Hanging with the Elephant (16 page)

But when the beloved was in Poland, I had no one to discuss all this with except the cat. Day by day, I nurtured
the same fanciful ideas and exotic notions regarding the various reincarnations of myself and my little pussy. From one lifetime to the next she may have been sticking to me just to help me towards the enlightenment she already enjoyed. She may have been incarnating as a cat just to allow me find in myself compassion for cats. After all, she was calmer than me. And I became even more convinced than ever that she may have been an abbess long ago when I was just a humble monk, and when we were both drenched to the bone on Skellig Michael or some other remote refuge, hunting together for fish and enlightenment.

The pattern continued every day. Some mornings I would go with the flow and lie in bed. The next morning I would get up and go walking in the hills like a wise man or a fool, and I would return after perhaps two hours and light a candle and sit in single-pointed concentration in my studio.

And I assured myself that to be enlightened was to go with every flow. So when I wanted to eat buns or cheese sandwiches or drink espresso I went to the kitchen and filled my belly, pleasuring myself in the security that I was not pleasuring myself at all. I ate chocolate at the television at night, assuring myself that I was not attached to it. The chocolate was of no significance to me; in fact it would have been unenlightened to resist it. I suppose once you establish that you’re in tune with the Lord of the entire universe, there is no end to the possibilities of self-delusion.

And I’ll never be able to resist candles – lighting them, gazing at them – sitting there thinking that I am loved by a mother who is hidden behind the veil of the natural world. Other men get up to all sorts of strange things while they are alone. They watch porn or sports channels or find women to whom they can tell lies in the hope of sexual gratification. They probably have far more fun than I do. But at least I had the freedom to do as I pleased, even if I only wanted to sit still and watch the tiny flickering flame.

All that would change when she returned. She would say, ‘Come home to reality, my love. Awaken to this present moment. It is our time. Soon it will be summer and the grass will need to be cut, my love. The smell of mown lawns will envelop us.’

She would gaze at me again, like the sun shining, and I would smile. I dreamed one night of a couple of otters lying on the surface of a river, holding each other’s hands as they slept in case they might slip apart and lose each other in the current. It was a dream that consoled me and made me feel I was not a stranger walking on the earth.

But while she was away, the pond had filled with frogspawn. The hares had begun wandering the fields like they owned the world. The badgers were down in the warrens near the quarry, minding their newly born babies. The magpies were watching for movements in the house in the hope that I might soon throw out some organic material. The crows were getting ready to build.

Each morning, the sun rose a little earlier over Leitrim, over the houses in Drumshanbo, and the new apartments in Carrick-on-Shannon, and the cottages around Manorhamilton where the artists slept, and the polythene benders and tents in the ditches where the New-Age hippies sheltered while they tried to retrieve their souls and find pathways in the undergrowth to some lost paradise. And the sun cast its morning light indifferently on the living and the dead. On the commuters heading to work in factories and hardware stores and the county council offices, and across the graves of musicians and poets and teenagers killed on the roads or in fatal accidents around the farm or on building sites in London. The sun cast its light on John McGahern’s grave, and on the grave of a bishop who once ordered a local library to remove all McGahern’s books from the shelves, and all the other sleeping dead in graveyards of every parish and village in this quiet county.

Sixty years ago, when I had just been born, Leitrim was a land of poor soil where the crack of a spade on stony ground could be heard through the still air from distant fields. But now it had been reinvented by a new generation – sculptors and painters and ceramic artists and film-makers and wood carvers and actors and even old IRA veterans who had built new lives with cross-border grants and retired guards and hippies from London and playwrights and old farmers whose sons were gay and lived in Brooklyn. The power of the clergy had greatly diminished, though there were still a
few priests who would rise early in the morning and sleep in the afternoons, and other priests who didn’t get out of bed until noon, and ex-priests who couldn’t sleep at all.

Everything changes. Nothing is permanent. So for the time being, there are fewer priests in Leitrim but more lesbians, fewer bank managers but more musicians. But who can tell what lies in the future?

As I looked out from my hilltop cottage in the hills above Lough Allen, overlooking the mountains that stretch from the peaks of Cuilce to the slopes of Sliabh an Iarainn near Drumshanbo, I could assure myself that, for this time being, Leitrim was undoubtedly an auspicious place to live.

I
T WAS NINE o’clock on a Monday morning when he phoned me, the beginning of my third week alone. The rain was beating the roof and the windows on the west side of the cottage. I went to the kitchen and settled a few scoops of coffee in a small espresso pot and placed it on a hot ring. I even resisted putting a bowl of porridge flakes in the microwave now that I was on the verge of becoming an enlightened Buddha, given that Buddhas don’t need porridge, as far as I know. I turned on the radio and then turned it off. I drank the coffee and went outside for a brief
investigation of the compound. The trees were bending in the westerly wind but none had fallen. Lough Allen was all tossed up by the storm and the white waves dotted the length of it, and some of the islands seemed to have shrunk in size, as the flood levels in the lake rose higher. A guttering had collapsed on one side of the cottage, and the water tank was overflowing and creating a pool of water beyond the east gable. I came back inside and saw for the first time a stain on the ceiling of the kitchen where water must have come in under the tiles and saturated the insulation in the attic. This didn’t alarm me because I knew we had a loose tile on that side. But then I saw another larger and darker brown stain on the ceiling around where the chimney takes the smoke and heat from the range up through the roof. And then I saw a stain on the wall, down along the chimney breast. In panic, I went into the next room and there too I noticed brown stains seeping through the white paint of the ceiling. I went to the sun room, where the ceiling was sagging like a hammock in the centre.

This is not good
, I thought.

And then the phone rang. I didn’t recognise the number and at first I didn’t recognise the voice.

‘Is that yourself?’ he asked.

‘Who else would it be?’ I said.

He laughed.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I replied. ‘I thought it was you.’

‘So how are you?’

‘I’m fine. But who are you?’

‘This is Enda,’ he said.

‘Right.’

‘Enda Maguire.’

‘Ohhhhhh, Enda Maguire. Well, how are you? We studied in Maynooth. Yes, I remember you. Did you ever get ordained afterwards?’

‘I didn’t. I got married.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Much better.’

‘I’m ringing about Tom Lunny.’

Tom Lunny was a parish priest in Laois when we were students in Maynooth and he was our hero. He loved theatre, T.S. Eliot and Verdi operas. He was a liberal, but also irrational and socially dysfunctional. For example, he couldn’t stand nuns and sometimes insulted them at mass by refusing to allow them to give out Communion. On one occasion when an overenthusiastic young woman in a veil walked over to him at the sign of peace with her arms outstretched, he whispered, ‘Feic off, Noddy,’ and then for no apparent reason he turned his back against her gesture of compassion.

‘A liberal indeed, but not a man to be sentimental about women,’ I suggested.

‘No, indeed,’ Enda said down the telephone.

‘I remember he once described charismatic prayer meetings as a rash on the mystical body of Christ.’

‘He’s dead,’ Enda said.

‘Right,’ I answered. ‘I suppose we all die sometimes. Buddhists say it’s in our nature to die. Should be good for us.’

‘The funeral is tomorrow.’

‘It’s for the best,’ I said. ‘No point in leaving him above ground going stale. He’ll want his body for the resurrection.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Enda said, ‘you’re being a prick.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘sometimes I don’t realise how cynical the past thirty years of clerical scandals has left me. I think there’s a scar on my psyche.’

‘I was just wondering,’ he said, ‘would you be going to the funeral? Seeing as how he was such a support to you and me when we were students.’

‘You must be joking,’ I said.

Tom Lunny’s head was shaved like an American marine and he had a deep voice, though he was never without his packet of Marlboro which he enjoyed with leisurely gestures, exhaling jets of blue smoke between his sentences. His shaved neck was beetroot red, and he had big ears that stuck out – perpendicular – to the sides of his head, and eyebrows as bushy as small mice. His lower lip was thick and purple, and he could hold the filter of the cigarette between his teeth with an uneasy sensuality. Everything about him was a contradiction; he was like a cross between a farmer from Limerick and Ernest Hemingway. He was ten years our senior but he’d often come to the seminary
and we’d go out drinking, to shaded corners of the Roost on Main Street or sometimes to bars around Grafton Street in Dublin where we laughed together and talked about some theatre show we had just seen at the Focus, or liberation theology and the possibilities of love in the barrios of South America. He impressed us because though he was older, he seemed very modern and confident. He was a philosopher. A man so disinclined to partake in ritual that you’d wonder how he sustained himself as a parish priest in Ireland for all those years.

Sometimes he’d agree to stay over in the seminary, and we’d end up in a room in Dunboyne House where he lodged himself, drinking whiskey. And when the bottle was finished and we were preparing the mugs of instant coffee, he’d suddenly declare that he had to go.

‘Well, fuck me, boys, I just realised I have a funeral at ten in the morning,’ he’d say, and he’d get into his car, at maybe 3 a.m., and head out the gates and off down the country towards his parish at the far end of Laois.

But he wasn’t unusual. The Church in the 1970s was a divided city. Some clerics slept with women. Some clerics had gay relationships. Women slipped in and out of the parochial houses by night. Old conservative bishops patrolled their gardens, shouting their anguish at the sky and asking God why the Church had been abandoned to a bunch of liberal decadents. That of course was all before Karol Wojtyla took the rudder and steered the Bark of
Peter backwards into the secure waters of religious and theological certainty.

The dead priest had a big old nineteenth-century parochial house and he used to have parties where clerics and schoolteachers and members of the choir got so drunk that they fell about in the rose bushes on their way back to their cars to drive home in the dawn light.

The dead priest had been an inspiration to us in 1975. He was in his thirties then and he read the
New York Review of Books
and often brought us to Dublin to see Beckett’s plays.

But when the Polish pope and the German theologian took over the Vatican, he just put his head down for thirty more years like many other liberals who were caught inside the organisation. Privately, they threw their eyes to heaven, sucked in the smoke of a thousand Marlboro cigarettes and worked their way through the single malts. What could they do? They were trapped. The people who might have been significant players in a liberal Church were sidelined and terrified into silence. I remember one professor who drank so much that he would occasionally be found sleeping on the doormat outside his own rooms – and Lunny drank so much that when he put his head down on the banquet table at a wedding in the parish nobody around the white table of coffee cups and dessert bowls noticed that he was dead until the groom was finished speaking and the best man called for Father to say grace.

‘That was a lonely way to go,’ I said on the phone to Enda, ‘but the truth is I didn’t like Fr Lunny. What did he do in the face of the catastrophe that has afflicted the Catholic Church during this past thirty years? He just became a drunk.’

There was silence for a few moments.

‘I’m astonished,’ Enda said, his voice a whispered cocktail of indignation and anger. ‘I’m astonished you would speak so ill of the dead.’

‘I’m not speaking ill of him,’ I said. ‘I’m just saying the truth. In fact, I feel sorry for him. But I won’t be going to his funeral. I’m up to my eyes with work. Trying to get stuff written. And the wife is away and the roof is leaking. I’m just too busy.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I thought you might just like to know.’

‘But call if you’re passing this way sometime,’ I added. ‘Love to see you. How’s the wife?’

As if I cared. I had done the damage. I had committed an act of treachery against someone who had once been of great help to me. Sustained me intellectually and encouraged me to take risks.

‘Separated,’ he said tersely. ‘Ten years. She wasn’t well. Anyway, maybe I’ll call sometime.’

‘Do that,’ I said, and hung up.

I made more coffee and sat staring at the ceiling. I wanted to see how bad the leak was. When nothing dripped, and I was fairly certain that the ceiling in the sun room wasn’t
in imminent danger of collapse, I went off to my studio to meditate.

But it was difficult because I was still troubled by the dead priest, and the leaking roof that might be overcome later by further storms. And, besides, through the door I could see that the wind had scattered my five little stones all across the patio. So there I was sitting in the zen position, a cushion between my ankles and buttocks, my eyes half closed, the candle flickering on a table in the corner and the more I tried to relax, the more my mind filled with anxiety as I wandered in a fog of lament for my mother.