Distant Voices (52 page)

But I digress. Gianfranco is dead, crushed in his small vineyard when his jeep rolled over him three years ago this week. So too is Mario Rossi, who played the Mexican Hat Dance through the night at the
festa
that welcomed my friends and me, and our families, into the valley; so too is Agostino Antolini. And so is Diamanta, Agostino's widow.

Bruno is
patrone
now. He is not a model farmer of the kind approved in Brussels. He has a confusion of wheat, olive trees and trellised vines, with tobacco as the only cash crop. In 1974, the year the electricity came, he and Mita were still living by barter. In 1981, the year they got the phone on and the bathroom with bidet was built above the stables, they were fully fledged consumers. I remember seeing for the first time the strange, flickering blue light of television in the silhouette of their fifteenth-century house. Directly behind and above them is the Monte Maggio, with its forest wall of beech, oak and chestnut. It was on these slopes that Mita's family, who were landless peasants, worked as share-croppers. So it is not surprising that she, not Bruno, is the most ambitious consumer; there is a second bathroom downstairs now, with gold taps and lights around the mirror.

As for Bruno, well, these days he is under siege from
i cinghiali
, the wild boar that come down from the Monte Maggio. They come when he leaves the fields and they eat the maize until he reappears at sunrise. They respect his authority, clearly. He carries only his ancient
zappa
, a heavy steel mattock balanced on a long wooden handle. So it made sense that he should make the scarecrow look like himself, or how he wished to look. It is mounted on a wooden steed, ever vigilant, an heroic figure. It even wears his best blue cap.

But the wild boar don't give a damn. They come and eat the maize anyway. I doubt if they would be as bold were Diamanta, Bruno's mother, alive. Like the boar, she would
prowl the fields in the pre-dawn light, appearing in doorways and windows, motionless, hollow-eyed and swathed in black, scaring the wits out of
bambini
and unsuspecting foreigners.

So Bruno thought of something new. On my first night back in the valley, just before midnight, when all sound is limited to the plop of falling fruit, Bruno brought up his own artillery. For seven straight sleepless hours the valley was blasted by rap, heavy metal, Motown, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Elvis and none other than Richie Benaud. Now Richie is normally a soft-spoken bloke; but here he was at four in the morning bellowing an old Test score to non-cricketing fans from Teverina to Seano. Richie, inexplicably, was on the tape that Bruno had made and which was broadcast at multi-decibel level from an outsized speaker in the saddlebag of his wooden Don Quixote. When I pleaded for a respite the next morning, he said, ‘Wild boars hate music,' though he failed to explain why they should have it in for cricket.

Had I not realised this was a Bruno plot, I might have taken action similar to that of the miscreants who, in understandable desperation, shot out the speakers of the Miracle Nun of Teverina. The Miracle Nun lived nearby, in a hilltop fortress guarded by Filipinos. She claimed to have been blind and to have had her sight restored by a vision of the Virgin. This was fine; but there was a sinister and pecuniary air about her sect, like that of the Moonies; and she herself was seldom seen. But she was heard. At night three-foot speakers dispensed her diatribe to a local population that, while respectful of the Church, has a history of anti-clericism. One night there were four shotgun blasts and silence was restored. The Miracle Nun has now gone, owing, it is said, many millions of lire in unpaid tax.

Italy was the first country I came to from Australia thirty years ago. I got off the ship at Genoa and lived here for most of that year; and the civilisation, kindness and sardonic way of the Italians have enriched my life ever since, and once again offer a future. In the early days, I travelled with two compatriots, one of whom bore the fine name of Bernardo Giuliano and was a distant relative of the Sicilian gunman,
Salvatore Giuliano. Bernie, a gentle taciturn man who spoke with an Australian country drawl, managed to perplex everyone he met by not understanding a word of Italian. We three ran a small freelance organisation, grandly called INTEREP. Our offices were in numerous
pensioni
, youth hostels and fields. We wrote about pasta, opera and cars; and no one paid us.

My favourite city then was Siena in Tuscany; and some years later I was introduced to the rib of mountains that runs eastward from the vast plain of the Val Di Chiana to the upper valley of the Tiber. This is where the hill tribes are; the Antolinis and Rossis and Vallis. The beauty of the place is announced by Cortona, an Etruscan town that, inside its walls, is Renaissance Italy in every modern sense. For as long as I can remember, the
comune
at Cortona has routinely provided art and music, scholarship and politics from all over the world, as a public service. The municipal library is world renowned. Last week, in the Piazza della Repubblica, the mayor, Ilio Pasqui, made Alexander Dub
č
ek an honorary citizen; almost everybody came.

Like most of Tuscany, Cortona has been communist-run for years, and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) emblem is fixed to the wall opposite the clock tower. The PCI, which recently changed its name to the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), today holds half the thirty seats in the
comune
, with the Socialists providing a majority. Those at present issuing blanket inanities about communism might reflect upon the achievements of this decidedly non-Stalinist variant in Italy, where mass support for ‘Eurocommunism' has helped modern democracy to flourish where it matters most to people: not in central government but in the regions, cities and towns.

An American writer and friend, Nancy Jenkins, who used to live here, once described the time of year when the Tuscan summer ‘seems to turn and settle on itself like a tawny country cat curling in the warmth of the sun . . .' That is the time now. Along from Cortona, just before you come to the Miracle Nun's place, the swimming pool owned by the
local parish sits deserted in a saddle of the mountains like a Hockney painting superimposed on countryside. The last of the Rossi brothers, Guido, stands on his balcony at Teverina, a handkerchief around his throat where he had an operation for cancer, rendering him silent. Beneath him is the Virgin lit up in her place on his facing stone wall. His wife, a jolly woman, died last year; and I sometimes think about him alone in that cavernous place.

This is the time when assorted feuds come to a head as the grapes ripen; and much of the wine will be terrible as usual. (Once, I said to a visitor, ‘See that wine you're drinking; it comes from the vines just over there.' To which he replied, ‘Doesn't really travel, does it?')

As for Bruno, he is inspecting the threshing machine, whose duplicate is in the museum of folklore in Cortona. He'll soon hitch it to his old tractor and will it into action. But now it is Sunday, and he is sitting with his cronies outside the local
bottega
, where they are fixtures every week. He is wearing his new brown suit; his shoes are polished, his jacket over his shoulders, a glass in his hand. ‘Wild boars', he mumbles as a greeting, ‘hate music.'

September 6, 1991

‘
IT IS MY
duty', wrote the correspondent of
The Times
at the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Belsen, ‘to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.' That was how I felt in the summer of 1979. During twenty-two years as a journalist, most of them spent in transit at places of uncertainty and upheaval, I had not seen anything to compare with what I saw then in Cambodia.
¹

My aircraft flew low, following the unravelling of the Mekong River west from Vietnam. Once over Cambodia, there appeared to be no one, no movement, not even an animal, as if the great population of Asia had stopped at the border. Nothing seemed to have been planted nor was growing, except the forest, and mangrove, and lines of tall wild grass. On the edge of towns this grass would follow straight lines, as though planned. Fertilised by human compost – by the remains of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children – these lines marked common graves in a nation where as many as a million-and-a-half people, one-fifth of the population, were ‘missing'.

We made our approach into what had been the international airport at Phnom Penh. At the edge of the forest there appeared a pyramid of rusting cars like objects in a mirage. The pile included ambulances, a fire engine, police cars, refrigerators, washing-machines, generators, television sets, telephones and typewriters. ‘Here lies the modern age,' a headstone might have read, ‘abandoned April 17, 1975, Year Zero.' From that date, anybody who had owned such ‘luxuries', anybody who had lived in a city or town, anybody
with more than a basic education or who had acquired a modern skill, anybody who knew or worked for foreigners, was in danger. Many would die.

Year Zero was the dawn of an age in which,
in extremis
, there would be no families, no sentiment, no expression of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music: only work and death. ‘If our people can build Angkor Wat,' said Pol Pot in 1977, ‘they can do anything.'
²
In that year he killed probably more of his people than during all of his reign. Xenophobic and racist, he might have modelled himself on one of the despotic kings who ruled Angkor, the Khmer empire, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. He was an admirer of Mao Tse-tung and the Gang of Four; and it is not improbable that much as Mao had seen himself as the greatest emperor of China, so Pol Pot saw himself as another Mao, directing his own red guard to purify all elites, subversives and revisionists. In the end he created little more than a slave state.

In my first hours in Phnom Penh I took no photographs; incredulity saw to that. I had no sense of people, of even the remnants of a population; the few human shapes I glimpsed seemed incoherent images, detached from the city itself. On catching sight of me, they would flit into the refuge of a courtyard or a cinema or a filling station. Only when I pursued several, and watched them forage, did I see that they were children. One child about ten years old – although age was difficult to judge – ran into a wardrobe lying on its side which was his or her shelter. In an abandoned Esso station an old woman and three emaciated children squatted around a pot containing a mixture of roots and leaves, which bubbled over a fire fuelled with paper money: thousands of snapping, crackling, brand-new banknotes lay in the gutters, sluiced there by the afternoon rains, from the destroyed Bank of Cambodia.

During the coming weeks one sound remained in my consciousness day and night: the soft, almost lilting sound of starving, sick children approaching death. In the eight
months since the Vietnamese liberation, only three relief planes had come from the West – none had been sent by Western governments, the International Red Cross or the United Nations – in spite of appeals from the new regime in Phnom Penh. By the end of October, the tenth month, UNICEF and the Red Cross had sent 100 tons of relief; or as the Red Cross in Geneva preferred to call it, ‘more than' 100 tons. In effect, nothing. Few geopolitical games have been as cynical and bereft of civilised behaviour as that which isolated and punished the people of Cambodia, and continues to do so in 1992. It is a game that beckons a second holocaust in Asia.

David Munro and I go back to Cambodia as often as we can. David and I have together made five documentary films about Cambodia; and our long friendship is committed to telling Cambodia's story until the world repays its blood debt, and there is peace. During each visit I sleep only a few hours every night. Lying bathed in sweat, waiting for sunrise, listening to the hammer blows of rain, I fall in and out of a dream-state which has assumed an unwelcome familiarity. In the passageway outside there is the sound of something being dragged on flagstones, like a bundle. This is followed by the urgent flip-flop of rubber sandals and by indistinct voices, as if conferring; then by the sound of a voice that soon becomes recognisable as the rise and fall of sobbing. The dream moves on to a setting in the countryside, which is lush and green as the sun burns away skeins of mist, revealing pieces of cloth fluttering from earth that is speckled white.

I have talked to my friend, Chay Song Heng, about this. Heng spent three and a half years as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, pretending to be an idiot so that the guards would not suspect him of being educated and kill him. Confined to a rice-growing ‘co-operative' and banned from speaking all but compliances, he imagined he was ‘a friend of the moon'. He studied the lunar phases and kept a mental record of the hours, days, months and years. ‘When liberation came on December 25, 1978,' he said, ‘can you imagine, I was only two days wrong!'

Heng is a translator and interpreter of English. His weekly government salary is enough to buy one can of Coca-Cola, so he takes classes in one of Phnom Penh's ‘England-language streets'. He is a diminutive man, who walks with a bounce, although I have now and then seen him tremble and his eyes reflect acute anxiety. ‘In the Pol Pot years,' he said, ‘I used to walk to the corner of the paddy in the evening. There I would practise my English. I would say to myself – well, mumble actually, in case I was overheard – “Good morning, Heng, and how are you this morning?” and I'd reply, “I'm quite well, thank you, apart from the difficulty of living. I am a captive in my own country, and I am condemned for nothing. But they have neither my brain, nor my soul.” By the way, do you know “The Cat and the Moon” by W. B. Yeats? I recited that to myself many times.'