A Fanatic Heart

by Edna O'Brien

  Why did you say that? To punish me for going to your house, for pleading with you. And on the way out I said, “Are you angry” and you said no but that maybe I was, a little. Of course I was. Not a little, a lot. Another time you said, did I have to talk so much. The trouble is, I talked to no one else in between. That is the worst of putting all one’s eggs in one basket. I loved your smell. You may have heard it from others, but you smell of gardens, not flower gardens, but herb gardens, and grasses and plants and dock and all those rampant things.

  Do you use the same words exactly, and exactly the same caresses, the same touch, the same hesitation, the same fingering? Are you as shy with her as with me? If only you had had courage and a braver heart.

  I do believe we would have been happy. It is perhaps foolish to say so, but there was nothing in you that I did not like and admire. Even your faults, even your forgetfulness. There was nothing in you that clashed with me. You were startled once by the flowers, very white flowers they were, with very thick blossoms. You admired them. It was as if you had never seen flowers before, or certainly never seen those. You made me feel as if I had cultivated them, as if they were an extension of me.

  I heard from that friend you brought that she is more demanding, makes her needs felt. You found a lack in me. You told me I am kind. I did a favor for your friend, but that was only to woo you.

  I am not kind, I cut people off as with the shears, and I drop them, like nettles. At this moment there are several people who could do with my company and I withhold it and that poor cat sits day after day on the window ledge or outside the door and when I open it to take in the milk, that poor black cat tries to slink in, but I kick it with my shoe, in fact, with the heel of my shoe. The same black cat as I held on my breast one night when you came and I was lounging. That was a false moment, but I had to vary things because the previous time you said it was unnatural to spend so many hours over a dinner table and I felt that already it was all getting a bit stale, and I wished in my heart that you would invent something, that you would think up some new plan, some diversion, arrange for us to meet elsewhere. Of course you couldn’t. There was a matter of secrecy and shortage of money. When I am short of money I borrow, and to tell you the truth, my debts are catching up with me, but when you are short, you go without. I wanted to give a big cushion to your child. You refused. At the same time as you swore me to secrecy I broke that pledge. I told a few of my women friends, and then you introduced me to a few of your men friends. I think you were showing me off. Come to think of it, we were like children. It is just as well it got nowhere.

  Yes, there are times when I think the whole thing seems ridiculous. For instance, the night you were to come to dinner, or rather, one of the nights you were to come to dinner, and after waiting for about two hours I got restless and began to walk back and forth, paced, and did little things, hoping that would speed you up—changed my shoes, brushed my hair, thumped the piano, kept opening and shutting the door. It was winter then and I could tell the seconds passing by a lot of ways but most of all by the candle burning down. It was a blue candle. At length I couldn’t bear it any longer, so I turned down the stove—I always had food that could be kept hot—and went out without a coat to wait at the bus stop. And do you know something, there was a moment standing there, an absolute moment, when I mistook someone else for you. Yes, I was convinced. I saw him at the top of the bus, wild hair, the anorak, and then I saw him rise and I saw his back as he went down the stairs of the bus and I got myself ready to smile, to kiss, to reach out my hand, and yes, I was shaking and as excited as if it were you.

  I wish it had been. That was the second occasion I went to your house. A very cold reception. You kept on the television. I was prepared to end it, and the next day you appeared out of breath and you sat and you talked and you said how it would all improve and everything would be better between us.

  Did you believe that then? I must confess I did. That particular evening, the objects—the room getting dark, the end of the blue candle, the two of us thinking that the worst of our troubles were behind us.

  You had to go away the next day. Away. Of course there are ruses for passing the time. I didn’t see my friends, alas I have abandoned my friends, but what I did do was to go to cafés where it was very full and very noisy. I searched them out, but no matter how full a café is, there is always room for one, usually at someone else’s table. The way they argued or looked into one another’s eyes. I was having a rest from you. I could tell the lesbians, even though they couldn’t tell, and those who would be together forever and those who wouldn’t. I had such a way of seeing into them, such clarity. That is another thing. I often see you as an old man and you are in a trench coat, white with the belt hanging down, one of those stiff trench coats with perforations under the arm, and you are recuperating from some illness and you are, yes, a disillusioned man. It will all be behind you then, she and I, and your daughter and your life’s work, and how will you remember it, how?

  In those restaurants they play waltzes. I loved the first bars of the waltz. I often stood up to dance, with my mind meandering. Yes, that has been my life of late, restaurants, people saying to each other, “Happy?” and people saying what François said and how much of that hair they should cut.

  I did something awful. Friends of mine were going away on a boat forever and I didn’t see them off. It was my godson going away forever and I didn’t see him off. I thought you might ring and I didn’t want to be out.

  My lovely godson. I sent him a cup and saucer to the cabin, but it is not the same thing. You see, I had a moment with him, unique; I think it was tantamount to a sexual moment. It was this.

  I had been in his house once, or rather, in their garden, and there was a party in full swing. A lot of people, a lot of drinking and jabber, and he and I sat far apart from the others, under a tree, asking riddles. There were flies bothering us and we used to blow them away, and he told me about his dreams when he was always winning, and then he said would I like to walk around, to go out of the garden. And we did that; we went out and walked all around the clapboard fence, and met a lady, a sort of serving lady going in with a platter of strawberries, and he held my hand and squeezed it on and off, and when we got back to our starting point and were just about to go in by the lych-gate he pointed to the nearby woods and told me there was a dirty man in there who pulled down his trousers and showed his butt, and then we hurried in. I didn’t see him off.

  And another thing, I bought fire irons—don’t ask me why, because it’s summer—and I tried to beat the lady down about the price. I went to her private house, having got the address from the assistant, and when she opened the door I saw that I was confronted by a hunchback, and still I tried to beat her down about the price. It was nothing. A matter of shillings. I stood there waiting for her to concede and she did. We are to be pitied.

  Another haunt of mine is cinemas, before they open. Oh, my God, they have to be seen to be believed. Shabby. Quite a long way from Strauss and the waltzes. Usherettes, mostly elderly ladies and people like myself, killing time in the afternoon. I want all my teeth drawn out of me and other teeth, molars, if you will, stuck back into my gums. I want to grind these new teeth, these molars, to a pulp. Perhaps I want to eat you alive. Ah yes, the seat of this love must indeed be a hate. So the sages would tell me. The hate extends to others. Good friends. How boring they have become. They tell me the shape of their new rooms, or the colors of their walls and what they eat in restaurants. Most terrible bilge. I get listless. Then I get angry. I have to leave right in the middle of their conversation. Mostly I don’t see them.

  I don’t work now. Waiting. It gets on one’s nerves. I can keep going a little longer, but only a little. One good thing about being out is that I imagine you telephoning. I exist on that little ploy for hours. I even live your disappointment with you. Your phoning once, then again immediately, then asking the operator to get the number, then phoning again in about an hour
and another hour, and concluding that I have gone somewhere, abroad, maybe as far as Morocco, when all the time I am in one of those cafés listening to one of those waltzes, thinking of you, or in one of those cinemas waiting for the performance to start, reading a sign that says FRUITS AND ICES, unable to stop thinking of you. It can’t be hate. Do you ever imagine me with another man? You offered me one of your friends once, the night we were all together, here, dancing and cavorting and laughing. Laughing we were. “Why don’t you have Mike?” you said. But your arms were all around me, and anyhow, we were on the landing, on our way to bed. Believe me, I even wanted you to feed and drink off me. I wanted to waste away in your service. To be a bone.

  Am I saying wanted when I actually mean want? It is still my purpose, still my intention. You forbade me the gift of having your child, and I was too honest or else too cowardly to betray you, to dupe you. Maybe you have taken the plunge, maybe you have got married and that is why you are not showing yourself. You told me once that you muttered something about it. You mutterer. That doctor I mentioned got killed in a plane crash along with a hundred others. You may get killed. Do you know what I hate about myself: I have never done a brave thing, I have never risked death. If only I had done something you could have admired me for. If only I’d renounced you. She is by your side. Your guardian angel, perhaps your little helpmate? Not from what I know of her. You told me little but you inferred a lot. We are so hard on ourselves. Ah yes, those waltzes in those restaurants make me cry, and so do mushrooms. If only I could hear your voice for a minute, half a minute, less. You go from place to place. She is by your side, whether you like it or not. I often imagine you in trains sitting opposite each other, saying the odd word, then getting off, the two of you sharing the carrier cot. What bliss.

  Tell me, is she pretty, is she soft, your lady, or does she have what is called a whim of iron? I did ask you once if she had blue eyes and you professed not to know. You must know. It is not that I am a lover of blue eyes, the question simply cropped up. You must have seen them in all lights, and at all moments, maybe even in childbirth. On these numerous train journeys, do you ever think of me? I know you do. I am certain of it. I can feel you thinking of me even now. You may carry the thought through. You may contact me. Yes, he died, that young doctor. I am glad that I didn’t make love to him. I would not care to have made love to a dead man. Yes, it got killed between us, you and I. Contravened. That is a fact, a bitter fact. It wasn’t that it didn’t happen, oh, it did. Oh, how it happened. Your face and mine, your voice and mine. Evening. Just like milking time, and the cows lowing as if we were in the byre. Then the moon came up. Our faces shone. I could have touched the stars. One should be thankful for a moment, even grateful, and not be plaintive like this. Yes, it is nothing short of a miracle, the way you met me, more than halfway. The way you came out of your innerness and complexity and came to me, and I told you things, nonsense things. I told you, for instance, about the one wooden sweet which was mixed up with all the other sweets in a carnival assortment. This wooden sweet had bright wrapping like all the others, and more than once I got it and I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry, and neither of us could tell why it was in the box in the first place, whether it was some sort of joke or the like. And you told me about having to undress at the doctor’s and having a dirty vest on, and being scolded by your mother. She was ashamed.

  It is when I think about you suffering that I cannot bear it. I think of you crying. You cried lest you could never see me again, and I said you always could and that I would always understand and be womanly and be patient. King Lear says women must be kind, or something to that effect. Yes, that is what I must be, kind and womanly. I know what I will do. I will talk to your friend Mike, the friend you brought here. I will tell him some little pleasantry and he will pass it on to you, and you will be touched, regaled. I will do that now.

  Oh, God, I have done it. I rang. He told me. You have gone back to your own country, you have fled. Gone with your family. I knew it. It seems she did something silly like her sister, something extreme. Oh, how mad I was to think that she would give you up, that we would all share. Oh, how cracked one’s thoughts get. You did the right thing, the only thing. Yes, I will see you when you are old, just as I visualized it, in the off-white mackintosh with the perforations under the armpit, and you will be convalescing. I suppose you’re married. And yes; you have no nature. Oh, God, send me some word, some sign, some token. Tell me if you are married, or if you’ve forgotten, tell me how you are. It has all been disastrous, tell me something, I have to know … I will never know, I do not want to know now.

  The Creature

  She was always referred to as the Creature by the townspeople, the dressmaker for whom she did buttonholing; the sacristan, who used to search for her in the pews on the dark winter evenings before locking up; and even the little girl Sally, for whom she wrote out the words of a famine song. Life had treated her rottenly, yet she never complained but always had a ready smile, so that her face, with its round rosy cheeks, was more like something you could eat or lick; she reminded me of nothing so much as an apple fritter.

  I used to encounter her on her way from devotions or from Mass, or having a stroll, and when we passed she smiled, but she never spoke, probably for fear of intruding. I was doing a temporary teaching job in a little town in the west of Ireland and soon came to know that she lived in a tiny house facing a garage that was also used by the town’s undertaker. The first time I visited her, we sat in the parlor and looked out on the crooked lettering on the door. There seemed to be no one in attendance at the station. A man helped himself to petrol. Nor was there any little muslin curtain to obscure the world, because, as she kept repeating, she had washed it that very day and what a shame. She gave me a glass of rhubarb wine, and we shared the same chair, which was really a wooden seat with a latticed wooden back that she had got from a rubbish heap and had varnished herself. After varnishing it, she had dragged a nail over the wood to give a sort of mottled effect, and you could see where her hand had shaken, because the lines were wavery.

  I had come from another part of the country; in fact, I had come to get over a love affair, and since I must have emanated some sort of sadness, she was very much at home with me and called me dearest when we met and when we were taking leave of one another. After correcting the exercises from school, filling in my diary, and going for a walk, I would knock on her door and then sit with her in the little room almost devoid of furniture—devoid even of a plant or a picture—and oftener than not, I would be given a glass of rhubarb wine and sometimes a slice of porter cake. She lived alone and had done so for seventeen years. She was a widow and had two children. Her daughter was in Canada; the son lived about four miles away. She had not set eyes on him for the seventeen years—not since his wife had slung her out—and the children that she had seen as babies were big now and, as she heard, marvelously handsome. She had a pension and once a year made a journey to the southern end of the country, where her relatives lived in a cottage looking out over the Atlantic.

  Her husband had been killed two years after their marriage, shot in the back of a lorry, in an incident that was later described by the British Forces as regrettable. She had had to conceal the fact of his death and the manner of his death from her own mother, since her mother had lost a son about the same time, also in combat; and on the very day of her husband’s funeral, when the chapel bells were ringing and reringing, she had to pretend it was for a traveling man, a tinker, who had died suddenly.

  She and her husband had lived with her mother. She reared her children in the old farmhouse, eventually told her mother that she, too, was a widow, and as women together they worked and toiled and looked after the stock and milked and churned and kept a sow to whom she gave the name of Bessie. Each year the bonhams would become pets of hers, and follow her along the road toward the chapel or wherever, and to them, too, she gave pretty names. A migrant workman helped in the summer mo
nths, and in the autumn he would kill the pig for their winter meat. The killing of the pig always made her sad, and she reckoned she could hear those roars—each successive roar—over the years, and she would dwell on that, and then tell how a particular naughty pig stole into the house one time and lapped up the bowls of cream and then lay down on the floor, snoring and belching like a drunken man. The workman slept downstairs on the settle bed, got drunk on Saturdays, and was the cause of an accident; when he was teaching her son to shoot at targets, the boy shot off three of his own fingers. Otherwise, her life had passed without incident.

  When her children came home from school, she cleared half the table for them to do their exercises—she was an untidy woman—then every night she made blancmange for them, before sending them to bed. She used to color it red or brown or green, as the case may be, and she marveled at these coloring essences almost as much as the children themselves did. She knitted two sweaters each year for them—two identical sweaters of bawneen wool—and she was indeed the proud mother when her son was allowed to serve at Mass.