The South

by Colm Toibin

  I go to the Palau de la Música. Sometimes when I walk into the hall and up the main stairs I see it again as I did that first year in Barcelona. The colours and the motifs distract from the music, it is overdone. But sometimes when the lights go down and you watch the stage, you can sense the splendour of the whole building.

  I go with a Catalan friend Maria Jover, whose eyes still fill with tears when she talks about the civil war. I like her softness and her prejudice. I go to her house on Saturday for lunch. Her daughter is there sometimes and they like to talk about culture: an exhibition, a concert, old Barcelona, books. Maria Jover was able to show me a catalogue for a show that you were in nearly twenty years ago.

  It took me a while to tell her about you. At first I mentioned that I had known you and I saw her watching me and it was some weeks before she mentioned that she knew you had gone to the Pyrenees to live with una anglesa and I said yes that I had lived with you and that I was there when you were killed and that I had a daughter with you and she died in the accident as well and I was heartbroken at the loss of both of you.

  We talk a lot about painters and paintings. She lives down by the side of Santa Maria del Mar. Her husband, too, was held after the civil war. She has not told me about what happened to him—yet I want to know why he was never able to work again. He did not die until recently. Maria gives the impression, however, that he died long ago. I have never asked her too many questions about it. Yet his presence and yours hang over our conversation. When we go to a concert together it is as though we should keep two seats vacant, one for you and one for her husband who was tortured after the civil war. For both of us reality rests in being reminded. For me the whole city of Barcelona, every street I use, every day, evokes memories of the years we were together.

  Last week Maria and I came out after a concert in the Palau. We did not speak, we often stay silent as we walk out. We had been listening to Bach’s cello suites. There was just the single instrument. I was moved by the music. Maria said she had heard Casals playing the Bach in Prades. The music had made me low. I could not face the night on my own trying to sleep.

  I asked her to come for a drink. I don’t think she wanted to. I was tired of being alone. She said she would drink a cup of coffee but she sounded reluctant. I took her to the Meson del Café where you would go to wait for me and Michael Graves after the first half of a concert when you had finished looking at the stained glass on the ceiling and the Catalan girls. You had no time for the music then.

  I sat there with her. I ordered a brandy with my coffee. She was uncomfortable in the bar. She doesn’t go to bars and she knows nothing of my life that I do not tell her. I talked about the last year of our life together. I told her about Carlos Puig.

  I did not tell her how you died or how Isona died. I know that you were driving a jeep and the jeep reversed off the road just outside the village. I know Isona was in the front seat and I know she broke her neck. I am told, they tell me, that she died instantly. They tell me too that you were still alive when they got to you. No one has ever told me if you said anything and I have never asked. I have always presumed that you were too badly injured to talk but maybe you could open your eyes, maybe you could hear. I can’t fill in those bits. I do not know what you felt. I had ceased to understand what you felt sometime before.

  There is one thing. I cannot contemplate what happened when the jeep went off the road, those moments. I must not contemplate what happened when the jeep went off the road. Did Isona scream? Miguel, what did she do, the poor child? Miguel, I am in Barcelona now. I cannot think about what happened. It is something I stop myself doing at all hours of the day and night.

  I can feel you close.

  I told Maria that I had to stop myself thinking about that. I did not tell her that you wanted to kill yourself and to kill the child. Nor did I imply it. I said it was an accident. I said you couldn’t drive. I said maybe you got into the wrong gear. I said the roads were bad. I said whatever I could. I told her the drop was sheer. I do not know what happened. I had lost touch with you. You had disappeared. I do not even know how you managed to start the jeep.

  Maria also has a man to remember. I do not know what they did to him. I do not know which method they used to unnerve him. She knows what happened; it was public; she has the motives in her possession. I do not. I thus cannot judge. There are facts missing.

  Don’t move. Hold still. I can feel you close.

  It is late spring in Barcelona, nearly summer. The swifts are frantic in the air. I am the woman at the window with the chair half out on the balcony, the cane chair with the footrest that I rescued from a rubbish heap in Calle Ancha.

  I am lingering here without knowing what to do. And Michael Graves still wants me after all this time. His failure in everything has become for him his failure with me. He has failed to persuade me to live with him, he has failed to make me believe that he can look after me.

  I will not settle for him.

  There are times when I have wanted to. I needed someone, I needed a set of domestic circumstances, someone to talk to, share meals with, make love to, go out to the bars with. I have never made love with him, although I have sometimes wanted to; even years ago when I was with you I wanted to. Maybe if I had made love with him then things would be different.

  I didn’t make love with him then.

  I doubt if sex matters to either of us any more.

  Loneliness, the loss of energy, selfishness, insomnia, these are some of my problems. He drinks too much, he works too little, he needs me too badly for me to be able to take him. I am not in love with Michael Graves, that is the answer. I cannot live with him, I have nothing to offer him, I cannot look after him, I cannot be the focus of all his hope. I want him to go away. I want you back.

  I want you back. That is what I want.

  I see him as often as I can. He is still funny and good-humoured and he still loves Barcelona. It is a relief to see him. I must keep him at arm’s length.

  He wants me to come back with him to Dublin. He says I cannot remain here forever brooding about you. He says I must move, even if to London or anywhere outside Spain. Maybe it is time I abandoned all this.

  * * *

  I went to Ireland with him last year. I did not go to Enniscorthy and I lived in fear that someone might recognise me. In the streets of Dublin I constantly saw people I thought I knew. I kept watching them and they would turn out to be someone else, someone I didn’t know.

  We went to Hook Head for a week. We hired a car and drove from Dublin. We passed through Wexford as the April day was fading and drove towards the sea. There was a guarded pink light which covered everything. We drove towards the sea at dusk, Michael and I, gazing at the extraordinary light. Neither of us had ever seen it before, although we were both born just thirty miles away. It was like being in another country. When we came to the first inlet we stopped to watch. Everything was governed by this light. Everything was changed by it.

  We were on Hook Head with the sea on three sides. This is the Ireland I imagined you and me being furtive in. Staying in the small places as husband and wife. I almost loved Michael Graves that night.

  I shall leave here; I shall give up longing for you. I must leave you dead, leave you buried in Alendo in the graveyard, the first bodies to be buried there in years, under the marble gravestone I brought up from Barcelona. You and Isona and poor Carlos Puig, whose body lies beside yours.

  There is still only one matter which will keep hammering away in my mind and it is what happened in the jeep when it went off the road. What went through your mind? What about Isona? Did you know what you were doing? Why did you take her?

  This is what you have left me with: anguish, speculations, doubts. Over and over again. Help me. Miguel, listen to me. I am in Barcelona now. Last evening the swifts came back to the city. I remember how we sat one evening as the sky darkened and stared up at them frantic in the air above Calle Carmen. We had been drinking. I remember it. Th
e swifts frantic in the air.

  DUBLIN IN WINTER

  Dublin in winter. In November the sky was an intense, cold grey; the light was clear and brittle. In December the darkness almost never left the sky; the day was an interlude.

  Fog seeped everywhere in January. In the little warren of houses around Oxmanstown Road where she moved when she returned to Ireland, the smoke from the chimneys didn’t lift, it hung heavy in the air all day. There was ice on the footpaths in the morning; there was a damp and bitter cold.

  Michael Graves telephoned her every morning and came across the city twice or three times a week. Sometimes they drank until closing time in Mulligan’s pub in Stoneybatter; some nights she cooked for him, but she was a bad cook.

  This was her second winter. She rarely travelled far beyond the few streets around her house. The weather reminded her of an impression she had once had of death. To be enveloped thus in a casual, alien cold.

  She could think of nothing to do. Everything she touched was damp; every night the sheets on the bed were damp, no matter how long she left the electric blanket on. The walls were damp. She could feel the damp everywhere; she could feel the damp in the clothes she was wearing.

  There were two upstairs rooms in the house. The front room was full of her stores: old paintings, half finished paintings. She tried to stay in bed in the morning. She tried to paint when she got up. Michael Graves gave her books. Sometimes there was music on the radio and that was good.

  The front room downstairs had a sofa where Michael Graves slept when he stayed. He was as lonely as she, even though he had his pubs, his friends, and a pattern to his life in the city. He hardly ever painted, only when commissioned, and even then he was slow and cranky. He lived on the dole which he collected every week. He complained about money, he complained about the cost of his flat. He wanted to move in with her.

  She cared for him. Perhaps loved him. She needed him at the other side of the city, as a visitor, as a constant companion.

  A LETTER FROM FARO

  Hotel Eva

  Faro

  Portugal

  May 8 1971

  Michael Graves my love,

  As you will have seen from the notepaper and the stamp on the envelope we are not in Venice as we were meant to be. This may come as a surprise to you and I can assure you it came as a surprise to me when we arrived at the airport in London and Mother produced the tickets. You will note from the date above that one week has gone and there are five more to go.

  We fill three rooms of the Hotel Eva. Mother and I each have a bedroom with bathroom en suite; between our rooms there is another room with a dining table and some easy chairs, each room has a balcony looking out on to a small marina. It is, as Mother says, “much nicer than Venice—isn’t it dear?—much nicer than Venice.”

  Mother has become larger than life. She was never small, but for this holiday she seems to have modelled herself on a number of well-known figures from the cinema. She has brought a lot of Henry James’s novels.

  We have breakfast at eight in our dining room. Mother demands that I be dressed before she starts. She knows about you, or at least she knows a certain amount about you. She asked me where you came from. I told her. She looked at me. Enniscorthy, she said, that’s where we’re from. Yes, I said, I know. “What’s his name again?” she asked and repeated it slowly. “Did he have a grandfather called Michael Graves?” I said I didn’t know. (Do you? If you do, send me a telegram.)

  She remembered a man called Michael Graves well. He was tall. Were you tall? (Are you tall?) She remembered he was the only man in Enniscorthy at the turn of the century who could sign his name. “The rest of them just wrote X my dear, imagine that.” She looked at me daring me to say that I didn’t believe her. Then she added: “He is RC, isn’t he?” I said yes. That was a week ago, our first day on the beach and since then she has been chuckling to herself: “My daughter is going out with a boy from the town, an RC.” She repeats it four or five times a day and I don’t think that she is going to stop.

  I have a lot of time on my hands. I hope you don’t mind if I ramble on for a while. Last night my mother looked out of the window and saw the town. “Oh,” she said, “there’s a town as well as a beach. A town. I hope you won’t be thinking now of going out with any of the boys, my dear.” I looked up from my book. “I am too old for boys.” There was silence for a while. Then she said: “Yes, so am I.” She is almost eighty.

  There is the ceremony known as moving mother to the beach. There is no beach in the town and she knew that before she came. The beach is two miles across a lagoon. Mother loves saying the word lagoon. “There’s a lagoon, my dear, just like in Venice.” The hotel provides a motorboat and a boatman. Mother must first be moved from her room, all hats, sunglasses, scarves, necklaces and Henry James novels. Then she has to be helped out of the lift and into the boat. The boat must also contain an armchair and a footrest as well as a table for her use on the beach. The boatman, or, as she calls him, the ferryman, is in charge of the furniture. She comments on everything that happens. “Now we are ready,” she will say, “for the ferryman to take us across the lagoon.” Or: “Halfway there, my dear, halfway there.” The boatman must then carry all the furniture to a toldo and then get mother and seat her in the shade, with her feet on the footrest, her sunhat on her head and her Henry James on the table. She will also have organised a small hamper and a tip for the ferryman who took her across the lagoon. A tip for the ferryman! I am not joking.

  From then on it’s advice, comment, gossip, reminiscences. Nothing she tells me is true, or maybe some of it is true, but not much of it. Every time I sit in the sun, she croaks at me and tells me it will ruin my skin. Never sit in the sun. She says it five times a day. Never sit in the sun. One day she moved her glasses down her nose and looked at me. “My, my,” she said, “but your breasts have been and gone.” I did not ask her what she meant. And when I swim, she says that my father was never in favour of swimming. He always discouraged it among his men. His men? I asked her if he was in the army and she said of course he wasn’t; what put that into my mind?

  My mother also has views on the North. “Dreadful situation, dreadful, never should have let it happen.” She seems to have read something about Irish history or the North which she keeps talking about. “You know I read that the RCs have been treated dreadfully up there. Dreadful time. You see they couldn’t vote.” And then she would go back to her book.

  I am not allowed to spend money. This, she says, is her last fling. In future she will be too old to go anywhere, and too broke. The money’s all gone, she keeps telling me. Then she looks up: “Have you ever sold any of those paintings, my dear?” I tell her I have but she is already engrossed in her reading.

  * * *

  She’s living on the proceeds of a house she sold. After that there’s her house in London which she’s going to sell so that she can move into a maisonette for the aged—at least that’s what she calls it.

  I feel like a paid companion, not allowed to stray for a single moment. This is why she chose here rather than Venice, I gather. In Venice I would have an excuse to go and look at the pictures and she wouldn’t be able to come. Also, Venice has frail, senile old ladies in every nook and cranny. Here at the Hotel Eva, Mother is a novelty. She likes being a novelty.

  I feel that at any moment the act will break down and she will be serious as she used to be. This is the woman who ran away when I was little because of what she referred to the other day as her dread fear of the Irish. This is the woman who financed my own escape and has financed my life over the last twenty years, who asked no question but relished each morsel of information I ever gave her about what I was doing with my life. She loves it when I talk of Pallosa. She loves hearing about the festivals, the times we had with Miguel, she loves when I talk in Spanish to the ferryman.

  She wants me to go home. It comes a few times a day, a question, a hint. Where is Tom buried? she wanted to know. I didn�
��t know. What did he die of? Then she forgets his name and refers to that man you married when you were young. Once I reminded her of his name she turned and looked at me: “I think you were right to get away from that hole, my dear.”

  She talks about the great-granddaughter in Ireland she has never seen. She would like to leave her something. “Something valuable, something she would appreciate.” Was she a nice girl? I told her I have not seen Richard since he was a ten-year-old boy so why on earth should I know anything about his daughter. “Would you mind if I left her my jewellery? You could take a few pieces, but most of it should go to her. Some pieces cost the earth, you know, even in my day. It was what men gave women when they wanted to show their appreciation. Does that boy from the town give you jewels?”

  I should never have agreed to come. She is oppressive. I am used to spending so much time alone. Sometimes I lie down on a towel on the beach far enough away from her to pretend I can’t hear but she starts to shout at me. I pretend I’m asleep. The other morning she closed her book and said, “It’s funny doing things for the last time. This morning when I was shaving I thought . . .” “What?” I asked. “No, little one, I was just making sure you were listening.” I have to face five more weeks of this.

  I know she wants me to go back home. What age is Richard now? she asked. I thought for a while. I told her I thought he was almost thirty. And what age is the little girl? I told her I wasn’t sure. Two or three. And how long has Tom been dead? I told her five years. And did I ever think of the house? I told her that I did sometimes. Did I like the house? Yes. Did I own the house? Yes, I thought I did. Did I own the farm? I told her that I believed she and I both had a share in the farm. She told me she had a share in nothing. She had left fifty years ago, never looked back and owned nothing. The house was big, wasn’t it? She remembered from pictures that the house my father built was big. You could easily get a little flat there, it would be a nice little home for you. Richard wouldn’t mind and, after all, you own the house. I told her I wasn’t sure I owned the house.