Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  And you don’t actually have to say the words. Sometimes it’s just a gesture. A woman on a Ryanair flight nudging closer to her husband, a man looking across the Formica table of a cheap restaurant at his partner as he seeks her approval before tucking into a large steak, or a young girl dropping her head onto her boyfriend’s shoulder on the bus to Cavan. They’re all saying the same thing in their own way; they’re all reaching out to hold each other.

  Some years ago, there was a homeless couple who died in each other’s arms as they slept in a doorway off Capel Street in Dublin. They were frozen to death in a cardboard box one frosty night. They hugged each other until the state pathologist parted them. Their intimacy was frozen stiff on an ice-covered street. The milkman found them the next day in the doorway, their bodies entwined by a mix of hunger, pain and love. They were old, alcoholic and homeless, and their minds too were probably twisted with psychic wounds and trans-generational traumas that never saw the light of day. But they held. They held each other tenderly as they fell into the silence of the night.

  And sometimes I think about young people in their intimate moments after orgasm. I imagine soft, sleepy males on the flat of their backs, like beasts of prey when there is nothing more to achieve, and I imagine their mates beside them in silence as they hold each other.

  Their embrace is the sanctuary of the modern world. Just like the monks of ancient days who found the presence of their god in the breaking of bread, so people now find it in that exquisite aftertaste of love-making, when they hold each other quietly. I suppose that’s what the ancient monks meant about Christ being ‘behind, before, above and in everything we do’.

  It’s what mothers do. It’s what lovers do. It’s what God used to do before we trusted each other. And it’s what my beloved used to do before she went away.

  THERE WERE TIMES after my mother died when I tried to evaluate what kind of a son she had reared – or what kind of a man had I become in the shadow of her long life. I thought about her every day. As I toured the country with a one-man show, she would sometimes appear unexpectedly, here or there, a ghost on a random street or behind a rack of clothes in some shopping arcade. At a checkout, I would notice an old woman counting her change, and I’d look at the back of her head and for a moment it was as if my mother was standing there.

  I remember being in a car repair shop in Limerick six months later, looking for seat covers because there was a rip on the seat of the jeep. The man behind the counter had a beard, and a mug of tea, and he found me a pair of cheap covers and threw in a Padre Pio air freshener to sweeten the deal. I liked him. I enjoyed being with him. I wanted the encounter to continue. The sheer masculinity of tyres and chains and oils in canisters and a cement floor well-blackened from spilled motor oil attracted me. I suppose I am still unsure of myself in a man’s world.

  Maybe that’s because I never really let my mother go. I kept her all about me until the day she died. I needed her to approve of me and to hold me as a child likes to be held.

  She was so strong that I couldn’t walk away from her. I didn’t pack my suitcase and emigrate. I didn’t harden myself by living out some great adventure in a foreign land or by turning into a brute in the fields with a spade. I stayed close to her. I paid her homage. I feared her. And where and when it was possible, I smuggled myself into an intimate collusion with other women, seeking not to seduce them but simply in every endeavour to be their accomplice.

  So I really envied alpha males their certitude, their compulsive attachment to the hunt and the way they take themselves so seriously. But I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed chatting with them. Not that the man in the repair shop was an alpha male. He was funny and self-deprecating, and it occurred to me that there is a huge variety of men in the world. They’re not all warriors. Outside on the streets, a man was collecting for a ‘Men’s Shed’. I gave him €1, stuck the ‘Limerick Men’s Shed’ sticker on my lapel and then went off to a pub where I discovered yet another emanation of the masculine universe: a drowsy world of leather and wood, with whiskey glasses on the tables, and pints of Bulmers and Guinness on the counter. It was 11.20 a.m. Sky News was on mute. One man sat at the bar staring at the screen. Another man read the newspaper on the counter like it was his job. Most people were wearing cheap, unwashed fleece jumpers, old anoraks and denim jeans. I ordered a mug of tea and nursed it in a shaft of sunlight. Everyone watched the mute screen as if they could extract some meaning from images of plutonium processing in Tehran.

  By coincidence, I met an Iranian man on the street within the hour, though I never mentioned plutonium. He was beautiful. His gestures were gentle and he spoke like a poet about the land he loved. He was standing outside a shop that sold Persian handcrafts. Beautiful patterns in various colours printed on cotton. I was looking for a bit of Velcro to patch the hole in the seat of the jeep because as it turned out the seat covers I had bought earlier didn’t fit. He showed me his stock of handbags and rugs and wall drapes all printed with intense colours.

  ‘These colours are beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘but the colours are from nature. Red comes from pomegranate and green from the skin of the pistachio nut and blue from the indigo flower and brown from the walnut.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ I wondered.

  ‘Iran,’ he said.

  Then he showed me the wooden print blocks that are used in the process.

  ‘It’s an ancient craft in my country,’ he said. ‘And my country is like a mother to me.’

  ‘It’s beautiful work,’ I agreed. His face was radiant.

  ‘I guess there is more to Iran than the images on Sky News,’ I said, and he smiled.

  I thanked him for the Velcro and went off thinking that if I had been born a woman I could easily have fallen in love with such a man. Not that I would want to be a woman in that neck of the woods. I feel sad sometimes when I see women in black veils with just a slit for their eyes, as they wait obediently beside men in elegant suits at airport gates. And I wonder if a woman’s veil is a comfort to a man, or is it because men are afraid of naked emotion that they seek to cover women. And it’s not just in Arabia or Persia that men fear emotion. An Irish woman once told me that on her way into the hospital to view the remains of her recently deceased father, her husband turned to her and said, ‘Your sisters will be in here so for God’s sake don’t start crying.’

  And sometimes I don’t want to be a man in any neck of the woods. Because I’ve often seen men brood but I’ve rarely seen them weep. Sometimes, I walk with the General and he sits on some bench by a lake, and he looks at the water so that viewed from the side he might be a cast of Winston Churchill, a bulldog crouching, and I can hear him breathe when we’re alone in the same room, but I can never discern his heart.

  My mother had a great ability to display emotion, even to the point of tears. Her song was one of disappointment. When I was a child, she would sometimes display me to the public and startle the audience with phrases like, ‘I would have loved a little girl.’ No doubt had she lived in Arabia, they would have clothed her in an extra-large veil, to protect themselves from her immense emotions.

  Even when I was a teenager, she could speak simple sentences – things like, ‘Your father was never interested in dancing’ – with enormous pathos, and tears would well up in her eyes as she sat in the front room with a nun who came occasionally from some parish outreach programme to enquire about her health. The two women would sit there watching the television and emitting large sighs of horror or compassion, depending on what the news was about. And I sat with them, veiled in an iron mask of indifference; the hard shell that I hoped would someday make me into a real man.

  IT WAS THE beloved who transformed Mother’s house. She began in February and I was amazed. In the end, it seemed so simple and such fun. She arrived with a Brazilian boy who appeared out of the blue and helped her with the painting. I went to Cavan one day to see the work and when I saw him, so young and b
rown as a chestnut without a shirt or vest, his skin leaping with light against the backdrop of white walls, I was speechless. The walls were as cold as a tomb and he stood there like some perfect brown angel smiling at me. The bed was gone from the dining room. There were ladders and wooden boards and paint tins everywhere. They’d been working for about a week by then.

  First they had stripped back the wallpaper and painted all the rooms white. Then they pulled out all the carpets and filled four skips with old furniture. Beneath the carpet in the kitchen and in the hall they discovered the original red and cream tiles that had been laid down when the house was built. She had knelt down on them with a knife and scraped them clean with the meticulous attention of a Tibetan Lama, and it was her who got a builder to take the doors off and put new fresh pine doors on all the rooms.

  One day, she saw a blue nightdress under the bed.

  ‘What’s this?’ she wondered.

  ‘Oh, that’s just one of her old things I meant to get rid of,’ I said, and I threw it into a black plastic bag destined for the skip.

  So much went into that skip. The broken chairs, the old sheets, the useless bed, the faded curtains, the delph angels, the Child of Prague, the wardrobes, dressing tables and the music cabinet for holding old records.

  The skip swallowed her life, her privacy, her illness and her death. It even swallowed the vinyl recordings of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and the crackling voice of John McCormack which I used to hear rising through the floorboards of my childhood bedroom as I lay awake at night worrying about school homework.

  One day the Brazilian boy found a box of hats; seven in all, including a feathery green cap, a white straw hat, a beret, and an extravagantly wide-brimmed blue hat like something a young woman might wear at the races. But the box was in tatters, and the Brazilian boy wanted to throw it out. When he asked me, I said I wanted to keep the hats.

  There was also an empty suitcase beside the hatbox which had my father’s initials on it. So the Brazilian boy decided to throw out the tattered hatbox and put my mother’s head-gear into my father’s suitcase, which seemed for an instant to bring them both together once again as he handed me the suitcase.

  I took it home and it is now in the attic of our cottage in Leitrim, and I suppose in the distant future someone will be surprised by the comedy of a man’s suitcase full of ladies’ hats as they forage through all the tracks and traces of private anxiety and trivial obsessions that I in my time may leave in my wake.

  By July 2013, the work was done. The rooms were painted with a second and final coat. Over the white base, they painted soft mushroom and burgundy red. And the chimneys were cleaned and the fires were lit.

  We thanked the beautiful boy from Brazil for all his help, paid him handsomely before he vanished into the air again, and then we sat down in the front room on two new sofas; one for her and one for me. We drank a bottle of wine that we had bought in a supermarket in town, before going upstairs. Our matrimonial bed, which we had cherished for twenty years since we first bought it in Boles of Boyle, was now there in the back room, all covered with fresh linen and soft pillows. It was our first night to sleep over. And then, in the middle of the night, I woke because she was awake.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ I wondered, but she didn’t say.

  The following morning was Grave Sunday, a day when the town gathers in the local cemetery to remember the dead who are buried there and to bless all the graves. We drove out for 3 p.m. The crowd had gathered and the priest was already walking around the graveyard in the blazing heat, casting holy water on the graves and on the heads of the faithful. The graves were so tightly laid together that it was almost impossible to find a standing place near my mother’s plot, so I stood close to the church as my beloved pushed forward with a wreath for the tombstone.

  An old man was standing near a tree. He saw me coming and pulled my elbow. Only then did I recognise him as Mr Dolan, the man with straw hair who had spoken to me at her funeral. He looked even more frail now. I stood with him, shoulder to shoulder, as he smoked a cigarette.

  ‘Where are you living?’ he enquired.

  ‘Leitrim,’ I replied.

  He said, ‘There’s no good broadband in Leitrim. You’d be better in Cavan.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I wondered.

  ‘About the broadband? Me daughter told me.’

  ‘I think she’s wrong,’ I said, ‘but I might do that anyway.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Come and live in Cavan. Now that the mother’s house is empty.’

  The voice of the priest through the microphone was uneven in the wind, a humourless roar, like the sound of a machine crushing metal in a breaker’s yard far away.

  The old man said, ‘There was a Leitrim clergyman one time, who became a bishop here in Cavan. And when he got the job, the Leitrim people bought him an Audi, so that he could swank around like the other prelates. But the new bishop registered the vehicle in Cavan because he didn’t want to be seen driving through the lush lawns of his adopted county with Leitrim registration plates. Doesn’t that say it all?’

  I said, ‘That surely says it all.’

  From the high ground, we could survey the congregation, some with hankies on their bald heads, some with elaborate straw hats, and some with their deck chairs right on top of the grass beneath which their ancestors slept, as they all sheltered from the sun. The priest was perspiring in his heavy vestments.

  ‘You’re safe enough in Cavan,’ the old man said.

  I was wondering if he ever washed his enormous mop of straw hair or if he ever changed his clothes. I imagined him in the same suit for decades, scything the fields in the heat of June and licking the frost off choc-ices in August, with perspiration dripping down his cheeks. Or did he ever wear the suit in bed, on winter nights, to keep his bones from freezing?

  A family of rusty-brown cattle with yellow ear tags, dozed in a field beyond the graveyard.

  Mr Dolan said, ‘The problem with Cavan is the drumlins. The horizon is always a few feet away. You go round in circles to get to where you started from. Do ye know what I mean?’

  The priest finished his prayers. Mr Dolan blessed himself.

  ‘My mother’s grave is over there beside the wall,’ he said. ‘She was buried in 1947; a white-haired woman in black shawls, with a chin that would split hailstones. And she could put the turf into the flames with her bare hands. But she was old when I got to know her, she’d spend her days remembering the dead – the lovely young boys who’d died on the roads, and in the Great War, and the old dotes who never woke up for their porridge, and those who were dead in drains or squashed by the plough or mangled by an unruly mare or cut in two in the trenches around the Somme.’

  Then he looked over at my mother’s grave and he said, ‘She isn’t here either.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You didn’t get the tombstone done yet,’ he whispered, changing the subject. ‘You’d need that done. Otherwise people would be wondering. You know what I mean?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘I’ll be looking after it soon.’

  ‘But she’s not here,’ he repeated, eyeballing me through the cloud from his smoking cigarette. ‘She’s in another place now. They’re all gone home.’

  And despite the blue sky at the top of the graveyard, we were engulfed in shadows from the trees behind us. The priest was finished. The people were scattering and we descended the hill as silent men trying not to disturb the dead. Having examined the world as poets do, and having prayed for the dead as Christians do, we went away with a great surge of vitality.

  ‘Who was that fellow you were talking to?’ my wife asked when I got as far as the jeep.

  ‘I think his name is Gabriel,’ I said. ‘He’s a Cavan man. Although I only know him as Mr Dolan.’

  I never saw him again, because he too passed away in the autumn of 2013 and now rests in his own plot beside his mother, where the soil is still heaped up in a mound, near th
e wall beside the trees.

  WHEN SHE WAS one year in the grave, I went back on the road doing readings and performances to earn a living. I toured between August and December 2013; cold, wet days and dark nights on the road, performing in arts centres and sleeping in the deluxe rooms of various hotels. It was a great adventure. I watched the universe unfold every night in a different lounge bar or in a different late-night takeaway.

  One night, I met a man with a heart of stone. He was in a bar in a midland town and he leaned on the counter as he sipped his drink, nursing grudges. I listened to him for a while as he spoke of his mother and how she had hurt him. When he was finished his litany of neglect I said, ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘No’ he said, ‘it’s all in the past. I’m happy now.’

  He clenched his fist around his glass of whiskey and he looked into it as if he was gazing at a knife that some day he might plunge into an unseen enemy.

  ‘Yeah,’ he repeated with a grimace, ‘I’m happy now.’ Though there was nothing in him that I could envy.

  I confessed to him that I’m rarely happy.

  The dogs in Leitrim are happy. They’re well-minded. They yap cheerfully when the farmers head up the hills with fodder for cattle. The horses are happy, apart from those who live in fields of rushes, shivering in the freezing fog. But mostly it’s true to say that animals, if well-minded, are reasonably happy. They fit into the natural universe in a way that I don’t. I sit uncomfortably in the world, aware of myself, uneasy that the universe remains silent and refuses to reveal its secrets to me.

  One wintry night in early December, with heavy rain and cold winds lashing the jeep, I checked into the Plaza Hotel in Tallaght. I was hungry.

  A young man in the bar told me that his mother worked in a Chinese restaurant nearby and he recommended the Mongolian beef. ‘It’s her speciality,’ he said. So we phoned her, and he spoke to her in a strange language and shortly afterwards the food arrived and I ate it in the half-light of the bar with a pint of cider to wash it down. It was delicious, and we passed an hour speaking about Mongolia, seaweed and the benefits of rice noodles.