by Frank Wynne
THE HARE-LIP
Maírtín Ó Cadhain
Translated from the Irish by Eoghan Ó Tuairisc
Maírtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970). Born in Connemara, in the west of Ireland, Ó Cadhain is among the most important writers in Irish (Gaeilge, as we call it) of modern times. As a young man, he worked as a schoolteacher, but was dismissed for his political affiliations to Irish Nationalism. He wrote numerous short stories, breaking with the oral tradition common in Gaelic literature and embrace modernism. His novel Cré na Cille created a sensation when it was first serialised in 1949, and was compared to the works of Beckett and Joyce. A foul-mouth oratorio narrated by more than a dozen voices belonging to the corpses in a graveyard, the densely textured, ambitious novel was long considered “untranslatable” (there is no such thing). It finally appeared in English in 1916, in two separate and very different translations: The Dirty Dust (by Alan Titley) and Graveyard Clay (by Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson), both published by Yale University Press.
Nora Liam Bhid spent the night as she had spent the previous one making tea for the wedding party. But now the light of an early February morning, fogged and white, was seeping into the half-deserted parlour, and since she had cleared up after yesterday and was now free, again the strangeness of it came nagging at her. The strangeness of being married, the change, the outlandish Plain: that same flicker of unease astir in her ever since the night her father came home from the Galway Fair and began telling her mother in private that he had ‘fixed up a strong farmer on the Plain for Nora’. And it had been no cure for that cut-off feeling to see the man himself and his sisters for the first time last week at the matchmaking. Like a female salmon locked in a choked up side-channel and destined never to reach the breeding beds in the clear shallows upriver, Nora had undertaken the marriage bond in the chapel of Ard late last evening. And now, finding no comfort in her mother’s mild words, her father’s boozy cajolery, her husband’s bland imperturbability, or in the chatter of her female in-laws friendly and sly, she went down into the kitchen to the group of her old neighbours who had come from Ard with the wedding party.
The dancing-barn outside had been for some time deserted and the kitchen was now thronged with people who fell silent when she appeared. Wheezing beerladen breaths, trails of tobacco smoke, specks of sand from the concrete floor floating in a frostfog—all this made the silence a palpable thing confronting her, a phantom, to try and drag from her the words that would express the anguish of her being. It was that time of a wedding morning when a man might go about starting a row and find none to hinder him. The fire had gone out of the drunken voices, the laughter was lifeless. The young folk, it seemed to her, got up without much heart to dance the jig, afraid that the married couples and oldtimers might take advantage of the quiet that was beginning to close in about the house and say it was time to go. Even the young folk from Ard, hardened to revelling and constant labour, every one of them by now was bleary of voice, weary of foot. The only one in the house left with some flinty fire in his footwork and the flush of life in his cheek was Beairtlin, her father’s servant-boy.
Nora dropped her head and let that flintspark penetrate her mind, that flush invade her being, till the silence and the unhomely thing receded. She remembered the many spells of innocent courting with him, snatching dulse from him in summer, or in the autumn the two of them on the flags of the dooryard cracking the nuts he had brought her from the hazelgrove of Liss, and nights of fireside chat together when the old couple were gone to bed and she was waiting up for Padraig her brother to come home from a visit. The girls of Ard, who were at the wedding tonight, had often given her a sly dig, suggesting Beairtlin for her. Tonight was the one night none of them would think of him for her, but it was the one night she wouldn’t have minded. Beairtlin’s witty remarks, that’s what used take the bitter edge off her laughter whenever her father and mother were settling a match for her. A pain of regret, dulled not healed. That she had been so slow to speak her mind to him that day, so unwilling to find fault with Providence, when Beairtlin told her that ‘the old fellow was making a match for her again, and no one would be given a wisp of consideration except a shopkeeper or a boss-man of the Plain’.
It wasn’t because she had been vexed with Beairtlin for what he said that she passed remarks that day about his hare-lip. Instead, she had intended to say that she’d go off warm and willing with him there and then. For when all is said and done, it wasn’t his slim and shapely person, his skygrey eye, his cheek red as foxglove, no, it was the hare-lip, that disfigurement he was marked with from the womb—he didn’t even try to hide it with a moustache—that attracted her eyes and her passionate lips. It attracted and repelled her, often her disgust got the upper hand, too often, that’s what left the web of her young life a heap of grey dust today. Even now it was the hare-lip she saw coming at her like a bloodsucking lamprey through a grey sea-lough. Beairtlin grumbled that ‘the Plainers had taken over the house all night with their reel sets’, but she couldn’t attend to him till the pair of them were out on the middle of the floor dancing the plain set of home.
‘So you’re spancelled at last?’ he said humorously, appearing to hide his vexation.
‘God willing,’ she answered. She realised fully for the first time what neither match, marriage, nor the wedding itself had given her dearly to understand.
‘Have no regrets. You’ve made a good swap, lashings and leavings and being your own mistress here on the level Plain, in place of the rocks and the slave-labour—and not to mention the vigilant eye of your old fellow—out at Ardbeg. We’ll send you an odd cargo of dulse, an odd bottle of poteen, and a bundle of nuts in the autumn.’
Nora’s heart missed a beat. She had forgotten until now that there was no dulse, no nuts, no poteen here.
‘I spent last night looking for you, Beairtlin, to sing The Deer’s Wood by Casla for me, but there wasn’t a sight of you in the crowd. You’ll sing it after this dance. Do. I’m longing to hear it again …’
But Beairtlin had hardly cleared his throat for the song when her mother and her husband’s sister came and carried her off again to the parlour.
‘Time for us to be home,’ said the mother. ‘Look, it’s broad daylight, and your husband Martin here without sleep since the night before last. You two are at home, God bless you, but look at the journey we have before us.’
‘Eleven miles to Gaalwaay,’ said Martin Ryan, the new husband. He had a slow congealed kind of a voice and the unhomely accent of the Plain. ‘And fifteen miles farther west again, isn’t that it? That’s what he used to tell me, a labouring man I had here one year from Ard.’
Despite their talk of the long miles and the scurry there was for coats and shawls, Nora wouldn’t admit that her family and friends were leaving her. She was made to realise it when the Ardbeg girls came kissing her and saying ‘not to be homesick, they’d slip over an odd time on a visit’. She recognised every individual shout of the Ardbeg boys going wildly on their bikes back down the Galway road, and that left the Plainsfolk more alien than ever as they took leave of her in the misty morning light. And all with their ‘Missus Ryan’ so pat on the tongue causing her cold shivers of fears. The cars that had brought the Ardbeg people were humming out on the road, the drivers hooting the horns. As she had done so many times before at the end of a wedding Nora put on her overcoat and walked out to the road. Beairtlin was the last one to crush into the car that held her family.
‘It’s God’s will, Beairtlin,’ she said. ‘Keep me a handful of dulse.’
Beairtlin had fixed the cape-ends of his raincoat across his mouth. Though her senses swam she caught the meaning in his words which came squeezed out through the hare-lip opening. ‘Don’t worry. And I’ll bring you a bag of nuts too. In the autumn.’
‘There’s plenty of noots in the cregs hereabouts,’ said her husband standing alongside her.
She stood unmoving at the gate, looking after the car until it ha
d passed Crossroads rise, pretending not to have heard her mother’s parting words, ‘not to be homesick, she’d see them soon again’.
Homesick? That anchor, keeping the spirit though in exile fixed in its native harbour? No, she wasn’t homesick. Tossed on a wave’s crest at the caprice of God, having cut her life’s cable, not a single link left with her natural element since Beairtlin went, she drove on straight ahead like a boat that has lost its bearings to the Crossways rise. She had never been nearer than Galway to this district and it had been dark during the wedding-drive last night, still it wasn’t to view the country that she walked to the crest of this hill. Her only idea was to climb the first rise that came her way and get out of this smothering trough between the two waves of past and present. At that moment she couldn’t tell whether Martin Ryan was to the left or right of her, she took no interest in the stem of his pipe circling the prominent points while he himself stabbed the queer uncouth names in the face of her illwill and detestation. She didn’t notice Ryan leaving her and going back to the house.
The fog was being rolled and thinned out and dragged by a freshening wind in grey diminishing strips to the edge of the Plain. As far as her eye could see, nothing but immense flat fields, no stones, no rock-heaps, and every foot of fencing as straight as a fishing-line except where they were submerged in winter flooding. Here and there a stand of trees, a thicket, down below her a few outcrops of bedrock like knots in a deal table that had been bleached and scoured. The spot where she stood was the most airy hill of all the dull rich expanse. The houses were not strung together here, the nearest wavering thread of smoke seemed to her a mile away. All the houses alike. And the same set of trees sheltering the walls of the haggards. It appeared to her fancy that one immense house had split in the night and all its parts had separated as far as they might out of sheer unneighbourliness. She looked back at her husband’s house. Not too unlike her father’s house in make and appearance, two-storey, slated. But her father’s house had looked newer, with a view of the sea, bare hills at the back of it, the house itself seeming a section of granite sliced out of the rock country to be set up as some tall symbolic stone in the middle of the group of thatched houses called Ardbeg. But there was a greater difference still. The two houses were as different as chalk from cheese. Like all the surrounding countryside her new house had a certain stupid arrogance, it reminded her of the smug smile of a shopkeeper examining his bankbook. Boasting to her face that it was no mushroom growth but a part of the everlasting. She knew it was a ‘warm’ house. She knew her father wouldn’t have set her there if it wasn’t, in view of her dowry and all the well-heeled upstarts he had refused on her behalf. She shivered to think that from now on she would be simply one of the conveniences among the conveniences of this house.
Here there was no barrier of mountain and sea to restrain a rambling foot or limit a wandering imagination. Nothing but the smooth monotonous Plain to absorb one’s yearnings and privacies and weave them into the one drab undifferentiated fabric, as each individual drop, whatever its shade, whatever its nature before being engulfed in the womb of it, the ocean transmutes into its own grey phantom face. From now on whatever contact she’d have with home would be only a thin thread in this closeknit stuff.
There was a chilliness in the morning, not a genuine cold—rather like the friendliness of her sisters-in-law. She went in. She noticed there was nothing out of place within. After all the merrymaking the kitchen wasn’t disordered enough to be called homely, not to say Irish. Their own kitchen at home had often been more of a shambles after a couple of hours dancing during a neighbourly visit. Apart from the two tables set end to end in the parlour, the attendants had set everything to rights before they went, and there wasn’t the slightest thing crooked to mark that an event had taken place, that two lives had been spiritually and bodily woven together in the tie of intercourse under the one roof to ensure the spring of life in that house. The prime events of a man’s destiny skimmed across the wide placid surface of this countryside as lightly as a finger-stone is flicked across water.
Sitting she looked about the kitchen, it was the first chance she had got of examining it since she came to the house. There were signs of careful housekeeping, nursing things to last long, on every single item from the saucepans cleaned and scoured to the two tall presses blond and mellow. A burial chamber, the image might have occurred, vessels and furniture set in it never to be moved until time should undo them; but, ignorant of the antiquities, what she did ask herself was how Ryan all on his own had kept the place so spick and span. This house needed no woman’s hand. Strangest of all, neither hearth nor fire to be seen. Instead there was a metal range, dull and unwelcoming. The last spark had died somewhere within its womb.
‘I wonder where’s the turf?’ she said to herself, getting up. In order to change this alien cold into a warm intimacy she must heap up a fire that would make the iron range red hot and prove to herself that a warm fire was more than a match for the rigid iron.
‘I use nothing but coal,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better not bother with a fire and take a lie-down on the bed?’
She took fright. Till now she hadn’t thought of the bed. That drowsy voice, assured, self-assertive, set up waves of repulsion in her, yet she recognised it as the voice of authority, not to be denied if he felt like bringing the thing to a head.
‘I’m not sleepy,’ she said at last. But her husband had gone out for the coal. He soon returned and shot a shovelful of it into the maw of the range. His jabs with the poker at the embers got on Nora’s nerves. Like a soul gripped by the demon on the edge of desire, the embers were quickly breaking apart and trying to flame. She’d give anything if her husband’s father, mother, any of his prating sisters or even a silent one, were here at the hearth.
The smoke of Ryan’s pipe was rising up to the loft in measured puffs, unruffled, unconcerned. The smoke of her father’s pipe, or Beairtlin’s, always made twists and angles as if they were wrestling with something in the air. There was none of the unfenced regions of her homeland in her husband’s conversation, none of the wild oats of speech. Prosy and precise, he could hardly be otherwise, for his mind was a smooth plain without the slightest up or down from end to end … With his rare attempts at a joke, a smile crinkling the stiff crease of his nose, he reminded her of the god of wisdom trying to be merry a minute. The more she grew accustomed to the local accent the more alien she felt it. She longed for a new twist in the tune—a change of person, change of day, change of time, that it might be night again, or that his voice might be angry, anything but that gentle deadly drone that did nothing now but linger in her ears.
She got up and stood in the doorway in the fresh air. Plump hens just let out were already scrabbling in the flowerbeds on each side of the concrete path that led from the steps at the front gate. What scant flowers had already poked up through the earth had been trampled last night. There was Beairtlin’s footprint—how could she mistake it, the many times it had caught her eye, on the bog, in the earth, on the seasand. She was examining the shape of the boot when a heavyfooted man with the soft hat of the region and a cord breeches passed on the road. Nora remembered he was some neighbour of her husband’s, he had been given special treatment in the parlour last night. Without slowing his step and with only the slightest turn of his head her way he greeted her briefly. Sparing his words as if every syllable was worth another penny towards the rent. The fog had come down again in a drab shawl over the Plain with only odd slits of visibility. Still she wouldn’t have gone back in so quickly if a filthy hen hadn’t angered her by scratching away the footprint with a mindless claw from the soft impressionable earth …