Peeling Oranges (17 page)

Irish history was taught to us in school as nothing other than one long ideological struggle against oppression. It was all propaganda: the pure-hearted Irish warrior fighting the evil English foe, as fictitious as the horse-mounted Saint James driving out the infidel from Spain with his sword.

There were no warts in school history. I learned nothing of the social customs of my people, of everyday happenings; and England and Europe were only mentioned within an Irish context. The English were seen only through the eyes of the past as redcoats or landed gentry. It was only later when I started reading Dickens and Marx and Engels that I learned of the exploitation in factories of the English poor – especially children – by their fellow countrymen.

In the meantime we were encouraged to follow Pearse. Blood sacrifice was extolled. Hadn’t Christ shed His blood for us…?

I write in my diary:

Can history follow general laws or is it just one event after another? Who will write the real history? The history of inner events. The worlds inside the world. What turns the screw which activates ordinary human motivation?

History is not ideology. Ideology shapes history into its own likeness. Ideology only skims the surface of history.

History is more than wars, and more than a Shakespearean tragedy, merely biographical of the great. History is effect. It is the study of the changing value of a penny. There are those in backrooms unseen, weaving threads, and they are not mere footnotes to history.

***

I go to Mam in her apartment. I run up the stairs. I’m excited. I want to talk to her, gently of course. I want to tell her what I have discovered, what I intend to do with my life.

She is sitting comfortably in her armchair, a rug around her legs. The TV is turned off. She doesn’t watch it anymore. It upsets her. The room is pleasantly warm.

‘The central heating is on?’ I say.

‘Yes. It’s grand.’

She is holding a newspaper on her lap. She looks... she looks almost contented. A trace of a smile.

‘Mam,’ I say. ‘Do you feel it happening?’

‘Feel what happening?’

‘History. Do you feel it happening all the time all around you? I feel myself blending with it. I think I will study history.’

The smile evaporates. ‘History. There’s no future in that.’

‘But what… what about Gearóid and Patrick? I say, ignoring her pun perhaps unwittingly given. ‘What about Maud Gonne? We’re part of it too in our own way.’

A sigh. ‘Who wants to be part of all that?’

‘Don’t you see that history gives us a role to play? History is the most important subject of all. I mean you can reject, I mean
one
can reject religion or an ideology or
even a partner, but one cannot reject history. Don’t you feel it?’

I tell Mam that I have applied for a scholarship in the university to read pure history. I tell her that I have to do a
viva voce.

Martha,
mater,
is travelling slowly through the corridors of her mind.

‘I felt it once, but all it does is numb you, so I don’t feel it any more. It steals your heart.’

I don’t know if she means
steal
with an
a
or
steel
double
e.
She keeps sighing. Those damn sighs that would take away a person’s enthusiasm for life or for anything.

‘But if you don’t know history you are doomed to repeat it. Someone said that.’

‘And if you do know it, you are eternally trapped.’

She is chasing her breath.

‘Are you all right, Mam? Will I peel an orange for you?’

‘It takes so much from you,’ she says ignoring me, ‘and all the time life is going on, real life I mean, all the time and we don’t even know.’

‘All right, Mam,’ I say petulantly.

‘What?’

‘You always do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Undermine anything I want to do.’

***

I am one of four students sitting in the professor’s study. The professor has very bushy hair and long locks. He is ensconced so tightly in an armchair, that I wonder does it have a removable arm for him to enter and exit. He wears a tweed jacket which makes me think of Yeats’ fisherman, but when he speaks it is in an upper-class English accent.

Tight-collared, with ties all neat, in staid colours, my fellow candidates sit.

‘And what,’ says the professor, ‘was the most important contribution that Great Britain made to world history?’

‘Her navy sir.’ A Mr Jenkins.

The professor is not impressed.

‘Her parliament sir,’ says another.

The professor’s eyes open a little wider under their hoods.

‘Ah yes, Mr Wesley isn’t it?

‘No sir, Mr Stanley
from
Wesley.’

‘Yes. You mean how the greatness of the empire lay in its ability to contain revolution within its hallowed halls of parliament. That it invented parliamentary democracy, a system emulated in most democratic countries today. Yes, very perspicacious.’

I’m not sure if the professor is praising Stanley or himself.

He looks at me, or rather looks over me.

‘And you Mr….?’

‘Foley, sir.

‘Well, Mr Foley, what do you think was the most significant contribution that Great Britain made to the world?’

‘Her downgrading of peoples, sir.’

***

I wanted to have added more (Oh, how we always think more fully after the event). I wanted to say that he was exaggerating the importance of the British parliament as a democratic institution. I wanted to say that its rhetoric does not stop bombs from falling, or that its hallowed halls insulate themselves to the cry of injustice or the sound of the snipers’ bullets. I wanted to say that the printing press was more important as a democratiser than parliament. But then that was not British.

Anyway, as regards scholarships, I always felt they were
elitist and, besides, history was never ‘pure’.

***

All this talk of nationalism is of little help to me personally. I don’t fit into any of the three categories. I am a subparagraph clinging to the underbelly of some great theory. Silence is no answer. My mother went silent for half of her life. She tried to eradicate half of herself. She extracted her tongue. She blocked her memory. All she kept flexible were her lachrymal glands.

I visit my mother every day, commuting either from the Rathfarnham house or from the university where I have enrolled, despite the lack of a scholarship. She never sold the house, despite all her posturing. She manages on her pension. The house is left to me presumably, but there were never any words between us on the matter. Or does she think it’s gone, like her mind, almost? Daily visits help to keep her
compos mentis
. Perhaps that’s why she had deteriorated on my return from Spain. I keep repeating to myself that I must be calm in my relationship with my mother, that I must follow doctor Mullins’ instructions and treat the great lady of the past with kindness. But she is stable now and has been for quite some time and, besides, the doctor does not know my mother as I know her. I have proof now that she had not been trusting towards me. Perhaps in her dishonesty she thought she was acting for my good and her own. But had she the right to sever the emotional cord that links a mother to a child? (And that is the way my feelings fluctuate towards her. One minute I want to help her, sensing her helplessness, and other moments I feel like tearing her hair out for all her dissembling towards me).

To call my mother a hypochondriac is unfair – she is genuinely unwell, especially with emphysema (I’m forev
er peeling oranges for her to help her to breathe) – but she also suffers from minor irritations – a pain in the back which I have to massage with Wintergreen, swollen veins in her legs which I have to bathe, and sundry, vague ailments. It is the right of an ageing mother to milk her offspring for any drops of human kindness which she can collect in her dry bucket. She isn’t that old. She tries to appear older that what she is, which is a basic ploy on the part of someone who is seeking sympathy. But where was her sympathy for my childhood, for all the lonely nights spent in a faraway dormitory, wondering why my mother did not want me?

***

One of the first things I do when I start university is to supplement my knowledge of my mother’s era by reading in the library. Countess Markievicz separated from her Polish husband and settled in Ireland with her daughter Maeve. Maud Gonne had an affair in France with a Lucien Millevoye which led to the birth of a child. And Martha Foley (yes, I can’t avoid it, the personal keeps coming back all the time), Martha Foley, member of
Cumann na mBan,
had a son adulterously. Martha Foley, my mother. Whether she was forced to or not, the fact remains.

And in the evenings, like a moth to lamplight, I am drawn back again and again to the primary sources – the diaries and letters.

Patrick Foley never openly expressed his jealousy of Gearóid to my mother, but he was clearly fearful. On first hearing of Mam’s correspondence with Gearóid, he wrote: ‘The snail bites off its penis after copulation and uses it to plug the hole of his mate to keep her monogamous.’

In all her correspondences, my mother was quite reticent as regards her personal relationship with Gearóid.
Obviously, she had to be in her letters to Patrick. He was already rather touchy about the revolutionary, although this feeling was somewhat assuaged on hearing about the Peg incident. Patrick, evidently, disliked my aunt. He records: ‘Love has transformed a cantankerous misandrist into a humanitarian. Long may it last.’ Apart from this snippet, however, I have been unable to find any source, either primary or secondary, which could throw clear light on Gearóid’s relationship with the two sisters.

In the light of day Gearóid is not Gerry, and his revolver is solid metal.

But what of the nights he spent alone (presumably) with my mother, when her husband was abroad? Would the fact that the diplomat had saved his life prevent Gearóid from cuckolding him in his own home? Or was my mother’s fondness for the gunman no more than a platonic friendship rooted in the innocence of childhood? And if that were the case, who, with my mother, was the other illicit party in the conceiving of me?

I peruse old newspapers. The winter of nineteen forty seven was one of the coldest recorded. Heavy snowfalls, blizzards, lasting till spring. It was a tough time for mammals (monogamous or not) carrying the embryos of future generations. And perhaps a tougher time for the embryos themselves to grow strong and prepare to leave the warmth of a womb for the purpose of being born.

***

At university I find myself – almost unwittingly – being drawn into Irish societies. I like the language, but not all the paraphernalia that goes along with it. However, in such societies one has to buy the whole package: the
céilí
music, the narrow nationalism, the anglophobia, the insular arrogance.

I try to upset the package a little bit – the boarding school cussedness in me overcoming shyness. I start hops and act as a DJ for a while in an attempt to introduce pop songs into an Irish setting. Pop songs are global. I mean in Spain they don’t spend all their time listening only to
sardana
or
flamenco
. My plan is to win more devotees by making Irish appear open and modern. It lasts for a while, but it is not taken seriously and I myself soon tire of pop songs with their inane repetitions and hyperbolic exclamations of undying love. Words always wear themselves out in the end.

But then of course there was Sinéad.

‘You must put on
céilí
music to speak Irish,’ Sinéad says.

According to the philosopher, Santayana, a fanatic is one who redoubles his or her efforts after losing sight of his or her goal. Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin is one of the most fanatical of the Gaeilgeoirí and quite beautiful now. She is no longer the skinny breastless kid I knew from the Liberties. She has emerged from that chrysalis fully endowed with the wonderful curves and bumps of womanhood. How had I missed that transformation? Where had she been hiding? But she wasn’t hiding anywhere. She was there all the time under my nose, visiting my mother regularly, chatting in Irish, and I didn’t even see her.

She is attending the same university as myself, so I sometimes accompany her home on the bus, but talk between us now is always of an ideological nature.

This evening Sinéad is on her favourite hobby horse decrying the incursions of Anglo-Saxon into Irish.

‘No language is complete in itself,’ I counter.

‘What are you saying?’

‘We’re not complete. None of us is complete.’

‘Your head is all mixed up since you came back from Spain, Derek. You’re corrupted. What would Pearse have
made of you?’

I think not of Pearse but of Picasso, of the contorted face of his three dimensional woman trying to look different ways all at once.

I wonder about Sinéad as we get off the bus and she walks beside me with her arts scarf up to her chin. I wonder does she see me physically. Does she see my hair blowing in the wind? Does she see the colour of my eyes? Or am I just a floating concept?