Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  “But I’m not of their time.”

  “No. It’s a loose concept. But I’ll bet it wouldn’t be more than six months before you started to make condescending remarks about, say, Americans. Already I’m sure that you have an historical dislike of the English.”

  “The English, yes. With good reason.”

  “You see. Forgetting that they saved you in 1940. Or an added reason to distrust them because they didn’t throw in the towel when you did.”

  “But we like Americans.”

  “Since when? Lafayette? Eisenhower? I’ll bet you despise our culture. Sure all the young French are heading towards New York. They’re not living on past glories. They want a slice of the cake of modernity. Of American culture.”

  “What culture?”

  “You see? Again. An IBM computer ain’t a Louis XVI fauteuil, ma chère.”

  “Well, you must admit it is a culture based mostly on money.”

  “The almighty dollar again.”

  “Dermot says if you want to know what the good Lord thinks about money you only have to look at those He gave it to.”

  “Look. We’re a race of bastards. But like mongrels we’re intelligent, and strong. America is the cultural mixmaster. You put in worn-out Russians, Germans, Irish, Italians, Spanish, English, Africans, Jews, Gentiles, Buddhists, the marginals, and the music goes round and round and what comes out is a retreaded, newly-blended American. Reborn. Rarin’ to go. No limits. A genetic mix made possible by the geographical transplant. New beginnings. An American Jew can marry an American Gentile. It’s still fraught but they see themselves as Americans first. There’s still ethnic pride and some ethnic sneers. Polacks, micks, wops, spics. But it doesn’t count. Racial stress, yes. Imbalances. But not as inflexible as in Europe. Success measured, naturally, by commercial achievement. Start driving a cab and wind up with a fleet. Start growing peanuts and arrive in the White House.”

  “Not always with salutary consequences.”

  “No, you can’t win them all. We’re not as cunning as, say, Mitterand. Mistakes are made. Yardsticks are too venal. The TV medium is the message. Hollywood reigns. But as Brecht said in another quite different context, grub first, then ethics. I say, financial security first, then culture.”

  “You’re certainly virile.”

  “A standing prick has no culture.”

  “Crude too.”

  “That’s how you see us. A spade’s a spade and no racial comment intended. You believe in the old-fashioned seduction scene. Music by Bizet or Ravel in the background, pictures by Fragonard or Delacroix overhanging, Balzac for a pillow and Chambolle-Musigny ‘91 decanted at room temperature in the glass, honeyed words, practiced and insincere as hell, in the shell-like ear. While we down a bottle of Budwesier—from the bottle—and whip it in, whip it out and wipe it. Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am. Is there a ballgame on television? The only race that went from barbarity to decadence with no civilizing period in between. I’ve heard that one too. The fact is, we have the best orchestras, the best ballet, the best opera, the most progressive museums, the most dynamic literature, the best contemporary art, Bacon excepted.”

  “The biggest and the best of everything!”

  “Damn right, baby. We don’t sit around admiring our decrepitude, watching the walls fall down. Knock ’em down and build!”

  “That’s why you’re in France?”

  “No, of course not. I’m here for the balance. To extract from the ancient and convert to the modern. Besides, I’m only one generation removed from the struggling Russian Jewish masses yearning to be free. By way of France, incidentally. I’m here to paint without the distractions of telephones and faxes and ‘let’s take a meeting.’ To lie fallow for six months. To recharge the batteries.”

  “Then?”

  “Back to the west coast. Not to Los Angeles but San Francisco. The houseboat studio in Sausalito. The racing on the Bay. And a certain lady.”

  “You never mentioned her.”

  “You never asked. A friendly fuck is not a lifetime contract. I think with all his hangups, Dermot’s your man. I don’t believe he’s afraid of sex. Only afraid of sex with you. Ask the Scandinavian broad. The Irish and the French are fairly compatible. Not if you castrate him, of course. Not if you look down upon him. Read some Irish poets. Where’s your Seamus Heaney? Your Joyce? Your Beckett? And I think you should forgive your father and go up and see him before he dies. We are all trying to get by as best we can. I’m sure he regrets part of his past. There ain’t many heroes around. There were some very bad Jews in the camps and outside them. Wait, Laure—”

  She ran away into the house. He dived into the pool and swam a fast crawl to the shallow end. Picked up a towel, and walked slowly and with finality to the Pavilion to get dressed.

  Friday

  24. Dermot: The Wanderer Returns

  They arrived in Ireland—Dermot and Nana—when the grey dawn was breaking over Rosslare. The car ferry was late docking. Force 7 in the Irish Sea. Blowing hard. SW wind against ebb tide and the skyscraper superstructure making windage that was barely checked by the shallow draught. No grip. A drifter, like himself. Crabbing its way across. Rabbit-hutch cabin, athwartship bunk, smell of stale urine, vomit in the corridors, drunks in the lounge. Sleeplessness. Bile. And a certain irritability between them.

  He had spent most of the night on deck. Alone. With the sea and things you cannot share. Another baptism. He stood in the waist of the ship, alone in the only part that was open to the weather. He faced to windward and the spray cut his face with a cold, invigorating sting. Sort of cleansing. He leant against the rail and hung on as the seas slapped against the hull and rose up almost to his deck level. The vessel staggered. He braced himself against the movement, and his muscles came alive. The wind shrieked in the superstructure. He relived a North Atlantic storm when he was swept from the starboard to the port side of the ship by a boarding sea and he was lucky to get caught up in a coil of ropes before being smashed against a pillar. He remembered a typhoon in the Pacific after he left the Arakan, wounded, and reverted to sea service, when it was forbidden to go on deck at all and the operations against Japan were postponed. That time when he was delivering the ketch from Adelaide to Sydney in a southwesterly gale, bare poles in the Bass Strait, pooped and petrified. Character-building, they say. It didn’t seem to have worked too well. It was the only elemental experience left. Except one, and he was not in the mood for the small death right now. He went below reluctantly and only because he needed some sleep. As he climbed into the top berth she reached out and touched his leg but he ignored it.

  That Friday the rain came down in buckets. It lashed the ferry terminal in sheets of solid water, horizontal under the overhang. The sky came down to the bleak harbor and everything was grey and unwelcoming.

  It was an inauspicious return of the native.

  Nana The Troll said, “God, that was awful! I hope Ireland is better.”

  Dermot, garrulous as they drove down the ramp, his garrulousness an attempt to conceal nervousness and to block conversation, declaimed in a nervous, nonstop way. He was facetious with an edge of bitterness. It all went above her head. Well, maybe she got the drift. Already he felt remote from her. It had been a mistake.

  “When did it not rain in Holy Ireland? I remember reading somewhere that Tutunendo in Colombia is supposed to be the wettest place in the world but anyone who believes that hasn’t been to Galway where it seems to rain 366 days of the year except leap years when it rains 367. An Irish year is like an Irish mile or an Irish fact; it’s a flexible commodity. It seems a lot longer than it actually is. ‘As long as a wet week’ is an Irish saying. In Kerry of course you go around in a wet suit and a diving mask picking up the old cod off the street. Hence the saying, ‘Ah, go on with you, you’re only codding!’

  Nana laughed. “It doesn’t matter, darling. Rain on the roof of an Irish cottage. It might be sexy!”

  She reached over and attempted
to squeeze his cock. He brushed her hand away, pretending he needed to concentrate on the disembarkation.

  It was the sort of facile remark he least welcomed. There was something heavy and serious about this return to Ireland. Not a time for outsider’s comment. Already he felt uncomfortable about bringing her with him. It was a kind of pilgrimage, a highly personal thing. And filled with dread.

  Also, he was embarrassed. Not only would she be out of place in Piltown but what would Mouse say when she learned of his company? Nana would not be welcome in Grove House. Even in jeans she looked more like a client of the Eden Roc of Antibes than of an obscure Irish village. The things he wanted to see, the fragments he wanted to collect, would have no meaning for her and he would be constantly aware of her disinterest and impatience.

  Besides, gloom hung over him after the fast visit to Paris, the empty flat, to the Fifteenth arrondissement to get the car, back to Roissy, the fast drive to Le Havre to get the night ferry to Rosslare. His inability to respond to her sexual overtures.

  He was angry with Nana and with himself. Irrational flashes. She was a supernumerary, excess baggage. She was there, he realized, just to provide warm flesh in bed and an anchorage for his lonely penis. Unforgivable.

  He was on a dry drunk, completely off the bulkhead. The shock. The emptiness. The imbalance. The emotional vertigo. His awareness of his tenuous lease on Nana. And the limited needs she supplied. The abandonment by Laure was like a kick in the balls or an iron fist in the solar plexus. Only relieved by the sexual narcotic. Or maybe facing up to the demons of his childhood.

  Mouse insisted that living in Ireland was better for screwed-up people than a Harley Street shrink. No matter that it screwed them up in the first place. Laughter and the sound of friends the cure-all. Why do today what you can put off ’till tomorrow? You’re not allowed to be serious, she said. It’s where the mad are truly sane, she said. Where your ribs ache with healthy laughter. And she’d burst into song with ‘Come back to Erin, Mavourneen …’

  The customs officer was taking his time about checking them out. As the man said, there is no word with the same urgency as ‘mañana’ in Irish. Dermot was glad to talk to him. He was a distraction from Nana. An opportunity to joke with someone who would play verbal ping-pong with him. Banish his childhood nightmares which were hovering there in the background. Black Gustave Doré caves with snakes and dragons. Interspersed bursts of inanity. No, insanity. A great gas, isn’t that what they used to say?

  “That’s an interesting vehicle, you have there,” he said, suspiciously.

  “Yes, a vehicle that’s a horseless carriage called a car, Orsifer. Voiture, machina, Wagen. Or an auto-mo-bile, as the Americans prefer. Internal combustion, isn’t it, sahib? The pistons go up and down and the wheel goes round and round and the smoke comes out here.”

  “Ah, another madman we have here! Welcome back to the asylum. And let’s have a look in the boot, if you don’t mind.”

  “The trunk? By all means. There’s only room for a toothbrush. Maybe two. And a box of french letters. Contraband in Holy Ireland. No? No contraceptives, no abortions, no divorce, no sex. Copulation no substitute for masturbation.”

  The official didn’t bat an eyelid. Dermot knew that given half a chance he would keep him there for an hour to take him down a peg or two and to relieve the boredom. Six hours to wait before the next ferry-load of victims. Anything for ‘the crack.’

  “What’s that number-plate? French?”

  “No, Italian. Reggio Emilia.”

  “But I see you live in France. Why a car registered in Italy?”

  “I like spaghetti better than foie gras. Me and the Pope of Rome who gave up Avignon a few weeks back. I’m an Irish peasant, like you. And I couldn’t get it registered in Lichtenstein or the Cayman Islands. Where of course I wash the filthy lucre.”

  “Begod, you’re a bright one, all right.”

  “That’s because I fuck a lot, Father.”

  That was too much. Dermot could see his little Sacred Heart badge blushing redder.

  It was a mistake to bait the customs man. Religion was a no-no subject for jokes. Dermot thought he was going to take the car apart for a while so he smiled and they decided to call it a draw. Just as he was about to close the lid of the boot/trunk the chap reached in and pulled a book out of the corner where it was lying in a box on top of other books. It was a book of abstract drawings facing poems, or ‘word flashes’ called Footprints of the Soul, by Jean Perret, a French artist, and Sean O Caoimh, a relatively unknown Irish poet. He opened it, looked at the art squiggles, and read out:

  The water lily floats

  serene. But under the leaf

  swims angry eel.

  “Well, now, there’s a nice thought.”

  Dermot asked, “You don’t find it a trifle salacious?”

  “Would you say your man intended a double-entendre?”

  “Could be. Try the next.”

  So the officer read out:

  The oyster half-shell.

  Someone has stolen the pearl.

  Ah, there is my hell.

  “Haikus, aren’t they?” the man asked.

  “Well, I didn’t plan them that way but that’s the way some of them came out.”

  “Is it yourself wrote them? Under a nom de plume?”

  “Guilty, milord. I like some better than others. This is apt for today, wouldn’t you say?” And Dermot quoted:

  The madness of Munch

  Proved the blindness of sanity.

  The customs man pronounced, “Well, it may not be Yeats but you’re not as frivolous as you seem.”

  Dermot said, “Yeats, he never put a word wrong.” And he started:

  Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands;

  And walk among long dappled grass

  And pluck till time and times are done

  The officer broke in and they finished it together:

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.

  Suddenly he was proud of his race. He thought it would be the frosty Friday before he caught a French customs official with Verlaine or an English one with Houseman.

  The customs officer let him go reluctantly. He was a nice man. With depth. Bored. Dissatisfied in that peculiarly Irish way. In limbo. Keeping melancholia at bay. Had Dermot stayed they would have wound up in the local pub and he would have reached Piltown at Christmas. Besides, he’s a reformed alcoholic. Nowadays he gets pissed as a newt on words and water.

  But he wanted to stay. He desperately needed the companionship of a man like that, simple yet literate. To talk the troubles away.

  They blasted off towards New Ross and Waterford.

  He said, “It might not be a bad life to be a customs inspector with a loaf of bread beneath the shed, a flask of Paddy, a book of verse and Cathleen ni Houlihan. Better than getting the 0740 Lufthansa flight to Cologne to hear tired buzz words about market penetration and perceptual segmentation. Goethe? Who he? Mehr Licht, Heinie.”

  “I don’t think you’d like it,” she said. “No suites in the Carlyle Hotel, no yachts, no models to play with.”

  “You mean you wouldn’t join me?”

  “No thanks. You’d have to find a nice red-haired Irish girl.”

  “They say convent girls are the best.”

  “Better than me?”

  And she reached across.

  “Ah, no.”

  The automatic unfelt response.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Into the Hole again. To see the view from the bridge. The valley of the Suir.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Not as nice as Vaucluse, the closed valley.”

  “That’s because your wife’s there.”

  “No.”

  But he didn’t sound convincing.

/>   “It’s so peaceful.”

  “Yes, that’s the word, all right. Peace comes dropping slow. Calm on the surface, turbulent underneath.”

  He was going to the village of Piltown in the County Kilkenny. The place where he was born. Where the genetic virus was injected. Back in the hole. But first he would stop at Fiddown. To test himself at the river. Could he take it?

  He drove on and the ghosts crawled out of the bogs.

  The towering figure was his father, The Boss, as they called him, ironically, copying his own mimicry of the local yahoos.

  “Tell me about your father,” she said. “Was he like you?”

  “The Boss? Yes, now I think so. When he was alive he was the bane of my existence.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, he was too pacifist for the times. He had been badly wounded in France during the war and couldn’t stand the so-called heroes of the Troubles. He let them see he didn’t have much time for them. They got him in the end. But in the meantime I had to pay for his outspokenness. Let me try to remember.”

  He talked, as if to himself.

  “Jesus wept—and well He might!” That was my father’s usual comment on the antics of his Irish countrymen. It exploded out of him every time they did something he disagreed with. Every day. Everything.

  “The tears of God flow, my dear, copious, keeping the Emerald Isle green. ‘Sure ’tis a soft rain!’ The stagey tourist saying. The old plamas, for which there is no accurate equivalent. Pronounced plaw-mawse, it’s what the Irish-Americans like to call the ‘Blarney.’”

  “You have it, my darling. And a very soporific voice, especially on the telephone. You always talk me into things I don’t want to do.”

  “I hadn’t noticed any strong resistence. Bullshit is what it is. And soft rain was not how it seemed when I was sloshing through pools of liquid cow-dung bringing the dumb, lumbering beasts in for milking. Arrah, not to say alannah, and sodom and begorrah, and a broth of a boy drinking tea so strong you could trot a mouse on it. Funny little people with their shillelaghs and their shamrocks and Celtic twilight myths. Come back to Erin, Mavourneen, if you’re on a round-trip ticket with a fixed return booking to Paris.”