by Kevin Barry
‘He was from Granada, or near Granada,’ she said. She looked out the window at the orange groves, the scorched headlands, the limpid day. ‘He was murdered by the Fascists in the thirties. It’s still a sensitive issue here.’ Peter shrugged. Before they joined the motorway she took out the poems. In the dark wake of your footsteps, my love, my love.
‘They never found his grave,’ she said. See how the hyacinths line my banks! I will leave my mouth between your legs, my soul in photographs and lilies.
She would have preferred Granada. She would have liked to have found the mountain road near Alfacar where Lorca was shot and buried. ‘He was chasing duende,’ she said. ‘That’s what he was after.’ She looked at Peter. ‘Do you know what duende is?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Tell me. What’s duende?’
She was surprised to find herself doing this, making him feel less, under par. He was proud, accomplished in his own field – the law – and generally peaceable. She was in a strange mood. Lately she found herself growing dismissive, impatient, employing at times a withering attitude towards him.
‘It means soul,’ she said. ‘The dark cry of the soul, the terrible sadness that seizes the flamenco singer.’ He was staring straight ahead. ‘The grief and hardship in her voice,’ she said.
She watched him search for a reply, for some comparison he might offer. The singer falls into a trance, he might say, like in sean-nós, or old women’s keening. Yes, she’d say. The kind that goes to the marrow, he’d say. Yes. Yes. She waited, but he offered nothing. ‘She is haunted by love,’ she continued. ‘Deranged by love, and death too. There’s always death.’
They were approaching the motorway then. She found her mind veering off into an imagined conversation. After a while she turned to him. ‘Why do couples always make love – desperate frantic love – after a big row?’ she asked.
*
They wandered around the port and then along narrow streets, stopping now and then to gaze up at the buildings. A spaniel came out of a courtyard and sat on the footpath, calmly looking at her. They walked for a long time. They did not know where they were going. In a doorway a teenage boy stirred and looked up at her with deep-set, familiar-looking eyes and she was filled with a mild panic that he might speak to her, say her name even.
They returned by different streets and came upon a procession of altar boys carrying a cross and banners and priests wearing robes and pointed hats like the Ku Klux Klan. At the rear, a brass band played and uniformed young men rode on horseback and she thought there was something haughty and triumphalist in their bearing, something in their perfectly sculpted features and flawless olive skin – the whole spectacle, in fact – that chilled her. Peter smiled and raised his eyebrows as if to say, Okay? Enjoying this? He took out his map. ‘That used to be a bullring,’ he said, pointing across the street. ‘There’s still one in use, not far from here. We should go, before they outlaw it.’
Later, in a restaurant, he brought up the bullfight again. ‘Seriously, we should go. There’s one on Sunday.’ She shrugged. She thought it was a test. They were drinking Rioja. The restaurant was crowded, buzzing with talk. He had ordered codorniz, quail, and when the waiter arrived and put down his plate the scrawny little bird toppled over. Just then a woman at the next table let out a sharp laugh that startled Catherine. Peter righted the carcass and tapped on the breastbone. He peeled back the skin and teased a morsel of moist dark meat from the ribcage and raised it to his lips. She turned away. A terrible piercing loneliness entered her. A scene from a book, from years ago, surfaced. Justine. There were lovers – maybe a love triangle – and hazy bedroom scenes and beyond the window the heat and bustle of a North African city. A camel collapsed from exhaustion on the street outside and men with axes came and hacked off its limbs and carved up its flesh, while it was still alive. What she remembered, especially, was the pained puzzled look in the camel’s eyes, and the eyes moving as its limbs were cut off. The eyes still moving as the head was hacked off.
The woman at the next table laughed again and Catherine looked at Peter. She began to picture the walk back to the hotel, the bedroom, their nakedness. She had had the feeling, setting out that morning, of going someplace, and now she had ended up somewhere else, somewhere that made her more homesick than ever.
Peter was smiling, holding out a small red box. Inside were earrings, amethyst.
She frowned. ‘I didn’t get you anything.’
‘I don’t want anything.’
She began to remove the earrings she was wearing and put on the new ones. He sat, quietly regarding her. He would soon want children. When she tried to picture a child it was her sister’s child that always came to mind. Amy. A beautiful, pale dark-haired little girl. Radiant with innocence. Catherine felt a strange closeness to this child that she did not feel towards the other children in the family. As if she saw Amy as she might have once been herself – a clean slate, as yet unblemished by the world – and had singled her out for saving.
She fingered the earrings. She looked at the couple at the next table. When we are young, she thought, we have enormous hope, we expect that someone – a man bearing love and mystery and new ideas – will come and help reveal us to ourselves. She looked at Peter’s waiting face. He was no longer mysterious to her. She watched him talking sometimes, eating and drinking with gusto, bouncing through life on the stable ground beneath him and she was struck by the distance that exists between people. How everything, the details of everyone’s hidden life, far exceeds anything we can possibly imagine. And how for brief periods one can live at a different pitch, an extreme pitch, and then, when it has passed, return to the middle way again. Without anyone else ever knowing. No one bound her to secrecy, and she thought now that people do this – she did this, she kept things secret – so that they can reimagine their lives when lived life is not enough.
On the way back to the hotel he took her hand and she walked blindly beside him. She would have liked to have said something about the religious procession, the boy in the doorway, the drive that morning, them – their union. She thought there was a thread of messages on the streets, maybe even in their footsteps and in the tides of their silence, to be unriddled, but she knew that to voice such a thought would make her appear cold and remote, signal a drift in her.
In the hotel room Peter switched on the TV and flicked through the channels. Then he patted the bed and said ‘Come here,’ in a warm open voice. She came and sat on the bed. He put his hand on her shoulder and she felt its lovely weight and closed her eyes for a few seconds. ‘Are you tired?’ he asked. She shook her head. He began to kiss her neck. ‘Let’s watch something,’ he whispered. He stopped kissing her and surfed the pay-to-view channels and then paused. A couple was having vigorous sex against a wall, the man driving hard and fast into the woman. Then the scene froze and the menu appeared on the sidebar. Peter took out his credit card and leaned towards the keyboard. He had always been keen to use porn. Everyone does, he said, and she supposed he was right, but it always left her feeling empty, and a little sickly, as if their love-making had been communal and he had shared her and her private raptures with others. She watched him type in his card details. Certain remote memories had a way of returning unexpectedly, and as he tapped the keys she began to remember a night out from a time before they were married. She had not known Peter for long and they were in a late-night bar with two of his friends. There was a DJ and a small dance floor and footage from old black-and-white movies being projected up on the wall behind Catherine – clips of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, a flapper in a beaded dress doing the Charleston. Then suddenly one of Peter’s friends laughed and Catherine glanced back at the wall. The Charleston girl had stripped down to her bra and knickers and was doing a kind of belly dance, wriggling her ample hips and jiggling her breasts, her nipples covered in little tasselled cones. Then she turned around and bent over, exposing her backside in cutaway knickers. Catherine looked away. Peter gave a l
ittle whoop, then leaned in and said something to his friend. When they laughed – a low secretive laugh – Catherine felt her heart sink. She looked into her drink. If she were a different woman she would have got up and left, but even then Peter had become the hub of her life, the one to prevent the drift. The friend laughed again, a guffaw this time, and Peter turned away to conceal his own contorted face. When she looked up the dancer was still there and, instead of knickers, a little triangular flap – a snatch or scrap of animal pelt – hung over her genitalia, attached to a thin band around her hips. She wriggled and shook, and the little flap, as if part of her, wriggled and shook too, and lifted, and something struck at the heart of Catherine and she burned with shame, as if she herself were up on the wall, naked, with the little female flap flapping and hopping and lifting, and Peter and his friends standing there, convulsed with laughter.
He moved the cursor over the menu and clicked. Two naked girls with enormous pumped-up breasts appeared, writhing on the screen. Catherine turned to say something but then his phone bleeped and her gaze drifted off and came to rest on the novel on the bedside table. She felt a sudden longing to return to it. To the promise of solitude, private and illicit, that it held. To the strange gaunt creature at its heart: a silent disfigured man, pushing his mother out of the city in a makeshift wheelbarrow, and then, after her death, wandering the desert, surviving on almost nothing, his mind growing emptier by the day. She had found herself worrying for him, as if he were real and in her life. Suddenly, at the thought of him, a jet of pain shot down her left arm, enfeebling her. How had she found kinship with such a man? Why was she flooded with feeling for him?
Peter moved up on the bed, propped himself up on the pillow and then tugged at Catherine to follow. The TV scene changed and a man and woman entered a ship’s cabin and began kissing and clawing and tearing each other’s clothes off, then panting and moaning exaggeratedly. Catherine assumed the language was Spanish. She read the subtitles, single inane words, and remained unstirred. The moaning and limb-thrashing grew louder, more phoney. She felt Peter grow impatient. He switched channels, began to surf for a different film. She got up and stood at the window, and he did not try to stop her. She leaned against the window sill and waited, not knowing for what. The memory of the motorway returned, the great hulking shadows that closed over them, the monstrous trucks thundering past as they all careered downhill. In a second everything could end. She closed her eyes, began to envisage the plunge, the fall into the gorge, and when she could no longer bear it she threw off her seat belt and climbed to the back and flung herself on the seat where she lay face down and motion sick for the rest of the journey.
She turned towards him. ‘I got a fright last night,’ she said. ‘I woke up in the middle of the night, choking.’
He threw her a glance and made a face. ‘What?’
‘It was a kind of nightmare. You didn’t hear me?’
He shook his head, then lowered the volume. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘It was you who was choking me.’
He hit the mute button. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘It was . . . a half-dream, half-real. I thought I was at home sleeping in our bed and you crept in to get something and you whispered, “Shh, go back to sleep.” And then there was a thumb pressing down on my Adam’s apple – hard, really hard – and I couldn’t breathe and in a second the pressure surged up inside my chest – and I knew I was going to burst and my heart was going to break into pieces . . . and I said, “Peter, Peter, stop.” I said it urgently but in a nice voice too because I knew you didn’t mean it, you hardly knew you were doing it . . . I had to wake myself up to save myself. I knew I was only a second away from dying.’
She turned away. She could feel his eyes still on her.
‘Why are you telling me this? What does it mean?’
‘I don’t know . . . Maybe you’ve silenced me.’ She half smiled. ‘Have you put a gagging order on me?’ Then, after a moment, ‘Do you remember, once, I told you about a boyfriend I had when I was nineteen?’
He shook his head.
‘I did, I told you. I told you a little bit. His name was Luke.’
‘The animal boy,’ Peter said flatly. ‘What about him?’
‘I kept him a secret from everyone. I didn’t tell you that.’ Peter raised his eyebrows. ‘It wasn’t difficult,’ she said. ‘I had my own bedsit. He used to sleep late, watch TV while I was at lectures, smoke dope sometimes . . . He never knew his father. There was just him and his mother growing up, and sometimes foster homes . . . ’
‘What made you think of him now, tonight?’
‘I don’t know. The restaurant . . . The quail, maybe.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Did I tell you how I met him? Maybe I did. He was giving out leaflets at the entrance to Stephen’s Green – with pictures of awful animal experiments, you know, monkeys with their heads drilled open without anaesthetic, mutilated kittens, circus animals . . . And the word vivisectionist—’
‘Jesus, Catherine,’ he groaned. ‘Not this old hobby horse again.’
‘I remember seeing that word and thinking it was a bit like abortionist . . . Do you know what he told me one night? He said he was happy only once ever in his childhood. It was a summer’s evening and he and his mother were sitting in her flat as dusk fell. Just the two of them . . . hardly speaking . . . with the light fading . . . and the sound of kids playing drifting up from the yard below . . . ’
She looked at Peter. ‘He saw it all, you know – the abattoirs, the transport trucks, the slaughter . . . It tormented him – the Devil’s carnival, everywhere.’
‘Oh, please Catherine! Not this again. Do not equate the life of a cow with the life of a human being. Six million human beings.’
The sound of muffled voices carried from the next room. She was aware of naked limbs moving on the screen. ‘When I was small,’ she said, ‘I used to hear my father getting up in the dark on winter mornings and going out and loading up cattle for the factory. He had reared them, you know, he’d looked after them every day . . . They walked meekly up the ramp onto the trailer for him.’
Peter swung his legs out and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘They didn’t know,’ he said. ‘They’re not capable of comprehending any of that.’
‘They’re capable of suffering.’
They looked at each other. He would always outwit her with words, with logic. Then his shoulders seemed to slump. ‘He put all that into you, didn’t he?’ he said sadly. ‘All that animal business.’
She turned her head away. Suddenly she felt far from home. She thought of her rooms, her chair by the window, her little garden.
‘He used to steal from me,’ she said. ‘Just little things – CDs, gift vouchers – to get money for dope . . . I didn’t say anything . . . I couldn’t.’ She shook her head. ‘At least when he was stoned – at least then, I thought – he might forget, he might get some peace.’
She had been incapable of tearing herself away from Luke. She had felt his silence as a kind of deprivation. And yet she almost wished to return to those times, to the fidelity of being she had felt then, the streaming across into each other, the mornings spent in bed when a thought that might have been his became hers.
Peter’s chest was rising and falling rapidly. Suddenly he flared up. ‘You were a mug, Catherine, that’s what you were – a mug.’
The sound of thumping music floated up from a bar and faintly vibrated in her. She thought of the tourists on the Ramblas, the birds in their cages, wings twitching from thwarted flight. She wondered what her life meant.
‘What happened?’ Peter asked in a quieter voice. ‘You dumped him, I hope.’
‘No. He just stopped turning up. I think he was ashamed . . . I searched the city for him, knocked on doors till I found his mother’s flat – she was sitting in a dark room watching TV . . . I hoped he had run away – on the UK news sometimes I’d see protesters outside animal-tes
ting laboratories and search for his face in the line . . .
‘Eventually I went back to my old life, my old friends . . . And then, ages later, I got a call from his mother’s neighbour. A builder had found him in a narrow gap between two buildings at the back of Capel Street, badly decomposed. He’d been missing for nearly two years . . . He must have climbed up there one night when he was drunk or stoned, and fallen off. Or maybe he jumped . . . ’
She used to imagine him drifting in and out of consciousness, the footfall of strangers on the far side of the wall. His brain winding down after death. Everything deeply and terribly wrong. She went to her parents’ house in the country for a while and lay on her old bed in the evenings, conjuring up his final hour. It was always night time, and he would stop on the street, tilt his head as if discerning a cry above the din of traffic, then glance up and catch a glimpse, an apparition – of what? A cat perched on the roof’s edge, or a man – himself, his own form – silhouetted against the sky? And then his footsteps running around to the back lane and the vertiginous climb until he could go no further and he stood on the roof, eyes drilling the dark as if trying to pierce the secret of what he might become, and something at his centre – his will, his life force – beginning to disappear, dissolve, silently implode.
‘I had this thought one night,’ she said. ‘This notion—’ She hesitated, uncertain, her words seeming weak for the task. ‘It struck me suddenly – like lightning – that he had done it intentionally – that he had sacrificed himself for the animals . . . Maybe he thought they’d know – somehow they would know – and be consoled . . . ’ She looked at her husband’s face. ‘You have to understand,’ she whispered. ‘He changed my heart.’
They were silent for a long time. All day she had been waiting for something to deliver her, wanting the day to end gently.
‘Tell me something,’ Peter said then. ‘Imagine . . . imagine there’s a fire, and you can save only one thing – me or your dog. Who would you save?’
