Peeling Oranges (16 page)

‘Tell me, the little boy…?’

‘What?’

‘The little boy, was he sitting on his mother’s lap?’

‘Lap?’

‘Yes, you know?’ I say, slapping my hands on my thighs.

‘What a strange question.’ She ponders for a moment. ‘He was just standing there. But I remember he was not crying. He was too small to know anything.’

She gazes towards the dawn stealing in through the window, making the tungsten light look wan and incongruous. I want to shout out something. But it is only in my imagination that I really go off the rails. My head is pragmatic. It always rules my heart, well nearly always.

‘You know there is the consolation. He taught me.’

‘What consolation?’ I was growing impatient.

‘The words. From the book.’

She presses the blanket tightly around her as if it were a prompt. ‘It is so that I learned the insignificance of the body, and every time I suffer, and every twist and turn I am made to make, I blot out what is happening to me, and I think… I think of the Great Love watching over us.’

She looks at me for approval. I nod.

‘The more we suffer in this world the greater will be our reward in the next, that is what Patricio said. So you see, Derek, it doesn’t matter what they do to me. They can hit me and
fuuk
me all they like, but as long as I think all the time of what is good – think very hard of what is good – then I can be pure like
La Virgen
and I can never be … what is the word?’

I did not give the word. I did not know the word anymore.

***

Early morning sounds begin to fill the cavities left by night: voices, shutters opening, wheels beginning to rumble on the street down below. I look towards Luisa’s shutters, halfclosed. Half the business going on. Maybe Uncle would come halfway up the stairs? Dust particles – little silver specks – become visible as the sun penetrates through gaps. I think how the dust was there all the time. I think of the physicality of air, and how only half our world is visible.

I tell Luisa I have to go.

‘But all I espoke about was me.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘That made me happy.’

‘You are estrange, Derek. Who are you really?’ A look of alarm. ‘What did you want from me?’

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘You filled a gap.’

‘A gap?’

‘Yes. In me. In myself.’

‘
I don’t understand.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Will you be all right?’

She places her hand on her heart.
‘¡Qué vayas con Dios!’’

I go to the little table to leave money down. She does not protest but tilts her head resignedly. I am leaving money, not for any services rendered, but for time used and perhaps to atone for the imminent disappearance of a cross and chain.

I tell her I will make enquiries for her at the consulate, but I have doubts of succeeding. Unlike Patrick Foley, I have no diplomatic influence. (Besides, why did
he
not get her a passport? Was he, despite his supposed benignancy, happy to keep her in thrall?).

It is almost full light as I descend the stairs. Without the protective cover of darkness, the building looks more rundown, more seedy (how words change meanings on different landings). Paint flakes from the walls and dirt is ingrained in the steps.

I squint as I come out of the building into the dazzle of the early Spanish sun. I turn like Lot’s wife (Luisa has me thinking biblically) and look up, but the shutters of her room are closed now. I think of bats and creatures of the night, and how we tarnish them with our own fears. I turn to face the world of light, the world of the virtuous, the upright, the world of law-abiding citizens.

I refrained from burdening Luisa with my own problems. One doesn’t overload the already burdened. I had read that somewhere in the Bible.

I think of names. I think of Luisa. Perhaps she was not given any surname. No matter. Who wants the name of someone else? Names are weights to bear.

I sit on a bench and enter in my diary:

Mary Magdalene was Martha’s sister. God is not invisible. God was seen by Mary Magdalene when he cast out her demons. The believers did not believe this. Faith, like memory and pity, is also selective. Love washes sin away
.

Then I see the Daimler parked in a side street, shining in the morning light, and I hear the knife grinder’s call. Almost hypnotically, as if driven by the call and the sound of the pipes fading towards the port, I walk around the car twice with Willy’s penknife open, scraping on autopilot. And in the solitariness of the street I smash a window with my fist. And I watch the blood dripping for free on the leather seats before I rip them apart.

***

A dog is grumbling under the shadow of a giant cloud.
The cloud is stretched and missing half its middle. The cloud blocks the sun that comes from Europe, except for the sun that comes from Spain. The landmass on which the dog rests was severed from Europe by sharp ice which left it to float alone in the ocean, except for the propinquity of the cloud.

The contemporary problem for Ireland is a matter of suture. How to sew pieces back together again.

I never liked geography. I could never find my way in maps. I could never get the thread to stay on the line to measure distance between A and B. I got lost in mountains or rivers or lakes or cities. Deliberately lost. We discover things by being lost.

***

My encounter with Luisa and señora Martínez has made me think of my mother as a woman maligned. Should I tell her what Patrick Foley got up to in Barcelona every Thursday? Would it salve her own conscience? Perhaps it would trouble her more. To explain it all, even to one in her full faculties, would be difficult. To explain it to a woman approaching senile
dementia
would be almost impossible. But damn it, she’s still holding out on me, and besides, maybe she knew everything all along.

Before leaving the country, I check with the Irish consulate in Barcelona for Luisa. The consulate confirm my fears. Without a passport there is nothing I can do for her. Luisa is a
persona non grata.

And so I depart from Spain not, I must admit, without feeling twinges of guilt about leaving Luisa behind. I keep tormenting myself over the pendant. Why did I take it? Why did I do such a mean thing? How will she feel when she finds it missing? But it is my mother’s.

***

‘Did you hear what he said, the headtheball?’ my mother says, when I come in to her apartment weighed down with haversack and suitcase. No kiss. No recognition. ‘I’m sick of listening to him. Tell him to shut up.’ Her eyes have a wide stare. She is watching an old movie on TV. I look at the screen. Snowy picture. Black and white. Gangster movie. Jack Palance is coming on strong with a female character. My mother turns away from the screen, and then turns back sideways as if to catch a surreptitious glance, to catch Palance off guard.

‘Are you not glad to see me, Mam?’

‘Did you see the way he looked at me, the get? Did you see that?’

‘I got you something, Mam.’

I take out the cross and chain.

‘You found it,’ she says as if it had been mislaid in some corner just a moment ago.

I fasten the chain around her neck. My mother is uncomfortable, recoiling slightly from my touch.

‘Where was it at all?’ she says, when I have finished and have stood back from her.

‘In a drawer.’

‘In a drawer,’ she repeats, half mumbling to herself.

‘Is that all, Mam?’ She is about to leave the room.

‘What?’

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘In a drawer,’ she says again, caressing the cross with her fingers as she shuffles away.

‘Wait, Mam. Stop. I have something to say to you.’

‘I have to go out for my tablets.’

‘They can wait a minute.’

‘What do you want now?’

‘What do you mean
now
, Mam? I’ve been away. Did you even know?’

‘You were away?’

‘Yes.’

She ponders for a moment. ‘Sinéad called. She was asking for you.’

‘Listen, Mam.’

‘I have to get my tablets.’

I raise my voice. ‘Just give me a minute.’

‘Don’t you start.’

‘Who was he, Mam?’

‘You’re always trying to upset me.’

I ignore the crocodile tears welling in her eyes. ‘It wasn’t Patrick, Mam.’

‘What?’

‘I found out. For certain. That’s why I went to Spain.’

‘To Spain?’ Her fingers have moved from the chain to a button on her cardigan which she twists nervously.

‘Listen to me, Mam.’

‘I have to get my tablets.’

She is breathing fast. Another of her sympathy-inducing tricks.

‘I have a right to know, Mam.’

‘Haaah!’ She is gasping for air. Pretending to gag.

‘Angela Martínez, Mam.’

‘Haaah!’

‘Who was it, Mam?’ I’m shaking her. I can’t believe what I’m doing, shaking the delicate frame of my mother.

‘No more of your tricks, Mam. No more.’ My anger is rising. Years of frustration coming out now.

She is holding her throat. ‘Leave me.’

‘Who did you have it off with? Tell me.’ I’m shouting now. ‘You know what they’re calling you over there?’

‘Stop it.’

‘A
sinvergüenza
. You know what that means? It means a woman without shame. Is that what you are, Mam?’

‘Can’t breathe.’

‘Is that what you are? Answer me, damn you.’

My mother collapses before me on the floor. She is holding her neck, trying to force air through the passageways. Her face has gone white as if the blood has left it.

‘Hang on, Mam,’ I say with a rising panic in my voice.

I hurry into the kitchen to get her tablets. When I return she has pulled the chain from around her neck and it lies broken on the floor. She is pressing on her throat with her forefinger and thumb, her tongue protruding partially through her lips. When I approach her with the tablets and tumbler, she brushes me away.

***

‘She had a close call,’ says doctor Mullins, an elderly man with glasses who has been attending my mother for years. ‘Keep those cigarettes away from her. She must not get excited. Any jolt at her age...you understand?’

He looks across (almost reverently) at my sedated mother, lying in the bed breathing calmly now. ‘Be gentle with her,’ he says. ‘This country owes her.’

***

Four hundred years ago, according to our history teacher, the English injected a ‘poisoned pin’ into the Irish psyche, and it has carried the malady ever since. Penal laws, evictions, religious oppression, attempted linguicide, peremptory executions for any dissenting voices were the norm during those past centuries. The result of all this was the people were divided in three: those who accepted inferiority as a hallmark of their race, those who rebelled, and those who denied their race altogether. Anything in between smacked of schizophrenia.

For the deniers, the only air to breathe was what wafted
across Saint George’s Channel.

‘They just have to turn on the BBC,’ my mother would say, referring to such people, ‘and they pick up an English accent.’

Mam is okay now. Well, no worse. Stable, you might say. She has her moments, of course. She was cool towards me for a while after the collapsing incident, but things are relatively calm between us now. Forgetfulness has advantages.

***

It is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising that turns history into myth. There are great parades through Dublin and throughout the country. Everyone is stepping to the military beat. Pearse’s memory is invoked by de Valera. President Kennedy had visited us only three years earlier, so there is a lot of patriotic pride about. People go around asking, ‘What are you doing for your country?’ instead of the more customary, ‘What’s this bloody country doing for me?’ It sounds good. People talk about the leaders of 1916. They say the executions were a raw deal: the wounded Connolly, unable to stand, shot chained to a chair, awakens something anew in all of us as the story is retold again and again.

‘It was a dastardly thing to do,’ Mam says, when I broach the subject with her, ‘to kill a man in a chair.’ She equates Connolly’s execution with the martyrdom of the early Christians. ‘Just like Saint Stephen,’ she says. ‘He was beheaded while sitting on a chair too, in the catacombs; saying Mass he was.’

The patriotic zeal manifests itself culturally. People are going around speaking Irish, attending
céilithe
. Some even want to return to wearing kilts. And those who scoff are dubbed West Brits.

In my own studies, I learn how Irish was used as a military language by the IRA. Because few English people bothered to learn it, the old tongue became invaluable as an indecipherable code of intelligence. How ironic this is when one considers English diligence in decoding German messages during the War years, or when one considers the vast sums of money spent by the British on security in the North of Ireland. By learning Irish, British intelligence could have infiltrated, at very little cost, the mythmaking machinery of a race of people whom they did not understand.