An Irish Christmas Feast (46 page)

When I was younger and more observant I spent some of my spare time studying the corner across the street from this very room where I presently write. I also studied the denizens of the area and when my room window was partly open I would often catch fragments of conversation.

The corner had one resident boy by the name of Johnny Muller. Passers-by would sometimes stop and endeavour to begin conversations with him. He never responded even when asked for the location of a bank or the post office.

If he was in talkative mood he might sometimes acknowledge the weather assessments of an old lady who passed down every morning and up every evening.

‘'Tis soft,' she might say.

‘Soft enough,' he might reply.

Once she asked him if the weather would hold.

‘Could,' he replied.

Lay people do not understand the function of a corner boy. He is not obliged to respond to questions or make observations. His function is to be there, to maintain his corner no matter what. Johnny Muller took his job seriously and this is the reason why he never smiled.

From my vantage point at the upstairs window I occasionally examined his face. There were no wrinkles and no blemishes. There were no repulsive aspects and no scars. I could never deduce whether he was grey-haired or bald because of the peaked cap which he always wore. I suppose the fairest thing to say would be that it was a good enough face as faces go. It certainly wasn't distinguished but neither was it forgettable. Some said that it was a face without character but there would be no way of confirming this until he was put to the test. As a rule when put to the test corner boys vanish from the scene or surrender their attention to distant vistas unseen by the layman's eye.

It took me several years to discover that Johnny Muller's face was incomplete as indeed are the faces of most corner boys. In Johnny's case it was clear that none of the great emotions had ever tampered with it. It seemed to me that it was awaiting alteration. His facial disposition was drab. His throat clearances and coughs were run-of-the-mill as were his rare utterances. Only his sneezes had colour. Unfailingly they were highly explosive and when they erupted in close continuity they shook him to his very foundations. Otherwise there was hardly anything to him but we should be forewarned that things change just when it seems that they will never change.

Johnny Muller was a resolute corner boy. He spent that part of his life which he didn't spend in bed, at his corner. When he first took over, after the previous incumbent had expired in the wake of a one-sided contest with a carelessly discarded banana skin, he foolishly believed that he would have little to do save pass the time and be mindful of his protectorate. It wasn't long before he learned that his responsibilities were legion.

Dogs had to be chastised and moved on. Querimonious and uppity passers-by had to be studiously ignored. Patrolling civic guards who stopped to rest up a while had to be hummed and hawed upon their constitutional way. There were other duties too numerous to mention.

When he arrived at his chosen corner at nine o'clock each morning he would first look up the street and then look down. He would then address his attention to the adjoining street and, satisfying himself that all was as it should be, would thrust his hands deep into his trousers' pockets and submit himself to a comprehensive bout of scratching. He would withdraw his hands after a while and draw upon the lobes of his ears, the point of his chin and the end of his nose. He would rub his shoulder blades and his behind against the wall at his rear. Finally he would scratch his ankles and his heels with their corresponding ankles and heels. Then and only then would he relax and enter into a period of meditation. He would be roused after a half-hour or so by the chiming of the parish clock.

One day he was about to return once more to his reflections when he beheld, out of the corner of his eye, a most uncommonly attractive creature coming his way. As she passed by a wonderful fragrance assailed his senses. Johnny noticed the elegant figure, the glamorous eyelashes and the beautiful blonde hair which fell gracefully over her slender shoulders.

‘No chicken,' he whispered to himself as he roused himself totally to concentrate the better upon this enchanting apparition. ‘But then,' he concluded as he finished his initial survey, ‘no old maid either.'

By his reckoning she would be a young sixty. By my mother's, I discovered later, she would be nearer to eighty than seventy.

When the visitor turned on her heel and retraced her steps Johnny Muller gave her the nod of friendly salutation and also the nod of absolute approval. An almost imperceptible smile appeared on her angelic features. From the look on Johnny's face it was clear that he was smitten. He was overcome by an unfamiliar giddiness. It was the kind of giddiness that overwhelms characters of Johnny Muller's ilk once in a lifetime. He had, up until this time, been fond of saying to himself, ‘I wouldn't give tuppence for a woman, any kind of woman,' when an attractive member of the opposite sex passed his corner.

Suddenly she had stopped and was looking straight into his eyes. A sparkling smile had now spread itself across her heavily made-up face. She had noticed him before, not once but several times and always from a distance. She was certain that he had not seen her. He would have reacted if he had. Now that it was Christmas she would make the most of her chance.

‘What do you do here all day?' she asked gently. It was the way she said it that hastened the melting process which had already begun in the underworked furnace of his heart.

Normally he would never answer when a strange female addressed him but now his reply was warm and instant.

‘I keeps an eye on things,' he told her.

A puzzled frown appeared for a moment on her shining visage.

Johnny was quick to notice that perplexity added to her allure.

‘You sort of watch over things?' she suggested.

Johnny nodded eagerly and then, to give substance to his role, his features assumed a deadly seriousness as he looked up and down and hither and thither as he scanned the faces of passers-by in search of evildoers. Satisfying himself that his bailiwick was secure, he favoured her with a smile of unconditional reassurance.

‘Do you watch over me?' Her voice quavered as though she would burst into tears.

‘You above all,' Johnny found himself saying.

‘Me above all!' she repeated the words as though they were the last line of a prayer. Johnny nodded reassuringly as they sought to solve the mysteries in each other's eyes. Her next move was to take him by the hand. He followed without a word until they reached the entrance to a clothier's called The Man's Shop.

After they had entered, some female onlookers, my mother among them, commented on the incident. The conclusions they drew were interesting. Johnny Muller always had an untouched look about him. It was certain that he had never been touched by a woman's hand, at least not since his infancy when he submitted himself to his mother's ministrations.

‘That woman's search is over,' my mother spoke with assurance. ‘She always knew what she wanted and she's found it at last.'

When the happy pair emerged from The Man's Shop there were gasps from the onlookers. Gone were the shabby clothes, the greasy cap and the worn shoes. Resplendent in his new outfit Johnny Muller took his fiancée's hand and led her across the road where he bade goodbye to his corner of forty years.

What the onlookers would remember most was Johnny's face. It was the complete product at last. For her part she radiated happiness. Her new partner was a far cry from the shop-soiled assortment she had put through her hands over a lifetime.

Neither of the happy pair was seen again in the locality but the locals evinced no surprise.

‘It's that kind of town,' my mother would announce modestly whenever Christmas came round and the subject of the disappearance was drawn down.

Older readers will remember a man by the name of Antonio Feckawlo and if not, maybe their fathers will. They should remember Hanratty's circus as well for that was his home since he departed Brindisi. Antonio's demise occurred a few days before Christmas and that is why he is especially remembered at this time. Those who have a soft spot for Casanovas and waxed moustachios will toast his memory this Christmas and for many a Christmas to come, all going well. Antonio Feckawlo was a circus knife-thrower, roustabout and fribbling fracturer of a hundred female hearts.

Only last summer in a well-known hostelry in Ballybunion I encountered an elderly lady who happens to be a native of Limerick city. She recalled with ease her first sighting of the amorous Italian whose uncle Giuseppi Feckawlo was a Vatican monsignor and confidante of several popes or so they said. If you were to see Antonio's features in the light of a setting sun against a backdrop made up of the cliffs of Doon overlooking the Ladies' Strand in Ballybunion you would notice that the rakishness and the sinister scars had gone and that they had been replaced by features of great aristocratic charm.

Antonio, however, was far from being a man of piety and the Limerick woman who had first seen him some eighty years before (she is now ninety-three) was quite carried away at the time by his good looks. In fact she swooned with the many other females present as he flung knife after knife at the voluptuous body of Gina Moldoni his sometime companion of an out-house palliasse. Her real name was Gert O'Day. Antonio, a knife-thrower of the first water, never drew blood from a target. He drew blood, however, from several masculine noses and was responsible for the discoloration of many an eye. He also had a powerful voice and he was irresistible when he went on his knees and sang in broken tones to the memory of his lost love.

Then one night not long before Christmas the circus was performing in Tubbernamuckerry. The tent was full and the crowd responsive. All the acts had been cheered to an echo. After Gina Moldoni had fed the lions with their rations of minced donkey-meat she was returning to the main tent when she heard strange noises coming from the monkey house. She looked in and there was Antonio in the arms of the female slack wire walker and the pair scandalising the innocent baboons.

She was greatly taken aback to put it mildly. She had always known that he was a practitioner in the unchaste art of seduction but it was the first time she had caught him red-handed. She decided to do nothing just then. All she did was to fling the bucket and what was left of the minced donkey-meat at her rival before cursing the pair roundly and vowing that she would have her revenge on Antonio Feckawlo. The opportunity presented itself shortly afterwards. Just before the knife-throwing act which was one of the highlights of the programme Gina Moldoni decided that the time had come to put manners on her erring partner.

To a roll of drums Antonio stepped forward and threw the first of his twelve knives at Gina. It embedded itself in the wooden frame a mere two inches from her left ear. There was rapturous applause. The second knife embedded itself a solitary inch from Gina's other ear. Again, there was a tumultuous cheer. The third knife landed two inches above the crown of her head and the fourth and fifth, in quick succession, implanted themselves at either side of her shapely throat. Now there were no cheers. Instead there were gasps. Antonio turned to acknowledge the gasps. He had experienced yells and hoots, sustained handclaps and cheers but gasps never!

As he bent to acknowledge this unprecedented tribute Gina Moldoni withdrew the knife at the left-hand side of her throat and stepped forward, to the astonishment of the onlookers. Antonio was so absorbed in the crowd's reaction that he presumed the silence to be another aspect of audience participation. Gina raised the knife and aimed for the right heel of her unsuspecting partner. The deadly missile missed its target but what it did not miss was the extended left buttock of the knife-thrower. It embedded itself firmly in the solid flesh and even when Antonio leaped forward from the pain and shock, the knife remained rooted where it had lodged.

Gina Moldoni, in the middle of the consternation, made good her escape. As she exited through a side flap in the canvas she was met by the trick cyclist who had already tied her luggage to the carrier. He bore her on the bar of the bike to a place far from the hills and vales of Tubbernamuckerry.

Rumour had it that the pair fled the country and ended up their days as itinerant evangelists in South Carolina.

After Gina's departure a score of females erupted from ringside seats. Between them they managed to extract the foot-long weapon from the great lover's Brindisian bum. He would sustain other wounds before he was drowned while attempting to evade his enemies as he crossed the Feale River near Listowel while that august waterway was in full flood.

‘He never deserved to drown,' said a cuckolded north Kerryman, ‘not while there was rope in plenty to hang the hoor.'

This was not a nice thing to say but it should not be taken too seriously since they are greatly given to hyperbole in north Kerry.

‘When he died,' said the elderly lady I encountered in Ballybunion, ‘the city of Limerick gave itself over to mourning.'

Apparently, its female population was inconsolable while many of its male population regretted that he had not been sexually incapacitated long before his demise.

There was no funeral because there was no body. Some said that it had been eaten by sharks halfway through the Atlantic. Others, pathological liars as well, maintained that his body had been de-boned before being chopped up and minced for the three elderly lions who made up most of the menagerie of Hanratty's circus. It was widely rumoured at the time that they consumed each other after they had polished off the baboons.

One of my late informants also informed me that Antonio Feckawlo always behaved like a gentleman until a member of the opposite sex appeared on the scene. He could not and would not stay clear of females, attached or unattached, and they, for their part, would not stay clear of him. In another age, a film would be made about him and his exploits. Like all great lovers, he was deeply misunderstood by his detractors but not by those he loved.

Let us hope that he is with his sainted uncle Giuseppi in the high halls of heaven for, all else aside, he was a lover of the old school and so, let us toast him.