Hanging with the Elephant (24 page)

‘Who was that fellow you were talking to?’ my wife asked when I got as far as the jeep.

‘I think his name is Gabriel,’ I said. ‘He’s a Cavan man. Although I only know him as Mr Dolan.’

I never saw him again, because he too passed away in the autumn of 2013 and now rests in his own plot beside his mother, where the soil is still heaped up in a mound, near the wall beside the trees.

W
HEN SHE WAS one year in the grave, I went back on the road doing readings and performances to earn a living. I toured between August and December 2013; cold, wet days and dark nights on the road, performing in arts centres and sleeping in the deluxe rooms of various hotels. It was a great adventure. I watched the universe unfold every night in a different lounge bar or in a different late-night takeaway.

One night, I met a man with a heart of stone. He was in a bar in a midland town and he leaned on the counter as he
sipped his drink, nursing grudges. I listened to him for a while as he spoke of his mother and how she had hurt him. When he was finished his litany of neglect I said, ‘That’s awful.’

‘No’ he said, ‘it’s all in the past. I’m happy now.’

He clenched his fist around his glass of whiskey and he looked into it as if he was gazing at a knife that some day he might plunge into an unseen enemy.

‘Yeah,’ he repeated with a grimace, ‘I’m happy now.’ Though there was nothing in him that I could envy.

I confessed to him that I’m rarely happy.

The dogs in Leitrim are happy. They’re well-minded. They yap cheerfully when the farmers head up the hills with fodder for cattle. The horses are happy, apart from those who live in fields of rushes, shivering in the freezing fog. But mostly it’s true to say that animals, if well-minded, are reasonably happy. They fit into the natural universe in a way that I don’t. I sit uncomfortably in the world, aware of myself, uneasy that the universe remains silent and refuses to reveal its secrets to me.

One wintry night in early December, with heavy rain and cold winds lashing the jeep, I checked into the Plaza Hotel in Tallaght. I was hungry.

A young man in the bar told me that his mother worked in a Chinese restaurant nearby and he recommended the Mongolian beef. ‘It’s her speciality,’ he said. So we phoned her, and he spoke to her in a strange language and shortly
afterwards the food arrived and I ate it in the half-light of the bar with a pint of cider to wash it down. It was delicious, and we passed an hour speaking about Mongolia, seaweed and the benefits of rice noodles.

On another occasion, I was in the Joinery in Smithfield to give a talk about Mongolia and orgasms and horses’ milk. The Joinery is a small arts centre that offers creative resources to young artists. Afterwards, I chatted to a psychiatrist. She was drinking mulled wine and she had a lilting Ulster accent. I would have been happy to converse with her all night but I needed to push on. I had a gig in Cork two nights later.

I drove as far as Portlaoise that night, thinking about psychiatry and mental health and wondering if chemicals had the capacity to inject happiness into the human skull. I checked into a hotel where a few teenage girls wearing silver tiaras and pink ballerina costumes hung around an empty dance floor in the lounge. A DJ played music so loud that it was impossible to talk, and a few unruly boys sat at tables slobbering their drink and shouting into each other’s ears. On a distant TV screen, Jeremy Paxman was talking to Russell Brand. I felt alone, but at least I wasn’t pretending I was happy any more. I guess that food, sex and belonging in a tent are only moments on the road of life. And so too is grief. Maybe meaning is further down the track. ‘It will come later,’ I told myself. And in the meantime all I could do was keep travelling.

After the gig in Cork, I went to my hotel and ordered a drink and brought it to the residents’ lounge. I was sitting on a big sofa when a woman came over to me.

‘I hope you don’t mind me sitting here,’ she said, as she sat beside me and gazed across the lounge, avoiding eye contact.

‘I read something that you wrote in the newspaper about your mother being a widow,’ she said. ‘Actually I’m a widow too,’ she added, as if she was confessing something ugly. ‘I’m fine most of the time, but I dread Christmas.’

‘What was your husband’s name?’ I wondered.

She spoke it, and I felt his presence well up inside her as she began to weep. And then we shared so much detail about her life in twenty minutes that I couldn’t stop thinking of her all through my trip.

‘It was like an amputation,’ she said.

And I just couldn’t get her out of my mind, even during Christmas, so I tried writing to her for the New Year, the kind of letter that I would never have been able to write to my own mother when her husband had died:

A
S I GET older I come closer to the type of isolation in which my mother had lived for years. And alone in Leitrim, two years after her death, I began to realise that life is almost comical in its brevity and in the hubris with which we live the early part of it. Nothing seems to be permanent, though I suppose that stories and the telling of stories is what matters.

And my story is that more than sex or death or the remote possibility of God, there was one thing more fundamental to my way of being in the world than any other, and that
was the all-pervading influence of a mother; and not just her influence, but her presence and her love.

So I had a need to satisfy her. My desolation at not being successful was often catastrophic and sometimes drove me to alcohol and at other times to religion. And I suppose that going through the things in her house was a necessary way of clearing her presence completely from the earth.

I even made a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Cz
ę
stochowa, in the monastery of Jasna Góra in Poland, a few weeks after she died. I suppose it was a way of acknowledging that my mother and the beautiful woman in Catholic iconography were intertwined, and I wanted to make my peace with both of them and I hoped that the psychic power of the Madonna would melt something in me – something hard and cynical that had grown inside me over the years.

Despite the enormity of Karol Wojtyla’s achievements in history, his papacy always uneased me. His elevation to the Throne of St Peter marked the end of the Church that I had joined. The short spring of hope and Christian renewal which had begun during the Second Vatican Council was over as he and Joseph Ratzinger began grinding liberal theologians and philosophers into the ground, and creating a façade of sanctity and orthodoxy behind which so many children suffered abuse, so much abuse was hidden and so many people were left bereft of any shelter in the confusion and storms of their ordinary lives.

Maybe that’s what happened to me. I couldn’t belong in Joseph Ratzinger’s Church, so maybe I cut myself off from the spiritual consolation of believing that there is someone beyond the stars that cares for us all with love. But there’s a strange tenderness creeps up on me when I am emptied of dogmas about the substantial nature of the universe. The freedom from certainty makes me feel vulnerable, and I get a sense of what my teacher means when he says that this emptiness is the mother of compassion.

Usually when I’ve been to Poland over the years, I have tended to ignore the triumphal crosses on the streets of Warsaw or on the spires of medieval churches in Kraków. I was never quite in the humour of making pilgrimages to the Black Madonna at Cz
ę
stochowa.

I was more interested in the story of those who had clung to the cliff for centuries, and who when they let go merely fell into the abyss at Auschwitz. I am not a Jew but sometimes in Polish ghettos I have had an overwhelming feeling of loss and absence and it’s hard to believe in little elephants that hang from daisies or in any other sentimental religious posters that might suggest we could be saved by God if we would just let go.

I remember being in Łód
ź
one winter, walking around the old Jewish ghetto in the snow, when I saw the full moon rise on a Friday evening. A pallid moon, it rose above the blackened trees and I felt so empty that I fled instantly back to the comfort of my hotel and had a hot bath.

The Grand Hotel on Piotrkowska Street is a world of old carpets, art deco, high ceilings and a hush of musty grandeur that has remained unchanged throughout the twentieth century; a hotel that has kept the hot water running and the doors opened continuously since then, and though I didn’t notice any other guests in the dining room, the waiter spoke in whispers.

When I was passing a red-bricked church near where the ghetto used to be, I felt a lump of shame in my chest and found it difficult not to think harshly about the Roman Church and all the popes who followed so eagerly in the footsteps of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who first made an issue of the cross. In his visions the cross first appeared like an upturned sword, by which he might conquer the world and which caused him to go looking for the true cross – the thing that popes for centuries afterwards asserted the Jews had used to kill God.

I didn’t feel much Christian fervour as the plane landed in Warsaw, nor on the train as it ploughed through the windy clouds of snow towards Łód
ź
on the eve of the Sabbath, nor did I feel much confidence in any god as I walked the derelict streets that were once a ghetto to 700,000 Jews.

After the bath, I watched from my window as men on a cherry picker cleared ice from the roof. Then I downloaded images of the moon and the sour, dark alleyways and backstreets that I had taken with my phone – images of
young boys with ear-rings selling onions from the back of a white van, an old man pulling two bags of coal on a buggy as his wife lit a cigarette and held it to his lips in the freezing fog, and a hatless woman who dropped her bag of McDonald’s food in the snow. I could smell the chips as she sighed and I wanted to hug her and say, ‘I know how it feels to lose something.’ But neither she nor I knew what it might be like to lose everything.

And neither of us were Jews. At least it’s not likely that she happened to be one of that tiny remnant who survived the Shoah.

The following day, I went to a Jewish restaurant and devoured a bowl of chicken soup, as good as ever my own mother made, but when I asked the girl who served me if it was owned by a Jewish family, she smiled and said she didn’t think so.

I left for Warsaw that Sunday. A man on the railway tracks in a yellow jacket was chatting on his mobile. I suppose he was talking to his wife about what to get in Tesco on his way home or some other ordinary business.

Snow always amazes me; the heaps of it stacked up and the salty falling of it, and the cloudy fog of it, and the very stillness in the middle of it.

But in a Polish monastery, I hoped I would find a way to return to my faith. After all, I had been ordained a Catholic priest, and though I resigned very shortly after I was ordained, I had never been laicised. I had clung
quietly to the hope that all my devotion to the icons of my childhood would some day awaken in me once more what is called the grace of God. But I was nervous of going to such a conservative place as Jasna Góra. I suspected it might be dark and poor and full of rain and old women in damp coats and hats like they used to wear in Ireland in the 1960s. But it just seemed like the right place to go after my mother died.

So I travelled to Cz
ę
stochowa in September. It was a bright autumn afternoon. The sky was blue. The town was asleep. The trees on the sidewalk were yellow. The supermarkets were open, but there wasn’t much business. I bought a bottle of water and an apple. Derelict men hung about outside, smoking, lying on the ground, scratching their beards, and sizing me up as beggars do when they’re about to beg.

A wide-open avenue inclined upwards towards the monastery, with trees lined on both sides. Young lovers smoked at street tables outside restaurants. There were men on bicycles and young girls walking dogs and couples just wandering with shopping bags or eating dainty fresh eclairs with their fingers as they strolled along. A pregnant woman in her twenties was waiting for me at the hotel reception, and she led me to a room with dark wooden floors and a black rug at the foot of a king-sized bed and a balcony looking out on the street. Tiny spotlights in the ceiling lit the room with a soft peach light and a jacuzzi in the
bathroom was lit by a red lamp on the wall. This was a very modern hotel and I thanked the pregnant woman and said I was delighted.