Irish Journal (6 page)

“Good work,” Henry said to me; “you seem to have done a thorough job.”

“One does one’s best,” I said modestly, “and I’ve got into the habit now of pulling a certain tooth for someone every evening. I know exactly which one it is; by this time I’ve become quite expert in political dentistry, and I do it thoroughly and with no anesthetic.”

“I’ll say you do,” said Padraic, “but aren’t we charming people in spite of everything?”

“Of course you are,” we all three said, in one voice: my wife, Henry, and I. “You’re really charming,” I went on, “and what’s more, you’re fully aware of it.”

“Let’s have another,” said Padraic, “a nightcap!”

“And one for the road!”

“And one for the cat,” I said.

“And one for the dog!”

We drank, and the clock hands still stood as they had stood for three weeks: at ten-thirty. And they would stay at ten-thirty for the next four months. Ten-thirty is closing time for country pubs during the summer, but the tourists, the visitors, liberalize hard-and-fast time. When summer comes, the landlords look for their screwdrivers, a few screws, and fix the two hands; some of them buy toy clocks with wooden hands that can be nailed down. So time stands still, and rivers of dark beer flow through the whole summer, day and night, while the police sleep the sleep of the just.

7
PORTRAIT OF AN IRISH TOWN

Limerick in the Morning

Because Limerick had given its name to the familiar little verses, I pictured it as being a cheerful place: humorous ditties, laughing girls, lots of bagpipe music, the streets resounding with merriment. We had seen a good deal of merriment on the roads between Dublin and Limerick: schoolchildren of all ages trotted gaily—many of them barefoot—through the October rain; they came out of lanes, you could see them approaching between hedges along muddy paths; children without number forming like drops into a rivulet, the rivulets forming streams, the streams little rivers—and sometimes the car drove through them as if through a river that parted readily. For a few minutes the road would remain empty, when the car had just passed through a slightly larger village, and then the drops began collecting again: Irish schoolchildren, jostling and chasing each other, often enterprisingly dressed, in variegated bits and pieces, but all of them, even those who were not merry, were at least relaxed; they often traipse for miles like that through the rain, and home again through the rain, carrying their hurling
sticks, their books held together by a strap. For over a hundred miles the car drove through Irish schoolchildren, and although it was raining, and many of them were barefoot, most of them poorly dressed, almost all of them seemed cheerful.

It had seemed blasphemous when someone once said to me in Germany: The road belongs to the automobile. In Ireland I was often tempted to say: The road belongs to the cow. Indeed, cows are sent as freely to pasture as children to school: they fill the road with their herds, turn round haughtily when you blow your horn, and the driver has a chance here to show a sense of humor, behave calmly, and test his skill. He drives carefully right up to the herd, timidly forces his way into the condescendingly formed passage and, the minute he has reached the leading cow and overtaken it, he can step on the gas and count himself lucky to have escaped a danger—and what is more exciting, what better stimulus is there for human gratitude, than danger averted? So the Irish driver remains a creature to whom gratitude is not foreign; he must constantly fight for his life, his rights, and his speed: against schoolchildren and cows. He would never be able to coin a snobbish slogan such as: The road belongs to the automobile. Ireland is a long way from deciding who the road belongs to. And how beautiful these roads are: walls, walls, trees, walls and hedges; the stones of Irish walls would be enough to build the tower of Babel, but Irish ruins are proof that it would be useless to begin such a building. In any event, these beautiful roads do not belong to the automobile; they belong to whoever happens to occupy them and whoever allows those desiring passage to prove their skill. Some roads belong to the donkey: donkeys playing truant from school, there are plenty of those in Ireland; they nibble away at the hedges, mournfully contemplate the countryside—turning their rumps toward the passing car. Whatever else, the road does not belong to the automobile.

Much contentment, much merriment among the cows, the donkeys, and the schoolchildren, came our way between
Dublin and Limerick, and who, thinking of Limericks, could approach Limerick without picturing a cheerful town? Where the roads had been dominated by cheerful schoolchildren, complacent cows, pensive donkeys, now suddenly they were empty. The children seemed to have reached school, the cows their pasture, and the donkeys seemed to have been called to order. Dark clouds came up from the Atlantic—and the streets of Limerick were dark and empty. Only the milk bottles in the doorways were white, almost too white, and the seagulls splintering the gray of the sky, clouds of white plump gulls, splinters of white that for a second or two joined to form a great patch of white. Moss shimmered green on ancient walls from the eighth, ninth, and all subsequent centuries, and the walls of the twentieth century were hardly distinguishable from those of the eighth—they too were moss-covered, they too were ruined. In butcher shops gleamed whitish-red sides of beef, and the preschool children of Limerick showed their originality here: hanging on to pigs’ trotters, to oxtails, they swung to and fro between the hunks of meat: grinning pale faces. Irish children are very inventive; but are these the only inhabitants of this town?

We parked the car near the cathedral and strolled slowly through the dismal street. The gray Shannon rushed along under old bridges: this river was too big, too wide, too wild for this gloomy little town. Loneliness seized us, we felt sad, deserted between moss, old walls, and the many painfully white milk bottles that seemed destined for people long dead; even the children swinging from the sides of beef in the unlit butcher shops seemed like ghosts. There is a way of fighting the loneliness that can seize one suddenly in a strange town: buy something; a picture postcard, or some chewing gum, a pencil or cigarettes: hold something in your hand, participate in the life of this town by buying something—but would there be anything to buy here in Limerick, on a Thursday at half-past ten in the morning? Would we not wake up all of a sudden to
find ourselves standing in the rain beside the car somewhere on the highway, and Limerick would have disappeared like a mirage, a mirage of the rain? So painfully white were the milk bottles—not quite so white the screaming gulls.

The old part of Limerick stands in relation to the new part like the Ile de la Cité to the rest of Paris, with the proportion of old Limerick to the Ile de la Cité being about one to three and that of the new Limerick to Paris one to two hundred. Danes, Normans, much later the Irish, occupied this lovely somber island in the Shannon; gray bridges link it to the banks, the gray Shannon rushes by, and up there, where the bridge joins the land, a monument has been erected to a stone—or a stone has been placed on a pedestal. At this stone the Irish were promised freedom of religious expression and a treaty was concluded that was later revoked by the English parliament, so Limerick is also sometimes called “the town of the broken treaty.”

In Dublin we had been told: “Limerick is the most devout city in the world.” So we would only have had to look at the calendar to know why the streets were so deserted, the milk bottles unopened, the shops empty: Limerick was at church, at eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning. Suddenly, before we had reached the center of modern Limerick, the church doors opened, the streets filled up, the milk bottles were removed from the doorways. It was like an invasion: the inhabitants of Limerick were occupying their town. Even the post office was opened, and the bank opened its wickets. Everything looked disconcertingly normal, close, and human, where five minutes ago we seemed to be walking through an abandoned medieval town.

We bought a number of things to reassure ourselves of the existence of this town: cigarettes, soap, picture postcards, and a jigsaw puzzle. We smoked the cigarettes, sniffed the soap, wrote on the postcards, packed up the jigsaw puzzle, and went cheerfully off to the post office. Here there was a slight
hitch—the postmistress had not yet returned from church, and her subordinate was unable to clarify what had to be clarified: how much did it cost to send printed matter (the jigsaw puzzle) weighing eight ounces to Germany? The young lady looked imploringly at the picture of the Madonna, with the candle flickering in front of it; but Mary was silent, she only smiled, as she has been smiling for four hundred years, and the smile said: patience. Strange weights were brought out, a strange scale, bright green Customs forms were spread out in front of us, tariff books open and closed, but there remained only one solution: patience. We practiced it. After all, who would want to send a jigsaw puzzle as printed matter from Limerick to Germany in October? Who does not know that the Feast of the Rosary, although not a whole holiday, is more than a half-holiday?

Later on, though, long after the jigsaw puzzle lay in the letter box, we saw the scepticism flowering in hard, sad eyes: melancholy shining in blue eyes, in the eyes of the gypsy selling pictures of saints on the street, and in the eyes of the hotel manageress, in the eyes of the taxi driver—thorns around the rose, arrows in the heart of the most devout city in the world.

Limerick in the Evening

Ravished, robbed of their seals, the milk bottles stood gray, empty, and dirty in doorways and on window sills, waiting sadly for the morning when they would be replaced by their fresh, radiant sisters, and the gulls were not white enough to replace the angelic radiance of the innocent milk bottles; the gulls bobbed along on the Shannon, which, pressed between walls, increases its speed for two hundred yards. Sour, gray-green seaweed covered the walls; it was low tide, and it almost looked as if Old Limerick were exposing itself indecently, lifting its dress, showing parts that are otherwise covered by
water; rubbish was waiting to be washed away by the tide; dim lights burned in the bookies’ offices, drunks staggered through the gutters, and the children who that morning had swung from sides of beef in butcher shops now showed that there is a level of poverty for which even the safety pin is too expensive: string is cheaper, and it works just as well. What eight years ago had been a cheap jacket, but new, now served as jacket, overcoat, trousers, and shirt in one; the grown-up sleeves rolled up, string around the middle; and held in the hand—innocently shining like milk, that manna that is to be found, always fresh and cheap, in the last hamlet in Ireland—ice cream. Marbles roll across the sidewalk; now and again a glance at the bookies’ office where Father is just putting part of his unemployment pay on Crimson Cloud. Deeper and deeper sinks the comforting darkness, while the marbles click against the worn steps leading up to the bookie’s office. Is Father going on to the next bookie, to put something on Gray Moth, to the third, to put something on Innisfree? There is no dearth of bookies here in Old Limerick. The marbles roll against the step, snow-white drops of ice cream fall into the gutter where they remain for a second like stars on the mud, only a second, before their innocence melts away into the mud.

No, Father is not going to another bookie, he is just going to the pub; the marbles can also be clicked against the worn steps of the pub: will Father give them some more money for ice cream? He does. One for Johnny too, and for Paddy, for Sheila and Moira, for Mother and Auntie, perhaps for Granny too? Of course, as long as there’s any money left. Isn’t Crimson Cloud going to win? Of course she is. She
has
to win, damn it; if she doesn’t win, then—“Look out, John, don’t bang down your glass so hard on the counter. How about another?” Yes. Crimson Cloud
has
to win.

And when there’s no more string, the fingers will do, thin, dirty, numb children’s fingers of the left hand, while the right hand shoves marbles, throws them or rolls them. “Come on
Ned, give us a lick,” and suddenly in the evening darkness the clear sound of a girl’s voice.

“There’s a service this evening, aren’t you going?”

Grins, hesitation, head-shaking.

“Yes, we’re coming.”

“Not me.”

“Oh come on.”

“No.”

“Oh well—”

“No.”

Marbles click against the worn steps of the pub.

My companion was trembling; he was a victim of the most bitter and stupid prejudice of all: that people who are badly dressed are dangerous—more dangerous anyway than the well-dressed ones. He ought to tremble in the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin at least as much as here, behind King John’s Castle in Limerick. If only they were more dangerous, these ragged ones, if only they were as dangerous as those in the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel who don’t look dangerous at all. At this moment a woman, the owner of an eating place, comes rushing out after a boy who has bought six-penn’orth of potato chips and in her opinion has poured too much vinegar on them from the bottle he took from the table.

“You wretch, d’you want to ruin me?”

Will he throw the chips in her face? No—he can’t think of anything to say, only his panting child’s breast answers: long-drawn-out whistling sounds come from the weak organ of his lungs. Did not Swift, more than two hundred years ago, in 1729, write his bitterest satire, the “Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or the Country” by suggesting to the government that the estimated number of 120,000 babies born annually be offered to the wealthy English
as food?
—precise, gruesome description of a project that was to serve a number of purposes, among others a reduction in the number of Papists.

The battle over the six drops of vinegar is still not over, the woman’s hand is raised threateningly, long whistling sounds come from the boy’s chest. Indifferent people shuffle by, drunks stagger, children carrying prayer books run so as to be in time for the evening service. But the savior was approaching: tall, fat, bloated, his nose must have been bleeding, there were dark patches on his face around mouth and nose; he had also advanced from safety pin to string: there had not been enough for his shoes, they were gaping. He went up to the woman, bowed to her, pretended to kiss her hand, drew a ten-shilling note from his pocket, presented it to her—startled, she accepted it—and said courteously: