Staring at the water, staring at the wall

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS IN a nursing home on Friday; a clean building, with squeaky floors, and radiators humming with heat. I was visiting an old man. He sat in an armchair beside his bed. His dinner arrived – warm mincemeat with mashed potatoes – but the plate was stone cold.

The door was open. There was little privacy. A woman was mopping the corridor floor, and a patient in the bed beside us keened in deep demented confusion.

“I’m supposed to get a glass of milk as well,” my old friend said.

In the distance I could hear someone being urged to use the toilet.

My friend didn’t bother with the jelly and ice cream; he just stared at the wall.

Afterwards I drove to Tralee to spend the weekend in the Brandon Hotel; a place with a leisure centre and a swimming pool and an elegant breakfast room, full of rashers and sausages and scrambled eggs.

There was a small crowd in the bar on Saturday afternoon watching the rugby. I lay on my bed upstairs, listening to the sound of children playing outside, and the occasional squeak of a waiter’s shoe on the corridor as he delivered trays to various rooms.

A hotel room is a refuge; a private world where you can do what you want with the bath, the telephone, the kettle and a dozen television channels. You can’t go wrong, unless you drink alone and then phone some old girlfriend.

I went for a walk at around ten on Saturday night, out past the marina, towards the sea. I noticed a man ahead of me, on the path. He was standing still, near a pond, where there are swans, and reeds and herons. He was staring at the water, and I recognised him because he had white shoes, and I had seen him earlier checking in at the hotel.

He stood there a long time in the darkness. I said “good evening” and then I stopped, and we chatted, and returned to the hotel together.

I said: “You were staring a long time at the water.” He said: “I was only catching my breath.” I said: “You sound American.”

“No,” he said, “I’m from Listowel, but I live in Long Island.”

We parted in the foyer. Musicians were tuning up in the lounge. He listened, and then said: “I used to play the fiddle years ago. I gave it up when the wife died.” He smiled and headed for the lift.

When I was young I yearned for fiddles. I’d cross the country in search of a good session. I’d stand on the Galway road with my thumb out for hours, just to catch a few tunes before closing time, in some glamorous lounge beyond Athlone.

Not that I could play anything. I just listened with a broken heart.

For me, traditional music contained an inexplicable sadness. Slow airs embodied what García Lorca called duende, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain”. Music was like the noise of a universe already opened in love; the tantalising song of union between male and female, between divine energy and the gushing earth, between time and eternity.

And I was, as yet, only a virgin boy in the western world.

All I seemed to experience was uncontrolled potency. In fact I was so potent that one night a girlfriend announced that she might be pregnant, which astonished me, since we had never succeeded in doing anything that would even remotely be described as intercourse.

Then she explained that an indiscreet frolic with someone else was the cause.

In trad sessions, nobody was old. Young women fell in love with men who could clamp turf, whitewash walls, fill their pipes and smoke on the pier in gale-force winds; men with brittle bones and weather-beaten faces, who carried a thousand tunes into those swanky lounges.

And we who were young had so much juice in us that even death itself did not seem like death. Graveyards were warm green lawns where we leaned against headstones, making daisy chains.

We would joke about the dead beneath the sod, and suppose that they were still gossiping and making music and smoking pipes.

And even the dead seemed more alive then than the living do now – the living who get left alone, to gaze at the wall, and wait, for glasses of milk.