Stones of Aran (29 page)

Thereafter we met Breandan only at long intervals. When Lilliput Press launched my
Pilgrimage
in the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, he spoke magniloquently. And when the
Times
Literary
Supplement
sent the book to Ireland’s poet laureate for review he forwarded it as a matter of course to Breandán, the representative of island literature. Breandán’s affectionate notice is probably the only one the severe
TLS
has ever published in which the author of the book under review is referred to by his first name. Then, in 1990, on my return to Ireland after a month abroad, I fell into conversation with a stranger on a train, who mentioned casually that she had recently attended Breandán Ó hEithir’s funeral. I am lazy about friendships, and have lived to regret it.

Just beyond the old teachers’ residence the road sidles up to the next scarp it has to climb, which steepens into a vertical rock-face called An Aill Bhriste, the broken cliff, along the left-hand side for a short distance. Here a “grotto” has been made out of a nook
of the cliff, with a conventional blue and white Madonna casting her eyes
upwards. Once, as I approached, a donkey came to the edge of the cliff and appeared in that visionary space above her, twiddling its huge furry ears in benediction. Another time I glimpsed a minute goldcrest—a rare bird in Aran—flitting in the tapestry of rambling roses and old man’s beard around her niche, the bright streak of its crown appearing and disappearing like stitches of gold thread among the cream and pink blossoms and shadowy greenery, all momentarily rendered as precious as a Crivelli. The last wedge of ground between the road and the scarp here is called Buaile na gCopóg, the pasture of the plantains, as I happen to know, because if I’m climbing the hill in company with some other shopper from the west and I run out of conversation, I fall back on place-name studies. Next, the road bends westwards, makes an effort and gets itself onto the next level by a steep ascent called Carcair na Ceártan, from a
ce
á
rta
or forge that used to stand on the right of the road, run by a Micil Riabhach Ó Niaidh, a Connemara
poitín
smuggler of a hundred and fifty years ago. At this point one enters the next townland, Eochaill, which is supposed to mean “yew-wood.” If ever there was a wood in it, nothing could be stonier than one’s first view of it today. An Chreig Dhubh, the black crag, is the name of the great terrace of limestone pavement that comes into view stretching away to the south from the road here, and I have seen consternation in the faces of newcomers who have climbed so far, to find only this desert, and further bare hills rising before them. Old Beartla thinks that it is a disgrace to the island that the Cill Rónáin men didn’t reclaim all this wasteland, instead of spending their days lying in the shelter of a wall and talking. In fact there is something lugubrious about this crag, and although I have often
botanized
across it and found as much fascination in its crevices as on other great crags to the west, it leaves me drained, as if by some localized side-effect of gravity. But it has a comic aspect too, which I owe to Beartla’s voluminous commentary on every step of our way, on the many occasions I walked with him up this hill,
sparing the pony of his side-car. He thinks that this crag, or a part of it, has another name, which sounded like Creig Arry. And what is the meaning of
arry
?
I asked; he didn’t know, but he thought it was somebody’s name, as in Harry Stattle. And who was he? Again Beartla didn’t know—but whoever he was he must have had great brains, because if a man did something very clever you would say “
S
á
raigh
sé
Hara
í
Steatail
—He beats Harry
Stattle
!” It took me a moment to recognize Aristotle, the father of cleverness himself, in this Aran dress. Of course the name of the crag, Creig Earraigh, whatever it means, has nothing to do with the philosopher, but I always think of him as I pass, and think too how Joyce, “bringing to tavern and to brothel / The mind of witty Aristotle,” would have relished Harry Stattle.

Curiously, Aristotle is a well-known figure in Irish folklore, and the tale of his marriage used to be told in Aran. It seems that Aristotle “was very wise, very brainy, but he didn’t like women at all,” and he had a man to cook and keep house for him. This housekeeper often discussed his master’s peculiarity with a woman who used to come around the house, and they decided to trick him into marrying her. Aristotle always had breakfast in bed, and one morning the woman dressed herself in the
housekeeper’s
clothes and carried in the breakfast to him. As soon as she was at the bedside the housekeeper locked the bedroom door and ran for a lawyer, while she started to shriek that she was being kept in against her will. The judgement of the lawyer was that Aristotle would have to marry the woman or face a court case, and so he consented to marry her, on condition that he could put her from him if ever he found fault with her. She in her turn agreed to this, on condition that if he put her out she could take with her three loads of whatever she wanted from the house. So they married, and had a boy-child of whom Aristotle became very fond. But later he began to hate the woman, and to suspect she was too friendly with the housekeeper, and eventually he ordered her out. “Very well,” she said, “but remember our agreement, that if you put me from you I can take three loads of whatever I choose
with me.” “In with you and get your three loads,” he said, “and get out of my sight for ever!” So she carried off the child as her first load, and left him in a safe place. Then she came back for the second load, and took away all the silver and gold and clothes she could carry. When she came back for the third time, she looked around the house for a while, pretending she was searching for something. Aristotle was standing in the middle of the floor, and she walked up to him and said, “I don’t see anything else I’d rather have than you, so up with you on my back!” “If that’s how it is,” said the great thinker, “wouldn’t it be as well for you to bring back the other two loads? We’d be better off staying here than anywhere else, and perhaps we’ll be more peaceful together in the future.”

Climbing the hill, especially on steamer-days when everyone was on the road, used to be a social occasion for us; at home we led such a private, hermetic life that sometimes when I answered a knock at the door I must have appeared blear-eyed from sleep, love, sorrow or the written word. But on the open road we were more convivial; only rarely did we hurry or lag in order to avoid sharing the long ascent with someone dull or cantankerous. Beartla was always a good companion on the road, but others could be tiresome, and whenever I was cycling up the hill and nearing the point where I would have to stagger to a halt and start walking, having no gears on my old black Raleigh, I used to look ahead and see what company offered, for once one had fallen in with a person it was difficult to part from him or her before the top of the last
carcair.
Conversely, if one wanted to impose oneself on a reluctant companion, to make some point at length, for example, the hill allowed one to do so as if by chance. M used this enforced pairing very effectively with a neighbour who we
suspected
was avoiding us. The ground of the difficulty was this. Strolling by Port Mhuirbhigh one day I had met him filling a donkey-cart with sand from the grassy bank between the path and the beach; I stopped and chatted, and brought the
conversation
round, very subtly as I thought, to coastal erosion. If the
bank was damaged, I hinted, the winter storms would break through to the path behind it; if the path went, then the wall of the sandy field called The Vinegar would be undermined, and if the Vinegar was blown away, all Kilmurvey House’s fine pastures would follow, and so on to Apocalypse. The man disagreed; the sea was always washing sand in and out of the bay, and there would be sand here after we were all dead. I returned the
conversation
to the fine weather and so on, and left him, as I thought, in perfect amity. Unfortunately a few days later official noticeboards appeared by the beach specifying the penalties for unauthorized removal of sand. The notices were soon thrown down, and it seems there was some muttering in the pubs that I with my
privileged
access to the ear of Government had been responsible for them. However, because we rarely met him on the road and he was not very forthcoming at the best of times, it was some months before we began to wonder if our neighbour Wasn’t Talking To Us. So when M one day saw him ahead of her pushing his bike up the hill, she strained every muscle to catch up, pretended to be overcome by gravity just as she was about to pass him, and then chatted with him on every topic but sand, remorselessly, all the way up the hill and two further miles back to the west, leaving him not merely mollified but cordial, confiding, entranced. (As to the beach, the sandbank is in tatters and the path has collapsed, but the Vinegar wall still stands. My certainties have
suffered
some erosion too, though; the storms of 1991 would have smashed the path with or without our neighbour’s help, and I am inclined to agree that there will be sand there after we are all dead.)

The flat stretch of the road on a level with the black crag is only a couple of hundred yards long, and then begins another climb, Carcair Ghanly, past the opening of the side-road leading down to the village of Mainistir. Thomas Ganly, who came to Aran in the 1850s to oversee the building of the pier in Cill Rónáin and the lighthouse on An tOileán Iarthach, married a Mainistir widow; a year later she died, leaving him her
cartúr
of land, and
he very quickly married the young daughter of the blacksmith Micil Riabhach, which caused a lot of talk. Thomas was from Antrim; his father was an Orangeman who married a Catholic and let his wife bring up the children in her own religion, but (as Breandán Ó hEithir puts it), some of the Ulster bigotry seems to have stuck to Thomas, for it is said he had to leave home after a row in which he broke a few Protestant skulls. He was no great farmer, according to family legend; once he saw some sheep
grazing
in one of his fields, and drove them down to the pound in Cill Rónáin, and then discovered they were his own and had to pay twopence a head to redeem them. Thomas’s offspring gave Aran plenty to gossip about. On the night a mainland suitor came looking for her hand, his sixteen-year-old daughter Maggie eloped with a penniless Fenian from Gort na gCapall, Mícheál Ó
Flaithearta
. One of Thomas’s sons, also called Thomas, was secretary of the Aran branch of the Land League. This Thomas and his brother-in-law Mícheál were arrested on suspicion of cliffing the Kilmurvey O’Flahertys’ cattle, but were released for lack of
evidence
. He also ambushed Ó hIarnáin the bailiff near the old quay in Cill Rónáin once, and fired a shot which grazed the man’s head and stunned him. When the bailiff came round, he saw a man called Kilmartin standing over him. The police searched
Kilmartin’s
cottage, which was close by, and planted a revolver and bullets under the newborn baby in the cradle, and arrested him. Thomas got away to Boston, but very soon fell ill with galloping consumption; on his deathbed he confessed that he had fired the shot at the bailiff, the priest sent word to Galway and Kilmartin was released. All this caused so much
rír
á
that Thomas’s brother, the Rev. William Ganly, had to leave his curacy in Mayo and emigrate to Australia. A third brother, Pat, inherited the farm, was evicted, and reinstated in half of it, as I have told.

We know so much about the Ganlys because of the
word-spinning
, word-hoarding children and grandchildren of Maggie Ganly and Mícheál Ó Flaithearta, who include Liam and Tom O’Flaherty, Breandán Ó hEithir, and some of the Aran people I
most enjoy talking to, and who have given me many of these details of the family history. Tom O’Flaherty wrote that he
preferred
his mother’s side of the family, “the emotional, witty,
storytelling
Ganlys,” to the “harsh, quarrelsome, haughty, ‘ferocious O’Flahertys,’” and his favorite relative was his uncle Pat, “carefree and irresponsible … a great rebel, the best story-teller in Aran.” Anecdotes of Pat’s high-spirited antics are many. He was a hero of the skirmishing with the land-agent Thompson. Once when
eviction
cases were pending against some Cill Éinne tenants he made the doctor drunk, took the keys of the dispensary, climbed into its roof-space and from there into the agent’s office next door, stole the iron box containing the eviction notices, rowed out and drowned it in the sea off Straw Island, so that the cases had to be dismissed. He was a “playboy” in the Aran or Syngean sense,
always
ready for fun, for running races and jumping, even when he was old, and it is from him that the
carcair
has its name, for he used to sit on a boulder beside it, on sunny days a hundred years ago, exchanging badinage with the passers-by.

In fact Carcair Ghanly is one of the most joyous places in Aran. As one climbs, at whatever the cost in breath, the whole eastern end of the island falls away into a vast perspective with the other two Aran Islands and the hills of Clare beyond—but I will devote a chapter to this view when we reach the top of the hill—and if, having come from the western villages in the lee of the island’s central ridge, one is swooping down it on a bicycle, here for the first time ocean appears to the south as well as to the north, and one is suddenly balanced on two immense blue wings. The most mundane errands are uplifted by this hill, even the week-in week-out delivery of goods from the steamer visible in the
harbour
below. Séamas complains about the
scl
á
bhaíocht,
the slavery, of his coal business, but when grinding up the hill on his tractor towing a trailer heaped with sacks, he radiates power, and noise, and grimy nods. Stiofán with his vanful of Calorgas bottles
salutes
the other Stiofán with his vanful of Kosangas bottles,
unprescient
of the merger of Calorgas and Kosangas even then being
planned out in the big world, and the slight
contretemps
which will ensue when it turns out that those Robinsons, with that
British
sense of fair play so much admired at least by the British, have been dealing with both of them. And here comes Robinson
himself
, sailing down the hill with a squeak of his old bike, a packet of fifty maps of Aran (1982 price £1.58 + 15%
VAT
, wholesale terms 33% off) bouncing around in a sally-rod basket on his handlebars, for delivery to the steward of the
Galway
Bay
—“I’m telling you, that fellow has his fortune made with them maps!” Yes, we all have our ad-hucksterish ways of living off the stones of Aran, and it is a good thing we have the daily bread of nature’s beauty to supplement them for they all involve a bit of
sclábhaíoch
:
but they give us identities too, they validate our going up and down the hill in the eyes of society. Before I produced the map, it was a mystery to our neighbours what we were living on; one man said to me, “We thought you must have money in rubber-mines or something.” But now I have an island nickname as definitive as those of the buyer from the seaweed factory in Connemara, who is Fear na Slataí Mara, the searod-man, and the representative of the Department of Agriculture, Fear na bhFataí, the potato-man: I am Fear na Mapaí, the man of the maps, and that is why I am on this hill.