Ireland
Page 19
They made their brushes out of all manner of things—feathers, both the quill end and the fluffy end; hairs pulled from a squirrel’s tail, or a badger’s neck, where the hairs are especially strong; pointed twigs, iron pins, shards of slate. On each drawing table they set out little balls of moss, to wipe off the excess ink.
No magnifying glasses in those days, no spectacles; these men worked with the naked eye. Sometimes they polished a piece of metal so that it shone and shone, and they reflected the sun’s light from the metal to the page; that way, they saw more detail, and their work could be tiny and intricate.
In the beginning Annan and Senan only concerned themselves with color and fine detail. When transcribing a text in the scriptorium, the writers used the feathers of the monastery geese and cut a sharp angle across the quill. Depending on whether they wanted the letters of their words fine or broad, they would cut the point narrow or wide. And they never crossed something out and started again—they could not do that on parchment. Every letter of every word had to be carefully thought about and then set down, in beautiful big, sacred letters, each black as a crow. And the colors had then to be controlled so that they didn’t run in little leaks across the thin membrane.
So there they sat, Annan and Senan, all their brushes and pens laid out on one side of the table and their piles of colors sitting in seashells on the other side. Each man had experience of creating colored work in sacred books.
Annan set out to make a page the way he knew best, and his first page consisted of a dense and tiny pattern woven into a greater picture of eight circles or discs inside a strong rectangle. Not a square inch of the surface remained undecorated—powerful straight lines and perfect curves dominated it.
First, he drew the outline, and for this he used a compass and other geometrical instruments. Then, he mixed much red and yellow and soft green and brown, and on the page laced it all into curls, coils, and complexity, lacework and tracery, arabesques and bobbles and curlicues. Anyone who looked closely at the page, he thought, must be drawn in deeper and deeper, must get passionately lost in the intricacies and beauties of these tiny details. He pored and pored over his page of parchment, with his badger hairs and his squirrel tails and his tiny quills of soft sparrow feathers and his colors.
Everywhere you go in the world today, wherever ancient Irish art is mentioned or displayed, the little spirals and ovals and leaves spring into the minds of those who know. The inspiration for this work lay easily to hand. These monks lived close to nature. Outside the windows of their cells they saw the trees and the leaves, the birds and the branches and the silver river winding by. All their patterns came from nature, animal, vegetable, or human, and in their own estimation they celebrated God by drawing attention to, and recreating, his beautiful works.
At the same time, however, now that our wider world is better known, it is possible to see all sorts of traces from other civilizations in these pages. Echoes of Armenia and the Orient, Egypt and Ethiopia, the Greeks, the Germans, the Etruscans—their tracks are to be found like little footprints on every page. Did they all know each other? Or did this work simply come up out of the pool of life like a face from the Family of Man? Annan, by the way, suffered greatly from indigestion and had to be very careful with belching when he was actually drawing.
Senan’s page looked not at all like Annan’s, and yet it seemed related—brothers of the same tribe. He built a structure of the four Evangelist portraits and the ancient symbols by which they were known. In the top left-hand corner he drew a portrait of Matthew, the only Evangelist always depicted as a man. Across from him comes Mark, portrayed as a lion, and the lower two pictures he made for Luke, whose symbol was a calf, and John, the eagle.
To say he drew them is a big understatement—the page was brilliant. Senan gave the man of Matthew a clear face and a pair of gentle, fluted wings. Mark’s creature has a long curled tail, and his body is rendered in the blue of the sky and the gold of the corn. The calf of Luke has a spotted face. John’s eagle has a proud glare and a great, blue, broad wing. General soft reds and yellows and browns and brilliant blues gave the page a kind of light that came from inside, like true beauty. The same tradition of lacy tracery tiptoes all over the page, and there are animals with curious expressions and indignant and swishing tails and feathers. Each portrait has a firm border, as though Senan contained all his talent within a most capable and responsible spirit.
His page was more playful than Annan’s, and in due time that gave the monks in the scriptorium a kind of permission to be amusing. Soon they drew little faces on their parchments, hidden in among the letters of the prayers, and they also drew kittens and butterflies and calves and the abbey dog and frogs and ducks and corn before the harvest, all wavy and yellow. Someone painted a wood, and when you looked into it closely, you could see the sun shining on the earth between the trees. Other monks added posies of flowers peeping out through the arms of letters and filled in a capital letter with the face of a little pig. Thus, because they had taken care with the tiniest detail of their works, Annan and Senan paved the way for one of the most delicate and human works in the world.
The two monks had a pact—that on the day one finished, he’d rap on the wall with a stick, seven raps, seven being an important number, because we have seven openings in our heads; two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and a mouth.
One Wednesday morning, just before noon, with three days left of the six months, they knocked on the wall together at the same identical moment. Then they rushed out in the corridor and embraced each other.
Annan said to Senan, “I can’t wait to see your page.”
And Senan said to Annan, “And I can’t wait to see your page.”
Soon it reverberated through the abbey that the two men had finished the competition, and the excitement ran through the air like good news.
When Senan saw Annan’s page, he almost burst into tears of delight. And when Annan saw Senan’s page, he wished to swoon. Each seemed dazed. Very carefully, as though they were carrying babies, the two monks took their work to the refectory, where a special stand had already been set up to display the two pages side by side. Annan set up Senan’s page, and Senan displayed Annan’s. Then they shook hands with each other and stood back to let the other monks see.
For an hour and more, until the bell for lunch rang—they had to ring it again and again—the monks of Kells Abbey stood looking at the two pages. Men wept, they laughed, they marveled. One thing they knew—nothing so captivating as those two pages by Annan and Senan had ever been made in that scriptorium.
And then they knew another thing—how could any mortal choose which should win? One page was as brilliant as the other.
They sent for Delia, who arrived in tremendous excitement. She loved the pages more than anyone. After congratulating the pair, she organized the secret vote.
Not counting Annan and Senan, that community had two hundred and nine monks. Plus Delia’s vote. Nobody expected Senan and Annan to vote. Therefore there was an even number of two hundred and ten, and the possibility of a tie. But since this was going to be a secret vote, they felt that they’d probably get a clean result.
Two boxes, marked “Page One” and “Page Two,” were placed on an oak table in the darkest corner of the refectory. Beside the boxes sat a large bunch of colored feathers, taken from three pheasants; the boxes and the feathers were covered with a tapestry. Every voting monk had to go to the table, lift the tapestry, choose a feather, and, making sure no one saw him do it, place the feather in the box of his choice.
One by one, youngest first, the monks voted solemnly. Nobody spoke. All you could hear was the shuffling of their sandals. Delia went last. After she voted, you could cut the tension in that room with a knife. The oldest monk, who was in charge of the voting, was about to lift the two boxes and count the feathers when Delia called out.
“Wait!” she said, this fair-minded woman. “Annan and Senan should vote. They’re monks too.
Isn’t that only fair?”
Everyone agreed, and the two friends made their way to the table; one after the other they voted. Their feathers brought the total to two hundred and twelve votes.
At last the old monk lifted the box marked “Page One” out to the main table, where everyone could see it. Slowly, slowly, he counted the feathers in the box, and slowly, slowly, he counted them again. The watching people looked at each other in amazement; the box held far more feathers than it should have.
“What’s going on?” they murmured—because the old monk announced, “Page One gets two hundred and eleven votes.”
Which either meant that the monks had put all the feathers into one box by mistake—or that everybody except one person had voted only for Page One.
Annan and Senan looked baffled. Delia cleared her throat to speak and said in a kind of a hushed voice, “We must see the second box.”
Everybody looked at her very strangely, unable to understand her reasoning. Surely the result was now known? The creator of Page One had been elected abbot, hadn’t he?
The old monk now lifted the box marked “Page Two” up to the main table and raised his hands in the air.
“Glory to God!” he said. “The box is full of feathers.”
“Please count them, Brother,” said Delia.
“I will,” said the old monk, and he began slowly to count aloud the feathers in the box marked “Page Two.”
Everybody watched him, holding their breath.
“Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four…,” and soon, “Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine,” and eventually and excitedly, “Two hundred and eight, two hundred and nine, two hundred and ten, and—the last one—two hundred and eleven.”
He looked baffled, but he said in his quavery voice, “Page Two, two hundred and eleven feathers. And that means that Page One and Page Two each got the same number of votes.”
A hubbub broke out that made Babel sound like a whisper. Did you know, by the way, that an Irish monk went to the Tower of Babel, took the best bits of all the languages he heard there, brought them home with him, and made them into the Irish language?
At Delia’s insistence, the old monk counted all the feathers again, in both boxes—and got the same result. Someone else counted them. Then Delia counted them herself, and she made it two hundred and eleven each. She counted out loud.
“Two hundred and nine monks. And myself. That’s two hundred and ten. Plus Annan or Senan. That’s two hundred and eleven. That means,” she said, “that almost everybody voted twice.” Then she blushed red as riches and said, “I know I did.”
Everybody applauded her. Delia looked at Annan and Senan.
“But I was hoping,” she said, “that you’d break the deadlock.”
Annan grinned. “I voted for Senan.”
And Senan grinned. “I voted for Annan.”
“In that case,” says Delia, “the two of you can continue as you are; you can run the abbey together. Instead of one abbot, we’ll have two.”
And that goes to show that things of great beauty can sometimes come out of awkward situations and that people, if you leave them alone, know how to make their own decisions. It also, according to some people, gave the Irish people the habit of voting often at elections.
The room had long darkened when Ronan finished. He read the last few pages at the bedroom window as the evening star brightened.
“If only he’d signed it,” he said half-aloud. “Then we’d have a name.”
Insofar as he could at the age of fourteen, he tried to reach the Storyteller through the dry pages. He visualized the evening in the O’Callaghan household. Which chair—the chair his father had sat in? Or Mrs. O’Callaghan’s? Did he turn his hat in his hands? Light his pipe?
If it had been a visit for one evening only, how large was his audience? If small, was that sad for a man who liked to be heard? Ronan also wondered whether he detected a certain fear in the story, a desire on the Storyteller’s part to praise the men of God. He winced to think of his mother’s rage. Why had she been so fierce?
He fingered the pages again, observed their numbers typed neatly on the top right-hand corner, the indentations for paragraphs, the heavy letters unevenly inked where one key received a stronger finger than others—the k, the s, the u.
Now a new problem rode in. Kate had raised it on the way home.
“Where will we keep that story?”
Alison opened all letters to the house, even Kate’s.
“The office?” said his father.
“I can—” Ronan stopped, about to say the word “hide.” Then he said, “It’ll be all right.”
“Are you sure?” said John and Kate together.
They obviously knew that Alison searched Ronan’s room. He himself laid traps—tiny strings on drawers and doors, a pen placed at a specific angle, all the tricks he’d learned from adventure stories. Not that Alison attempted to conceal her visits; if she found reading matter that she deemed unsuitable, she removed it and sometimes replaced it with a work on the lives of the saints. But she left his history books untouched.
Two years previously, Ronan had decided he would bury his treasures. Therefore, at specified points in the woods and fields, he engineered deep caches. In them he buried tin boxes; they stored the entire proceeds of his search for the Storyteller. Most correspondents had replied to him at school because his letters suggested an educational project; on his way home through the woods he stored them underground.
Next day, Ronan went to the rocky corner of the high woods and moved a pile of stones. The tall oblong can, wrapped in old raincoats, came up easily; after a struggle the rusting lid yielded; he eased in the Annan and Senan typescript and replaced everything with care.
On the following Thursday, the school had a football game. At home Ronan lied, said attendance as a supporter was mandatory. He went on the bus, but not to the game. A five-minute walk from the field took him to the main street—and a gray door. Inside, a woman with fat arms halted him.
“Yes?”
“I have a message for Madeleine O’Callaghan.”
“Give it to me, and I’ll give it to her.” She slid back a glass panel.
Ronan said, “I have to give it to her in person.”
“Her class finishes at four. You can call back.”
“May I wait?”
“Ooh,” the woman trilled. “‘May I?’ ‘May I’ indeed? Around here we can only manage to say, ‘Can I?’ And where d’you think you’ll wait, Mister May-I?”
“Outside,” and Ronan retreated to the hallway.
Nothing happened in the next twenty minutes, nothing at all. No one came and no one went, and all Ronan saw was the bare staircase and the walls painted an exhausted municipal green.
At four o’clock a bell rang. The woman with the fat arms frowned as Ronan came back.
“Will you point her out to me?”
“Huh. You’ll know her straight away. She’s like a flagpole that has long hair on it. Someone should cut that hair for her, I would if she was my daughter.”
A throng of chattering girls poured up the stairs like Finn MacCool’s women. With giggling come-on eyes they pushed past Ronan. Near the back of the crowd, a remarkably tall girl chattered to two others who hung on every word. And yes, she did look like her mother, though much thinner.
“Are you Madeleine?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Ronan O’Mara. You know. The story you typed.”
“Oh! Howya? I wasn’t there Sunday, my cousin had her appendix out, I was bringing her grapes, did you bring it back? My mother said she gave it to you for keeps.”
Madeleine had her mother’s punctuation.
“I wanted to ask you about him.”
“Wasn’t he quaint? And the hat and the pipe, my father said he was as quaint as a cottage. I’m famished for a cup of tea, come over to the bus stop café.”
Ronan asked question after question.
Madeleine had the chatter of a bird.
“Not a thing wrong with him except the odd wheeze. Aren’t these cakes quaint? I love anything coconut. Oh, he was very lively, laughing like a donkey and puffing away at the pipe and lowering the glasses of whiskey like he was afraid the source was drying up, and the black coat and the tight old pants and the hat, talk about quaint. He wouldn’t stay the night and we had a fine room for him, the overflow room, we keep sacks of flour in it, they often use it after a party or something, but no, he had to be off.”
Madeleine ate a third cake, and Ronan called for more. A coconut flake clung to her upper lip.
“Where did he go?”
“We never saw. All we know is that he walked out the door at midnight like some sort of magic man and he was gone, no flashlight, no torch, nothing, not even a match. Where he stayed we don’t know and my father asked people but nobody saw him anywhere and no one met him on the road the next day. Maybe he’s a ghost.”
The extra cakes arrived; Ronan was still within his pocket money. Madeleine ate three out of the four, her braided hair swinging like a bell rope.
“But I’ll tell you something we heard. D’you know who I mean by Barry Hanafin? ‘The Poet Hanafin,’ they call him—probably because he’s actually a poet. I heard that when times are rough with the old man, he goes to stay at Barry Hanafin’s, they have a pub too, so he’d like that. Tell me, did you ever kiss a girl?” She had started to tease him.
“We’re all talking about kissing these days, it seems to be in fashion or something.”
“No,” said Ronan, startled. They left the table.
“Well, you’ll have no bother when you want to. I know a slew of girls who’d find it very easy kissing you. Including myself. Bye now,” and Madeleine O’Callaghan waved an airy hand.
Ronan trotted after her.
“Where does he live?”