After the Wake

by Brendan Behan

  Mr. Bolívar, Ciarán’s and Deirdre’s father, ran a wine business in Dublin, and even when his side lost the Spanish War, his diplomatic skill stood him in good stead. He got the right side of the Bishops by presenting the Cardinal with a magnificent fifteenth century chalice which he had rescued from sacrilege. It was said that he rescued a few chalices for himself, while he was at it, and sold them to American millionaires for vast sums.

  A minority of the Bishops kicked up a row over the Cardinal accepting the chalice from a former agent of the Reds, but the Cardinal fell in love with it, and blessed Mr. Bolívar, and forgave him his trespasses.

  The situation got a bit more complicated after that because Franco’s crowd were recognised, and his new Ambassador to Ireland dropped a gentle hint that they wouldn’t mind having their chalice back. At one stage of the game, they even contemplated legal action in the Irish Courts to secure its return, and contacted Mr. Bolívar to give evidence for them. They offered him a fair sum of money for his trouble, but he said that though he was a former anarchist he could not see his way, as a Catholic, to going against the Cardinal in a law case.

  His attitude in this matter even made him popular again with the Knights of Columbanus, the Catholic Freemasons, who compete with the Protestant Freemasons for contracts and sometimes combine with them to keep up prices in the shops. It was agreed by the Knights that Mr. Bolívar was a true Papist, at the back of his politics, and his anarchism was excused on the grounds that he wasn’t doing it for nothing.

  Mr. Bolívar’s attachment to the Anarchist Republic of Catalonia had never interfered with his business of wine importing and potato exporting.

  During his term as a diplomat he used to say at dinners and receptions, as reported in the newspapers, ‘It is good for our two countries – Ireland needs the civilising wine and Catalonia needs the strengthening spuds. Éire go Bráth!* I Visca Catalunya!’

  Mr. Bolívar often used stage-Irish expressions from America, like ‘spuds’ for potatoes, because he was born in Mexico City.

  His father was half-Irish, and his mother was of purely Irish descent. In many countries of South America there are large cattle-owning colonies of Irish people descended from settlers who emigrated in the 1840s and ’50s from the grazing country of the Irish Midlands.

  They are now an immensely wealthy group, and their eldest sons are sent home to Mullingar and Athlone and Kildare to be educated. One of them is mentioned in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. ‘The higher line fellows began to come down along the matting in the middle of the refectory – Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee, and the Spaniard who was allowed to smoke cigars and the little Portuguese who wore the woolly cap.’

  These South American Irish are intensely proud of their ancestry, and have a snobbish horror of Irish-Americans from the United States. They also, when in Ireland, have the strong farmer’s prejudice against the Dublin and Belfast working-class, whom they regard as slum-dwellers. Though it contains, as noted above, many stage-and screen-Irishisms, their English speech is that of Counties Meath, Westmeath, Kildare and Longford.

  For a time after Franco’s victory, Mr. Bolívar was not permitted to do business with any part of Spain, but when things settled down, it was discovered by Franco’s Embassy that as long as Mr. De Valera’s party ruled the country, they must do business with Mr. Bolívar or get no spuds. For Mr. Bolívar, in his day, had been representative of the Irish Republic in South America.

  In the Catalonian Cabinet Room hung his mementoes of earlier Republics. A manifesto signed by, amongst others, Señor Loyola Bolívar, on behalf of: ‘Los Libertadores en la América del Sur.

  La Raza Gaélica.

  Los pueblos ya no podrán ser manejados como el alfil sobre el tablero. Ellos serán los únicos árbitros de sus propios destinos.’

  Presidente Wilson occupied one side of the mantelpiece, and on the other side was a large and beautifully engraved Irish Republican Bond:

  ‘República de Irlanda.

  Certificado de Título.

  Diez Pesos.

  A………….

  Yo, Éamon De Valera, Presidente de Gobierno de la República de Irlanda –’ and more to the same effect I’ve no doubt, dated Febrero, 1921.

  So, in the Irish Government, Mr. Bolívar had many friends, and devil a much good the Bishops could do the Caudillo, so long as De Valera’s party was in power, and if Franco wanted Irish spuds, he had to get them through the same source that the Reds got them.

  For the Fianna Fáil crowd recognised but the one true Pope, by the name of Éamon De Valera, late of 42nd St., and lesser Popes were taken notice of only in a religious way.

  They would always grant his Holiness censorship of immoral publications (such as this) but a tariff or a trading quota was, as my sincere colleague the late Anton Chekhov would say, a character out of a different opera.

  So, Mr. Bolívar re-opened his trade with Spain and announced to his friends of the Friends of the Spanish Republic that it would be only penalising the proletariat there by refusing to send them any spuds.

  He had other interests besides wine and potatoes, and for years had a big house in the County Dublin between the mountains and the sea. He ran two cars – one of them a large Hispano-Suiza.

  Though an abstemious man, the cooking of his Basque chef was famous, and his cellar was one of the best in Ireland.

  ‘If Loyola Bolívar did not have a good sup of wine,’ said the other Dublin businessmen ‘in the name of God – who would?’

  Besides, the businessmen at Loyola’s table were usually supposed to be on diets. They were not very strict about these diets, only for a few days after the death of one of their number, but they preferred to diet on an excess of whiskey or claret than on an excess of starch.

  It was agreed on all hands that Loyola’s lunches and dinners would have been worth ten times as long a journey, and out to his house trooped the businessmen who ate and drank and did deals over the cognacs till Mrs. Bolívar lost her temper one day, and from an upstairs window dropped an Ibizenco fish-weight on the head of the President of the Scottish Widows Mutual Financial Trust while he stood at the hall-door waiting for his car to drive up and thanking Mr. Bolívar for a wonderful lunch.

  Mrs. Bolívar and Loyola married when he was twenty-one years old and she was a shy girl of eighteen from the plains of Kildare, living the simple, ample, and happy life, the only daughter of an Irish grazier.

  Horses and cattle were the great interest of the countryside, and the devil and as much María Bolívar didn’t know about them.

  Her maiden name was the same as her lover’s, for they were third cousins. It was in their great grand-uncle’s house that they met when he was a schoolboy on holidays.

  María hunted in the season and went to Dublin in August for the Horse Show, and in May for the Spring Show, and for two weeks after Christmas to see Jimmy O’Dea in the Gaiety Pantomime and to help her mother order vast quantities of clothing at the January Sales.

  Twice she had been to the Continent; once to Rome for the Ordination of her favourite brother, Louis, and to Lourdes with her mother, when the old lady’s health began to fail.

  On both occasions they travelled straight through London on the Wagons-Lits, but stopped some days in Paris, going and coming.

  London they considered a shabby receptacle for poverty-stricken Irish people and petty criminals on the run.

  María could play the piano, spoke French and could speak – but not read – Spanish which she learned from her cousins on their trips home from Latin America. She was elegant, beautiful, and when amongst her own sort of people, amiable and good-humoured, whether they were servant boys or graziers.

  At a harvest home, there was porter and pig’s cheek, with home made-bread, and María the life and soul of the party. An artless cailín*, she moved amongst the farmworkers and dairymaids with an easy grace, and laughed and danced and played hornpipes on the fiddle for the party.

 
; Loyola she had known since they were children and when he asked her to marry him, it was considered on all sides an excellent match.

  They were closely enough related to consolidate the wealth and lands of the Clann* Bolívar, but not closely enough to bring them within the degrees of kindred and consanguinity forbidden by the fifth Precept of the Church.

  So, they were married and went to Paris for her shopping – a wedding present from Loyola; to Rome for the blessing of Pope Pius XI, Achille Ratti, just begun his Pontificate; and to Spain for a long and sunny honeymoon.

  For long enough she used her accomplishments to entertain Loyola’s guests, and indeed, it was only after nearly fifteen years of marriage and Ciarán and Deirdre were fourteen years of age that she began to get restive at Loyola’s dinner parties and ceased to please his guests.

  At a dinner to receive the Cultural Delegation of the Basque Republic to the People of Ireland, she insulted them, not the people of Ireland of whom she was bigotedly fond, but the Cultural Delegation.

  This consisted of the Profesor of Middle Euskade Iambica, Bilbao University; a vice-president of the Basque Republic; his chaplain; the Secretary of the Catalan Committee for Joint Anti-Fascist Action of Trotskyites and Communists (3rd International); and Lady Jane Blanchard who spent a week trying to persuade W. B. Yeats to go out and fight in Easter Week 1916, and who was now on the Committee of the International Red Aid.

  Lady Jane always insisted on giving this organisation its full name, in case it would be mistaken by its initials for the Irish Republican Army, with which she had fallen out in 1934, on the general question of the day-to-day struggle and the particular one of the I.R.A.’s refusal to spare a dozen twelve-ounce sticks of gelignite for a parcel to be sent to the Secretary of the Employers Federation during the coal strike.

  The late Subhas Chandra Rose, the Indian Nationalist leader, described her, ‘as a champion of the down-trodden in every land, a great friend of the Indian people, a fiery preacher for every good cause in her native land, the breaking-up of the big estates, the revival of the Irish language, and birth control – a splendid figure of revolting womanhood.’

  Legend had it, that on occasion of her Easter visit, Yeats asked her what did she take him for, said he was too delicate a man and threw her down the stairs two days after the Fall of the General Post Office, because he was going to write a poem about it.

  It was believed that she was instrumental in getting Frank Harris and Charlie Chaplin to visit Jim Larkin in Sing-Sing. She certainly used her influence with Governor Al Smith to get him out. Smith had an almost feudal regard for Lady Jane Blanchard, on account of her family having evicted his family from their cottage in County Cavan, back in the old days.

  Apart from that (Loyola said), her great age would have entitled her to respect, apart from her life of service, when he described that terrible evening at the dinner party of the Cultural Delegation when María insulted them all.

  At a party the previous week, for the All-Ireland Director of Operations for Standard Oil (New Jersey, U.S.A.) María showed signs of restlessness by leaving the dinner table before the tortilla. Loyola excused her by saying that she had a headache, and sweet things did not agree with her, and she was gone up to her room to lie down.

  Now, many of the guests had on previous occasions seen her consume square yards of tortilla, of which she was extremely fond, and the fact that she had not gone up to her bedroom, but down to the kitchen, was made apparent to all assembled, by the rising notes of her fiddle on which she was playing the well-known tune, Upstairs in a Tent, for a hornpipe danced by the gardener’s boy and a housemaid.

  This was bad enough, though the party consisted of Dublin businessmen, who all suffered from their own wife troubles, but the next day, she announced to Loyola that she was sick and tired of his friends and acquaintances, and would he let her off those parties, and let her amuse herself with her own friends, in the kitchen.

  ‘With the servants?’ asked Loyola.

  ‘They are friends and relations, some of them of yours and mine,’ said María.

  ‘After all the money was spent on your rearing,’ said he, ‘your own second cousin in the Jockey Club de Buenos Aires – what are you? – beef to the heels, like a Mullingar heifer.’

  He insisted, however, that she come to the next dinner party and they’d make arrangements about future dates. Most of the guests did not speak English, and she wouldn’t have to be there to make conversation with the Cultural Delegation and the Secretary of the CCJAFATC (3rd Int.).

  ‘All right,’ said María, with resignation, ‘if you say so, I’ll make converstion with them.’

  ‘You’ll do as you’re fuckingwell told,’ said he, in Castilian.

  María began by refusing to make conversation with either the Delegation or the Secretary of the CCJAFATC (3rd Int.) on the grounds that none of them spoke intelligible Spanish.

  She offered a handkerchief to the Chairman of the Cultural Delegation, because she said she did not wish him to blow his nose on his napkin.

  As Loyola said, she spared neither age nor the sanctity of God’s anointed for she called Lady Jane an old Grange bitch, and alleged that the chaplain, sitting beside her, was trying to feel her leg under the table.

  ‘You might at least have respect for Father Cardona’s Sacred Office,’ said Loyola, with mounting fury.

  ‘He might keep his Sacred Paws to himself,’ said María, ‘Catholics … Catholics how are you! This crowd is no better than the Christian Front.’

  This was a reference to the crowd supporting Franco, ex-members of the British police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary, and their sons, with some ex-Free State Army officers, and failed clerical students, though the mass of them were recruited from the Dublin underworld.

  They were known to the Franco Army as ‘the tourists’ and their leader, General O’Duffy, as ‘the Flying Postman‚’ because he went around in an aeroplane collecting his men’s mail, while his men spent their time reading and writing letters and sending postcards home, drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes.

  Six hundred of them left Ireland, and all returned safely but seven, six of whom were killed accidentally. The other one was in a bad state of health for some years before he joined the force, and only went to Spain because his parish priest thought the climate might do him good.

  It was a deadly insult, to compare a bourgeois Nationalist, or any respectable person, (even a respectable supporter of Franco), whose family had not been in the Black and Tans or convicted of burglary or shop-lifting or living on prostitutes with the Christian Front.

  By the grace of Providence the guests did not know this, nor notice the insults at all, nor the altercation between Mr. and Mrs. Bolívar. The Iberians could not understand English and gave determined attention to the food and wine. Lady Jane was stone deaf and very drunk. So that dinner party did not pass off so very disastrously, but at the next, María dropped the Ibizenco fish-weight on the head of the President of the Scottish Widows’ Mutual Financial Trust; he was unconscious for four days, and Mr. and Mrs. Bolívar finally parted.

  Loyola was a generous man to his family and María was not short of money herself. She moved out of the big house, in County Dublin, and bought one for herself in Ballsbridge. Here she lived, with Ciarán and Deirdre, and her uncle Hymie. Ciarán and Deirdre were away at school when their father and mother parted, but it was agreed that María should have the custody of them.

  Loyola was kind and sent them money, but he was the kind of man that needed his children about him, although he was satisfied that they were being well looked after.

  When they finished boarding-school and went to the National University, Loyola called at the house in Ballsbridge one day, held a conference with María, and presented them with a new motor-cycle to take them to and from their classes. Ciarán was to drive it, and Deirdre was to go pillion. Sometime Ciarán had another girl called Mairéad Callan as a pillion passenger, but Deirdr
e did not object, because she had affairs of her own to attend to.

  Ciarán was studying medicine, and Deirdre was studying Social Science, because she wanted to work with little children. Her brother remarked, grimly, that she would not be short of a supply of them, by the looks of things. This was what the party was about.

  In the years they were growing up, their father continued to take an active interest in them and in plans for their futures. He had fixed it already for Ciarán to take over a doctor’s practice as soon as he had qualified. He did not think much of Deirdre’s Social Science, and when she was eighteen she was introduced to a very correct, well-dressed young man from the Mexican Embassy, whose family was rotten with money.

  There was no difficulty in the way, for María agreed with Loyola that it was an excellent match. Deirdre, dear, amiable and healthy girl, smiled when he asked her to marry him, and said she’d love to.

  He was very formal, but most attentive. He called and took her out in his car every Sunday. The wedding was fixed for Saint Stephen’s Day, the twenty-sixth of December, a favourite day for Irish weddings, and an engagement of one year.

  But between hopping and trotting, Deirdre had been seeing this student from National, and his foot slipped.

  By this month of September she was discovered to be somewhat pregnant.

  This was where I came in.

  I had been a comrade of Ciarán’s in the Fianna Boys – the Irish Republican youth organisation – since we were twelve years old, and later in the I.R.A.

  We were both twenty-one; he was a third year medical student, and I was following the family trade of house-painting. Ciarán and I drank together, and sometimes I drank with Deirdre – not that she drank much.

  I did not drink with her and Ciarán together, except in their house, for he was a bit of a snob and did not want his only sister to get involved with a house-painter, if she could get some fellow with the readies.