Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (25 page)

 
          
 
"On O'Connell Bridge?" asked my
wife.

 
          
 
"On O'Connell Bridge," I said.

 
          
 
And we walked on down in the gently misting
rain.

 
          
 
Halfway to the bridge, as we were examining
some fine Irish crystal in a window, a woman with a shawl over her head plucked
at my elbow.

 
          
 
"Destroyed!" The woman sobbed.
"My poor sister. Cancer, the doctor said, her dead in a month! And me with
mouths to feed! Ah, God, if you had just a penny!"

 
          
 
I felt my wife's arm tighten to mine.

 
          
 
I looked at the woman, split as always, one
half saying, "A penny is all she asks!" the other half doubting:
"Clever woman, she knows that by her underasking you'll overpay!,"
and hating myself for the battle of halves.

 
          
 
I gasped. "You're ..."

 
          
 
"I'm what, sir?"

 
          
 
Why, I thought, you're the woman who was just
back by the hotel with the bundled baby!

 
          
 
"I'm sick!" She hid in shadow.
"Sick with crying for the half dead!"

 
          
 
You've stashed the baby somewhere, I thought,
and put on a green instead of a gray shawl and run the long way around to cut
us off here.

 
          
 
"Cancer . . ." One bell in her
tower, and she knew how to toll it. "Cancer . . ."

 
          
 
My wife cut across it. "Beg pardon, but
aren't you the same woman we just met at our hotel?"

 
          
 
The woman and I were both shocked at this rank
insubordination. It wasn't done!

           
 
The woman's face crumpled. I peered close. And
yes, by God, it was a different face. I could not but admire her. She knew,
sensed, and learned what actors know, sense, learn: that by thrusting, yelling,
all fiery-lipped arrogance one moment, you are one character; and by sinking,
giving way, crumpling the mouth and eyes, in pitiful collapse, you are another.
The same woman, yes, but the same face and role? Quite obviously no.

 
          
 
She gave me a last blow beneath the belt.
"Cancer."

 
          
 
I flinched.

 
          
 
It was a brief tussle then, a kind of
disengagement from one woman and an engagement with the other. The wife lost my
arm and the woman found my cash. As if she were on roller skates, she whisked
around the comer, sobbing happily.

 
          
 
"Lord!" In awe, I watched her go.
"She's studied Stanislavsky. In one book he says that squinting one eye
and twitching one lip to the side will disguise you. I wonder if she has nerve
enough to be at the hotel when we go back?"

 
          
 
"I wonder," said my wife, “When my
husband will stop admiring and start criticising such Abbey Theatre acting as
that."

 
          
 
"But what if it were true? Everything she
said? And she's lived with it so long she can't cry any more, and so has to
play-act in order to survive? What if?"

 
          
 
"It can't be true," said my wife
slowly. "I just won't believe it."

 
          
 
But that single bell was still tolling
somewhere in the chimney-smoking dark.

 
          
 
"Now," said my wife, "here's
where we turn for O'Connell Bridge, isn't it?"

 
          
 
"It is."

 
          
 
The corner was probably empty in the falling rain
for a long time after we were gone.

 
          
 
There stood the graystone bridge bearing the
great O'Connell's name, and there the River Liffey rolling cold gray waters
under, and even from a block off I heard faint singing. My mind spun in a great
leap back to December.

 
          
 
"Christmas," I murmured, "is
the best time of all in Dublin."

 
          
 
For beggars, I meant, but left it unsaid.

 
          
 
For in the week before Christmas the Dublin
streets teem with raven flocks of children herded by schoolmasters or nuns.
They cluster in doorways, peer from theater lobbies, jostle in alleys,
"God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" on their lips, "It Came
Upon
a Midnight Clear" in their eyes, tambourines in
hand, snowflakes shaping a collar of grace about their tender necks. It is
singing everywhere and anywhere in Dublin on such nights, and there was no
night my wife and I did not walk down along Grafton Street to hear "Away
in a Manger" being sung to the queue outside the cinema or "Deck the
Halls" in front of the Four Provinces pub. In all, we counted in Christ's
season one night half a hundred bands of convent girls or public-school boys
lacing the cold air and weaving great treadles of song up, down, over and
across from end to end of Dublin, Like walking in snowfall, you could not walk
among them and not be touched. The sweet beggars, I called them, who gave in
turn for what you gave as you went your way.

 
          
 
Given such example, even the most dilapidated
beggars of Dublin washed their hands, mended their torn smiles, borrowed banjos
or bought a fiddle and killed a cat. They even gathered for four-part
harmonies. How could they stay silent when half the world was singing and the
other half, idled on the tuneful river, was paying dearly, gladly, for just
another chorus?

 
          
 
So Christmas was best for all; the beggars
worked —off key, it's true, but there they were, one time in the year, busy.

 
          
 
But Christmas was over, the licorice-suited
children back in their aviaries, and the beggers of the town, shut and glad for
the silence, returned to their workless ways. All save the beggars on O'Connell
Bridge, who, all through the year, most of them, tried to give as good as they
got.

 
          
 
"They have their self-respect," I
said, walking my wife. "I'm glad this first man here strums a guitar, the
next one a fiddle. And there, now, by God, in the very center of the
bridge!"

 
          
 
"The man we're looking for?"

 
          
 
*That's him. Squeezing the concertina. It's
all right to look. Or I think it is."

 
          
 
"What do you mean, you think it is? He's
blind, isn't he?"

 
          
 
These raw words shocked me, as if my wife had
said something indecent.

 
          
 
The rain fell gently, softly upon graystoned
Dublin, gray-stoned riverbank, gray lava-flowing river.

           
 
“That’s the trouble," I said at last.
"I don't know."

 
          
 
And we both, in passing, looked at the man
standing there in the very middle of O'Connell Bridge.

 
          
 
He was a man of no great height, a bandy
statue swiped from some country garden perhaps, and his clothes, like the
clothes of most in Ireland, too often laundered by the weather, and his hair
too often grayed by the smoking air, and his cheeks sooted with beard, and a
nest or two of witless hair in each cupped ear, and the blushing cheeks of a
man who has stood too long in the cold and drunk too much in the pub so as to
stand too long in the cold again. Dark glasses covered his eyes, and there was
no telling what lay behind. I had begun to wonder, weeks back, if his sight
prowled me along, damning my guilty speed, or if only his ears caught the
passing of a harried conscience. There was that awful fear I might seize, in
passing, the glasses from his nose. But I feared much more the abyss I might
find, into which my senses, in one terrible roar, might tumble. Best not to
know if civet's orb or interstellar space gaped behind the smoked panes.

 
          
 
But, even more, there was a special reason why
I could not let the man be.

 
          
 
In the rain and wind and snow, for two solid
months, I had seen him standing here with no cap or hat on his head.

 
          
 
He was the only man in all of Dublin I saw in
the downpours and drizzles who stood by the hour alone with the drench mizzling
his ears, threading his ash-red hair, plastering it over his skull, rivuleting
his eyebrows, and purling over the coal-black insect lenses of the glasses on
his rain-pearled nose.

 
          
 
Down through the greaves of his cheeks, the
lines about his mouth, and off his chin, like a storm on a gargoyle's flint,
the weather ran. His sharp chin shot the guzzle in a steady fauceting off in
the air, down his tweed scarf and locomotive-colored coat.

 
          
 
"Why doesn't he wear a hat?" I said
suddenly.

 
          
 
"Why," said my wife, "maybe he
hasn't got one."

 
          
 
"He must have one," I said.

 
          
 
"Keep your voice down."

 
          
 
"He's got to have one," I said,
quieter.

 
          
 
"Maybe he can't afford one."

 
          
 
"Nobody's that poor, even in Dublin.
Everyone has a cap at least!"

           
 
"Well, maybe he has bills to pay, someone
sick."

 
          
 
"But to stand for weeks, months, in the
rain, and not so much as flinch or turn his head, ignore the rain, it's beyond
understanding." I shook my head. "I can only think it's a trick. That
must be it. Like the others, this is his way of getting sympathy, of making you
cold and miserable as himself as you go by, so you'll give him more."

 
          
 
"I bet you're sorry you said that
already," said my wife.

 
          
 
"I am. I am." For even under my cap
the rain was running off my nose. "Sweet God in heaven, what's the
answer?"

 
          
 
"Why don't you ask him?"

 
          
 
"No." I was even more afraid of
that.

 
          
 
Then the last thing happened, the thing that
went with his standing bareheaded in the cold rain.

 
          
 
For a moment, while we had been talking at
some distance, he had been silent. Now, as if the weather had freshened him to
life, he gave his concertina a great mash. From the folding, unfolding snake
box he squeezed a series of asthmatic notes which were no preparation for what
followed.

 
          
 
He opened his mouth. He sang.

 
          
 
The sweet clear baritone voice which rang over
O'Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a
quiver, not a flaw, anywhere in it. The man just opened his mouth, which meant
that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as
let his soul free.

 
          
 
"Oh," said my wife, "how
lovely."

 
          
 
"Lovely." I nodded.

 
          
 
We listened while he sang the full irony of
Dublin's Fair City where it rains twelve inches a month the winter through,
followed by the white-wine clarity of Kathleen Mavoumeen, Macushlah, and all
the other tired lads, lasses, lakes, hills, past glories, present miseries, but
all somehow revived and moving about young and freshly painted in the light
spring, suddenly-not-winter rain. If he breathed at all, it must have been
through his ears, so smooth the line, so steady the putting forth of word
following round belled word.

 
          
 
"Why," said my wife, "he could
be on the stage."

 
          
 
"Maybe he was once."

 
          
 
"Oh, he's too good to be standing
here."

 
          
 
"I've thought that often."

 
          
 
My wife fumbled with her purse. I looked from
her to the singing man, the rain falling on his bare head, streaming through
his shellacked hair, trembling on his ear lobes. My wife had her purse open.

 
          
 
And then, the strange perversity. Before my
wife could move toward him, I took her elbow and led her down the other side of
the bridge. She pulled back for a moment, giving me a look, then came along.

 
          
 
As we went away along the bank of the Liffey,
he started a new song, one we had heard often in Ireland. Glancing back, I saw
him, head proud, black glasses taking the pour, mouth open, and the fine voice
clear:

 
          
 
"I'll be glad when you're dead

 
          
 
in your grave, old man. Be glad when you're
dead

 
          
 
in your grave, old man. Be glad when you're
dead, Flowers over your head, And then I'll marry the journeyman. . . ."

 
          
 
It is only later, looking back, that you see
that while you were doing all the other things in life, working on an article
concerning one part of Ireland in your rain-battered hotel, taking your wife to
dinner, wandering in the museums, you also had an eye beyond to the street and
those who served themselves who only stood to wait.

 
          
 
The beggars of
Dublin
,
who bothers to wonder on them, look, see, know,
understand
?
Yet the outer shell of the eye sees and the inner shell of the mind records,
and yourself, caught between, ignores the rare service these two halves of a
bright sense are up to.

 
          
 
So I did and did not concern myself with
beggars. So I did run from them or walk to meet them, by turn. So I heard but
did not hear, considered but did not consider:

 
          
 
"There's only a few of us left!"

 
          
 
One day I was sure the stone gargoyle man
taking his daily shower on O'Connell Bridge while he sang Irish opera was not
blind. And the next his head to me was a cup of darkness.

 
          
 
One afternoon I found myself lingering before
a tweed shop near O'Connell Bridge, staring in, staring in at a stack of good
thick burly caps. I did not need another cap. I had a life's supply collected
in a suitcase, yet in I went to pay out money for a fine warm brown-colored cap
which I turned round and round in my hands, in a strange trance.

           
 
"Sir," said the clerk. "That
cap is a seven. I would guess your head, sir, at a seven and one half."

 
          
 
"This will fit me. This will fit
me." I stuffed the cap into my pocket.

 
          
 
"Let me get you a sack, sir—"

 
          
 
"No!" Hot-cheeked, suddenly
suspicious of what I was up to, I fled.

 
          
 
There was the bridge in the soft rain. All I
need do now was walk over—

 
          
 
In the middle of the bridge, my singing man
was not there.

 
          
 
In his place stood an old man and woman
cranking a great piano-box hurdy-gurdy which racheted and coughed like a coffee
grinder eating glass and stone, giving forth no melody but a grand and
melancholy sort of iron indigestion.

 
          
 
I waited for the tune, if tune it was, to
finish. I kneaded the new tweed cap in my sweaty fist while the hurdy-gurdy
prickled, spanged and thumped.

 
          
 
"Be damned to ya!" the old man and
old woman, furious with their job, seemed to say, their faces thunderous pale,
their eyes red-hot in the rain. "Pay us! Listen! But we'll give you no
tune! Make up your own!" their mute lips said.

 
          
 
And standing there on the spot where the
beggar always sang without his cap, I thought, Why don't they take one fiftieth
of the money they make each month and have the thing tuned? K I were cranking
the box, I'd want a tune, at least for myself! If you were cranking the box, I
answered. But you're not. And it's obvious they hate the begging job, who'd
blame them, and want no part of giving back a familiar song as recompense.

 
          
 
How different from my capless friend.

 
          
 
My friend?

 
          
 
I blinked with surprise, then stepped forward
and nodded.

 
          
 
"Beg pardon. The man with the concertina
. . ."

 
          
 
The woman stopped cranking and glared at me.

 
          
 
"Ah?"

 
          
 
"The man with no cap in the rain."

 
          
 
''Ah, him!" snapped the woman.

 
          
 
"He's not here today?"

 
          
 
"Do you see him?" cried the woman.

 
          
 
She started cranking the infernal device.