by Colm Toibin
‘She heard you, all right. Don’t mind her, now.’
On Christmas Day, she seemed cheerful as she tried on the cashmere cardigan he had brought her; he told her again that he had driven down that morning and that he was going back soon to have Christmas dinner with his friends in Dublin.
‘I’d say the road was quiet coming down,’ she said. ‘Years ago there’d be no traffic at all on Christmas Day, but I suppose that’s changing too, like everything else.’
She looked at him directly, as though she were checking now if he really had meant it when he said he was returning to Dublin. He held her gaze, trying to make it clear to her that he was not lying. She grew silent and appeared locked in some reflections of her own for a while until she noticed the buttons of the new cardigan, which she began to admire.
In the New Year, she started to weaken. Paul began to drive down one evening each week, as well as Saturday. He often found her asleep when he came on Saturdays, Brigid nudging her to wake up when she saw him coming. In the evenings when he visited, she was always in bed and usually did not wake. He would move a chair close to the bed and sit there for a while watching her. She seemed tiny in the bed; he could see the veins on her hands almost breaking through the skin. Noeleen assured him that if there was an emergency she would call him immediately.
When Noeleen finally did call, in the late morning one Wednesday in the spring, he was not surprised.
‘Should I come now?’ he asked.
‘You should, Paul.’
‘How long does she have?’
‘It could be a matter of hours,’ she said. ‘She’s weakening. The pulse is slow.’
‘Is she awake?’
‘No, Paul, she’s asleep, and we have her very comfortable.’
‘Does she know she’s dying?’
‘Ah, who can say?’
When he arrived at the nursing home, he did not go into the large room where Josie normally was but waited by the office for Noeleen to finish a phone call.
‘The doctor saw her earlier,’ she said when she put the receiver down. ‘And he’ll come back if we need him. And I phoned the Manse and told them. There’s no priest there now, but they’ll phone back as soon as someone comes in. She woke a while back and took a drink of milk, but she’s asleep again now. She’s in the room on her own. I wanted her to be private.’
They left him alone with her. A few times when she struggled for breath he thought to go into the corridor and find one of the nurses, but he presumed that they knew what was happening. A priest came and performed the last rites.
Every time he walked down the corridor to go to the bathroom or get some air, Paul had the sense that he was being watched with a sort of grim silence by the old people who saw him. He was the messenger of death, he realized. He was the one waiting. They must have seen it before. None of them even acknowledged his presence.
Later, when it was dark, the doctor came and said that Josie could not last much longer. They left food for Paul in the dining room and put an armchair in Josie’s room, in case he wanted to sleep.
‘You can never tell. She could last longer than any of us think,’ Noeleen said as she prepared to retire for the night. ‘That’s God’s decision – it’s not ours.’
One of the women working all night was from Lithuania; the other was local. He was not sure if they were nurses or orderlies; he did not know their names. Slowly, however, as the night wore on, he realized, by the way the local woman came and took Josie’s pulse and by her skill at making his aunt more comfortable in bed, that she was a nurse. A few times when she came into the room he went out into the corridor with her afterwards.
‘I’ve seen it before,’ she said. ‘She’s holding on. It’s impossible to know for how long. You learn things in this job. And one of them is that sometimes it’s the hardest thing to die, almost harder than to live. For some people, it’s the hardest thing of all.’
A while later, when Paul was alone having a cup of tea in the kitchen, she came and told him that he should return immediately to his aunt’s room. ‘She’s awake now. I didn’t think she would wake again.’
Josie, he saw, was lying on her back with her eyes open. There was a bedside lamp on, but he kept the door open as well so that light from the corridor came into the room.
‘It’s Paul,’ he said. ‘You’re having a great sleep.’
She mumbled something and then made as if to turn.
‘I’m here now,’ he said. ‘If you need me for anything. I’m sitting here. And I’ll get you anything you want.’
She seemed to grow more agitated, and her right hand began to shake. She was trying to say something, but he could not make out even a single word.
‘Don’t make yourself tired,’ he said. ‘You can rest now, and we’ll talk later.’
She turned her head and looked at him and tried again to speak.
‘Her,’ she said. ‘Her.’
‘Who?’
He could not understand the next thing she said.
‘We can talk later, when you are up and dressed,’ he said.
Josie’s hand started to shake again, and her breathing sounded like a set of sighs.
‘Josie,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me?’
She fixed her eyes on him.
‘Can you hear me?’
She mumbled, and he thought she might be saying that she could hear him, but he was not sure.
‘I won’t see her. Do you understand?’
Her gaze was sharp now, almost accusing. She made an effort to move.
‘No, don’t move. I’ll get the nurse in a minute. I just want you to know that I won’t see my mother. I didn’t visit her. I didn’t. I don’t even know where her house is. I haven’t seen her. And I won’t. I promise I won’t.’
She nodded, but he was not certain that it was a direct response to what he had said. He leaned in towards her and held her hand.
‘I promise you now that I won’t see her. I don’t want to see her.’
He was still not sure that she had understood. When she closed her eyes, her face changed. For a moment it could have been a smile, but it was hard for him to tell. Her breathing grew shallow. He thought that she was going to die then and touched her arm tenderly for a moment and went to find the nurse. When he came back to the room, Josie’s face had changed once more, he thought, the expression softer, calmer. The nurse checked her pulse and looked at her watch.
‘No, she has a while to go,’ she said. ‘She’ll go in her own time. The doctor prescribed something for pain if she needs it, and I have the keys to the press where it’s kept. But she won’t need it now. She’s slipping away without any pain, that’s what she’s doing. But she’s not ready yet.’
As dawn broke and the morning light crept in through a chink in the curtains, new nurses came on duty, and the early routines and noises in the nursing home, which he had never witnessed before, began. When Noeleen appeared and said that it must have been a long night for him, he realized that the whole night had felt like an hour or two, nothing more. What was strange now, when he went back to the room and sat with Josie again, was how much she changed every few minutes. He wondered if it was a trick of the light, or maybe his eyes were tired. Her face, for a while in the morning shadows, seemed to him like the face of someone young. He had not known her when she was young. He remembered her always as a middle-aged woman with grey hair, someone content as long as nothing new or unusual was happening, someone always happier in her own house when the day was over and everything was in its place. He sat and watched her.
In the middle of the morning, they asked him to leave for a short time as they shifted her position in the bed again.
‘It won’t be long now,’ the nurse whispered to him when she came to tell him that he could return to the room. He stayed with Josie for the next hour or so until the nurse appeared once more and took her pulse and then returned with Noeleen and another nurse and they said a decade of the Rosary as Josie fad
ed into death.
The day was warm. Paul stood out in front of the nursing home and phoned work to say that he would not be there until the following Monday and then texted some friends in Dublin to say that his aunt had died. As he came back in, he found that Brigid had been taken by Noeleen down to the room to see Josie and say goodbye to her. He waited in the doorway as Brigid stood beside the bed. She smiled at him as she turned.
‘Paul, I’d say you’ll miss her now,’ Brigid whispered to him as she moved towards the door. ‘We’ll all miss her.’
‘We will, all right,’ he said.
Brigid sighed as she passed him.
‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ she said.
He stood in the doorway and watched her walking down the hallway back to her place in the large room, with Noeleen behind her to make sure that she did not fall. He turned then and closed the door and sat on his own with Josie. He thought for a moment of pulling the curtains back and letting the room fill with light so that he could look at her clearly for the last time, but he knew that it was better to leave the room as it was. Her arm, when he touched it, was already getting cold.
He did not touch her again, but stayed there silently with her. He was tired, but he did not have even the smallest urge to sleep. He checked his mobile phone as a text came through from a friend. He thought that later he would go to Dublin and get a suit and some clean clothes and then come back and maybe stay at the hotel. In the meantime, he would wait until the undertaker arrived and then think about the death notice to be put in the newspaper and the arrangements for the funeral. There was, he thought, nothing else to be done.
As he sat there, he realized that he should go to Josie’s house, that staying at the hotel would do nothing for him. He could, he thought, leave the door ajar in her bedroom and her sitting room, or open a window, do something in the house to mark the fact that she had gone. He was surprised at how much that thought seemed to satisfy him, almost console him, and how quickly that thought led to another, one he had been keeping at bay.
Somewhere not far from here, he knew, his mother was living in the same day as he was, under the same sky, in the same watery light that came from the sea and the Slaney, and someone would surely tell her before evening that Josie, her sister-in-law, had died. The knowledge that he had promised not to see his mother merged in his thoughts with an image of her being told the news of Josie’s death. Her life and the one that he had lived apart from her filled his mind now, as though a space had been freed for them, the shadows cleared, by what had happened in the night and by Josie’s going. He found himself inhaling and releasing breath as a way of nourishing that space, and he breathed in hard for a second at the thought that nourishing it like this was maybe all he would ever be able to do with it.
Barcelona, 1975
At first there were two. They watched me easily, nonchalantly. They were good-looking and, like actors, utterly alert to themselves, dressed I remember now – and I may be wrong about some of these details – in black and white, one with a waistcoat, the other with a grandad shirt. One was taller; both were thin and lithe. The taller one was braver, cheekier; the other seemed content to wallow in his own skinny beauty. They were watching me now and they wanted something from me and I was not sure what that was.
I was twenty then. I had left Dublin just after my final exams, taken the boat first to Holyhead and then the night train to London and then the plane – my first plane journey – to Barcelona. I was raw and unhappy and I missed home. Sometimes at the beginning I stayed in bed the entire day, listening to the city sounds – metal blinds being pulled up and down, motorbikes, voices – wishing I was back in my old bed in a back room in Hatch Street with everything familiar and easy.
I dreamed one night that I found a great balloon to take me over the Pyrenees and the Bay of Biscay to the comfort of Dublin. I dreamed of watching the kingdoms of the world from this height, all made golden by the prospect of abandoning the daily ordeal and the constant excitement of being in a foreign city alone for an indeterminate time without a word of the language.
The two of them were watching me still. To make sure I was not imagining that they were somehow in pursuit, I stood up from the seat and moved slowly down the Ramblas towards the port. They stood up from the seat opposite and, when I looked behind, I saw that they were following. I sat down again on another seat and they sat brazenly opposite me. When one of them smiled, I returned the smile. They were not threatening me; they were not frightening; and they were not going to go away. By now I was not sure, in any case, that I wanted them to.
The taller one walked over and sat beside me. Soon we discovered we had a problem. I had no Spanish and he had no English. When I spoke in faltering school French, he shook his head and pointed to his friend and called him over. His friend had no English either, but he spoke fluent French. Soon a number of facts became clear: they lived nearby in Plaza Real; one was a painter; the other, the smaller one, was studying literature. They were not surprised when I said that I was alone in the city and was living in a pensión nearby and looking for work as a teacher. They spoke to me as if they would never let me go.
We must have had a drink, or spoken at greater length. But it is also possible that, trusting and needy, we made our way quickly to the apartment on the top floor of a corner building on Plaza Real, an apartment that had within it, like a maze, other smaller apartments and locked rooms, one of which was owned by the painter. The student of literature’s room, which had its own bathroom as well, was across the badly lit and dingy corridor.
I did not know what we were going to do when we went back. Talk some more, I presumed. Have a drink, perhaps. But I must have really known. I was not that innocent, even though I had never done anything like this before. I suppose what I really did not know is how or when or in what combination it would be done. I know that I eventually spent time naked in a bed with each of them separately, but I am unclear now about the order or the precise circumstances.
I know that we were in the painter’s room. I thought his paintings were bad, too literal and crude, but the room itself was wonderful, laden with strange objects, prints and posters and funny ornaments. There was a small stereo and one classical record, among the collection of jazz and rock and old Spanish songs. It was Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. I asked them to put it on and it became the theme music for my visits to that room over the subsequent months, the only music I heard at that time. The lovely cello coming in first was more than an aspect of the pleasure I felt and the things I learned in that room, it stands in for them now; the concerto’s chords and cadences and sudden gorgeous shifts are enough to conjure up the scene in all its newness and excitement and glory.
The painter’s room comes to me now in two guises. It was a small, intimate, lamp-lit room, dominated by a large bed; it was also a large room where many people could happily sleep. I don’t know how it could have been both. That first night it was a small room. There may have been a chair. The music was on. One of us was sitting on the bed. The painter was wandering in and out of the room as the other, the one interested in literature, came towards me and began to kiss me. There was a taste from his breath I had never encountered before. It was the taste of garlic. And even now, should I smell it from someone’s breath, it carries an erotic charge with it, a sense of pure easy pleasure, beautiful lips and tongues and teeth, and the promise of soft warm skin and sex.
I was unhappy that the painter might return and find us kissing, and when he did, I moved away, as though we had been caught by a parent or a teacher. This amused them. Barcelona in 1975 was a foreign country, I soon learned. I tried to work out the rules. These two young men were friends, not lovers. They seemed to have followed me without discussing which of them might entertain me when we got home. They had no interest in being together with me, but they were not embarrassed at being watched by the other in this, the preliminary stage. So we kissed again, this time as though it did not matter who was watch
ing.
That night, or some night soon afterwards, I fucked the literary guy on the painter’s bed. He was by far the more beautiful of the two when he was naked; he was smoother, more feminine, with a much thinner waist and beautiful long legs. His arse was hairless, almost fleshy.
He kissed with slow passion and responded slowly, carefully and deliberately to every movement. His lips and his breath were what I loved most. In a drawer on the right-hand side of the bed he found Vaseline and he rubbed it on his arsehole and on my dick and then he turned away from me, face down, his arms stretched out in front of him, his head to the side.
I had done this only once before. I presumed it was easy. I lay on top of him and shoved my dick in hard, with an aggression he might not have seen in me earlier. He screamed, yelling at me in French to take it out, take it out, I was hurting him. When he was free of me, he turned away, holding himself and moaning. The idea that I had hurt him made me excited, but I was also alarmed that he would not speak to me or turn back towards me. I did not think that I had done anything wrong.
Somehow, over the next few minutes, the French language ceased to work for us. He had to make sounds and gesture with his hands to emphasize that I had pushed in too suddenly, too fast and too hard and I must go in more slowly, gradually and gently. All of these instructions took time. It did not occur to me that I could lose interest in finishing what I had begun. I remained ready to be educated, longing to fuck him some more. I was thus ready to start again and do as he said. He turned once more and put extra Vaseline on his arsehole. He wanted to be fucked again; I knew now that he did not want to be hurt. In seeking to oblige, I nonetheless made him wince as I put my dick inside him as fully as I could and began as slowly as possible to fuck him, trying to keep going and going until he seemed to be both hurt and happy at the same time.
I do not know if it was that same night I ended up in another room, a much smaller room, with the painter, and watched him growing bored with me, having begun with an immense and all-governing fervour, kissing me, holding me, running his hands all over me. I do not know if we ever came to orgasm with each other, but if we did it was the end of our sexual time together. The passion we had was a small game and it ended soon after it began.