Country Girl: A Memoir (34 page)

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 ringing 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.

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 crayon 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.”