Deadly Confederacies
Page 5
So, her father was dead, and she was given a day off school, like all the other children. An Archbishop’s death, especially one of his standing and influence, was a notable event.
It is neither here nor there how the shell containing the secret was cracked open. There is proof at the end of my words to you – a facsimile of a letter. The original is kept in a safe place. There is no anger in me toward the Archbishop and the nun whom he loved. If they had not come together I would not have met Eleanor, had two beautiful sons, and a granddaughter, and the child’s mother in my life. I have no anger, just a profound sorrow that runs deep to the heart and beyond. I want the Church to open itself to the world about Eleanor, to hand back my wife’s real identity to her openly. In other words, to create a miracle for me: for the Church to
come clean.
I have no more to say. But this does not mean that I should have the last word.
The Letter from the Archbishop to his daughter.
My dearest Eleanor,
By the time you read this you will be, God willing, in the prime of your life. It was my express wish that you were not to be told of the circumstances surrounding your birth and of your parentage until at least thirty years after my death. My primary concern was to protect you, your mother and your foster parents from unnecessary and stressful intrusions into your lives. You are by now aware of the position I held in life, and that there are very many who will not give you a moment’s peace when this secret breaks. I ask you not to divulge it until your children have grown.
Emma, your mother, is a very good person and a very spiritual woman. I loved her from the moment I laid eyes on her. Our friendship spanned for over forty years, and during all this time I was head-over-heels in love with her. Every breath of mine wanted to be with her, to be in her company. I wore your mother down over that period, Eleanor, and I would have given everything up for her and to be with you both. Your mother is a special woman, and I don’t have to explain this to you; members of your real family will tell you. You too have her gift, and often, throughout your life, I am sure it has caused you much strife.
I feel that this was God’s curse on me for my sins: to fall in love, to create a beautiful human being, and to have it all taken away from me. I am not a young man, and I’m going to my grave with a heavy and broken heart – broken by an immeasurable sense of loss, and at my hardness of stance and lack of forgiveness concerning certain matters. If a priest had fallen as I had done I would have had him severely chastised and banished. I see now that I failed in things where there was no need to fail. There are matters I know of, Eleanor, beyond the scope of the ordinary human, and yet I served a lengthy period in ministry not comprehending the power that is love.
I love your mother and I love you. Every wakeful moment, both of you are in my mind and in my heart.
Above all else good that I would wish for you, it is my hope that you find stability and peace in your life. Sometimes people don’t find stability until they reach old age; some people have it all their lives and then lose it in old age.
I would like you to remember this when you pray, and I hope you can find it in your heart to do that, for me. It was written by Yaakov Yitzchak, the Seer of Lublin who passed away in 1815 (you know by now of the Brahan Seer, your ancestor – such things the spirits have to tell us).
‘I love more the wicked man who knows he is wicked than the righteous man who knows that he is righteous. The first one is truthful, and the Lord loves truth. The second one falsifies, since no human being is exempt from sin, and the Lord hates untruth.’
Each time we forget this, Satan wins a battle and finds a home.
I will watch over you, my dearest darling Eleanor.
Laurence
xxx
Taming the Wolves
Every morning at the small café, he sits under the wine-coloured awning, from nine to midday, and watches the tourists, pilgrims, local people and pigeons. The skies too, the patterns of cloud, the contrails of jets. Feels the breeze and hears the songs from buskers and radio. Listens to the barrage of voices. Sometimes he feigns interest in a newspaper article, but he does so to lose the focus of someone watching him. Watchers are watched too, he understands.
He is a man with little else to do with his life. So, he sits and drinks espresso and picks at a Danish pastry, perhaps two. And looks, listens …. Why he likes to do this is beyond him. Natural curiosity? Distraction? It is, he supposes, something that brings him from the centre of his own being, not entirely a distraction, but close. His name is Garcia Leary, a 39-year-old son of an Irish turf-cutter and a runaway Irish nun. Bob was his childhood name. Garcia was his since he was 19, a nickname. It was one of two. The other, Spanner, was because of his olive skin colouring, perhaps caused by some errant Spanish chromosome.
At about noon, he always leaves for home, to an apartment down a cobbled laneway, not far from the Roman Arena, where once he had listened to Pavarotti. He has lived in Verona for three years, and shares an apartment with a woman eight years his senior, although he thinks that she might be a little older. Not that age matters, and she has weathered the years rather well. She is slim, brunette, with short hair and green eyes he no longer knows how to read, for all his skill at looking.
He used to busk, playing his guitar in nightclubs and cafés, singing popular songs, along with some ballads he had written himself, though he no longer sings, plays his guitar or writes songs. It is as though he has changed persona, become an altogether different man to the one who had walked out on his wife and son seven years ago, because he felt that, if he hadn’t, the wires in his head would have melted. He had come close to harming himself and others.
He buys the day’s groceries in a small corner shop two doors from the apartment. He walks with a lopsided gait, a result of a traffic accident eighteen months earlier. His skeletal frame badly shaken in the collision, he is sure that the full consequences upon his health have yet to mature. Maria had been driving. She’d entered an inner-city roundabout with her eyes on a handsome Latino pedestrian, and pulled out in front of a white Berlingo van. His side took the full whack. He sustained two broken ribs and a broken ankle. Whenever he is stressed his head pounds, and there are days when an inexplicable tiredness falls upon him – it is not a tiredness cured by sleep. In fact, he does not know how best to describe these bouts of tiredness, other than to say that it feels as though something has abruptly vacuumed away his energy. Maria apologises now and then, especially after he catches her looking at the wreck he has become; her sculptured ruin. Worry and concern written are all over her elfin face, sown deeply in there alongside the guilt. He has no head for much, except watching. Apart from the headaches and bouts of tiredness, there is the neck pain. Constant, but tolerable – when it is not, he takes painkillers. But he does not tally his aches and pains to her, nor does he ever complain of the discomfort. The van driver died, leaving behind a wife and two sons. Maria’s mind has much with which to contend, and he would not swap places. Besides, if he were to badger her, she would up and leave him. He ignores the fact that people can badger with silence, too.
She works part-time as an English teacher, and is usually at home before him. He knows she is not in, because the mail is lying on the blue doormat. He ascends the stairs, grocery bag in one hand, the other gripping the wooden handrail. Two of the screws in brackets holding the rail to the lime-coloured wall have worked loose, and they lie on the bare stair amid a film of plaster dust and brown plastic plugs. He leans too heavily on the railing – he keeps forgetting. Although he knows she is not at home, he calls her name. Momentarily, it seems to fill the silence and the emptiness. The landing is narrow. The attic trapdoor is of glass to allow natural light to grace the hall and the stairway, which had previously always needed a shining light bulb to chase away their gloom.
‘Maria,’ he calls, entering the apartment.
The clock with the gilded roman numerals on its red face tells him she is way past home time. He wonders if he should call her. She doesn’t like him to ring her at work. He checks his phone. A message. Ah … she has to see someone, so will be late. Won’t be long. Why hadn’t he heard her message beep on his phone? Do I go so deep into myself that I’m deaf to the world?
He makes a sandwich, sprinkles oregano over slices of beef tomato, and takes a beer from the fridge. Sits in front of the TV, but does not turn it on. Rarely does he bother with watching television, and he becomes restless during DVDs that Maria plays. Usually romantic slush or sci-fi. He lets himself fall asleep during them. Prefers listening to the radio, as music soothes the beasts that sometimes come to roam the corridors of his mind.
When she arrives home, she barely acknowledges his presence – it occasionally happens, and he knows not to try to coax her thoughts into words. She remotes the TV to life, and helps herself to a sandwich he had left for her. Checks the mail. He smells her jasmine scent, runs his forefinger along the back of her leg, squeezes her buttock.
‘Change out of that blue shirt, Garcia – it’s rank,’ she says, moving away. He showers every other day, because it has become a habit. He is too hairy-chested, too hairy in general, she often says, for him not to shower every day.
‘I have some bad news for you,’ she says, sitting into the armchair.
‘Let me guess … the landlord is increasing the rent?’
‘No. I …’.
‘He’s dead?’
‘No … this is serious … and you’re not going to like it … but I think you need to consider this … just don’t say a word, right, Garcia … listen and then decide.’
‘I’m not able to make decisions any more. It hurts.’
‘This is something you were talking about doing before the accident.’
‘I see,’ he says, understanding where the conversation is leading.
‘I …’.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It would be too stressful, that is the why. And I am quite certain that Rosemary and Anthony would want nothing to do with me.’
‘You didn’t think like that …’.
‘I think like that now.’
‘What’s changed?’
He shrugs. What hasn’t changed? he thinks.
‘I don’t know … but it has, Maria. I walked out on them, and I kept walking for years, and they’re in the past, and I’m in theirs … and that’s what I think now.’
‘Okay,’ she says, nodding.
She will not take the matter further, or argue her viewpoint … she does not pressure him, for the stress comes as a red cloud across his forehead, and the lightning bolts flash inside his skull. He sees his thoughts as voracious wolves, the rest of him as a tired traveller nursing dying embers in a forest white with snow.
The conversation, he senses, has led them around a corner. She is in deep silence, churning thoughts in her head, as though searching for the best approach to tell him something. She is by the window, smoking one of the five cigarettes a day that she allows herself. Homework copies are stacked on the table. Framed in the window, in the afternoon light, she fleetingly reminds him of some film star. The name won’t come to him.
She says, looking out the window, ‘Do you remember what else we discussed … had agreed upon … before the accident?’
‘Yes.’
‘About breaking up?’
‘I remember,’ he says very quietly.
‘It is back on the agenda,’ she says, facing him.
She’d resolved that there wasn’t an easy way of delivering her news. The words, he feels, are sharp instruments, piercing. They inject a lump in his throat, waves of sickness in his stomach, and bring tears. The inner turmoil reveals itself in the slight tremor of his cheeks. He wipes his lips.
He looks at her. She can’t meet his gaze. She shakes her head as though to free herself of his stare. Her features seem set in stone, and would not, he thinks, be out of place among those of the nearby Roman sculptures.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ she says, jamming her cigarette in an ashtray and lighting up another with the Zippo lighter he had bought her for a birthday present.
‘Do what, Maria?’
‘This,’ she gestures with her hand, ‘living in a dump, looking at you moping about the place, dealing with your moods … living with the accident every day for the rest of my life.’
‘I see,’ he says.
‘I have to put distance between it and me … I need to move on.’
She does not mention his lack of spring in the bedroom, his disinclination to discuss their future. There were times she had tried to raise the matter, but he had had an idea where she’d wanted to bring him, and constantly deferred the issue for another day or changed the subject.
‘So your idea was to abandon ship,’ he says, ‘when I was back in Ireland?’
‘What man wouldn’t want to see his son?’
He calls her a bitch. But she has spoken the truth, if for a devious reason. Deviousness he would never have, until now, believed was in her character. What man wouldn’t be curious to see how his son is doing, if not his ex-wife? What sort of man is he?
‘You don’t care about them, Maria … you just wanted to use it as an excuse to get shot of me … would you have come with me to Ireland?’
Her silence answers. She is leaning against the window, her cigarette not going far from her lips. There is a series of rushed draws, and then a long inhalation and exhalation. She waves the smoke out the window.
‘Who is he?’ he asks, feeling a pain in his neck, a heat coming inside his head.
‘It doesn’t matter, Garcia,’ she says.
So, there is someone else.
‘How long has it been going on?’ he asks.
‘Does it matter?’
He massages his neck, stands and goes into the bedroom for his painkillers. Takes a bottle of water from the fridge and washes them down. Slams the fridge door shut – jars of this and that shudder in the quake.
She sighs.
He says, ‘I can’t go back to Ireland.’
‘Really’.
‘So,’ he says, ‘why push me in that direction? What else is going on with you?’
She shrugs, and because she feels that he has come too close to her, she leaves the window, sitting into the table.
‘I just don’t believe that you can’t go back, Garcia … I don’t know what you did there that keeps you away. You never said.’
He nods. He put his hands in his jeans’ pockets, because he talks with his hands and it annoys her. His mouth, she likes to say, doesn’t need his hand as a conductor’s baton.
She says, ‘It’s perhaps fortunate for me that I have no idea.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve no idea what I mean by that.’
He is certain that she fears that owning the knowledge would place her in danger. What does she think? That he is an IRA man on the run? A drug dealer? A murderer? Some other class of criminal? He throws each of these at her, but the
y bounce off her rigid expression.
‘Are you leaving or am I?’ she says.
‘The apartment lease is in my name, isn’t it?’
She doesn’t answer. Her new lover has no place, or else none good enough for her. Perhaps he shares accommodation? The idea comes to him that this new man is young, perhaps younger than him, definitely younger than her.
‘I’ll go,’ she says.
‘I like it here,’ he says, ‘and I can’t walk out on anyone any more … I can’t do that.’
She stares at him briefly, then leaves the room to make the call, to pack. Meanwhile, he brews a fresh pot of coffee. Wise perhaps, he tells himself, to go out for a while, to lessen the pain of watching her leave. He could say hurtful things that he would later regret saying. He is not violent. Obviously, she considers him a risk, although he had never lifted a finger to her in anger. He must have said something to her at some stage in their relationship about why he had quit on his wife and son. He can’t remember. Yes, he had come close to choking the life out of Rosemary, because she had pushed him to breaking point – she had done what Maria is doing. But he had changed, and perhaps the accident had wrought that change; now, he lets things go – the things he cannot change.
Emerging from their bedroom with two rucksacks, one plump and the other much less so, she flits around the living room and kitchen, bagging ornaments, small, framed lithographs of the Roman amphitheatre, and other touches she had bought to make their apartment a home, keeping an eye on him as she proceeds.
Minutes later, a car horn beeps. And then she is gone. Without a word of goodbye – just a look commingling goodbye and sorry. He hears the plop of a rucksack descending each step, the oh God as the handrail loses more screws, the opening and closing of the front door. He looks out the window in time to see a yellow Renault turn a corner.