The Second Mister (7 page)

I decided to leave but she took me by the arm and in a surprisingly gentle tone said:

“
You’re turning out just like your father.”

Her voice deceived me and I suddenly felt close to my aunt in a way that I realise with hindsight should have demonstrated to me the fragility of the defences that I had erected around myself: my ramparts and bastions were made of wax and could be melted by the slightest warmth or the most fleeting perception of affection.

Any danger that I might be engulfed by sentimentality soon passed when Aunt Gethsemane pointed her shears in the direction of a strange conifer at the bottom of the garden. This tree would not have been out of place in a horror film as it had long hanging branches which at a distance gave the impression that they were draped with thick cobwebs.

“
Just like your father
,” she went on.
“I remember one day, not long after her marriage, your mother prevailed on me to invite them both to Sunday lunch. I left the dining room for a few minutes and when I returned your father had disappeared. I ran out to the garden and
spotted him behind that tree. I had no doubt at all about what he was doing: he was casing my chamaecyparis. It would have been gone by morning if I had not caught him.”

I was about to suggest that there might have been a less heinous explanation for my father’s behaviour when my aunt said something that changed the course of my life. There are moments which stand like great pointed rocks
that always remain high above the vast ocean of existence,
contemptuous of tempest and turbulence, indifferent and ineluctable, immovable and inexorable: the instant between life and death, the second which it takes to sever some fond relationship that had been enjoyed for a lifetime, the painfully drawn out but infinitesimally brief period of time that ends in the explosive revelation of the self to the self.

“I always knew your father would end up in jail,”
my Aunt said as she turned away.

I stood in the centre of the garden unable to think or even move. An incensed army of fire breathing ants danced across the back of my belly; some sort of crab started to scrape at the bottom of my diaphragm . I understood what she had said but its enormity did not allow me to absorb it, as if my psyche had been rammed into a turnip pulper by her few verbs and nouns. I wanted to cry, I wanted to throw myself on the ground, I wanted to chase my old
Medea
of an aunt through the evergreens into which she had again disappeared and tear her to pieces bit by bit.

Of course I did nothing.

Eventually, a chill gust of wind from the west brought me to my senses and I started to walk away, without saying goodbye. Three beech leaves were suddenly lifted off the ground and they swirled around each other at extraordinary speed, reminding me of myself seconds before, a
lifetime before. I went slowly towards the gate and when
I reached it I looked back. Aunt Gethsemane’s head appeared suddenly in the middle of the shrubbery.

“
I’ve cut you out of my will”
she cried, as I moved away with a quickened stride.

B
en
Jonson, Dryden, Lord Byron and I have, at various times, attempted to translate into something resembling standard English the works of
Quintus 
Horatius Flaccus,
otherwise known as
Horace
. Whatever about the quality of the work of the first three gentlemen, I can say without hesitation that my own intensive efforts in this area possess a unique grace that resembles the hoof-prints of a drunken pack mule, described in shaky Braille.

The reasons why
Horace
is so difficult to render into English are various. Even among his classical peers his work was regarded as a model of intensity and concision. The absence of definite and indefinite articles and certain other technical peculiarities of Latin add to the translator’s woes. In spite of this, I knew one young man who managed to greatly improve a phrase of the master.

It was a long time ago, towards the end of April 1963. I was preparing for my Leaving Certificate examination. My Latin teacher was an elderly cleric, who was personally as unfamiliar with humour, as he was with cuckoldizing concubinage in Calcutta. There is some reason to believe that he may have smiled, or even laughed, a year or two before the Eucharistic Congress of 1932. The modern view
however, is that this was probably a reflex action of his
facial muscles due to bilious indigestion or, (Heaven forbid ! ), trapped wind. Anyway, a classmate of mine, was 
translating Ode VII Book Four under the teacher’s rhadamanthine eye . All went well until he came to the fateful words “
Gratia…nuda
.” These, he brilliantly translated as “
Grace, in the nude, Father ”
. The priest reacted in a highly alarmed manner, then composed himself once more, and said:

“ No ! No ! Not at all ! It is ‘Grace lightly clad, because of warm weather’
.”

And so, many happy hours were spent in the remaining weeks before our examination speculating as to which of the two states
Grace
was in at any given time, and how she might be induced to change from one to the other !

Unfortunately, in most schools Latin has long since disappeared from the curriculum. I often feel sympathy for the young scholars of today, who have to face the worst that the Department of Education can throw at them, with neither
Grace
or much else to console them, except perhaps the formula for benzene and the terrors of trigonometry.

It is time for linguistic reform !

George Bernard Shaw had strong views on the widespread eccentricities to be found in English spelling, and firmly believed that it should be simplified. He pointed out that, logically, it is possible to spell the word “
Fish”
with the letters
“ G H O T I”.
This can be achieved by pronouncing the “GH” as in “
ROUGH
”, the “
O”
as in
“WOMEN”,
and the “
TI
” as in “
NATION
”.
G H O T I : Fish.

Well, George Bernard Shaw was a wimp.

The English language, whatever about English spelling, does not need to be simplified: it needs to be made more complicated and in a revolutionary way. This would make ordinary communication far more interesting and would have many practical but hitherto unforseen advantages.

Some months ago I purchased a book on Latin verbs and in it I came across a tense called the “
passive periphrastic.”
I had never heard of the
passive periphrastic
before and believed that I had managed to live into my mid-sixties without any great need of it.

How wrong I was !

Two nights later at a function in Dublin, a man came up to me and verbally abused me, for a number of well-founded reasons. He was an alumnus of St.Michael’s College in Listowel and he concluded his rant by saying “
..and you did not even go to St.Michael’s …it was not good enough for you.”
I told him that he was right, which greatly surprised him. I then made excellent use of my recently acquired knowledge by telling him a specimen sized lie. This was to the effect that when I had finished at National School, my father had called me aside and said “
Paddy, I can’t send you to St.Michael’s with your friends; if you went there you might not encounter the passive periphrastic”.
Boy, did that send the little wretch running for the hills !