ, they just stand there.

—They think they’re members of the family, said Gus, still honestly deploring the fact. My wife and I raised them from the egg and the pouch.

The man was not to know the wife was gone, and he thought the wife must be Kate, and the reference calmed him a little.

They drank tea, giving Frank Pellegrino and his American wife a last quarter-hour of sleep.

—What agency sent you? the canteen man asked. He was casual. He was not prosecuting them.

—Bernard Astor, said Kate, flying automatically so to speak, with thousands of feet of thinness under her wings.

—I thought he was in promotions. I didn’t know he was an agent.

—See, said Kate. We did this job for him at a film premiere in Sydney.

Young men and women carrying metal boxes or battery belts or holsters for spanners and screwdrivers round their waists came and went, making themselves tea and coffee. A man with a light meter round his neck on a black cord arrived rubbing his hands and yelling, Oh Jesus, it’s a cocoa morning, boys and girls!

This fellow Kate recognized: Pellegrino’s boyhood friend, Pete Rapotec, who had shot all Pellegrino’s films, the good and the bad, just as Marty Fenton, graduate of the Adelaide University School of Music, had written all Frank Pellegrino’s scores. Rapotec was a walking index of Pellegrino’s loyalty to the talents of old friends.

The canteen man grabbed a woolly-headed boy with a belt full of tools around his waist and said, Rabbit, take these people over to Frank’s caravan.

Frank
. The egalitarian film set in the egalitarian bush in egalitarian Australia.

The boy led them across open ground on grass which crackled—its moisture had frozen overnight. The beasts at this or that stage either followed, led, or outflanked. They got to the caravan with
PELLEGRINO
stenciled on its door and the boy knocked. Opening up, Frank Pellegrino was wearing a towel around his waist. His upper body had an olive smoothness which Kate remembered, but which had aged a little and acquired with success and failure baplike slabs of fat around the chest.

—Jesus, Rabbit, he said. This is worse than fucking Alaska.

He
had
once made a film in Alaska. With his childhood cameraman Rapotec. Music by his childhood composer Fenton. He stared
toward Gus and Kate and the loosely associated beasts, and moisture steamed from his undried shoulders.

—Do those two want a job? he asked, nodding toward Chifley and Menzies.

—We brought them for that, Kate told him.

—For what scene? I didn’t order them.

—My name’s Kate, Kate told him. I knew you. I worked with Bernard Astor.

—Kate?

—Kate Gaffney. You might remember. Adelaide.

First he looked over his shoulder, widening his eyes, shaking his head slightly within the boundaries of the wider, more sweeping movement.

—Listen, wait there. I’ll just get dressed. Wait there.

Naturally enough, he didn’t want his wife to hear the utterance of old lovers’ names.

While Pellegrino got dressed, Kate led Rabbit and Gus down the hill a little. In this process Chifley and Menzies were still outriders, keeping watch on the limits of the known, tolerable, breathable world.

—I might, suggested Rabbit. If you don’t mind …

He nodded to the steaming knot of men and women around the catering truck.

—You go by all means, said Kate.

She watched him dance off to breakfast, and the cold burned within her like a flame and caused the old itching of the shoulders. Soon Frank Pellegrino emerged from the caravan, wearing untied sneakers and pants and a leather trenchcoat of the kind which must have cost him some thousands of dollars in New York but which he wore like a Myambagh Escapee wearing overalls.

—Kate? he asked afresh.

—Kate Gaffney.

—I heard the radio. I wondered, you know. But you weren’t washed away? Some other Kate Gaffney …

—Yes, some other.

—I think it’d be a bloody mercy if this fucking location flooded. But listen, there was talk about an explosion …

—Not us, Mr. Pellegrino, said Gus firmly.

—What about those animals we brought, Kate asked him.

—Christ, you’ve changed, love.

And then, being the decent or at least sentimental man he was, he put his hand out and touched her clogged hair by her cheek.

—I mean that without prejudice. Naturally you don’t work for Bernard anymore?

—No. This is Gus, Frank. Gus, Frank Pellegrino.

—Augustus Schubert, or some name like that? asked Frank, ever attentive, ever a student of news broadcasts.

—Schulberger, Mr. Pellegrino, said Gus, hoping Pellegrino liked battlers.

Pellegrino, who looked more of a crafty Sicilian than his parents did and who probably found it wise to cultivate his ancestrally wise peasant air, assessed Gus. Gus did not meet his gaze but fixed his eyes frankly on the misty hill behind the caravan. Pending judgment.

Before long, Frank gave up being an employer and spoke quietly to Kate.

—As I told you I would, I always remembered how you were kind to me in Adelaide. You were my guide in the bloody netherworld, Kate. I’m pleased you didn’t drown. I mean, I can’t help wondering what happened to you since … You know what’s happened to me, anyhow. Every bastard’s been dancing on my grave, but I won’t bloody die for them. And I’ve got a bloody good wife, Kate.

—Can we stay here? asked Gus suddenly, since the reunion dance was taking so long.

—I don’t know about incognito, Gus. Kate’s a well-placed woman. There’d be a lot of people sad if they couldn’t celebrate her survival. I think we ought to let people know.

By common consent Gus and Kate kept silent for a while. Kate said, Make room for us in the budget, Frank.

Frank Pellegrino scratched a worry sore on his lower lip.

—Come on, Frank, Kate insisted. Be a sport.

—Oh Jesus. A sport. Is that what you want?

He shook his head, but in a way which added up the old loyalties and debts.

—Okay. Report down to the production office—it’s the one closest to the catering van. I’ll ring ahead. Use any names you like. Tell them I sent you. You’re the animal wranglers. I reckon you’ll need accommodation. You’ve got to see the executive producer about that. Klaus. Next to the production office.

Menzies walked right past Frank Pellegrino.

—Reassure me though. What are these two like with actors?

Gus said quickly, The roo doesn’t box people.

—I don’t want him to box anyone, mate, said Frank. What I want is for him to wander up to our Italian leading man and give him one hell of a great bloody epiphany. The spirit of Australia eyeing the bugger off. I mean, he’s big, your roo, and he’s got that archetypal look. Would he stand still for a shampoo, do you reckon? Rapotec’ll want to give him one.

—Shampoo’s okay, said Gus.

—Our Italian leading man can have a bloody epiphany with the emu too. You know, the best things in the script are often things that befall you at the time, on location. So, Kate, you can hang round here while we film the grace notes with these two. You ought to dry off and get some breakfast. I’d better get back to the missus.

And with a small wave which gave them the liberty of the location, he turned and went back to his caravan, the sodden laces dragging, the leather coat crackling in this dry winter dawn.

It was in this way that Chifley and Menzies were not so much written as injected into the shooting schedule of the new Pellegrino movie.

The Italian prisoner of war is left by his charges at the gate of the sheep station. He asks in broken English where he is to go.

—Up that way, mate, say his departing Australian guards. Up at the house.

Walking up the long red road, he encounters Chifley blocking his path, a tutelary deity. Chifley weighs him in that direct contemplative way. It is not exactly the epiphany Frank Pellegrino wants, but it inhibits the Italian—at the threshold of the farmhouse where he’ll meet and become the lover of an alien woman—with a sense of the level, terrible strangeness of the country. At various stages the Italian encounters Chifley again, and Chifley’s gaze is to return to him frequently in flashback throughout the film.

Likewise Menzies’ enormous striding speed cuts across his vision, especially in a crucial early scene. The vehicle in which the Italian star and the female lead are traversing the great, vaporous plain encounters Menzies, who scoots along on an indifferent, uncompetitive parallel, in the end outspeeding the truck. Excellently
shot. Not overdone. The lead actors are required to occupy the truck during this long-range shoot: Pellegrino rarely permits standins. Kate and Gus attend the screening of the rushes every evening in the freezing shearing shed, where rugg-ed actors and crews pass bottles of cabernet sauvignon around from mouth to mouth and exclaim about Rapotec’s camerawork.

In the rushes, they see too the separately shot truck interior scene. The Italian prisoner turns to the woman in the truck—at this stage they don’t know each other well—with a wide-open and inappropriate smile on his face, because he thinks she has seen and been amused by this startling progress of great, flightless Menzies. But she has not even noticed Menzies. The bird is simply an unremarked item in her landscape. She wonders what this Italian is grinning at. She is hostile to the size of his grin. Gawp-eyed Menzies is a catalyst of hostility and so, in the end, of passion.