Beyond the Breakwater

by Catherine Foley

  I’m sure he’s graceful and terrifying in flight but he’s captured on the ground here. He’s nervous because he was clearly in the process of eating some class of an egg. He looks as if he has possibly heard something and, holding his position, he has raised his head to scan for predators. His food is like the yolk of an egg that has spilled out of the shell in one great glob of yellow and mustard.

  It’s a painting by the artist Mick Mulcahy from west Waterford, a painter of great power. He was a young man when he painted this beast of a bird in the late 1970s. He had yet to travel to places like the Sahara, the outback of Australia, to Papua New Guinea and to Korea, where he would portray indigenous peoples and their natural environments – an endeavour for which he was to become well known. Back then he was staying with his father in Helvick and my aunts, Sheila and Gile, were near neighbours.

  He presented the painting to them as a gift one day, carrying it in to them under his arm, offering it to them the way he does, pleased, confident and proud of his work. They may have had a drink to celebrate or my Auntie Gile may have prompted a little round of applause. I know they were all in agreement that it was powerful. It was a creature that was somewhere between a crow, an eagle and a black gull. Together the three of them came up with a name and christened it that day when he stood it on a chair and they stood back to look at it. CROGAL, they said. And Mick wrote that in pencil on the side of the frame.

  The painting hung for years in their dining room. I always loved its colour and its strangeness. Years later, when Auntie Gile died, the painting was left to me in her will.

  Crogal’s backdrop is a swirling whorl of colour. It circles him, rotating around him in a heady mix of geometric and circular designs in warm reds, ochres and yellow tints. There are zigzag sections and red markings, the likes of which you might see on a totem pole.

  His beak is long and curved and red like the caked mud of an equatorial riverbed. He’s got nobility and a vulnerability about him, even if he’s fierce and watchful.

  He watches me now, Crogal. I don’t think he’s nervous any more. He appears calmer to me now, somehow. His rich yolky egg has remained untouched since it was painted, so he’s happy to stand and remind me of his story – of his creation in Helvick Head by Mulcahy when seagulls were squawking and squealing outside the windows, demanding to be flung onto his canvasses instead of this black interloper from another time, when savage hunger and satiation were the only laws and life was a jungle full of colour and verdant tangles. Crogal is happy to remind me of his growth as an heirloom and of his journey to my house in Dublin.

  As a teenager, I would stand and admire Crogal when I visited my aunts. I loved the brazenness of the bird’s blue-black plumage. I loved the strangeness of it. It was a great furnace of colour, vibrating in the corner of their cream-coloured dining room. Over the years cigarette smoke filled the room as they talked and reminisced and the walls faded slowly to a coffee-coloured beige. But Crogal’s colours never faded. Today he is as steady and black and vibrant as ever, standing guard.

  51

  Dusty Books

  I love owning old books and papers, especially those that once belonged to relatives I never knew. They can contain all manner of information about another time. They can shed light into someone else’s mind and provide a glimpse of life as it was in a distant past.

  I took great care of where I shelved them when I moved into my new house in the Liberties. I raided our shelves at home and brought a number of them back to Dublin with me. I liked having them around me. I always grouped the old ones together – it seemed like a natural fit.

  Sometimes, it is the books that are missing pages and covers, eaten by mites and falling apart at the seams that mean more to me than newer, shinier ones. I particularly love old schoolbooks, especially the ones that are signed with a youthful scrawl and possibly dated. It’s fascinating to leaf through Enquire Within Upon Everything, for example. This is a great compendium of information from the Victorian age. It was first published in 1856. There’s no signature on this book, but it was purchased in Mitchell’s Book Store at Cangallo in Buenos Aires, so I presume it was bought in the early 1920s by William Ryan of Waterford, a cousin on my mother’s side whose father was a sea captain but who himself worked for many years with the railways in South America, and who, according to family lore, knew Eva Perón.

  I believe he was quite a serious, distant man. He married but he was not particularly loving or kind. Maybe he was a bit like this book: full of quaint, erudite details and facts, if perhaps short on emotion and humour. According to the publisher’s preface to this, the one-hundred-and-thirteenth edition, proof of the book’s worldwide popularity is clearly shown by the record number of copies sold. Sales reached the wonderful total of 1,500,000 copies, a number which the publishers, Herbert Jenkins Limited of London, believed in 1923 to be ‘absolutely without precedent’.

  And when one ‘enquires within’, there are all manner of tables and titbits, tips and antiquated information. There are suggestions on proper conduct and manners, sections on dinner parties, balls and evening parties. A gentleman’s calling card, for example, should measure 3 x 1.5 inches, while a lady’s should be 3.5 x 2.5 inches. The surface should be slightly glazed; the edges must not be gilt.

  There are gardening hints, medical information, food and cookery, legal information, general information, household hints and miscellaneous receipts. I like to think that William Ryan used this book a great deal. It would have appealed to his mathematical, engineering side. There’s a section on poisons, on the care of infants, on how to wash a white lace veil and so on.

  Another book that I value is an old tattered copy of a catechism, entitled A Companion to the Catechism: Designed Chiefly for the Use of Young Catechists and Heads of Families. This belonged to my paternal grandfather, who signed it on 2 September 1903 in a strong, clear hand – Daniel Joseph Foley. He was seventeen at the time. He was born in 1886.

  It must have been the start of the academic year at the De La Salle School in Waterford. His brother Pat signed it five years later on the same date, 2 September 1908, so they must have shared it. It’s an old hardback and it was bought in P. M. Egan’s shop, bookseller and stationer, of 78, the Quay, Waterford, as a stamp on an inside page testifies. It was published in 1897 by M. H. Gill & Son of 50 Upper O’Connell Street, Dublin.

  There’s an old piece of blue blotting paper, frail and thin, lying between two of the pages with the lines of a religious poem written by Dan entitled ‘Jesus Sold’ on it. Here’s the last verse:

  Erring men,

  Love again,

  Give sinning o’er,

  War no more,

  But follow him.

  It’s the simple sincerity of his young heart that is so appealing to me. Underneath this, he appears to ask the future co-owner of the book, his brother Pat, what he thinks of the poem. Cad é do mheas air, a Phádraig, he writes. Pat must have given a verbal response as there’s no written trace of what he thought.

  The book’s question and answer format is accessible even though it deals with complex theoretical abstracts. In one chapter the student is asked if servants are obliged to protect their masters from wrong. How should masters treat their servants, it asks on the next page. It is clear the book is from another era when Heaven and Hell, sin and sacrifice, masters and servants were daily realities; where concepts such as absolution, remarkable visions and fast days were accepted readily and without question.

  Dan Foley’s teenage signature is full of conviction and confidence. The official stamp of the Boys’ School, Ferrybank, Waterford is here too, proof that Dan – who was headmaster there until he died at the age of fifty in the summer of 1937 – must have used this catechism right through his life. He’s also written a few notes in pencil on a page at the back, possibly in the run-up to an examination, which is another word he’s written in pencil on this same page. These notes include the words ‘subjection, pain, grief, darkness of un
derstanding, weakness of will, inclination to evil’.

  What a book! What a schooling young people had then.

  Oh to have known these men who read and loved books, to have looked into their eyes and asked them questions about life and love, age and time. I turn the pages of their books carefully, lovingly even, waiting to unearth another particle of information that will give me a further glimpse into what they and their lives may have been like. Sometimes it is the absence of a mark that can prove beguiling and mystifying. But a mark in the margin, a dog-eared or torn page or a written word can reveal so much that it leaves me puzzling over it for a long time and I let my imagination run riot.

  52

  Guatemala

  The minibus drove us as high up the mountain as it could go. Then we walked. The path wound steeply up through tall trees. Through the branches we could see other mountains rearing up into the sky, ranged around us at every point. It was hot; from the air, you might have seen vivid slashes of bright green and orange earth.

  We climbed up to a small Mayan village on a level with the highest peaks. I was in Guatemala with a group of journalists who had been invited by Trócaire, the Irish charity and overseas development agency, to visit some of the places where its volunteers were working so that we could report on its campaign to seek justice for the country’s indigenous Maya people.

  It was quiet in the tiny, grieving Guatemalan village of Xecotz. The ground was covered with soft clay so all movement was hushed. The bare feet of children and their parents walking along earthen lanes left only the smallest imprint. We saw the earth squish beneath them. We followed in our sturdy boots. All sounds were dulled as we made our way to their little church. A cock yodelled on a post, alerting us all to the coming of night.

  And then the darkness fell quickly, blanketing us until we had to grope our way along a path. Still, looking up high above us, we could see that the sky was clear and the stars were twinkling in an inky universe.

  We went into the roughly built chapel where many of the local people had already gathered. Great big eyes watched us from the pews when we sat on the benches on the right-hand side of the chapel. There were whispers in the dim light. Little boys, some with swollen bellies, stood nearby and pressed in close to their mothers. Three men strummed on guitars in a corner, their music thin and scratchy. They seemed out of tune, jangling and weak with no melody and no strength behind their hymns.

  Mayan families were in the process of saying goodbye – a ceremony that was due to finish before the sun came up – to the family members who’d disappeared during the civil war. The bodies had only recently been discovered, exhumed from a mass grave. Now, they were to be given a proper burial at dawn and we’d been invited by Trócaire to witness the ceremony on the understanding that we would write about it, thereby drawing attention to it in the wider world and also highlighting the plight of these people, who had endured terrible brutality and injustice throughout a war of genocide perpetrated against them from 1960 to 1996.

  When we were there in the mid-2000s the Maya people were in the process of bringing the perpetrators of that genocide to court and Trócaire was helping them to achieve this. Many horrific things occurred during the genocide in Guatemala; for example, during 1981 and 1982 the army and paramilitary groups murdered 100,000 people.

  As we travelled through the country and interviewed various individuals, I sometimes felt that we were intruding on their grief. I worried that we had no right to quiz these people, who were there to answer our questions about their experiences of having lost their families, or being raped or beaten. They told us that they wanted us to witness and report on their suffering. Ever since, I remember how they looked at us and explained that it was important that we were there.

  And so we all huddled close on the benches as the vigil continued, us westerners trying to understand what they’d been through. It was a night to think about their souls, it was an oíche na marbh (a night of the dead) to remember forever.

  The church felt like an old-fashioned school classroom. All the coffins were piled high in rows, one on top of another. They were light-coloured, small, newly made, still rough and sticky from the sap seeping from the light wooden structures.

  The shaman – a thin man in narrow white pants and a dark purple coat – swung a thurible and the sweet smell of incense filled the space as the sad, empty night wore on. Before the sun came up, the men stopped playing their instruments and joined others to carry the coffins outside. They went down the side of the mountain towards a long, communal grave they’d dug, where they would bury the bodies of thirty-three loved ones from their community.

  We followed the procession of mourners – toddlers, old people and young boys. There were solemn faces; they seemed weary, too spent to cry. As they gathered along the top of the trench, we saw the dawn breaking and the sun’s first rays begin to peep over the distant horizon.

  As the ceremony began, the dark nearby peaks began to change, turning a pinky orange, blushing. The dim light spread. Now, it began to change to yellow and the light lit up the trench. The ochre clay was piled in heaps and the gash in the earth was red and glistening, open like a wound.

  The shaman stood on a rise and swung the thurible again and again as the sun rose. The musicians started another scratchy hymn, strumming loose strings, their grey trilby hats looked as worn as their eyes. More men, all thin and small-boned – their wide-brimmed hats stark against the red clay – got into the trench and started taking the coffins from those on top, trying not to jolt them. No one spoke as the boxes were passed from one to the other. Some boxes fell awkwardly. Once all the coffins had been placed in the trench, the men climbed out and began shovelling in the red clay. It was nearly over.

  The shaman, standing on a pile of red earth, chanted softly. It sounded like he was saying a decade of the rosary. The incense from his thurible wafted back and forth, a smudge of lilac against a white sky. We hung our heads low, trying to imagine what terrible events had happened in Guatemala, to leave them so cloíte mar seo, so defeated like this, so broken.

  53

  The Berber Women

  The Berber guide and I were sitting on the floor, our backs against a whitewashed wall. We were studying the carpets that had been unfurled at our feet. Their geometric designs were hypnotic. I stared at all the repeated abstract shapes – the lines and lines of little crosses that were woven into the rugs. They had a mysterious pull. The Berber tribeswomen at the other end of the room sat on the floor, watching, possibly hoping I was going to buy something, while the guide spoke, directing my attention back to a particular carpet in front of me with a tiny star at the core of its design.

  ‘See the four points of the cross and the point at its heart,’ he said. ‘These are the five points of a star. They correspond to the five elements of wisdom.’ He listed these five elements on his fingers: silence, emptiness, wideness, purity and the light of stars.

  I looked down at the dark-skinned women who had woven the rugs, lacing designs into a pattern to represent the wisdom of their ancestry. They watched me with sparkling eyes, waiting, their burkas tucked in around them. But I was no bargain hunter and in the end I didn’t buy any rug.

  Back in the daylight, the air was filled with the sounds of Arabic traders selling their wares. I walked through the outdoor market, known as a souk. Its narrow passageways wound through rows of ancient stalls, home to a variety of different trades. There was a cobbler sitting at a counter mending shoes; in another booth a man was sharpening knives using a kind of bicycle to power his lathe. I passed a stall where stacks of spices were piled high on a display wagon and in another little booth a barefoot man covered in navy dye was stepping into a vat of black liquid to stamp on a sheep’s fleece. Around the next corner, I walked into a swarm of flies buzzing around the head of a camel, held aloft on a spike over a butcher’s counter.

  I felt like Princess Leah in Star Wars, wandering through her galaxy, so when the snake charmer
beckoned me across, hoisting a great snake up out of a basket at his feet and draping it around his neck, I didn’t start away. The man handled the snake firmly, stroking it. He coaxed me over, nodding and beckoning. I went closer, keeping my eye on the python. The lugubrious serpent hardly moved. The noise and the frenzy of the place filled me with resolve. I nodded and in a second it was around me, its weight tight around my neck and across my back. It was cool like leather, heavy, and I didn’t mind at all.

  Later that day, RoseAnn and I travelled in the heat of the lower slopes of the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco. We were in a minibus, driving past tall medieval castle walls and turrets, sand-coloured locations where Lawrence of Arabia was shot in 1962 and then in 1999 where they filmed Gladiator. And now, a few short years after that film was made, RoseAnn and I – along with a small group of trekkers – were in the very same area, heading for a little village in the mountains.

  Going along bumpy, potholed roads, we passed olive groves, grazing camels and young shepherds resting under palm trees out of the heat, their flocks nearby. When the driver turned up a narrow lane shaded by trees and rocks, the air grew cooler.

  Once we’d disembarked, we carried on by foot, bringing all our belongings with us, walking for the rest of the day along a stony track. It curved by the side of a dry riverbed. We went higher all the time, often stepping over treacherous dips. We had to watch our step along that path and not be distracted by the changing landscape that went from barren, rocky gorges to lush, green stretches. When I looked down I could see the dried bed of the river below, strewn with boulders, as if they’d been sprinkled over the caked mud by a mighty celestial hand.