Farewell to Prague Page 11

  He is withdrawing from us, leaving us, no longer interested, already joining the spirit of his mother.

  Sometimes a girl comes to visit Marek, a very beautiful girl, Zdena, from a town in Swabia. She has blonde, curly hair and cheeks with a dog-rose flush. She wears a black and white check scarf with a sepia rose and a sepia bunch of anemones in alternate white squares. She wears a red dress with vardos and hounds and boys in kerchiefs on it. They have a row one Saturday afternoon, something about terminating a physical relationship and beginning a new one, which ends in violence, Marek stabbing himself with a knife, although only superficially. She stops coming after that.

  ‘I had to take tranquillizers for a week in order to be able to come to terms with things. I know this sounds like a classicl junkie case, but I was close to killing myself.’

  ‘I saw you walk past AIDS, your mother’s death, heroin. First time you broke down was when she left you.’

  ‘After having been close to the end, I now want to live a conscious life. And therefore I suddenly realize how superficial most people are. It hurts me to see how they waste the most precious gift they have, which is time.’

  ‘Foggio is fine.’

  It was in the autumn of 1982 that Marek picked up AIDS in Verona, injecting himself, with an Italian companion. He’d run away from school in the West of Ireland about a year before.

  They’d walked from a rose-madder square, filled with umbrellas over stalls, to a bit of waste near a bridge of burnt sienna to inject.

  He thought of the light on the Atlantic as he injected. ‘There was a block we both came up against there, a block …’

  The angels of death come strangely. Like the pistachio trail of the angel of death in Cecil B. de Mille’s The Ten Commandments, which I saw from raddled black wooden benches.

  Shortly before Christmas I went to the Gulf of Mexico with Irene, and we’d walk arm in arm on the beaches. A sixteen-year-old boy who was already an ex-alcoholic was also staying in the house. There was the smell of Russian olive in the air and the tutu bird hooted over the water’s edge like trains going into Southern towns. At evening the horizon was tangerine, the sea pale Medici blue, with lavender sluices running along the beach. Come night-time men would put long wooden tables on the beach and clean fish by candlelight.

  We sat by a table of our own on the beach one night, windows of the houses lit up like gauzed theatre. There was a candle in the middle of the table and it made the boy in his shorts look like Georges de la Tour’s Sebastian.

  ‘I don’t feel whole. I wonder from the centre of my being what my relationship with you and others is. I feel like this candle.’

  He blew it out.

  I hold Marek’s hand at night as he lies.

  This city is a city of fathers with children, children on fathers’ shoulders, a father hugging an infant to him, wheeling a low black pram with bubble sides. It is a city of beautiful children, a little boy, a cloth satchel slung over his shoulder with his bicycle on the Metro. Two little boys selling their toys and other items on a cloth on the pavement – a capsized baboon, filthy runners size II, a bear wearing a heart brooch, a bear with an alligator’s head.

  A little boy cries on the train, face against the door. Then suddenly he turns about and shouts something at two Turks who are kissing, with the mother of one of them looking on. He turns back again and cries again and bangs his head repeatedly on the door.

  My first time making love I was on my way north to Donegal, hitchhiking. It was the year I met Phil Lynott in a night coffee shop in Dublin. We had cappuccinos with chocolate on the cream. Behind him were pictures of Italian houses with roofs like a bed of yellow grapes in sunlight. The lights were squashed into the rain outside. A boy with a scarf dribbling around his neck sat opposite. An actress, with apricot hair, in black, went by outside. He had a melancholy Lionel Barry-more moustache and he spoke about exile and James Joyce. His Joyce was the older one in an amber-red jacket, the one who’d lost his daughter.

  It was the year I met a blond boy on the boat from Holyhead, just as we caught sight of the Wicklow mountains, whose mother had left when he was three and who’d been a detainee in Mountjoy. I made an arrangement to meet him again in Bewleys on Grafton Street.

  I was picked up outside a graveyard in Strabane by a young Protestant with big, effeminate lips like the boxer Joe Louis and driven for the night to a country house which lay up an avenue. There were miniature yellow chrysanthemums in pots wrapped in orange paper on the porch. Just inside was a photograph of a woman in a hobble skirt. His mother was away. There were orange Nerine lilies in the room in which we made love, brought there from an autumn garden.

  When I lived with Eleanor in Rathmines two years later, there were pictures of Hart Crane all over the wall – Crane against grained New York skies, Crane in profile, Crane with Peggy Cowley – and pictures which suggested Crane: a victrola with a stack of records, sailors in blue under a red flag on a French beach.

  We had a friend from the back-streets of Dublin that summer, a boy with a rough helmet of black curls. He came from a high-rise block of flats, with a giant Child of Prague in the window, in an area where blond boys curled up in door-ways at night, and had a mother whose hair was as black as his. In early adolescence he’d been a skinhead, knocking around Kimmage and Clonskea.

  Then he’d started, still as a skinhead, to read Euripides, Ovid, Homer, Aristophanes in the National Library.

  He joined the Divine Light, lived in the temple in North Dublin where there was rhubarb and oranges under a picture of the guru, went to London where he lived with an old Protestant poet from the North of Ireland over a pet shop in Richmond. She had seal-black hair which she wore in a plait over her head and her dresses were of black broadcloth. There were always tears in her sleeves. The sofas in this flat looked as if they’d been attacked. She had many cats and she led them along by the Thames. He came back one day and found her dead on one of the sofas.

  He’d just returned to Dublin when we met him.

  A few years later he did a strange thing, returned to the flats, fungus now all over his face, and faded into his background as though he’d never come out of it. Then he changed again, ran for the Green Party, got elected, went to Europe every few weeks, wore carob-brown suits or jackets with chintz in them, became dashing and haunted again with the memory of that stubble on his face in a fashionable way, but with eyes in photographs against the Liffey that were sad, that were out of place, that were those of a shoe-shine boy in Rome.

  The summer in Rathmines with Eleanor I got an invitation to visit a writer in the country. Eleanor, although she had many affairs, was jealous. I took a red bus through a countryside where the ruined cottages were overgrown with the Australian vine.

  She greeted me in a black alpaca dress with snapdragons in her arms. She had grey hair, touched by ginger, and an oval, marsupial face. At night she let her hair down and spread it out and in the greyness there was char-black.

  The summer after my breakdown in London I finally evaded my pursuers and started making love again, on the tops of buses at night, in parks.

  When I first came to London in 1977, and there were no relatives living in London, I made love to a boy who’d picked me up, in his flat in the East End by a series of Thames-side pylons. After making love I looked out the window and saw that the entire street was filled with Salvation Army people, filing along, a march having broken up, musical instruments by their sides.

  In the autumn of 1973 I knew something would irrevocably come between Eleanor and me. I got a train from Florence to Siena, through hills of cinnamon and lilac with corners of ruby. Siena was gold and papaya and rose. Boys in pale blue denim suddenly turned corners of spiral steps. Someone in a mac on the street wore a poppy scarf. Bells sounded from all directions. A funeral service was being held in St Catherine’s Cathedral. Outside a little boy in a blue coolie-type coat, with short brown hair, stood holding a bunch of flowers that was bigger than him: bl
ue, mauve and white delphiniums, auburn tickseed, purple Michaelmas daisies, poppies, goldenrod, purple speedwell.

  This city of Berlin, with its greengage blocks of flats and blinking red lights on church spires, brings another subconscious. I remember the public man’s wife who cut her throat and survived, and who walked about town with him in turtle clothes, face inflamed, anguished, but composed; the swan-necked woman who died young from grief; the woman, a student of singing once in Heidelberg, who threw herself out of a window.

  One of my friends from University College taught English in Berlin and had a catatonic breakdown here. He came from a house in Dublin, in a street of persimmon and crumbled acorn houses, full of crenellated old yellow lampshades and large emerald ashtrays. His mother, although a very respectable Dublin woman with pictures of the Little Flower in her house, had some strange obsession with other women’s umbrellas and used to pinch them from cafés in Dublin. Photographs of him with female relatives on Irish beaches, against houses the yellow of old lace and ivory, billows on them like the retreating breasts of the aged. A photograph of him with his mother on a beach in Lanzarote. He finally killed himself by throwing himself out of a train in the South of England.

  In a squat in Battersea a boy from Ireland is crying. He’s crying because of the way they denigrated him, tore him down for his sexuality, tried to make him less. All I can do is look on.

  More than anything we seek forgiveness for having let them touch us.

  Dear Eleanor,

  I am in a city now where you used to live. I follow your tracks. The Romanian women crouch with small babies. Little Romanian boys sell lurid postcards of Checkpoint Charlie. A German woman in a fur coat rubs the eye of a little Romanian girl. The sky these days looks as if it has been brushed with a pearl glow. The Turkish women stand around like huddles of nuns. All kinds of old people come out, scarves, big boots – some look as if they are characters from the Brothers Grimm. A woman with waist-length white hair. An old man hobbles in the black velvet costume of a mysterious and ancient trade, elephant trousers on. The child we would have had would have been happy and at home here. I see children everywhere, little boys with silver stoles around them locked into their fathers on the Metro, a little girl sacramentally carrying a loaf of bread in white paper past ancient houses. I hear you’re pregnant. Please be happy. We’ll probably never meet again, but something of you will be with me always: those old aunts of yours who used to sneak around Dublin with bunches of parsley, the mad turtle and white dappled dog your mother executed in the Wicklow mountains, the mantle of Dublin neon lights that always seemed to come and protect our love.

  I see you in Ranelagh, buying veronicas for me which are mixed with twigs the flower seller has painted white.

  Some things are beyond understanding – human cruelty and spite.

  Our child will be our mutual journeys which have linked up sometimes for moments and said maybe there is a kind of God, a kind of protection, some sidereal banner.

  I had a strange dream last night. We were back in the hotel in San Francisco. We are looking for a room for the night. A man stands beside the receptionist.

  ‘Do you know what anarchism is?’ he asks in the dead of night.

  ‘I went to school too,’ she growls.

  He mumbles apologetically and disappears into the night of flagging neon while we go upstairs and make love, the taste of redwood trees and Indian air still in your silver-blonde curls, the lostness still in your eyes which was there on the front of a truck as we crossed Golden Gate Bridge …

  ‘You’re incapable of having full physical relations with women except with Eleanor, yeah.’

  In New Orleans I am watching the funeral of a taxi driver. Some nuns in black with circular wreaths of poinsettias look on from a car. A photograph of the taxi driver and photographs of two dispatch riders were placed on a grave in Saint Louis Number 1. The taxi driver and the first dispatch rider were killed. They got to the second dispatch rider in time.

  We are performing W. B. Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon on Dollymount Strand late on a summer’s afternoon for children from the Dublin slums. A piebald horse grazes nearby on a mound of grass. Some of the little girls wear daisy-chains. I am the lame man, on the blind man’s back, both of us going to the saint for a cure. The big, broad-shouldered girl with grey hair is the blind man. Suddenly a little black-haired boy, in a blue cardigan with black cord bas-relief running over the front of it and patent shoes, with skin like dented crockery, breaks from the crowd and starts shouting at the saint, ‘Please saint, cure me. My Daddy says I’ve a girl’s voice and beats me up all the time. Please saint, give me a man’s voice.’

  Years later I visit the grey-haired girl in a mental hospital near the border.

  ‘You’re a golden oldie,’ she says, as we meet in the lounge. There is a picture of a camel being dragged through a desert on the wall.

  A boy with twin earrings on each ear, eagle on his belt, silver studs on his boots looks at us. At his feet is a carpet with a lozenge shape in the centre. There is coleus on the windowsill and the window is multi-grided.

  We go walking, almost immediately, among the ash and alders and hazels and willows of the grounds.

  ‘It was a fair ould boot up the arse for me,’ she says.

  Two nuns are walking by. ‘Didn’t a lord once live here?’ one of them asks the other.

  At the beginning of that summer of plays on beaches we’d hitchhiked together in Spain. We flew to Benidorm and hitch-hiked from there – Murcia, Almeria, Malaga, Fuengirola, Seville, Granada, Madrid, Avila, Gerona, Barcelona. We even got to Ceuta in North Africa by a short boat ride. First night we stopped for a couple of coffees in a café big as an amusement arcade on a street of poplar trees in the dead of night and then went on, sleeping in the same bed in rooms with dove-brown shutters, attended by ladies with bobbed hair, in low white high heels and clothes the mulatto brown of Martin de Porres.

  In the chapel of St Teresa’s convent in Avila she’d said, ‘Wouldn’t Aunt Evelina be happy with me now?’

  Someone subsequently told me of an Irish woman, in the days of cloche hats, who came on pilgrimage here and how afterwards, when she’d got to Toledo, allowed herself to be picked up by a sheep driver and had him make love to her on the side of a hill.

  As we walk the girl tells a story of her Holy Communion, how her mother washed the white dress the night before and how it turned blue, and then for some reason she starts singing.

  ‘I went for a walk on such a winter’s day. California dreaming on such a winter’s day.’

  Right up to the end of that summer, when I left for the United States for the first time, I was still playing in the theatre company, dressed in black, looking into a Victorian pram on a bandstand in St Stephen’s Green with blue-painted pillars.

  In London I wasn’t so much going through a bad time as feeling pressed in, pestered by family, when I went to a party at Christmas. There were soldiers there, lords, ladies, representatives from Amnesty International, all in rose-madder paper hats. I nervously fingered the John McCormack records. The only person who’d spoken to me so far was a runaway from Glasgow in a seal-skin costume. I’d drunk hot chocolate all day so I wouldn’t get drunk, but champagne mixed with Beaujolais Nouveau mixed with gravy on Brussels sprouts – a gay wine bar manager had handed the sprouts to me saying, ‘So you’re the vegetarian’ – and suddenly I felt sick and went to the little whitewashed toilet where I started throwing up. It was when I returned that some newcomers to the party, a tall, broad-shouldered boy with vagabond hair I’d known in Ireland and his wife, with snowflake-peroxide hair, in a frou-frou dress, came up to me. He put his hand on my arm and so the gesture was passed on. Dylan, an Indian boy called John, and I thought for some reason, as John McCormack sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, of an Irish woman from the country, in a black cloche hat, walking through a field of poppies after making love.

  Spring comes to Berlin; women look out the win
dows of peach houses; lime trees come into blossom against umber roofs; a hurdy-gurdy woman in Kreuzberg, in Edwardian costume, leads her hurdy-gurdy on a wagon drawn by a donkey with carnations in his ears; a dispatch rider cycles under Marien-kirche with a bouquet in his mouth; a little girl runs along a path by the border carrying a toy horse with a mane as black and fulsome as a Sephardic Jewish woman’s hair; there are cowslips in the front of the detergent in shop windows in East Berlin and aftershave being sold from side-street vans; in a toilet in Friedrichstrasse Station a miniature bottle of champagne is stuck on a pin into a pot, wrapped in tinsel, of daffodils and lilies; a boy in cobalt sweeps the street, two plastic fleabanes on the back of his wagon, one pink, one magenta; a crippled Turkish boy in a black leather cap turned back to front, moles on his face, motors himself across a road, sometimes helped by a companion, and turns and throws a smile at me.

  Before I leave Berlin I visit the site of the Gestapo torture rooms nears Kochstrasse, Putkammerstrasse, where prisoners were executed on a bombed-out site on 23 and 24 April 1945. There’s a blown-up photograph of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a little museum, blond, balding, in an open-necked shirt. On a side-street is a socialistic mural, girls in blue dancing and boys with red kerchiefs playing violins and accordions while wheat is gathered. In a nearby museum there is a painting of Ruth and Boaz meeting in a field of poppy-sprinkled green barley, a man in turban and thoab to the side of the field. A gull flies low over the border.

  ‘The mighty gods forbid no one to travel the path of love.’