Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  ‘A liberal indeed, but not a man to be sentimental about women,’ I suggested.

  ‘No, indeed,’ Enda said down the telephone.

  ‘I remember he once described charismatic prayer meetings as a rash on the mystical body of Christ.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Enda said.

  ‘Right,’ I answered. ‘I suppose we all die sometimes. Buddhists say it’s in our nature to die. Should be good for us.’

  ‘The funeral is tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s for the best,’ I said. ‘No point in leaving him above ground going stale. He’ll want his body for the resurrection.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Enda said, ‘you’re being a prick.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘sometimes I don’t realise how cynical the past thirty years of clerical scandals has left me. I think there’s a scar on my psyche.’

  ‘I was just wondering,’ he said, ‘would you be going to the funeral? Seeing as how he was such a support to you and me when we were students.’

  ‘You must be joking,’ I said.

  Tom Lunny’s head was shaved like an American marine and he had a deep voice, though he was never without his packet of Marlboro which he enjoyed with leisurely gestures, exhaling jets of blue smoke between his sentences. His shaved neck was beetroot red, and he had big ears that stuck out – perpendicular – to the sides of his head, and eyebrows as bushy as small mice. His lower lip was thick and purple, and he could hold the filter of the cigarette between his teeth with an uneasy sensuality. Everything about him was a contradiction; he was like a cross between a farmer from Limerick and Ernest Hemingway. He was ten years our senior but he’d often come to the seminary and we’d go out drinking, to shaded corners of the Roost on Main Street or sometimes to bars around Grafton Street in Dublin where we laughed together and talked about some theatre show we had just seen at the Focus, or liberation theology and the possibilities of love in the barrios of South America. He impressed us because though he was older, he seemed very modern and confident. He was a philosopher. A man so disinclined to partake in ritual that you’d wonder how he sustained himself as a parish priest in Ireland for all those years.

  Sometimes he’d agree to stay over in the seminary, and we’d end up in a room in Dunboyne House where he lodged himself, drinking whiskey. And when the bottle was finished and we were preparing the mugs of instant coffee, he’d suddenly declare that he had to go.

  ‘Well, fuck me, boys, I just realised I have a funeral at ten in the morning,’ he’d say, and he’d get into his car, at maybe 3 a.m., and head out the gates and off down the country towards his parish at the far end of Laois.

  But he wasn’t unusual. The Church in the 1970s was a divided city. Some clerics slept with women. Some clerics had gay relationships. Women slipped in and out of the parochial houses by night. Old conservative bishops patrolled their gardens, shouting their anguish at the sky and asking God why the Church had been abandoned to a bunch of liberal decadents. That of course was all before Karol Wojtyla took the rudder and steered the Bark of Peter backwards into the secure waters of religious and theological certainty.

  The dead priest had a big old nineteenth-century parochial house and he used to have parties where clerics and schoolteachers and members of the choir got so drunk that they fell about in the rose bushes on their way back to their cars to drive home in the dawn light.

  The dead priest had been an inspiration to us in 1975. He was in his thirties then and he read the New York Review of Books and often brought us to Dublin to see Beckett’s plays.

  But when the Polish pope and the German theologian took over the Vatican, he just put his head down for thirty more years like many other liberals who were caught inside the organisation. Privately, they threw their eyes to heaven, sucked in the smoke of a thousand Marlboro cigarettes and worked their way through the single malts. What could they do? They were trapped. The people who might have been significant players in a liberal Church were sidelined and terrified into silence. I remember one professor who drank so much that he would occasionally be found sleeping on the doormat outside his own rooms – and Lunny drank so much that when he put his head down on the banquet table at a wedding in the parish nobody around the white table of coffee cups and dessert bowls noticed that he was dead until the groom was finished speaking and the best man called for Father to say grace.

  ‘That was a lonely way to go,’ I said on the phone to Enda, ‘but the truth is I didn’t like Fr Lunny. What did he do in the face of the catastrophe that has afflicted the Catholic Church during this past thirty years? He just became a drunk.’

  There was silence for a few moments.

  ‘I’m astonished,’ Enda said, his voice a whispered cocktail of indignation and anger. ‘I’m astonished you would speak so ill of the dead.’

  ‘I’m not speaking ill of him,’ I said. ‘I’m just saying the truth. In fact, I feel sorry for him. But I won’t be going to his funeral. I’m up to my eyes with work. Trying to get stuff written. And the wife is away and the roof is leaking. I’m just too busy.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I thought you might just like to know.’

  ‘But call if you’re passing this way sometime,’ I added. ‘Love to see you. How’s the wife?’

  As if I cared. I had done the damage. I had committed an act of treachery against someone who had once been of great help to me. Sustained me intellectually and encouraged me to take risks.

  ‘Separated,’ he said tersely. ‘Ten years. She wasn’t well. Anyway, maybe I’ll call sometime.’

  ‘Do that,’ I said, and hung up.

  I made more coffee and sat staring at the ceiling. I wanted to see how bad the leak was. When nothing dripped, and I was fairly certain that the ceiling in the sun room wasn’t in imminent danger of collapse, I went off to my studio to meditate.

  But it was difficult because I was still troubled by the dead priest, and the leaking roof that might be overcome later by further storms. And, besides, through the door I could see that the wind had scattered my five little stones all across the patio. So there I was sitting in the zen position, a cushion between my ankles and buttocks, my eyes half closed, the candle flickering on a table in the corner and the more I tried to relax, the more my mind filled with anxiety as I wandered in a fog of lament for my mother.

  When I was nine months old, my mother decided that she had had enough. So a nurse was engaged. A teenager of exquisite beauty and tenderness who would steal me up a little bit of bread at night, to the back bedroom where my mother had abandoned me. I loved this nurse. I learned from her the music of the Cavan drumlins, the certainty of love, the pleasure of milk. But then at four years of age, the nurse vanished. She was let go. And there’s not much you can say to a four-year-old after that. They don’t understand how you can ‘let someone go’.

  As a result, I grew up with an uneasy suspicion that the mundane world was never quite dependable, and that the people around me were not quite reliable. And my mother, who had her own problems, appeared as an enigma to my eyes, a colossus that stared down at the baby on the floor wondering what she’d do with it, and me on the floor looking up at her, wondering who the fuck she was.

  I comforted myself with vague memories of the beautiful woman I had lost, who used to feed me lumps of bread and who then vanished without explanation, and I always blamed her absence for the fact that by seven years of age, I couldn’t knot my tie, belt my trousers or tie my shoelaces.

  Looking back, it could fairly be said that I ought to have worked harder in school. And it’s a pity I didn’t play more with other children, trust them or talk to them; maybe even play a little football now and again. That’s what children are supposed to do. Work as a team. And study. If I had even done a bit of homework every night, I might have got a good Leaving Certificate. Who knows, I might have become a doctor or an astronaut. But no, I was trouble from the word go – not to others, but to myself, a solitary child, a loner in the schoolyard, an infant aba
ndoned by the queen of heaven. And then in adolescence, like all the other boys in my class, sperm flowed from my loins at night with the usual insistence of nature. But it terrified me. I feared that this was not a natural substance of my own making. This was the Godly essence of humankind. As if buckets of tiny unborn babies, lost souls, potential football teams were dying before they were born and every night I was bandaged more in wads of guilt and grief.

  And to compensate for this concupiscence, as the priest in the confessional called it, I leaned a lot on Dominic Savio, a watery saint who had died when he was about fifteen. I had a poster of him in my room. Other teenagers had Mao Tse-tung on the wall, a big fat smiling demon who was slaughtering all before him in China at the time and who was very fashionable among students in the Western world. The Mao poster was a way of saying to your mother that you were finished with her. The knot was broken. The umbilical cord had been severed in the teeth of Mao’s sleazy grin and in the deep red stain of the poster – like the ocean of blood in which Mao was drowning his nation.

  But Mao and his lusty revolution were not for me. No. I was committed heart and soul, on my bare knees, to a watery saint that no mother would want her boy-child praying to. And yet this jaundiced little creature in love with death was, for me, a more subversive role model than the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, because his deep self-denial and his disengagement with the mundane world offered a sorrowful child like me an alternative reality. At night, Dominic induced in me dreams of death, and the life beyond death and the possibility of being enfolded once again in the arms of a beautiful woman who I lost so abruptly at the age of four. Religious fervour is what put me to sleep at night. That was, of course, after I had released into the cold universe another thousand unwanted souls spurting from the tip of my penis.

  And then, instead of maturing in late adolescence by reading Camus and Sartre and realising that we all are alone in the universe, I tried to hold my divine mother’s hand through life, trusting that she would always lead me home.

  Except that, eventually, I let go. Because there is a kind of self-awareness in late middle age that rises up out of the loins, when the loins are old. It is a slow realisation that religious faith is just a therapy for depression, a way of masking one’s anxiety about impending death.

  And then finally in my fifties, I was obliged to confront my real mother again. Mammy, my very earthly mother, was now an ageing and infirm old lady, beginning to wobble and shake and eat Panadol like jelly babies and complain irrationally about the neighbours.

  Eventually she died. My dear mother, after doing her best and getting nothing but a lifetime of disappointment from me, at ninety-six years of age took her last few breaths with intense concentration and serenity and in the passing of a moment, she was gone. The room emptied. The bones in the bed maintained no further significance beyond all the other dust in the universe. Mammy would not be there to hold me ever again.

  And I’m not blaming her for anything. I couldn’t. She was a great lady. A character. She was a small bird of a woman, agile in her mid-nineties and quick-witted. She could laugh and joke in company. She had a powerful turn of phrase. She played golf. She was an extraordinary cook. She relished having visitors to the house when we were young because she could relive again the days when she was a young woman walking the corridors of the Metropole Hotel in Cork, greeting guests, and ensuring that their linen was impeccable and that everything else in the room was to their satisfaction. She could hold her memories and live them again in brief affected exchanges with the occasional visitors who called to her in old age.

  She loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and she danced with a coy feminine delicacy, but on the other hand, she was abrasively truthful. She could cut the socks off anyone who disagreed with her and, as she grew older, she engaged with doctors, bureaucrats and civil servants as if they were the enemy. Even as a widow, a bereaved queen in muted grey, her eyes could reach across a crowded dining room and connect with someone in the far corner, just to share her grief.

  I remember nights when she was exuberant. When she was funny and happy and drank whiskey, and told great stories and danced with strangers. Nights when she came for Christmas and couldn’t be put to bed until the singing ended. And earlier, when she was younger, I would accompany her to the weddings and dance with her, and she’d say, ‘Where did you learn to dance so well?’

  I sensed that my father danced like a donkey and, as he got older, he withered fast. But as she got older, something deeper darkened her face. Something never discussed.

  I didn’t really understand her until she died. I never got the full picture. It was only when I went into her house after the funeral and looked into the cupboards and drawers that I found something – like the tracks of the animal or like the markings on a cave wall – that suggested someone had been there and tried to scrawl in private and unconsciously a little of what it was like for them to be human.

  It was all there in her house, the photographs and scraps of paper, the notes and diaries and shopping lists from the past. From them, I could patch a person together. By touching things, and smelling things, and reading little one-line notes about what she had paid for face cream or bales of turf briquettes I became closer to her than I had ever been when she was alive. And I became more ashamed of the ways that I had let her down.

  THE ROOF OF our cottage had been leaking for years. We noticed it each winter. The same brown stains would appear on the ceiling during November. But they never seemed urgent. The stains were tiny. Like freckles. We would look at them sometimes as we ate our toast and marmalade in the mornings with a sadness that writers and artists acquire as they get older and poorer and can only watch the deterioration of their homes with stoic humour. It’s part of the package for an artist that success is merely the postponement of failure and eventually an old age of anonymity and frugal living awaits us all.

  I remember the beloved going off to London for a week in October after my mother had died, and I sat in Arigna looking up at the ceiling and feeling sad but not alarmed at the spreading brown stains above. I wasn’t alarmed because that winter I had other things to worry about.

  Like the fact that my mother’s house was still locked up, untouched and unloved since the day she had died. And if the roof came off that house during a storm, I wouldn’t even know about it. That’s where the leaks could destroy a building that was already decaying because fires had not been lit regularly, and the windows were never opened to ventilate the rooms. We were heading into another winter, and it didn’t seem right to leave it like a mausoleum, with dust gathering on her clothes, and fungi creeping in behind the wallpaper, and the radiators turning the bedrooms into incubators for creepy crawly things as the snow fell outside on the abandoned garden. It was all just a waste of electricity. In fact, I was so worried the house would deteriorate further that I pleaded with the solicitor to do something with it. But he just turned it back on me.

  ‘Perhaps you could get a team of cleaners to go in and scoop out all the rubbish,’ he suggested one day on the phone as I was driving through Carrick-on-Shannon. ‘It’s simple. Just put everything in one big skip.’

  I said, ‘I can’t just put all her private things in a skip and send it to the dump. I’d prefer to burn everything. How could I throw her bed into a skip?’

  Mother hadn’t even wanted to get that bed. She’d said it was squandering money. But the nurse insisted that we get a new one and so off I went to the furniture store. It just about squeezed into the jeep, though it scuffed the upholstery on the roof and possibly dinged the back door. But it had to be done. Because a good bed is essential. Years ago beds were revered; old people would say that ‘so-and-so had taken to the bed’, as if that was a final stage of enlightenment. There wasn’t much talk of heaven as a hectic zone; rustic theology didn’t entertain any hyperactive angels flapping around in choirs; afterlife to the Cavan man was a big sleep, a great snooze, a long doze till Christ returned
on tiptoe, at the dawn of a new tomorrow. The grave was just another bed, and eternity was a silence undisturbed.

  I was trying to park when the solicitor had phoned. There was a Traveller wedding on the steps of the church and the street was jammed with vans, and settled people were gawping at the bridesmaids in pink dresses. I couldn’t take my eyes off the belly buttons and talk to the solicitor and drive, all at the same time.

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ I said, and turned off the phone.

  There’s a way nomads carry their bodies that mesmerises me. Settled people show their wealth by building houses, but the wealth of nomads is carried on their shoulders or hangs from their ears or their wrists. And the enormous houses that settled people build and that pepper the Irish countryside seem crude and ostentatious compared to the grace of a woman walking down the steps of a church wearing her grandmother’s gold ear-rings, and carrying in her demeanour all the pride of seven generations who have lived on the side of the road, with nothing to call property but the elegant meringue of white satin in which her virginity is packaged.

  When I had parked the jeep, I phoned the solicitor again and told him I was sick. He didn’t understand what I was talking about.

  ‘I have a cold that won’t go away,’ I explained.

  ‘And what can I do about that?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘I need to go to a chemist,’ I said. ‘Therefore I can’t think about the house today. I’ll call you tomorrow.’ And I hung up abruptly.

  ‘I’m congested at night,’ I said to the chemist. ‘I’m afraid it might be an infection.’