The majestic bird hovered before me, flapping its wings and screaming madly, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I WAS in a Brazilian store in Temple Bar last week eating a coxinha, which is a mix of chicken and cheese, wrapped in a ball of flour and deep-fried. It was delicious, or as the dark haired woman from Sao Paolo with me said, “Gustosa!” We were standing at the door of the shop, with the coxinha balls in our hands.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked.
I was thinking of the days I used to cycle those same streets and haunt the doors of studios where artists lived, before the area became fashionable.
In the 1980s Temple Bar was usually quiet in the mornings, and the sky was always blue in autumn, and impoverished artists drank coffee, hugged their gas heaters, and dreamed of sex in the afternoons.
I arrived on my bike from Fermanagh as distressed as any other refugee. In my 20s I had been swept away by a romantic notion of a new Catholicism: priests at the cutting edge of revolution, working for justice in the favelas of Brazil; a church of the people where the real saints were Oscar Romero, Helder Camara, and the Jesuit brothers in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
My dream was short-lived. I spent two years in a parish in Fermanagh, where the closest thing to liberation theology was agreeing to allow Sinn Féin to use the parish hall for meetings, and where I found myself locked down in the mire of all that tribal bitterness that Churchill so eloquently predicted would endure perhaps until the end of time.
Dublin was like a different planet, undisturbed by the radio and television censorship of the news from Ulster, which made Fermanagh seem as remote as Afghanistan. I could conclude only that Ireland was not a single nation, but merely an island of divided tribes.
I was planning to buy some Brazilian beef in Dublin, but explaining Irish history to my Brazilian friend simply confused her and distracted me, so I forgot the meat, and had to go to the butcher in Mullingar on Saturday.
There were five women in the queue; rib-eyed steaks and legs of lamb were flying across the counter at a fierce rate.
“We don’t see you on the bike anymore,” one of the ladies said to me.
I’m always a bit nervous of people who talk in the plural. They remind me of the Dean in secondary school who used to stand outside the bicycle shed in his long black soutane and interrogate the dayboys who came late.
“We don’t seem to be getting our message across, about punctuality, do we?” he’d say, and then cane the latecomer’s hands, which was a difficult start for boys who cycled four miles on frosty mornings without gloves.
So when the woman in the butcher shop said, “we don’t see you on the bike anymore,” I took it as a judgment. “I’m not living in town anymore,” I explained. “I moved out the country.”
“Ah,” she said, “that explains it.”
She seemed relieved. “We thought you might be . . . ill.”
I think she was going to say “dead”, but she checked herself just in time.
That night I dreamed that the woman from Brazil grew feathers and turned into an eagle, in the middle of the night, and flew off from her balcony along the canal, and out to my house.
A rapping at the window startled me, and when I opened it, the majestic bird hovered before me, flapping its wings and screaming madly.
And then, as is the custom in dreams, the eagle spoke: “Is this where the man on the bike lives?” the eagle asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“So, what’s keeping you awake?” the eagle inquired.
I said, “We can’t seem to find our libido anymore; it’s vanished.”
“Ay, compreeendo!” the eagle said. “It’s not very sexy being Irish anymore, is it? A pity the English didn’t succeed in teaching ye manners; ye might not be in such a mess.” The eagle turned its beak sideways and lanced me with its left eye.
“Perhaps that’s what the priest was trying to do with his cane, all those years ago, outside the bicycle shed.”
The eagle issued a musical cackle, and flew away, into the dark, and then I actually did wake up, and realised that the window was open, and that the noise was only the shutters rattling in the wind.