Lutum fecit ex sputo dominus et linivit oculos meos (The Lord made clay with spit and anointed my eyes ...)
THe haunt PROJECT IS PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WRITERS SA, AND IS SUPPORTED BY ARTS SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
Nonfiction by Brian Castro
So I didn’t know, of course, that the ski trip was already organised by my half-sister and her friend Sonya and that something was going to happen which they knew well in advance, because my father had written that something had to happen to me and would my half-sister get some help to create this scenario where, when this thing was over, they could all write about it? They would send aerogrammes whizzing across oceans, paper planes in their light-blue thinness, almost translucent so anyone could, without tearing them open, read the ball-point indentations backwards or in a mirror, and decipher the whole ski trip during which something would happen at Thredbo or Smiggins or Perisher and during which time I would learn to snow-plough or climb slopes forming herringbone patterns in the powder or descend, executing stem-Christies, parallel, or simply schuss into a tree and get myself well and truly killed—but it wasn’t going to happen that way because my father wrote that this had to be well-planned and it wasn’t going to be about skiing since I was a slow learner and that the trip would be a significant experience for me and because slow learners don’t really understand what experiences they are having at the time anyway. My father seemed to think: it would be a waste of time teaching him how to ski, better to get him into the mountains and slowly—he tried to italicise with lots of underlining—you would educate him, which was what he wrote to my half-sister who now shared all the aerogrammes with Sonya, slowly he will awaken to the fact that he is a man since it has taken him all this time at university reading books and losing his eyesight which we all know is caused by the imagination—you see, he is haunted by his imagination—and will you please get this friend of yours, Sanja, or whatever, sounds Russian—you know, I knew some terrific Russian girls in Harbin who could skate the pants off any man, but my grandmother told me they were just escaping the great Manchurian plague which came with the railway ... anyway, get this Sanja to collaborate with you to cure his blindness, but the best thing is to check it out first, as to what kind of blindness it is, whether it is ignorance or introversion and not inversion, and don’t do the experiment on your own because you know how that will turn out, get a friend, preferably a friend who is not too close, but someone—as you say, Sanja would be a good bet—who is older than he is, who can handle the game and take some fun from it, like lead him to one of your favourite haunts blindfolded or something and reveal reality to him ... and mind you, doing him this favour would last him a lifetime, so that’s all from me for now and I remain your loving papa etc ... and thus it came to pass that the three of us drove to the snow and at Perisher I had a small bunk in the chalet and the women had the big bedroom and there was a lounge with a fire beside the French windows outside of which the snow was piling up and I felt very cosy and excited that tomorrow morning we could all ski out the front door to the bottom of the ski lift and then I would learn from Sonya how to disembark the chairlift properly and then ski off to the left over some easy slopes which would soon begin to get steeper, mined with moguls, and where snow-ploughing wasn’t going to work that well, so firstly Sonya would teach me to do a ‘Christie’, which is some kind of beginner’s trick: forming a wedge by rotating one ski outwards from the stemmed ski and by shifting your weight to the right, let’s say, opposite to the downward direction, then making a V in reverse and then drawing in both skis to the parallel position perpendicular to the slope, you slowed before plunging again. Easy. I must say Sonya was a good teacher, patient and caring, and while we were doing it there was a brief moment when she bent right down in front of me and held the tips of my skis and we skied down, she going backwards gently and I feeling very thrilled in this position and then she let me go and I fell a few times but by the end of the day I was turning Christies, which is a name derived from Christiana in Norway (not Denmark) where it was first developed and now, back in the warmth and comfort of the chalet I went into the large bathroom by the big bedroom, luxuriating in the hot steam. I then went to sit in the sauna next door and suddenly Sonya came in totally naked and sat next to me so casually that I thought this was what one did in saunas and tried not to notice her nakedness though I had the beginnings of an erection beneath my towel, not missing the point that she was very blonde and her nipples were dark and this sent me into a curious swirl when just as suddenly in entered my half-sister, also entirely naked, who sat on the other side of me—my half-sister who was very dark and her nipples light. As the steam rose around us the two women began a conversation about skiing that morning, and as Sonya was showing how important the downhill ski edge was in turns, she placed her hand on my towel, and my half-sister was leaning on my shoulder to absorb Sonya’s expertise and before too long, covered in perspiration and steam, I was sandwiched between them, my obvious desire proving something to my father, at the same time releasing my half-sister from subscribing to Man magazine and Penthouse for the express purpose of leaving them under my pillow because obviously I wasn’t too bookish now, and was instead covered in embarrassment, though Sonya was kind enough to wipe me down and as a much more mature woman, comforted and cuddled me while my half-sister smiled painfully and left the sauna to go to her bedroom, somewhat disappointed, I think, that the experiment was so quick and easy, and on the way home none of us spoke very much, so I presumed it had all gone wrong because they couldn’t establish an understanding between them—not even about skiing!—and I grew silent as a sphinx until we ran out of petrol and the trip began to unravel as a disaster since there were no service stations open and I, having now become a man, finally got out at one and knocked at the house behind the shop and an Alsatian dog was suddenly lunging at me from behind the heavy glass door before a grumpy old woman with lilting German like she came from Bavaria brought out a can and filled it for us and at that very moment I felt that Sonya liked me and would have wanted to continue our relationship while my half-sister sat sourly in the back seat betrayed by this new liaison since in the dark Sonya was driving with one hand and placing her left hand in my lap except for when she had to change gears, the two of us playing a game of naming one’s favourite novels and I could imagine my half-sister writing to my father saying the experiment had failed, that her half-brother was definitely an invert, too obsessed by books, and though he may look normal, the books are definitely holding him back from normal life, that when my father eventually arrived in Australia he ought to force me to play golf or go to the races and they would all arrange girls for me to take out on these occasions, sporty girls who would teach me how to breathe underwater and do hand-stands on the lawn but of course this never happened because in less than a week after his arrival, my father asked Sonya, whom he still called Sanja, to accompany him to his new club where he would give her five hundred dollars to play the pokies, since he thought five hundred Australian was worth the same in Hong Kong dollars and so my mother and I stayed home sitting up late, watching television—I, who was suffering an exquisite jealousy though no longer blind, could at least now parallel ski in tidy tight turns in my imagination, sending up puffs of powder behind me so that I gradually disappeared from view.
✷✷✷
Brian Castro is the author of eleven novels, a volume of essays and a poetic memoir and cookbook His novels include the multi award-winning Double-Wolf, Shanghai Dancing and Blindness and Rage. He was the 2014 winner of the Patrick White Award for Literature and the 2018 Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry.
