The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  That first night she’d booked a room in a hostel in the little town of Tarifa, the most southerly town on the Iberian Peninsula, and set out to explore the narrow, whitewashed streets and small squares, without noting the name of the hostel, or looking to see where it was situated. ‘I thought, my God, what have I done? It was late November, cold and wet, and I felt bereft.’

  We were climbing a narrow, winding street, and Helen popped her head around the rejas, the ornamental railings of a gateway, from where there was a strong smell of oil paint. ‘Hello Henrie?’

  A woman with clear hazel eyes, paint brush in hand, pulled them open. ‘Come in Helen, come in. I want to thank you for your encouraging words yesterday. I’m really sorry, but I’d just collapsed under the daunting pressure of getting all these paintings ready for the exhibition in London. After you left I felt able to continue, and I worked all night at them. What do you think?’

  The large paintings, which varied in size, were piled on tables and stacked behind each other on the tarpaulin-covered floor of the tiny room. As Henrie busied herself with rearranging them to make more space, a glut of abstracts bursting with washes of colour, pinks and turquoise and hazy white, flashed by before our eyes. They were obviously landscape inspired: the light and the Mediterranean and Atlantic air masses that converge in Tarifa over the turbulent gyre of sea were captured in the flood of feelings which the canvases called forth.

  ‘They’re beautiful portraits,’ I told her. ‘Your soul and the life you lead in Tarifa is on show here, Henrie: you’re a good person.’ She texted Helen later to thank her for inspiring her with much needed confidence, and that she appreciated the valuable support she received from those two visiting Irish friends.

  Helen admitted she hadn’t shown what I’d written about her in At Five in the Afternoon to her daughter.

  ‘Why ever not?’ asked Terry, surprised.

  ‘Michael, with Tania’s teaching job, and looking after Jeremy and the boys, and they’ve had five different sets of visitors, they lead such sociable lives, so different to mine,’ she explained. ‘My daughter is even more beautiful, but too thin. She rings me whenever she’s driving alone in the car,’ she continued, acknowledging with a glance her laconic use of language. ‘And the grandchildren have their lives with their friends now in Sotogrande. They go on sleepovers, so I don’t babysit as much as I used to.’

  ‘You were a safe and imaginative counterbalance in their lives,’ I recalled.

  ‘Oh, the two boys are wonderful, tremendously competitive, total opposites. The older, Nicholas, is tall and rangy like their grandfather. Things come easy to him. He’ll be a big hit with the ladies. All his shoes are lined up neatly in his wardrobe. While I can see that James, the younger one, equally bright, has to fight for his place in the sun. So I showed them their Chinese horoscopes. Nicholas is a rat, clever and successful, and I felt that James needed a little boost. So I showed him that he’s a tiger, the most beautiful cat in the world, who’s a naturally solitary creature, a superb survivor, but a bit messy where he lives. And he said, “Nan, Nan, that’s me, that’s me.” And you could see him straighten up.’ Helen sat upright, nodding in satisfaction: ‘I call him “tiger” now!’

  ‘If it wasn’t for you,’ Terry reminded her, ‘they all wouldn’t have come down to Spain. You’re a trailblazer, Helen, always have been, and there are many people who owe you a debt of gratitude because of who you are.’

  ‘I’ve pulled back, which I think is a good thing, because I was too available. There was a time I used to keep every weekend free in case I was needed, which is a problem of mine. Tania rang me last Friday morning to babysit that night, and I declined: I said I’d need more notice to arrange matters.’

  She was referring to caring for her cats, and she sparkled. ‘They always run to greet me when I come home from Gibraltar. They’re so very affectionate,’ she said. ‘The big male, Beauty Boy I call him, hadn’t come to say hello, and I went looking for him. He was under the bed with a trophy he didn’t want to let go of: a big rat!’

  We grimaced in disgust.

  ‘Oh, that sort of thing doesn’t faze me: it’s country living,’ she laughed. ‘When first I married Simon, we packed up the Land Rover and travelled through Iraq and Pakistan. I was seventeen years old, yes that’s right, married at sixteen! We arrived in Bangkok at the most important time in my life, when I was expecting my beloved Tania. From the back of the jeep, I saw a group of men around a campfire throw something into the flames. The little creature would run away; they’d catch it again and throw it back in. When they all fell asleep, I rescued what turned out to be the most beautiful cat, with big ears. It was badly singed, but I nursed it back to health. I really loved that cat: he was my companion when Simon was away working for the BBC. And after I had Tania in the hospital, I couldn’t wait to bring her home to introduce her to my cat. When I arrived at the house with Tania cradled in my arms, Simon somehow released the guard dog, and it killed the cat before my eyes. It was a horrendous thing to happen.’ Tears pricked her eyes at the memory, and she shuddered. ‘I sank into the most frightful depression.’

  On one day a week, Helen drives into Gibraltar, where she works in a holistic centre as a reflexologist. ‘I give each client about one and a half hours of my time, because they all want to talk.’

  ‘It’s about time that you worked directly as a psychotherapist,’ I told her.

  Helen was shocked. ‘Wouldn’t you have to have pieces of paper to hang on your wall?’ she protested.

  ‘The work comes from the heart, Helen, and not from the head. You’re doing it anyway, just as you’ve described. That’s what your own personal analysis has equipped you for,’ I told her. ‘How long had you spent? Nine years was it? At the end of analysis you’re constituted an analyst according to Jacques Lacan: it’s a self-appointing vocation which your own analysis prepares you for. And,’ I pointed out, ‘nobody licensed Freud!’

  She still appeared hesitant. Her sense of integrity appeared to be an obstacle in the way of grasping at this opportunity to make some extra money. Or maybe she found the psychotherapist label too stark, too onerous a responsibility, too draining of resources, despite her proven fearlessness.

  ‘All students are required to work with clients. Terry and I would supervise you from Dublin over Skype, so give it some thought.’

  Helen has to make do with very little, because the downturn in the economy has wiped out whatever investments she had. She has no health insurance, because she can no longer afford to pay the premiums. The only luxury she permits herself is her cleaner, who comes to her for two hours on a Tuesday morning. Pepa is one of an army of Spanish cleaners who vigorously chase the dust out of every miserly corner, upturning in the process any pieces of furniture that block their path. The drawback is that Pepa has the Spanish love affair with lejia, bleach. There are shelves filled with this dangerous chemical on open display in every Spanish supermarket. Pepa throws lejia about everywhere. ‘Look,’ said Helen, showing off her beige linen slacks, ‘those white spots are bleach marks, and this was hanging up on a rail in the bedroom!’

  During the eight years that Helen has spent in the south of Spain, she has gradually moved to inhabit the shadow side of that freedom from being judged, from being placed and labelled, that she once experienced as being attractive when first she landed. ‘This countryside around Tarifa is very like Africa,’ she said, and there was real affection in her voice. ‘Some of my friends have had to leave everything behind in Rhodesia, or Kenya, everything they owned, farms that had been in their families for generations: we have that colonial background in common. We also share the divestiture of context; we can recognise that in each other,’ she admitted. Helen, Terry and I were seated in thirties-style cream leather armchairs by the open French doors of the Punta Sur hotel near Helen’s home on the Costa de la Luz, and the soft, warm westerly wind, the poniente, was blowing in off the raised blue ocean, carrying with it the scent of th
e honeysuckle twining about the balustrade. There was a very large map of Africa hanging on the wall behind the billiard table, and some blown-up photographs of life in the African bush, hunting scenes, were splashed with hot sunlight, which crossed the brown tiles in the evening shade of the lounge. A large dog, an elegant creature with a ridge of hair down its back, was boisterously playing with its young owner at the far end of the room, plashing up and down.

  ‘It’s a Rhodesian ridgeback,’ said Helen. ‘They’re very powerful dogs, bred for taking down lion.’ Helen grew up in Kenya, where her father was Chief Medical Officer. ‘People wash up on the shores of southern Spain for an infinite variety of reasons. They’re a motley crew made up of many nationalities,’ she explained. ‘Most people here, including the local country people among whom I live, can’t tell who I am. They can’t read my accent,’ she said, sounding sadly pensive. Helen has impeccable manners, and she speaks beautifully in an Anglo-Irish accent. ‘They see that I live in a tiny house out in the campo, and that defines me for them, whereas I’m much more than that.’ We’d been speaking earlier about family holidays travelling around Europe in the fifties. Each summer, Helen’s family used to take a ferry from Mombasa to Trieste through the Suez Canal, with their large Citroën Pallas, which her father bought in Paris. ‘When I lock up for the night, and gather in my tiny family around me, you come to realise how very little you are in the universe,’ she said.

  The deadly truth she entrusted me with demanded no response, and we fell silent. The dog approached us sniffing the air, then turned back to its owner.

  ‘I brought with me in my suitcase a box overflowing with photographs: there’s one of me with my father at the Rift Valley, another of all of us with Mum and Dad standing rigidly to attention outside our home in Mombasa; Michael was wearing in Indian feathered headdress. I think I shall have them blown up at the local photo shop in Tarifa.’

  The pilgrimage that Helen has undertaken is a spiritual one to do with her being. In travelling to the most southerly point of Europe, where she could see the North African coastline thirteen kilometres away across the Straits of Gibraltar, Helen has journeyed back to her roots. She has travelled deep within to rediscover a time when she played unconcernedly with the native children in heat of the African bush. It was a time of pure being in the moment, when the lofty adult concepts of the past and of the future spoke a different language, and were incapable of stooping down to join in the games and the laughter, brimming with life. Those moments of play, which she recaptures during her morning swim in the ocean, are derived from the body, and in particular, its continuity after the deadly interruption of the cancer which had caused her to hold her breath. Now that she’s been given another chance, the daily miracle of her continuous participation in southern Spain’s sunrise fills her with joy and with gratitude. In addition, the play of pure being has become for her a function of the aging process. ‘All of my life I always had a man on the go,’ she confessed, ‘but now I have developed deep friendships with women. At my sixtieth birthday lunch hosted by my daughter Tania, there were ten women around the table, all of them interesting women with wonderful stories to tell, and hugely supportive. Life here is so on the edge that women are more open, and speak the heartfelt truth to each other. In summer, Tarifa is heaving with a young crowd who are concentrated on surfing during the day. Their enthusiasm is infectious and hugely admirable, and they party at night, but not so hard as to interrupt their sport. Women of my age are confined to the margins.’ Helen looked at me, and her kohled eyes twinkled with humour. ‘We inhabit the blank space surrounding the text of a page, Michael! So what we tell each other has added importance, like scribbled notations. It holds us in a collective of wisdom, binding us together, like a patchwork quilt. My German friend, Christa, married to an English alcoholic, had an affair four years ago with an evangelical minister from Denmark, who told her that he was going to end his marriage and come here to live with her. And after four years, she still hopes that he will. When I attempted to nudge her in the direction of reality, pointing out that it appeared the minister was more concerned with protecting his position, she told me that she needed to believe, in order just to continue. Her belief was a fantasy that sustained her, and I can understand that. Such pain and honesty is a gift. It’s a usual exchange among the women here. I am truly blessed,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you get anxious, Helen, living on the edge like that?’

  She reached out and patted my hand, quoting the Benedictine nun, Julian of Norwich, telling both of us: ‘All shall be well, Michael, and all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well!’ I wanted to reassure her in return, but my words would have sounded glib after her reach for such poetic mysticism.

  Helen chided, ‘What could you possibly write about me? I lead such a little life.’

  My rejoinder led to a lively discussion of Lorca’s ‘aesthetic of the diminutive’, the sensual perception that all of life is contained in a small piece, held together as it is in the important detail of a dream, which is more often neglected, hidden on the periphery in the shadows, but which nevertheless confirms us in our humanity. Helen has the understanding that always there will be difficulties in life. Her belief in the resilience of human beings to face and overcome their challenges has led her to invite in strays, who’ve warmed themselves at her hearth for a time, before she’s opened the door again on an uncertain world, and encouraged on their way those pilgrims who are passing through. They leave that little dwelling in the south of Spain enriched by Helen’s bounty, more certain of their value, having grown bigger under the watchful quietness of her love.

  Part Twelve

  You Could Make an Olive Dance

  ‘You could make an olive dance!’ Terry has great faith in my writing. The significance of the impossible image he painted is underlined by his suffering from polio, where even standing upright to walk a few steps poses a painful challenge. Terry lives daily with a malicious representation of the human body. In his particular case, the everyday reality for most people was altered subjectively in the mind of his creator, so that Terry has been forced to respond to life resourcefully and without complaint. He has an unshakable belief in the limitless, transforming power of the imagination, and an equally strong conviction borne of fate’s arbitrary cruelty.

  The image of a green olive dancing with all the emotional intensity and grace of a flamenco artist as it ripens towards black under the harsh Spanish sun, expresses the confrontational drama of living life on the edge by the Mediterranean Sea in the south of Spain. Yielding to those subtle, sprung rhythms within the day keeps attention directed effortlessly onto the here and now. One day succeeds another in tranquillity, freed from the strict disciplines of time and the anxieties of achievement. The human spirit flourishes in such an environment, meditating deeply with a part of the mind that otherwise never would be given voice.

  This llanto, the deep song of Andalusian folk music, is like the warm wind that blows in late summer. It scours the land, whistling through the pines and the cork oaks by the Mediterranean basin, dancing especially around the beautiful broad and pendulous white-leaved hojiblanca olive trees, bowed down to the ground with their bumper crop. The song gathers up the perfumes of the parched grasses, the nuttiness of sweet almonds, and the fresh taste of exotic fruit. It tells of the various civilisations it has experienced, those of the Phoenicians, Romans, the Moors, and of the Christian and Jewish peoples who made this land their home. Enriched with such a broad heritage, it confronts the intense white light of day that hurts the eyes, with the starkness and the ambiguity of truth.

  ‘You could make an olive dance.’

  I can see through the window where I write at my desk, the light go on in the sky behind the blackened, gnarled branches of a cork oak, an imperceptible brightening at the eastern horizon. Soon it will be time to water the plants on the terrace. It is cool this morning, just 23 degrees, and there are clouds in the sky. A sheet of mist from
the sea extends over the valley beneath the blue peaks of the mountains, creating nature’s first mystery of the day. Later, a gentle interruption over my shoulder, ‘Good morning! How did you sleep?’

  The intimate abundance of those August days, the repetition of waking up to more of the same under the oppressive heat of southern Spain, soothes the spirit like some soft, intensely aromatic olive oil spreading over broken breakfast bread hot from the oven, glistening like the greenest liquid gold. Aceite, the Spanish word for oil, is a survival in everyday speech of the Arabic al zait, meaning juice from the olive. At the core of its sound (despite the brutal overthrow of successive administrations in Spain) the word retains the continuity of handing down from generation to generation the civilising custom of tending to the olive tree, and harvesting the fruit to extract its juice. Aceite represents the transformation that occurs when olives were ground between two large stone wheels turned by mules. This paste was then loaded onto circular mats stacked high on a press, which was squeezed by turning a large wooden screw, until the liquid dripped down on the outside of the stack and into a container. After a day, the oil floated to the surface because it was lighter than the vegetable water. It was then skimmed off and stored in cool, earthenware jars.