Songdogs (3 page)

But within a few days the bombs started again. Fires raged in Madrid. The joke was that the Communists could make toast.

My father stood in the camp, a holy medal at his throat, and watched as the bread and bombs zipped in towards his friend Manley, who was in the city somewhere. He envisioned Manley tracing the pattern of the strange parcels with a Lewis gun held at his shoulder, blowing a bale of loaves to bits, crumbs of it floating down around him. Maybe Manley would hallucinate and think it was a flock of birds, with the trajectory of doves. Or maybe he would be given a loaf by a
novia
who loved him. Or maybe Manley was dead – it was the end of the war and there weren’t many Communists left.

The siege of Madrid wore its way through winter, and my father watched it through the eye of a camera, knocking frost off the soles of his boots, flecks of snow melting into the uniform of Franco.

Manley had left Ireland long before my old man. The vulgar suits were left hanging in a cupboard and, drunk on Marx, he had sauntered away, leaving my father alone in the town. There was a narcosis to Manley’s going, but it was two years before my father followed. He left on his twentieth birthday, no politics in the leaving, simply bored. He sold the house, paid the grave of the Protestant ladies a final visit, gave Loyola to a young boy in town. He pinned most of his inheritance into the rear waistband of his trousers. A few strange stares followed his going – the dickybird camera had become something of a fixture around the town, and perhaps people would miss it. He packed a rucksack and moved out, brutal with innocence. Two new Leica cameras strung across his breast. A huge skip in his stride. He didn’t stop to get blessed by the priest who hailed the virtues of Francisco Franco and General O’Duffy.

The old man hitch-hiked and walked his way through storms along the seaboard towards Cork. A wiry unshaven man in a brown hat, wandering through fields, splashes of blood-red poppies like a premonition in the ground, his last look at Ireland for almost three decades.

The only ship going out was full of Irish Fascists in blue shirts. Songs were summoned up about good ways to die in vineyards. Beards grew thick as the waves knocked the boat around off the coast of France. They landed in a blue and delicate Spanish bay, where a melancholy guitar was drowned out by the shouts of the men. They punched the air and grabbed at their crotches as girls at windowsills blew them kisses. But the songs were muted when one of the soldiers was kissed by a teenager, a Communist sympathiser, who bit his tongue out and spat it in his face. The girl was shot to death, running away through a field of hay, a silence descending on the regiment as they stared. By the roadside a priest incanted prayers and doled out holy water to the soldiers. They moved on, the stub of a tongue flickering uselessly in one man’s mouth. Suddenly there were olive trees, bloated bodies, lemon groves,
butifarra
sausage, stretchers, mangled faces. My father sent photos of severed limbs and discarded bullet shells to newspaper editors. They chucked most of them in the bin, but every now and then one was found tucked in the bottom corners of an English newspaper, beside the colourful reports of some daring young journalists. The photos were dark and brooding – a chaplain in a field, stepping over the dead, a woman picking shrapnel from her thigh as if bored by the enormity of her wound, an obese surgeon smoking over a stretcher, the sucked-in bones of a village after an aerial bombardment.

The old man bribed ambulance drivers to let him take his shots, bellowed in cafés, slept in the open under stunted trees, made his way towards Madrid where Manley and other Republicans were being besieged. He had no politics, my father, he was only a photographer, shooting visions, but he placed the holy medal at his neck for safety. On one of the Leicas he pasted a portrait of Franco. He didn’t care about the man – it was just a convenient blur to him, a safe passport, a foxhole. Nor did he care for Manley’s hero, Stalin. He might have looked vaguely comic out there, riding along on the backs of vans, handkerchief tied on his head, four-knot style, under the hat, men with guns in a circle around him. His rucksack, with two Foxford blankets tied on the bottom, was his only link to home.

He wore a pair of big black boots that he had taken off the feet of a dead Welsh Republican. The body was found, fragrant with death, in a clump of bushes. There was a letter in the inside pocket of the man’s uniform, telling his mother, back on the banks of the Teifi River, how much he missed her cooking. ‘Mum, that stuff would…’ and the letter finished there. The old man undid the laces, pulled the boots off – he needed new ones, his own had begun to flap. Some newspaper was stuffed into the toes, and he wrote a note to the family, saying that one day he’d return them. On the bottom of one sole was a carving of a sickle, so that every time his right foot landed it left an impression of the sickle in wet ground. He left sickles behind him for miles, until a soldier in the regiment, walking directly behind him, levelled a rifle and forced him to remove the boots – ‘Communist boots make a Communist man.’ He left them on the ground where the soldier riddled them with bullets. Bits of leather splayed around and the laces lay in some sort of mourning. Maybe there was a family on the banks of the Teifi who waited for years for a large brown package to arrive, waited for some totem of a dead son, waited for a story of some heroic death, waited and waited, among mounds of food and mouldy leftovers.

The dead soldier’s name was Wilfred Owen, an echo of the World War One poet. Years later my father’s life might invoke a line of the poet’s for me: ‘Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.’

He bartered his way into another pair of shoes – rope-soled
alpargatas,
and as the weather got colder, snow in countryside drifts, he bought new boots. The holy medal still shone at his throat and, by the time he reached Madrid, he was well able to sing the praises of nationalism.

He waited outside the city among the gum trees and watched the bread being loaded onto airplanes to swell the nostrils of a pilot. Thousands of loaves. Some of the dough still rising. He stood in the camps as the planes flew off and wondered what it was that had brought him here, took shots of the nationalists as they waited for the planes to return, drilling their way through time and howitzers and dark-haired whores. There were as many pictures of prostitutes as there were of bread. The prostitutes held a peculiar fascination for him, girls who rolled their skirts up on the rubble of their thighs. It was fashionable to be a little plump, so the girls sometimes wore four or five skirts over one another to give breadth to their hips. The men around them were articulate with their penises, a natural extension from the barrel of a rifle to the absurd freckle sitting on any man’s undershaft. One of the shots shows a line of men in a tent, Germans, Spaniards and Moroccans, impatient with sweat, waiting in queue for a thin pockmarked whore in baggy underwear, panties around one ankle. She is kneeling down in front of an equally thin soldier with her mouth at his crotch. At the back of the queue another soldier raises an air-punch in anticipation of the soldier’s climax. His fly is already open and his scrotum leaks out like an underwater polyp.

In makeshift hospital tents there was as much syphilis as shrapnel. Years later, when I went through boxes in our attic, there were shots of women naked in lamplight, women parading in front of his camera, women with sheets pulled coyly around them, women with their heads tilted sideways and an eye in half a wink. I was a teenager when I discovered them. I’d sit, perched on a slat of wood in the attic, thumping away at my body, in the beginning of its own articulation. I became the camera, became the cameraman, and all the time hated my father for being privy to these visions. I walked into the photos, parted the canvas doors of the tents, stood, bemused at first, talked to the women. The women smiled at my curious appearance, beckoned me backwards to the 1930s, asked me sly questions. I hung in behind the camera as outside the planes droned in the clouds with their bounty. The women would move around in the photographs for me, come behind the camera, take me by the hand and lead me somewhere no lens could watch, let me touch them, open my shirt buttons with a flick of their fingers, let me wander, sleep beside them. Sometimes I swore that I could hear the bread falling outside.

When Madrid surrendered, the graveyards of Spain were full of men the world could not do without – other wars would need them.

Manley was found in the charnel of the city, minus one leg in a bombed-out house, babbling, a row of stale loaves around him. The doors and windowframes had been torn off and used for firewood. Manley was strewn out on a mattress that smelled of urine. Unshaven. Huge boils on his neck. He spat in my father’s face when he saw the holy medal, but the old man wandered around the city that day and bought some forged papers for his friend. They were in the name of Gordon Peters. Manley became a man who crawled around on crutches and invented a new past for himself. He and a few other stray Republicans hid in the city with their new identities. My father still had his inheritance, pinned away in plastic at the back of his trousers. He and Manley made arrangements to leave the city together, but Manley disappeared one morning while out buying provisions. My father sat in the shell of the house and waited, days giving way to weeks, cameras gathering dust, the mattress beginning to fester. He searched for his friend, walked around in a stupefied ache, couldn’t find him.

One afternoon he found Manley’s crutch along the banks of the Manzanares – it had been carved with the initials G. P. – and he felt sure his friend was dead, although the body couldn’t be found.

The photos that they had taken years before in Mayo, with Manley in his outrageous suits, became my father’s most vibrant memory of his friend. When the old man talked of Manley he remembered him as a sixteen-year-old with a lustful glint in his eye, rather than a legless soldier who reeked of piss at night. It was something the old man often did – if a moment existed in a photograph, it was held in that particular stasis for ever. It was as if by taking a photo he could, at any moment, reinhabit an older life – one where a body didn’t droop, or hair didn’t fall out, or a future didn’t have to exist. Time was held in the centre of his fist. He either crumpled it or let it fly off. It was as if he believed that something that
was
has the power to be what
is.
It was his own particular ordering of the universe, a pattern that moved from past to present, with the ease of a sheet dropped into a chemical bath. Manley was sixteen once and, because of that, Manley was sixteen forever.

Even today I suppose he might still believe that there’s a loaf of bread in flight above Madrid, a single one, or a parachute-load of it, making its way gracefully through the air from the belly of a high-flying bomber, preparing itself to fall.

*   *   *

After the whiskey he fell asleep in the chair. He woke when I knocked over the kettle in the kitchen by mistake. Pulled the blanket from around himself, clacked his lips together, reached into his shirt pocket, took out a box of Major. After a few minutes he fell asleep again with a cigarette burning down in the ashtray. I stubbed it out, went upstairs and took a hot bath in the iron-coloured water. A bit of a waft from my clothes, though not as bad as him. He’s fairly pungent. The smell was hanging all around the house. A deep unwashed odour, the disappearance of himself, the sort that smells like old campfire. When Mam was around all those years ago, she would wash our clothes in the sink – exiled in a farmhouse kitchen, watching the vagaries of Irish weather, black crows defiling low over a brown bog, telling stories of the colour that once used to exist in her life. She would lift me up and sit me on the sink, gaze out at the columns of crows, talk of other birds – vultures, grackles, red-winged hawks – in other places. She had a couple of sarapes and sometimes they would animate themselves on the washing line, fluttering out over the land, reds and yellows and greens. Mexico existed on the washing line for her, hung out to dry, the woollen ponchos full of life beside the ordinary clothes of our days, my father’s vests, his trousers, his underwear, the banality of them held tight with wooden pegs.

These days, without Mam around, the old man has let the rings of dirt settle down around him – eleven years of it on his shirt collars.

In the bathroom, clumps of hair sat in the sinkhole, under the waterlines. A tiny sliver of soap in the dish. I got some shampoo out of my backpack, sank down into the bath. It was nice, that black silence outside the bathroom window, no mosquitoes or dune bugs battering against the air. Only a couple of harmless moths throwing themselves stupidly against the window. I lay in the bathtub until the water grew cold. At midnight I woke the old man to see if he wanted to go upstairs to his bed, but he grunted sleepily: ‘I’m grand here, it’s comfortable, I sleep here all the time.’

The edge of the chair made a red line on his face, which ran down to the sparse grey beard. His beard may have its own entropy, so that instead of growing outwards it is shrinking inwards to his skin. It looked like a stubble of only one or two weeks, but it has probably been there for months. Two large patches on his cheeks, where the hair doesn’t grow anymore, adding symmetry to his bald pate. I watched him as he woke. He rubbed the red line away from his cheek, coughed, reached for the stubbed butt in the ashtray, smelled it, flicked it towards the fireplace, lit a new one. ‘They taste bloody awful when they’ve been stubbed out,’ he said. He held the new smoke between his teeth, looked around the room. ‘Jesus, it’s chilly enough though, isn’t it?’

I went to the cupboard underneath the stairs to get the blue beach blanket. It smelled a little musty. Waited for him to finish smoking, handed it to him. He pulled it around himself, tucked it up to his chin, gave me a wink. He brushed my hand away, though, when I offered him a cushion to put behind his head.

‘Conor,’ he said, ‘I thought you were dead, for crissake.’