Authors: James Lawless
She tells me she waited until I had finished my studies before moving, as if she were trying to hold on, to suffer it out for as long as she could for my sake. But she can’t take it any longer. When I ask her to explain why she wants to leave, she says it’s a feeling – and feelings are real things – of not being safe.
***
In my father’s study the walls are lined with books, except for one wall on which there hangs a painting. It depicts a snowstorm: people are huddled in capes as they cross a mountain with a beast of burden; and a bare tree, bent by the storm, struggles alone for survival.
There is a writing desk: mahogany with a yellow leather top. By the window an earthenware pot houses a golden Lobivia cactus which my father had grown from seed. Mam said that he used to talk to the seed to coax it into life, to bring sunshine into a dull room. Beside the pot there is an old gramophone and records in faded sleeves.
One of the drawers in the writing desk is locked. I find the key for it in an envelope in an open drawer – my father would not have won a medal for concealment. When I unlock the drawer I find diaries and letters, lots of them. I lift up one of the diaries and a cutting, gone mustard, from an old newspaper, falls out. It’s from the ‘Thanksgiving’ Section.’ An encircled piece of print gives thanks for success in an examination to ‘Great Saint Joseph of Cupertino,’ it reads, ‘I promise to make your name known and cause you to be invoked. Signed: Patrick.’
Underneath the letters I discover old girlie magazines.
On flicking through some of the pages with their sepiacoloured photographs, I stop at one with a turned-up corner. A beautiful young girl crouching on all fours looks straight into my face. Her eyes are so alive that I swear they moved. But of course this has to be my imagination, as my mother would say. But for me she came alive; she unwound herself from the confinement of paper and the wooden prison of the drawer and entered inside my head.
An interesting observation: while I was attracted to her, I was not aroused physically despite her nakedness. Rather, her vulnerability evoked in me a desire to protect her, to shield her from the world. But she was someone else’s woman, a secret woman locked away. And the magazine was faded and crinkled. It smelled of age. To dwell lustfully on her would be a sort of necrophilia.
Why did my father mark this page? Is it only in our fantasies that we find compatibility? I’m not sure why I say that. I’m not at all clear. But then I never was. Too many imaginings, too many dreams.
My father died from a heart attack. He was elderly when he married. I have no memory of him. Mam, understandably, finds it all too painful to talk about him. So, since I discovered the diaries, I have been secretly reading extracts from them the last couple of times I came home. Mam has not twigged it yet. I read randomly when she is elsewhere engaged.
He was very fond of literature, and the mahogany shelves of his study are crammed with literary books and manuscripts and poems. I also counted six different bibles. I sometimes take down his books and try to feel the breath of his life in them and imagine my pen blending in with his annotations. And of course one of the books has the hollow inside.
However, despite the books and the magazines and the
revolver, it is his diaries which really draw me into my father’s world. They reveal a cryptic universe which leaves me fearful at times to delve too deeply. That is why (initially at least) I can only ingest small fragments at a time, and that is why I am in no great hurry to get to the ‘there’ that everybody else seems to be going to with such haste.
I sit at my father’s desk – all his files, diplomatic correspondences, all untouched, all left neatly. What is diplomacy? I look up a dictionary. It is from the Greek –
diplomas
, documents or treaties; ‘the keeping of such documents to facilitate the recreation of the past.’
I casually open a page of his diaries:
September 1938:
Had to go to Barcelona to do a report on the Catalan situation. Such a wonderful change from Madrid. I can smell the sea air. I can breathe. Wandered along the Ramblas. Couldn’t believe it was L when I saw her standing there. Never thought I would see her again. Despite heavy makeup, I still recognise the little girl inside. Stayed overnight. Long journey (621 kilometres) but worth it – fertile. Besides, distance reinforces anonymity. Will go again next Thursday; easy to find a pretext. Can sleep in the overnight train if I can’t get the car.
***
My mother is packing, clearing things, filling boxes. She really meant it after all when she said she was moving. She takes clothes from one box and puts them in another, and then she says she can’t see what she is doing, and she runs her fingers along the windowsill in search of her spectacles. So many years spent semi-reclusively in a suburban house, and now it is all to end. It was the last break-in that made her snap. Thieves gained entry by prising open the latch on the kitchen window. I got a six inch nail and
hammered the window permanently shut. Too late! She wants to move into an apartment, protected by intercom and security guards.
‘You take his books, Derek; you might make use of them.’
My mother never goes near my father’s things except to dust them occasionally with her long feather duster. She treats them as fixtures. Her feather brushes lightly over them as if they are little sticks of furniture with nothing inside.
‘Were there many break-ins, Mam?’
‘Ever since forty seven, that terrible winter, the house was never secure.’
She sighs so deeply, I feel as if her whole life is expiring. Words are breaths. We are allowed so many, and then they are all used up.
‘No more. They took my cross and chain.’ She is suddenly alarmed. ‘Where’s my cross and chain?’
She did not have a cross and chain.
My mother’s mind wanders between solid worlds and floating worlds. ‘We have to bear our cross.’ She stares at me accusingly, as if to say I am responsible for all her misery. Then she smiles and says matter-of-factly, ‘I’ll be safer in a flat with a caretaker, don’t you know?’
I have a recurring nightmare since boarding school of a man, a huge man with a revolver, his face covered, crouching over a blond woman. She is holding a scissors and wearing a flimsy nightdress, delicate like gossamer. It’s a dream that never reaches a conclusion. I always waken before it ends.
I had often asked my mother to keep me at home, to educate me locally so that I could protect her. But it was as if she thought it was ordained for me to go away, almost like a priestly novice. And all the time I felt she was using
education as an excuse for not wanting me around. She was using it to try to change me.
‘Education is a mould,’ she said. ‘It can mould you into something different from what you are.’
‘Like Nelson, Mam.’
‘What?’
‘Like changing the statue?’
‘Don’t
you
get me rag out.’
My mother never got her rag out. It was just her way of speaking.
‘But I don’t want to be different, Mam.’
‘Sure, everyone wants to be different.’ She looked anxious. ‘Everyone wants to be someone else; don’t you know that?’
***
There are lots of references in the diaries to routine diplomatic activities: sending off letters, making reports, asking a certain señora Martínez to type such and such. The typist seemed to irritate my father:
She is always fussing over me. She is also quite inquisitive, always asking me where I’ve been. Sometimes I think she is trying to read my mind.
***
I prefer his observations outside the realm of work:
How we judge by appearance. A man with a crutch was jeered as he stumbled. He was trying to catch the Barcelona train. He hobbled along with all his might, as the train pulled out, to the taunts of the healthy-limbed who were securely on board. Is it the Old Testament rather than the New that is followed here? Human defects mean kinship with the Devil and unworthiness in the sight of God. I myself do not escape with my stoop, and then there is the other matter, the secret matter which makes me feel like half a man. I feel I am the butt of their jokes. JB has gone to America to do further research. There is no one I can talk to. I am surrounded by machos. I just live for Thursdays. Words written to M or JB have limited therapeutic power because they are not tactile. One cannot live on ink alone. The price of a career.
***
After their honeymoon, when my mother had returned to Ireland, he wrote:
The body is evil. At night I sleep with my hands crossed on my chest and I utter pious ejaculations to ward off impure thoughts, just as we were taught in school.
***
November 1941:
I have been reading Spallanzani (JB’s book). How advanced his knowledge was. He was ahead of his time. How sad that the Preformation theory was proved wrong; he showed clearly that there must be contact between egg and semen for the creation of life. But he instils hope as I read of his successful experiments with artificial insemination; and all this as far back as 1769. If I could only beget a child, even if not spontaneously. Human sperm can be stored, can hibernate like a flower seed in a pod and grow into life in the spring. It is our duty as a species to provide a continuity.
***
‘Mam was I adopted?’
She is dusting the mantelpiece with her feather. She stops, startled. ‘What a thing to say? Of course you weren’t. It must be from him you get your flights of
fancy. Oh no.’
She has remembered something. ‘What is it, Mam?’
‘Nothing.’
She floats away just when I thought she was becoming lucid.
How many people talk to each other but don’t know what each other thinks? Where does one find what a person thinks? In the eyes, the posture, the gesticulation, the slipped epithet, revealing a crevice, a ray of illumination?
***
July 1945:
At last I have perfected the refrigerating system that will withstand Spanish heat. The glycerol and carbon dioxide work perfectly just as JB predicted they would. For the experiment to succeed it is paramount that the seed be kept deep-frozen until needed. The whole thing is compact and will travel well. It is so exciting to see the blue irradiation shining on my little ‘altar’ and the test tube rising up like a monument in the middle of the simulated garden which I have made for it with miniature plants surrounded by ice and artificial snow.
***
I think of the erection of empires, of Nelson’s stump, of Wellington’s monument in the Phoenix Park, of a phallus as impotent as stone.
***
A marital criticism: August 1946:
M is restless here. She complains about the heat. She moons about. She is in love with love and romance, but it’s all girlish fantasy.
***
Mam is sitting by the fire, staring into the flame.
‘Your father and I were happy in Spain.’
She speaks as if knowing telepathically the fragment I have just read.
‘Tell me about my father, Mam?’
‘Your father, don’t talk to me…’
She is angry, momentarily, and then calm once more. ‘You were only two…’
‘I know, but is there nothing? Some detail?’
‘Your father was a good man.’
‘Whatever happened to Mr Counihan, Mam?’
‘Counihan?’
‘The insurance collector.’
‘Oh, the society man. That was years ago. We changed insurance since then.’
‘Why, Mam?’
‘Why? Because… I honestly can’t remember why. But sure don’t you know insurance companies change all the time?’
***
The moon shines through the window of my bedroom. I can read by it. Contrary to what my mother says, it is clear from the diaries that she found it difficult to settle in Spain. Despite the dangers during the War years, she commuted at regular intervals between her host and native countries.
Absence makes the heart grow fond once more: September 1947:
One more month and my little angel will be with me. We can at least talk and touch and hold.
Underneath the diaries there is a photograph of my father. A sort of dreamy veil hangs over his face. He has wistful brown eyes and a moustache. I look like my mother.
When I lie down I place my fingers on buttons, pressing them for answers.
October 1947:
M is with me now. She said the house was burgled. It was a terrible experience for her. She was quite shaken by it.
***
It is late. I hear my mother checking bolts on doors. I go out to her.
‘Mam, what was it like here in the forties? Was there much violence then?’
‘It was worse then.’ She pulls at the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘There were worse things.’
‘What things, Mam?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘What things?’
‘Don’t be always at me,’ she snaps irritably, moving away.
***
Christmas Day 1947:
There is blood in the snow as I look from my window on to the embassy garden. A little robin I think, got at by the cats.