by Neil Jordan
Hie est enim calix sanguinis mei, the priest says, which shall be shed for you and for all men for the remission of sins. He raises the battered cup to the sunlight. Rose's notes would falter and her body would shudder slightly, a tiny missive I was coming to recognise. She would tell me to stop, but without conviction. Her eyes would fix on the manuscript as if the dots charted the rhythm of her breathing. She would only speak of it in musical terms. Moderato cantabile. The more profound her pleasure was, the less she referred to it. Afterwards I would play the same tune while she stood by the window and smoked. Music, I realised, was the way to keep Maisie's footsteps at bay. And Rose tried to disapprove, but her heart wasn't in it. Give over, Donal, she'd say, what would your father think? Till the day I took the dusty record from the pile of my mother's things in the attic upstairs.
It was Rachmaninov playing himself. When she came for her regular class I showed it to her and placed it on the phonograph. I put the needle down, turned up the volume gradually and his second concerto filled the room. What's this? she asked. Sit here and listen, I said, tapping the space on the couch beside me. I want to learn this. She sat beside me and let me take her hand, which was by now smaller than my own. She listened with her head back, let me unclasp one stocking, then the other. Stop it Donal, she said when I undid the buttons of her blouse, but again her heart wasn't in it. Her hand played with my hair, my mouth and then in a moment of surrender eased me down on to the carpet. The playing was impossibly good and I wondered whether Maisie would notice the orchestral bits or hear our ever-more impassioned breathing but gradually the concerto seemed to fill the house, to echo round the promenade, beyond the railings and out over the Irish Sea.
O res mirabilis. I remember Mouse's voice echoing round the arches of the church on the windy hill. And the priest now turns to give the wafer to both of his muscular altar-boys, to the Guardia Civil who walk forwards as meek as any line of schoolgirls while the Moroccan still whacks the stays of the tower that holds him. The wind blows in one last gust with hardly enough breath to shift the Virgin, sending eddies of sand round my ankles and I know the moment has passed and I'm still standing.
Afterwards we lay in one another's arms and the record had got stuck in a groove, playing the same three notes over and over again. And that's it, Donal, she said. That in the end is where it all leads to. All what? I asked her. Everything, she said, every word, every hope, every glance across a crowded room, the whole damn thing all leads up to that. And that's your lesson for today. I reached out to bang the phonograph, wondering what she meant when the door opened and I saw Maisie standing in the wedge of dust-coloured light.
The carpet, she said.
What about the carpet? I asked.
I need to do the carpet, she said.
Rose's stockings were hanging from the side of the couch, behind which she lay, her face deep crimson, mouth closed to prevent an explosion of laughter.
Rose got wet, I said, to explain the stockings.
It's not raining, said Maisie.
From the sea, I said.
The carpet, she said again, closing the door.
Maisie was simple, but not that simple. I turned to Rose and saw that all urge to laugh was gone.
I better go, she said. She stood quickly, pulled her stockings over her feet.
Don't worry, I said to her.
It's not her, she said. It's your father.
She won't tell, I said to her.
She will. Some day, she said.
Let her, I said.
You're a kid, she said, you don't understand.
But she didn't tell, whether because of an innate simplicity or sense of decorum I would never know. I sat at tea that evening waiting for the words to blurt out of her, some remark about the mythical rain, her being wet again with stockings undone but she served us in silence, then returned to the book she had open by the range.
Rose however took it to heart. The thought of my father knowing struck her with an almost scriptural force. The next week she listened to me play with a sternness that would have done any country schoolteacher proud. When I walked her back to the station she talked. I'm sorry, she said, I shouldn't have let you. I should have had more sense. I wouldn't have let you stop me, I said. It's my fault, she said, I should have left long ago. No, I said, its not your fault. Blame the music. So it's Rachmaninov's fault then, she said, smiling wryly. I love you, Rose, I said, surprised at how easily the words slipped out. You don't, she said, and I'm going to stop teaching you. You can't, I told her. I can, she said, and I have to. What will you tell my father? The truth, she said.
The truth, I thought. The truth about the roses on her dress and the way her hair spread out on the carpet. What is the truth? I asked her. The truth, she said, is that you're a bold boy and I'm a hussy. And I'm the one who should have known better. But you can't stop coming, I told her. Why can't I? she asked. Because you won't tell him, I said.
And that was the truth. We came to the station then but she drew me on, through the back streets till we came to the church. Come inside, she told me. So we walked into the draughty hall. I watched her sit in the back row beneath a picture of the Garden of Gethsemane. Sit down beside me, she said. I obeyed her and we both looked up at the altar. Now tell Him you're sorry. I'm not, I told her. How come I am? she asked me. Maybe you're sorry enough for both of us, I said, and she laughed. We sat in silence for a while. I presumed what she was doing was asking for forgiveness. After a time I let my hand touch her leg. She smacked it away, but laughed again. We're not getting very far, are we? I asked. She shook her head and blessed herself.
Pater noster, qui es in caelis, the priest says, facing the spatters of blood on the monastery wall. I asked her outside whether God had spoken to her. She told me that indeed He had. But the burden of the conversation she never shared with me. I was to discover it at next week's lesson. She listened to me play with the same abstracted air as on her first day. You could at least talk to me, Rose, I said, wrapping up the piece. That's true, Donal, she said, patted my hair and left without a further word. I followed her down the promenade, at about twenty yards behind. She would turn, see me following, wave me away, then walk on again. The next week followed a similar pattern. So God expressed Himself as always, through silences. I came to accept them after a while, came to enjoy them, even: the pregnant silence between phrases of music, the occasional hush of her voice and now and then, as before, but infinitely more nostalgic, the feel of her hands on mine when she came to correct me. We came to relish our status as sinners, the melancholy of the truly damned.
The winter came on and the rains with it and the gabardine coat she wore was wet more often than not. Her hair hung around her face in moist curls. I progressed to Debussy, and the fractured harmonies reinforced my sense of exile. We had banished ourselves from each other, from that intimate contact and need that after a time was like a dream, so distant it seemed. She became Rose, my piano teacher, which was what she was after all. There was a pain in the blunt reality of this fact but after a time I must have grown up, for I began to forget the pain too. I could open the door and welcome her, say hello Rose; say, Maisie, what time is Rose due, without the world turning somersaults between the phrases.
Then one afternoon, the lesson ended, I walked her to the door and said, see you Rose, next week.
You won't, she said and my heart skipped a beat.
What do you mean I won't? I asked her.
You'll see me at the weekend, she says. Your father's asked me.
Asked you what? I said.
To come out here. For a picnic.
I stared at her and wondered why I had to keep myself from shaking.
And you said yes.
I did. Thought it would be nice. The three of us.
She walked towards the promenade then, leaving the door open, holding her music case up to shield her face from the rain.
I sat with him at teatime and waited for him to mention it.
/> He didn't, so the silence that seemed the natural state of things continued. I sat the next night and again waited. Again he didn't, so I asked.
Rose is coming out, I said to him, more a statement than a question.
She told you? he muttered, reading as he ate.
For a picnic, she said.
Yes, he said. I thought it would be nice. The three of us.
He was repeating her phrases, but the words seemed foreign. I wondered then had she asked him.
We don't spend enough time together.
You and Rose? I asked.
No, he said. You, me, the three of us.
Why didn't you tell me? I asked him.
I was about to, he said.
When I asked you?
More or less.
I got up, cleaned my plate and walked outside. The sun was perched over the low tide like a beached whale. The light was beautiful and bilious. I wondered what conversation had led to that conversation and how many of them there had been. I tried to picture the three of us, napkin spread with scones between us, sipping tea in the Wicklow Hills. I wondered whose silences would be the most severe: mine, his or hers.
Mine were, in the end. We trudged through the Devil's Glen, me holding the hamper, both of them ahead of me like Mouse's vision of a courting couple. I felt churlish, even ridiculous in my silences but could think of nothing to say. That she had changed I could notice. From the girl who came to our door five years ago she had become a woman. She walked the way a woman walked, took her shoes off the way a woman would, planting her feet square in the damp grass, catching his arm when she stumbled, smoothing the linen cloth over the rock we had chosen to eat on with an almost maternal air. She expected something, a new stage in her life; the girl she had been on the piano stool now wanted something, something vague and undefined, but something very close to me. And whatever it was, it felt to me obscene.
I lay with my head in the grass, staring at the parting clouds, trying to define this obscenity. He was relating some story about a reception for the German ambassador. Donal, you're too quiet, she said. I know, I said, I'm sorry, and raised my head when he came to the punchline and attempted to laugh. But the laugh wouldn't come.
We both stood at the train when the day was over and watched her depart. He talked and I maintained my silence. About the day, the way it went, how we should do these things more often. We should, I lied, then walked in silence with him home.
Ite, Missa est, the priest says and the ceremony is ended. But we can't take him at his word and go yet, we have to wait till he washes and wraps his cruets, till the altar-boys grab the makeshift altar and march ahead of him to the ruins of the monastery door. He'll return next week in the battered truck with his black case and the miracles inside. Then our guards walk round in a lazy swagger and click their tongues against their teeth as they would to cattle and we take it as a signal to move. We are marched towards the cool of the hard shadows by the monastery wall, through the low arch and down the steps. The sun comes in great shafts through the cellar windows, which move from left to right throughout the day. We'll shift around the straw-covered floor as it does, crowding into the shadows, the only diversion whatever happens in the square outside.
The thin boy from Seville takes his place by the window and stares at the blood-spattered wall. You'll take my place, Irlandes, when the time comes. We look like each other, no? I tell him we do, and that I will. Then I'll go to Ireland and meet your sister. I tell him I have to disappoint him about the sister. Ah, he says and smiles, as if it had been a possibility after all. Then maybe I stay here. Maybe, I tell him, that is the only viable option. So when they come to shoot me, Irlandes, you will hold my hand? I tell him that if I hold his hand, the likelihood is I will be shot too. So we go together, he says, like I should have gone with Frederick?
He is in our cell because he joined, incongruously for a Spaniard, the Abraham Lincoln battalion. The lover of a Boston student, he signed up with him in Paris and they made their way to Madrid. Frederick was hit by a Red Cross truck two miles behind the lines, denying both of them the glorious demise they had imagined.
How would you have gone with Frederick? I ask him, but before he can tell me yet again we're diverted by the sounds outside. Here we go, Pat, the Welshman says and takes his pew at the ledge by the window. They lead a line of shoeless figures from the shadows into the hot sun. One of them breaks and runs and the Moroccan in the box-tower decides to put his gun to better use. He aims and fires twice and the figure falls, a dark shadow on the whitened ground, a darker stain gradually spreading around it. The others shuffle forwards with eerie obedience and form a line by the blood-splattered wall. Their guards make an untidy half-circle, raise their rifles and create an intermittent staccato like a badly played kettle-drum till the line has become a crumpled heap.
Inside we say nothing for a while. Then Antonio beside me tugs at my belt. You'll think of me, Irlandes, when they shoot me? I tell him that if they shoot him, they will shoot all of us, and that if they shot all of us, diplomatic incidents would ensue. He shakes his head, smiling wryly. No, he says, they take the one Spaniard from the cell and shoot him, like a dog. I shake my head, knowing that I'm wrong. And when they shoot me, he says, I want you to think of me. I assure him I think of him hourly. No, he says, I want you to read this and think of me. He takes a crumpled paper from his pocket and holds it to the light. From Frederick, he says, and asks me to read.
It is a yellowing scrap, torn from a book. I read.
Because I could not stop for death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The carriage held but just ourselves—
And immortality.
He waits for more but the page is torn and at the rough edges the words are indecipherable. What does it mean? he asks. I tell him it is a poetic meditation on the theme of death, quite at odds with the shabby ceremonials outside. But beautiful, no? Beautiful indeed, I tell him, but useless. Frederick had a use for it, he says. He said his soul was in the words. And if you read it when they shoot me, mine will be in them too.
I look at his dark eyes by the barred window and my own feel wet. Because he accepts it so readily, I can only believe it will happen. So I promise him I'll read it if they come to shoot him, if they haven't shot me first. He rewards me with a smile.
The gun was to blame. It hinted at a past of his I'd never seen, at possibilities I dared not think of. The piano lost its frisson for me, though the lessons kept on, like the memory of movement in a limb that has been severed. I took the gun walking with Mouse along the tracks round the Head, laying bullets from the chamber on the metal struts and waiting till a train came by to explode them. I took to shooting salmon in the river by the harbour, in mid-air as they leapt up the weir, flashes of silver which would explode when hit in a stripe of red. The nightlines had become a memory as well by then and this mode of fishing would have to suffice. I sat on the peak of the Head one afternoon with the town below me and the sprawl of the city beyond. I put one bullet in the chamber, spun it then stuck the barrel in my ear and listened to the sound of the trigger as I pulled. A greasy click, slow, like the operation of a giant wheel as the chamber moved and then I knew either an explosion of sound and the final silence or a further click. I heard the hammer hit home and then a silence did descend, the clouds moved in quiet glory over Djouce mountain, the sun came through in a many-fingered burst and I relished my escape. It was a version of death, a peace beyond anything life could throw at me. I tried again with Mouse, in the old mill behind the sewage plant. Here, I told him, a game of chance, and showed him how I put the single bullet in the chamber, spun it with the palm of one hand and shoved the barrel in my ear. Stop it Dony, he said. Why? I asked him. Give me one reason why. I waited for a reason and when he had none squeezed the trigger. He hit the gun from my hand as I did so and it exploded, sending the bullet into the watertower of the sewage plant behind. We watched a stream of amber-coloured liquid squirt f
rom the tower. There's your reason, he said.
It was an escape though, of another kind. The liquid fell, silently, in a long arc and formed a puddle at our feet. Mouse was shouting at me, his mouth opening and closing, though no sound came out. Then he hit me in the face and I could hear again. Could have been you, he said, you fucking nut. That stream of piss, I said. Yeah, he said, and turned away, it could have been you.
I kept it with me, though, tucked into the pocket of a gabardine coat I developed the habit of wearing. I took the train to Dublin, to a meeting of the Republican Congress in Rathmines Town Hall. I heard grizzled old veterans of his war rail against the Free State, talk about the betrayal of just about everything, including the Republic and the working class. "I knew your father" became a kind of refrain to me, expressed with a hint of regret and disapproval and a large dollop of suspicion about my presence there. He had put his name to several publications on the danger of the growing tide of anarchy, De Valera's betrayal of the principles of the Treaty and the rising communist menace. I watched him speak in the Royal Dublin Society on the virtues of the corporate state. I stood in the background while they drove a flock of goats through the august premises, twenty through each door, and I could see from the back his expression as a large horned monster leapt the podium. Cries of Blueshirt! and Fascist! and scum of all description echoed round the hall as the meeting broke up in chaos and my last glimpse was of him, tall, statuesque, his bearded mouth still moving soundlessly amidst the mayhem.
