Peeling Oranges (13 page)

‘If Connolly or Collins had foreseen Ireland developing into a…don’t you know? what’s the word…?

‘Materialist?’

I know the word. She had used it many times before.

‘…into a materialist culture, would they have given their lives for us? The trouble with noble people is that they presume nobility in others.’

She looks across at me. Her upper lip is quivering. ‘Ireland is a desert,’ she says.

***

I try to picture my grandfather crossing Camden Street during the Easter Rising. He is wearing a long coat and hat and carrying his trade union bag. My grandfather is a civilian, but he also responds to a call of duty. He has a heavy flu. Muddy thinks it might be consumption.

Bullets whiz over my grandfather’s head as they are meant to do in any good action picture. Bullets are noises sensed in the ears. They are not missiles that pierce the heart.

And cities are built for commerce. They don’t like being pulled apart by belligerents, no matter how ideological they may be. The moods of cities change from day to day as citizens seek the means to survive. And when crevices appear in city walls, citizens scavenge and hide, peeping out at the strange breed who try to blow up their world. They throw stones. There are plenty of stones in cities. The War Widows throw stones into a darkness. It is an action, not so much of hostility, as of incomprehension.

Citizens hear the volleys from Kilmainham Gaol. The volleys waken something in their brains. They are losing rare eagles. The volleys are impoverishing their world. Fourteen executions; two per day. Who are the murderers with the rifles? Each shot acts as an alarm clock ringing in the national consciousness. And one shot from a high window in Camden Street brings my granddad down.

***

Michael Collins, who had visited Muddy to offer condolence on the death of her husband, came again when Tomás was gunned down.

‘Poets sing their sadness,’ my mother said. ‘Their misery evaporates into air. But where does the sadness of non-poets go?’

Uncle Tomás was given an IRA military funeral. The volleys that were fired, according to my mother, went through her heart. And as for Muddy, if it weren’t for Gearóid who held her, she would’ve jumped into the grave alongside her son.’

All that is tangible to me of my uncle Tomás is his revolver, which now rests among a diplomat’s books. It acts as a link between generations, between the living and the dead.

***

Another day my mother is in good form. It is a warm day. The sun is shining. Her neurasthenia (newly-diagnosed) is under control. Apparently she developed this nervous condition without knowing what it was, after her ‘horrendous experience’ in Rathfarnham. I, of course, was her ‘horrendous experience’, although she pretended that it was the burglary.

I imagine the callers to her house when she was alone: the insurance man with his beard and shiny boots knocking at the front door, or the IRA man emerging out of the folds of night going through the lighted doorway towards her. I think of my mother, a recluse in the suburbs, a laughing girl in the Liberties.

I write in my diary: ‘Environment is an architect of the spirit.’

***

There is some talk on the news about an increase in the number of homeless people. It acts as a jumplead for her memory. She speaks of the absurdity of a State who paid a widow with a large family an allowance of seven shillings and sixpence per week when her weekly rent was ten shillings. She witnessed the evictions. There was nothing she could do. It was the law. She speaks as if it had happened yesterday.

‘We tried to help them in the tenements. But some things are best forgotten.’

‘I want to know, Mam.’

‘A lot of them in their leafy suburbs have forgotten.’

‘They’re not all bad, Mam. We moved.’

‘Not all bad?’ She ignores the second part of my statement. She doesn’t see herself as a suburbanite. She doesn’t think she has moved at all. ‘There are many people of principle – self principle, ha! Two pence halfpenny looking down on two pence. Society was more egalitarian then. People were closer, don’t you know?’

I think of Mam using words like ‘egalitarian’. It was part of the socialist jargon of the time which had crept into everyday speech.

‘Maybe it wasn’t more egalitarian on paper, but it was in the context of neighbourly acts. A body on the street was never ignored. The old biddy with the shawl and the jug of porter sitting up the lane was part of our community too. People were not afraid to laugh or cry. They wore their hearts on their sleeves. Not like now.’

Where did my mother wear her heart when it came to me? I wish I could have been that body on the street or that old biddy with the shawl or anyone, so that I could have felt her care for me.

‘You visited the tenements?’

‘Oh yes.’ She sighs. I can hear her wheezing again. ‘All the children went about barefooted. The twopencehalfpennies were the ones who had the shoes. They had large families with the blessings of the Church. But I’ll tell you this, whatever about the church, I know it has its faults, but if you don’t believe in God, you won’t believe in man, either.’

‘What about love, Mam?’ I have that uncanny feeling that I was here before.
Where was your heart?
I want to say.
I never saw your heart anywhere, Mam, least of all on your sleeve.
Things that I haven’t the
heart
to say.

‘It’s the same thing: love and religion. Where would we be without them?’

‘But…’

Before I can say anymore, she drowns me out with a fit of coughing that I swear is put on.

***

I pour her tea from the earthenware teapot, the one she likes.

’Did you scald it?’

‘I did, Mam.’

She sips the tea. ‘It’s weak.’

‘Will I let it draw some more?’

‘It’ll do. Put the cosy over it.’ She pulls her tartan rug around her (her own cosy). ‘I remember the ex-soldiers with empty sleeves. Where could they wear their hearts?’ She laughs. ‘Or with trouser legs pinned up, on crutches on street corners singing or playing the mouth organ because they had no money and nothing else to do.’ She pauses. ‘It was gas when you think of it,’ she says.

‘What was, Mam?’

‘The soldiers, when they were home, teaching the rebels military techniques to be used
against
the army they were fighting
for
.’

She lights another cigarette. ‘The consumption,’ she says. ‘The horses with the plumes passing with the hearses. And the children – children must play if they are to be children.’

‘And if they don’t play?’ I say, challenging her. ‘What happens to them?’

She looks at me. ‘I’m getting tired now, Derek.’

I have unnerved her. I know by her dismissive tone I have struck a chord. ‘Tell me about the children. What did they do?’

She coughs and wheezes and rubs her legs, but she sees no sympathy in my eyes.

‘They played football in the yard. A bundle of rags tied up with string. And old folks spoke of the Devil Era and asked what that Spanish twister was up to.’

She sighs. ‘Now Derek, let me go to bed.’

I am clinging desperately to a chrome bar on a crowded bus with my ticket vicegripped between my teeth, unable to remove the trickles of sweat that roll down into my eyes. The driver drives recklessly. The bus sways around sharp bends. There are gasps from some of the passengers.

I alight into the searing heat of a small town called Cuadro on the
Costa Brava
. A man is walking parallel to me on the opposite side of the road carrying a suitcase. He keeps appearing and disappearing in a swirl of sand and grit, whipped up by a wind. He looks early twenties, broad with brown brylcreemed hair and long sideburns – Elvis style. He nods across to me. His eyes light up when he realises we are both heading for the youth hostel. It’s as if he has found a long lost comrade. ‘Wilhelm,’ he says, striking the deep concavity of his chest. ‘Wilhel…’ I try to say the word. ‘Willy,’ he says striking again. ‘Willy,’ I say, and he smiles. He points to the muscles in his arms and insists on carrying my suitcase.

Later on the beach, I feel the first twinges of sunburn as Willy makes signs in the sand saying, ‘brmm brmm’ which I presume means he is a mechanic. He goes to a wicker hut and buys martinis and huge slabs of Spanish chocolate which he shares with me.

Two other Germans arrive at the hostel in a shining Daimler. Many of the hostellers, including myself (not Willy, who strangely stands sullenly aloof), gather enviously around the car, admiring its chrome and leather upholstery and rosewood fascia. They speak in a fluent American-English. When they see Willy, they look scornfully at him.

‘
Nichts gut,’
Willy says, as he sits opposite me at a table in the hostel. He is holding an orange which he is peeling with a penknife. He nods disapprovingly in the direction of the other Germans who are talking loudly at another table.

Suddenly, as the Germans rise, his face becomes contorted and looks like it’s going to explode. I’m not sure whether it is due to desperation on his part in trying to communicate to me (something which is obviously of paramount importance to him), or to an anger generated as his fellow countrymen approach. The stocky one called Klaus hits against him with his elbow (apparently deliberately), striking the hollow between Willy’s broad shoulder blades. Willy springs up out of his chair, pressing the knife so hard between his fingers that the blood shows through his veins. Klaus, standing his ground, looks disdainfully at him and says, ‘
Versuchen Sie es,
’ and Willy, surrendering, sits down again.

I want to say something to the forlorn Willy, to sympathise with him, but I have not the words.

He sighs and rises slowly from the table. It’s all like a three act play being synopsised into the span of a few moments. He closes the penknife which he had been holding open all the time and, with a sad smile, places it in my right hand, encircling my fingers around it.

‘Auf Wiedersehen mein Freund’

***

A full moon shines through the hostel window. Does the moon have memory? Does it remember me, its insomniac boy? I put my Spanish grammar away and lie under blankets shivering, ironically chilled by the effects of the sun. I think of my mother back home. Is she managing on her own? She has moved to her apartment. Not quite in the Liberties, where she wanted to go of course, but near enough. Off the South Circular Road in fact, near where the new Coombe maternity hospital now stands. There is a caretaker to keep an eye on things. She will be safe there. She will be looked after at least as well as I was looked after in boarding school. I’m free now, free of that institution anyway. And she can stew for a while. I don’t care.

‘The money is good in the bloodbank,’ an American hosteller whispers from a lower bunk, which makes me think of my resources.

***

There are several people on the morning queue for the bloodbank, all poor-looking, all native. An emaciated and haggard-looking man is complaining that he is only allowed to sell his blood once every two months. How does one make a living as a blood salesman? I understand his Spanish. His vocabulary is simple.
Muchos niños
– many small children. How is he to support his large family with such infrequent visits?

‘
Los ricos
,’ he rambles on, ‘they don’t like parting with their blood. They are afraid of a pinprick –
un alfilerazo
. That is why they pay the poor to do so.’

The man’s voice is too be weak to be angry. ‘It is not
justo
,’ he says, mopping the sweat off his brow with a polkadot kerchief.

I eat a complimentary hot dog and drink a beer as I count my pesetas. ‘Rare,’ the nurse says. ‘You get more pesetas.’

‘And the thin man?’ I say

‘What thin man?’

‘Outside. The one mopping his brow?’

She looks out through a slit in the door.

‘Is his rare?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘his is very common.’

Water is streaming from the eyes of the haggard-looking man. It loosens the grip on the pesetas I’m holding. I place the money in skeletal hands.
‘Para los niños.’

***

I’m sitting in the backseat on the leather upholstery of the Daimler, travelling to the beach. Passing by other hostellers, who are trekking on foot, instils a guilt in me. I am still thinking of Willy and unarticulated things. I’m hot in the car and about to roll the window down when Klaus snaps, ‘Don’t touch.’ They speak of Barcelona in their own language. They say
‘geschlecht’
-something or other a few times, and each time they say it they guffaw, making me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps they are laughing at my sunburn. Klaus asks me if I have noticed the bromide in the coffee in the hostel, and Lothar, the fair-haired one, gives me a copy of
The Damned
which he has just finished reading in English.

‘Did you hear there are peasants in the hostel who are selling their blood?’ says Klaus.

Lothar laughs.

Lothar laughs very loudly.

***

I see a man pushing a bicycle along the seafront. He walks barefooted and blows small pipes which make a haunting sound like leaves soughing in the wind. And in between blasts on the pipes, he shouts in a guttural and semi-incantatory fashion something I cannot decipher, like the unintelligible shout of a newspaper vendor or some primitive proclaiming his existence to the early morning.

Two Irish girls on the beach are on the last day of their holiday. They know Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin from college. ‘She’s so dedicated,’ one of them says. ‘Dedicated?’ I say. ‘To our country. An inspiration for all of us.’ We speak in Irish, and it sounds so natural far away from home, far away from navel gazing. We talk about other nationalities. We talk about Franco and the
guardias civiles,
small, tough-looking, smileless figures who patrol about in three cornered hats with rifles and pistols, and with moustaches so thick that it makes me feel that what I’m trying to grow under my nose is just a little piece of ginger down. And I find myself visualising these
guardias
of a previous generation, their fathers or grandfathers perhaps, leering at my mother on the Cantabrian coast. They had ordered young people off the beach at rifle point the previous night. Some were hostellers who sleep on the beach because the hostel is sometimes full. Others were hippies with guitars who wear cutaway jeans with threads hanging loose. And we say it is a disgrace that girls are being prodded with rifle butts for being dressed ‘indecently’, and we laugh at the old women in black shawls on the seafront who wag their fingers and shout
‘sinvergüenzas’
at scantily clad females. But the Irish girls are well covered and they keep tugging at their ample swimsuits for fear of revelation. I ask them if they saw the man who played the small pipes. And they tell me that they are the panpipes and that he is the knife grinder announcing his presence. And we laugh again when a group of young Englishmen lend ear to our speech, and conclude that it is ‘obvious’ that we are ‘nattering away’ in Greek. ‘Would you believe it, our nearest neighbour?’ one of the girls exclaims.

***

I walk up the drive to a modest chalet with a veranda covered in bougainvillaea (an address from Patrick’s diaries). On the lintel over the front door an iron triangle hangs on a rusty nail. An old woman with squinted eyes is sitting in a wicker chair in a shady corner of the veranda, embroidering lace.

‘Ah yes,’ she says, somewhat to my surprise when I enquire in Spanish if this is the home of Javier Jiménez. I was half expecting to hear he was dead or had moved to some other address. ‘He has just come back from Barcelona. Business, you know? Javier is a businessman. He owns property in the city,’ she says proudly. ‘You also are a man of business?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘well sort of. I want to talk to him.’

‘You are not of the police?’

‘Oh no,’ I say.

Satisfied, she summons Javier in a weak voice.

A middleaged man, very low in stature with a huge moustache obliterating his mouth, appears in the doorway, his belly bulging through a navy T-shirt.

‘What is it you want?’ he says curtly.

I tell him I’m looking for information on the late Patrick Foley.

‘Heeem,’ he sneers in a strong Spanish drawl, ‘you want to know about heeem?’

By his tone I’m expecting him to close the door on my face, but he pauses and starts looking me up and down, and then offers me a Chesterfield cigarette which I politely refuse.

‘One moment,’ he says, and he goes indoors and returns carrying a towel.

‘I am going to the
playa
,’ he says. ‘You can come along with me and I will tell you all you want to know about
el chulo
, Foley.
Hasta luego, Mama
.’ He plants a kiss on his mother’s cheek. The old woman looks up from her embroidery and gives her senescent son a toothless smile.

We walk down the sloping road towards the sea, the same road I travelled in the Daimler, but when we get to the turn for the main beach, he points the opposite way towards the lighthouse, which stands isolated at the end of a long promontory of rocks. I hesitate for a moment before venturing on.

He strips to his skimpy togs, bidding me to do the same, and pokes about in the water, wading through the shallows, turning up rocks, looking for limpets or similar kinds of shellfish, exposing them, removing them from their covers and popping them into his mouth. He offers some to me, but I decline. I press him about Foley but, rather gruffly, he says,
‘Mañana’
.

He comes towards me. He asks me would I like to make
‘mucho dinero’.

‘Where?’ I say.

‘In Barcelona.’

‘Doing what?’

‘This,’ he says, pulling down his togs.

***

A lone peasant stands, a dot in the vastness of the charred earth, as the train trundles into the interior. My mind loses itself in the rolling countryside: the arid plains, spare parched shrubbery pleading for mercy under an unrelenting sun, occasional goats and sheep, emaciated cattle, and then a more orderly terrain of serried ranks of olive and orange groves and vineyards sweeping past.

Basque separatists have just exploded a bomb in
Calle de O’Donnell
in the centre of Madrid. People are fleeing in all directions, pushing past me among the rubble of stone buildings and plate glass and the wailing of sirens. And I think: funny, the Irish name under attack. And then I see Franco. Yes, fleetingly in an armed cavalcade passing along the street to the blaring of horns. Someone shouts,
‘El Caudillo’,
and points at a little pristine uniform shining with medals through which protrudes a bald brown head like a polished chestnut.

I call to the apartment of señora Angela Martínez. The
ama de llaves,
a tiny, spindly woman, informs me that yes, señora Martínez still lives at this address, but she is not in at the moment. She will be back in a short while –
un rato.

I feel the sun burning me in the street, so I go into the
Prado
art gallery where I look at Goya’s paintings: his Saturn devouring his Son (reminding me of Pug devouring my
Jelly Baby
), and
La Nevada – The Snowstorm
– the original of Patrick’s painting. But I don’t linger. I fear (illogically – but then all trepidation is illogical) that at any moment Javier Jiménez is going to jump out at me from some corner.

When I return to the apartment, an elderly lady with an enormous bosom opens the door. I tell her where I am from, and that I am a relative of Patrick Foley, and was given her address to look up when I came to Spain.

‘Ah, how nice,’ she says. ‘Come in, come in. Isn’t it terrible, these explosions? It’s not safe to go out. And who was it gave you the address exactly?’

‘Martha Foley,’ I lie.

‘Ah, Martha. Such a long time. She is well?’

‘Not very well, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

She seats me in a divan near a huge urn with artificial flowers, as she sets out cups.

‘Señor Foley, ah yes,’ she says, ‘he also had poor health. He was
simpático
, a kind man. I remember he always bought Christmas presents for the children of the embassy staff: big boxes of sweets.’

Large globules of sweat appear on her forehead, which she chooses to ignore, and they proceed to trickle down both sides of her face.