Tuesday 31 March 2015

By the light of the silvery moon.

In Paris the moon sends soft, cold rays of crystal light to shine through an open, uncurtained, attic window and fall silently on the heated, naked bodies of two lovers who lie spent and at ease in each other’s arms on a mattress. There is no bed, only a mattress on the floor, a few chairs and a small table where they have left the crumbs of a meagre dinner, all they could afford. There is no bathroom other than the shared shower in the corridor downstairs and a toilet at the end of the mouse-infested hall. Poor in the things of this world but rich beyond measure for those few distracted moments of forgetfulness, bathing in each other’s sweat, the lovers notice not the moon but each other's bodies that it helpfully illuminates and exposes by its soft, transparent fingers that explore, caress and pry.

In Venice the same moon fires an arsenal of light that glints off the darkly disturbing waters of the Grand Canal. A cold wind glances off the same waters and whips them into tiny waves that shred the oily sheen into pieces, cold like so many bodies that have taken forced leave of this life and are doomed to an eternity in a watery grave. Gondolas ply back and forth under the romantic moonlit sky and keep the secret their narrow hulls look down upon night after night, their passengers oblivious to the madness stirred beneath them by the poles of the gondoliers as they propel them along the waters, under the bridges and into their beds. The carnival plays out under the direction of the moon whose light resurrects characters that unleash evil that has been stored in the shadows from ancient times, a rich dinner of Phoenician spells and the wine of the magic of Arabia mixed by the cathedral priests, a drunkenness that only the pure in heart can resist.

The carnival spins on while, above the low roofs of sleeping Agra, the everlasting, stolen kiss of moonlight upon marble animates the dome of the Taj Mahal. The dome pulsates. It transmits the cries of Shah Jahan and his young, dead bride across the centuries, linking their sadness to a universal network of anguished souls whose tortured separation weaves a web wherever people have been young enough to love and old enough to know. The moon is witness and the moon cries tears that sparkle but cannot soothe.

Thursday 26 March 2015

Trust Your Wind.

Algeria, Sahara, Assekrem, DesertEnzo kicked fallen leaves and twigs away from the sparse grass and eased himself down on it. He was sweating and tired from the long, slow climb along the track that rose up from the village and his legs were beginning to hurt. The blistering sun had been beating down directly on his back for half an hour or more, but as he turned to lie on the grass it shone on his face, beaming on him through the filter of the dark, shiny, green leaves of an orange tree. A breeze shifted the leaves back and forth above him throwing down an ever-moving, lacy camouflage that blended his brown body into the hard earth and the thin, brown grass. He rested for a while and enjoyed the cool currents of air that moved around the circle of shadow that swayed slowly about him, purposely trying not to think about the letter that had arrived that morning and had caused so much trouble.

Few people ever walked that track: not many people had any reason to visit the village it led to, and not many villagers ever ventured out beyond the limits of the orange groves that they worked. Oranges were the life blood of the village and had been for a long time. The make-up of the soil, the temperature, the long sunny days and the right amount of rain that fed the streams that criss-crossed the area all combined to produce fruit that was succulent and sweet, the kind of fruit that Northern Europeans associate with sunshine and well-being, luxury and holidays; fruit that was commonplace and readily available, but at the same time hinted at the exotic. What Europeans didn’t know when they picked out oranges in the supermarket on cold, dismal European mornings was that the winter snows were part of the story of their oranges every bit as much as was the summer sun. Not heavy European falls of snow of course, but a light dusting of white powder that fell once or twice every year well before any signs of new fruit began to appear.

The snow was always a welcome diversion for the villagers but it never lay for long. Frost was more common than snow, but again not a hard, heavy, northern frost that would freeze even slowly moving water, just a skein of white satin that faded away at the approach of the morning sun even before it had fully risen from beyond the mountains. But even though snow and frost were short-lived, the days of winter on the high plateau could still be bitterly cold, and on those days everyone looked forward to the return of the spring rains and the warmth of a new sun.

This was not a day like that. The winter days were well passed when Enzo set out to climb into the mountains that day, but the balmy days of spring had also gone and the heat of summer was as hostile as the cold of winter. He knew the mountains well, had chased his father’s goats up through the orange groves, higher through the rough grass then higher still, up to the stony crests of the peaks, but that had been boy’s work. Now he was a man and looking after goats fell to his younger brothers. Enzo’s job now was to oversee the orange harvest, securing the best price for the fruit and dealing with officialdom.

However these arid, rugged mountains that Enzo loved were also the barrier to his dream of a different kind of life. Beyond the mountains lay the cities on the coast, the gentle influence of the Mediterranean and the rumoured delights of modern life. The mountains were the watershed between the stony Algerian desert and the coastal plain, the watershed between village life and the bright lights. They represented either a barricade or a gateway whichever way a person chose to regard them. For Enzo’s father the mountains were the last line of defence against the evil and pollution of modern ways and influences, for Enzo those same mountains were the obstacle to a new life, he felt hemmed in when he looked up at them, but that debate wasn’t worth having.

So Enzo settled for sitting on top of the mountain gazing into the distance toward Algiers, towards Europe, towards life, or towards where he imagined those things to be, without ever seeing them. That’s why he ventured up the steep climb on such hot days when work was slack and the smell of oranges offended him beyond what he could tolerate: he loved to fantasize, to escape for a while even just in his imagination, to give himself for a few hours to the mirages that presented themselves through the desert haze: Paris, New York, Algiers …..

And then the letter arrived. It was respectfully addressed as always to Enzo’s father, but it was written in English, the language only Enzo could read and that aroused his father’s suspicions, and not unreasonably. Enzo’s uncle had written, his mother’s youngest brother, and the content of the letter was obviously directed at Enzo.
Abdelaziz had left the village five years before when Enzo was fifteen years old. He wasn’t much older than Enzo and they had grown up more as brothers than as uncle and nephew. It was with Abdel that Enzo had chased goats on the mountainside and they had dreamed dreams together and had fantasized about Europe and America. Then suddenly Abdel had left. There had been a few letters at first from Marseille where he tried to get work but then the letters tailed off and the one that had arrived that morning was the first in over three years.

The stamp wasn’t French. The letter wasn’t written in French. The content was brief, beginning with the formalities of asking after everyone’s health, but the meat of the letter was for Enzo, and it came in the form of an invitation.

According to Abdel there was plenty of work to be had in Ireland. Work on building sites, work in cafés and restaurants, work in supermarkets and on boats, and Enzo was tempted. There was no talk about pay or conditions or what life was like in Ireland, no talk trying to sell the idea, trying to convince, just a bare invitation, and Enzo had to decide. His father had immediately started talking about responsibilities, family loyalties and orange harvests that were now beyond a man of his years. He reminded Enzo that he was the only one who could decipher and respond to the business letters from the cooperative that bought his oranges. He impressed upon his son that oranges were all he knew, he wasn’t born to work for someone else – he had the family business that would one day be his own, but Ireland still sounded good.

As he climbed the track up the side of the mountain Enzo went over the arguments time and again. He knew nothing of life in Ireland but everything about life on the farm in Algeria. That thought didn’t help. He had no way of finding out about Ireland but here he had security. He had family, with everyone depending on him – parents, brothers, sisters. Enzo had never had to make a decision this big in his life before. There was no-one to help him, no-one to confide in because no-one would want him to leave.

Pressure mounted in his head and in his heart as he lay in the shade. He got up and pushed himself the last half hour to the summit of the mountain and sat with a divided heart looking north then south then north again. He had never seen the sea, didn’t know what it was, but he knew what oranges were and he didn’t want to know any longer.

Ireland. It sounded like a strange place, it had a strange sounding name, although he had heard of it. He tried to imagine the clamour of strange voices speaking a language he knew how to read and write but had never spoken. Through the imagined babble in his ears the strains of the call to prayer began to filter in, mixing and diluting the call of a new life. The voice of the Muezzin hung in the heavy air, representing security and a sense of home. The letter burned in his hands as he re-read it trying to uncover some sense of what a new life would be like, but he knew that in the end the choice would not be a reasoned one. He stood up, again looking to the north and the south. Indecision. God would decide, God of the winds and the mountains, God of goats and oranges and steamers heading out from Algiers taking the courageous to Marseille and beyond. Give God his place he told himself. Let God decide.

He stood facing along the ridge with the life of the village on his left and the possibilities of Europe to the right. He held the letter high above his head and determined that he when he let go of the letter he would follow whatever direction the wind would carry it, and he would obediently follow the breath of God.

With his eyes tightly screwed up against the fading sun Enzo slackened the fist his fingers made around the piece of paper. He opened his closed hand and trusted his future to the wind.

Monday 16 March 2015

Crucifixion in Donegal.

Paul Charles locates the action of his novel in a place he knows well – Donegal; and it’s a place I know well too, so I can attest to how accurate he has caught the shades of local colour.

He writes convincingly about the tracking down of a murderer, exposing along the way some of the many scandalous, small-town goings-on that have some bearing on the killing in question. The victim’s demise forces the unseemly details of the lust-life of several local worthies under the nose of Detective Starrett.

Starrett’s personal demons are also paraded for the reader’s benefit as happens with many detectives who are set the task of bringing villains to justice, and those demons, as is the usual habit, come in the form of beautiful women. Two beautiful women to be exact. Which one will he chose?

But let’s be generous to Detective Starrett of the Garda Síochána na héireann (Irish Police Force – I’m sure you knew that, but just in case). The murder that exercises his little grey cells is one that has been effected in a particularly unpleasant manner: the victim has been crucified in close imitation of the fate that befell Jesus Christ.

The strangest aspect of the crime for me however is not the method of execution, or that it was carried out in a Church, or that the particular Church in which it occurred doesn’t appear to put much store by the crucifixion of Christ. What strikes me most forcefully is that the local, largely Roman Catholic, populace doesn’t seem to be too perturbed when they hear the news.

Paul Charles keeps the reader’s interest with a large shoal of red herrings as a variety of likely and unlikely candidates fall under suspicion. The reader is also most keen to discover what reason lay behind the crucifixion – wouldn’t shooting or stabbing have done the job just as well? We are also keen to discover if love is to blossom between Starrett and the state pathologist, Dr Sam Aljoe. Okay, Sam is short for Samantha, I’ll give you that but I’m giving nothing else away.

The events are as contrived as they are improbable, some of the characters larger than life and some not all that convincing, but hey – it’s a fast-paced detective novel, and one that’s worth the read.

Dust of Death by Paul Charles published by Brandon.

Saturday 14 March 2015

Passing through Paris on a foggy evening.

Paris, Night, Lights, Pavement, Inner City, FranceI love to wander around Beaubourg on a cold, damp, night in November, to smell the burning from the fire-eater’s torches that mixes with the warm smoke given out by the chestnut roaster’s brazier, and I let them both fill my head. A cold, fresh, misty breeze touches my cheeks and moves the leaves and litter about at my feet.

All around the square, people huddle in groups or wander alone like me, and all their faces light up differently under the influence of the tall, orange flames that shoot up from the fire-eater’s mouth. The flames and the street lights land on black faces, white faces, yellow faces, all painted differently, some made to look villainous, some made to look sick, and some look far from home.

And there’s music. African drums, South American pan pipes, buskers, they all turn out tunes that have been adapted to please the Western European ear, all hoping to wrest a Euro or two from the deep, warm pockets of the rich who mingle among the crowd, and you don’t have to be rich.

There will be the taste of menace in the air. The sword-swallower, the fire-eater, the martial arts performer – any of them could make a fatal mistake but they don’t. There’s the hint of danger from groups of heavy drinkers, young and old, dishevelled and well-groomed, and I watch my back. There’s the sense of the everyday when an elderly lady with a blue rinse walks her coated poodle across the square, tip-toeing around the menace, the flames and the dirt.

And when the wandering is done I love to slip unseen into the cinema in the Centre Pompidou, to watch a sub-titled Russian film and them emerge a few hours later in a different mood when people have moved on and all that’s left are a few drunks, the leaves and litter that still swirl in the light breeze, and the cold touch of the foggy night on my face.

Friday 6 March 2015

Confessions of a pizza virgin

Supreme Pizza, Sliced, Cheese, Italian, Food, TomatoIt’s true – I was 18 before I had my first taste of pizza, and it was in Italy that I lost my pizza virginity, and what better place to lose it. I was travelling alone around Europe and spent many lonely days and nights on trains and in cafes. It was winter, and even Italy seemed to be caught in a great welter of sadness.

I felt the need for company and sunshine, things I had known nothing of for weeks on end it seemed, so I decided to head further south, to Greece. That decision was made in Naples, just as I got off the boat from a day in Capri. It had been a stormy crossing and there had been nowhere on the deck of the tiny, over-loaded boat to shelter from the biting wind. I was hungry.

Next day I took the train to Brindisi to catch the ferry to Corfu. Just a few miles from Brindisi, on that snowy November afternoon, the train stopped. There was no station, just wet, miserable countryside in every direction and a hideous sky above, full of snow clouds and the approaching darkness of the night. The sun had given up a long time before and had retreated early, overcome by heavy clouds that piled up on top of each other. I was hungry.

The other passengers seemed not to notice that we were no longer travelling anywhere. There were only four others in the carriage and one of them, a Canadian girl called Evie, took out her guitar and started singing Leonard Cohen songs. No-one has ever covered a Cohen song quite like Evie, and Cohen songs I think have never brought light and heat into a frigid railway carriage in the way they did that bleak afternoon.

Evie told me that there was a strike. The strike was set to begin at 4 pm and since we weren’t at a station at that time we just had to sit it out in the train. At 5 pm precisely the train moved off, the heating system came on and within 10 minutes we slid noiselessly into Brindisi station.

I was still in time for the overnight ferry to Corfu, but because of the storms over the Adriatic the ferry had been cancelled that night, and that was when I fully realised just how hungry I was. I had eaten in cheap cafes for many weeks and hadn’t had what anyone would call a decent square meal in all that time, and there beside me, as the hunger was about to demolish my wasted body, was a shop that sold pizza.

I hadn’t a clue what pizza was (it hadn’t hit Ireland back then) but when I saw it I knew I had to have it as it lay there in huge slabs all red and yellow and green and warm. It was priced by the kilo but I had no idea how big or small a kilo was – kilos hadn’t arrived in Ireland either back then. I hovered for a while watching and listening to other people buying slices but still was unsure what to ask for having no Italian and no way of judging how much to ask for.

So I plumped for a kilo. I pointed to a slab of warm pizza and said “un Kilo of that one”. The man looked at me as if I had asked for something strange and whacked off an enormous slice of pizza. It really was big, too big, but in it went and boy it was good. There was easily enough for three people in that giant slice but I was hungry and it tasted so good. I loved the feel of the grease on my lips when the pizza was gone and the smell that lingered and I hung around the shop for a long time just breathing in the warm, flavoursome air. I was utterly satisfied and content. I’d even forgotten that I still had to find somewhere to sleep that night and even the freezing snow-turned-to-rain that had started to fall couldn’t take away the shock of the pleasure of that first time.

And I haven’t stopped eating pizza ever since. I couldn’t do without it now. If I don’t get it at least every few days I get restless and ill at ease, and my wife knows that all I need is some of the good stuff.

Thursday 5 March 2015

Greek Café

Lefkada, Island, Greece, Tavern, BarBack in the 1970s, in days of the “Regime of the Colonels”, and before the beginnings of mass tourism, not many foreigners passed through north western Greece, especially in winter; not much has changed on that score. The politics are different now and there’s a bit more money about, but winter in those hills and valleys and coastal lands will always be a cold, wet, muddy affair with villages wrapped in dank, grey mist for weeks on end, and poverty in weather as miserable as that must be the worst kind of poverty.

I got to Igoumenitsa early on a morning in December, making the short crossing from Corfu on a small boat carrying just me and a tractor. Corfu town had been all but silent when we left with only a small cafe open, but the sun was shining in a gloriously blue, optimistic sky. Fortified by a glass of incredibly potent coffee I stood at the front of the boat scanning the sea for traces of the mainland where I had hoped to rest up and recuperate after a long, hard summer’s work in the vineyards of France and Italy, but soon we chugged straight into a white bank of mist and that was the last I saw of the sun for several weeks.

Igoumenitsa was a miserable affair. It was sheltered from the wind from lying at the head of a small inlet where boats from Italy called on their way down to Corinth and Patras and Piraeus and beyond but not many travellers ever got off. The boat I got in on stopped beside some sort of concrete ramp and I walked into the mist towards the town along a muddy track. Rain was starting to fall and it was still not lunch time.
There was a cafe. Always look for a cafe when you get into town and spend a while there getting your bearings, collecting your thoughts and seeing if you can meet anyone who might invite a poor, cold stranger home, or even who might buy him a cup of coffee – that was always my strategy and it usually worked. It didn’t work this time. Not straight off.

The windows looking out over the small harbour were misted up and the rain began to fall heavily against them. Out through the mist, when I rubbed a bit of the window clear, I could see the sea starting to swell and the two small fishing boats in the harbour were thrashing about. As the door of the cafe opened and closed I felt the cold wind that was starting to rise, but the room started to heat when it filled with half a dozen fishermen who couldn’t go out that day. They sat and smoked and drank coffee and talked loudly at each other.

I began to feel unsure. There was a familiarity about the scene I was part of but I couldn’t put my finger on what I was being reminded of. I certainly hadn’t been in Igoumenitsa before – if I had I wouldn’t have come back for a return visit for sure. It was my first time in Greece. That kind of déja vu makes me feel nauseated, and with the strong smells and the hunger in my belly I was sure I was going to pass out. I breathed deeply for a while and settled my stomach and it soon came to me. Zorba. It had been a few years, but I had once read Kazantzakis’ “Zorba the Greek” and this cafe and all that went with it was strongly reminiscent of the opening scene in the cafe in Piraeus during a storm that was stopping sailors from leaving port. Coffee, oil skins, bavardage, the storm, the foreigner, yes, this was the cafe in Piraeus all right.

The storm lasted forever but I didn’t have forever to sit through it. I had to get to Athens.

Wednesday 4 March 2015

Viennese café


Vienna, Austria, Buildings, Café, Shops
I forget the name of the café because it has been about thirty five years since I’ve been in it, but it was somewhere just off the Ringstrasse if I remember correctly. I had been cold all day, just walking around the city taking it in and hadn’t been able to afford food. The little change I had I decided to hold onto to buy a hot drink before going back to my cheap, cold and not so pleasant room. I was owed money from my job in Rotterdam and it hadn’t come through.
So around eleven o’clock I opened the door of the cafe I’d had my eye on. A blast of heat rushed past me into the cold street and the weight of coffee in the air made my empty stomach heave a bit.
Vienna in the 1970s was of course a centre for espionage and covert surveillance. Its cafés and concert halls were populated by diplomats, military types and Yasser Arafat lookalikes and the city seemed always to be on edge. The Viennese people of course were charming, but that didn’t count. If anything was going down on the international scene it would have been planned in a Viennese café. So I’m told anyway. It positively bristled with characters straight off the page of a Graham Greene novel.
I sat at a small table and sank into the most luxurious leather armchair. I ordered a coffee and pastry, though the waiter looked at me askance as if muttering to himself “Who in their right mind eats pastries at this time of night?”
Snow started to fall outside. It fell thick and steady and a chased a man in a black overcoat in off the street.
 

Shattered dawn over Belfast.

Skyline, Sky, Sunset, Red, BeautifulThe sun rose on Belfast this morning just as I was getting out of bed. The sky had the look of a pile of ashes in a fireplace for a while and then came to life with a few streaks of apricot light bouncing off the clouds. In a very short space of time the sky had been wiped clean of clouds and sat above the city like a cold but resplendent cover, painful to look at.

Only a soft murmur rose up from the city to reach these southern suburbs until 06.35 precisely, the time when every morning in life, heavy snow and Icelandic ash clouds permitting, the first plane roars rudely into the air from the city airport to spoil the idyll then alters course for England.

Thingummy

Long way into town.

The guest house was cool and quiet. From under its thatched roof and high ceilings I stepped into the already stale morning. It was like w...