The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  ‘You could make an olive dance.’

  The sun was sinking down behind the sierras, painting the clouds pink against the blue of the sky. The Alhambra lay protected by sentries of the darkest green cypresses, stretched out along the side of the hill over fields of pumpkins and aubergines and vines, in silent repose now after throngs of people had clambered through its royal halls and patios during the fierce heat of the day. The jewel of Granada was surrounded by a pale yellow aura, yet the walls of the palace glowed red in the mellow sunlight, the silhouette of the turrets slowly fading to black as the sun disappeared and the stars came out in the soft velvet sky, to the clacking applause of the crickets and the hissing of the water sprinklers. A little to the north, in the open air auditorium which is surrounded by the gardens of the Generalife, the country estate of the Nasrid kings, the air was fragrant with the scent of the box hedges and the clumps of chive and lavender, as the brick walls released their heat, wafting the perfumes into the night air.

  The dancers, a dozen of them dressed in black, turned and twisted as one, stamping out the flamenco rhythm with their high-heeled shoes. They bowed forward in an over-arm gesticulation, then arched their backs to a cascading windmill of arms, and held the arrogant pose on the slow rotation, clicking their fingers overhead with a most delicate movement of the wrist, tapping out the beat with their toes. A sharp turn of the head to the right, to the left, as they travelled sideways across the stage, drumming their heels and swirling around again to the intricate guitar music. Through the spasmodic frenzy of their gestures, raising and shaking their skirts in a furore, the men wielding a cape around their bodies like a matador, the dancers embodied the pent-up emotion, the desire in the raucous voice of the singer, that insinuating thread on which they were carried. As this fusion poured out relentlessly, continuously, filling up the thick night air so that we were drowning, the dancers ascended slowly towards the heavens trailing gasps of wonderment and awe, and at the sudden, unexpected surcease, frozen in death together, there was relief that the threat had passed us by, at least for now.

  The dead spirit of the bullfighter dressed in black, and the poet who had loved him, clothed in an impeccable white suit, danced a pasodoble. The shock of seeing two men openly dance their love one for the other, and lament their loss through a tender embrace in front of Granada’s conservative audience, was intensely moving. This city has been traditionally Catholic since the re-conquest, and the final overthrow of the Moorish civilisation. As the two men steadfastly continued to dance side by side alone on the huge stage, tears of admiration coursed down Terry’s cheeks, and he squeezed my arm until it hurt. For the first time, the performance provoked isolated cries of ‘bravo!’ from around the amphitheatre. The emotion it evoked was grief, deep sorrow for humanity’s burden of vindictive hatred which was laid upon the shoulders of Federico Lorca, a son of Granada, and Spain’s greatest modernist poet of the twentieth century. With three other intellectuals, he was lined up against an olive tree, still standing in Viznar outside of the city, and shot dead by the Escuadra Negra, the death squad of the Fascists, early in the Civil war. He was thirty-eight years old when his life was cut short. The four bodies were dumped together into an unmarked grave which has never been identified. At the termination of the ballet, some members of the audience had risen to their feet, and they gave to the liberal challenge of the choreography a sustained, standing ovation; others remained firmly seated, fanning themselves with their programmes. The lament over Spain’s recent political history, and the implied criticism of the reactionary powers that be, had been heard.

  Lorca’s greatest poem, ‘LLanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’, an expression of sorrow on the death of his friend, Ignacio, was danced in a metáfora flamenca by the Ballet Flamenco de Andalusia. In the beginning, a voice had quoted the opening line ‘A las cinco de la tarde …’ which I’d employed as the title of my first book, concerning my battle against prostate cancer, and the blackness which had threatened to engulf me. That struggle with death in the arena begins in Spain at five in the afternoon. As the pas de deux progressed, and the beautiful sequences continued to dance deep in my heart long after the performance has ceased, I was strengthened in the awareness that this socially engaged writer who was a committed defender of the dispossessed, a homosexual who was assassinated by the uncaring evil of a philistine’s bullet, with two further bullets fired ‘into his arse for being a queer’ (as quoted by his biographer, Ian Gibson), had composed a poem which speaks to the world of how human beings should live and behave towards each other.

  Afterwards, I pushed Terry in his wheelchair down towards the car park. We didn’t talk, bobbing amidst the sea of Spanish voices. The fact that he was reliant on my holding him bound us together in a physical expression of our intimacy. I laid my hand on his shoulder, and he raised his hand and placed it quietly on top of mine. What we’d seen, and the experience we’d been through, was deeply personal to us as gay men, and it had made us proud.

  ‘You could make an olive dance.’

  Through the years, I’ve heard myself carried in Terry’s voice as an animating presence. The reflection he upholds for me has some of the alienating qualities of a mirror, inverting what’s seen. Nevertheless, his portrait is a loving one, often tinged with wry humour, which Terry has made into his life’s work. He has created a well-defended area of freedom within which the two of us can flourish. His unshakable faith in my writing pushes me forward centre-stage, but the original expression ‘You could make an olive dance’ comes from him. I give him voice, which dances with all the colour and tone, the inflection and modulation that’s required for the message to be received properly. The manifest emotion propelling ‘You could make an olive dance’ is love. The implicit meaning in Terry’s impossible phrase is ‘I love you!’ By employing it, Terry crowns me with the highest honour of an olive wreath.

  The archetypal evergreen tree of the Mediterranean region, the olive, with its fragrant white flowers in spring, and its autumnal fruits that are black when ripe, marks in its longevity the everyday transitions that occur in the cycle of life, when the ending reached is timely. Those recurring periods which naturally succeed each other so that events can grow towards a completion, is the fruit of continuous caring and of love, of tenderness over time, as in the golden gestures of husbandry. These repeated acts are ordinary, indeed diminutive, but they impart to life its vigorous juice. The harvest leaves all parties, and every living thing, transformed without limits.

  ‘You could make an olive dance!’

  Part Thirteen

  Aengus

  On the third floor of the new St Vincent’s Private Hospital, I walked up to the nurses’ station. ‘Is it alright to visit Aengus?’

  A wide, cherubic smile. ‘Yes: he’s expecting you, Michael …’ and he glanced at his watch ‘… at three o’clock.’

  It showed seven minutes to three on the clock high up on the wall behind the nurse, so I went back out into the foyer to wait by the lift. What I knew was that Aengus was the editor of the highest-circulating Sunday newspaper in Ireland, the Sunday Independent, and deadlines obviously had to be important to him. I took the opportunity to bathe my hands in the disinfectant gel which was available at the double doors outside the ward. He was suffering from lung cancer, and according to his wife, Anne, a traumatic incident had thrown him into a sudden and ferocious depression, which had caused his morale to plummet. Although Aengus hadn’t read my book, he would have been aware through the interviews I gave on television and radio of my experience in coping with prostate cancer, and the loss of my brother to cancer. Those were the obvious reasons I was called to visit him. Anne’s hope was that Aengus might open up to me, but I didn’t know what to expect.

  When I walked into the bleakly functional hospital room on the dot of three o’clock, I met a tall, well-built man with shoulder-length grey hair who was standing by his bed in a dressing gown. The blinds were down, blocking out the winter sunlight,
but in the gloom I could see that Aengus was handsome, not particularly fierce-looking for a successful chief executive, about my own age, and he invited me to pull up another chair. ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Arrah, just ok,’ he said, weakly. ‘I’m a bit down today. And how are you?’

  ‘When I was going through the cancer I was down as well. Are you taking anything for it, Aengus?’

  ‘Zispin, but it’s a very low dose.’

  ‘You can take up to forty-five milligrams, which is what I took, was glad to take. It’s like a bandage: it keeps the two sides of the wound together while the healing is going on. So be sure that you take it, Aengus.’

  Thus began a series of bi-weekly visits to a man that I came to admire for the even-tempered nature of his endurance, and the bravery with which I saw he underwent the vicissitudes of his illness. More than that, I found he had an emotionally intelligent, sensitive nature, which was beautiful to behold and very attractive to experience. I was comfortable in his courteous presence. He pressed the bell, and when a nurse appeared, he surprised me by asking, ‘Please, would you bring a cup of tea for my guest?’

  Early on during our getting-to-know-you discussion on that first day, Aengus laid down the ground-rules. ‘People ask too many questions,’ he said, smiling at me, ‘don’t you find that?’ The smile lit up his face, and extended up into his eyes, which twinkled with devilment. I came to love that smile, which was ready, despite his suffering. He had a slight Kerry accent, which showed itself in the Gaelic underpinning of the way that he spoke English: ‘nach dtuigeann tú é’, or perhaps in the native Corca Dhuibhne dialect ‘cad déarfá?’ don’t you find that?’

  I was maybe too eager, a restless intrusion into the measured pace of his recovery. I soon understood not to ask him anything about himself unless he volunteered the information. I was also reticent about contributing anything into the conversation which would divert him in any way from what he wanted to say. I reined myself in to accept the inevitable silences without showing any impatience or anxiety, because my psychoanalytic training would have impelled me to interrupt the reverie of one of my clients, inviting them to clothe what was going on for them in words. These visits with Aengus had a different tenor: they were being framed differently for a start. Aengus was to be my guide on a journey whose destination was withheld from me: the travelling was all. I was also entering as a guest into his domain, and accepting the good manners of that designation. Aengus gathered his resources before releasing what he decided to say, which took effort because of the pressure on his breathing. He had the security of an oxygen mask at his nose. At times, I felt that he was teaching me.

  ‘What broadcaster do you most admire?’ he asked me once.

  ‘Gay Byrne,’ I said.

  ‘I was watching the Queen’s visit. Wasn’t it wonderful? At one stage in Dublin Castle, President Mary MacAleese becomes over excited, and I saw Gay Byrne intervene and talk to the Queen, and deftly steer her around out of the way. It was extraordinary to watch. He has that skill he used on air: it’s a simplicity which conceals art.’ He looked across at me from the bed, ‘People think anyone can read the news, and they can’t.’

  ‘It requires grace under pressure, which is Hemingway’s phrase,’ I added.

  He repeated the phrase, ‘Grace under pressure: I like that,’ he said, chuckling to himself. At the time, I hadn’t realised the devastating truth with which Aengus was grappling.

  Oftentimes we sat in silence, and he would close his eyes briefly, until he wanted to say something again. Those silences were powerful. They had the effect of blocking out the hospital bustle so that the two of us existed inside a companionable bubble, each of us concentrated on the other so that the words when they arrived could splash over us and have their full, drenching import. I’d focus on his mouth, and remain still until he spoke, which he did with increasing frequency as he began to trust me, and as I began to trust myself. Those encounters were intense. The intimate setting of Aengus’s bedroom allowed for a divesting of the worldly masks in which we clothe our real selves. When he became agitated, and began to ask where his sons had gone to, I knew that he was tiring, and that it was time to make a move to go. ‘I could come back and visit on Thursday next if you’d like, Aengus?’

  ‘I would like that.’

  ‘I’ll see you on Thursday, so.’ And I’d grasp his hand, swollen with drugs, outstretched from above the bedclothes, and walk gently from the room.

  He was keen to take exercise, to get air into his lungs: ‘Crown says it’s a good thing.’ I guessed that this must be part of Dr John Crown’s narrative of hope, allowing Aengus to get through his days while keeping up his morale. So we’d walk slowly and with great effort on his part from the hospital room up to the Family Room, where he’d reach for a chair to sit down gratefully, and hold out his shaking hands for a plastic beaker of water. Often there’d be visitors inside, talking or watching television. We’d sit there in that attuned silence we’d brought with us while he recovered his strength, and the rapid gulping of his heavy breathing became quieter, and eased. When he signalled he was ready, we’d walk back deliberately, he leaning on the walking aid, pushing it ahead of him and trying to steer it impatiently around the nurse’s trolleys in the corridor. Those walks were conducted in semi-silence, because Aengus didn’t have the breath to talk and to walk at the same time. Occasionally I’d encourage him with a ‘Well done, Aengus: you’re doing really well,’ because the undertaking he’d chosen was enormous, at the outermost limit of his reserves. He quoted back to me Santiago in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: ‘I went out too far.’ But he’d insist on completing five rounds, ten walks. ‘I’ll try again,’ he’d say, counting off each of them until he’d achieved his target. It was while we were resting in the safety of his hospital room during the turnaround that Aengus would venture some personal comments, which were pithy, going directly to the heart of the matter. Oftentimes he bounced his remarks off my experience of surviving cancer.

  ‘I get very anxious: feel I can’t breathe,’ he said, looking up at me searchingly.

  ‘Like a panic attack,’ I offered.

  ‘Yes, that’s it. I get into a panic. Do you have that?’

  ‘I did, Aengus, when I was undergoing the illness.’

  ‘It’s like drowning,’ he said. ‘I felt something in my chest was broken,’ and his eyes were wild with the fright of remembrance.

  ‘It’s a terrible feeling when it’s there, but it does pass, Aengus.’ And from his face I’d read whether I should continue on and venture a possible solution for dealing with his terror, or whether validating his experience was enough, which made us brothers in arms, caught up in a gallant fight to the death against that unscrupulous foe, cancer. More often, the acknowledgement that what he was feeling was appropriate, seemed to be sufficient to help him cope with what was so alien to the previous life he’d led as a healthy man, up to just six months ago. His experience since then was so profoundly shocking, and driven on with such celerity, that he didn’t have time to catch up with the assault from the disease, nor have the personal space to recoil from the savage wilderness of the medics where immediately it had taken him.

  It was the October Bank Holiday Monday, and the ward was relatively quiet. Aengus had been admitted for side effects from the ‘wonder drug’ he was on. A scan had been done, of which he hadn’t yet had results. October had been a happy month, the only really happy month since Aengus was diagnosed in April. He’d managed to go to work, to have meals out, and to play his tin whistle. He told Anne, ‘I want to die at my post!’ Aengus and Anne were happy on that afternoon sitting in the Family Room, waiting for a doctor to give some steer about the symptoms he was suffering. An oncologist, not on Aengus’s immediate team, arrived with the oncology nurse in charge that day. And without ado, pronounced, ‘I’ve seen your scans, and the disease is progressing!’ Their world fell apart as the doctor moved on, leaving behind that primed bomb. F
rom being a free man, overnight Aengus was held captive, with his life delivered into the hands of another, who treated him as the object of their specialty, an additional cruelty of which he was made painfully aware. The change was bewildering. Cancer had unmanned him. Aengus held himself with great dignity, but he was in deep shock. Anne responded by asking if she could stay the night with him, and the staff was wonderful about that. She slept beside Aengus in the hospital almost every night from then on, until he came home for Christmas.

  ‘It’s a catastrophe!’ As a journalist at the top of his profession, Aengus chose his words advisedly. His short utterance in my presence was making known that the incomprehensible misfortune of being diagnosed with lung cancer, a disease which was progressing, was a tragedy whose dénouement ended in disaster. ‘Crown is hoping to shrink the tumour with the chemo,’ he explained, but his tone sounded unconvinced. ‘I think I’d be better off out of it altogether, if I don’t improve. This is no life. I sleep alright with the drugs, but it’s not a restful sleep. I can’t read anymore. I just sit here, waiting.’ He’d been staring straight ahead, his head on the pillow. ‘It’s like an out-of-body experience,’ he said, incredulously. ‘I’m looking on, and I don’t know what day is which. Did you find that?’

  ‘Yes, Aengus.’

  ‘Sure, what’s the point in that?’

  I was listening intently to what he had to say, and there was consent in my silence. On another occasion, I named it emotionally for him: ‘You have great suffering, Aengus,’ which seemed to take him by surprise. He said nothing in response, perhaps unwilling as a man not to downplay it, but he pondered what I was saying. Some days later, I overheard him admit to Lucy, who was busy affixing tabs to his chest in order to take a cardiograph, ‘I’m very sick, you know.’ I questioned whether I was one of the only people around Aengus who gave him the freedom to think about giving up the fight, since everyone’s effort was aimed at getting him better. All the members of his team had managed, without lying, to keep up his morale. I felt his subversive thoughts to be more in tune with the rebellious demands of his spirit, a truth he was silently concealing out of respect for the resolute efforts of the medical team, and of his loved ones. I saw the evident love and protection with which all three of his adult sons, Dion, Evan and Stephen, surrounded their father. At various times, I witnessed each of them solidly by his side, publicly holding his hand. How could their father willingly break those links, and abandon them?