Rosa was an Italian Ashkenazi Jew who spoke an obscure Italian–Judeo dialect as well as English and Italian and Yiddish. She bustled into the restaurant as though evaluating it for higher purposes of her own. She proved an ultra-efficient waitress, passionate about food and generous with her smile. She smiled and nodded approvingly at her diners, and called out their orders to Papa through the hatch-window as though each were a declaration of good taste. She never picked them up on their bad pronunciation and forgave them when they used the wrong cutlery, added too much salt, cut up their spaghetti with a knife and fork. She smiled and they fell in love with her and ate whatever she recommended. Though 123 had no coffee machine, she brewed strong, dark coffee in the French way on the kitchen stove for them.

Rosa Ferros was also an artist.

A peasant artist, she called herself; she was self-taught and a bit folksy. But her images were moving. They caught your attention. She mainly drew scenes from Southern Tyrol where her whole family had been exterminated in the Bolzano Transit Camp in 1944. She had escaped long before the atrocities. In 1938 she had been freighted off to Melbourne as a proxy bride. It was soon after Mussolini had published his Charter of Race and her father had lost his job as a government official. Now she couldn’t look at a picture of the Dolomites without breaking into tears. She loved her proxy husband, Michele Ferros, as soon as she saw him from the porthole on the Jervis Bay. They had no children and he died of stroke only three years into their marriage. She would never love a man again, she said.

That was the story of Rosa’s survival and freedom. She never saw the landscape of her childhood again, she never remarried, and she never located a single relative. So she painted out her personal losses in oils and watercolours and harsh charcoal line-drawings.

It was Rosa Ferros who got Papa onto the subject of Art. It was Rosa Ferros who took Papa to the Antipodeans exhibition and introduced him to James Parish.

THE ANTIPODEANS

The Antipodeans Exhibition was held by the Victorian Artists’ Society in East Melbourne. Papa didn’t know anything about art, knew only from Rosa that abstract art threatens the future of art and civilisation. The only artwork Grandma Blanche had had in her house was a reproduction image of a boy and girl, in eighteenth-century dress, holding a dead chicken in their cupped hands.

Rosa yanked him by the arm. ‘Come and meet my friend, Mr Parish,’ she said.