Now it was ten years since they had Travelled, she said, but they went off all the time in vans. And she spoke of their journeys. She had wanted to emigrate to Australia once in the 1960s when visas and jobs were easy to come by, but at the last minute her husband had backed out. He was a less enthusiastic adventurer. She wanted someday to see Russia and Germany, and they had gone on pilgrimages to Knock in Ireland and Lourdes in France. She deplored the long hours of waiting and the poor organization at Lourdes, but they had gone there all along the backroads of France, and the French people they met had been so friendly—a report which was itself testimony to their talent for travel. They were very devout; Cathleen had told me of a pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer near Arles in southern France, a place of great Gypsy pilgrimage as well. When her mother recited the places she’d like to go, Cathleen added, Please God, Jerusalem. “Narrow and wide,” concluded my notes, “Muslim. Freedom. Change,” and I never could make sense of them. Darkness had fallen while we had been swapping stories, and darkness fell very late that time of year. They sent for William, and he drove me back to central Dublin in his van, fast, as I swayed between him and his sister around the bends in the roads.
17
The Green Room
It was warm, sticky, and June 16 when I got up that last morning, the morning after the visit to the McDonaghs. It was, of course, the anniversary of the day Ulysses takes place in Dublin on June 16, 1904, the day Joyce is thought to have chosen to commemorate some eventful date at the beginning of his relationship with Nora Barnacle, not long before they left Ireland for good. Bloomsday, as it’s now called, has become a citywide if not a national holiday, a mildly ironic institution for the city Joyce abandoned. Or perhaps not, for Ulysses alone established Dublin on the map of literary imagination more effectively than all Dickens’s novels did London, or Edith Wharton’s, New York. Everywhere, piles of brochures announced Bloomsday bicycle races and guided tours and breakfast readings. It was hard to tell whether Bloomsday was a local’s or a tourist’s event, amid the cottage industry of Joyce statues, plaques, t-shirts, postcards, and other flotsam that, like Bloomsday itself, seemed to function as a pleasant alternative to reading the books. Perhaps the real irony is that the exile Joyce and his fictional Wandering Jew have become key elements in the makeover of Ireland for consumption by tourists, bait for the swarming of populations.
I like holidays, though. They insist that time is cyclical and patterned rather than an uninterrupted industrial flow of workdays, and insist that we celebrate the coincidence or overlap of times. They call upon us to use the present to think of the past as well as the future, and to regard the past as a live force shaping the present. They punctuate the year’s long sentence. I had thought about participating in an event or two, since I had coincided with the right place and time, but I had already gone and taken a look at where 7 Eccles Street, Bloom’s home, had been, and at a few other sites highlighted on the Ulysses map given out by the tourist office. Besides, a ceremony is a religious invocation of the original event, as communion is of the Last Supper, but an imitation is the thing least like an artistic original on the very grounds of originality, no matter their formal resemblances. It seemed to me that morning that the best homage to a secular narrative about people pursuing their own ends would be to pursue mine and listen for the echoes. After all, Ulysses is not a novel about a Jew who, in 1904, takes his half-Spanish wife to all Odysseus’s ports of call around the Mediterranean. Joyce himself followed Homer very loosely.
So I bought a copy of The Irish Times and went to the Elephant and Castle restaurant in the gentrifying Temple Bar district for an American breakfast. My waiter, who had worked at another Elephant and Castle in Manhattan, talked about New York with me; I once had a memorable breakfast at that outpost of the chain on the last morning of a winter visit there, a morning so cold my drying hair turned into icicles on the way to my rendezvous. Now that I had been invoking interstate highways and sagebrush plains and Manhattan canyons, I missed coffee too, but scrambled eggs and June sunshine put me in a pleasant international limbo. It was a typical day in The Irish Times: “U.S. Courts Jail Dublin Man in IRA Arms Case”; “First Atlantic Flight Re-Enacted after 75 Years”; “Cleric Cheers Closure of Boutique for Transvestites”; “Over Four Hundred Homeless in 1993: Hard Core of Dublin Young People Now Rely on B&Bs”—this last a story about putting up homeless children in tourist lodgings for extended periods.
One feature in The Irish Times seemed intended to mark Bloomsday, however obliquely: it was an article about Ireland’s rapidly shrinking Jewish population—though there had been four thousand Jews in Ireland at the time of World War II, there were now less than a thousand, and preserving the culture and finding fellow Jews to marry was becoming ever more difficult. Emigration was the alternative to giving up on being part of that minority culture. One could make up a modern Leopold Bloom recovering, in the style of our times, his ethnicity and his Judaism, emigrating to London in search of community, or following Stephen Dedalus to Paris, or going to Hungary, where his father was from, or going further, to the Mediterranean, to Israel—though half-assimilated isolation was a state he accepted as quite natural in 1904.
I was, that afternoon, going off to spend a few days in Paris myself and looking forward to it. My associations with Ireland were largely symbolic, but I had walked (and flown), not run, away to Paris at seventeen, when seven thousand miles seemed like a suitable distance to put between myself and my life up to that point, as well as a good place to wallow in the historicism California had not yet coughed up for me. I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one’s own country, in one’s own hometown, among one’s kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused. Looking at Ireland as a homeland had unnerved me with the very sense it gave of a homogeneous, predictable, familiar world, until I’d found a roster of colossal changes and an outsider population. At this end of my wanderings I had had enough smalltown friendliness and wall-to-wall white faces too; it was time to mill around in a city that was no longer the French capital of my youth but a polyglot cosmopolis full of Africans and Asians who had reversed the colonial process and were remaking the city, making it less predictable, less conventional, more porous to other possibilities and more complicated identities—more like home for me.
Which is not to say I wasn’t satisfied with my trip. Like a beachcomber emptying out her pockets, I laid out the finds of my travels at breakfast: an elephant skull, a Peruvian butterfly, a desert giantess confessing to me over Chinese food, a busride with a Hawaiian woman who explained to me how like her wet island home Ireland was, a steady supply of North American musical traditions and devotees, a New Zealander who had amused me by punctuating every sentence with dead: dead wrong, dead tasty, dead beautiful. This last acquaintance impressed me for having wrapped up all his affairs and discarded all his belongings before he left home, so that nothing called him back or limited the possibilities of his trip; travel itself had become a home unshadowed by the necessity of return, a state without boundaries. As my own time away came to a close, I could hear the sirens of familiar comforts and responsibilities begin to call softly.
These were the souvenirs of Ireland as a global crossroads; a month’s sequence of local landscapes were likewise pressed like flowers in my notes and mind, saved along with innumerable arrangements of gray stone, twin fountains of flawless tea and whiskey, and episodes of hospitality from dinner at Paddy’s sister’s in Cork to my repast in the McDonaghs’ trailer the night before. I had found what I hadn’t known that I was looking for: in the midst of a country that had seemed from afar to be about fixity and memory and literature, a mobile people who had avoided solidifying their past through literacy and history, a real culture that, along
with Joyce’s fictional Wandering Jew, seemed to render even the Catholic Republic of Ireland open to multiple possibilities—of which departure was one. Which is only to say that I had distilled for personal use a fluid version of the past that licensed a volatile present of wanderlust and mixed blood. The fixed and the fluctuant, remembering and forgetting, the pure and the hybrid, roots and wings would sort themselves out and tangle themselves up again, but I had reached a celebratory state where resolution seemed as unnecessary as it was impossible. If I had to spend the rest of my life traveling back and forth between incomplete states, why, I like to roam. And I like inconclusiveness, like a conversation that will always leave more to be said, rather than the conclusion that comes down like a verdict and leaves silence in its wake.
* * *
Dublin was good to me in my final days there. I had been meandering with the satisfaction of the return visitor, for whom navigation is no longer a challenge and for whom the pleasures of the familiar begin to gleam shyly among those of the new. Summer had come, the days were warm, the evening light lingered until after ten at night, the bars seemed fuller than ever, and drinkers spilled onto the street, basking in the rosy twilight. People noisily hawked World Cup souvenirs, tobacco, and fruit on the streetcorners, and one haggard old woman selling by the river impressed me as though she had been a witch or a cannibal, with her black perambulator made to carry babies heaped instead with apples and oranges. In the June evenings the arches of the bridges reflected in the Liffey made perfect ovals, like rows of vast eggs through which birds flew and garbage drifted. I had been wandering further afield, beyond what seemed to mark the bounds of the tourist’s city, that city which is a phantasm of dislocation and leisure to the resident, just as the resident’s working city remains elusive, obscure to the visitor, however much they overlap. In Dublin, of course, they overlap a lot; the center of the city mixes tourist, administrative, and nationalist sites.
One day, amid my Traveller researches, I tried to follow the Liffey on its short course to the sea and found that east of the Custom House and the train station it disappeared behind walls and the streets angled off into a neighborhood of a wholly different texture than centermost Dublin. In no time at all, I was wandering amid cheap modern apartment buildings whose stoops were occupied by plump, poor young mothers watching children rush up and down in the sunshine and grime. I’d blundered into the inhabitant’s unglamorous city, away from the Palladian splendor and postcard racks, into a place poor enough to feel dangerous, outside the literary problems set by the texts I knew best, instead inside the terms, say, of Roddy Doyle’s novels.
It was the city’s central artery, the Liffey, that held my attention, though, and I found a version of it in stone on the walls of the Custom House. Enormously long, gleamingly white, and heavily adorned with sculpture, all but the riverfacing south façade were surrounded by fenced grounds and security guards. But the gatekeeper, once he heard I wanted to look at the art and we had exchanged a few pleasantries about weather and California, beamed and waved me in and sent me to the side entrance to pick up some literature. I wandered round it for a long time, clutching my literature and craning my neck and looking my part. The Custom House had been built on pilings on marshland on the north side of what was once the city’s eastern edge, and in its mix of motifs and its position between land and water, it serves as a model gateway between the local and the global. It was built during the brief Golden Age of 1782–1800, the era of the independent Irish Parliament before unification.
An Englishman whose father had been a French Huguenot refugee, James Gandon, designed it, and he drew on the Roman Doric style for its architecture and the symbolic language of classical allegory to ornament it. Though that language has foreign origins, it speaks of local things in its hybrid tongue of goddesses and harps and cattle, perfect for a customs house which functions, after all, as a filter to adapt the goods of the world to the benefit and custom of the country it serves. TheDáil Éireann, the Irish Parliament, had ordered that the Custom House be attacked in May 1921, because it was “one of the seats of an alien tyranny” that had not yet been replaced throughout the city, and the Dublin Brigade torched it so effectively the fire smoldered for weeks and the stone cracked as it cooled for months. The damaged edifice was originally slated to be torn down, but it is instead a restoration that now serves independent Ireland, though the world grows ever harder to filter out.
Along the river the Custom House has a gorgeous, horizontal sweep of façade that is, in the nice words of the architectural history I had been handed, “beyond praise.” Atop the opposite, northern façade, four half-nude statues representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and America stand like victors, the four corners of the world from when it still had distant edges. Commerce, amoral but effective priestess of bordercrossing and transnationalism, stands supreme atop the great central dome, the goddess who shrank that remoteness. But a tourist manual identified her instead as Hope. Probably Tourism herself, Commerce’s hopeful sister with the distracted gaze, should be added to the façade to reflect the changing global and local economy; perhaps even Emigration with her winged shoes and exhausted face belongs here—but those goddesses would lead to others, to a little-match-girl icon of Poverty and on and on to a white marble mob of explanations that would crush the roof. Nationalism survives in tiny harps carved into the columns, on the friezes of the porticoes, and harps elsewhere huge and crowned as the Arms of Ireland, holding the flanking English lion and Scottish unicorn in check. Even the motif of the harp, the same harp that appears on Ireland’s coins and stamps and passports, is eclipsed by the particulars of Edward Smith’s carvings of the principal Irish rivers on fourteen keystone arches on all four sides of the building.
The rivers are represented as staring heads with deeply carved mouths, and they make the immense building a miniature of Ireland, whose rivers flow outward to the sea. Almost everything that is allegorized as a human figure is allegorized as a woman—Liberty, Justice, Commerce, Britannia, Ireland—but thirteen of these strong heads are men or gods whose beards stream and ripple like water and trickle eels and dolphins. They make magnificent allegories. Identifying goods and symbols crown each river: oaks on the handsome Shannon, wool on the beaming Suir, interwining swans on the happy face of what is probably Belfast’s Lagan, tower fortifications on the pugnacious Foyle, which runs through Derry. The fourteenth, the goddess of the Liffey, has the place of honor on the southern façade facing the actual Liffey. Her braids like tamed waters twine around her longnosed, serene face, and her headdress is an abundance of fruit and flowers.
* * *
That Sunday of my last week, an introspective day of rest since everything was closed, I walked to Phoenix Park along the Liffey, westward, landward, away from the sea I hadn’t reached. On the way back, trying to recall what I’d dreamt, knowing that the whole underlying flavor of the day came from it whether I could retrieve it or not, I saw a ripple in the water, like a thought itself surfacing. The water was green like a bottle, there was a carpet of green waterweed crawling up the walls of the river, and steps and ladders descending down into it, as though for bipedal amphibians, and the ripple became a fish. Thanks to the fish, the surface of the water that had seemed so opaque revealed a degree of transparency to a depth of perhaps a foot. The fish turned into three big fish in a row, blue above and silvery white below, all moving in the same direction I was, and at the same speed. I proceeded for several minutes parallel with the fish, who were perhaps a dozen feet out from the stone embankment of the river, as though we were sharing a Sunday stroll in an interlude in which water and land, swimming and walking, no longer separated us. They became five fish, then the leader took a sudden turn and they all vanished in his wake. Once I knew the secret of looking through the surface, the stagnant-looking green water began to wake up. A cluster of five, perhaps the same five, swam up from the opaque greenness and then swam out of sight again. Nine surfaced, bluer than the cloudy sky, and w
henever they turned, they flashed silver. Larger and larger schools began surfacing, as though the whole river were coming to life, but so were the surface and the afternoon light, and they made the water almost opaque again. The last school swam across the river rather than up it, swam into the stately windows of a Georgian housefront reflected upsidedown into the rippling liquid, swam into the wavering windows and disappeared.
The sea was a duller green on the ferry from Rosslare Harbor to Le Havre and the night was pitch black, so that the sound of waves being splashed and plowed, the pitch and the deep hum and throb of the ferry were the only evidence of location. After inspecting all the perfume sales counters and bars and the labyrinthine structure of the boat itself, I settled down for the night. On my uncomfortable couch of two seats and a window ledge, I dreamt I was home again, in my home for the last dozen years, a light-drenched, airy white set of rooms that fits me like a shell fits a snail and that in my dreams constantly mutates in wondrous ways, its familiar doors and windows opening onto unfamiliar landscapes, its rooms periodically growing and its walls cracking to reveal unknown regions and possibilities. The first episode was unspectacular, a complicated culinary dream about making soup on my old white stove and finding a dead bat beside it. It was the vulnerable flesh-pink of the bat’s crumpled wings that left the deepest impression when I woke up among the sleepers all around me on the ferry, and in the next dream a friend and I were making a heraldic emblem of a vulture and a honeybee. In the final, unforgettable one, there was a room off the hallway I had never paid attention to or had shut off and forgotten upon moving in, a green sort of sitting room with even a fireplace, where there is in truth nothing but a wall. In this dream on the water between Ireland and France, I had opened it up again and thought I would, with the help of one of my brothers, move all my books into it and have a workroom at last. I woke rested and happy, and the sense of expanded space hovered round me all the way to the continent and beyond.
A Book of Migrations Page 25