Peeling Oranges (19 page)

‘Every country creates its own myths. British colonialism had created the myth of the superiority of English people and English language and culture over other races and languages and cultures. Irish nobles were denigrated as uncouth. Irish peasants were caricatured as ape-like. Irish intelligence was mocked. The Irish language was deemed “barbarous”. The effects of such symbolic violence still abide in the Irish psyche. And it was all done with such good humour, perhaps the most lethal weapon of all. We were meant to laugh at ourselves being put down. And the deluded West Brits among us fell for it all, and we commenced to downgrade our own.’

I pause and look at my audience. There is not a head turned up. Any expression or gesticulation on my part is irrelevant. My audience is just ears and fingers propelling pens on white paper.

‘Stop,’ I shout, ‘don’t just transcribe; listen to what I have to say. Think of what I am saying and agree or disagree, and then write what you wish, but in you own way.’

Some heads look up at me, and for a moment there is silence. Expectation?
Look mate
, the silence seems to be saying,
just deliver. We’ve got exams to pass. We want to get out there and enjoy the world. We can only afford you lip service. We are night students. We haven’t time for eccentrics.

‘Irish nationalists,’ I continue, and the pens start scratching again, ‘on the other hand, created the myth that everything English was bad – “burn everything English except her coal”. They also created the myth that the Irish language could be revivified and become the first and, indeed for some, the only language once more. This was an attempt at reverse colonialism, the reverse of the
bata scóir
policy…’

Ah, a hand up, a question. The young man in the second row.

‘What was the
bata scóir
policy, sir?’

‘The
bata scóir
was a stick worn around the neck by Irish-speaking school children in the nineteenth century. Every time the child spoke in Irish, a notch was carved on the stick, and each notch represented one beating at the end of the day. Such “disciplining methods” were even adopted by some of the parents of these children who believed that there was no good in their language, if one wished to be upwardly mobile (which is what you all want, damn you).’

Something strikes my face. A wet paper ball lodges at my feet. No one seems to notice, their heads are so deeply bowed. Was it thrown in an immature, jocular vein or for some deeper reason? An idealistic gesture, a reaction to something I said? We are a tribal people. We don’t like to blame our own. Yes, that’s it. I say it out loud; it’s relevant.

‘We are a tribal people. We don’t like to blame our own, but it was a form of linguistic genocide and suicide all mixed up. We are a schizophrenic race. We fight for and against the same cause simultaneously. We want things both ways. We are in and out at the same time. How often “in” and “out” are used in the same sentence, in the same breath in our speech on this island. We have a fascination with position, where we stand…’

I feel my tongue rolling words along the palate, lifting and lowering to the demands of diphthongs and syntax piling into the larynx, which is now delivering on insularity and the myth of purity of race and language, adding: ‘We create the myth that we are not mortal at all but gods dressed in mortal apparel and therefore life, mere transient life in its ordinariness, has little value. And words propound on the apotheosis of the Cause (the highest god) to whom we as lesser gods must pay homage, necessitating the inevitability of blood sacrifice (to expiate that god). Hence the primitivism of our so-called modern world, proving the myth of civilisation itself…’

I hear my voice slowing down almost like an engine and eventually stopping. The lecture is over. Have I touched anybody? And for a moment I think that maybe my words could have the same effect on my audience as Luisa’s biblical words had on me – that they only vindicate the speaker and wash over the listener like mumbo-jumbo.

The lids grow heavy over my eyes like curtains about to fall after a show. I hear shuffling and laughter as the students leave the lecture theatre. I want one of them to talk to me or even to brush past me or bump into me, but they walk by me as if I am not there. And the person who threw the paper ball? Lost for ever in the crowd.

***

I make my way to my mother’s apartment. I want to tell her about the lecture, even if she doesn’t understand. I crave someone’s touch. There’s an urgency;
something
is saying to me there’s an urgency. It’s a January evening. It is the time of year when I feel the near death of my birth coming back to haunt me. My bones shiver. A pall hangs over the world. Even the street lamps are shrouded. It’s the make-your-mind-up time for the universe, between death and life.

I’m going to confront her. Gently, as doctor Mullins said, but confront her nonetheless. Maybe it’s too late to confront her. The lucid periods have all but gone now. When you relinquish your home, you give up your autonomy; you begin to atrophy. Maybe it’s because I know all this that I have stalled in the past. But it’s not the thread in my mother’s life that I’m afraid of severing, not now, not after her surviving all this time. That thread is well inured now to any sort of testing on my part. And I also have become inured to all her little tricks of feigned helplessness. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with her after all. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m afraid to heal the wound I’ve carried so long. But now the time has come. Jolt or no jolt. This time I won’t raise my voice or get angry. But I won’t weaken either or let her weaken, not like before. This time I’m going to have it out with her once and for all.

As I approach the apartment, I see an old woman at the far end of the street. She is shouting something. Drawing nearer, I recognise my mother. She is distraught. Her hair is dishevelled. Her cardigan is hanging off her shoulder over her nightdress, the wrong button in the wrong buttonhole.

She grabs my sleeve. ‘Have you seen Gearóid?’ she says. She looks at me as if I am a stranger. ‘Where’s Gearóid? Gearóid will get him.’ She is panting.

‘It’s all right, Mam,’ I say, ‘perhaps he’s inside.’

She is reluctant to return at first, but then she holds my arm tightly and, for the first time in my life, I feel as if a current is running through me, and we both go in together.

The caretaker informs me that a youth had climbed up a drainpipe and had broken into her apartment, but the alarm went off, and he escaped empty-handed. It was just the fright that got to her.

Security is a myth. That’s what my lecture should have been about: ‘The Function of Myth in Security.’

***

My mother’s health has deteriorated. It has happened suddenly after all the procrastinating in the past. She just went downhill after the breakin. Her breathing comes in fits and starts. Her face has fallen. The jaw has dropped; the mouth hangs open. Neuralgia was giving her such pain that two nerves had to be severed above the right side of her mouth. She hides her face in a veil. A face once beautiful reduced to a hanging wall, lopsided, lifeless.

‘Mam,’ I say, holding her hand, trying to recharge a current.

The eyes in the wall have a vacant stare.

***

My mother is laid to rest, if that is the phrase, in Mount Jerome cemetery. It was her wish, a wish she made many years ago. She liked its compactness and proximity to the city. ‘One has to consider one’s mourners, don’t you know?’ she used to say. Patrick had bought a double plot in Mount Jerome for six. I don’t know why he bought it for six; maybe he thought his AI experiments would eventually prove successful. Anyway his body was buried there after being brought back from Spain. There was room in the Woodburn plot in Glasnevin on the north side of the city. Martha could have rested there beside her brother Tomás, and her father and her mother (Muddy had passed away in 1955). At first I thought her refusal to go to Glasnevin was due to old southern Dubliners’ reluctance to cross the Liffey (except to shop) – their world was their immediate vicinity. But my mother had done social work on the northside and had marched with Saint Mobhi’s in 1932. So her refusal to go to Glasnevin –
Jerome
was one of her last intelligible words – was due to something deeper than mere geographical preference. For Martha Foley née Woodburn, going to Mount Jerome marked her final break with all the ideology on which she had been weaned. And as for her wish to be buried with Patrick, whether it was due to ignorance or blindfolding on her part, I cannot tell.

The final day of winter. ‘If only she had made it to the spring,’ someone says, ‘she could have lasted into another year.’ ‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ a fatalist retorts. The word
soul
is mentioned. ‘God rest her soul.’ I hear the sound of the bell as the soul of my mother passes through the cemetery gate in the sleet and the wind.

I read Patrick’s headstone:

PATRICK FOLEY, DIPLOMAT

BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER (SIC)

DIED 29 JUNE 1950, AGED 56 YEARS.

And the clay: when I try to drop the clay as a symbol of dust, it makes a dull, thudding sound on the coffin like a turd dropping. My red rose and the bouquets of flowers are being thrown into a cesspit.

I go to a pub across the road from the cemetery. Several people buy me drinks. They just land them on the table at which I’m seated. I keep thinking of words sculpted in stone. What difference does it make now anyway? What difference do words in stone make?

Then someone introduces me to Gearóid MacSuibhne.

I don’t know who introduces me. All I can see are hands, podgy hands, gnarled and freckled with stubble of hair shaking, possessing flesh. I refuse those hands. How many hands are shaken in hatred all over the world?

‘You’re him, you’re Counihan,’ I shout. ‘You’re the one who persecuted my mother.’

Hands restrain me, well-meaning hands.

‘Counihan was one of my aliases,’ he says, so calmly in Irish, it makes my anger rise.

‘Shut your fucking Irish up.’

He looks around. ‘Keep your voice down, Derek.’

I have to look at the man. I had verbalised his Gaelic words every time he spoke in ink. And now, as he voices the words in English, I think a different person is speaking.

‘I didn’t persecute your mother.’

‘Liar.’ I am about to strike him. I see my hands clenched as fists, but other hands and voices restrain me.

‘It’s the grief,’ someone says, ‘he’s overcome.’

‘I have a letter,’ says MacSuibhne.

‘You’re going to pay.’

‘Please, Derek.’

I brush the letter from his hand, making it fall onto the floor.

The pathetic figure grovels beneath me. He picks up the letter, smoothes it out and, rising stiffly, offers it again. ‘It’s from your mother.’

I look around at the pints of stout dotted around the tables like a congregation of priests with their white collars and dark robes. People are raising the glasses to their lips, mumbling supplications, imbibing slowly and deeply.

‘You understand Irish.’

‘Fuck you.’

Some faces are raised from their liquid devotions. Voices whisper like sibilant prayers: ‘Normally such a polite young man.’ ‘A credit to her.’ ‘Teaches at the university.’ ‘Maybe it’s the
dúchas
coming out in him.’

‘Look, Derek, I feel a certain…’

‘A certain what?’

‘Responsibility.’

‘What responsibility have you ever shown?’

‘You must read this letter. I want you to understand. I know you’ll understand it. I know you have good Irish no matter what you say. She wrote to me in forty seven.’

‘Forty seven. Sure.’ I throw him a look of disbelief.

‘Yes, I know. I have it all that time. When that terrible thing happened to her. You’re mature enough now to understand the whole story. Read it.’

‘Fucking terrorist.’ I’m not thinking of what I’m saying. I’m not a history lecturer or a history sleuth. I’m just a maddened mother’s son.

‘I’m not a terrorist.’ His tone has changed. He is no longer conciliatory. ‘That’s British propaganda.’

‘Oh, you speak the foreign tongue very well. Where were you all the years?’

‘In prison a lot of the time. To tell you the truth…’

‘Truth? All your crowd look for is validation.’

‘The truth is that I gave my word to Martha that I would stay away. There was so much danger, not just for me but for her, especially after the last time.’

‘What last time?’

‘It’s all in the letter.’

‘You didn’t stay away because I remember it was you, the insurance man. I remember all the arguing and my mother crying.’

‘She was crying because of the gang who attacked her, don’t you understand? She never got over it. Read the letter. I found out the whereabouts of one of them.’

‘I’m supposed to buy all this?’

‘She wasn’t able to tell you or Foley, or anybody because of the shame of it all. Her only way to get it off her chest was to disguise it in Irish and write to me about it.’

‘Why should she write to you?’

‘As someone somewhat removed.’

‘Ha.’

‘Read the letter, Derek,’ he says solemnly. ‘It’s right for you to know.’