Irish Journal (7 page)

“May I request you, Madam, to regard these ten shillings as sufficient payment for the six drops of vinegar?”

Silence in the darkness behind King John’s Castle, then the man with the blood-stained face suddenly went on in a low voice:

“May I moreover remind you that it is time for the evening service? Please convey my respectful regards to the priest.”

He staggered on, the boy ran off scared, and the woman was alone. Suddenly tears were streaming down her face, and she ran weeping into the house, her sobs still audible when the door had closed behind her.

The sea had not yet allowed the kindly water to rise, the walls were still naked and dirty, and the gulls not white enough. King John’s Castle reared grimly out of the darkness, a tourist attraction hemmed in by tenements from the twenties, and the tenements of the twentieth century looked more dilapidated than King John’s Castle of the thirteenth; the dim light from weak bulbs could not compete with the massive shadow of the castle, everything was submerged in sour darkness.

Ten shillings for six drops of vinegar! The man who lives poetry instead of writing it pays ten thousand per cent interest. Where was he, the dark, blood-stained drunk, who had had enough string for his jacket but not for his shoes? Had
he plunged into the Shannon, into the gurgling gray narrows between the two bridges which the gulls used as a free toboggan? They were still circling in the darkness, they alighted on the gray waters, between one bridge and the other, flew up to repeat the game; endless; insatiable.

Singing came flooding out of churches, voices of chanting priests, taxis brought travelers from Shannon airport, green buses swayed through the gray darkness, black, bitter beer flowed behind curtained pub windows. Crimson Cloud
has
to win.

The great Sacred Heart shone crimson in the church where the evening service was already over; candles were burning, stragglers were praying, incense and candle warmth, silence, in which only the shuffling footsteps of the sacristan were to be heard as he straightened the curtains of the confessionals, emptied the offering boxes. The Sacred Heart shone crimson.

How much is the fare for these fifty, sixty, seventy years from the dock that is called birth to the spot in the ocean where the shipwreck occurs?

Clean parks, clean monuments, black, severe, well-behaved streets: somewhere near here Lola Montez was born. Ruins from the time of the Rebellion, boarded-up houses that are not yet ruins, the sound of rats moving around behind the black boards, warehouses cracked open and left to the disintegration of time, green-gray slime on exposed walls, and the black beer flows to the health of Crimson Cloud, who is not going to win. Streets, streets, flooded for a few moments by those coming from evening service, streets in which the houses seem to get smaller and smaller; prison walls, convent walls, church walls, barrack walls; a lieutenant coming off duty props his bicycle by the door of his tiny house and stumbles over his children on the threshold.

Incense again, candle warmth, silence, people at prayer who cannot bear to part from the crimson Sacred Heart being gently reminded by the sacristan please to go home.
Head-shaking. “But—,” whispered arguments on the part of the sacristan. Head-shaking. Firmly glued to the kneeling bench. Who is going to count the prayers, the curses, and who has the Geiger counter that could register the hopes concentrated this evening on Crimson Cloud? Four slim fetlocks, there is a mortgage on these that nobody is going to be able to redeem. And when Crimson Cloud does not win, the grief must be quenched with as much dark beer as was needed to nourish the hope. Marbles are still clicking against the worn steps of the pub, against the worn steps of churches and bookies’ offices.

It was much later that I discovered the last innocent milk bottle, as virginal as it had been in the morning; it was standing in the doorway of a tiny house whose shutters were closed. In the next doorway an elderly woman, gray-haired, slatternly, only the cigarette in her face was white. I stopped.

“Where is he?” I asked softly.

“Who?”

“The one the milk belongs to. Is he still asleep?”

“No,” she said quietly, “he emigrated today.”

“And left the milk?”

“Yes.”

“And the light on?”

“Is it still on?”

“Can’t you see?”

I leaned forward, close to the yellow chink in the door, and looked in, where in a tiny hall a towel was still hanging on a doorknob and a hat on the peg, where a dirty plate with the remains of some potatoes lay on the floor.

“So he has, he’s left the light on, but what’s the difference: they won’t be sending him the bill to Australia.”

“To Australia?”

“Yes.”

“And the milk bill?”

“Hasn’t paid that either.”

The white of the cigarette was already dwindling toward her dark lips, and she shuffled back to her doorway. “Oh well,” she said, “he could have turned out the light.”

Limerick slept, under a thousand rosaries, under curses, floated on dark beer; watched over by a single snow-white milk bottle, it was dreaming of Crimson Cloud and the crimson Sacred Heart.

8
WHEN GOD MADE TIME …

That a church service can only begin when the priest arrives is obvious; but that a movie can only begin when all the priests, the local ones as well as those on vacation, are assembled in full strength is somewhat surprising to the foreigner used to Continental customs. He can only hope that the priest and his friends will soon finish their supper and their postprandial chat; that they do not overindulge in reminiscences: the range of do-you-remember conversations is inexhaustible; that Latin teacher, that math teacher, not to mention that history teacher!

The movie is supposed to start at 9
P.M.
, but if there is one thing subject to change it is this hour. Even the vaguest formula for an appointment, as when one says “around nine,” is by comparison a term of utmost precision, for “around nine” is over by half-past nine, when “around ten” begins; this “9
P.M
.,” the unadorned precision with which it appears on the poster, is a snare and a delusion.

The strange thing is that no one is in the least annoyed at the delay. “When God made time,” the Irish say, “He made plenty of it.” There is no doubt that this saying is as much to the point as it is worth meditating on: if we imagine time to be a
substance that has been given to us in order that we may settle our affairs here on earth, we have certainly been given enough, for there is always “plenty of time.” The man who has no time is a monster, a fiend: he steals time from somewhere, secretes it. (How much time must have been wasted, how much must have been stolen, to make the unjustly famed military punctuality so proverbial: billions of stolen hours of time are the price for this prodigal kind of punctuality, not to mention the monsters of our day who have no time! They always seem to me like people with not enough skin.…)

There is ample time to meditate, for by now it is long after nine-thirty, perhaps the priests have got as far as the biology teacher, a minor subject after all, possibly a spur to hope. But even those who do not make use of the delay for meditation are looked after: records are played unstintingly, chocolate, ice cream, cigarettes are offered for sale, for here—what a blessing—smoking is permitted. There would probably be a rebellion if smoking at the movies were prohibited, for among the Irish the passion for moviegoing is coupled with that of smoking.

The rosy glow from the shells on the walls gives out a feeble light, and in the semidarkness the atmosphere is as lively as at a fair. Conversations are carried on across four rows of seats, jokes are shouted over eight; up front in the cheap seats the children are making the kind of cheerful racket heard otherwise only in school breaks; chocolates are proffered, cigarette brands exchanged, somewhere out of the dark comes the promising squeak of a cork being pulled out of a whisky bottle; make-up is renewed, perfume sprayed; somebody starts singing, and for those who do not allow that all these human sounds, movements, and activities are worth the trouble of occupying the passing time, there remains time for meditation; when God made time, He made plenty of it. Certainly in the use of time there is as much extravagance as thrift, and paradoxically enough it is the time-squanderers who also manage
to save it, for they always have time when you ask them for some; time to take someone quickly to the station or the hospital; just as you can always ask money-squanderers for money, so time-squanderers are the savings banks where God deposits His time, keeping a reserve for when some is suddenly needed on an occasion where one of those people who never have enough time has spent it in the wrong place.

However: we have gone to the movies to see Ann Blyth, not to meditate, although meditation comes surprisingly easily and is pleasant enough in this fairground of lighthearted gaiety, where bog farmers, peat cutters, and fishermen offer cigarettes to and accept chocolates from seductively smiling ladies who drive around during the day in great cars, where the retired colonel chats with the postman about the merits and demerits of East Indians. Here classless society has become reality. It is a pity, though, that the air gets so stale: perfume, lipstick, cigarettes, the bitter smell of peat from clothes, even the music from the phonograph records seems to smell: it exudes the raw eroticism of the thirties, and the seats, splendidly upholstered in red velvet—if you are lucky you get one where the springs are not yet broken—these seats, probably deemed elegant in 1880 in Dublin (they must have seen Sullivan’s operas, perhaps also Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey, and early Shaw), these seats smell the way old velvet smells that resists the harshness of the vacuum cleaner, the savagery of the brush—and the theater is an unfinished new building, still without proper ventilation.

Well, the chatting priests and chaplains don’t seem to have got to the biology teacher after all, or are they discussing the janitor (an inexhaustible topic), or their first furtive cigarettes? Those who find the air too stale can go out and lean for a few minutes against the wall of the building: a clear, mild evening outside; the light from the lighthouse on Clare Island, twelve miles away, is not yet visible; the eye falls on the quiet sea across thirty, forty miles, beyond the edge of the bay as far as the mountains of Connemara and Galway—and looking
to the right, westward, you see high cliffs, the last two miles of Europe lying between you and America. Wild, the perfect setting for a witches’ sabbath, covered with bog and heather, rises the most westerly of Europe’s mountains, a sheer drop of two thousand feet on the ocean side; facing you on its slope in the dark green of the bog, a paler, cultivated square patch with a large gray house: this is where Captain Boycott lived, the man for whom the inhabitants invented boycotting: this is where the world was given a new word; a few hundred yards above this house, the remains of a crashed airplane—American pilots, a fraction of a second too early, had thought they had reached the open sea, the smooth surface between them and their native land: Europe’s last cliff, the last jag of that continent, was their doom.

Azure spreads over the sea, in varying layers, varying shades; wrapped in this azure are green islands, looking like great patches of bog, black ones, jagged, rearing up out of the ocean like stumps of teeth.…

Finally (or unfortunately—I am not sure which) the priests have finished or broken off their school reminiscences, they have also arrived to look at the feast promised by the poster: Ann Blyth. The rosy shells are dimmed, the racket in the cheap seats dies away, this whole classless society sinks into silent anticipation, while, honeyed, colored, and wide-screened, the film begins. Now and again one of the four- or three-year-old children begins to bawl when pistols bang too realistically, or blood, looking too genuine, flows from the hero’s forehead, or dark-red drops even appear on the heroine’s neck: Oh, must this lovely neck be pierced? It isn’t permanently pierced, don’t worry; a piece of chocolate quickly stuffed into the mouth of the bawling child, and pain and chocolate melt away in the darkness. At the end of the film one has that feeling unknown since childhood—of having eaten too much chocolate, indulged in too many sweets: Oh that painful precious heartburn from intensely enjoyed forbidden pleasures! After so much
saccharine a spicy preview: black and white, gambling hell—hard thin women, ugly bold heroes, more of the inevitable pistol shots, more chocolate stuffed into the mouth of the three-year-old. A program of generous dimensions; it lasts three hours, and here too, when the rosy shells begin to glow again, the doors are opened, on people’s faces what is always to be seen on people’s faces at the end of a movie: a slight embarrassment, disguised by a smile; one is a little ashamed of the emotion one has involuntarily invested. The beautiful creature from the fashion magazine climbs into her great car, enormous blood-red tail lights, glowing like lumps of peat, move away toward the hotel—the peat cutter plods wearily off to his cottage; silent grown-ups, while the children, twittering, laughing, scattering far into the night, repeat to each other the story of the film.

It is past midnight, the light from Clare Island lighthouse has been shining across for some time, the blue silhouettes of the mountains are deep black, a few yellow lights far off in the bog; Grandma is waiting there, or Mother, or the husband or wife, to be told what they are going to see for themselves in a day or two, and they will sit by the fire till two, three in the morning, for—when God made time, He made plenty of it.

Donkeys bray in the warm summer night, passing on their abstract song, that crazy noise as of badly oiled door hinges, rusty pumps—incomprehensible signals, magnificent and too abstract to sound credible, an expression of limitless pain and yet resignation. Cyclists whir by like bats on unlit wire steeds, until finally only the quiet peaceful footsteps of the pedestrians fill the night.

9
THOUGHTS ON IRISH RAIN

The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather.