The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.

  Me ha dado el sonido y el abecedario,

  Con él las palabras que pienso y declaro:

  Madre, amigo, hermano, y luz alumbrando

  La ruta del alma del que estoy amando.

  Thank you, life, for giving me so much.

  You’ve given me sound and the alphabet,

  With them the words in which I think and declare:

  Mother, friend, brother, and shining light

  Illuminating the way of the soul of my beloved.

  Part Four

  Hanging from the Balcony by One Hand

  The three women at the next table in the Marbella Club Café had determined not to pay for their meal, and they laid about the waitress with words: ‘… spilled our champagne … cold, inedible … were truly sorry, you wouldn’t charge …’ Their sharp and sweeping strokes cut the surface of Mira’s skin. The poisonous emotions propelling the torrent lodged themselves into the slits and gashes multiplying on her body. The women stood up, gathering up their bags, Anna noted a changthangi pashmina draped over the back of a chair, and they loudly walked away, talking and laughing about their intended visit to a nightclub, dismissing Mira from further consideration. The waitress bent to tidy up the remains on their table, shamed under the weight of words that the women had left behind. It was an ignominy read by everyone in the café: she knew that they could hear the words echoing about her body like the crackling flames in a funeral pyre, whose fierce blaze was uninterrupted by the sudden silence.

  Anna and James had noticed the women immediately, blonde forty-somethings wearing miniskirts. They’d been made aware of the demanding, English voices: women who were used to being indulged by wealthy men. But they’d also seen that the waiter service had been impeccable. Before they left, they made a point of speaking to the manager on Mira’s behalf, to set him straight on the misrepresentation. A week later, when they visited the MC Café again, they were shocked to discover that Mira was dead. The manager told them that on her way home that early morning, Mira had toppled off her scooter just down the road outside the Puente Romano Hotel, and she died later in hospital from multiple fractures. He said it was an incomprehensible accident which had deeply upset the staff, and that the hotel had paid for Mira’s mother to come from Greece.

  ‘Not an accident,’ mumbled Anna, her cheeks scalded by the sudden tears.

  The cars were whizzing by the small, sad shrine at the side of the road. On the tufts of yellowing grass, her colleagues had placed four red plastic holders that had contained candles, and they’d laced to a post with black, Marbella Club ribbon, three flowers of coloured paper, and an A4-sized photograph which was protected by a plastic covering, under the heading ‘Our Mira’. It showed a smiling girl with an open face, but whose gaze didn’t penetrate the lens, so that the image remained locked in on itself, on the far side of the camera. Maybe that snapshot caught the genuine aspect of her vulnerability, the aloneness of her lack of connection in southern Spain, which Anna had recognised many weeks before: she’d given Mira some left-over garden pots for the balcony of her new apartment in the centre of Marbella. She understood that the young woman’s stability had been overturned by a verbal assault, that words had assailed her. She’d witnessed the violent blows that words had landed on her body earlier that evening. She recalled how the words had punished the politeness of Mira’s spirit, flogging repeatedly at her courteous deference to the judgements of those vulgar women. Anna felt guilty that she hadn’t intervened directly to shield her from the barrage, and she was confident in the truth that Mira had been battered to death by the deadly substance, words.

  Day after day, the sun shines down on the Costa del Sol, baking the clusters of white-walled villages, driving the dust with the wind through uneven alleyways. And, for a few days’ holiday each year, the Mediterranean sunlight warms northern European bones. For those of us who live under the intense gaze of its unseeing eyes, the Spanish sun is an unappeasable God, primitive and ageless, without empathy. Two thousand years ago, the Roman legions stationed in Hispania Baetica worshipped it as Sol Invictus, the unconquered: in any struggle for victory, the sun always wins. That’s an immutable law, a secure foundation stone which can uphold a person’s sanity, or break it, under dogged pursuit from the frightful sun of Spain. But the otherness of its nature, unmediated to humankind, evokes the silent horror of a snake. The sadness of Mira’s accident, the sorrow of those colleagues who raised an altar at the side of the road to remember their friend, are clandestine emotions, hidden from a God who has no conscious awareness. In the face of this daily personification of death, the survivors who assemble on the shores of southern Iberia clasp each other easily in the arms of language. They weave a mellow fabric with the pale blue flowers of words, five-petalled words which are immediately thoughtful and kind, tender and considerate, loving. It’s the cool, linen awning clacking in the breeze that hides the fragile, living weave of their connections from incineration by a baleful gaze. It’s the enclosed patio garden shaded by fragrant orange trees, protection from fused eyelids and a fatal strike for the interconnecting pathways which are led hither and thither by their words. And sometimes, unthinking security can be inverted: the linen sheet can fold, the snake can penetrate the garden. Devastation happens quietly from within.

  I stood up in Ojén’s Town Hall at the annual general meeting of the Comunidad de La Mairena, and told everybody about our tenant, who lives in the far extension to our apartment; my indignation at the unfairness of the situation swept me along. ‘Stefan Schmidt hasn’t paid his rent for the past nine months, since last summer. And we’ve also been paying his electricity bills for the year and three months that he’s been living there. He owes us nearly seven thousand euro.’ I was interrupted by gales of laughter which echoed around the large assembly room. I thought they were laughing at our predicament, but Terry whispered not at all, they were laughing at the insolent boldness of the ‘renter’, as a glamorous German woman subsequently called him. Somebody then suggested that we shouldn’t speak to those who owe the community money. And afterwards, when I was having a word with the secretary from the administration, she told me, ‘My heart sank when I heard you mention Stefan Schmidt. I have had experience of him over the past few years. And when I heard you say that he is now in La Mairena …’ She looked stricken. ‘Tell your solicitor to go very powerful against him.’

  There was a note attached to the hall door: ‘Hello Michael, hello Terry. When you have time for a meeting? With or without lawyers. I think we should find a good solution for the apartment! Then you will have your rent and I can stay. Stefan.’ He came across to our apartment on the Saturday morning at ten o’clock, unshaven, and wearing a dark tracksuit. Stefan is a tall, lean man with black, oiled hair swept back from his forehead. He looked like an ungainly insect, a locust, as he folded himself into the armchair opposite; he was very much in charge of himself. ‘I cannot see you because of the flowers,’ he said in his dry, accented voice, almost a rasp, as our friend Anna leaned forward from the couch to put the vase of lilies onto the lower table. She and her boyfriend, James, had arrived beforehand, and they sat in on the meeting: ‘But you have to pay your rent …’ they kept repeating periodically in an incredulous tone, because of Stefan’s effrontery.

  He was calmly explaining that his lawyer had advised him to try for a solution. He’d come to tell us about his bill for damages to his furniture, and I told him to examine the contract for where it says that he’s responsible for insuring his own belongings, and that we weren’t liable. Terry pointed out, ‘Six weeks ago, you showed us a bill for six thousand euro for repairs to the apartment, and now you’re saying that the damages bill has gone up to nine thousand euro – in little over a month? What happened, Stefan?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said happily. ‘I have a Persian carpet which was destroyed.’

  ‘I notice that the rug we left in the apartment, you put it out on the balcony in
all that wind and rain,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that’s only two hundred euro,’ he replied.

  ‘Yes, but it’s our two hundred euro!’ reminded Terry.

  I explained that as good landlords we were concerned for him and his children, but he seemed taken aback at my suggestion that the best solution would be for him to move out of the apartment now (his three children attend the Colegio Alemán across the road) before the difficulties were compounded. Anna pointed out that we need his rent in order to pay the mortgage, the community fees and the electricity.

  Stefan was unmoving. ‘My solicitor has advised me to withhold the rent, yes, and we are going to take the two issues of the rent and the damages together.’

  ‘Stefan, you have to pay your rent. And if you don’t, then we shall pursue you for the back rent that you owe us, you will be removed from our property, and we’re also going to sue you to reclaim the costs of the legal fees involved.’ He remained impassive. ‘The burofax, which is the certified copy of a letter to be used in court, has already been issued, Stefan, and I’m aware that you haven’t picked it up, but it’s still legal. You have a few more days before we leave for Ireland to stop this matter from escalating.’

  The discussion with him went around and around for about three quarters of an hour, but got nowhere until James, in exasperation, stuck it to him: ‘Are you going to pay your rent?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Stefan, emphatically. It was out before he could help it.

  I got up from the couch as Terry began to speak, and went to open the hall door. ‘You’re an angry man, Stefan,’ said Terry.

  He demurred.

  ‘This is what I work at, Stefan: I’m a psychoanalyst, and I’m saying that you’re an angry man; I’m reading your body language.’ They were standing, and Terry moved up close to him and into his space. ‘I don’t know who it was who hurt you – your father, your mother – but take it to them and not to us.’

  Stefan suddenly reddened under Terry’s gaze.

  ‘We’re good people. We did nothing to you, and yet you’re hurting us by not paying your bills. I know when I’m being rolled over.’ Stefan said nothing, and later, Terry explained that he’d had the feeling he was looking at a shamed little boy. He asked him, ‘What sort of a father are you? We’re paying for the light and the heat for your children, and they’re not even ours.’

  Stefan leaned away from him to shake hands with Anna and Jimmy on the couch before walking out. I called after him, ‘We’re here until Wednesday, Stefan …’ but he didn’t look back, nor slacken his stride. Nor did he communicate with us directly again.

  His wounding action, and our vulnerability to his assault, was shocking. In the short term, we were powerless. The attack he’d launched was two-pronged: on the one hand, withhold the rent from us, and with the other, press home his advantage by billing us for damages at a price more than what he owed us in rent: a lose, lose situation. It undermined our belief in the Spanish dream to such an extent that when we opened the door into our beautiful apartment that Saturday evening, it had lost its lustre. We moved around it clumsily, as if the comforting shelter that had been our home in Spain had been sold from under us.

  Four days later, on St Patrick’s Day, when I sat on a bench at Barajas airport in Madrid waiting for the connecting flight to Dublin, I looked at the river of men who passed me by, a river in flood. I observed the colour of their skin, I listened to the myriad languages they were speaking, I noted their age, their physical condition, but most of all I examined the expressions on their faces to see if I could detect whether they were ineffective men: frightened eyes, a defeated, tremulous mouth? What was the missing piece in our education that rendered us incapable? Or were we so overeducated that we were effete? Did Stefan think he could harry us because, as Terry alluded to, we’re not fathers, that we’re gay? Had he been assessing the situation that evening he sat beside us signing the contract, taking in the Christmas flourishes in our apartment, the brightly coloured cushions scattered like flowers across the couch, the fun of the multi-coloured chandelier, and did he say to himself then that these men are like children playing house? At what stage in our dealings with him did Stefan feel so masterful, so certain of winning that he cut off from feelings of altruism and decided to set his malicious game in motion? It had to be because he felt that he could revile us.

  Terry came up to my seat at the airport. ‘I’ve forgotten my walking stick in the minusvalido toilet …’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ I offered, but when I searched there, it was gone; just the smell of cigar smoke in the air.

  ‘Isn’t that a shitty thing to do to someone who obviously needs a walking stick,’ Terry complained. ‘And I really liked that one – blue, with the flowers on it.’

  The next time we travelled abroad was some months later, and we were at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. We’d parked in the underground car park at the Centro-Commerciale Leonardo. Terry went up into the shopping mall to buy a pair of plastic spectacle frames in blue, a striking colour one can find in Italy: they brought out his lively blue eyes, which blaze with intelligence. We were gone no more than forty minutes. As we got back to the car, Terry called out to me, ‘We’ve been robbed!’ At first I thought he was joking, but there was a showering down of glass when Terry slid open the door. With a panicked feeling in the pit of my stomach, I saw that our two suitcases, the brown leather Bally bag, and the new Toshiba laptop containing the first three chapters of my second book had been taken. The shock was explosive. My book was gone, and I didn’t have a backup. I was finding it difficult to breathe: my lungs seemed to be drowning in the humidity, and my heart was in flitters, stracaithe. Terry’s walking aid was upended between the back seats. We’d been left with only the clothes we were standing in, which were sticky with sweat. ‘It’s my fault,’ he said, desolately. I turned and ran to the escalator to get help.

  The two sets of keys to the apartment in Dublin, with the keys to both cars on the same key ring, were in the pocket of the Bally bag. The red shoes we bought for Anna as a present were in one of the suitcases, and my reading glasses were in the pocket of the laptop bag. Terry’s wonderful, candy-striped Signum shirts that he bought in Germany, all of them were gone. I felt burdened with the sorrow as each new memory of what had been in the luggage arrived for us like leaden weights, and my head hung lower. It was similar to a death. Terry was to say later, ‘They’ve taken our emotions as well …’ I think his perception was about us being numbed with shock, and that we’d been plunged into mourning suddenly.

  Since the violent assault from cancer, I’ve found living, the response to that ‘How are you?’ question about upholding your being in the world, very hard to sustain at times. The tendency to expect the best and see the best in all things has been undermined to such an extent that I can experience survival as a futile exercise, as if the easy outpouring of my being has been too rapid, and I’m left depleted, and go into spasm. The weariness I feel reminds me of the fatigue associated with recovery from cancer. At such times, my head falls down onto my chest with the total loss of hope, and in the moment I can visualize throwing myself off the terrace of our apartment in Spain, six stories above the ground, to end the overwhelming pain of an effort without end: quietus est. When I told Terry what I was feeling about having been so comprehensively robbed in Italy, and what I wanted to do, he said calmly, ‘Please don’t do that to yourself, or to me.’

  The Italian police didn’t want to know about the robbery, passed the buck to the police at the airport, where we met a woman cop named Claudia who’d grown up in Long Island on a diet of Cagney and Lacey, and who even looked like Tyne Daley. Claudia finally took charge of our report for the insurance company. She told us the robbery was most likely carried out by Roma, and she alarmed us by saying that they had a network throughout Europe, so we should change all of the locks in Dublin without delay. We rang our friend Barbara, who organised a locksmith for the apartment, and had the cars clamped in
the garage, but still I’m hanging from that balcony with one hand.

  The robbery was an unforeseen event without an apparent cause. On the surface it seemed to be chance, but I concluded it had happened to us because we’d been careless. We’d acted without giving sufficient attention to our surroundings, and had put our belongings at risk, so that now our attention was being seized in a brutal and violent fashion. Fate had given us a harsh wake-up call that had left us bereft. The inevitable fortune had befallen us predetermined by our own actions, so it wasn’t strictly speaking like the trauma of cancer, which is extrinsic to meaning and truly arbitrary. The temptation for us was not to move beyond a ‘This is Italy’ type of explanation, having witnessed the total breakdown of whatever chaotic system they’d put in place for the breakfast in our hotel the morning before, and blame a people whose ancestors had once ruled the known world with efficiency and order, a people who had brought to fruition the civilisation that we enjoy to this day. The last time Terry had been in Italy thirty years ago his car had also been robbed, and it was found burnt out as well. We both had known this, and yet we’d walked away from a car full of luggage. We’d been foolhardy.