After the Wake (5 page)

There was a party to celebrate Deirdre’s return from her abortion in Bristol.

Ciarán, her brother, welcomed me, literally with open arms, when I entered the Catalonian Cabinet Room where the guests were assembled.

Even her mother, the screwy old bitch, came over with a glass of whiskey in her hand, and said, ‘You’re welcome, Brendan Behan.’

Bloody well, I knew why I was welcome.

It was I squared the matter for Deirdre to go over to England, and have her baby out, under the National Health Service, so to speak.

The mother was supposed to be a very good Catholic and I was a bit shocked to see the matter of fact way she accepted the situation and even put up the money for the trip and the readies* to pay the quack.

She never let on to know, of course, that there was anything amiss (no pun) and pretended to believe that Deirdre was ‘going on a bit of a holiday to the other side.’

Deirdre and Ciarán’s father was Irish Representative of the Catalonian Government at the time of the Spanish War and had been instrumental, it was said, in preventing the Irish Government from recognising
Franco till the whole thing was over and it didn’t matter any more.

There was great pressure to recognise Franco brought on the Government by the Cardinal and Bishops of Ireland, but it was said that De Valera had some sympathy with the Catalonians and Basques, on account of having relations amongst them. It might also have been the case that he was remembering when he was President of the Irish Republic and was excommunicated by the same Bishops.

Mr. Bolívar, Ciarán’s and Deirdre’s father, ran a wine business in Dublin, and even when his side lost the Spanish War, his diplomatic skill stood him in good stead. He got the right side of the Bishops by presenting the Cardinal with a magnificent fifteenth century chalice which he had rescued from sacrilege. It was said that he rescued a few chalices for himself, while he was at it, and sold them to American millionaires for vast sums.

A minority of the Bishops kicked up a row over the Cardinal accepting the chalice from a former agent of the Reds, but the Cardinal fell in love with it, and blessed Mr. Bolívar, and forgave him his trespasses.

The situation got a bit more complicated after that because Franco’s crowd were recognised, and his new Ambassador to Ireland dropped a gentle hint that they wouldn’t mind having their chalice back. At one stage of the game, they even contemplated legal action in the Irish Courts to secure its return, and contacted Mr. Bolívar to give evidence for them. They offered him a fair sum of money for his trouble, but he said that though he was a former anarchist he could not see his way, as a Catholic, to going against
the Cardinal in a law case.

His attitude in this matter even made him popular again with the Knights of Columbanus, the Catholic Freemasons, who compete with the Protestant Freemasons for contracts and sometimes combine with them to keep up prices in the shops. It was agreed by the Knights that Mr. Bolívar was a true Papist, at the back of his politics, and his anarchism was excused on the grounds that he wasn’t doing it for nothing.

Mr. Bolívar’s attachment to the Anarchist Republic of Catalonia had never interfered with his business of wine importing and potato exporting.

During his term as a diplomat he used to say at dinners and receptions, as reported in the newspapers, ‘It is good for our two countries – Ireland needs the civilising wine and Catalonia needs the strengthening spuds.
Éire
go
Bráth!*
I Visca Catalunya!’

Mr. Bolívar often used stage-Irish expressions from America, like ‘spuds’ for potatoes, because he was born in Mexico City.

His father was half-Irish, and his mother was of purely Irish descent. In many countries of South America there are large cattle-owning colonies of Irish people descended from settlers who emigrated in the 1840s and ’50s from the grazing country of the Irish Midlands.

They are now an immensely wealthy group, and their eldest sons are sent home to Mullingar and Athlone and Kildare to be educated. One of them is mentioned in James Joyce’s
Portrait
of
the
Artist
as
a
Young Man
. ‘The higher line fellows began to come down along the matting in the middle of the refectory –
Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee, and the Spaniard who was allowed to smoke cigars and the little Portuguese who wore the woolly cap.’

These South American Irish are intensely proud of their ancestry, and have a snobbish horror of Irish-Americans from the United States. They also, when in Ireland, have the strong farmer’s prejudice against the Dublin and Belfast working-class, whom they regard as slum-dwellers. Though it contains, as noted above, many stage-and screen-Irishisms, their English speech is that of Counties Meath, Westmeath, Kildare and Longford.

For a time after Franco’s victory, Mr. Bolívar was not permitted to do business with any part of Spain, but when things settled down, it was discovered by Franco’s Embassy that as long as Mr. De Valera’s party ruled the country, they must do business with Mr. Bolívar or get no spuds. For Mr. Bolívar, in his day, had been representative of the Irish Republic in South America.

In the Catalonian Cabinet Room hung his mementoes of earlier Republics. A manifesto signed by, amongst others, Señor Loyola Bolívar, on behalf of: ‘Los Libertadores en la América del Sur.
La Raza Gaélica.

Los pueblos ya no podrán ser manejados como el alfil sobre el tablero. Ellos serán los únicos árbitros de sus propios destinos.’

Presidente Wilson occupied one side of the mantelpiece, and on the other side was a large and beautifully engraved Irish Republican Bond:

Yo, Éamon De Valera, Presidente de Gobierno de la República de Irlanda –’ and more to the same effect I’ve no doubt, dated Febrero, 1921.

So, in the Irish Government, Mr. Bolívar had many friends, and devil a much good the Bishops could do the Caudillo, so long as De Valera’s party was in power, and if Franco wanted Irish spuds, he had to get them through the same source that the Reds got them.

For the Fianna Fáil crowd recognised but the one true Pope, by the name of Éamon De Valera, late of 42nd St., and lesser Popes were taken notice of only in a religious way.

They would always grant his Holiness censorship of immoral publications (such as this) but a tariff or a trading quota was, as my sincere colleague the late Anton Chekhov would say, a character out of a different opera.

So, Mr. Bolívar re-opened his trade with Spain and announced to his friends of the Friends of the Spanish Republic that it would be only penalising the proletariat there by refusing to send them any spuds.

He had other interests besides wine and potatoes, and for years had a big house in the County Dublin between the mountains and the sea. He ran two cars – one of them a large Hispano-Suiza.

Though an abstemious man, the cooking of his Basque chef was famous, and his cellar was one of the best in Ireland.

‘If Loyola Bolívar did not have a good sup of wine,’
said the other Dublin businessmen ‘in the name of God – who would?’

Besides, the businessmen at Loyola’s table were usually supposed to be on diets. They were not very strict about these diets, only for a few days after the death of one of their number, but they preferred to diet on an excess of whiskey or claret than on an excess of starch.

It was agreed on all hands that Loyola’s lunches and dinners would have been worth ten times as long a journey, and out to his house trooped the businessmen who ate and drank and did deals over the cognacs till Mrs. Bolívar lost her temper one day, and from an upstairs window dropped an Ibizenco fish-weight on the head of the President of the Scottish Widows Mutual Financial Trust while he stood at the hall-door waiting for his car to drive up and thanking Mr. Bolívar for a wonderful lunch.

Mrs. Bolívar and Loyola married when he was twenty-one years old and she was a shy girl of eighteen from the plains of Kildare, living the simple, ample, and happy life, the only daughter of an Irish grazier.

Horses and cattle were the great interest of the countryside, and the devil and as much María Bolívar didn’t know about them.

Her maiden name was the same as her lover’s, for they were third cousins. It was in their great grand-uncle’s house that they met when he was a schoolboy on holidays.

María hunted in the season and went to Dublin in August for the Horse Show, and in May for the Spring Show, and for two weeks after Christmas to
see Jimmy O’Dea in the Gaiety Pantomime and to help her mother order vast quantities of clothing at the January Sales.

Twice she had been to the Continent; once to Rome for the Ordination of her favourite brother, Louis, and to Lourdes with her mother, when the old lady’s health began to fail.

On both occasions they travelled straight through London on the Wagons-Lits, but stopped some days in Paris, going and coming.

London they considered a shabby receptacle for poverty-stricken Irish people and petty criminals on the run.

María could play the piano, spoke French and could speak – but not read – Spanish which she learned from her cousins on their trips home from Latin America. She was elegant, beautiful, and when amongst her own sort of people, amiable and good-humoured, whether they were servant boys or graziers.

At a harvest home, there was porter and pig’s cheek, with home made-bread, and María the life and soul of the party. An artless
cailín
*, she moved amongst the farmworkers and dairymaids with an easy grace, and laughed and danced and played hornpipes on the fiddle for the party.

Loyola she had known since they were children and when he asked her to marry him, it was considered on all sides an excellent match.

They were closely enough related to consolidate the wealth and lands of the
Clann
*
Bolívar, but not closely enough to bring them within the degrees of kindred and consanguinity forbidden by the fifth Precept of the Church.

So, they were married and went to Paris for her shopping – a wedding present from Loyola; to Rome for the blessing of Pope Pius XI, Achille Ratti, just begun his Pontificate; and to Spain for a long and sunny honeymoon.

For long enough she used her accomplishments to entertain Loyola’s guests, and indeed, it was only after nearly fifteen years of marriage and Ciarán and Deirdre were fourteen years of age that she began to get restive at Loyola’s dinner parties and ceased to please his guests.

At a dinner to receive the Cultural Delegation of the Basque Republic to the People of Ireland, she insulted them, not the people of Ireland of whom she was bigotedly fond, but the Cultural Delegation.

This consisted of the Profesor of Middle Euskade Iambica, Bilbao University; a vice-president of the Basque Republic; his chaplain; the Secretary of the Catalan Committee for Joint Anti-Fascist Action of Trotskyites and Communists (3rd International); and Lady Jane Blanchard who spent a week trying to persuade W. B. Yeats to go out and fight in Easter Week 1916, and who was now on the Committee of the International Red Aid.

Lady Jane always insisted on giving this organisation its full name, in case it would be mistaken by its initials for the Irish Republican Army, with which she had fallen out in 1934, on the general question of the day-to-day struggle and the particular one of the I.R.A.’s refusal to spare a dozen twelve-ounce sticks of gelignite for a parcel to be sent to the Secretary of the Employers Federation during the coal strike.

The late Subhas Chandra Rose, the Indian Nationalist leader, described her, ‘as a champion of the down-trodden in every land, a great friend of the Indian people, a fiery preacher for every good cause in her native land, the breaking-up of the big estates, the revival of the Irish language, and birth control – a splendid figure of revolting womanhood.’

Legend had it, that on occasion of her Easter visit, Yeats asked her what did she take him for, said he was too delicate a man and threw her down the stairs two days after the Fall of the General Post Office, because he was going to write a poem about it.

It was believed that she was instrumental in getting Frank Harris and Charlie Chaplin to visit Jim Larkin in Sing-Sing. She certainly used her influence with Governor Al Smith to get him out. Smith had an almost feudal regard for Lady Jane Blanchard, on account of her family having evicted his family from their cottage in County Cavan, back in the old days.

Apart from that (Loyola said), her great age would have entitled her to respect, apart from her life of service, when he described that terrible evening at the dinner party of the Cultural Delegation when María insulted them all.

At a party the previous week, for the All-Ireland Director of Operations for Standard Oil (New Jersey, U.S.A.) María showed signs of restlessness by leaving the dinner table before the tortilla. Loyola excused her by saying that she had a headache, and sweet things did not agree with her, and she was gone up to her room to lie down.

Now, many of the guests had on previous occasions seen her consume square yards of tortilla, of which she was extremely fond, and the fact that
she had not gone up to her bedroom, but down to the kitchen, was made apparent to all assembled, by the rising notes of her fiddle on which she was playing the well-known tune,
Upstairs
in
a
Tent
, for a hornpipe danced by the gardener’s boy and a housemaid.

This was bad enough, though the party consisted of Dublin businessmen, who all suffered from their own wife troubles, but the next day, she announced to Loyola that she was sick and tired of his friends and acquaintances, and would he let her off those parties, and let her amuse herself with her own friends, in the kitchen.

‘With the servants?’ asked Loyola.

‘They are friends and relations, some of them of yours and mine,’ said María.