Novelties & Souvenirs (34 page)

On the beach, now nearly covered in sand, lay three—four—bodies. If he had not known them to be Spaniards he wouldn’t now as darkness came on have known they were men. But he knew; he had rushed toward them with the others when they
came tumbling from the sea, staggering up like apes from the withdrawing water. They had reached out hands to him:
Auxilio. Succoro, Señores.
And the Irishmen with him, crying out like animals, their faces distended so that he seemed not to know them at all, had murdered them; had almost murdered Cormac when he tried to stop them.

Now he stood farther off, afraid to watch any longer to see more Spaniards come ashore, knowing he would not again try to interfere in the villagers’ madness, yet unable to leave. If he had a gun. Tears of frustration and helpless rage mixed with the rain clouding his vision. He turned away from the sea and looked up to where, just raising itself above a coign of rock, the roof of the Fitzgeralds’ house could be seen. Was there a light burning? He thought there was.

And what did you do when they came ashore, Cormac?

I could do nothing, and the Spanish were murdered, Ineen.

He pulled his feet from the muddy sand and began to work his way down the shingle, watching the sea and the knots of men, and, far off, the ship, whose masts were now parallel to the slabs of sea that bore it up.

Little ken I my bairn’s father

It wasn’t the wine, not entirely: though when she went to draw another jug she noticed that her lips and nose itched a little, growing numb, and that filling the jug she was slapdash; she spoke aloud to herself, saying she shouldn’t have babbled on to this stranger, and laughed.

She had told him about her father, who had been a priest, and was a cousin of the Earl of Kildare, and how the English had per
suaded him to come into the new dispensation and he would be made a bishop by the queen; how he did so, despite all his kin’s hatred of him for it; how he renounced his vows and the True Church, and married the frail daughter of an English lord in Dublin.

And was it that his family hated him for it; or that his wife despised him and lived in a continual state of loathing and shock at Irish ways and the Irish until she died, soon after Ineen was born, leaving her loathing behind her, solid as furniture; or that after their promises, and in spite of a hundred letters her father sent to London, and twenty visits to Dublin, the English never began raising her father toward the promised bishopric, not so much as a wardenship—apparently satisfied that promises had been enough to draw him out of his church; or was it that in the end he had lost even the false and empty parish the English had given him, where he preached to nearly nobody, because at last Desmond—his distant cousin too—rose up against the English and heresy, and her father had to be taken off by sea lest he be hanged by his flock: was it that terrible story, or was it God’s vengeance at his defection, that had made him mad? The English, as though tossing him away, had placed him in this northern isolation and given him a piece of the wine trade—wine! that with his breath he had once altered in its red heart to the blood of Jesus!—and let him live on a tariff he collected, a useless middleman. Was all that enough to make him mad? Or was God’s vengeance needed?

“It hasn’t made you mad, Ineen,” Sorley said, and she saw that the story had washed over him without altering his features. “And Desmond is dead, who fought for Mother Church. Whose vengeance was that, then?”

She returned now with the brimming jug, and Sorley saluted it
with his cup. She filled the cups; two drops splashed out and stained the linen of her sleeve as quick as blood. She dipped the sleeve in the bowl of water, pressing water through it absently. “I wouldn’t like to drown,” she said. “Not of any way.”

“Avoid the sea.”

“They say men drowning can see treasures lost in the sea—ships sunk, gold, jewels.”

“Do they? And do they have candles with them to light up the darkness?”

She laughed, wiping her mouth. Her father cried out, dreaming; a sob, as though someone were stifling him with a pillow. Another cry, louder. He called her name; he was awake. She waited a moment, feeling vaguely ashamed. Maybe he would sleep again. But again he called her name, his voice edged now with that piteous panic she knew well, which grated on her senses like a rasp. “Yes, Father,” she said gently, and went to the press in the corner, from which she took a jar of powder; some of this she mixed into a cup of wine, and, having lit a rushlight at the fire, carried the wine and the light carefully up into the loft.

Her father’s white face looked out from the bed curtains, his white cap and large pinkish eyes making him look like a terrified rabbit looking out from its burrow.

“Who is it in the house?” he whispered urgently. “Cormac?”

“Yes,” she said, “only Cormac.”

She had him drink the wine, and kissed him, and said a prayer with him; then when he groaned again she laid him firmly down, speaking calmly but with authority, as she might to a child. He lay back on the pillows, his stricken eyes still searching her face. She smiled, and drew his curtains.

Sorley sat unchanged by the fire, turning his cup in his fingers.

Why had she lied to her father?

“They say too,” she said, taking a gulp of wine, “that there’s a bishop under the sea. A fish bishop.” She had seen a picture in a bestiary of her father’s.

“Certainly,” Sorley said. “To marry and bury.”

“What rites does he use, do you think?”

“And the mackerel is the fish’s bawd. Men!” He shook his head, smiling. “They think even the fish live by the laws they live by. A little handful of folk, huddled up on the dry land that’s not a tenth part of the size of the seas, and dreaming of bishops for the fish.”

“How is it, then, in the sea?” she said, for some reason not doubting he knew.

“Come with me and see,” he said.

Far less the land that he goes in

Where they went, that night, was not seaward though. Cold as his touch was, it was strong, and she would not have been able to resist it even if she’d chosen to do that, which she did not choose. She thought to press her hand against his mouth so that he would not cry aloud, but he was not one who cried aloud.

She slept like one dead, and he was gone when she awoke, and her father too, calling from the loft, but she paid no mind, and got up; felt run down the inside of her thigh a dribble of slime she thought might be blood, but no, she hadn’t bled.

He was not gone far. How she knew it she could not have said. She wrapped herself in a warm mantle and went out into the day, where the storm wrack still filled the sky and the sea. The ship she had watched could still be seen, dismasted and clinging to the rocks like unswallowed fragments in a mastiff’s mouth. She went
down along the way to the beach, and it wasn’t long before she saw him striding ahead of her, holding his hat on his head for the offshore breeze. She passed the place where last night the men from the Spanish ship had come ashore; their bodies lay dark and shapeless as seals, half-buried in sand: no place a human soul could rest; they must be buried as Christian men, whatever. She would ask Cormac Burke to help.

He had not turned at all to look at the bodies of the men on the beach, kept on till the turn of the cove and the flat rocks that went out into the sea, where the seals did sometimes lie to bake their cold bodies. He was after tossing away his hat, and then his cloak, and when he came to the rocks he was as naked as he had been in her bed in the night. And when he bent to reach into the seaweed and the crusted stones wedged in the great split of the rocks and found something there to don, she knew whom she had had in her. She had known all along, but now she knew to see and to think: to think what would come of this, now and in the months and years to come.

H
OW LONG THE WAR
has gone on is not known, not even to the subjects; its beginning is not remembered by the objects, who cannot remember anything at all, being objects. It began with the opening of metaphorical eyes on the subjects’ part, and the appearance before those eyes of the other, obdurate and irreducible—the object. The insult has never been forgiven on the one side, nor acknowledged by the other, which would maintain its entire innocence if it were capable of maintaining anything beyond its simple existence.

The subjects had, from the first, inherent advantages unknown to the objects (who knew nothing). The subjects had the ability to
apprehend
, above all; they also had communication, organization, administration, a chain of command more or less complete, with weak links of course but weak links that were known about at least and therefore perhaps less damaging. They could conceive of orders, and give them. The objects had only extension, multiplicity, and a large number of simple qualities—hardness, softness, color,
and so on—which they could put forth more or less continuously in the presence of subjects. The objects had the advantage of numbers, however; there were far, far more of them, and they cared nothing for casualties.

The subjects also had the advantage of being the only ones who understood that a war was being waged, though in the end it is clear that this was not solely an advantage but in certain critical moments actually counted as a disadvantage, even a disaster. Most of the major setbacks of the subjects came just at those moments when their own knowledge, and the obdurate ignorance of the objects, was most apparent to them (to the subjects; the objects knew nothing of it either way). In fact it can be said that any attack of the subjects on the objects could be considered identical to a counterattack of the objects on the subjects.

The original strategy of the objects, metaphorically speaking (objects having no strategies as such), was divide and conquer. What was divided, however, was not the enemy, the subjects, but the objects themselves, in a continuous raid upon the subjects’ powers of discrimination, a bewildering (for the subjects) and terrifying (for the subjects) proliferation that could only be opposed by an equally continuous generation of new categories by the enemy. Subjects caught unawares could find themselves suddenly surrounded by crowds of discrete and well-furnished objects, whose numbers quickly rose to virtual infinity as the trapped subject shifted its consciousness here to there in rising panic. Grains of sand, items of scenery, vegetation parts, incoming waves, stars, inches, geometrical figures, tools, all had to be instantly forced into the right categories or at least into categories perceived as correct by the battling subject, whose consciousness rapidly filled, reaching toxic levels that could result in sudden loss of apprehension,
and therefore reduction to object status, at least temporarily: a state referred to (by the subjects) as “pawn capture.”

The objects’ strategy had an advantage and a disadvantage, from the objects’ point of view, a point of view which certainly did not exist. The advantage was that only the subjects could perceive the objects’ strategy, and therefore in every encounter between subjects and objects the subjects became immediately (even anteriorly) involved in carrying it out. The disadvantage was the same as the advantage: every perception of the objects by the subjects, which could have been counted as a victory by the objects if they could have counted, was also counted as a victory by the subjects; the more objects there were perceived to be, the more of them could be considered (by the subjects) to have been captured.

For a very long time now the victory has hung in the balance as the two sides march and countermarch. But wars of attrition (which is essentially what the subjects were engaged in) can only end in one way, if the courage and application of the side engaged in the attrition of the other remains high—and this is the one thing the subjects can be sure of, that they will never, in effect can never, surrender, cease, or even pause for a moment in reducing further objects to cognition.

The objects, of course, don’t see it that way. No relentless production of new categories by the subjects can effectually reduce their numbers. The subjects may believe that very capacious categories—categories such as “all that stuff,” “things out there,” “this and everything like it,” “big things,” “matter,” and so on will eventually cause the objects to surrender willy-nilly (the only way in which they could surrender). But the objects do not, agree, in fact cannot. All that the objects can be said to know, or to behave
as if
they knew, which itself is a distinction that only the subjects can make—what
the subjects in their dark watches and lonely trenches suspect that the objects really somehow
do
know in their unimaginable nonexistent hearts—is that the subjects’ categories are in fact only further objects. There is no end.

There is no end. Only the subjects understand this, as well as everything else that is understood. There will be, can be no final annihilation of the objects: that is the vow, the promise implicit in all the strategies and all the tactics of both sides. The war may go badly, has gone badly since the beginning for the objects on many fronts, but it will never be over: will not be over until the last subject finally closes its eyes in sleep or death, and knows no more.