The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  Conor confidently replied from under his blanket, ‘If I wanted you to move your foot, I’d ask you.’

  My director’s eye saw a shot that would be perfect for the new back cover. The highly carved baroque entrance to the bullring was lit by the evening sun. The light was reflecting off the polished stones of the ramp, which rose up in deep shadow towards the two wooden half doors that gave onto the bright yellow sand of the arena behind, blocked off on the far side by that wonderful pillared arcade with the shadowed arches. If I were to position myself in the sunlight before the entrance, having just left the arena and the brave performance of that dance with death behind me, then such a photograph would give the brighter message that I’ve survived my cancer, and that I’m emerging into the sunlight following that battle. For whatever reason, the sharp contrast between shadow and light, the difficulty of photographing in a public space with day-trippers around, and the expense of the photographic plate, Conor didn’t give me the photograph that I wanted.

  There was another evening when I stood in a field outside Ronda staring into the scalding sun as it sank lower in the sky, constantly repositioning, being shuffled into the lengthening shadow of a cork oak tree, as Conor got me to hold his lighting meter to my chin while he adjusted the lens, and tried the flash. ‘Open your eyes while I check the focus.’ And so it went on and on, for well over an hour, as the light levels continued to drop rapidly, and the glaring sun mercifully retreated behind a hill. As it grew dark, Conor eventually told me, ‘I’ve been having trouble with my focus, and I can’t figure out what’s wrong.’

  I was aghast. ‘D’you mean to say you haven’t taken any photographs at all?’

  He was staring dismally at his camera. ‘None, I’m afraid.’

  My anger breached the code. ‘Conor, it would have been easier if you said immediately what was wrong, instead of putting me through that pantomime.’

  He looked around at me, and he held my gaze. The irony of my advice to him, expressing the truth which I hadn’t put into practice, hung in the heated air between us.

  ‘Oh, let’s go down to Yanx and have a burger.’

  During the meal, a gulf opened up for me, and I began to fall. ‘I’ve had a hard life. I’ve had to work hard all my life. There was the sexual abuse as a child, I worked in the States during the summers to earn the fees to put myself through college. I’m working at two jobs to try and make ends meet: up at four o’clock in the morning: incredibly stressful on all sorts of levels, trying to sound cheerful. And then there was the cancer, abusive, horrible, and it’s likely to come back in the future, and I don’t know when …’ I’d said too much suddenly. I sounded unhinged, ugly, but it was fluent, boiling over and flowing. ‘I hate it: I really hate it,’ I said. It was as if somebody else were berating me with this: I was inhabiting my shadow personality, and while I was feeling desperately distressed, I didn’t know the precise reference: what was it that I hated? The truth, was that it, or more properly, my seeming inability to express it? I felt like the over-tired child again, beyond it, inconsolable, unable to work out what was wrong, rebuked, sent to my room for bad behaviour, sitting alone in the cúinne dána, the bold corner, beaten and terrorised. Good manners reasserted themselves and prevailed, and while Terry, sitting opposite, caught my gaze, neither he nor Conor commented on my remarks. I finished my meal in silence. It was tasteless, but the repetitive movements with my knife and fork, the ice-cold beer, served to calm me. Afterwards, I bought Conor a big ice-cream for dessert, ‘No, no, you have it,’ and I paid for the meal. We’d begin again, tomorrow.

  In January, the shadowy blue mountains in the south of Spain seem to float on wisps of greyish cloud. During the day, the sudden lash of rain showers brings down the tepid temperatures, until the sun shines out once more, raising the light levels and the warmth dramatically. On one such winter’s day, Terry and I met Helen for lunch in the Ke Club at the Puerto Deportivo de Sotogrande, as the waiters continually swept the glittering raindrops housing the sunlight off the outside glass tables with plastic wipers, turning them into sheets of falling diamonds. We kissed her delightedly on both cheeks, embracing her slender warmth, and saw that she looked happy and healthy.

  ‘You remember the last time we met in August, I was madly enthusiastic about raw food?’ she said. ‘Well, I went along to this Chinese doctor in Gibraltar, and he took my pulse and he asked me what was wrong.’ Helen had suffered from cancer; she’d had a tumour removed from her brain. ‘He said the raw food wasn’t nourishing me, and that I was seriously depleted. He listed off several symptoms, and I had all of them: no energy, difficulties with my memory, no desire to take exercise or to meet people, no desire to do anything. I wasn’t at my best through all of last year. It was a depression that I’d been struggling against for several months, and I hadn’t realised why I was feeling so low. So I asked him “Will I be able to turn this around?” And he said, “If it’s not too late!”’

  ‘And, are you alright, Helen?’

  ‘He’s been giving me a course of herbs since September, alternative medicine, and I perked up almost immediately. I’m feeling really well today.’ She looked glowing.

  We’d brought down with us from Dublin as a Christmas present, the photographic portrait of Helen that Conor had taken in August last. I’d spied on the two of them hard at work in the heavy evening heat, amidst the lush gardens of the Punta Sur Hotel outside Tarifa, and kept out of their way, in order, as I told myself at the time, to permit the artist total freedom to interpret what he saw. With hindsight, this was an abdication of my responsibility to direct the shoot, a diminishing action which had the effect of distorting my relationships with Conor at the time, and also with Helen. It was a necessary fight I should have accepted in order to retain what cannot be given away, and I’d let myself down. I viewed the portrait when I saw it for the first time, as a representation of my failure. And I had reservations whether an intelligently perceptive soul like Helen would warm to it, so we’d left it in the boot of the car.

  Towards the end of that enjoyable lunch in Sotogrande, when we’d relaxed and exchanged our news, and wrapped ourselves up once more in each other’s lives, I went outside to retrieve her gift. At the table, Helen cautiously removed the black tissue-paper and looked at the picture, holding up the frame with both hands before her, like a mirror.

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ she exclaimed, surprised.

  The photograph showed Helen dressed in white linen, in a medium-long-shot static pose, looking unsmilingly straight down the lens. Her pepper and salt shoulder-length hair was swept off her face, and her hands were held behind her back so that she was unprotected.

  ‘What d’you think?’

  She said immediately: ‘Older women should be approached with a greater softness of touch: they need that kindness.’ She was examining the woman that Conor had seen, and she crooked a finger under the kohl-outlined eyes, blotting out the lower part of the face. ‘Look at the suffering in those eyes,’ she said, incredulous, ‘they‘re so sad.’ And she shivered involuntarily. We’d prepared Helen by telling her that I didn’t intend to use the portrait in my new book. Some of the other photographs that were taken paparazzi-style through the bustling streets of Tarifa earlier on that carefree August day were brimming with life and movement, and would suit the writing better.

  ‘I see that you’ve folded your arms out of the way behind your back in that portrait!’ I joked.

  ‘Oh, my poor hands, gnarled from all the reflexology work: they’re old beyond their years, and of course I hide them,’ she protested. ‘It’s not a question of vanity. We’ve all been battered by life; you can see that in my face: it’s a battered face,’ she declared, and Helen turned the frame around so that it caught the light, which heightened the dappling effect on her skin from the trees in the Punta Sur Hotel garden. She went on, ‘This photograph has taken away my privacy. I feel as if I’m standing there naked.’

  ‘It’s not how I see you, Helen,�
� I assured her truthfully, in an effort at mitigation, since for me Helen is a warm and beautiful woman with an exquisite face of unusual delicacy, graceful, stylish, constantly in motion.

  ‘I’m relieved to hear that,’ she said, laughing ironically, still closely examining the picture for what it revealed. I gave her a hug, feeling guilty about my part in its production.

  Terry intervened from the other side of the table. ‘Conor made his name by taking a series of photographs of the women of the troubles in the north of Ireland. They’re studies of courageous women, who’ve been through a lot of suffering. Perhaps Conor has used the same technique on you? Maybe one day you’ll be able to see your portrait as a work of art, hanging on the walls of a gallery as well. Conor is an extremely sensitive man.’ And he added an amendment, ‘He’s more comfortable under the dark cloth, under the blanket, in the shadows.’

  ‘I gathered that from the first time I met him,’ Helen responded, sounding puzzled. After a thoughtful moment, she said, ‘We all present a certain face to the world which covers over our inner privacy. And while we share that privacy with our friends and those we trust, we choose not to reveal our private nature in the public forum. We all behave in the knowledge that there’s an incongruity between what is expected to be, and what actually is. It’s a dissembling that we accept for the sake of good manners, a pact that smoothes the way for our interactions.’

  ‘Impeccable manners is what I associate with you, and with Anna: it’s an overriding characteristic. Conor has approached you forensically,’ I suggested.

  ‘Precisely! I’ve heard you say, Michael, that when you meet a client, you could reach in behind the wall they’ve constructed around themselves and pull out what they’re concealing. But you don’t do that violence, because they’d go into shock.’

  ‘People go to the trouble of constructing that wall to help them to cope with life,’ I contributed, ‘so that it has to be dismantled brick by brick, even if the barrier is no longer working for them, and is keeping them imprisoned instead.’

  Helen laid the picture down on the table, so that we all could see it. ‘An older woman,’ she explained, ‘although presumably she’s wiser from having lived longer, she doesn’t have the resilience of youth to recover easily or quickly. She deserves a respect, where the beauty of youth can still be found, written within the aging process on her skin: all of that, both ends of the spectrum if you like, should be present without any exclusion. I appreciate that Conor is a young man, with all the ebullience of youth. Perhaps such an ethical approach is itself a measure of the aging process, and derives from the accumulation of life’s wisdom. I think that Conor has achieved a remarkable portrait, of which he should be justly proud. He’s a wonderful photographer to see what he saw … But where’s the soft focus, for pity’s sake?’ she pleaded, suddenly striking a lighter note, and sending herself up to gales of laughter. I indicated to her with my fingers over the glass, the out-of-focus dappled foliage which surrounded the clarity of the figure in the photograph, and noticed for the first time that a splash of sunlight had highlighted the side of her neck.

  Helen had arrived at a conclusion. ‘Now that it’s been done, you can use the photograph in the new book if you like,’ she stated. ‘I don’t mind, Michael, because Conor has captured the truth.’

  For the first time, I saw Conor’s portrait in a new light. ‘I agree with you, Helen: an older woman deserves respect. What a good, good word you’ve chosen, because as well as meaning to pay attention, respect derives from the Latin specere, to look. The re indicates a return to a previous condition, a looking back, so that the whole spectrum as you’ve described it, the whole range of a person’s life can be observed written on the face. Conor has looked with his professional photographer’s eye and revealed what he saw, maybe, as you’ve indicated, the depression you were experiencing at that time. I didn’t pay sufficient attention to you on the day and preserve your discretion, which is my failure, and I apologise to you for that. I didn’t fully realise the impact of my inadequacy until now: I should have protected you and overseen the shoot.’ I placed my hand in the centre of the portrait so that it blotted out the figure. ‘I suggest you take it home and place it on a table rather than on a wall so that you can get used to it,’ I offered, ‘and then hang it in your bedroom, or somewhere private. The photograph has been chosen by Conor as one of his best, and we must give due respect to that. And you’ve generously justified to me and Terry why it truly belongs to you, but to no one else. I’m happy that you’re taking it home to Tarifa.’

  Terry interrupted, ‘Helen, would you trust yourself to that woman in the portrait; could you rely on her experience?’

  ‘Of course!’ was the unhesitating reply.

  ‘Then I think you’ll come to like it,’ said Terry. ‘It’s a wonderful portrait of you, Helen, particularly since it has revealed something to you that you hadn’t seen before.’

  Terry understands the sacred nature of the soul’s secrets, and the vulnerabilities of a brave woman who’s living alone in a foreign country, which was mediated for him now through the commentary that Helen had provided.

  ‘It’s like Mum,’ Helen said, folding the tissue paper around the frame, before slipping the picture down into the bag, ‘when she wasn’t well. And,’ she added, ‘wearing her cross face!’ She glanced up at the two of us. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve said what I’ve just said about turning into my mother!’ she rasped, and we roared with relieved laughter, the three of us bound together in our daily struggle to survive as best we can on our individual journeys, always courageously putting our best face forward. And Conor, as a brilliant artist who has fearlessly shown us that a portrait is like a palimpsest, increasing in interest as it matures, was lifted up into that lightness as well. Through his persistence, he had succeeded where I had failed.

  Part Eleven

  Helen

  Helen lives alone in a little house near Bolonia beach in the south of Spain, a fishing outpost founded by the Romans two thousand years ago. It’s surrounded by the outlines of ancient fields in the middle of the Spanish countryside, and very rural. Helen was emphatic. ‘I feel more at home here than anywhere I’ve ever been in my life. They all know me in the local village, Fascinas, as the woman with the perfect hair!’ and she made a square gesture with her hands, laughing. Helen’s shoulder-length hair is a natural pepper and salt colour, because she has eschewed dyes since the surgeons in Dublin removed the cancerous tumour from her brain. ‘I feel totally safe, even in the blackest of nights. Sometimes Moroccan migrants come ashore from across the strait, but they don’t pose me any threat. I think that I’ve become hard,’ she concluded, ‘like the country people have had to do, because life can be unforgiving out in the campo. Although when the farmers separate off the calves from the cows, I can’t bear to hear the looing sound of the mother’s distress calls searching frantically for their young.’ She shuddered.

  Terry had warned Helen not to allow her loneliness turn her into a cat woman. ‘If I hear you’ve been searching through the basuras, the rubbish bins, I’ll take the first plane down,’ he’d joked.

  The week before the concert reading of At Five in the Afternoon in the National Concert Hall, Helen rang us in great distress to say that she wouldn’t be able to attend, because her nearest neighbour, a tall, beautiful French woman, had that morning left her front door on the latch, and walked into the sea. The woman was a recluse, and she’d been minding over twenty cats. Helen felt obliged to house them out of respect for her dead friend; she felt unable to abandon them to their fate. Eventually, she paid for the bulk of the cats to be shipped to a cattery in Valencia. Helen had held onto four, the sleekest black ones with amber eyes. A friend who’d attended the concert, and who knows Helen, had queued up afterwards for me to sign a copy of the book. ‘What did you make of the cats?’ she asked, conspiratorially.

  When next we met Helen, she told us that Chantal’s suicide had affected her profoundly. The F
renchwoman was a single mother who’d been unable to find work in the south of Spain. She’d been estranged from her wealthy family in France, because they disapproved of her stoic decision to submit to destiny, and live out her life in the Spanish countryside. When her daughter had arrived to claim the body, she found that nothing worked in the house where her mother had lived: not the cooker, nor the shower, nothing. They concluded the landlord must have been trying to get rid of her, because she didn’t have any money. Chantal’s circumstances and death forced Helen to see clearly the straitened conditions in which she too was living, and the dangers that come from too much isolation. She had to confront within herself possibilities about how to cope with life’s difficulties that she’d closed off, that she’d never normally entertain. While her training had equipped her to seek help and to talk over difficulties together, it was still further territory to be mapped and to be conquered by this brave explorer of the soul.

  Eight years ago, Helen sold her house in Dublin, and had arrived in Andalusia for the first time. She said she felt like a pilgrim, a person undertaking a journey to a sacred place. She’d boarded a bus in Marbella, turning her back on the empty glitter of urban sophistication, and headed west into the windswept open spaces beyond Tarifa, where the wild olive trees bend double in the wind under the fierce force of the levante. She discovered a place where her soul could walk upright under the sun, with room to grow in harmony with the changing seasons: the meadows bursting with masses of colourful wildflowers in spring when the señoras wash down the walls of their houses with bleach, the incessant racket of the crickets when the roads clog with campervans during the heavy heat of summer, those cool autumns of soft winds when the countryside empties of the young surfing crowd and life is handed back to the locals, resuming the rhythms of its calm and steady pace, until the cold, driving rain of winter weeps into the houses, and blackens the walls again with mould. That seasonal cycle embraced Helen with its certainty, and she lived her life well. On those days when the levante isn’t whipping up the sand into the air, Helen strides out with the rising sun past the ruined columns of a Roman basilica to an empty beach by the ocean, and goes for a cleansing swim in the waters of the Atlantic. The baptism renews her commitment to a life of tranquil simplicity in the south of Spain, which is a life of the mind, emptied of what is unimportant. Future terrors wash away with her regrets under the powerful stroke of the present, as she swims strongly in an ocean of pure being, and follows a pathway of sparkling light until she melds into the brilliance which is held openly within each day. ‘People here treat you as you are,’ she said. ‘They don’t know your baggage, which is immediately attractive. There’s a freedom in being anonymous, in saying “Me llamo Helen,” in naming yourself, and holding out your hand to another, devoid of expectations.’