SILVANO GREGOLI

Canberra, April 1995

It’s almost time to leave. Four years in Australia and the chapter is already closing.
At this point it is customary to put together a few souvenirs.

The first one is ready. It is a small Plexiglass plate with a Red Back from Canberra inside. Red Backs are small, plump and very poisonous spiders, recognizable by a bright red triangle on their black backs. This embalmed spider exhales a sad memory. One bad day, David, our giant family spider – a Huntsman, also from Canberra – went missing. Anny Moore, the small animal vet next door, was worried too. Six days away is a long time for a Huntsman. Anny had a lot of hypotheses. She had apparently ruled out the possibility that we had killed him. Over time, she had gotten to know us better and noticed that our Australisation process was progressing rapidly. Including the mutation from an instinctive arachnophobia to a firm and festive arachnophilia. So, who else could have wanted to harm David?
Anny didn’t think of escape, or even illness. He wasn’t old, and she’d seen him frolicking along the walls a few days earlier, which was a joy to behold. Not to mention the fact that Huntsmen are sedentary spiders: once they adopt a house, their connection to it is only broken when they die. Perhaps his fate as a large but non-poisonous spider had crossed that of a Red Back, a fascinating and poisonous little spider. Perhaps a fight had ensued. Or, worse still, a terrifying Funnel Web from Sydney had broken into the house and David had tried to chase it away. Mostly to defend the girls. Perhaps, in the scuffle, the Funnel Web had managed to sink its crescent-shaped teeth into David’s abdomen and killed him.

Poor David! The embalmed Red Back I will carry with me will forever remind me of you. You were perhaps the most poignant memory of my four years in Australia.

The second souvenir, one of many, is currently on the buffet table. It is one of those heavy wooden fruit bowls we bought in Bungendore on the day of the “cicadas from hell”. Anyone who has never lifted it will find it hard to believe. It weighs more than the ten Tarot oranges it carries.

But that is not enough. We have many more souvenirs, many…. None of them really satisfying. OK: I got a nice Aboriginal boomerang and some large Aboriginal drawings with signatures. But I am left with the doubt that the market for Aboriginal art is not always genuine.
So, I decided to go to a specialist shop in Sydney in search of an object that would, in my future and in my future home, emit space-time waves that would bring me back to Australia from time to time.

I won’t describe this strange shop in detail now. There were several rooms, large, high, dusty, quite dark and filled with an unusual collection of bric-a-brac.
It was not easy to find the manager, but eventually he appeared in a corner, behind a desk. He seemed intelligent, with a good head and probably a good brain. Faced with such an individual, I took the direct route: I was looking for an object that would eternally emit space-time waves carrying Australian memories.
The owner understood at once, and with a broad smile he led me to a small room off to the side, less dusty than the others, and full of objects of obvious magical-shamanic origin.

«To be honest» he told me, «these artifacts are not strictly Aboriginal. They come from the many Australian islands north of the extreme northern tip of Australia, just below Papua New Guinea. On these islands grows a plant with a dense blackish wood – ironwood, they call it – from which the natives make some amazing ritual objects. This, for example, is a “hammer” » he said, showing me a small wooden statuette, 40-50 centimeters long, as heavy as iron, with an oval, flattened body with scales around the edges, a long neck and a small head with two deep-set shell eyes. «They take the figure by the neck and strike its flat body against the object they wish to strike, for example, the handle of the chisel with which they carve other “hammers” or other ritual figures. »

As soon as I held it in my hand, I felt that this “hammer” was a beautiful object. It might even be useful to me in the future: there is always something in life that needs beating. I asked the price; he sighed and then threw out a figure. A little discussion and the number became acceptable.
Around the “hammer” there were many other works of art, very similar but more elaborate. I will try to describe the one that caught my attention more than the others.
The sculpture was the size of a large painting and the weighed three or four kilos. The shape was a vertical oval: a sort of large leaf.

The edge of the oval was formed by two slender crocodiles. Joined at the top of the oval by their tails, they descended, arching their small bodies and ending into two snouts armed with protruding teeth and cunning eyes. Inside the oval was a crouching woman who could only be recognised for what she was just because she wore two small breasts, round like pointed bowls. She had slender arms and legs, and her hands and feet clung to the inside of the crocodile oval. Like an acrobat clinging to the trapeze.
The problem was the face. The face wasn’t feminine at all. The nose was particularly menacing: thin, hooked and turned down like a vulture’s beak. The mouth was also a man’s, but a very special one. How can I put it? An essentially evil man, accustomed to committing the most heinous of crimes. In place of the eyes were, as always, two very white shells with jagged black entrances. A massive crocodile tail extended from the man-woman’s chin, covering her naked body down to her groin. One detail: the monster was holding a terrifying looking child in its jaws. The baby’s position was that from which babies are born, but transverse: a metaphor for a difficult birth full of crocodile moments?
Finally, on either side of the lower part of the crescent-shaped artifact, appeared four wooden hooks that seemed completely out of place in the symbolic arrangement of the whole.

« What is the purpose of this marvel? » I asked the salesman.
« Well, forget about the artistic motifs, which are only there to show off the sculptor’s skill. The only purpose of the object is to have four hooks. On these hooks the natives hang plastic bags floating in the sea, which they believe have magical properties. In reality, the whole complex sculpture serves the same purpose as four nails hammered into the wall of a hut. But the natives have time to sell, art to sell and artifacts to sell. In fact, we buy them and then sell them to people like you, because I know you will buy them. And don’t worry about the space-time waves emitted by the Papuan artifacts: they have all the credentials you expect from them.

In fact, the hypnotic power of the artwork in the small room won me over. The prices were painful, but I was returning to Europe with a hammer and four hooks, whose practical value was equivalent to that of four nails, but whose symbolic, pictorial, anthropological, magical, therapeutic and incantatory value was far superior.
I was about to leave with my last purchases when the owner looked me straight in the eyes and said: «Wouldn’t you like to see another unusual object? ».
«Why not? » I replied. I was beginning to believe in this guy.
«Follow me. »
In a dark corner of the room, standing on a piece of carpet, was the MinDimBit.

To define who – or what – the MinDimBit was, it is not enough to look at its photograph. One also must describe it. Describe it? Its shape, its appearance, or the intense wave field of unknown origin emanating from its dark corner?

The power of adjectives! Years later, if I wanted to convey the emotions of my first encounter with the MinDimBit, all I had to do was utter a first cloud of “behavioral” adjectives: threatening, repulsive, grim, sinister, ferocious, frightening, dangerous, evil, vile, malignant, fearsome… And a second cloud, “phenomenological”: dwarf, gnome, hairy, young, old, man, woman…
But the curious reader is also entitled to a full description. So, I’ll start from the bottom and work my way up to a height of about eighty centimeters.

The feet first. The feet were very wide, long, naked, human, parallel and one with the wooden base that supported them and gave them a sense of unshakable stability.
The legs – naked, short, human, well-shaped, bent and spread – were well built and gave the body an appearance of youthful daring.
The pubic area – smooth and strictly asexual – served only to support a graceful, rounded belly with a navel resembling a flattened cherry.
Above the belly, a straight, vertical torso ended at shoulder height with two female breasts, neither beautiful nor ugly, sloping downwards and without any function.
Finally, the arms – long, slender and arched – connected the shoulders to the knees, giving the whole an extra element of stability.
The whole body was smooth and of a beautiful dark chocolate color. The artist had enriched the surface of the body with large red ornamental motifs: circles, stripes, commas…
Above the body, which had no neck, was a head.

«What is this horror? » I asked the seller, who looked at me with amusement.
«It’s an ancestor. A traditional figure in primitive art. There are all sorts of them. Masculine, feminine, protectors, sages, madmen, possessed… But this one is special. »
«I can see that. The body is female, but the head is male. Devilish, demonic and angry too. »
«You are right, but only partly. The MinDimBit is a woman, including the head. Look at this»  and he showed me the back of the little monster.

«As you can see, the female body is well represented and extends above the shoulders with a decidedly feminine neck and nape. »
On closer inspection, the back of the MinDimBit showed the anatomy of a young woman, almost a child, from head to toe.
«It is not the head that’s the problem» he continued, bringing the object back to a frontal position « it’s the face. And it’s not a face, it’s a mask. In short, the MinDimBit is a wooden statuette of a young woman with a mask over her face. A man’s mask, as you can see, complete with beard, flaming eyes, hairy ears and fierce teeth. This is the real power of the statuette. The body is only there to support the mask. »
«But what is it for? »
«To frighten people. The natives place it on the doorstep of their homes to ward off evildoers. Legends abound. One day, a wicked man braved the hellish waves emitted by a MinDimBit guarding a hut. The man, a colossus, tried to steal it, but fell dead, withering at the feet of the eighty-centimeter figure. Another man took the MinDimBit and turned it towards the inside of the hut. A fatal mistake! His arms had shrunk forever. These MinDimBits have a very bad reputation. »
«And you want to sell me this public menace? »
«Yes, of course; and I know that my MinDimBit will feel right at home in your house. You won’t be afraid of it, but other people will be. In fact, it will do you a great favor. No one, not even in your world of skeptical rationalists, would dare to harm it for fear of irritating this eighty-centimeter-high thing, surrounded by an unknown electromagnetic field that would extend far beyond the house. In fact, this is exactly what you were looking for when you came into my shop. I saw it right away. »
«First you scare me, then you encourage me to buy the little monster. I must say, it’s ugly. A hideous black beard of primitive plant fiber frames his chin. Threads of the same reddish fibers sprout from his nose and ears. The bracelets on his wrists and ankles are made of the same coarse rope. Mamma mia! Do you want to sell this me? »
«I don’t want to sell it; I want to give it away. You can’t sell MinDimBits, no one has ever dared to, so why should I? I don’t believe in its demonic powers, but I respect tradition and I’m giving it to you. You have already bought a lot of goods from me, and that’s fine with me. If you can keep it the rest of your life, that’s even better. With practice they get stronger and stronger, more and more protective…»
My wife also seemed interested in taking him in; the intense field of psychic attraction had now captured her too.

When we got home, we had to explain a bit to the girls, aged 13 and 16. We told them that the MinDimBit was a kind and protective spirit. He had an unpleasant face that he used to scare away evil spirits. Such things didn’t exist, of course, but in the old traditions they did. There was no need to worry, they were mental images that belonged to the realm of myth. Especially as this monstrous gnome had no power outside Australia. For us it was just a souvenir, and the plane that would take us away from this world was already warming up its engines.

It was evening. In practice: where to put it? I didn’t want to put it out in the garden. A nocturnal prowler would have easily slipped it under his arm to break it and burn it a little further in the bush, drinking two liters of beer on it. If he hadn’t died first.
After some thought, the MinDimBit was placed in the bedroom, facing the French window overlooking the garden. Seen from the back, the MinDimBit revealed to the sleepers the back of a small, well-built woman with well-defined limbs, while on the other side the frightening face blocked access to thieves, murderers, snakes and poisonous spiders.

Night falls, and with night comes sleep. Deep sleep. REM sleep. The time when dreams, nightmares, strange ideas and metaphors from a buried world are born…
But then, right in the middle of an Australian REM sleep, I’m woken up by a mighty shshshshshshshshshsh… A hiss, or rather more than a hiss, a powerful blast, a sound reminiscent of a gas or liquid escaping from a pressurized installation.
«Fuck, a water pipe has burst! »  I said to myself, and jumped out of bed, eyes wide open. I ran to the kitchen, then to the living room, I opened the windows in the garden (maybe a sprinkler in the irrigation system had gone off), I ran to the girls’ bedroom, woke the dog in the process…. Nothing. But the rustling: shshshshshshshshshsh…, continued. It seemed to be coming, muffled, from our bedroom. A broken water pipe in the wall, under the floor?
Then suddenly: «A gas pipe has exploded! »  I said, speaking loudly. «We’re all going to explode in here! » I ran around: no smell of gas.
Back into the bedroom. The noise seemed to be coming from under the floor, and under the floor was the basement, with the boiler, the burner, the gas meter, the water…

I looked at the clock: it was about three o’clock in the morning.

I walked out into the Australian night. I’d never been in the boiler room before. The door was ajar. You could hear a shshshshshshshshshsh... but it was far away, I had to locate it.
That’s easy to say.

By the light of the torch, a whole swarm of eight-legged beasts awoke from their slumber. They had woven webs as thick as carpets, perhaps to catch large rats.
And yet I ought to find out where that bloody noise was coming from. I plucked up courage, but it was the courage of despair: I didn’t want the house to explode. I patrolled the most desperate corners of the storeroom. There was no smell, no increase in the intensity of the noise… that seemed to be coming from above the ceiling. And above the ceiling of the storeroom was our bedroom.

Back to the bedroom:  shshshshshshshshshsh… That’s where it was coming from. In fact, there was no longer any doubt: it was coming from the area in front of the French window overlooking the garden.

I had to come to terms with the fact that it was the MinDimBit.

And suddenly, instead of fear, a wave of anger washed over me: «That bastard! »
I thought.  «He gave it to me! He managed to give it to a passing Piedmontese who’d never heard of MinDimBit. Well, now it’s over for that bastard to be woken at night because of the shshshshshshshshshsh. He had handed me the hot potato!
I approached the MinDimBit with anger: anger is the best antidote to fear. I grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him towards me. There was that horrible face. I wanted to slap it. I lifted the statuette and brought it to my eye level. Back then, I still had the ferocity to want to meet my gaze with the bloody shells of MinDimBit. I held it firmly in my hand. I had got it by its little arms, resting on its knees. I had got him in my grasp…
Yet I didn’t feel that the shshshshshshshshshsh... was coming from there. It didn’t seem to be the one doing the shshshshshshshshshsh…
I pushed the evil statuette down the corridor and came back to the door leading to the garden: Shshshshshshshshshsh... as before.
So, it wasn’t the MinDimBit. It was something else, something even more mysterious and terrifying.

Next to the French window there was a chest with three drawers. I opened the three drawers one by one. When I opened the third drawer, the bottom one, the shshshshshshshshshsh… doubled in intensity.
There was something in this drawer blowing very hard between the sheets and towels. The irrational fear became rational. But then the MinDimBit and its donor had nothing to do with it! The problem lied in the drawer! A charge of dynamite about to explode, preceded by a very long acoustic signal to scare people away? A monstrous animal, one of those little-known specialties found only in Australia? When I begin to remove the sheets and towels to expose it, what will I find? Would it jump out at me, hissing and puffing?

So, I revealed the secret. The explanation is long, but easy to understand.

It was the early 90s. No mobile phones, no email, no computers, no Skype, no WhatsApp, no internet. Contacts between Australia and Europe were difficult. The telephone was unaffordable. It was only used to announce a death or a birth. Businesses used fax or telex. Private individuals sent occasional telegrams. Newspapers arrived yellowed, with news of governments already fallen, of men already dead. Australia really was Down Under.
Even the radios didn’t work. As everyone knows, electromagnetic waves do not follow the curvature of the earth; they get lost in space. But there were exceptions. Certain wavelengths, bouncing between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere, could travel long distances. They didn’t reach Australia, but the Radio France International stations covering the French colonies in the Pacific worked wonders with their repeaters: it even happened that a signal emitted in Paris, after bouncing from layer to layer, was picked up by a repeater, amplified and sent it back into the air. The dream was to receive a radio signal in Australia, scrambled and muffled, but coming from Europe. At the speed of light.

Hong Kong was a popular stopover on flights between Brussels and Canberra, and very special Sony radios were sold in Hong Kong. These were very high-tech items, specializing in receiving ultra-short waves, the best for long distance travel. Complicated to use. Very expensive. They came with a manual that looked like a PhD thesis. Nobody understood anything, but lots of people bought them.
I did too. In Canberra, I pulled wire antennas of a certain length out into the garden, placed them in the indicated direction. Nothing. Just a coming and going of hoarse sounds, like alien breaths.
And then one day, who knows why, the little radio fell into a stubborn silence. To wake it up, I tried all the buttons, I pressed them all, one by one, two by two, I tried all the combinations, I lingered on the various buttons for several seconds. Nothing happened. The Japanese radio I’d bought in Hong Kong had given up the ghost.

I had left it lying around the house. Then someone had moved it from room to room while cleaning. It ended up on the bedroom chest of drawers, and from the top of the chest into the third drawer. And there, after the sheets were changed, it ended up at the bottom of the drawer. No one knew it was there.
But there it was, at the back of the drawer, quivering and puffing like a dragon. The mystery of the agonizing shshshshshshshshshsh… had finally been solved.
All that remained was to understand why she had woken up in the middle of the first night in the company of the worrying guest.

I won’t deny that I had considered some unorthodox hypotheses. For example, I had considered that the space-time waves emitted by the MinDimBit belonged to the ultra-short-wave family. And that the MinDimBit, eager to contact its new master, had chosen to communicate with me through the loudspeaker of that jewel of Japanese technology, dead forever. The frightening shshshshshshshshshsh would have been the voice of Papuan black magic trying to contact me.

I sweated a lot, but in the end, I came up with an explanation. Improbable, far-fetched, but rational.
By reading the manual, I discovered that the little radio could be put into “deep sleep” and then woken up at a set time on a pre-programmed day, month and year. By blindly tapping buttons here and there, and by sheer chance, I programmed it to wake up at three o’clock on that famous night.

Simple, isn’t it?

Banal, but plausible.
Plausible but banal.

What a pity!

***

Epilogue

Nice, November 2024

Thirty years have passed since that night, and the MinDimBit has never stopped transmitting Australian space-time waves. It was he who advised me to add this Epilogue.

So here it is, in the corner of my living room in Nice, overlooking the sea. It hasn’t aged a day. No wrinkles, no cracks, no insect holes.
But that’s not the case with me. In fact, as time goes by, my face looks more and more like his. Not in ferocity, nor in warlike daring. In… in… I can’t find the right word… Let’s say “repulsion”. From his vantage point, he stares impassively at the Promenade des Anglais and the old town of Nice below. He doesn’t seem very involved.
Other worries…

He’s not alone. Around him, in the entrance to the apartment, are other artifacts with toucans and crocodiles, bristling with wooden hooks that won’t hold plastic bags found in the sea. Macron’s government has banned them.

There is a wooden statue of a serene woman nursing a large baby. Another masterpiece, minimalist and crocodile-free, shows a woman clinging to the usual oval trapeze. At the bottom are two long hooks for hanging the big plastic bags that Macron hates.
Everywhere one sees white, hard and shiny sclerotic.
How I envy them! The day I’ll lose my eyes, I’d like to have two of these shells transplanted.

My relationship with the MinDimBit has calmed down a lot.
I must admit that lately I’ve been taking liberties with him that I shouldn’t. For example, when I come back from walking the dog, I take my cap off and put it on his head. It doesn’t even look bad on him. I know he doesn’t like it, but he lets me do it on the condition that I keep the promise in the back of my mind that I won’t give it to anyone or destroy it.

One day, on the internet, I saw some objects from Papua New Guinea – finds from the Sepic Valley – that looked very much like him. They were also called MinDimBit. They seemed to be very rare, even precious….

I saw a shadow pass over its eyes.

Don’t worry, MinDimBit: I won’t sell you.
In fact, if you agree, we could even be cremated together.

HERE the French version

HERE the Italian version