Island of Lightning (4 page)

Rugby's most obvious victim is the capital city. On match days it closes down. Undoubtedly, Cardiff requires sport. But intelligent sport. It needs the on-field dazzle that the marble edifices of the Bay and the adamantine cockscomb of the St. David's Hotel are bestowing on its architecture. But during last autumn's Rugby World Cup it was a no-go area for anyone not wishing to get Heinekened out of their heads in its café bars. For those who ventured in, there was one occupation. Punditry, whilst looking at wraparound screens as our players hit the Millennium turf. Joining the throng, I made surreptitious notes. But whilst wanting to describe the present, I was constantly tugged back by the stars of my own era.

The Quinnells? Now I understand why France will never allow British beef back into the country. Scott Gibbs? Robocop on amphetamines. And as the matches progressed, Rob Howley cut an alarming figure. A vast poster was erected in Cardiff, courtesy of BT. With every game the poster seemed to become bigger. Howley's haunted eyes and hollow cheeks towered over the city. The age of anxiety had arrived. Something dreadful was about to happen. Here was a Big Brother losing his grip and according to the
Western Mail
, his ‘world class' status recently bestowed by that same paper's posse of rugby writers.

So what about Jenks? Of those 300 international penalties. That world record. Yes, our millennial monument to tedium. Three hundred penalties mean four hundred and fifty minutes of the nation holding its breath like some bizarre cult suicide. (Models of the points-scoring boot are now on eBay. One hundred and five quid to you, butty.) But at least Jenkins looks human. Note how most international threequarters have become indistinguishable from one another – an overmuscled species of genetically-enginered mercenary, all snarling gumshields and bodybuilders' stretchmarks. But that does not include Allan Bateman.

I remember Bateman as permanently aged 35. Usually, he's injured. This only underlines his superior wisdom. On the rare occasions he does don the corporate Welsh shirt he's as cunning as a conger. Or at least someone who can run and think at the same time. If rugby was chess, Bateman would be both bishop and knight. He is equally adroit at taking the thrilling diagonal and the perplexing counter direction. Catch him while you can.

Finally, there is the Boss. Graham Henry has been nicknamed The Great Redeemer. He is invited to schools and hospitals to encourage. To bless. Very quickly he has learned that the Welsh are paralysed by lack of self confidence. One recurring image of this abjectness is their enthusiasm for tough-talking, wry-smiling father-figures. Admonition, then a hug. I love you, daddy. As an ex-headmaster with a nimbus of All Black macho mystique about him, Henry fitted the bill. He broods high in the stand, frowning so deeply it seems he has glimpsed a future in which Wales loses to the Blasket Islands and an Ikea XV. Around him sits the masonry of the WRU committees. Smug as ampersands.

Henry quickly learned that the Welsh are at their best in crowds. Individually, they lack the cultural grit of the Irish, the exasperating gene of English authoritarianism. But communal cockiness quickly palls. Not finding sufficiently talented players in Wales, Henry trawled the old dominions for wild blood, adventurers who might leave home for piratical challenges at Rodney Parade and Westgate Street. His stricture is clear. It is easy to paint your face red and green and queue for two hours in the Millennium Stadium for a three quid can of Happy Shoppa lager. Easy and horribly explicit.

The coach became aware of the depth of this problem on his first flight into Cardiff airport. Greeting the world's travellers is a statue of the greatest Welshman. Who might that be? Aneirin Bevan, of inspirational political vision? Iolo Morgannwg, who was telling us two hundred years ago that there was too much reality about? No. It is Gareth Edwards. How could we forget those tries, repeated again and again? Who would allow us to forget?

Welsh people, Henry has repeated, need to learn how to stand apart from the throng. (Which, to be fair, is what Edwards did. As a player he was usually greater than his team.) Where, demands the boss, is the Wales of the imagination? Quit the flock. Write your own lines instead of accepting the bitpart offered by social orthogenesis. Yes, but it's hard, Mr Henry. It's so hard.

To be fair, it is the media, especially the
Western Mail
, that are responsible for the hyperbole that bloats rugby and anaesthetises everything else. This newspaper has devoted hundreds of thousands of words, all instantly forgotten, to ligaments, ‘super twelves' and ‘crises'. There have been more crises in Welsh rugby than the Balkans. Television coverage doesn't help. I would prefer to remember Jonathan Davies as an angel dancing on a pinhead, than as a pundit with nothing to say and saying it in a voice like a glove-puppet. I admired Ray Gravelle when he practiced genuine Stradey piraticism. Today he's become an all-purpose factotum for cultural orthodoxy: S4C, the gorsedd, rugby as mystical rite. On the other hand I'd rather encounter Dai “The Enforcer” Young in his Top Man togs than a red jersey, headband pulled tight, eyes bulging like an extra from
Human Traffic
.

Thus, after speaking to devotees at Walkabout and The Scrum, my recommendations are:

* Realise that rugby is about money and not nationality. So? Ban the national anthems. The players' tears and American-style fists on hearts are cringeworthy to those of us who thought John Redwood word perfect throughout
Mae hen wlad
. Instead, play the sponsors' company songs.

* Turn the game on its side. The World Cup was five weeks of piled up juggernauts. The jags and mercs were stuck in traffic. All I recall are behemothian backsides wiggling under the daylight moon above the Millennium Stadium. So? If the touchlines became the trylines and vice versa, there would be more points and greater space for the wings. Remember Dewi Bebb, the ghost who smelt of wintergreen? Or Gerald's snipeflight through a misty afternoon? John Bevan's buffalo soldiering? JJ like a red stamen of mercury? Turn the game on its side and we'll see their like again. And the crowd will have a better view.

* Ensure everyone who plays for Wales comes from Ponty. We'd lose the matches but win the brawls in the nightclubs afterwards. And that's where it really counts.

3.

A Dutch hell's angel in frightwig and marmalade vest inches through the crowd. He bears a tray of
oranjeboom
, fizzing and deadly. Finding a corner table he waves in delight at the tv camera.
Jah
, he mimes. Six pints. And all for me.
Tot straks
.

Now we're getting there. Sports coverage increases exponentially to fill the media time available to it. Digital television has encouraged further efflorescence. Meanwhile, on BBC, sport has reached the pinnacle of the news hierarchy. We are all Man United fans now. If Wales loses a Six Nations match it must devastate both the individual and the national psyche. Caring is compulsory. But as the digital labyrinth convolves, we will need to identify where our loyalties lie.

Mine are with darts. I rediscovered darts at this year's World Championships, held in the cathedral-sized lounge of the Lakeside Country Club, Frimley Green. The last darts I had played was in that ciborium in a Bridgend hotel, decades previously. The longest sums I'll ever write. At Frimley, English, Welsh and Dutch fans cwtched together in the sparkling alcoholic fug. Tuxedoed hosts explained the poetry of scoring. A 120 to finish required a Shanghai. A measley 1 meant the darter had entered The Madhouse or Annie's Room. Then, on to the stage, stepped Count Dracula. A beergutted demigod in black lurex, The Count tossed plastic vampire bats into the audience. He next proceeded to lay low The Archer, sponsored by a firm of West of England meatpackers, in a match classified by darting elders as ‘epic'.

Throughout the tournament the aristocracy of darts had looked in for a swift half and photo opp. In real life they were publicans or scraped by on the exhibition circuit, throwing backwards or indian-style. All were paragons of numeracy. One hundred and thirty seven check-out? The third dart would be airborne before the crowd could lift another french-fry. And as ever in the tournament, the players' flash wives exhorted their partners like marine sergeants, faking every orgasmic 180, tamping their glasses, straining in dresses tight as the green foil over dew-encrusted Pils.

And when The Count had climaxed with a perfect 170 and sunk to his knees, union jack flights still quivering where his last arrow lay against the bullseye wire, the crowd launched into its planned delirum. Dutchman hugged Englishman. A Welshman in rugby shirt, carrying an inflatable sheep, mobiled the bar for a gargantuan round.

Yes, darts is the answer. There's more booze in it than rugby but none of the gloating nationalism. As long as we beat the English we don't care? Yeah, right. In darts, everyone understands that the prelibations and inquests that stretch an eighty minute rugby international into a week of onanistic dreariness could never apply to their sport.

Darts is not serious. Darts is amateur dramatics with tungsten tips. Because it's as camp as a pantomime horse, darts remains uninfected by self importance. It is not a subject for mass delusion or a specious metaphor for identity and belonging. And there are no bluejawed loose-heads threatening mayhem. On the oche, sport returns to human scale. Down that four metre corridor can be found natural redemption through modesty and loss. Because darts acknowledges its own risibility, it will never be involved with the puerile messianics of the back page. Those fascistic longings. Well, that's what Annie told me. And she should know.

A Dream of the Tortoise

A meditation by Alfonsina Storni on Jorge Luis Borges and the suburbs of Buenos Aires

There was a house I used to pass on the street named Arevalo. Number 2378, if I recall. A long street, you would think, but not so long for Palermo or for Baires itself, that city of long streets and longer afternoons.

It was a heavy door, of some tropical wood. Maybe rosewood or mahogany. On my wanderings I would look forward to reaching that door, so immense yet welcoming. But I never dreamed to knock. It was enough to look at the door itself. Because what a satisfying thing is a door. What an irrevocable statement a door makes.

One day, one afternoon that is, for once it was always afternoon in Palermo, I happened to be there again. I found myself dreaming through the slumber of Palermo, the shadows of the plane trees my only companions, the dust glinting in the gutters, when the door opened. The wonderful door. And through the door came a blonde woman. Of course, I had to look. To stare.

A blonde woman in Palermo? Impossible, I thought. What is she, a Swede, a German in a city that was soon to know many Germans? But at that time she seemed unique. In the city of the dark machismo.

And behind the blonde woman came a tall man. A man as tall as the woman was blonde. And the man carried a camera, one of those expensive cameras, hooded like a falcon. I imagined its lens the navy blue of a newborn's eye. An awkward contrivance, that camera, borne with both hands. And the woman walked by and we exchanged pleasantries in Castellano, and I was rewarded with a glimpse into the hallway before the man closed the door.

At the hall's end was a harpsichord. Yes, I'm certain of that. Because there was another man who sat at the harpsi-chord and played. I caught a few notes. Bach, I'm sure. The key of E major, the sunlit key. The key of hope and maybe of redemption. Yes, I heard a stave or two, might even have improvised my own phrases. And then the door closed on the house of harpsichords. For that's what I called it from then on: 2378 Arevalo, the house of harpsichords. Because harpsi-chords make the music of the afternoon. Especially of the waking dreams of what were Palermo afternoons.

After meeting the blonde woman, I went more frequently along that street. But I never saw her there again, or the man with the camera. And I never heard the harpsichord except in my head. E major on a silent afternoon, with horse dung in the middle of the road and a dusty Phaeton parked under the planes. Maybe a hummingbird poised motionless, kissing the air; the way a hummingbird hangs like a model of a hummingbird. Little jade ornament of the somnolent hours.

I tell you this because I happened to be there this week. Yes I, Alfonsina Storni, sixty years after my death, in Palermo once again. Not that my behaviour was so different. I found myself drifting past, as light as that hummingbird I could exactly recall. Its scarlet bill fine as a hypodermic. Its invisible wings. Yes, an E major moment in the afternoon light.

There was the house. If this was Arevalo, it had to be the same residence. But where was the door? The wonderful door with its carvings and brass knocker had been wrenched from its frame. A new door, a hateful and insignificant door, an atrocity of a door, stood in its place. And the spaces in the porch were filled with shoddy brickwork.

Yet, I said – to myself of course – because who else might I speak to now? It doesn't matter anymore. At least to me.

But I walked on, turning right out of Arevalo, into the traffic and crowds of what felt a different district. And I drifted down Santa Fe, and there were others who floated with me, shadows like myself, but we were few compared to the bustle of the avenidas. And I came eventually home to the trees. To the patio where I linger.

And now, for this moment, it's the end of our expedition. Because we've reached the park in Palermo and I must stay here with the boys. The very big boys. Because the poets are remembered here. At least that hasn't changed so much. The poets loved Palermo and now in its turn Palermo loves its poets. And I am with them, for was I not a poet? My last poem was published in
La Nacion
, and while the public read it over coffee and medialunas, or in the swinging omnibus, I was stepping into a river as wide as an ocean.

Yes, here in the park we are a fine group of faces. Not such a bad ending. Perhaps honour at last. This is my kind of fame. I'm with Casona and Machado. And Lorca. Poor Lorca. Not far away is Asturias, the Guatemalan, whom I have never read, despite his Nobel. Yes, he's the copperheaded laureate whose brow in this summer light is too hot for the children to touch. Ah, the irony of that. Because Borges is here too, old JLB, Borges who was never Nobeled, Borges with his bust wrapped in sackcloth. For restoration they say. Well, they are taking their time. But I am here with Borges and he with me.