Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  Ophelia appeared, refreshed. She had rung the owner, who was perfectly agreeable to my moving to Ca’an D’Or, and we would go to the estate office and get the keys. It turned out to be even more friendless. A square modern house, set down in the middle of a field, with no olive or lemon groves around it. The central heating did indeed come on at the press of a giant white switch, but the racket from several fans was such that it would preclude any possibility of writing. It was decided that I would stay in a pensión in the old town at night and each morning take a taxi back to the finca to work in solitude. In the one pensión that was open, the patrón gave us the keys to the two upstairs rooms, to choose which one I preferred. They were identical. One looked onto a square and the other onto a narrow street, which I settled for, thinking it would be quieter.

  After Ophelia left to catch her plane, I saw crowds gather in the square and learned that the fiesta known as Calle di Calvari was happening that evening. It was for Sant Antoni, Saint Anthony, patron saint of farm animals, who had already been blessed in the farms earlier in the morning. There would be a pilgrimage, which entailed climbing 365 steps to a small chapel that nestled at the top. This was known as Calvary. Along the way there were beautiful homes, gardens, and even shops. I got halfway up to Calvary, but by then the first pilgrims were on the way down and breathless from the climb. I turned back with them down to the square. It was already lit with the lights of numerous paper lanterns, and loud drumbeats signaled the commencement of the revels. A witching night. A night of wine and wassail and a huge banner with black lettering that read EVERYTHING LICIT IN THIS NIGHT OF FIRE. Having done the penance of the climb, people were in high spirits as they trooped into the square for the bacchanalia. Harlequins and Columbines, their faces ghostly, danced about, and children danced with them and ran in mock horror from the devils, whose horns, fresh from the slaughterhouse, dripped with blood. Youths were dragging a huge tree across to the steps of the church to set fire to it, and a woman who was closing her stall sold me a knitted shawl for half price, a grudging expression on her face.

  Marcel Proust has described bells as being “resilient and ferruginous,” but in that small room in that pensión, on a narrow bed with the pale green band of light from the clock radio, they were bold and presumptuous, punctuating the wretched hours.

  “Nobody sleeps at fiesta, madam,” the daughter of the house said, as I came down very early to give back the keys. The deposit I had to forgo, since, as she said, her father had arranged the best terms possible for me, and moreover, they could have let the room to an honorable person. The square in the early morning was deserted, the yellow sandstone of the church of Nostra Senyora dels Àngels drained of sunshine, as an elderly woman with a soft green broom swept the debris away. The church door was closed, but I recalled its interior, so ornate, figures of the Virgin, angels, and saints caparisoned in gold, their arms bedecked with it, gold crowns on their heads.

  In the bodega I bought things that did not need cooking, picturing as I did the electric stove still in its wrapping inside the kitchen door of the villa. Almonds, tins of sardines, salt biscuits, and stuffed olives. On the way down the steep passageway, in the window of a shut boutique, the female dummies in fawn bast, with their little turrety breasts, were huddled in a heap, as if someone had vacated the place in high dudgeon. At the side window was the name and telephone number of a gentleman who did shiatsu massage, and I copied it down carefully.

  On my way back I kept asking the taxi driver to go slowly. “Lento lento,” I would say, so that I could note some landmarks in order to give directions to the masseur. There was a roundabout, then a left turning, then a sculpture of a rooster, red-brown and not very beautiful, then a belt of trees where the road got dark, a monastery on a hill, which he told me the name of, Puig de Santa Mar’a. He was in a hurry. The car bounced over the narrower roads and the bumpy stone bridges, and I barely had time to catch sight of the wild cat on the hoarding.

  “El gato,” I said.

  “Salvaje,” he said, and soon after swerved to the right, barely missing a tree, and onto the rough track that I saw in daylight to be sand-colored.

  “Salvaje?”

  He shrugged and said tourists were “loco loco” to go into the forest where the wild cats lived. He was annoyed at having to get out to open the green gates, and then it was on down past the olive groves and the vineyards to the villa, in which I was hostaged for eleven days.

  There were heartening signs. The gardener had come. A fire blazed and crackled in the huge grate. The bole of wood had been pushed back and served as a sort of chimneypiece, and the tall logs had been placed pyramid-wise to allow for a draft. He had filled three wheelbarrows with wood, assuring me that I would have enough until he returned on the Thursday. “Jueves. Jueves.” On that day also, oil would be delivered. I inquired about the solitary sheep under the ruin, and all he said was “Estúpido, estúpido.” Seeing the books and the notebooks, he asked if I was a “Profesora,” and wanly I said I was not.

  After he had gone, I decided to have the massage that very day, to arrive at the “mucha calma” state, a phrase that I had discovered in my phrase book. Everything depended on this Japanese man; his Zen-like touch would do wonders for my raveled, unslept state. A woman answered the telephone, and I could not tell whether she was Japanese or Mallorcan. She was the essence of courtesy. I communicated with the help of a dictionary: no sleep, nervous. “Nerviosa,” she repeated, and said that her husband would come immediately, as it was obligatory for him to help all people nervioso. Three o’clock. “A las tres.” “Es a la disposicion de usted.” He would be at my disposal. She wrote down the directions as I spoke them in English, with smatterings of Spanish. He must take the road out from Pollensa, past the roundabout, past the esculpido, cockerel, and then the arco of dark trees and the “Puig,” where the monastery was. He will think, I told her, that he is going nowhere as the roads become narrow and narrower and bumpy, but he must persevere until he gets to the bridge, el puente, and the picture of the cat, el gato. He will go down an empty road until he comes to a green gate and then up the drive, the camino, to the entrada, where I would be waiting, waiting. “A las tres.”

  I carried the duvet down, along with towels and sheets, to be near the fire, believing that he would bring a massage table. Now and then I went out, just to see if his car was coming. I was not too concerned when by three-thirty he had not arrived. She assured me that he would stay as long as I wished, one hour, two hours, whatever my requirement. Several times I stood on the terrace flapping my arms idiotically so that he would see me as he turned the last loop of the private camino. Rushing to answer the ringing phone, I skidded on the stone floor, barely avoiding casualty. My agitation conveyed itself to the woman, who assured me that he was on his way, he had been doing so for two hours, but sadly he had mistaken the directions and was without a map. “No carreteras,” she said, no roads, but I must not trouble, as it was obligatory for him to help those in pain or nervioso. I repeated the directions, the roundabout, the arco of trees, the rooster, the bridge, the dirt track, and so on, as my faith in this expedition began to falter.

  With each new phone call things became more misconstrued, her voice shriller as she repeated words I had unwisely spoken, very little light, getting more dark, narrow lane, it seem nothing, you feel you are nowhere, but you must persevere until you come to green gate. I decided that I would walk to the top of the avenue or even beyond and watch for his car, which was a red Honda.

  The light began to fade, and I felt something soft on my cheeks, feathery, like a moth wing, except that it was snow, a thing almost unheard of on that island, snow that turned watery as it fell. I could hear sounds of motorcycles revving up and became convinced that local thugs had heard of my arrival, a señora sola, in a villa alone, and were setting out on a maraud. I ran the whole way back to the house, and the phone stopped its ringing just as I entered. I took this to be a good sign, that she was merely ring
ing to say he would be arriving presently. I thought this all the more, since she did not ring back again at once. I read the leaflets that I had taken from the church and the pensión, simply to pass the time. Saint Anthony was a Coptic saint from Egypt, a saint of the desert, and father of all monks who went into the wilderness. He was tempted by the devil with boredom, laziness, and phantoms of women, and when that did not break him, the phantoms of women converted to wild beasts, wolves, lions, snakes, and cats. A life-long hermit, he wove mats of rushes. Next I read of the olive tree, cited in the Iliad and in the Bible, native to the coastal areas of the Mediterranean basin, western Asia, North Africa, and northern Iran, at the south end of the Caspian Sea, distantly related to lilac, jasmine, and true ash trees and more disposed to poorer soil. An olive leaf was what a dove brought back to Noah, when the flood had ended.

  All seemed propitious.

  Shadows were thickening under the high wooden arches, and I did not have to put my face to the window to know that daylight was gone, completely gone; it would be pitch-dark out there, partly snowing, the terrace, the olive trees, the orange garden, the tennis court, and poor estúpido Damien Hirst all swallowed up in it. I dare not step outside, as I might slip or miss a step. The telephone rang. Her equanimity had been sorely tried. Her husband had had to turn around and go home, as the obscurement became too great. There were muchas puentes, many bridges, but sadly not the bridge that would have led him to me.

  I knew, as I know each time, that the entire journey—the extra canvas bag that I had to buy at Gatwick airport in order to remove some of the books from the overfilled suitcase, the notebooks with the references to the poisoned flowers of the Borgias, black Pluto’s door, the pensión, and the aggravation of the ringing bells—had all been for one reason only, to postpone the terror of starting the book that I both did and did not want to write.

  The only sound in that room was the hissing as water from the green wood that I had inadvertently thrown on the fire was sucked up by the gleeful flame.

  The North

  To write about the North was to enter troubled waters, wrath and accusation from some, fractured friendships, along with the sneering insinuation that I was “sleeping with Provos.” Such was the accusation, in a restaurant in Dublin, the author Hugh Leonard called across to me, for all to hear.

  I admired those who had written about war, especially Hemingway, Orwell, and Auden. But this was a different war, the “dirty war,” as it has been named, fought openly and in shadows, death and devastation by the IRA, the four Protestant paramilitary organizations, the security forces, and the British army—street battles, curfews, terror and counterterror, car bombs, booby traps, honey traps, roadblocks, assassinations, ambushes, feud deaths, punishment beatings, and the murky world of agents and double agents, a war where courage and criminality overlapped, a war where ideals were shafted in the all-out hurrah of victory.

  My mother, in her letters to me, would dwell on these atrocities as she read of them, pitying the living that had to go to the mortuaries to identify their own, often merely by a coat button, a buckle, or a shoe. She saw the pity of war; whereas, for many in the South, increasingly the IRA were the “mindless hooligans” who brought shame on their fellow Catholics and a stain on the altar of the nation. The “mindless hooligans” on the other side were not nearly so vehemently rebuked.

  The first thing I would notice when I went to Belfast in 1974 was the light. A gray, rainy light, working-class Protestant and Catholic houses, identical, Lilliputian size, the presence of mountain and sea, and heaped clouds that cried out for poetry and not bloodshed.

  Here were two sides who shared a language and a landscape, yet with an atavistic zeal, claiming it as their lawful birthright. I was amazed at how people went about their daily business, but there were always the sirens and the covert fear of worse havoc at any moment. No corner shop, no pub, no car park, no disco, no filling station, no lay-by was without the “miasma” (as Seamus Heaney called it) of spilled blood. There would be no Guernica, or no Homage to Catalonia for this; it was as Anna Akhmatova said of her years under Stalin, “My muse has been flogged to death.” It bore no resemblance to the rebellions of yore, the ones I had learned about at school, rebellions crushed in a matter of days, the last being Easter 1916, of which Yeats wrote the beautiful cathartic poem of “sweet and daring” men. This was a war that reached epic magnitude, slaughter and counterslaughter, which on paper could be termed Jacobean but in life became a gruesome statistic of death and mutilation, so that, as in Hamlet’s Elsinore, “carnal, bloody and unnatural acts” were committed by all sides.

  It was not that there were no stories; it was that there were so many, barbaric and inchoate, often defying human comprehension. To take one week alone in the history of the province is to give an example of the madness, the mayhem. It was 1988, when three unarmed members of the IRA, in Gibraltar, who were probably intending to carry out an attack, were shot in the street by the SAS, and their bodies, flown home to Dublin, were met by thousands as the cortège headed for Belfast. At Milltown Cemetery in west Belfast there were thousands more mourners when a loyalist gunman launched an attack, firing a handgun and throwing hand grenades. He was chased and followed by dozens of Catholic men, three of whom he killed in the chase, and then out onto the motorway, where they caught him and beat him unconscious, until a police car arrived and he was carted away. A few days later, at the funeral for one of the three men whom he had killed, two British army corporals mistakenly drove their vehicle into the cemetery, and the nationalists, believing it was a repetition of the attack of a few days previous, pulled the two men from the car and shot them. It would need Dante, from down among the damned, to grasp the convolutions and repercussions of that week alone: cold murder, mad murders, hatred and revenge in all its sunken, telluric depths. Poison and fear and funerals.

  Two buses left the city center twice a week for Long Kesh prison, one for Catholics and one for Protestants. I saw the faces of mothers and wives, wearied, stoic, lugging parcels, lugging children, faces that, if one were to see them in Dublin or London or New York, one could not say, This is a Catholic face or This is a Protestant face. Then unexpectedly, the needling bitterness. I boarded the Protestant bus by mistake, and on hearing my southern accent, a woman told me to get off and go with my own lot, “the Fenian scum.” What I will never forget on that bus journey is a plucky little boy, aged about six, walking up and down the aisle, index finger pointed, saying to each person, or each pair of persons, the interrogative word “So?” I would write that, except that I couldn’t. Did his mother teach him rebel songs? Would he grow up to be a gunman, or would the stalled peace initiatives eventually succeed?

  What price peace,

  Will it cost us all our lives?

  And when there’s no one left to die

  Will peace come then?

  What price peace, is it coming, is it gone?

  The Catholic youth Stephen McCann, who wrote that song, has a white cross bearing his name erected alongside thousands of other white crosses for innocent victims, in the grounds of City Hall, Belfast. He paid for it with his life. As he returned from a dance at Queen’s University at two in the morning with his girlfriend, he was picked up by some Shankill Butchers, bundled into a car, and driven to a remote place, where he was shot in the head and his throat cut, something that happened on Saturday nights, when they went with knives and cleavers to get a “Taig.”

  Yet when their leader was shot by the IRA, hundreds of loving eulogies appeared in the columns of the Belfast Telegraph, including one from his aunt, which read, “Nothing could be more beautiful than the memories we have of you, to us you were very special and God must have thought so too.”

  Over the years I would hear the harrowing tales of the mothers robbed of their children in atrocities committed by one side or the other. There was the little revenant Julie Livingstone, killed by a plastic bullet in a police riot, who had written her name with a crayo
n in the airing cupboard, under the stove, and on the inside of the wallpaper, for her mother to find after her death. There was a Catholic mother who had gone to live with a man in a Protestant area whose house was bombed by loyalists, and though she managed to jump out of a window, calling to her children inside to go to the stairs, the stairs had already gone up in a sheet of flame and the three children taken. There was a Protestant mother who had lost a son when the IRA bombed a fish shop in Shankill Road, who chained herself to the exit turnstile of Long Kesh prison to confront his killer, who was due a ten-day Christmas parole. Anne Maguire was wheeling a pram on a road in west Belfast, her other two children along with her, when a car swerved out of control, up onto the pavement, and crushed them. It was a getaway car, driven by an IRA member, his comrade Danny Lennon beside him, having just been shot dead by a soldier in an armor-plated Land Rover. She was unconscious for two weeks, but when she came to and had to learn the fate of her children, she could not believe it, as she had not seen them buried. The loss was too much, and eventually she cut her wrists with an electric carving knife and left a note asking to be forgiven.

  When the IRA bombed England, the fear and apprehension were palpable, one woman asking me in dismay why the Irish would want to kill innocent people in Manchester or Birmingham or London. It was useless to cite history or the chain of deaths surrounding Anne Maguire. But reactions in Ireland were different, more personal, more heated, more challenging, and at times vacillating. When in 1974 loyalists set off three car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan one day, inflicting the greatest slaughter so far, dozens of people were killed in the rush hour, dozens more injured; it was said that the morgues were the grimmest places Ireland had seen in a long time. That grimness could hardly be mitigated when an Ulster Defence Association spokesman said, “I am very happy about the bombings in Dublin. There is a war with the Free State, and now we are laughing at them.”