Patrick White - The Eye of the Storm

Mamma would attempt to make what she was careful to refer to as her Version of the Greek dishes’, wearing an apron stained with tomato, her smile bitter for the oil she had spilt; because Mamma had only been taught to read poetry, receive calls, and discuss life on marble terraces beside the Gulf. Most excellent are the soudzoukákia of Anastasia de Santis— Papa would pretend to gobble, to emphasize this excellence, though Greek food is fodder beside the subtleties of Bologna, Torino, not forgetting little Parma. It was one of the jokes Mamma accepted, because they loved each other, even in Marrickville.

After deciding for nursing, Mary de Santis had once invited her fellow probationers Eileen Dooley and Verlie Rumble to a meal. Her gesture had been spontaneous enough, but misgiving set in as she watched her friends walking from the tram towards the junction of Warnock and Cathcart Streets, that brownest, most blistered corner in the whole suburb, on it the MIXED BUSINESS (Enrico de Santis) with residence above and behind.

Her martyrdom made public, Mamma appeared more desperate than ever. The black dress probably looked like mourning to the two summery visitors. Wearing over it a freshly stained apron, she brought them her Version’ of the Greek soudzoukákia.

‘These, I believe, are also called “Smyrna sausages”,’ she explained to Eileen and Verlie, who giggled.

‘Whatever they’re called, they look tasty,’ Eileen said to encourage Mamma.

It was a hot day. They were sitting beneath the trellis, its attempt at grapes mildewed by the humidity. Papa came out from the shop with a wicker-covered demijohn. Eileen and Verlie barely allowed themselves wine, and giggled as it touched their lips.

Eileen was pushing the food around the plate with her fork. ‘Gee, they’re rich, aren’t they?’ She had meant ‘foreign.

The girls had begun looking with a changed expression at their friend Mary de Santis, who grew reckless: she raised her glass and drained it in a purple, choking gulp. She could feel the wine returning to her cheeks, and what was almost insolence replacing her normal docility.

‘This is the food it is natural for us to eat.’ It was strange hearing herself talk like a bad translation, but in keeping with her foreignness, as she looked at Eileen and Verlie, the one dumpy, freckled, red, the other simply a pale girl.

By the time Mamma brought out the snapshots Mary de Santis had recovered, her docility, and her agony was complete. Mamma sat holding the snaps, her hands like graceful paper fans gone sooty in the grate. The photographs caused so much pain, you often wondered why she had to produce them. Today in particular, under the eyes of these gawping girls, they were excruciating.

‘These are at Smyrna,’ Mamma explained, herself laid bare.

‘Aren’t they funny!’ Eileen said. ‘The houses! Do people live like that?’

‘No. They don’t exist. The houses were destroyed by the Turks. This is one of the cathedral. This is where the Turks crucified the archbishop — on the doors of his own church. Afterwards they put out his eyes.’

The two girls were gasping and perspiring for the monstrous event they were being forced to experience.

‘All these are happier pictures,’ Mamma suggested, though her sigh would not have allowed you to believe; ‘all at Athens. After the Catastrophe we fled to Metropolitan Greece, and were some years as refugees. This is where Máro has been born. See? Máro as a small baby.’

They wouldn’t have believed it! Mary de Santis: this papoose thing; and black .

Mary de Santis realized she had reached the apogee of her foreignness; that she accepted it as part of her Greek fatality she only understood in later life. Where earlier in the sequence of events wine had replaced her docility with insolence, she was now gently drunk with pride.

‘Oh, what are these, Mrs de Santis?’ Passing through the house to the street the two girls could not resist what might be another source of danger.

‘These are icons, Christian— Orthodox icons.’

The girls breathed and mumbled. They said they were Catholic.

‘My husband was a Catholic — until he thought better of it.’ Mamma gently smiled.

The girls looked pained; one of them asked, ‘What is he now?’

‘He is nothing,’ Anastasia de Santis admitted, out of her tragic depths. ‘Oh yes, my husband is a courageous man.’

Brave? Perverse? Self-destructive? It was difficult to decide; or whether he was something of each: Enrico de Santis, the fashionable gynaecologist turned refugee and shopkeeper. ‘What is the use, Anastasia? By the time they have chewed me up in examinations, and convinced themselves I am not disruptive to their system, what shall I have left to give? I shall take this shop, and make a decent living. We have each other — as capital, haven’t we? And a shop will be entertaining for the child: all that pretty prosciutto and mortadella. Think of the geography she will learn from the labels on the tins! The linguistic advantages!’ Papa was at his most ironical; while Mamma invoked her Panayia and the saints.

In retrospect, Mary de Santis realized her parents’ love for each other had been their religion. Because she had grown up excluded from this, without their being conscious of it, she had evolved tentatively, painfully, a faith of her own.

On the surface it was her vocation as a nurse. During his worst mental torments Dr Enrico de Santis would ask to see her certificate. He seemed to find comfort in knowing that she was continuing in a tradition. In the final stages he would beg her for the needle, said she had the ‘kind touch’. She had obeyed his wishes to the extent of breaking her vows. While Mamma prayed to the Panayia, Saints Anastasia, Barbara, Cosmas and Damian — the lot. Mamma’s lips and temples grew transparent with prayer, as Papa’s whole being revealed its increasing dereliction.

After several years of trial and attempted expurgation, all three had been involved in the great mystery. Mary de Santis, the only survivor, emerged as the votary of life: there were the many others she must save for it; or ease out as she had eased the failed man her father, and her equally failed saint of a mother.

In spite of her certificate and thirty-three years of experience, Sister de Santis still considered herself a novice; humility would not have allowed her to claim status in any hierarchy of healing, whether physical or spiritual.

But she was sometimes taken by the hand and shown.

She also enjoyed worldliness. At her first meeting with Mrs Hunter those fifteen years ago, her future employer had set out to clarify a situation. ‘Although you are my nurse, Miss de Santis — God knows why I need a nurse for this — upset—“breakdown” my bitchier friends choose to call it — I don’t want you to emphasize the fact. No ghastly uniform. I’d like people to accept you as my companion. I shall think of you as my friend.’ Then, for the first time, you experienced Mrs Hunter’s smile: a golden net she spread over the innocent or unwary; and because in those days you were both, you had been caught.

During the first weeks with this unorthodox case, the steps you took across the geometric rugs, on jarrah floors of a sullen red, were hardly more than automatic. The silence hypnotized no less than the strangely broken voice which commanded while inviting.

Mrs Hunter decided, ‘I want you to make this your home. Go into the kitchen and see what you can find to eat if you feel hungry in the night. Take yourself off to bed if I’m boring you; I know I do run on at times — from being so much alone.’

Elizabeth Hunter spoke with such a studied earnestness she made all but the most cynical, or the most callous, believe. Mary de Santis was neither. She wanted a belief, which perhaps this ageing, though still beautiful woman could give her: secondhand experience must be more enlightening than that which may never come your way; and Mrs Hunter was composed of the many relationships she had enjoyed, with the many friends she was still seeing in spite of her myth of loneliness.