The Road to McCarthy (13 page)

Ireland has been transformed in recent years by a mania for building very new houses in very old places, so it seems appropriate that this self-styled deposed Irish prince should be living in a newly built villa on an ancient hillside in this prehistoric port. Inside, the house feels formally European with few concessions to local style. It is spotless and pristine, with not so much as a newspaper or teacup casually discarded, as if a real estate agent is expected to turn up at any moment with a prospective purchaser. The walls are hung with Greek and Russian Orthodox icons. Incense burns. Ethereal ecclesiastical chants issue forth from high-quality hidden speakers.

Conor and Tommy have gone rather stiff and formal on me, as if they feel we are privileged to be here. You don’t get the impression they’d ever barge in uninvited, turn on the football and grab a couple of lagers from the fridge. Although Conor has claimed the title of Mór, Terence is the accomplished historian with many years’ experience living the role, and it appears that the younger brother still instinctively defers to the elder, whatever the official pecking order.

Terence introduces me to his long-time companion, Andrew, and Andrew’s
mother, Betty. “My cousins,” says Terence enigmatically, by way of nonexplanation. Andrew also styles himself the fifth count of Clander-mond, a title bestowed on him by Terence. They have known each other since childhood. Betty is over on a visit from Ireland. Though Tangier has always had a reputation as a hot spot for smuggling, I suspect Betty may be the only person ever to have crossed the border carrying Irish sausages, Cheddar cheese and black pudding. She should be aware, however, that transporting meat on international airlines can be a risky business.

I once knew an elderly lady, a former fashion editor for
Vogue
, who lived in a flat on Hove seafront. Each year she used to spend Christmas and New Year in Venice, always taking essential festive paraphernalia with her from home. One year the airline managed to lose the suitcase in which she’d packed a Christmas pudding and a small frozen turkey, so she had to have pasta instead. The luggage turned up the following March, by which time she’d forgotten about the turkey. She opened the bag to reveal unspeakable scenes of maggot apocalypse, into which she threw up. After that she always carried items of poultry in her hand luggage.

Betty and Andrew leave to keep a dinner appointment, and Terence offers us drinks. He’s not at all what I’d been expecting. I realize I’ve been hoping for some kind of medieval warlord with a big cloak and daft beard, all ceremonial daggers and hearty laughter. But he is sharp and playful—though clearly slightly wary of me—funny and camp, and talks so much he makes his two hyperloquacious brothers look like members of a silent order that encourages smoking. I ask for a gin and tonic. He raises an amused eyebrow.

“Well, how terribly English.”

He pours me one with no ice or lemon and I try not to rise to the bait.

“Yes, well, I am English.”

“Really?”

“Well, sort of. Half and half. You know?”

“Then you’ll understand the nature of the relationship between the two countries.”

“I’m not sure anyone could claim to understand that.”

“It’s perfectly simple.”

There’s a theatrical pause for maximum outrage as he checks that we’re all listening. We are.

“Ireland,” says Terence, “is an invention of the English. It is a construct, a fiction. As a political entity Ireland does not exist.”

He’s enjoying this. It’s not the opening gambit I’d been expecting from a potential claimant to the Irish throne, but it was worth coming to Tangier just to encounter such an outrageous point of view. As I gulp the gin and the brothers weather down the paintwork with nicotine, Terence launches into a compelling monologue about how English kings and the Roman Catholic Church combined to steal or crush all that was indigenous and Gaelic—a wrong that has been compounded by the present, he believes illegitimate, Irish state which was founded on lies.

“There is a pretense that Ireland has always been green and republican, Catholic and Utopian, a place of equality where chiefs were voted into office and there was no aristocracy. This is rubbish of the highest order.”

Ireland, he repeats, was invented by the English. Historically it was four kingdoms—Ulster, Munster, Connaught and Leinster—and that is the way it should be now.

“More gin?”

Absolutely.

Anyway, he says, it was the Anglo-Norman way to lump disparate places together for ease of administration and domination. The island was Gaelic but not “Ireland” until the English, and he says it again, “made it up.” Then in the modern age de Valera—“an American Spaniard, and how Gaelic is that?”—institutionalized a lie in which, says Terence, Sinn Fein and all the rest of them are equally complicit.

“That dancing-at-the-crossroads pigs-in-the-kitchen antipluralistic myth in which Protestants were unwelcome, anti-intellectual priests were given power and Roman Catholicism became a test of your Irishness, all based on a past that never existed. This is a made-up Ireland. It simply never was so.

“These priests were anti-intellectuals from the pig-owning classes who presided for decades over the mental and spiritual decline of the people.” It’s a legitimate point of view, though not one that’s likely to win him universal
popularity in Ireland. Tommy joins in with a story about the priest who made his early years a misery. A naïve and lingering childhood belief that God must really be on his side and not the priest’s was eventually borne out when the hated cleric caught fire one Sunday during Benediction.

“The hem of his cassock got caught in the thurible the altar boy was swinging, and whoosh! Up the bastard went.”

At one point, Terence reads aloud from one of his books. He has the manner of a potentate holding court but is also very funny, as if he believes in everything he is saying, but also has an underlying sense of the apparent absurdity of his position. The present Irish government, he says, is “an occupying power.”

As the evening wears on, I decide that it’s not for me to judge whether or not Terence is who he says he is; that’s for him to know, and others to decide. Yet I’m much taken by his colorful arguments—the more unpalatable they are, the more he seems to relish them—and by the breadth of his historical knowledge. Informed at all times by a prodigious sense of humor and tempered with generous doses of pseudo-aristocratic pretentiousness and unreconstructed snobbery, he’s a one-off in a world of production-line opinions. Here’s a man who openly proclaims to hold Sinn Fein, the Ulster Unionists, the Irish Republic and the British government in equal contempt. You might question the logic, but you have to admit it’s an original point of view. It’s unlikely that the notion of solving the problems of partition and sectarianism by dividing “Ireland” into four hereditary monarchies is one that’s come under serious scrutiny in Stormont, Whitehall and Dublin in the last twenty years of negotiations. Maybe that’s what’s been holding them back.

Over coffee all three brothers regale me with the story of a MacCarthy who was murdered while working as a missionary. Most of him was eaten, though his head somehow survived. Inspired by Australian Aborigines who have successfully claimed bones from British museums, the brothers are hoping to repossess the head and bring it back to Ireland. This seems unlikely, as it is currently revered as a sacred fetish object in a glass case somewhere in Africa. Conor suggests that I might like to undertake its recovery on behalf of the clan. I have a brief vision of myself wheezing through the
jungle with a severed head tucked under my arm, pursued by irate and extremely fit fetish devotees, and decline.

“It wasn’t so much the fact that they ate him that upset our family,” says Terence, “but the fact that they ate him on a Friday, in Lent.”

The evening takes on a more somber tone when he touches, without any prompting from me, on his abdication, overthrow, disgrace, call it what you will. He claims none of the other Gaelic chiefs currently recognized by the Occupying Power would be able to pass the tests of provenance that have been applied to him. He’s been targeted, he says, because he upset people with his political ideas, his thoughts on de Valera, and for denouncing the hijack of the Gaelic chiefs by the heritage and tourist industries. He returns to the theme of anti-intellectualism, waspishly pointing out that the visionary authors of whom Ireland is now so proud—Wilde, Joyce, Beckett—were all forced into exile. The parallel I’m expected to draw is clear. I remind him of Joyce’s line from
A Portrait of the Artist:
“Ireland is the old sow that eats her own farrow.”

“They should put that on the bloody brochures,” says Terence. “Instead of
céad mile fáilte
.”

As we head for the taxi that’s waiting outside the gate, he produces two thick leather-bound foolscap volumes and hands them to me.

“These are my Tangier diaries. You might be interested to read them. No one else has.”

I take them, though it’s not clear why he’s taken me into his confidence in this way. As I get into the car, he leans across.

“If it’s wild geese they want, then I’ll be the last goose.”

Back in my room
at the hotel I take the diaries and sit on the balcony. The night-lit port is framed between two arches and there’s a faint hum of traffic as the city goes about its never-ending business.
“Strait Talk—The Tangier Journals of Terence MacCarthy Mór, Prince of Desmond,”
says the title page.

The diaries cover thirteen years, and run to nearly 600 pages. Warm rain is falling on the palms outside my balcony as I drain the last of the
Soberano. A dog howls and an ethereal wailing emanates from the edge of the medina. I head for my bed and find the cover has been turned back and a room-service breakfast menu is sitting on my pillow.

Somewhere out there Mohammed is trying to get to sleep on a floor.

The next day
Tommy, Conor and I take a walk in the casbah. Despite bright daylight we get emphatically lost. Luckily there’s no sign of Mustafa. An old man notices our plight, gives us clear and explicit directions, and we still can’t find our way out. We spend another half-hour imprisoned in a dream-like maze of arm’s-width alleyways, blue sky just a narrow slit overhead, as the boys babble nonstop of MacCarthy clan history, of how Terence was stitched up by a corrupt establishment, and of the deeds of Finnian MacCarthy, the Great Wolf of the Irish, who slaughtered the Normans, before coming to an untimely end himself. So what happened to him?

“Killed by the feckin’ Normans.”

I’ve no idea whether or not Conor is my clan chief, though I fear the probabilities are against it, but he and Tommy are like those previously undiscovered distant relatives you meet at a wedding and with whom you get on famously. I’ve always enjoyed the kind of comedy where you don’t know whether or not you’re meant to be laughing, and the two of them have this quality. They’re like an off-the-wall Gaelic double act performing their work in translation into English.

Eventually we emerge in a familiar part of the medina. The street resounds to loud and strange taped music that’s probably Arab or Berber, but could easily be the kind of Afro-Irish-Anarcho fusion you hear hippies playing in Galway and Goa. The weather must have improved in Salt Lake City, because inside a café men are watching the giant slalom.

Our conversation turns to the subject of hangovers. Conor tells me about a holiday a few years ago with a friend who went out to play golf while suffering a severe reaction to the night before. At the first tee he was struck by lightning, which lifted him off his feet and knocked him flat to the ground.

“When he came round, he didn’t realize what had happened. He only
knew he was lying on the floor, feeling terrible, and presumed it must just be a much worse hangover than usual. So he went back to the chalet for a lie-down.”

Tommy’s in stitches at the thought of it, and with good reason.

“A few weeks later, he was staying on a caravan site in Sligo,” says Conor, “and didn’t he get hit by lightning again?”

“Aye,” says Tommy, wiping his eyes, “it was like he was on a personal mission to disprove the proverb.”

Conor says it’s time for them to leave. They are expected for dinner.

“Terence and Andrew are cooking Irish stew. We mustn’t be late.”

Café Central
was where Burroughs, Ginsberg and their boho entourage chugged absinthe and made whoopee in the 1950s. These days no alcohol is allowed in the medina, which is why I’m enjoying the novel experience of drinking orange juice after dark on a Saturday night. It’s not as bad as you’d imagine. If you’re desperate, you could always pretend there’s a UK measure of vodka in it. There could be. It’s so small you’d never notice.

There is no sign outside Café Central to let you know that this is Café Central. It’s on Petit Socco, the tiny square that also doesn’t display its name. This means that if you go out looking for Café Central on Petit Socco you’re at a double disadvantage. The only way to find it is by a process of elimination. At first you’ll walk straight through Petit Socco because it’s so small it doesn’t seem much like a square, but once you understand that nowhere else looks anything at all like a square you realize that must have been it.

The café is a large, crumbling oblong room that may have seen better days, though it seems unlikely. Pink and green pillars support a high ceiling, handsomely appointed with fluorescent strip lights hung with cobwebs like fishnet stockings. The only service point is a tiny tiled bar opposite the doorway that boasts the same espresso machine Burroughs might have enjoyed. It’s hard to work out how they make a living here. The profit margins on coffee, tea and orange juice must be tiny, and that’s all they appear to sell.
An old man sits in the window, rolling little balls of hashish between his fingers, and smoking them in a long wooden pipe. Two other men are muttering conspiratorially in the corner. On a giant screen at the far end of the room people are skiing. No one is watching. Sky Sports Two is God’s, and Rupert’s, way of reminding us that wherever in the world we escape to, we live in a tawdry and imperfect universe. If it weren’t for the screen, the crumbling exoticism of the café would be impossibly romantic. It occurs to me that in a strange way the screen is a reverse metaphor, a paradoxical reminder that this is not a movie, but real life. Perhaps I’m getting a bit of blowback from the old guy in the window.