by Tommy Dakar
We found a corner of the square where the wind couldn't molest us. Pablo was in a reflexive mood and hadn't said much all evening. I was hoping that he'd touch on what it was he was thinking about, but as I didn't want to ask him straight out we carried on talking about daily events, joking and trying to sound experienced and in control of our lives. I suppose I could have forced the issue with a 'penny for them' type line, but I've learnt from the lot at the fair that you have to respect people's private thoughts. If he wants to say something, I want to listen, if not, I'll forget it. It's a personal liberty of his, like it's one of mine to not listen if I don't want to.
We'd been sitting there for some time watching the wind pick up the litter and then, in disgust, throw it back, scattering it across the square, when he began to tell me of when he was a child. All the local boys would get together to play football on the beach in the long summer evenings. The promenade would be full of people taking their evening stroll and the boys dived and showed off and shouted at each other to impress them. But whenever a priest came into sight the match would suddenly be abandoned and all the boys would run over and kiss his hand. Apparently it didn't matter at what point the game was, as soon as the priest appeared it was suspended until all of them had kissed his hand. Pablo was looking at me incredulously, as if I'd told him the story, and he found it hard to believe.
I was laughing; to me it all seemed totally ridiculous, almost unreal. Me, the son of the son of an atheist, who'd never had to even show respect for morning assembly let alone a vicar or a church. If anything I was taught to mistrust anything to do with religion. I had to laugh. I asked him if it was still common practice and he assured me that times had changed.
'If I catch my little kid doing it I'll kick him in the pants.'
Then he got on to what had started his anecdote. He'd been packing up his stall when out of a side street had poured a group of schoolgirls, more or less two-by-two, as he put it 'shepherded by a flock of nuns'. The scene had reminded him of his Catholic upbringing, of incense and processions, guilt and love and a million other images and concepts that he had tried to disassociate himself from over the years. What had really disturbed him was that, despite his own efforts to deny this indoctrination, it obviously still continued. We started to cite cases: the good conservative Catholic, the product of Franco's reactionary Spain; the fanatical Palestinian, fed on Islam and injustice; the money grabbing, church-going American, with dream home and dentures; the clear-sighted, joyless, dedicated socialists. All of us the sum of our environments, bearers of parent-induced crosses, political1y designed aspirations. Give me the child at seven and I will give you the man, which doesn't say much for the man. The pity is that these different educations simply set man against man. A good Muslim boy who follows his father's advice must necessarily disagree with the obedient Jew, the orthodox communist.
We stopped for a while and drank beer in silence. We both knew that there were two or three huge issues rearing their heads in this time-worn and typical conversation. Philosophy, morality, infinity and so on. But they need reflection, such grand topics, and we decided to leave it for the time being. Also what my friend had said about 'cojones' was still troubling me, and seemed somehow tied in.
In religion there is a certain complacency, a lack of urgency, a feeling that all is going according to plan. The goal is not temporal but spiritual; the emphasis is eternal, not finite. And our life here, our society, is often seen as no more than a stepping stone to something better. And that would be fine given a different world, a world where no change was necessary, no effort required, no injustice witnessed. Fine in a world where a man could do nothing.
Salvador, the central American beaten by the police:
'You gotta have hope man, yeah, when a man loses hope he's lost everything, he may as well die.'
Hope is for the living, and the dead can look after themselves.
Around three o'clock I wander off to sit on the sea wall and eat the sandwiches that Loli, the Boss's wife kindly gives me every day. She's a strange and fascinating woman full of superstitions and generosity. I found out at an early stage that it would be virtually impossible to hold a conversation with her - I'm always trying to be so logical and understanding and she comes back with the oddest beliefs, beliefs that invariably involve an act of kindness on her part. She talks of the soul a lot. I remember when she tried to read my palm for the first, and last, time. She started by explaining the theory, which line represented such and such an aspect of my destiny. But when she saw the look of disbelief and amusement on my face she refused to go on.
'If you don't put a little soul in it you'll never even start to believe.'
I don't even start to understand, Loli, believe me.
Some children are playing on the huge dissolving sugar lumps they've tossed in to the sea here to make it less bitter, screaming and diving in the cloudy water. The wind has almost dropped away entirely and only the slightest whisper of a breeze reminds my forearms and forehead that the wind forever blows off this endless sea. I go back over what Pablo said last night. Yes, it's alright, but as it has all been said before it leaves me feeling that there must be more to it. I suppose it's different for him, coming from Catholic Spain where the faith still unites the majority of the population. He probably has too much contact with it, the churches and holy days, his parents and friends, his own memories. For me it's something else. At home the churches are converted into discotheques and there are fights outside on a Saturday night. I used to play football between the gravestones and practise junior sex in the chapel doorway. Religion to me smacks of things long dead, like 'thou' and bustles and the vicars themselves. The problem is not how to rid myself of something in which I simply can't believe anymore, rather what to put in its place. If, as I suspect, religion is a pair of blinkers, what is it that we are not advised to see for ourselves? With what can we fill the vacuum - assuming it needs to be filled? Or is it that religion on a personal level is fine, as the man on the T.V. used to say 'and may your god go with you', and that it's only the Church that claims so much power? Does it really matter if you believe in purgatory, reincarnation or dust? Isn't the real criminal this pedagogic body, that missionary, the crusader? The readiness to shed heathen blood? The eternal indoctrination of children? The politics of religion?
I watch the boys swimming and finish my sandwiches. And I think to myself what a bloody serious topic it all is, and how I could do with a drink, a bit of music, and maybe even a dance. That's why it's so hard to get anywhere with these philosophical bits, you arrive at a point where the only thing that occurs to you is to have a cigarette and then hunt out a toilet. So you put it to one side like your mother's knitting, untidy and unfinished, and promise to go back to it when you can. And the impression it gives you is that it will always be like that, that no matter how much you think about it, talk and shout about it, it will forever be unfinished. Yet you return and return to these stabs that give you the desire or the need to revisit the serious issues - the idle conversations that suddenly catch you with their unseen burrs, the unexpected street scenes, the uncanny unwinding of events, dream sequences. Once you've cast on it's knit one, pearl one, until you've cast off. And as I think that the sun is engulfed by a high riding cloud and I begin to laugh. Writers and film directors OK, but that the uncaring tall blue sky should dabble in symbolism is just too much. I trot back to the ponies and trains giggling like a child.
And the dead can look after themselves. Can you, my love, wherever you are? Yes, she's dead and will never return, I know that in the bar, at the bus stop, climbing the stairs to Pablo's place. But in my dreams she never died, she simply went away. And so often she's come back to me among tears and surprise that I now dream I tell her I used to dream of how she came back, but that in the clear morning light I used to dismiss it all as a dream. We are the dead, of course, and the unborn, caught between womb and coffin, walking receptacles of life. And this phantom called life, this flee
ting dream is the only thing we have in common. Life and the absence of it. If we are to communicate at all, let death be the starting point. Not life after death, but death after life, our lives, that which separates me from Linda, that which unites me and you. And let the dead revisit us in our dreams lest we forget.
Against the faded sky, framed by its distant pastel blue and spring yellow brightness they pass. Serene and even, the humming of the generator reflecting the rhythm of their movements as the trains and racing cars and spaceships good naturedly amble round and round. Some children sit grim-faced, tightly gripping the sides of whatever wagon they've chosen, eyes fixed on a point just in front of them. Others shout and wave at their parents every time they pass them. The sun is high up on the roof of the sky and the wind tugs at everything, pestering like a toddler and making the whole scene flap as if land and sea were no more than a flag in a stiff breeze. And there's something in the air today, a thrilling, quivering feeling that is familiar and is trying to remind me of another time.
It doesn't come to me and I leave it.
The ride is about to begin again and I go round collecting the usual plastic coupons. It's an absurd idea but the Boss insists on it as it's usual practice at the bigger fairs. Instead of simply collecting the money, I sell plastic chips which I later collect back in. When there are only four children on the ride I feel a bit ridiculous. Still, the children seem to like the idea and officiously thrust the coupons at me. Some parents don't give them to their kids and hand them back to me over their son's heads. Quietly, without fuss or hesitation, they start off again on the trip that never goes anywhere but round and round and round. Yet they come, year after year, a constant swarm of infants who long to fly a fighter plane or sail a ship, who don't care if they end up where they started from as long as they have the ride. And when it's over and they have to go, they cling on and kick and scream and it usually finishes in tears. But they go on doing it on the octopus or helter-skelter, interested only in the sheer fun of doing it. It will always be like that, I think.
Then it comes back to me like a blow in the back, and the noise of the machinery seems to leap into my stomach and suddenly, like a scene change in a film, I'm back on top of the rock, and below me I can see the gulls glide and below that the slap and groan of the bloated sea. The air wet and salty like an echo of that sea. And in me too, strong currents and rocks and crashing waves. For two months her death had raged in me, and taken all sound and sight out of life. Between being alone and feeling dead I had to sign papers and eat and meet people and wash and sleep and get up and a million other mundanities that had lost all meaning. Whisky and sleeping pills and stare at the floor or the ceiling, hardly even thinking, just dying. To avoid people I knew but could no longer know I came here, to the sea, out of season, looking for tranquillity and a moment of peace, but the oppressive numbness came too. Then here, on this very rock, it came to me that I might as well stop. No, I wasn't contemplating jumping into that swollen mass, I had no intention of leaping into the emptiness of it all, I simply tried to decide if I would or not kill myself, how or when was not important or urgent. An end to this stupid endless pain, this pathetic incurable hopelessness, this suffering. And then the air and the rock and the waves began to thrill in me, and behind me the country held its high tense note and I thought: this decision will be my full stop. Wind in my hair, salt on my lips and an end to my expression, my memory, my knowledge and my ignorance. Dead.
Yes, I let the cries yell No!
I rebelled and pushed that decision away from me and I chose to live. I could not embrace the defeatist and ice-cold position of death, and I stepped back from the edge of the rock although I had never intended to jump, because I wanted to make a gesture. With no one to see me except myself I took one symbolic step back and the air still rang. And death receded.
Those of us who are not suicides it is because we have accepted life, have agreed to live, and as I come back to the children and the fair I think of Salvador and his cojones and I'm sure I know what it is. Still, I'll leave it for now because the memory has exhausted me. Maybe I've been dwelling too much on Linda lately, but then she's so tied up with everything that I have to. For now, back to work.