I peered at him, thinking ‘how’s the bloody blarney today?’ He was about twenty-nine and looked like a shabby leprechaun, with his red hair and mischievous eyes set in a pudgy, pasty face—what I could see of it in the midst of a long, red beard, which reached down as far as where the top button of his yellow shirt would have been if the shirt had had a button. Rory was so small and Bohemian that if Antonio had been a dancing girl instead of a funereal, elderly bar-owner, you would have thought Rory was Toulouse-Lautrec sitting in the Moulin Rouge.
“Top o’ the morn to you!” Rory was the only real Irishman I ever met who actually said this.
“Hi, Rory,” I sighed. I sat down opposite him with my back to the bodega door. Behind Rory there was a grimy picture of Jesus holding a heart, dripping dollops of blood, surrounded by a halo. Christ was gazing upward and to one side. I sighed again.
Rory took a swig of his beer with a lascivious look in his blue-green button eyes.
“How the hell can you drink that stuff at this time in the morning?” I kidded him.
“Cap’n Jones,” he replied irascibly, “will you stop . . . It’s a clock-watcher you are. It’s Barclay’s Bank you should be workin’ in, beJasus!”
Antonio put a beer in front of me as sadly as if it were a death-sentence.
“Yeah, I’d nick the lot and have it away on my toes so fast you’d think I’d a rocket up my jacksy . . .”
“So you would, an’ all, so you would, indeed you would, even if it’s myself that says it, I do believe you would!” said Rory. “I see ye’ve the black dog on ye this fine day, and anyway, me lad, how’s your Celtic face and the Gaelic heart of ye, old son?”
“O’Boggarty,” said I, sensing his sarcasm, “it’s a shit-face I have this morning, and my heart’s the heart of a Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty, as black as thunder and as hard as Portland granite!”
“Ach, areen,” replied Rory, “so it’s missing your navy days, you are old son?”
As I listened, half amused, half furious, O’Boggarty quietly and sonorously, in his flat yet lovely sounding round-voweled Western Irish voice, quoted Joyce: “That’s your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the earth. The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber on the face of God’s earth and their lands in the hands of a dozen gamehogs and cottonball barons. That’s the great empire they boast about of drudges and whipped serfs . . .”
“Oh, come off it, O’Boggarty,” I interjected. “That’s been over and done with these twenty . . . forty years past.”
Rory’s voice rose now, and his words—Joyce’s words—rolled and reverberated from the dirty walls of the bodega. “They believe in rod,” he roared, as with the end of each phrase he banged a closed, pudgy fist on the table, “the scourger almighty, creator of hell on earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried . . .” O’Boggarty’s eyes gleamed now with a rascally joy as he watched me wincing . . . “yelled like bloody hell, the third day he rose again from the bed, steered into haven, and sitteth on his beam end until further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.”
O’Boggarty’s quote, as he well knew, was word-for-word perfectly accurate. I screwed up my forehead as I quoted back at him: “But, says Bloom, isn’t discipline the same everywhere? I mean wouldn’t it be the same here if you put force against force?”
“Ah!” O’Boggarty shouted with delight. “Ah ha!” He laid his bottle of beer down, rubbed his lips with his wrist, and went on now in a low, melodramatic tone: “Didn’t I tell you? As true as I’m drinkin’ this porter if he was at his last gasp he’d try to downface you that dying was living.”
Rory, keeping a half-malicious grin on his face and his gleaming elf’s eyes on me, half-turned his head away. Then, after a moment or two, his eyes left mine, his grin dissolved, and he slumped down further and stared at his almost-empty bottle, which dully returned his look as if it were bereaved by the loss of its former contents.
“How’s it goin’, Rory?” I murmured.
The little Irishman perked up and smiled at me hugely. “The very best, it is!” He reached in his pocket. He brought out a large, bent envelope. He scuffled it open with his white, soft, pudgy fingers. He riffled through a pile of English banknotes, an inch thick, all fivers by the look of them. Again he grinned from ear to ear. “Enough for six months’ booze,” he said, and winked one gnome’s eye at me. “Six hundred of the best!”
“So you got your advance through?” I knew he had been waiting anxiously for a publisher’s advance on a “long novel” (not a word of which had so far been written).
“Yeah, Sleazy Frank brought it back from London for me, like I asked him to. Can’t trust the Spanish mails . . .” O’Boggarty replaced the money in his pocket, all the while watching me—for traces, I suppose, of envy. But of course I gave him no satisfaction, for I had none. Sissie’s allowance was due, and that would see us over until my next delivery job, which was already arranged. Instead, I looked around the bodega. Antonio, sad-eyed as a hanged spaniel; O’Boggarty, happy as a Hobbit, and I were the only people in the bar.
“Not many people about today,” I remarked, to break the silence. “And those that are look like they’re going to a bloomin’ palace investiture.”
“Or an execution,” commented O’Boggarty.
“I wonder what the score is, Rory?”
The little elf scowled at me. He was like a bearded baby doll frowning. “You don’t know what day it is today?” he asked. I kept silent as I looked at him. I found myself, as usual in harbor (never at sea), trying to remember the date.
“Sure, it’s the day of All Saints,” he continued. “It’s the day when they . . . all us good Christians, at least . . . remember all our loved ones who’ve passed away . . .” (He looked serious as a judge while he said this.) Then his eyes took on a dreamy glaze, and I knew another quote was coming . . . “across the bourne from which no traveler returns.”
“You mean who’ve kicked the bucket?”
Rory O’Boggarty leaned his hairy head back and closed his eyes. “Acch!” he intoned, “God save us from the coarseness of the Cymry, the waggishness of the Welsh, fellow Celts though they be. Sweet Mary in heaven, help us poor Irish souls!”
I grinned at his kobold head as he leaned it forward onto his chest and sighed, closing his eyes. Then he opened them again and stared at me, an imperious imp. “Cap’n Jones,” he announced gravely, “it’s no great respect for the dear departed that you have.”
“Aah!” (I was enjoying myself now that I was getting back at him.) “It’s a load of bullshit, O’Boggarty. It’s little to do with respect for the dead. All it is, is . . . pity for the living, that’s all!”
O’Boggarty’s face clouded darkly.
I went on . . . “Self-pity, mainly, that’s what it is. ‘Oh, poor me, look at poor little me, left all alone.’”
I cocked two fingers at Antonio, silently ordering two beers. “The best way you can respect the dead is to live your own life as best you can, and for God’s sake show more respect for the living.”
Rory’s leprechaun eyes danced in fury at the challenge. I had touched a raw nerve of a man who resented having been brought up in a repressive home and had been, to compound his self-torment, educated by Jesuits.
I gave the screw another twist. “The best way that you can show respect for the dead is to do your best to share their belief in life, but in your life, and by putting your life ahead of their deaths. I think more of one living child or a leaping dolphin than I do of all the generations of dead who ever lived!”
“Then you’re a hypocrite!” shouted O’Boggarty, his Irish up. “You told me that you could not imagine life without the works of great writers of the past—Plato and
Homer and Shakespeare and Blake . . .”
“Don’t forget Joyce,” I taunted.
“They don’t really mean a thing to you if you’ve no respect for the dead . . .” He took a swig of his new beer. “I’ve suspected it, sure, from the very first time I saw you and heard you, Cap’n Jones—it’s a bloody Druid you are! A drooling Druid! An idling idolator . . .”
“Better than being a nattering necrolator!”
O’Boggarty slumped down even farther into his rickety chair. Again he closed his eyes. Slowly he wagged his head from side to side.
“It’s the little things that make up life, Rory,” I said.
Still with his eyes closed, O’Boggarty asked in a low voice, “Then you don’t believe in a hereafter?”
“I don’t know, but if there is a hereafter, it surely can’t be anything like this life, and if it’s not like this one, then where will all the gladness and delight, the pleasure and joy, be? Where will all the life be? If there isn’t joy and delight and pleasure . . . and yes, pain and misery and suffering, too, then how the heck can it be life? And if there isn’t any life, then how can it be an afterlife?”
As I spoke O’Boggarty slowly wagged his red-shocked head from side to side, wisely, as if he were a Sunday-school teacher listening to an inquisitive child asking who created God, and why, and when, and how many of them were there?
He was silent for a whole minute, until, suddenly, the whole tiny bodega bar-room seemed to fill with people. He opened his eyes with a start. He stared in the gloom at the intruders for a second or two, then his face lit up like a boy whose kite has been lifted for the first time by a breeze. “Josélito!” he roared, “Cómo estás, amigo?”
Rory quickly stood up, all five-and-a-bit feet of him, and thrust his strangely small, childlike hand in front of him. The Castilian language, spoken in the accent of County Limerick, is a wonder to the ears, at least to mine, but the newcomer, who was now vigorously shaking the hand of the Green Land, evidently understood him perfectly. I turned to inspect the new arrival who had interrupted my revenge on O’Boggarty. As I did so, my attention was caught by the other figures which darkened the already dark bodega and made it seem suddenly crowded.
There was a woman—small, rotund, and dressed completely in black—her hair gleaming under a black shawl. She had one arm still lingering through the door as she awkwardly turned her body and shyly smiled at O’Boggarty. The hand on the end of the lingering arm gently rocked a perambulator, on which was balanced, precariously, it seemed to me, a large raffia-work hamper. On top of the hamper sat a little girl of three or so, while from behind the hamper gazed the red and well-fed face of a fat baby, which violently shook a rattle. It was as if the fat baby knew that both O’Boggarty and I had hangovers which would have made a rainy day after Ballinasloe Horse Fair, with every sweepstake stub in Galway swirling around in the sodden wind, and every man’s hand shaking for twenty miles around, look like the midnight Christmas Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
I recoiled, winced, cringed, and flinched as I stared at the fat baby. Every time it shook the rattle it drooled and laughed at me. Inside the door, clinging to the dark little woman’s skirts, were two little dark, well-dressed boys, both on their best behavior, looking ineffably bored. And so they should, I thought, as I studied them. It was, after all, the Day of the Dead, and on this holy day of dread not even little boys should be little boys; it might disturb the spirits of the underworld, and then what would become of us?
I turned to inspect the man who was shaking hands with Rory. For a moment, as I took in his black suit, black fedora, and black armband, I didn’t recognize him. Then he turned to me and flashed a wide smile as he stabbed a hard, calloused hand at me and crinkled his blue eyes. With a shock I realized that this was José, one of the fishermen who, in their blue denim pants and jackets, and straw sandals, waved cheery greetings to me out on the bay, and sometimes slapped my back in the bodega and hola’d and Cómo está’d me, grinning and joking, on normal, everyday Days of the Living. José and I had something in common—we had both served in the navies of our respective lands. For that reason José’s Castilian was good and understandable.
“How are you, Señor Jones?” He pronounced my name “Honays.”
“I see you’re all dressed up,” I observed stupidly. “Going to church today?”
“Si, Todos los Santos . . . All Saints Day.” José gave O’Boggarty and me a weak, sad grin as the Irishman flashed a warning look my way.
José looked at O’Boggarty. “You’re Irish,” he said.
Rory nodded, his wide-open, innocent eyes dead serious.
“Catholic?” asked José.
“Yes, of course!” said O’Boggarty, as if he’d never spent an hour in his life ridiculing his Jesuit teachers in Dublin.
José turned to me. “English,” he stated.
“No, Welsh,” I replied. I didn’t wait for The Question. “But we have our own church—it’s sort of like the Catholic church, only we don’t have popes, we have poets.”
That went completely over José’s head. O’Boggarty glowered darkly at me from under his brow and paid for José’s glass of wine; wine so red it looked as if it had been collected from the drips of the bleeding-heart picture on the wall.
José beamed at me. “Good. Look, you don’t have your ancestors here—your family dead—so why don’t you come along with us? We will not be long in church, and then we are going to the cemetery for lunch.”
He did not bother to ask Señora José if it was in order. Instead he reached over to the eldest of his two silent little lads, who must have been about eight, and firmly pulled the boy to his side. “We have a whole piglet. Roasted. Manuelito here killed it last night on the kitchen table.” He squeezed his eldest son’s shoulder proudly. “Cut its throat. It took the little whore at least a half-hour to lose its blood and die . . . and the noise, señors, you should have heard it! Yes, Manuelito did a good job. We’re very proud of him, very proud indeed. He’s going to be a big, strong man, just like his father, hey?” José turned and shot a beam at his wife, who duly fluttered her face as she gazed at her eldest.
José, glowing with pride, turned back to O’Boggarty and me. His face took on a crafty aspect. He looked as if he knew what would entice us for sure. “Wine, too—I’ve four whole carafes! And a chicken, and shrimp, and roasted potatoes, and fish . . . She cooks fish muy bien, the best in Ibiza!”
Rory O’Boggarty laughed. “Sure!” he cried in his best Limerick-Castilian, as he grasped the little pig-slaughterer’s hand and shook it. “Sure, Josélito, Capitán Honays and I will be very happy to come with you!”
I nipped back to Cresswell and left a note for Sissie: “Gone to Hades, back at four.” Then I half-ran to catch up with the rotund little fisherman, his rotund little wife, the pig-sticker boy, the innocent younger-yet boy, their silent ladylike daughter, the rattle-waving, malicious baby, and the diminutive, red-headed Irish leprechaun, as they wended their way gravely to the church.
The mass was sung by a lavishly caparisoned priest, surprisingly young-looking. His Latin was good, even though he called out the words as if he were reading off a ship’s manifest. The crowd—and it was a crowd—packed the church and, unemotionally, it seemed to me, chanted the responses and made the proper motions, presumably at the proper times. During the high point of the mass, however, while the host was raised by the priest, I was distracted by a small bird which had somehow strayed into the building and was now the cynosure of the eyes of everyone in the congregation under the age of fourteen. This pleased me greatly. After the mass was over I stepped outside jauntily, thinking about the little bird. It was as if God had sent us a lighthearted reminder that He was still alive and well and thinking of us—or at least of the children.
We reached the town cemetery, half as old as time and twice as old as space, after a walk of a mile or so
. Rory O’Boggarty, who had emerged from the church as if his book had just been featured on a best-seller list, was something of an authority on the history of Ibiza. “Sure, this cemetery was originally a heathen burial site—that’s before the Phoenicians arrived and built a temple here, dedicated to their chief female goddess, it was. Her name was Tannit.”
“Sounds like a sunburn lotion,” said I, trying to keep the party as lighthearted as I’d felt watching the bird flutter around in the gloomy church.
“Acch, it’s a terrible man y’are at your lessons!” said the leprechaun, hurling a glower at me, but good-naturedly.
The whole Ibizan family was smiling at him, with the exception of the fat baby, who threw its rattle at him and pouted a deep frown. I immediately made up my mind to buy the baby a real rattle, a real man’s rattle—like the ones they whirl at international soccer matches—as soon as I could, and to put the child at the very top of my Christmas list.
At a dignified pace, with O’Boggarty holding forth on the history of every clump of grass we passed, we all proceeded up a grassy knoll, which was bestrewn with tombs. Not your everyday, Calvinistic flat slabs, which look so definite and permanent, as if whoever is below them will never get out, under any circumstances; no, these were more like small cottages, but covered with carvings of angels and cherubs (some of which looked startlingly like the fat baby—I made up my mind to buy it a trumpet instead of a rattle). Some of the family vaults looked like little palaces, as if doting parents had ordered tiny models of Versailles to be built for their spoiled royal brats. I noted that the people who were gathered gravely around these stone wedding cakes were, in the main, wealthy-looking.
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