Peeling Oranges

by James Lawless

  I tried to rise above the attempted slurs. I told him my instructions were to accompany him to the French border at B, whence he would be escorted by the Gestapo to Germany. There it was intended he would join up with other members of the ‘movement’ who were planning Operation Dove. My job was to explain the dangers, that it could be double-cross – ‘the generalisimo is capable of anything,’ I whispered, interjecting into my own statement, while staring at his splint. He could be shot in the back while supposedly escaping. And there would be nothing we could argue against the Spanish head of State who was not putting himself at risk. There were no guarantees. But on the other hand there was no alternative either.

  ‘Danger is no stranger to me,’ he said.

  The guardia civil returned carrying crutches made of wood so rough they looked like they had just been hacked down from a tree.

  My heart grieved that we had to abandon Jesús in the dark cell. MacSuibhne protested, but I told him they were orders.

  ***

  Sometimes a life depends on lack of light.

  The agreement with the Guardia Civil was to wait until darkness had fallen before moving MacSuibhne; and Javier Jiménez would then drive them to the French border. They had papers which authorised their entry through any Nationalist roadblocks that they might encounter:

  As we motored along the Cantabrian coast, JJ kept swearing for being enjoined upon to drive a ‘comunista rojo’. I felt the tension growing between JJ and G. G apparently understood some of JJ’s anti-communist imprecations, and suddenly lashed out at him with his crutch which nearly caused the car to crash.

  By dawn we had reached the pass through the Pyrenees. We met two German agents. As G was led away, he struck again with his crutch at JJ, shouting that I would have to banish my fascist friend.

  JJ, inflamed, ran to our car and reappeared wielding a revolver. He pointed it at G’s back shouting ‘anarquista” and ‘bastardo’. I hurled myself at the diminutive man, bringing him to the ground. A shot rang out. Blood trickled from my arm. I had possession of the revolver as G and the two agents, their Lugers drawn, glanced back. ‘Go on,’ I shouted breathlessly, ‘everything is all right now. Go gcumhdaí Dia tú.’

  I heard the tapping of the crutches on rocky ground for a while longer, and then the harsh sound of an engine, and then the lights turning away from Spain.

  ***

  Patrick made no attempt to have Jiménez reprimanded. He knew it would have caused a diplomatic furore if the Irish legation had sought the reprimanding of a loyal Spanish subject, especially at a time when the Caudillo was at his most triumphalist. It also could have jeopardised the life of Gearóid MacSuibhne.

  But there was also a darker, secret reason, as Patrick records in his diaries:

  JJ holds a noose around my neck concerning the Barcelona trips. He is a source of great worry to me. He wants more money for his continued silence. I have no choice but to comply.

  ***

  Patrick was recalled from Spain. He spent some time in Washington, where he met up with Doctor Beltrán. He seems to have undergone some sort of operation. He talks about Beltrán extracting sperm from a sample of tissue, taken from the testes, during a small biopsy. His diaries are not clear on this period and, as he was home a lot of the time, there were no letters sent between himself and Martha. There is a reference that my mother makes to Gearóid about Patrick’s domestic life. She says he has gone in on himself a lot, that he rarely socialises and spends most of his time, either locked away in his study, or pottering about in his glasshouse trying to grow exotic plants from seeds.

  My mother did not accompany him to Washington. He was only away for a short while, she said when I enquired. ‘It was during the War, don’t you know?’

  ‘You used to talk about America, Mam,’ I said, trying to draw her out, ‘the opportunities.’

  ‘America!’ She looked shocked. ‘What would I be going there for? There’s no morality there.’

  It appears that Patrick was going through a depression at the time, and perhaps saw his recall from Spain as a demotion (despite the fact that most diplomats are moved around every three or four years to prevent them from ‘going native’, and to reacquaint them with policies at home). He refers in his diaries to vague, unsubstantiated innuendo in diplomatic circles which questioned his professional competence, alleging that he posed a threat to the delicate balance of Irish neutrality. And he makes a number of references to his private life being his own. Normally a taciturn man in matters concerning his career, Patrick now became outspoken and expressed his anger at the practice of politically appointing some ambassadors. He made it known that he considered this practice unfair to career diplomats who had spent years in office gaining valuable experience. But behind all this ranting there was a deeper reason for his demise, to do with Jiménez who was never far from his mind and who obviously continued to hold sway over him. One can almost hear his words shouted through the ink: ‘JJ, he will be my undoing’.

  In the meantime a world war was raging, and Patrick hardly made a reference to it. Perhaps he was seeking a reprieve. I mean can one just leave one war and land directly in the middle of another? Is that the continuity that the world seeks?

  But it was Madrid he went back to. It was always Spain he requested.

  Wars, however, appear to like continuities as do families. But continued years of war proved as barren for my parents as they did for the European landscape. Nevertheless, despite the time passing, my mother still lived with expectation, and Patrick still pursued his studies on impotence, maintaining his correspondence with Beltrán.

  Patrick’s impotence, it seems, was psychogenic. It is obvious he was not sterile. It appears he was unable to maintain an erection long enough to ejaculate inside a woman:

  There could be difficulties with M. She is totally opposed to any sort of experimentation in this area. She believes scientific meddling interferes with the natural order of things. I understand her sensitivity, but are we not meant to use our intelligence to improve our lot? If we are to accept her logic, does that mean we should stand by in hopelessness and watch a quarter of our population being wiped out by consumption? Are we to ignore scientific research? She says having a child is not the be all and end all, that there’s a special blessing for marriages that are chaste. I shall have a job working on her.

  ***

  It is also clear now that this man, my putative father, had sexual difficulties even at the time of his honeymoon. He refers back in his diary to the island of Cies. He is quite open, almost scientific, as if he is taking stock of relative potency:

  The coitus on the island was really more of an intimacy than the physical act proper. I had difficulty in staying erect. M was so understanding, but she does not know a lot. It cannot be due to any lack of physical beauty before my eyes, for she is indeed beautiful. Or perhaps it is the proximity of the physical that deters me. I have been used to inanimate visual stimulation. Something inhibits me. Is it to do with religion? A repressed upbringing? I have no trouble the other way when I wander out in the night. Is it that I think M is too pure, or that the act is dirty? Is it because I have spent so much of my life on a lofty intellectual plain that I consider coitus a base act, animalistic, like the dog mounting the bitch in the street? Or is it due to my age? The doctor can’t answer my questions. Despite the risk, I will have to go to Barcelona again. I am filled with trepidation, but the compulsion is stronger than my fear.

  ***

  ‘Come out of that room. What are you doing in there all the time?’

  ‘I’m all right, Mam. I’m reading.’

  ‘I hope it’s not his stuff you’re reading?’

  ‘No, just books.’

  ‘There’s supper going cold.’

  ‘I’ll be out in a while.’

  ‘Sinéad is here.’

  ‘You talk to her.’

  I hear my mother and Sinéad conversing in Irish downstairs in the drawing-room. There’s a fluency
in my mother’s speech. She seems to be able to focus better in Irish. Perhaps she draws more easily from its well. Perhaps Irish is more anecdotal: stories from the past repeated over many times, just needing the press of a button for replay; not as difficult as struggling in the anglicised grammar of the present.

  I put one of Patrick’s old records (a guitar fantasía by Rodrigo) on the gramophone and wind the handle to drown out the drone of the words rising.

  The sun is shining through the window on the painting of the snowstorm: the travellers make their way head-bowed in the blizzard looking for a house of shells. Behind them the snow heaps up.

  I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s Sinéad. I stop the record.

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘All on your own,’ she says. ‘What are you looking at?’

  The girl in the middle of the storm.’

  Sinéad looks at the painting.

  ‘It gives me the shivers. Where did you get it?’

  ‘Patrick got it in Spain.’

  ‘Didn’t think there was any snow there. It’s funny.’

  ‘What’s funny about it?’

  ‘Not that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Calling our fathers by their first names.’

  I feel a terrible impulse to tell Sinéad things, to take her into my confidence, to tell her about boarding school and my mother (the side of her Sinéad doesn’t know) and Patrick Foley. I want to tell her how it feels to go around in the world not knowing who your father is or was. To go around living a lie. But I don’t know what I can tell her. Not just yet.

  ‘You’re talking in English,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, I forgot,’ she says, correcting herself in Irish.

  She looks so serious now.

  ‘Tell my mother that.’

  Suddenly she kisses me on the lips. ‘To seal a secret.’

  ***

  At every opportunity I find myself back in my father’s study, I mean back in Patrick Foley’s study, impervious to sun or rain or what the world is doing outside. I delve into a world inside the world, going out only to visit the library as I try to piece history with personal lives, trying to find history’s mould.

  On returning to Dublin from her honeymoon, Mam had found Muddy in a state of shock. She had been attacked by a street gang who tried to extort ‘protection payment’ from her. They had smashed her shop window and could have done more damage were it not for Gearóid (he did not set out for Spain until the autumn). He sorted them out.

  Hallways in the Liberties are dark places where unseen things happen. People collide with unknown shapes; gunmen rub shoulders with courting couples; beggars sleep rough; and children dart through the darkness afraid of the banshee.

  Gearóid appeared one night in the hallway adjoining the Woodburn shop. Martha would have bumped into him only he struck a match. He made no reference at all to the wedding, and behaved towards her as if she were still single, and he was her protector.

  ‘Those wretches won’t be giving you any more trouble,’ he said in Irish, referring to the street gang. He told her that he was going to Spain to support his comrades. And then he was gone. My mother called after him, but she was told to shut up by a couple from a dark corner who were ‘doing the business’.

  ***

  One evening per week (mostly Thursdays as it happened) my mother did social work in the slums and tenements of Dublin – it developed from her visits to the 1916 widows and relations of those killed in the ‘movement’. She described her experiences in her letters to Patrick. She visited families living in single rooms – sometimes up to twenty per room. ‘Imagine, Patrick, these hovels are called the Mansions.’

  One family she grew particularly fond of was the Chaigneau’s. There was a number of such French names (Devereaux and Leon among them) around the Liberties. They were descendants of Huguenots who had been banished from France by Louis XIV because of their Protestant beliefs. But that was centuries ago, and Mrs Chaigneau, as my mother points out, ‘is Catholic now well and true with her family of thirteen.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you wonder what it’s all about?’ my mother said once, referring to nationalism, ‘with the mixing of all the names I mean.’

  Mrs Chaigneau’s family inhabited a basement flat:

  She has a gas sense of humour, Patrick, despite all the hardship. I was visiting her only last week when the rent collector called. ‘I’m looking for the rent,’ said the rent collector. ‘Oh come on in,’ says Mrs Chaigneau, ‘and we’ll look for it together’.

  ***

  The children went around in bare feet even in winter. She comments on their huge red chilblains. She managed to get shoes for some of them, old shoes stuffed with cardboard. The Evening Herald provided a boot fund charity which my mother availed of and Frawley’s department store in Thomas Street gave cardboard boxes which were cut as inside soles for leaky boots. However, one child stood on glass and never told anyone that he was cut – it was a minor thing; everyone had cuts, but he walked on animal dung one day when the drovers brought their cattle and sheep up from the country and he developed gangrene.

  My mother saw the little boy on crutches with one trouser leg swaying in the wind.

  Tommy Chaigneau was eight years old. She wrote to Patrick, saying that she had found a new friend. Sometimes she brought little Tommy to the pictures, sacrificing her romantic preferences for cowboy films:

  He loves Randolph Scott. After a picture he tells the story to the other children, who sit around him feeding on every word. For a short time at least they are transported from a world of poverty to a world of high adventure. Each little boy wants to be ‘the chap,’ and each little girl, ‘the beautiful damsel’. And they run out afterwards looking for Bang-Bang who is shooting everyone with his key.

  Some of the women ask me if I am married. They find it hard to understand that you are away from me. They? Why am I saying they, as if I am no longer part of them? Is it because I went away? They live so close to each other, Patrick: aunts, grannies, cousins, all only a couple of blocks away. Their whole world is contained within an arm’s length.

  They live in the present except for the Diddly club where they save their halfpennies for Christmas. Each day is the one day – a permanent pursuit of a crust to keep them alive. But they have music and song despite the hardship. There is a melodeon in every tenement. And the men, when they have no money, sing on the street corners for the want of something to do.

  Some of them know Muddy. ‘Oh a grand generous woman,’ they say. ‘Many’s the credit she gave, not like some of the huckster shops nowadays. A pudding at Christmas, or a bit of coal for the fire.’

  They ask me if I have children. I tell them not yet. They say the number of children you have is a sign of how much your husband loves you. Mrs Chaigneau says the woman on the top landing only has three children. Her husband doesn’t love her at all, she says

  We will have children, Patrick, won’t we? We have plenty of time. I miss you so much. I hope you are safe over there, and that you are looking after yourself.

  Mrs Chaigneau told me that the woman next door to her has a fancy man. ‘You see her husband is a rig – you know,’ she said ‘one ball,’ and when she said it, I got a fit of the giggles. She was so serious, but when I laughed, she laughed too. People can be funny, Patrick, without knowing, don’t you think? Anyway, her husband can’t ‘do the business’. No one makes any comment.

  Oh, the basement Mrs Chaigneau lives in is terrible; its the worst part of a tenement house; it’s near the sewers, and when there’s a drought the rats come up through the floors. There is such poverty, Patrick, it would break your heart. When I called one evening, one of Mrs Chaigneau’s daughters – Pauline, she is sixteen – was getting ready to go out with her fellow. She had no money for makeup so she dabbed a wet cloth on the red ink of the Sacred Heart Messenger and applied the colour to her cheeks. And she went away singing with her home-made rouge as happy as if she were a lady
.

  ***

  Some of the women, even when pregnant, didn’t know where babies came from. My mother recounts visiting a fifteen-years-old girl in the Coombe hospital:

  She had a little misadventure. She kept staring at her navel, expecting the baby to pop out through it. She was crying when nothing seemed to be happening. Their mothers tell them nothing. My mother told me nothing really. But then I could read, but even at that, there is fierce censorship. It’s funny seeing the women coming in to the library in Kevin Street saying the book they want is on their doctors’ prescriptions.

  ***

  In my reading of the period I learned that a church-imposed Puritanism entrapped a married woman in two ways: on the one hand she was told to increase and multiply; and on the other she was told that what she was doing was dirty and evil and that afterwards she must be cleansed. The cleansing was known as churching. After a birth the woman had to go to church to renounce Satan so that she could be accepted back into the fold once more. Until she did that she was tainted and was not allowed to touch or prepare food.

  Such ambivalence incensed my mother. She argued if women had ‘gone on strike’ and refused to continue to prepare food indefinitely in protest at such humiliation, both the Church and all patriarchy would be in a ‘right stew’:

  The reality is that the women in the tenements are saints, living saints. Some husbands give them no money, but drink it all, and then come home looking for their dinner and this and that, and beat up their wives when there is nothing there for them. It is as if their wives are to blame for everything – they are just slaves. They have such courage. They are expected to perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

  But even my mother had to admit that drunkenness was understandable in such squalor. Drink was cheap: two pence for a jug of porter, and the false security and warmth of a public house could be so attractive when all that awaited one was a dank room.

  Outside, the streets were littered with spittle and excreta. And as evening approached, the smoke from the soft, bituminous coal rose up and enshrouded the city in a lethal, sulphuric mist. Coughing could be heard as my mother passed each tenement on her way homeward. There was no light. People went to bed when darkness fell. There were no cradles for babies, only arms. And always, incongruously visible, the Protestant spire of Saint Patrick’s, piercing the mist.