The skull talked back from a mirror as in a Georges de la Tour painting.
Before he died he returned to Rome, an open-air dance.
The irrevocable arrow in Georges de la Tour’s painting of St Sebastian.
Faldinova Triona.
Per il mil Marek, a bunch of geraniums, marigolds, mallow flowers, mimosa, auburn tickseed, purple Michaelmas daisies, poppies, goldenrod, mauve and white delphiniums.
‘We’re fellow travellers,’ a boy at the Greyhound bus station in Saint Louis once said to me.
And I bear his words in mind as I travel by train between Siena and Florence six years later, sticking my head out of the window to look at azure and billowy mountains meeting a surf of evening cloud.
Autumn 1973 I got drunk in a cemetery in Florence, by a block of flats, and then started hitchhiking south through Etruria.
On the coast a row of horse-drawn wagons with grape-kegs on them went over low water in a bay.
One evening I stayed in a youth hostel in a town where all the shutters were green and where young men in high stockings and very brief shorts were playing soccer on a pitch beside a row of parasol pines and plane trees which shaded some salmon-orange ruins.
There was a picture of John XXIII in the hallway, a yellow basin with a tap above it, and an American boy with great deltoids, in shorts, rucksack on his back, walked in, beaming, while I was there.
I was alone in a small dormitory when a boy in a T-shirt with Popeye on it walked in in his underpants. He had Jesuitical black hair, with slight crowsfeet, black stubble on his face. He took off his T-shirt, sat on a bed and looked at me with a suggestion. He sat there like that until I made the first move, going over to him. We started kissing. He had a small, pointed, Italian mouth. There was a mistletoe of hairs around his dark nipples. He held his mouth to the corns of my nipples as if waiting for a sensual land to be awakened – what was being illuminated in me was Grafton Street, the tides of inquisitive shoppers, a picture of an azure Chartres Cathedral above apple blossom at the corner of Westmoreland Street and D’Olier Street – I wanted to deflect some inhibition – the scene changed on Grafton Street and they were nineteen-forties people, a cinema queue outside the Grafton Cinema, a hugely hatted garda directing charcoal-fuelled cars – I touched the boy’s hard pectorals as I’d touched the statue of David on the Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence – I called up an image of love-making, boy, boy, girl – his eyes were the turquoise of those Etruscan bays – I wanted to cross some border into sensuality land, and to make this transition I had to forget the country I was from and start again without a country – but country was too logged in me – a group of young people lingered outside the Golden Spoon on Grafton Street, one of the girls in a mahogany fur coat, a flock of gulls making a sea-scene – and the inhibition wouldn’t go and there was a noise in the corridor and he flitted away.
I return to Ireland now; I travel by trains, buses and I feel: someone tried to beat me with crowbars here, someone tried to do me in.
I pass landscapes where the bog-cotton is gleaming snow on dark bogs, beds of meringue and I try to put the pieces together, I feel the proximity of the assassin again and I try to determine the motives for the cruelty.
I go into a pub where the mirrors are back-painted, flashed or inscribed with encaustic designs. Carved griffins, lions, basilisks on top of an alcove are silhouetted against streams of blue light like griffins, lions, basilisks in a cathedral. Cerulean cigarette smoke rises against stained-glass windows and the chatter is merry. Young people in denim are reflected in the glass of alcoves which is painted with sprigs of white hawthorn, families of tomtits on twigs, lilies on rivers beside round towers, cornucopias. Cherries are ribboned into the tiles by the wainscot and nude tallow infants gather Indian-red apples on a back-painted mirror. There are rucksacks lying against columns of carved fir cones. Sugar and tea are sold beside the liquor.
In Cork city Our Lady of Fatima stands in the train station, hands outstretched.
In Derry a party of mongoloid women wait for an Ulster bus and one of them shows me her photograph album – holidays in Portsallin, a photograph in cat’s-eye glasses, bouffant hairdo against St Columba’s Cathedral. She wears ceramic earrings with hearts in them.
‘Through a glass darkly …’ What am I looking for? Maybe a face. The face of a boy I knew who committed suicide a long time ago, Cherokee hair, big bones, an elegance of stance.
Once I met him on the street and he said, ‘In our school they put penises up backsides. It’s lovely.’ He went to school in the East of Ireland and I pass that coast by train, water on either side, a field of rape in evening shadow.
It’s like peeling layers and layers of plaster off a wound to see what you find at the bottom of it.
It’s like putting piece upon piece of a stained-glass window together.
I go into a pub and there’s a boy in shadow at the door. Maybe it’s him.
Then I go to a seashore with an oblong whitewashed church nearby, electricity windmills on a hill – propellers on huge rods – and I pick up a cuckoo flower and examine the colour as if it’s human.
Going to Eastern Europe was like looking through those tubes you got as a child in the stores that sold jelly crocodiles and dolly mixture and tins of peaches, and seeing at the end – an illumination beyond the loneliness, the greyness – coloured constellations.
‘And I, the writer, was there twice, always for five consecutive days and saw the wonderful things, not only with the planets but also with the fixed stars.’
When a friend went away to the city when I was ten he sometimes wrote letters to describe the city. Russian logs in Thompsons on the Tivoli. The exotic variety of the mental patients at St Mary’s Asylum. Cartoon faces on the borders of the letters. Then I started going to the city, trips to see films in the Astor on Eden Quay. A few weeks before I went to France with the veterinary student and saw the Georges de la Tours in 1972 I went north with her, hitchhiking around.
Orangemen were crossing Craigavon Bridge in Derry, in tartan kilts. We stayed in a house on Lough Swilly and next day on Fahan Strand I went for a swim while the girl and an English boy watched. Afterwards we had a conversation on the beach. I hesitatingly touched him to make a point and he said, in front of the girl, ‘Touch me. Don’t be afraid to touch me.’
Before I left Ireland in 1977 I sat with a witch who had a Marie Antoinette hair-do in Wexford. ‘It’s the light. The inner light,’ she said. ‘If you’ve got it you’ll come through. Some people fake it. It’s a continuity. It’s going back, been there for a long time.’
Afterwards I walked on Curracloe Strand, wild nasturtiums at the side of it. Nowhere did you see the light going more quickly in some people than in Berlin. Girls with cocker-spaniel red hair who used to smile, beam, before the Wall came down, glared, were horrible-mannered a few years after the Wall was gone.
Nowhere did you see the continuity more either, old people with forever chapped hands selling their bits and pieces on a carpet outside a supermarket, before moving on to a new address.
Berlin 1945, ruined buildings and smoke, a few old people over a stove frying potatoes in a pan, their bits and pieces in bags beside them.
The light breaks through and connects the bits and pieces and makes a glass window in a lonely church.
‘We were nonconformists,’ Mr Haythornthwaite told me of his childhood.
He came to Ireland looking for his childhood. He would show you blue-eyed Marys and wood sorrel in April, wood garlic and the campion flower in May, purple loosestrife on river banks in June, balsam, woundwort by streams, the bush of St John’s wort in the bog, the bogbean flower, white ladies’ mantle, yellow mignonette, the deep purple, violet, dun-purple Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He could tell you how the grass of Parnassus which he saw in the mountains of North Connemara in the twenties also grew in the marshes in Northern Russia. He was forever walking around in a cap and an old manky coat, slightly bent, identifying flo
wers, looking very serious.
He would cycle to ruined monasteries, Gothic windows outlined against the sky, he in his braces and his honey-brown check shirt stopping to touch hedge woundwort, snapdragon, wild carrot, wild strawberry, storksbill, bilberry.
In the alcove of the guesthouse where he stayed he usually wore herring-bone tweed and mackerel jackets, even on fine days. It was the guesthouse where the American soldier had stayed. It was as if there was still the pubescent, American smell of the soldier from the couch and the armchairs which were the beige colour of a Martin de Porres face.
We were standing at the window of the guesthouse one day when a shadow passed. It was the boy from the country in a shirt and a black polo neck. I went out to greet him but he’d disappeared. His visits to town were rare, as he boarded in the east.
Whereas once there’d been stories, television had come to the alcove by then: Julie Felix singing; a black boy, in woollen cap and donkey jacket, by a moat under a cotton mill in Georgia.
I went to visit him in his room in the Midlands of England in 1974. Women with Barbara Windsor beehive hair-dos went by on the street outside. He played Grieg’s ‘Solveig’s Song’ and his ‘Gjendine’s Lullaby’ for me. Nearby was the office-block-looking school of which he was headmaster in his last years as a teacher.
Four years later, on a day of a great rainbow, I came with daffodils for his grave.
‘It’s a strange world I see now. Life is cheap. Yesterday’s death in Coleraine will be a one-day wonder.
Television had killed conversation in bars. Another change is that the town had become car-conscious. I think Mr Cunniffe and I were the only two left who cycled to our fishing. We found a bunch of yellow forget-me-nots one day as we cycled to the bog.
In spite of everything I think of you often, and picture the street. My eyesight lets me down nowadays, but maybe it will improve. They can’t take away the days we had.’
Norway in the twenties, staying for consecutive summers in a place called Beverdalen, swimming in a lake during the days and a sauna at nights, open-air dances, the music of the Hard-anger fiddle.
In November 1986 I stood at the harbour in Skien with my writer friend’s son, mallards on the water, lots of summer yachts in dock.
Mr Haythornthwaite found Ireland after Norway.
For a few decades he taught in Chester. He had a beloved, and used to go to Chester races with her each year. Then he returned to teach in the village he came from. But Ireland had become his continuity and then someone, at the beginning of the Troubles, said something horrible to him in a pub and he never came back.
His bullet head, iron and cream, that bar moustache, fleeced red nose, he in an electric-blue jersey, against the council houses when I went to visit him.
‘It’s the autumn of my life, and I feel like an autumn narcissus,’ he said.
Outside, boys with sculpted crotches stood against mustard, straw, pineapple colours.
When I hitchhiked to his grave I’d moved from Ireland to England. I went to the house of his niece after I left the graveyard. There was a Mediterranean rock rose outside and holographic glass over the door. She and her daughter Dyala let me in. Just inside the door was a coronation picture of George and Mary in 1937. She showed me a photograph of herself and Mr Haythornthwaite in Weston-super-Mare the summer before he died.
In a room with Staffordshire spaniels and miaowing ceramic cats there was a collection of pen and ink sketches I’d done as an adolescent – he in a coat and cap by the bog river, donkeys by the bog river, the grove which hid the bush of St John’s wort, turf stacks, a gabled house with a bush of fuschia outside on the edge of the bog.
In the local church was a statue of Our Lady of Walsingham with a three-pronged crown, curled at the ends like Arabian slippers.
I stopped in the Venus Café before hitchhiking back. Baked jam roll and custard.
The Baptists, Quakers, Seekers, Levellers, Ranters still lived in London at that time.
When I got back to my room in Shepherds Bush I was already packing to go to the United States.
‘My love is like a red, red rose.’
I met a boy once from his village, by the Thames. A beggar boy. He’d gone back to a wedding in the village, disguised as a soldier, and no one recognized him.
In Derry on Craigavon Bridge I pass a young British soldier with Spartan features. It is a day of rainbows on the Foyle, over the ruin of a huge mill. I smile and he smiles and I wish him safety and I think of Mr Haythornthwaite for no particular reason.
Walking down Gerard Doustraat in late September, a yellow tram pulling up against weeping willows, children, one of them in a white tie-wig, pink lamé horns, pink lamé jabot, I turned around and for the first time in years clearly saw the alcove of the guesthouse with the young American soldier in it. This new city summons him, tie of Indian-red, cornflower blue braces, ears that looped out like Mickey Mouse’s.
When lessons were done, you’d go down to Rosie’s and Grade’s, pull the key on a brown string through the vertical letter slit, let yourself in, run through the dining-room with a picture of the Lakes of Killarney on the wall as though painted in greasepaint, the work of a passing player, sit in the alcove reeking of turf fire, tobacco gutted from an English fisherman’s pipe, the young American soldier maybe there, a tie of downward spilt colour on him, half of it duck-egg blue.
So Amsterdam always became associated with the soldier; when a plane went into a tower block there I thought of him and wondered where he was.
The Broken Tower. The Tarot card of change.
A tram pulls away, with heads lighted against the night.
A girl greets us in her dressing-gown, fur mice on her slippers. We last saw her in North Connemara.
I need you now, soldier. I feel you saw something horrible and came through. I see you, in geranium trunks, looking at me as you sit by the river. Words and phrases help to keep your image before me. Tennessee. Roll Cut tobacco. Image is carried to image. You are handling a marmalade-coloured ten-shilling note, in a nicotine-stain yellow shirt, chinos, canvas shoes, in a grocery-shop-cum-pub, reflected on a mirror back-painted with sunflowers. To get to you I’ve got to get rid of so much of the horrible education we were given. Like Mr Haythornthwaite, who threw away what he taught at school and was taught by flowers.
Going into a new city, on a street in autumn, it’s your face in a tram, lighted up against a window, and the trams in the cities, gold and persimmon and pink ochre, become telegrams to one another, all connecting up a search for a face – a talisman against attack.
A boy from the back-streets of Dublin, stubble on his face, was your face for a while.
A Cockney student in London. Aged sixteen and already married.
A backpainted and gilded mirror in an Irish pub now throws back faces that could be one I’m looking for, a smoke, an explosion of rain outside.
‘Aye. Oh aye,’ a boy says in the pub lavatory.
A flashed pub mirror – ruby, blue – in a London Irish pub and a song, ‘If These Lips Could Only Speak’ sung by Bridie Gallagher, brings the journey to its beginning, and it’s the soldier’s face in a backpainted mirror, Tab Hunter’s slightly mosaic face, Venetian blond hair, forever hurt awryness.
Miss Mackassey who taught us at convent school played Mrs Massingham in Gaslight in a crimson cord dress and Princess Margaret in The Student Prince, sitting with a parasol, in a picture hat, in the Royal Palace of Karlsberg. She got cancer and just after she was told she had it she ordered all of us children to leave the classroom for half an hour. When we returned there was a tableau in chalk on the blackboard, all colours, of the fair – tinkers, horses, caravans, down to the embossments of horses on the caravans – one detail connecting up with another detail, each detail separate in itself, a rung in the journey, the travail, the bravery towards an overall effect.
And so the journey continues. As the train leaves the station Marek slips into a coma. There are cakes freckled w
ith sugar in a booth. The cake boxes have dandelions and orange and blue spider flowers on them. Bottles of lemonade and jars of pickled kohlrabi and beetroot are also sold. A little girl dressed for winter stands on the platform, red hat, coat, trousers, Wellingtons. A small boy beside her. Near them a gipsy woman in a flounced red dress, gold bracelets on her wrists. A Red Army man carrying Vecchia Romagna. A boy with an outspread eagle on his belt. A tall boy who looks like Marek.
A bayan playing as we cross a border into Latvia and even now, long before we get to Leningrad – where there will be ghosts in the midsummer light, women in their loveliest dresses, dresses with marigolds on black, bees on bold, doves with outspread wings, red beaks and feet, on green, like the transfers you got in lucky bags as a child and put on white paper – the exhalation of the night-time but still illumined pine forest in the carriage, the dead are resurrected, the boys of the West of Ireland – a teacher from Athlone who killed himself, a student of psychiatry with Cherokee hair who took rat poison, boys who went into the annihilation of England.
Prague, 12 August 1987. An old man in a Homburg hat, a medal of John of Nepomuk on it, crocodile skin shoes on him, feeds doves on his lap on Celetna Street. A boy with a skateboard, marigolds and horseshoes underneath it, on one side of the bench to him and on the other a girl in a blouse with red lips with red roses in them on spring green who looks on. A boy comes out of the building in which there is a vegetarian restaurant. He is very tall, wears shorts, red shower sandals. His hair is the colour of ichor. He is about seventeen. He stands and looks to his right for a moment.
The first day I arrived in Prague there was a poster of Goya’s Miguel de Lardiz-Abal everywhere, a man with his left hand missing and a letter in his other hand saying ‘Expulsis’, there were plastic tubs of ice-cream with viridian juice running through them in the windows, there were creamy cakes with chocolate papal hats called Budapest. I’d known for a long time I had to get to Prague. I knew that I came from a cruel and hypocritical and unrelenting country. No matter what, they’d be right. I knew that there was an imminent madness, an imminent breakdown in me and I knew I had to get there before it happened. ‘You’ve lost your soul,’ a voice on Wences-las Square whispered. Crossing meadows with cinnabar-red poppies spotted on them, towards the high-rise building in which I was going to stay, I looked around and saw the child I could have had, who would have been my companion now. I could see the child I’d once been. I saw the grief and loneliness of the Irish in Britain. I knew there were bits and pieces I had to gather, to make sense of, not just for myself but for them. I looked towards the country of childhood when I’d had a soul and realized it was possible to get souls back, but only through long journeys, inner and maybe outer.
Farewell to Prague Page 22