‘Absolutely not,’ I said, ‘because my beautiful wooden floor would be destroyed with bird poo. And I couldn’t keep the door open all the time and besides, if you were coming and going you might bang your head off the glass and kill yourself.’
He was devastated. He looked around him once or twice, and then flew out the door without farewell. I sat on the step outside the door staring at the lake. Absorbing sounds from the garden. Absorbing colour and light and the movement of birds and the smell of the yellow gorse that was starting to bloom. Great heaps of sensation flowed through me, and I didn’t bother to analyse what they were or what was me.
I kept remembering that my mother was wearing a green cardigan and a pale cream frock in her coffin, with a silver broach pinned to the lapel of the cardigan. I could see her still, the face all powdered and polished with rouge and lipstick, as if that could protect her body from the worms. But yet, beneath the clothes, I could sense her nakedness in death. When we die we can hold no more. That is the exquisite sorrow of it.
And I remember too that just to sit sometimes with the beloved, and breathe in unison and know we were alive, even if we were only watching some banal programme on the television, seemed like an enormous miracle. Sometimes watching soap operas was like a lazy falling into semi-consciousness. The programmes were so vacuous and shallow that sitting passively before the moving images felt like entering into a void. And yet, in the void, we could feel time passing and in the passing of time we could feel our hearts cry out to each other in love: Hold me.
The old Asian proverb kept coming back to me. ‘If you name the bird you cease to experience the song,’ and I began to suspect that my mind had finally come home to my body, as Thich Naht Hanh says.
Later that morning, I made a decision. I loitered around the gates to the roadway, admiring the primroses beneath the branches of the wild rose and realising that spring had already arrived. I was waiting for the postman. When his white van drove up, I asked him if he could assist me in the small matter of removing a piece of furniture from the house.
He agreed and we went indoors and I showed him the fifty-inch television.
I said, ‘I’d like to put this thing in the shed.’
‘Jesus,’ he declared, ‘that’s a beautiful television.’
As we lifted the huge screen, I could see his face crunch into a tight muscular squeeze and he went beetroot red. I was wondering what would happen if he had a heart attack. Might he be insured by An Post? Or might our house insurance cover it? You can never be too careful.
‘Christ,’ he said, ‘this is heavy.’
It was, but eventually we got it out the door and around the back of the house into one of the dry sheds.
‘That’ll do,’ he said.
‘That’ll do,’ I repeated.
He handed me a brown envelope. It was the bill from the solicitor for all the work done on the property in Cavan.
‘No love letters,’ he joked.
‘No love letters,’ I repeated.
I didn’t tell him that during the year I had read too many old love letters that I myself had written forty years earlier. I came upon them by accident one day in an upstairs wardrobe in Cavan. Letters that I had composed to girlfriends and never sent; some that they had sent to me. Letters that had been forgotten for decades.
And they weren’t complimentary. For the most part, I was condemned in the scrawl of several young women as a cold fish and a man frightened of trusting other people.
But time passed. We all grew old. And I would hardly remember their names now except that my mother for some reason stored the letters in a suitcase, underneath a silver photo album that tracked her own honeymoon in 1950 from the Bush Hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon to Galway, the Cliffs of Moher and around the Ring of Kerry. Her album was stuffed with photographs, of herself, with a worried brow, or of him posing at the bonnet of his Ford car, and in one picture both of them hugged and smiled like children under Daniel O’Connell’s monument in the middle of Ennis. Maybe she put my photos with her own by accident and then forgot about them. Or maybe she actually read my willowy love notes and saw some comic contrast between the formality of her own happy honeymoon and the litany of my sins and sorrows as enunciated by a variety of honest young women.
During those six weeks alone in Leitrim, I often sat on a garden seat beneath the huge Chilean beech trees, their long, extending branches of hard green leaves reaching across the lawn, and the silver birch and downy birch bending to the east from twenty years of windy winters, and the white flowering jasmine, and the spinosa wild rose that came from Sligo, and the chestnut that Paul and Anne had given us as a wedding present in 1993, and the oaks that were blessed by my teacher the Panchen Ötrul Rinpoche, and the yew that a monk from Tibet had planted, and all the other trees and living things that were beginning to show life and bud at the end of a cold March. The cottage had deteriorated. It was filthy. I had not hoovered it. I had not washed the dishes nor turned on the dishwasher. I had not made nor changed the bed in two weeks. But in the garden, I felt emotionally clean and spiritually naked. My self-obsession dissolved like the morning dew and I became aware of the world. My mind was clear.
So I sat with Simone Weil and beautiful swallows and the odd dark cuckoo, and sometimes near the willows I turned to gaze on Simone Weil but there was only me beneath the trees. I turned to find my mother too, or some other saint, but they were all gone. The garden was empty.
Lough Allen was blue. The sky was blue and cold. A long tuft of white cloud like cotton wool hung on the ridge of Sliabh an Iarainn. Around me the alder trees and primroses were flourishing. The slope of the lawn was riddled with holes where the badgers fed at night. In the woods behind where I was sitting, there was a carpet of snowdrops. A single magpie stood guard high up in a Scots pine. And along the beech hedge, a wren was hopping about looking for things I knew nothing about.
I still remember a bronze relief I saw on the wall of a church as I was on my way to the monastery of Częstochowa. I was in Warsaw waiting for the afternoon train and I decided to walk into Old Town and on New Street I saw a huge figure of Christ carrying his cross, outside the majestic doors of a church, and I went inside, which is where I found an image of Mary, holding not Jesus but a dying soldier. Her two hands were clasping his head to her breast. The mother’s loving face was in the foreground, her big eyes as sad as if she were holding her son. And I had to pay attention to it. I knew it was a soldier because there was a hole in the back of his head. A hole as perfectly round as a pistol shot and there was no hope for him. But yet she held him. It could have been an image from Afghanistan or Syria or any airport terminal where a woman stands and waits for a bodybag. I remember being moved by the sad face of the woman. It wasn’t as if I was looking at anything divine. The soldier was clearly human. And so was she. It was just a simple and undeniable affirmation of human compassion and for no particular reason it reminded me of an incident that happened when I was a child.
It happened in the afternoon when I had just come home from school. I took a young kitten out of the cardboard box in the kitchen where it had made its bed and the animal was instantly terrified. It ran everywhere to escape me. It jumped up on chairs, and then the table and onto the worktop. I realised that Mother had left a cooker ring on and it was red hot. I could feel the heat from the metal. The kitten was on the worktop. If I jumped at her, she might jump onto the ring. So I thought maybe it would be better to stand still. Don’t frighten her further. But she actually walked determinedly towards the plate until her paw connected with the red iron and stuck to it, sizzling for a moment, and then she screamed and flew through the air and ended up behind the washing machine and the old Jacob’s biscuit tins in the scullery that were used for holding wrenches. And she wouldn’t come out.
I lay on my side telling her I was sorry. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. Her eye watched me. She didn’t know what had happened. She didn’t know how she had been hurt, or who had done
it – though she probably suspected me. In the darkness, I could see just her eye between the tins and the washing machine. But she kept looking at me. And I stayed there. I kept looking at her until, eventually, she came out and let me hold her. I held her for a long time, petting her, and both of us were terribly upset. After a while I knew she felt grateful to be comforted. I knew she liked being held. I knew that the pain had woken in her an intensity of awareness about the savagery of sentient life and in that pain she felt strangely better because she was being held.
After that, we were great friends. Her paw healed and she loved nothing better than to jump up on my lap when I came from school and be held by me. And I loved holding her. And my mother never blamed me for taking her out of the box. And I never blamed my mother for leaving the cooker on.
BY THE TIME the beloved arrived home from Poland, the season had changed. The winter was over. Spring was well developed and because of the warm weather it felt like summer. It’s not as if she had been away for years. It was only six weeks. But I was up at 7 a.m. and I went mad fussing around the house, cleaning dishes and floors and worktops and emptying the cat’s tray that had been unchanged for over two weeks.
She had travelled across Europe and trudged in the snow along foreign streets and met new friends and learned all sorts of new stuff about Fresco Art and Expressionist painting, and she would have new ideas now about the meaning of life, because that’s what happens when you leave your comfort zone and go to another world for a few weeks. But I was at home with the elephant; the enormous conundrum of the human mind. And it settled. Just occasionally it settled, and was still and present to the rustling leaf and the buzz of life around me.
Every day, I had sat on the floor, with my back straight, in front of a small candle as the cat sat on the opposite armchair watching me with one eye, a paw covering the other eye and half her head.
At 8.30 a.m. on a beautiful spring morning, I finished my meditation and, without the slightest compassion, I threw the cat out. She wasn’t impressed. ‘The beloved is coming,’ I explained. ‘She might even now be in the air over Germany heading for Dublin airport. We mustn’t be sleeping all day today.’
I imagined throwing my arms around her saying, ‘So tell me everything.’
‘Where do I begin?’ she would reply. ‘I have had so many adventures!’
That’s the way it used to be in the old days in good hotels, when we had been separated for a while and were suddenly back together again. We would run the hot water and plant the condoms under the pillow and arrange the bed before getting into the bath. Those were afternoons I loved. And afternoons were the best moments for love, or so I read in a poem by Ovid when I was a teenager. ‘Afternoons were the best,’ Ovid had said. And I stuck to that proposition and I found it to be true.
Before heading to Dublin to meet her I filled a tiny suitcase with some fresh clothes and a toilet bag. I put the laptop in my briefcase, with the flexes, adapter and a phone charger. And I took walking boots and my rain gear too, flung them all into the back of the jeep as if I was heading off trekking in the mountains.
Then I was nearly off. The engine was running. Except that I decided to go back and double-check the electricity and the central heating and make sure that the kettle was plugged out. And, of course, the cat had slipped back in a window. So I got her by the underbelly and left her outside again.
I reversed slowly out the gate. The cat had now hunched into a tight bundle of misery at the gable wall. It was almost 10 a.m. I drove down the slopes of Mount Allen, the lake on my left spread for eleven miles and the mountain behind it. I went through Drumshanbo and on towards Ballinamore. I was almost in Cavan when I got a text. I saw her name and pulled over to read it.
Apparently she was still in Warsaw. She was stuck in Warsaw. She had mistaken the month when she was booking her return flight. She had clicked ‘April’ when she ought to have clicked ‘May’ and when she got to the check-in at Modlin airport the lady said that there was nothing she could do to help. So she had to book another flight, and then another night in her hotel and then go back all the way on the bus to Warsaw with all her luggage. I don’t think she would have been too happy about that but she was actually apologising to me and hoping that it didn’t inconvenience my plans.
‘No problem,’ I texted back. In fact, I was delighted. I would have an extra evening in the city.
I arrived at the hotel in Ballsbridge around 3 p.m., checked in and immediately booked a ticket online for the Project Arts Centre later in the evening. I’m a creature of habit.
Driving back along the same canal, and checking into the same hotel and even going to a show in the same theatre as I had done on the day she had left were all a kind of ritual of repetition that made me feel secure.
The show was called Visitation. It was a collaborative work between a Butoh dancer, a musician and a sculptor. I took my seat in the racked auditorium of old-fashioned seats and I could see the Butoh dancer, standing on the edge of the stage, pallid and undefined among the shadows. When the show began, he moved slowly across the stage for an hour like a ghost or a moon; a human without a narrative, broken like a victim of war and silent like an imbecile.
It was an exquisite experience. It didn’t offer any clear narrative or storyline. Just a human being in motion, full of anxiety on the surface, and yet deep down in his movement, I felt a sense of longing, a connectedness with people in the audience, as if he was trying to assure us of his enduring love for us. I read it like a poem, a kind of love in a time of cholera. And I felt an intense connection with the dancer, as if we were a single being, feeling the same disturbance, and that he there on the stage was just expressing in his body what was buried in my heart.
I couldn’t wait to tell the beloved about it the following day.
I returned to the hotel and enjoyed a couple of brandies in the bar, chatting to a young waiter from Bulgaria. I was excited. Then I went upstairs and opened a bottle of wine, which was meant for the beloved, except that she was stuck in Warsaw so now it was just myself and Vincent Browne again, and Vincent couldn’t drink with me since he was on television and I could hardly push a glass through the screen.
I also had two brandy glasses, because I didn’t want to be seen carrying a single brandy to the bedroom. So I pretended I had company, as I was ordering my two final drinks. That way if I met someone in the lift they wouldn’t think I was a sad bastard drinking alone. And in a sense I wasn’t alone, because the Butoh dancer was still with me. I imagined him following me after I left the theatre, naked and white and taunting me, like a messenger from beyond the cliff, to let go and awaken.
He was so close behind me and so vivid in my imagination that when I opened the door of the room, I turned around and spoke to him.
‘Here,’ I said, ‘hold this,’ meaning the tray on which my two brandies rested. But as I spoke, a woman coming out of a door across the corridor saw me talking to myself, which caused me in turn to let one of the glasses slide off the tray and break. The other one I managed to save with my other hand.
‘Fuck it,’ I hissed, which undoubtedly the woman heard as she strode down the corridor, her high heels making not the slightest sound on the deep pile of cream carpet, although she did turn at the lift and gazed back down the corridor at me and smiled.
‘Now look what you made me do,’ I hissed at the Butoh dancer, when I got inside the room. ‘I lost a brandy over you.’
Outside I could hear ambulances in the traffic, rain hitting the windowpane and the wind stretching the branches of the trees inside the railings of the car park. It’s funny how I’m always spilling drink, I thought.
And in fact when the beloved came through the glass doors of the customs area in Dublin airport the following afternoon, I was holding a paper cup full of coffee which I waved to signal – I’m here – and the coffee spilled over my head. She was pulling a case on wheels, with two smaller bags hanging around her neck. We fumbled a hug and she look
ed at the coffee dribbling down my cheek and smiled.
We got a taxi. The driver was from Cameroon. I asked him about racism. He said sometimes people flag him down, make him do a U-turn because they are so desperate for a taxi and when he pulls up and they realise he is black they wave him on or tell him to fuck off. ‘It is not nice,’ he said.
After that I whispered my questions.
‘How was the trip?’
‘What did you eat?’
‘Had you many perogis?’
‘Were you at the opera?’
In the hotel, the Bulgarian waiter smiled.
‘How are you this afternoon?’ he enquired.
‘I am well,’ I replied, and before I could say more he spoke again.
‘Shall I get you your usual, sir?’ Like I was James Bond.
So we took the drinks to the room, my Miss Moneypenny and I, and when we were inside the door she started rummaging in her cases, checking that everything was there, opening presents she had bought for various people and showing them to me and asking what I thought.
I filled the bath and she lay on the bed. She said the water was too hot so I got in first and soaked and then came out wearing a white bathrobe and a new pair of silk pyjamas I bought at the airport while I was waiting. She was looking up at the ceiling.
‘So,’ she said, stretching on the bed, ‘any news?’
‘I made soup,’ I declared. ‘Chicken soup.’
‘Great.’
‘I have a big pot of it. Sitting at home on the cooker. We can have it tomorrow.’
‘And no other news?’
I looked in her eyes.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No news at all.’
I suppose I could have mentioned the television, but already the past had swallowed up all that had happened over six weeks. And, besides, I was holding her in my arms once again.
Acknowledgements
THANKS ESPECIALLY TO my brother Brendan, and to all Nellie’s family, relations, neighbours and friends in Cavan who supported her with love through the years. Special thanks to the home help, care workers, Health Service personnel and Active Age volunteers who sustained her when she lived at Glenasmole, and to the staff of Newbrook Nursing Home in Mullingar for their immeasurable kindness in her final journey. Thanks to my partner Cathy for her love and wisdom, and to Sophia for brightening up so many birthdays for her granny. Thanks also to Simon Carman, Philomena Brown, Kathleen and Ann McGrenra, and to so many more who constructed a fabric of love and kindness over the years around the person we all knew as ‘Nellie’.
Hanging with the Elephant Page 20
