Hanging with the Elephant (25 page)

The monastery was different. It was surrounded by massive walls just beyond the leafy park across the road. I entered under the arch and along a cobbled avenue to the main church. The little cobbled street was silent like a medieval village, without traffic, apart from a few Franciscans in robes, nuns, priests, and old women coming and going from the church.

Some priests walked about with a great sense of humility, their heads bowed and their faces turned inwards, but others swaggered in their cassocks, eyed me with suspicion and authority, and some old nuns stood like generals at the door of the visitors’ centre, like the countrywomen of my childhood who could rule their houses as little tyrants.

But it wasn’t them I had come to see. I had come to worship the sacred mother; she who is enshrined in the icon above the tabernacle, and who would soon enfold me in her tenderness. I blessed myself at the water font and stepped inside.

In the shaded church, poor people were kneeling and standing and walking and lighting candles. There were young nuns with slim bodies kneeling very still in the pews with such physical discipline that I could feel grace oozing from their stillness. A fat priest was saying mass on
a side altar. A little bull of a man with red ears, he ploughed through the liturgy like he was starving and needed to get at his porridge.

And for everyone in the church, and for me as well, there was just one single focus for our attention. It was behind the railings of a small chapel, in the far corner; the Black Madonna, the exquisite and ancient icon that holds a glance more haunting that the
Mona Lisa
and more embracing. A red sanctuary lamp hung before the image and a silver monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament sat on the white altar cloths below it.

The icon drew me in to pray and worship and to remember with nostalgia the gestures of devotion I had learned as a child. I felt years of alienation from the Church beginning to dissolve.

There was something so intense about the presence of love in the small chapel that no irony or cynicism could be tolerated. This was home. And I too had a right to be here.

‘I am here in a safe place with you,’ I whispered.

I remained for a few hours, sometimes sitting beneath the icon in close proximity and sometimes walking away, down the back of the church to sit in a pew remote from the others.

Sometimes I felt that the bodies of nuns around me were vibrating with love, and I watched how they prostrated themselves on the floor as they came and went. One particularly beautiful face wrapped in her nun’s starch habit
turned and gazed directly at me and for an instant I had a wild urge to prostrate myself before her. But I desisted, although we did kneel a long time side by side before the icon. And the more I offered my body in reverence to this mother, the closer I felt to the men and women around me, as if in some very deep way we were brothers and sisters.

When the bells rang, a little priest came out as chirpy as a cuckoo from a clock and sang the mass in Latin. I went to the altar to receive the sacrament. And as the litany of the saints washed over me, a great sense of remorse overwhelmed me and I began to cry.

I don’t understand what happened that day. It certainly didn’t reawaken in me any fervour for religion. But it did heighten my awareness that without some connection with the great mother of all things, and without acknowledging her grace in the air, in the trees, the mountains, sea and sky, I would be lost forever.

While the beloved was in Poland, I turned to the east, reading sutras on my Kindle and watching the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh on YouTube. In fact, I even improved at the meditation. I suppose everything is a question of practice. And through the six weeks of her absence I had gradually become accustomed to the silence. Each day passed without much event. The postman would throw more pamphlets from various political parties in the letterbox around noon. I collected my takeaway lunch in Drumshanbo around 1 p.m. and ate out of the small
silver dish in the kitchen listening to the tail end of the RTÉ news. In the afternoons, I dozed at the stove, though gradually the weather improved and, by April, Leitrim was enjoying a foretaste of summer.

I spent a lot of time talking to birds, the horse in the field next door, the cat, Simone Weil and other folks whom I conjured out of the air. Even my dreams became clearer, and I dived into them at night like a swimmer in the water.

One night, I dreamed that the president of Russia was a cuckoo bird on my roof, and he was shaking the chimney, because our chimney is not in good condition and of course in winter the strong winds blow the rain up the tiles, underneath the flashing so that the white walls of the cottage turn brown along the line of the chimney breast. So the idea that the president of all the Russias was up there with claw feet shaking the chimney pot did me no good at all. And what was worse, he was wearing no clothes, and his skin was covered in feathers. Of course, this was only a dream. But I didn’t know that, because we don’t know we’re dreaming when we’re dreaming. I thought I was lying outside on the grass beneath the clear sky and that the cuckoo flew off the chimney and hovered above me, blocking the sun.

I woke up in distress, but at least I was in bed. It was about 7 a.m. and I could hear the real Mr Cuckoo singing his song farther up the mountain, near Scardan Waterfall, which is the spot where he seems to announce himself every year.

Later, I was in the studio, wondering if it was time to close up the stove for the summer, when a swallow flew in the glass patio door, carved a circle in the space above me, and landed on one of the rafters that crosses the apex roof.

‘I used to live here,’ he said.

I said, ‘No, you never did, this was only built last year.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there was a green shed on this exact spot when I came in previous summers. And now it’s gone.’

‘Yes,’ I confessed, ‘there was a green galvanised shed here but I was obliged to take it down in order to build this lovely studio.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s not so lovely for me, is it? Where am I supposed to go for the next five months to rear my little chickens?’

His feathers were oily black with a tint of blue.

‘Can I stay here?’ he seemed to ask, as he shifted sideways on the rafter.

‘Absolutely not,’ I said, ‘because my beautiful wooden floor would be destroyed with bird poo. And I couldn’t keep the door open all the time and besides, if you were coming and going you might bang your head off the glass and kill yourself.’

He was devastated. He looked around him once or twice, and then flew out the door without farewell. I sat on the step outside the door staring at the lake. Absorbing sounds from the garden. Absorbing colour and light and the movement of birds and the smell of the yellow gorse
that was starting to bloom. Great heaps of sensation flowed through me, and I didn’t bother to analyse what they were or what was me.

I kept remembering that my mother was wearing a green cardigan and a pale cream frock in her coffin, with a silver broach pinned to the lapel of the cardigan. I could see her still, the face all powdered and polished with rouge and lipstick, as if that could protect her body from the worms. But yet, beneath the clothes, I could sense her nakedness in death. When we die we can hold no more. That is the exquisite sorrow of it.

And I remember too that just to sit sometimes with the beloved, and breathe in unison and know we were alive, even if we were only watching some banal programme on the television, seemed like an enormous miracle. Sometimes watching soap operas was like a lazy falling into semi-consciousness. The programmes were so vacuous and shallow that sitting passively before the moving images felt like entering into a void. And yet, in the void, we could feel time passing and in the passing of time we could feel our hearts cry out to each other in love: Hold me.

The old Asian proverb kept coming back to me. ‘If you name the bird you cease to experience the song,’ and I began to suspect that my mind had finally come home to my body, as Thich Naht Hanh says.

Later that morning, I made a decision. I loitered around the gates to the roadway, admiring the primroses beneath
the branches of the wild rose and realising that spring had already arrived. I was waiting for the postman. When his white van drove up, I asked him if he could assist me in the small matter of removing a piece of furniture from the house.

He agreed and we went indoors and I showed him the fifty-inch television.

I said, ‘I’d like to put this thing in the shed.’

‘Jesus,’ he declared, ‘that’s a beautiful television.’

As we lifted the huge screen, I could see his face crunch into a tight muscular squeeze and he went beetroot red. I was wondering what would happen if he had a heart attack. Might he be insured by An Post? Or might our house insurance cover it? You can never be too careful.

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘this is heavy.’

It was, but eventually we got it out the door and around the back of the house into one of the dry sheds.

‘That’ll do,’ he said.

‘That’ll do,’ I repeated.

He handed me a brown envelope. It was the bill from the solicitor for all the work done on the property in Cavan.

‘No love letters,’ he joked.

‘No love letters,’ I repeated.

I didn’t tell him that during the year I had read too many old love letters that I myself had written forty years earlier. I came upon them by accident one day in an upstairs wardrobe in Cavan. Letters that I had composed to girlfriends and never sent; some that they had sent to
me. Letters that had been forgotten for decades.

And they weren’t complimentary. For the most part, I was condemned in the scrawl of several young women as a cold fish and a man frightened of trusting other people.

But time passed. We all grew old. And I would hardly remember their names now except that my mother for some reason stored the letters in a suitcase, underneath a silver photo album that tracked her own honeymoon in 1950 from the Bush Hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon to Galway, the Cliffs of Moher and around the Ring of Kerry. Her album was stuffed with photographs, of herself, with a worried brow, or of him posing at the bonnet of his Ford car, and in one picture both of them hugged and smiled like children under Daniel O’Connell’s monument in the middle of Ennis. Maybe she put my photos with her own by accident and then forgot about them. Or maybe she actually read my willowy love notes and saw some comic contrast between the formality of her own happy honeymoon and the litany of my sins and sorrows as enunciated by a variety of honest young women.

During those six weeks alone in Leitrim, I often sat on a garden seat beneath the huge Chilean beech trees, their long, extending branches of hard green leaves reaching across the lawn, and the silver birch and downy birch bending to the east from twenty years of windy winters, and the white flowering jasmine, and the spinosa wild rose that came from Sligo, and the chestnut that Paul and Anne had
given us as a wedding present in 1993, and the oaks that were blessed by my teacher the Panchen Ötrul Rinpoche, and the yew that a monk from Tibet had planted, and all the other trees and living things that were beginning to show life and bud at the end of a cold March. The cottage had deteriorated. It was filthy. I had not hoovered it. I had not washed the dishes nor turned on the dishwasher. I had not made nor changed the bed in two weeks. But in the garden, I felt emotionally clean and spiritually naked. My self-obsession dissolved like the morning dew and I became aware of the world. My mind was clear.

So I sat with Simone Weil and beautiful swallows and the odd dark cuckoo, and sometimes near the willows I turned to gaze on Simone Weil but there was only me beneath the trees. I turned to find my mother too, or some other saint, but they were all gone. The garden was empty.

Lough Allen was blue. The sky was blue and cold. A long tuft of white cloud like cotton wool hung on the ridge of Sliabh an Iarainn. Around me the alder trees and primroses were flourishing. The slope of the lawn was riddled with holes where the badgers fed at night. In the woods behind where I was sitting, there was a carpet of snowdrops. A single magpie stood guard high up in a Scots pine. And along the beech hedge, a wren was hopping about looking for things I knew nothing about.

I still remember a bronze relief I saw on the wall of a church as I was on my way to the monastery of
Cz
ę
stochowa. I was in Warsaw waiting for the afternoon train and I decided to walk into Old Town and on New Street I saw a huge figure of Christ carrying his cross, outside the majestic doors of a church, and I went inside, which is where I found an image of Mary, holding not Jesus but a dying soldier. Her two hands were clasping his head to her breast. The mother’s loving face was in the foreground, her big eyes as sad as if she were holding her son. And I had to pay attention to it. I knew it was a soldier because there was a hole in the back of his head. A hole as perfectly round as a pistol shot and there was no hope for him. But yet she held him. It could have been an image from Afghanistan or Syria or any airport terminal where a woman stands and waits for a bodybag. I remember being moved by the sad face of the woman. It wasn’t as if I was looking at anything divine. The soldier was clearly human. And so was she. It was just a simple and undeniable affirmation of human compassion and for no particular reason it reminded me of an incident that happened when I was a child.

It happened in the afternoon when I had just come home from school. I took a young kitten out of the cardboard box in the kitchen where it had made its bed and the animal was instantly terrified. It ran everywhere to escape me. It jumped up on chairs, and then the table and onto the worktop. I realised that Mother had left a cooker ring on and it was red hot. I could feel the heat from the metal. The kitten was on the worktop. If I jumped at her, she
might jump onto the ring. So I thought maybe it would be better to stand still. Don’t frighten her further. But she actually walked determinedly towards the plate until her paw connected with the red iron and stuck to it, sizzling for a moment, and then she screamed and flew through the air and ended up behind the washing machine and the old Jacob’s biscuit tins in the scullery that were used for holding wrenches. And she wouldn’t come out.