Lots of people told them to go to the salt mine. Patients with pulmonary trouble came from all over the country, all over the world in fact. People even asked them where they were from, as if they had come especially for their lungs, all the way from Ireland. She told them she had lungs like a damp cottage and they said she had come to the right place. It’s a famous mine, she says, like a place of pilgrimage without prayers, with the same air temperature day and night. She describes the trucks carrying out boulders of stone-white salt, and the people coming to inhale and straighten out their shoulders. Lots of people in wheelchairs. Grandmothers and all. Even people who were off the cigarettes having a cigarette, why not? Because the air was so clear it was crackling in your nostrils, she says. Whole families going for a picnic down there with fold-up chairs and a portable cassette player making hardly any noise because the place was so big. All the children breathing up and down and playing football in a huge underground stadium, she says. With floodlights. And goal posts marked out on the salt walls.
And after the salt mine, she’s telling me, they went swimming nearby in a salt lake that never freezes. It was the strangest feeling, she says. Floating on top of the water. Their legs were rising up out of the lake in front of them like buoyancy bags, you couldn’t keep them down. That’s what happens, your legs feel weightless, she says. And Noleen had a way of turning everything that went wrong into something to laugh at. When they were coming out of the lake they must have chosen a spot that was very muddy, because they were covered in mud like female wrestlers, the two of them laughing and holding on to each other, hardly able to stand up.
Travelling unlimited, she says.
She says her lungs are left in Romania. My lungs are in Romania, she says, and my head is in New York and my feet are in Berlin and the rest of me is in Dublin.
5
I heard her speaking a number of times in public. I saw her on stage once at the literary festival in Ennis, County Clare, in the Old Ground Hotel. I also saw her in Colorado, in Aspen. It was my first time in the Rocky Mountains, but they were very familiar to me already. I had a good memory of those mountains from watching television as a boy. I had also heard a lot of songs that were written about that part of America.
Some of the things she said in Ennis she also said in Aspen. She was there to speak about herself and her family. What life was like for a Dublin woman in her own time. How things have changed and how much better things are now and how much has gone missing. She was well known for speaking straight from the heart, no matter where she was, Ennis or Aspen. She was the world expert on her own childhood and what happened inside her family, nobody could argue with her about those facts. People everywhere in Ennis and Aspen loved hearing what things were like in Ireland and why she could never forgive her mother and father.
The problem was that every time she spoke in public, she would get herself worked up, she got angry, she cried openly. People wanted to hear everything in person nowadays and that left her vulnerable, stepping back into her own childhood and remembering it all over again as if it happened only recently and it was never going to be over. Every time she spoke about these things in public she had to back them up emotionally, in tears, as if nobody would believe her unless she cried.
Sometimes I was afraid the story was getting magnified each time she told it. You know the way you remember things larger than they actually were, whenever you speak about them, just because somebody is good enough to listen. People in the audience were so enthusiastic, she may have been forced to make things look worse. Or maybe it was just a matter of finding the best words to describe the worst things. She had a good memory for bad memory, so she said herself.
Or does everything get smaller when you talk about it?
My concern at the time was her not being able to let go. I hated seeing her crying in public. It was hard to watch her taking out a handkerchief from her sleeve, or not even doing that, allowing herself to cry openly without any attempt to hide her tears. So I made a suggestion to her, as a friend, in good faith. I think it was being away in Aspen that made me say things I would never have thought of in Ennis. The mountains allowed me to put forward the idea that she might try to understand her mother and father a bit more. Not that she would have to forgive them or anything like that, I was not questioning her story or saying it didn’t happen, only that sometimes when she spoke, it took too much out of her. Why not try and put it behind you?
For your own peace of mind.
I was saying this because I had the same problem with my own father following me all the time, even though he’s dead now. The fact is, he never goes away and I’m still afraid of his anger. Sometimes I think it might be better to pretend you never had a father, even for a while now and again, like a short vacation from your memory, instead of sitting up all night like a child waiting for him.
She listened to me. She tilted her head as usual and allowed me to speak my mind. I thought I was doing quite well, making some good points that were worth considering at least. I was only saying that remembering your childhood is not all that it’s made out to be. And you need to give your father the right to reply, especially if he’s not around to speak up for himself. Otherwise it’s like a military tribunal. That’s all I’m saying, you need to step into their shoes and see their point of view.
That’s rubbish, Liam.
She said the altitude was beginning to affect me. I was not thinking properly. The clouds were below the hotel and the air was so thin, oxygen-depleted, my understanding of things had become a bit simplistic.
It’s my life, she said.
I’m only trying to help you get over it, I said.
You want me to abandon my brother?
She was having a yoghurt, I remember. In her room, overlooking the mountains. She was telling me that her memory was all she had to go by. Your memory keeps changing and you have to keep up with it, she said. The yoghurt was finished but she was still finding tiny bits. She picked up the tin-foil lid and licked the remaining yoghurt off until it was shining and then she went back to the carton again.
She said that’s what writers do, they search around for things to write about in their memory, like a human laboratory. It’s not really possible to make things up out of nothing, she said. Nothing is invented, only things that have already happened in some way or another happening all over again in your imagination in more and more fantastic ways.
She continued going around the yoghurt carton with the spoon, so I got the impression she was looking for something in it to write about.
You’re not going to find anything more in there, I said.
She stared at me. You never knew how she was going to take something like that, she might laugh with you or she might go the other way.
You’re living in a fantasy, Liam. That’s what she said to me. You think it’s possible to walk around with no memory. You think it’s humanly possible to put everything behind you and walk away like you’re leaving behind an empty field, or an empty barn?
Ah Jaysus, Úna. I’m only saying, give your parents a break, you can’t blame them for everything.
Well you should have heard her. She accused me of trying to take her childhood away from her, stealing everything she had to write about. I could hear the emotion rising in her voice, as if she couldn’t speak the words fast enough. I can’t even remember half of what she said, all about children being kept quiet by letting them put their hand in a jar of satin sweets so they wouldn’t listen to what the adults were saying. She said I was trying to claim that she was a child invisible, with no interest in the world.