This Is Happiness Read online

  Faha was where, one day when I was ten, Ganga, his own fingers crook-shaped from the handles of shovels, had gone into the room down and rooted about and come back bearing a case and said: ‘Now, Noe, here, try my fiddle.’

  It was where I had learned the music.

  5

  I’m not sure how much of that helps bring you there. It brings me, and I suppose that’s a start.

  You don’t see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you’ve been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed. Because, in Faha, you won’t believe it yet. Because in that place the gap between not-raining and raining-again was usually so short you only had time to shake the drops off your cap before it started once more. You won’t believe it until you look at the sky and hold out your palm.

  That Spy Wednesday, I got up from the table and went to the threshold. In my knowledge of it, the sky in Faha was mostly the colour of distillate, a grey luminousness you might imagine was on the point of becoming other, revealing a brighter reality that lay all the time just above. The problem was, it never did. I had not at that time been up in an aeroplane. I’m not sure anyone in Faha had, or those that had had not returned to tell about it. Shannon airport was still in its infancy. I had not yet experienced the spirit-shock of that moment when the plane pierces the canopy and you discover what was for me the unimaginable immaculacy of blue above. I realise this is common now and many don’t remark it. But the memory remains for me and in dark days it helps somehow to think of that all the while above us. In any case, the point is that for enough of the time to make time itself irrelevant, the sky over Faha remained unchanged. You couldn’t conceive of it changing.

  But now, the veil of weather lifting, I could see across to Miniter’s, down to Considine’s where Delia lived with her brother Paud, an innocent, see the gleaming back of the river where it turned the bend near the house that was Talty’s and later became the poet Swain’s. The world dripped and glistened. The ash trees on the bounds of the bog garden were unleafed yet but flickered now because birds were about and in the first moments of after-rain there was an undeniable newness.

  There was no actual sunshine yet. Nothing of what was to come. Just a lightening, a lifting, that in St Cecelia’s was in concert with the Te Deum and sent a flood of coloured light in through the stained glass above the Men’s Aisle as Father Coffey delivered a sermon binding together Church and State by announcing the coming of the electricity and the resurrection of the Lord.

  Joe lay on Ganga’s cushion in the snaffling of a dog dream. I went to the threshold and was stood in the first instants of the departed rain when a man’s voice called out, ‘Hello.’

  When you’re young everyone is old. I remember that. This man was old, I thought then, but now know he wasn’t out of his sixties.

  Whether he was passing or had been waiting below at the gate I couldn’t say but he came in the yard now with a brisk gait, a small case at his side. He was full-bearded, a man who had probably been slight when young but the world had muscled and beer had bulked him, so although of mid-height he was strong and square and full, but he carried the weight of himself with a look of bemusement, as if it was he who told the world the joke of himself.

  He came in the yard with the strange nimbleness of a large man. When he smiled he had what Frances Shea calls Atlantic-eyes, which I think means deep and blue and distant. They were extraordinary. I think I got that right away. I would never see eyes quite like them again.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, as though I was the one who had just appeared.

  His hair once fair was now that colour between blond and silver. It had a small scattering of hedge-confetti.

  Because this was sixty years ago some details are imagined. Nobody who’s lived an anyway decent amount of life remembers everything.

  He put down his case, sat on the sill, looked down at the smallness of his boots and extended towards me a strong hand.

  ‘Christy,’ he said.

  6

  And for moments, nothing more.

  Some people understand the privilege of stillness and can sit and breathe and look and hear and smell the world turning and let what’s next wait the while. He sat and looked down towards the river and I sat beside him, both of us looking I suppose thirteen different ways at the river but saying not a single word.

  I thought he must be a travelling man, there were many at the time, not just the whitesmiths and pot-menders but people adrift in the country generally, for all the reasons known to man unmoored from family or home and making a kind of living from wares carried in cases and opened like miniature theatres to display whatever was newest in the larger world. They were generally talkers, with a line of patter that although worn thin from repetition was still indulged and acknowledged for the craft and craftiness in it. There was little threat and only a measured distrust of them. The planet was not yet so full that another human being coming to the door was not cause for curiosity and interest, and because the ordinary orbit of one life then was smaller the stranger brought a sense of a curtain drawn aside. Their manner and stories, phrasing, the cut of their clothes, a travelled quality in the very creases of their skin, all carried an air of elsewhere to those who would not venture out of the county in their lifetime. The travellers came out of storytime, you felt, and although some were notorious and some had the guards in plodding pursuit, for the most part they were harmless, understood to be a stray thread stitched into the fabric of the countryside, and on different visits I had seen sellers of brushes, knives, pots, ointments, oils, carpets, spectacles, and once, teeth, lay out their wares in the kitchen before Ganga, who always wanted to buy everything, and Doady who wanted none, bar the set of Saints & Martyrs cards that it might be unlucky to refuse.

  Encyclopaedias, of course, were a speciality, offered by gentlemen scholars in shabby tweed who came with their own diploma qualifying them to handle the sum of human knowledge, that had been condensed down to Only twenty-four volumes, sir, and was continually revised so it was accurate of what was known in the world up to yesterday afternoon. The full set of encyclopaedias, the scholars knew, were beyond the purses of Faha but, not wanting to concede to the disadvantages of geography or to cut the Fahaeans off from the prime desire of mankind since Adam, they announced that the Board had decreed that the volumes could be purchased on an instalment plan, and, for signing up today, there was authorisation to make a one-time special offer of a free atlas with three hundred colour plates wherein you could visit everywhere from Acapulco to Zanzibar. Furthermore, to house the sum of human knowledge, you could also purchase this display case, this handsome set of shelving, or the deluxe glass-fronted facsimile library. And under the spell of That’s India paper, sir, now just feel the quality, many were sold, and in houses out the townlands where there wasn’t enough money for shirt collars or socks it was not unusual to see sets of encyclopaedias, but with gaps, Light to Metaphysics say, or Pre-Columbian to Sacred, where reality had overtaken noble sentiment and left some sections of alphabetised knowledge unavailable, but with people none the worse for that.

  Despite the certainty that everything new cost more than was at hand, no salesman was ever driven from the door and many were temporarily accommodated in haybarns or outbuildings, or given just the mug of tea, Mam, and a cut of bread before they passed along the road and into the twilight. Like swallows then, some came back the next year, and recalled the welcome in such a house and what such a one had told them about a sick child or a son or daughter gone to Boston or New York, and by some secret skill of binding place to people they remembered the story of each household and forgot that no wares had been bought here. But what matter, they had the necessary optimism of all traders and this year they had these colourful mixing bowls and, Look here, tap on that, Missus, go on, you ca
n’t break them, because see! They’re made of plastic.

  Christy, I thought, was one of these. Or maybe like Hartigan, the bug-eyed, whey-faced and toothy piano-tuner from Limerick, who had an untrustworthy air Doady said because he could not be fattened, who was stitched into the narrowest pinstriped suit and always came through Faha after, as he put it, tuning the nuns in town. Though pianos were something grand and mostly only notional in Faha, Hartigan would stop at a few houses along his way in case he could spark an interest in a second-hand one or just some sheet music that would suit the accordion too, Missus, if there was one in the house at all. He smoked while he stood in the doorways, eyeing up the sale. ‘Virginia blend,’ he’d say, looking at the cigarette burning in his fingers. ‘Smooth as cream.’

  Perhaps because of some primitive but profound allure attached to the tuning or because of the mysterious attractiveness of those even tangential to music, he had a long train of rumoured paramours and illicit relations, all of which were in defiance of his actual looks and testament to the unknown depths of females.

  So, because I didn’t want this stranger to begin whatever presentation he had prepared when Ganga and Doady were not yet back from Mass, because of the binds of my own shyness then, and because he seemed perfectly at ease sitting on the damp sill, to Christy I said nothing more than: ‘They’re not here. They’re gone to church.’ And, I’m not sure why, after a moment added: ‘It’s Spy Wednesday.’

  To which he made no reply but nodded and smiled out at the river and the road he had come.

  The cat came out the window of the cow cabin to investigate by back-rubbing the leg of his trouser. He rubbed her head. ‘Hello, Sibby,’ he said.

  You live a decent length you get an appreciation for the individuality of creation. You understand there’s no such thing as the common man, and certainly not woman. But even then, in those first moments beside him on the windowsill, I think I knew there was something arresting about him. Everybody carries a world. But certain people change the air about them. That’s the best I can say. It can’t be explained, only felt. He was easy in himself. Maybe that was the first thing. He didn’t feel the need to fill the quiet and had the confidence of the storyteller when the story is still unpacked, its snaps not yet released. His hair had not been barbered in some time, his beard rose into his cheeks and descended inside the collar of his shirt, around the top-button of which was grey with finger-grease. The flesh of his face had the same travelled quality as his clothes and belongings, as if cured by hot suns and cold winds. He was deep-wrinkled, like a chamois. His life was written all over him. His eyes I’ve mentioned. I can see them still. It seems to me the true and individual nature of a human being’s eyes defy description, or at least my capabilities. They’re not like anything else, or anyone else’s, and may be the most perfect proof of the existence of a Creator. Maybe that old thing about eyes and the soul is true, I can’t say, but I did wonder the first time I saw him what gave a person eyes like that.

  ‘You’re?’

  ‘Noe, I’m called.’

  Somehow the name Noel had never quite fitted me. As was common in towns, perhaps to combat the numerousness of people and the blurring of individuality, people were given nicknames, or had their own abbreviated. In the schoolyard in Synge Street I was first Know-All, but soon enough became Noe, to rhyme with Crowe, which, by the genius of chance, was both No and Know, and pretty accurately captured the polarities of my person.

  We sat there, a mismatched pair. He looked away at the river, I looked sidelong at him.

  His suit too was blue, a startling blue now, and from travel and time creased not just at knees and elbows but in every inch of it, a sense not so much of uncared as comfort. The material was not the coarser durable cloth of suits sold in Bourke’s then but maybe linen I think and as unsuited to the weather in Faha as anything he could have worn. It could have been tailored in Egypt, or, I had heard of a panama hat, maybe this was a panama suit. There was a button missing at the cuff of his left sleeve. The centre one on the jacket where it crossed his belly had under pressure shattered, but a heroic remnant still held it closed. Along the hem of both trouser legs were brown exclamations of dirt thrown up from travelling a puddled road. The suitcase, on the ground in front of him, was a kind popular then when journeys were few and one or two transits were all the lifetime expected of them. It was a little more than cardboard, a lot less than leather, of what had once been a tan colour but from sunlight or rain was now a paling mustard. It was small enough, maybe for no more than a single change of clothes, and like all the rest of him it had mileage put on.

  We sat watching the river.

  ‘Is that a pheasant?’ he asked, nodding towards one down at the foot of the ditch thirty feet away. I was surprised he couldn’t see it.

  He was unperturbed. ‘I used up most of my eyesight on the wonders of the world and the beauty of women,’ he said.

  I’m not sure why exactly, but that knocked me an inch off myself, an inch I could not seem easily to recover. He angled over to one side, fished out and offered a crushed pack of cigarettes.

  ‘No. No, thanks. I won’t,’ I said, as though I sometimes smoked.

  He took one out for himself, rolled it gently between his palms to return it to tubular, put it in his mouth and began what would become familiar, the fruitless search about his pockets for a match. As long as I would know him he would never find one, but each time search and each time arrive at the same mystification at the devil taking all his matches.

  ‘There’s some inside.’

  I went in, looked in both sets of places that by continuing marital dispute the matches were supposed to be, until I gave up and took a taper from the fire.

  When I came out carrying it he was gone. His case was there, but he was not.

  7

  In the same way that order of entrance into St Cecelia’s was preordained, so too it was a given that men lost interest once the service climaxed. Mossie Pender was always the first to leave. Mossie had reached the age when he no longer held dominion over his bladder, and in the last moments of Mass, host unmelted on his tongue, rushed from St Cecelia’s into Ryan’s next door, where the small back window of the urinal released the splash of his waterworks as the general congregation emptied out. Most of the men, as if they had no religious dimension and had in fact not been to Mass, were already back on the post-office windowsill.

  The church was the biggest draw at the time, and in the hour before and after Mass, Mission or Devotion, the shops did brisk business. People availed of the opportunity offered by being in the village, and the shopkeepers profited from the lightened spirit of man and womankind fresh from church and optimistic that the Lord was looking after them. I don’t know what the equivalent is now, or if there is such a thing.

  That they came outside that Spy Wednesday into the cleansed light after the rain can only have bettered business. Of course, no one considered that the rain had actually stopped, only paused, miracles being unknown in Faha.

  While the women went into the shops the men waited, lighting up. To a man they were all skilled in the essential but unsung art of passing the time of day. On Sundays, they would be next to the open boot of Conlon the newspaperman’s Volkswagen, wisps of white smoke rising off them like minor Pentecostals.

  A small butt of a man, Conlon came from Ennis and traded on the insecurities of the far-flung. He used the Ennis greeting, ‘Well?’, to which the correct reply was, ‘Well.’ He had the slit eyes of a Norseman and an out-and-out mastery of eyebrow-throwing: ‘Could you credit Sputnik?’ or ‘The Minister for Posts and Telegraphs!’ or ‘United!’ he’d say, throw the eyebrows and extend towards you an inverted newspaper, folded even as a tablecloth, inside which was what you didn’t yet know about Sputnik, what the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs had promised now, and the news of Manchester United, to which, with the native affinity for tragedy, the sensate half of the country now supported after the Munich crash.

/>   Ganga didn’t take a paper, but his neighbour Bat Considine did, and on Sundays, out of an avid craving to secure himself more thoroughly on to the spinning planet, Bat took all the papers, one of each from Conlon, who sold them with an approving nod. ‘You’re a gentleman.’ Bat was a bachelor and until late in life would take no lift but tramped home the four miles with the papers tucked under his oxters and sticking out of both the inside and outside pockets of a greatcoat, and he didn’t mind at all that when Ganga came calling he took an old paper or two back with him and in that way kept up to date with what was new in the world last week.

  Now, it is not my intention to paint the parish in an overly rosy light. It had its full share of villains, in due course some of which were found out, and some of which were not, as is true everywhere. There were many wrong things thought then, as no doubt in time we’ll find out there are now too. Time has unpeeled a history of infamy for the country’s institutions, and failures of compassion, tolerance and what was once called common decency were not hard to come upon. Faha was no different; cruelty, meanness and ignorance all had a place then, but as I’ve grown older the instances and stories of them seem less compelling, as if God has inbuilt in me a spirit of clemency I wasn’t aware of when younger. It may be, of course, that I’m just grateful to be above ground and what seems more significant to note is human goodness. I’m at an age now when in the early mornings I’m often revisited by all my own mistakes, stupidities and unintended cruelties. They sit around the edge of the bed and look at me and say nothing. But I see them well enough.