It had seemed blasphemous when someone once said to me in Germany: The road belongs to the automobile. In Ireland I was often tempted to say: The road belongs to the cow. Indeed, cows are sent as freely to pasture as children to school: they fill the road with their herds, turn round haughtily when you blow your horn, and the driver has a chance here to show a sense of humor, behave calmly, and test his skill. He drives carefully right up to the herd, timidly forces his way into the condescendingly formed passage and, the minute he has reached the leading cow and overtaken it, he can step on the gas and count himself lucky to have escaped a danger—and what is more exciting, what better stimulus is there for human gratitude, than danger averted? So the Irish driver remains a creature to whom gratitude is not foreign; he must constantly fight for his life, his rights, and his speed: against schoolchildren and cows. He would never be able to coin a snobbish slogan such as: The road belongs to the automobile. Ireland is a long way from deciding who the road belongs to. And how beautiful these roads are: walls, walls, trees, walls and hedges; the stones of Irish walls would be enough to build the tower of Babel, but Irish ruins are proof that it would be useless to begin such a building. In any event, these beautiful roads do not belong to the automobile; they belong to whoever happens to occupy them and whoever allows those desiring passage to prove their skill. Some roads belong to the donkey: donkeys playing truant from school, there are plenty of those in Ireland; they nibble away at the hedges, mournfully contemplate the countryside—turning their rumps toward the passing car. Whatever else, the road does not belong to the automobile.
Much contentment, much merriment among the cows, the donkeys, and the schoolchildren, came our way between Dublin and Limerick, and who, thinking of Limericks, could approach Limerick without picturing a cheerful town? Where the roads had been dominated by cheerful schoolchildren, complacent cows, pensive donkeys, now suddenly they were empty. The children seemed to have reached school, the cows their pasture, and the donkeys seemed to have been called to order. Dark clouds came up from the Atlantic—and the streets of Limerick were dark and empty. Only the milk bottles in the doorways were white, almost too white, and the seagulls splintering the gray of the sky, clouds of white plump gulls, splinters of white that for a second or two joined to form a great patch of white. Moss shimmered green on ancient walls from the eighth, ninth, and all subsequent centuries, and the walls of the twentieth century were hardly distinguishable from those of the eighth—they too were moss-covered, they too were ruined. In butcher shops gleamed whitish-red sides of beef, and the preschool children of Limerick showed their originality here: hanging on to pigs’ trotters, to oxtails, they swung to and fro between the hunks of meat: grinning pale faces. Irish children are very inventive; but are these the only inhabitants of this town?
We parked the car near the cathedral and strolled slowly through the dismal street. The gray Shannon rushed along under old bridges: this river was too big, too wide, too wild for this gloomy little town. Loneliness seized us, we felt sad, deserted between moss, old walls, and the many painfully white milk bottles that seemed destined for people long dead; even the children swinging from the sides of beef in the unlit butcher shops seemed like ghosts. There is a way of fighting the loneliness that can seize one suddenly in a strange town: buy something; a picture postcard, or some chewing gum, a pencil or cigarettes: hold something in your hand, participate in the life of this town by buying something—but would there be anything to buy here in Limerick, on a Thursday at half-past ten in the morning? Would we not wake up all of a sudden to find ourselves standing in the rain beside the car somewhere on the highway, and Limerick would have disappeared like a mirage, a mirage of the rain? So painfully white were the milk bottles—not quite so white the screaming gulls.
The old part of Limerick stands in relation to the new part like the Ile de la Cité to the rest of Paris, with the proportion of old Limerick to the Ile de la Cité being about one to three and that of the new Limerick to Paris one to two hundred. Danes, Normans, much later the Irish, occupied this lovely somber island in the Shannon; gray bridges link it to the banks, the gray Shannon rushes by, and up there, where the bridge joins the land, a monument has been erected to a stone—or a stone has been placed on a pedestal. At this stone the Irish were promised freedom of religious expression and a treaty was concluded that was later revoked by the English parliament, so Limerick is also sometimes called “the town of the broken treaty.”
In Dublin we had been told: “Limerick is the most devout city in the world.” So we would only have had to look at the calendar to know why the streets were so deserted, the milk bottles unopened, the shops empty: Limerick was at church, at eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning. Suddenly, before we had reached the center of modern Limerick, the church doors opened, the streets filled up, the milk bottles were removed from the doorways. It was like an invasion: the inhabitants of Limerick were occupying their town. Even the post office was opened, and the bank opened its wickets. Everything looked disconcertingly normal, close, and human, where five minutes ago we seemed to be walking through an abandoned medieval town.
We bought a number of things to reassure ourselves of the existence of this town: cigarettes, soap, picture postcards, and a jigsaw puzzle. We smoked the cigarettes, sniffed the soap, wrote on the postcards, packed up the jigsaw puzzle, and went cheerfully off to the post office. Here there was a slight hitch—the postmistress had not yet returned from church, and her subordinate was unable to clarify what had to be clarified: how much did it cost to send printed matter (the jigsaw puzzle) weighing eight ounces to Germany? The young lady looked imploringly at the picture of the Madonna, with the candle flickering in front of it; but Mary was silent, she only smiled, as she has been smiling for four hundred years, and the smile said: patience. Strange weights were brought out, a strange scale, bright green Customs forms were spread out in front of us, tariff books open and closed, but there remained only one solution: patience. We practiced it. After all, who would want to send a jigsaw puzzle as printed matter from Limerick to Germany in October? Who does not know that the Feast of the Rosary, although not a whole holiday, is more than a half-holiday?
Later on, though, long after the jigsaw puzzle lay in the letter box, we saw the scepticism flowering in hard, sad eyes: melancholy shining in blue eyes, in the eyes of the gypsy selling pictures of saints on the street, and in the eyes of the hotel manageress, in the eyes of the taxi driver—thorns around the rose, arrows in the heart of the most devout city in the world.
Limerick in the Evening
Ravished, robbed of their seals, the milk bottles stood gray, empty, and dirty in doorways and on window sills, waiting sadly for the morning when they would be replaced by their fresh, radiant sisters, and the gulls were not white enough to replace the angelic radiance of the innocent milk bottles; the gulls bobbed along on the Shannon, which, pressed between walls, increases its speed for two hundred yards. Sour, gray-green seaweed covered the walls; it was low tide, and it almost looked as if Old Limerick were exposing itself indecently, lifting its dress, showing parts that are otherwise covered by water; rubbish was waiting to be washed away by the tide; dim lights burned in the bookies’ offices, drunks staggered through the gutters, and the children who that morning had swung from sides of beef in butcher shops now showed that there is a level of poverty for which even the safety pin is too expensive: string is cheaper, and it works just as well. What eight years ago had been a cheap jacket, but new, now served as jacket, overcoat, trousers, and shirt in one; the grown-up sleeves rolled up, string around the middle; and held in the hand—innocently shining like milk, that manna that is to be found, always fresh and cheap, in the last hamlet in Ireland—ice cream. Marbles roll across the sidewalk; now and again a glance at the bookies’ office where Father is just putting part of his unemployment pay on Crimson Cloud. Deeper and deeper sinks the comforting darkness, while the marbles click against the worn steps leading up to the bookie’
s office. Is Father going on to the next bookie, to put something on Gray Moth, to the third, to put something on Innisfree? There is no dearth of bookies here in Old Limerick. The marbles roll against the step, snow-white drops of ice cream fall into the gutter where they remain for a second like stars on the mud, only a second, before their innocence melts away into the mud.
No, Father is not going to another bookie, he is just going to the pub; the marbles can also be clicked against the worn steps of the pub: will Father give them some more money for ice cream? He does. One for Johnny too, and for Paddy, for Sheila and Moira, for Mother and Auntie, perhaps for Granny too? Of course, as long as there’s any money left. Isn’t Crimson Cloud going to win? Of course she is. She has to win, damn it; if she doesn’t win, then—“Look out, John, don’t bang down your glass so hard on the counter. How about another?” Yes. Crimson Cloud has to win.
And when there’s no more string, the fingers will do, thin, dirty, numb children’s fingers of the left hand, while the right hand shoves marbles, throws them or rolls them. “Come on Ned, give us a lick,” and suddenly in the evening darkness the clear sound of a girl’s voice.
“There’s a service this evening, aren’t you going?”
Grins, hesitation, head-shaking.
“Yes, we’re coming.”
“Not me.”
“Oh come on.”
“No.”
“Oh well—”
“No.”
Marbles click against the worn steps of the pub.
My companion was trembling; he was a victim of the most bitter and stupid prejudice of all: that people who are badly dressed are dangerous—more dangerous anyway than the well-dressed ones. He ought to tremble in the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin at least as much as here, behind King John’s Castle in Limerick. If only they were more dangerous, these ragged ones, if only they were as dangerous as those in the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel who don’t look dangerous at all. At this moment a woman, the owner of an eating place, comes rushing out after a boy who has bought six-penn’orth of potato chips and in her opinion has poured too much vinegar on them from the bottle he took from the table.
“You wretch, d’you want to ruin me?”
Will he throw the chips in her face? No—he can’t think of anything to say, only his panting child’s breast answers: long-drawn-out whistling sounds come from the weak organ of his lungs. Did not Swift, more than two hundred years ago, in 1729, write his bitterest satire, the “Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or the Country” by suggesting to the government that the estimated number of 120,000 babies born annually be offered to the wealthy English as food?—precise, gruesome description of a project that was to serve a number of purposes, among others a reduction in the number of Papists.
The battle over the six drops of vinegar is still not over, the woman’s hand is raised threateningly, long whistling sounds come from the boy’s chest. Indifferent people shuffle by, drunks stagger, children carrying prayer books run so as to be in time for the evening service. But the savior was approaching: tall, fat, bloated, his nose must have been bleeding, there were dark patches on his face around mouth and nose; he had also advanced from safety pin to string: there had not been enough for his shoes, they were gaping. He went up to the woman, bowed to her, pretended to kiss her hand, drew a ten-shilling note from his pocket, presented it to her—startled, she accepted it—and said courteously:
“May I request you, Madam, to regard these ten shillings as sufficient payment for the six drops of vinegar?”
Silence in the darkness behind King John’s Castle, then the man with the blood-stained face suddenly went on in a low voice:
“May I moreover remind you that it is time for the evening service? Please convey my respectful regards to the priest.”
He staggered on, the boy ran off scared, and the woman was alone. Suddenly tears were streaming down her face, and she ran weeping into the house, her sobs still audible when the door had closed behind her.
The sea had not yet allowed the kindly water to rise, the walls were still naked and dirty, and the gulls not white enough. King John’s Castle reared grimly out of the darkness, a tourist attraction hemmed in by tenements from the twenties, and the tenements of the twentieth century looked more dilapidated than King John’s Castle of the thirteenth; the dim light from weak bulbs could not compete with the massive shadow of the castle, everything was submerged in sour darkness.
Ten shillings for six drops of vinegar! The man who lives poetry instead of writing it pays ten thousand per cent interest. Where was he, the dark, blood-stained drunk, who had had enough string for his jacket but not for his shoes? Had he plunged into the Shannon, into the gurgling gray narrows between the two bridges which the gulls used as a free toboggan? They were still circling in the darkness, they alighted on the gray waters, between one bridge and the other, flew up to repeat the game; endless; insatiable.
Singing came flooding out of churches, voices of chanting priests, taxis brought travelers from Shannon airport, green buses swayed through the gray darkness, black, bitter beer flowed behind curtained pub windows. Crimson Cloud has to win.
The great Sacred Heart shone crimson in the church where the evening service was already over; candles were burning, stragglers were praying, incense and candle warmth, silence, in which only the shuffling footsteps of the sacristan were to be heard as he straightened the curtains of the confessionals, emptied the offering boxes. The Sacred Heart shone crimson.
How much is the fare for these fifty, sixty, seventy years from the dock that is called birth to the spot in the ocean where the shipwreck occurs?
Clean parks, clean monuments, black, severe, well-behaved streets: somewhere near here Lola Montez was born. Ruins from the time of the Rebellion, boarded-up houses that are not yet ruins, the sound of rats moving around behind the black boards, warehouses cracked open and left to the disintegration of time, green-gray slime on exposed walls, and the black beer flows to the health of Crimson Cloud, who is not going to win. Streets, streets, flooded for a few moments by those coming from evening service, streets in which the houses seem to get smaller and smaller; prison walls, convent walls, church walls, barrack walls; a lieutenant coming off duty props his bicycle by the door of his tiny house and stumbles over his children on the threshold.
Incense again, candle warmth, silence, people at prayer who cannot bear to part from the crimson Sacred Heart being gently reminded by the sacristan please to go home. Head-shaking. “But—,” whispered arguments on the part of the sacristan. Head-shaking. Firmly glued to the kneeling bench. Who is going to count the prayers, the curses, and who has the Geiger counter that could register the hopes concentrated this evening on Crimson Cloud? Four slim fetlocks, there is a mortgage on these that nobody is going to be able to redeem. And when Crimson Cloud does not win, the grief must be quenched with as much dark beer as was needed to nourish the hope. Marbles are still clicking against the worn steps of the pub, against the worn steps of churches and bookies’ offices.
It was much later that I discovered the last innocent milk bottle, as virginal as it had been in the morning; it was standing in the doorway of a tiny house whose shutters were closed. In the next doorway an elderly woman, gray-haired, slatternly, only the cigarette in her face was white. I stopped.
“Where is he?” I asked softly.
“Who?”
“The one the milk belongs to. Is he still asleep?”
“No,” she said quietly, “he emigrated today.”
“And left the milk?”
“Yes.”
“And the light on?”
“Is it still on?”
“Can’t you see?”
I leaned forward, close to the yellow chink in the door, and looked in, where in a tiny hall a towel was still hanging on a doorknob and a hat on the peg, where a dirty plate with the remains of some potatoes lay on the floor.
&
nbsp; “So he has, he’s left the light on, but what’s the difference: they won’t be sending him the bill to Australia.”
“To Australia?”
“Yes.”
“And the milk bill?”
“Hasn’t paid that either.”
The white of the cigarette was already dwindling toward her dark lips, and she shuffled back to her doorway. “Oh well,” she said, “he could have turned out the light.”
Limerick slept, under a thousand rosaries, under curses, floated on dark beer; watched over by a single snow-white milk bottle, it was dreaming of Crimson Cloud and the crimson Sacred Heart.
8
WHEN GOD MADE TIME …
That a church service can only begin when the priest arrives is obvious; but that a movie can only begin when all the priests, the local ones as well as those on vacation, are assembled in full strength is somewhat surprising to the foreigner used to Continental customs. He can only hope that the priest and his friends will soon finish their supper and their postprandial chat; that they do not overindulge in reminiscences: the range of do-you-remember conversations is inexhaustible; that Latin teacher, that math teacher, not to mention that history teacher!
Irish Journal Page 5