Pietà by Michael Fitzgerald

Author:Michael Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925760828
Publisher: Transit Lounge

Thursday, 18 May 1972

There is a church in Rome dedicated to the souls of the murdered, with bones and skulls construed into the most elaborate of chandeliers, as if the victims of violence can guide us, and for us to bathe in their light. The church is just around the corner from the convent, near the river, but when I go there this morning it is all boarded up. Chiuso. Perhaps, like me, it is waiting for Whitsunday, just a few days from now.

When I wind back a different way to the convent, I pass the entrance to a courtyard. It is home to a cat, with its own lean-to hut in the corner, and a grove of orange trees bulging with fruit. The day is still warming, but I can smell them, along with the last blossoms of spring. So when I see Borromini’s folly through the trees, pulled into the forced perspective of his colonnade with the heroic figure dancing at the end, I am heady already.

If a sudden shift of the eye can convince us that what appears to be a life-size figure is, in fact, barely two school rulers tall, along the length of a short cricket pitch and not forty metres away, then I wonder what the imagination can do. It is another miracle of perspective. For no sooner is the cat rubbing my leg than I am back under the fruit trees of Port Pirie where I grew up. These were of almond and nectarine, and ants swarmed underneath that I can remember stomping. Nearly twenty years later I still feel the flush of guilt. These memories, you see, I had supposedly given up when I took my vows. There was no then, just now; no before, only after.

Teaching art at St Aloysius these past few years has indulged me. By its very nature, art has a memory. Can we control the feelings that flow in and out of it, mixing with our own? In the end, how can our response not be personal?

I am thinking this as I travel through the gallery rooms above the orange trees, in this former palace of a cardinal called Spada. There is a portrait of him, pen poised, dressed in a gorgeous coral gown aproned in lace. The picture is bordered in gilt on a high red wall crowded with dozens of others. How can frames contain so many memories? Already I have lost sight of the invigilator, slumped in his chair and superstitiously grabbing at his crotch, and I am back in my sleep-out at Port Pirie.

There were two gold-framed pictures I grew up with, both inherited from the closed-down convent in Solomontown: one of a sleeping baby Jesus enfolded by the Madonna’s blue mantle; the other of a bearded monk in a yellow-dappled arbour overlooking the Amalfi Coast. I wonder now if I had fallen under the spell of these pictures. Perhaps at night their smoky colours had escaped their frames to enter my dreams like vapours, to take the form of my nun’s vows in Adelaide.

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