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He had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feeling.
The strangest thing he had learned while alone in his mid-thirties was about the length of the nights. They were never-fucking-ending. They opened out like bleak continents. They were landscapes sombre and with twisted figures.
To be able to stand back from and recognise his obsession as exactly that did not lessen its extent nor remove its danger.
Early in May, the call came through that Uncle Aldo was on his way out up in Donegal. It was a miracle that he was even going still. Aldo had drank like a fool always and chased women and crashed cars; he burned summonses; he fell out of a hotel one time and landed on a taxi. I was the last of his close relations. He was my father’s only brother, and my father was long dead. It was the lungs, in either case, that would cart them off. The lungs and the dampness, I suppose. Here’s a very old joke— Cause of Death: the west of Ireland. Aldo had mostly been a figure of my childhood. His visits had
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He beckoned me to come closer— “There could be a tumour the size of a small dog atein’ you from the inside out,” he said, “and you wouldn’t even know it.” “Okay,” I said. “So what you should do,” he said, “is live your fucken life.” “I have you now,” I said. “And I tell you,” he said, “this place? Whatever way this house was set down…just here…on this spot…I can’t explain it but the women go mental fucken gamey as soon they get a waft of the place at all.” With a surge of unnatural strength he clawed me towards his chest and rasped the words at me— “Get them sat in there by a peat fire with a
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I knew well that I was a maggot, and that in my own unreliable ways I was precisely in the line of Aldo’s stock, my reckless green-eyed uncle who had broken the hearts of nuns and blind girls, had stabbed friends in the shoulders if he missed their backs, had propositioned my mother in the scullery of an Easter Sunday morning, and who once had seen the lights of Moose Jaw burning across the Saskatchewan plain.
I was trying to collect the songs that were as yet unrecorded before their moments had irretrievably passed. My research was in sean-nós—the “old style,” in Irish—the unaccompanied folk singing that is plaintive, sometimes harsh, with often a lovelorn quality, and with narrative always. These were the song-stories that were usually passed down by means of the recital alone.
I tried to sleep for a while but my mind ran and I could not sleep. I went out to the foothills of the Bricklieves and walked the last of the day away. The hills displayed with arrogance the riches of autumn and glowed, and I walked in a state of almost blissful sadness. There had been an intense romance that lasted the first half of the year but it no longer held—she went back to her wife. At my age—I had long since cleared the vault of fifty—it was not unreasonable to assume that this might have been my last great love. But still my pain had that shimmer of bliss at its edges—I had gone to
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“Have you travelled far today?” “Oh Christ,” he said. “Was it Kenmare, Mother? Was the last place?” “Horrendous,” she said, and placed thin fingers to her throat in long suffering. “Full of horrible skinny Italians on bicycles,” he said. “Calves on like knitting needles and their rude bits in Lycra. I mean it’s bloody December!”
The bar was empty but for them. I just wanted to lock up for the day and not open for the night. I wanted to drink mint tea upstairs and watch television and go on the internet. But they were making light work of the Cork gin. “It was a dry town,” she said, narrowing her eyes, “was Toronto.” “Hideous Protestant bastards,” he said. “What’s this is next along?” I turned, coldly; I tried to look stern. “I’m afraid that’s a very cheap and nasty Spanish brandy.” “How did you know I was coming?” he said.
“Well, Al,” he said, “it turns out that my darling wife has only taken off with the Pilates instructor. A she. And twice the man I’ll ever be.” “You should never have married an actress, darling.” “So you’ve been saying this last fourteen years, Mother.” “Marry the shop girl,” she said. “Marry the factory line. Marry the barmaid. MARRY THE WHORE! But never, never marry the actress, Tony.” “Well, it’s a little late for it, Mother.”
He had the realisation we all have but that most of us are wise enough to keep submerged—the knowledge that death always is close by.
February is an awful fucking month just about everywhere.
