'The human species is unreasonably optimistic'

THE GENERAL has taken to the bed, because, according to him, a schoolteacher has taken over the country. On Sunday I saw him stretched with his snout in the air, unshaven, and bearing an alarming resemblance to a walrus asleep on its back; and of course he denied that his illness had anything to do with drinking alcohol while taking antibiotics.

The antibiotics were prescribed for an infection that arose from a cold, which started after a hunt, during which a fox was slaughtered. Apparently someone wanted to rub fox’s blood on the face of the youngest rider, as is the custom, but the girl refused to comply. That so shocked the General he walked home in the rain without his hat. Then he caught the cold that led to the infection.

Yet within days he wanted me to drive him to a function in Manorhamilton celebrating the work of Tom Hickey, the actor who used to play Benjy in the Riordans, a character the General still believes to be a real person.

After hobnobbing with illustrious thespians in Manorhamilton and guzzling wine, the General found that the infection had returned. It floored him for another week. So he stayed in bed with his ears glued to the radio as the nation’s voters drove a spike through the vampire heart of Fianna Fáil, for whose roguery the General always had a sly regard.

When I called on Sunday afternoon, he declared that his illness had been further exasperated by the prospect of a schoolteacher becoming the Taoiseach.

The curtains were closed, and we both sat in silence listening to the mannered despair of Choral Evensongon BBC Radio 3.

“Piteous Christ,” he moaned, “I feel I’m at my own funeral.”

The General is not likeable when he’s sick and I admired his wife’s courage in agreeing to come and mind him for a few days. At one stage, she came into the room to remove the remains of a mutton stew, which he had toyed with earlier in the afternoon.

“It smells like a bear pit in here,” she said, opening a window and picking up his discarded underwear from the floor, as she left.

“Do you believe in heaven?” the General asked me, from the bed, still bearing an uncanny likeness to a dying walrus.

Not wishing to get involved in a metaphysical discussion I replied, rather flippantly, that for me heaven was in Leitrim.

“But I abandoned it five years ago,” I said, “when the wind of the Celtic Tiger was at my back and in the blind presumption that I might end up in some alternative paradiso beyond Paris; and as you know, I got no further than Mullingar.”

“So it is true!” he cried, like a Romantic poet on his deathbed. “Paradise comes to no one! Because the dreams of our youth are unreasonable and unachievable; no wonder we end up disillusioned in old age.”

I suggested that he was feverish, and that I should leave.

“Do you know who I really loved?” the Walrus asked, as he scratched his whiskers, dug his snout deep into a tissue and retched up another gob of infected mucus from his lungs.

I wondered whether he was about to finally admit that his beautiful wife downstairs cooking his mutton bones was the woman he truly loved. Perhaps he was about to admit he had been a fool to leave her, and that all the Polish women who work in all the Gala shops of Ireland could never compensate for her tender affection. I said, “No I don’t know who you loved.”

“Muhammad Ali,” he whispered. “I saw him fight Sonny Liston in 1965 on my father-in-law’s black and white television. It was the night I proposed to her and, when the announcements were done, her father and I decided that we would stay up all night just to watch the fight.

“There was a film on beforehand and as the champion came into the ring, I went to the kitchen to make hot whiskies, and before the kettle boiled I heard a cry of despair from the other room. I rushed back in but the fight was over. Ali had floored Liston in the first round.”

I was silent.

“Ali lost everything in the end,” the walrus continued, “but I am correct on one point at least: the human species is unreasonably optimistic about the future. We think we can achieve the impossible. And when we can’t, we invent God. Or Enda Kenny!”