A lusty opera brings back chaste memories

LAST SATURDAY I headed west, to watch the opera, Carmen, transmitted live from the Met in New York, to a cinema in Galway. I thought it might relieve the claustrophobia that overwhelms me every winter, writes MICHAEL HARDING

My mistake was that I didn’t get out of Ireland years ago, and fly like a moth to some blazing centre of enlightenment, such as Paris or Berlin; instead I got stuck, up to my neck, in the dregs of an exhausted culture that reinvented itself as the Celtic Tiger. But at least Mullingar is 50 km closer to Paris than Drumshanbo is; so I am making progress.

Galway is much more cosmopolitan than Mullingar. Somewhere beyond Oranmore there is an artistic quarter of television people and painters, and restaurants of sean-nós jiggery and fishermen gabbing in Irish; though I can never manage to find it. I always end up lost, in a wasteland of roundabouts, resembling some anonymous town in Florida; a boring gridlocked world with a skyline marred by gigantic supermarket signs, and KFC logos and the neon urgency of burger joints.

The cinema, like movie houses everywhere, smelled of popcorn, and carpet. Unwashed teenagers staggered about the foyer with 3D glasses and sore eyes.

The live transmission from the Met came in high definition, with close-up camera shots of the singers, so I could see Roberto Alagna’s tonsils bobbing up and down whenever he hit a high note.

At one stage in the interval the camera picked out a teenage girl in the New York audience, chewing gum with determined jaws, and it struck me that I was just an invisible wretch looking in her window, and she was like a child at the fireside in a Dickensian tale, who doesn’t know that beyond the flickering flames some dark stranger lurks outside the window, with an uncouth accent. I felt I was looking in a window at my colonial masters.

Carmenis a lusty opera about a man who runs away with a gypsy girl.

I saw it for the first time in New York about 25 years ago and the spectacle was so wonderful then that I walked into the night with a young black woman, despite the protestations of my Irish companion who had been holidaying with me in Long Island.

He made faces behind her back to indicate that my new acquaintance might be a prostitute; but of course I knew that already.

I assured him that I would be fine, and then I went off with her to a land called Hotel Rio, where other hookers were hanging out on the steps and a bald black man stood seven foot tall behind a wire grill at reception, taking money for rooms from the girls and their clients.

Diane and I went to a deluxe room upstairs, in which there was nothing but a bare mattress on the floor and evidence that the basin had already been used as a urinal.

I don’t know if we were sexually compatible because we never actually attempted anything intimate. She was overloaded with chemicals and I had no intention of engaging her professionally. I just wanted to talk about life.

Eventually she said she was hungry so I took her to a diner, where I offered to buy her a cheeseburger but she only wanted a bowl of cornflakes and then she laid her head on the red tabletop and fell asleep. I squashed a few dollars into her fist, and walked out into the New York morning.

I did nothing so rash after the opera in Galway, apart from opening up a conversation with an elderly woman in the car park beneath the cinema, as her husband searched for their car. The old lady had Dame Edna glasses, and was wrapped in fur, and her husband’s cheeks were cobweb-blue, and his nose suggested that he liked his whiskey as much as his opera.

I drove back along the new motorway and across the Shannon in the dark, filled with absurd affection for that beautiful American prostitute I had cornflakes with almost 30 years ago.

Driving through the dark and derelict centre of Athlone, I imagined I saw her outside a Chinese restaurant.

If she did appear, I would have bought her dumplings and Peking Duck, and I would have fallen in love with her all over again, with the wild music of gypsies still beating at my heart.