Parallelograms

That was a cold cold cold morning, that day. Tractors passed early: green for Michael, orange for Sam, blue for Tom D, each with its own throaty cough. So cold the hands of autumn under my dressing gown. I had left my big coat in the car ready for the viewing and the walk to the church. Rain was predicted. And the eternal wind.
I must air my fusty funeral suit with the button up waistcoat and go out and blow the cobwebs from my head along the concrete path. I shall follow the path into security. Perhaps I should extend it? All the way up the meadow, maybe to the hawthorn enclosure. Perhaps even beyond those magic protectors. Over the bóithrín. Out across the commonage. Up past Martin’s pines and their dark pine martins’ lairs. Over the bog and away from the misty holes where the bogmen fester out the centuries. Even further out, far and away to hot and hotter places. Keep it going. Into the broiling Chaco, land of wild pigs and serpents. Through the sizzling streets of Concepción littered with old tanks and steam trains. Down Asunción’s cobbled lanes shaded with pink and blue lapacha, strange giants whose seeds resemble castanets and whose husks crack like rifle shots on the hottest days. Or even further. To the terra incognita of my unexamined youth. My own no-man’s-land. I can speak the lingo now.

June 1st 1966
At the Bottom of the Garden, Calle San José 32, Calella, Spain.

I ought to call this an interim report; it is so long since I wrote anything. Time goes quickly here. During the month I have kept up my routine, practicing two hours every morning at the bottom of the garden and then normally an hour or so in my room in the evening by candlelight with Vera lying in bed reading or listening. The garden is ideal for practicing, with its high walls that shut out the world. I’m screened from the house by a thick flowering shrub all covered with pink blooms, and by the tangerine tree. I hadn’t seen a tangerine tree before. They are very closely branched. It makes a good screen. I sit in a kind of summerhouse. The end of the garden, which is paved except for the flowerbeds, is roofed over, high, like a kind of stable. The overflow from the water tanks runs out in a terracotta fountain with cherubs and moss. There’s a large pond-like tank under it where they keep the milk and the cakes, full of bug-infested water. It’s very secure and isolated, except when Mr or Mrs B comes down to collect a bottle, or leave one in the tank. I’ve learned a lot of songs: the whole of the Clancy Brothers songbook.
It’s raining now, after lunch. The thrushes are noisy and radios are playing in the house next door and someone is hammering. They are always building here. There was thunder a while ago. Now just the soft rain pattering on the leaves. Clouds of swallows above the house.

That was a faraway place, off there, forty and more years ago, at Bobby’s Bar on Franco’s Costa Brava between Barcelona and the bare and tragic hills that overlooked the ocean. The valleys were full of paths and the paths full of dust, untrodden, like old abandoned houses. The trees stood always motionless as old people at a funeral. They moved me often enough as I walked through the scattered ruins they observed, never knowing why I felt so sad or what might once have happened there.

So very far away, on the sharp edge of youth, with childish things put behind me by default and the rest of life like a dark impenetrable thicket barring my path. It is clear now that I had defaulted somewhere along the way and had not picked up all the essential equipment I was to need to finish my journey in a satisfactory manner. Unless, that is, it was the journey that mattered, and not even the Devil cared where I ended up afterwards.
I learned my first trade there, practicing my guitar by the terracotta fountain under the tangerine tree and beside what turned out, when it burst one day into amazing Martian Invader Technicolor bloom, to be a pomegranate bush, cruel, thorned and beautiful.

This was a place I had no need to know again, although the memories linger like Saturday night perfume during Sunday morning prayers. I retained for later use the pomegranate bush’s safe isolation of being, penetrated only by a consciousness of lizards and locusts and the meaningless poetry of rain.

This morning Pam came in with an uneven drizzle of tears and told us that Audrey whom I’d met a couple of times had been killed this morning. It was on the road from Pineda. She and a lorry, the car demolished. I remember what they said about her. Suicidal, whatever that really means. She talked and thought and painted and was lousing up her life. I am not touched. I did not really know her. I do not know yet what lousing up a life means. And death is just a word. I have never seen a corpse or even loved anyone who became one. I’ve never even loved anyone. I don’t know what people mean when they talk about their feelings. The sound of the rain is nice. And I am alone, also nice. Lunch was good: stew with beef and kidneys in it, and strawberries after. Vera is kind today. I’m shirking painting the new bar. So I’m quite content. Listening to the rain.

I stand by the open coffin with the bitter-sweet taste of tea and toast and rhubarb jam in my mouth. I noticed mould in the jam jar this morning. I had to scrape it off. It is a shock to see you now, old neighbour! You are shrunk to nothing shrouded in silk ruffs and painted like a little doll; a model man made of marzipan in a confectioner’s shop window. You are not here. You are gone. A line of sombre lads, the immaculate males of the family, salute your journey with a volley of handshakes but you have already gone. The people say you were a model man. Older women grey-haired in black dresses with silver brooches mourn you in a sad line. Younger women sit and I am sorry for their trouble again and again and again as I review the family. It is a quick business. I am soon out in the sunshine and the rain.

Now the rain is much harder and the ground has begun to smell earthy and wet. The butcher’s fridge next door is humming away. I suppose I can hear the sea somewhere in the background, apart from the thunder, but it’s difficult to tell, there are so many other sounds; all distant behind the rain; indefinite places, but distant.

Calella is utterly boring and only practice, reading and long walks with Vera up into the hills make things bearable. I cannot converse with the B’s. We live in different realities. Perhaps mine is an illusion, though it seems true enough to me. Martin is very funny. The parents squabble and quarrel at night in the room next door. The bar isn’t yet open so I have no work and am kept but not paid. I haven’t sung since The Gloucester in South Kensington. The tour guides who frequent the house do not help to liven things up much. Everyone sits around talking about food mainly or lawyers. I act the buffoon usually which is the only way I can place myself comfortably. Otherwise I might just as well not be in the room. Nobody talks about REAL things. There is no common ground when we are assembled. Conversation is about food and diseases. I am still without a point of view that I can write down. Mainly I am me, just shut away, and that is that. And the rain falls with such a pleasant sound and the leaves are very, very green this afternoon.

We went out last night. There was a power failure and we sat around in candlelight eating fried eggs. Then Martin wanted to go out for a coffee. I don’t like these bars and coffee joints. The peasants, German and Spanish, laugh and point at my beard. Some hysterical woman pulled it a few nights ago. I settled with Mathew for him to buy us strawberries and cream. Then we went and borrowed 40 pesetas from Martin and went to Kiki’s bar and met Bob and borrowed 100 pesetas. Got a little bit drunk and touchy and quarrelled with Vera and went home and quarrelled some more and went to sleep and woke up and made it up. She is nice to me today. So be it, this day of rain and death and caring very much about everything somewhere deep down underneath and lost.

The garden has two kinds of lizards and now and then a great three inch grasshopper.