She wasn’t performing for the camera — she was performing for him. She never asked to see the prints. There wasn’t an ounce of vanity in her poses.
Early in the morning she would stand outside her house and hug herself into the weather, the peculiar patterns of clouds that scurried over the Mexican sky, winds that blew from a million different directions, carrying strange scents, sounds, squalls of rain, bits of dust. The wind had peculiarities that she made her own. When she was eleven years old she had given the wind different colours. A red wind carried desert dust, a brown one came riverwise, a grey one brought the scent of mesquite, a curious green one came one summer carrying swarms of locusts. Her favourite at the time was a black wind — a wind that did nothing at all, that didn’t exist, when the town turned black and torpid with its static heat. She always thought the wind would gather in a man for her — maybe that was why she fell in love with my father, I don’t know. She called him ‘mi cielo,’ my sky, and a lazy black wind blew through.
Perhaps she visited my father’s shack late at night, the weather temporarily forgotten, her blouse fully opened, her head cocked back under candlelight, the scar under her eye muted, the hole peeling with moonlight, I don’t know, I have never found out, but they were married a year later. She was eighteen, he was twenty-seven. It was the year that the war ended, puff-faced leaders leaning over a table to sign an uneasy peace, a plane drifting off from the western edge of Japan in the shadow of a mushroom cloud — but they had little idea what was happening in the world and were slightly aghast when they found out, months later, that their wedding was held on the exact same day that Buddhist monks were burning alive in orange robes and rope sandals in a city called Nagasaki.
On the morning of the wedding, two dozen rabbits were strung out on the washing line, like a row of very dark red lungs, penned up with giant clothes pegs, ready to be eaten at the feast. The photograph at the church shows them smiling. His hair is slicked back but a cowlick negotiates his eyebrows. Her feet point in opposite directions from under the hem of her white linen gown, crocheted flowers at the edges, her hair threaded and ribboned where it had begun to grow out, the dress tight to the forearm and puffy at the shoulders, her hands in fingerless lace gloves, resting on her hips as if she were already waiting for something wondrous to happen, another strange wind to blow in. A crowd of men hang around them uneasy in suits, jackets shiny at the elbows, one woman reaching up to the side of her husband’s face, maybe taking shaving soap from his ear, maybe brushing back a hair. They moved in a long procession from the church down to the house, my mother and father in front, an accordion ringing out, a trumpet, a guitar, children picking up coins that were flung behind the cavalcade, a particular burro leaving a healthy trail of manure along the way, small girls beside them, swinging the hems of their dresses, someone belting out a song from a window. A red breeze blew for my mother on her wedding day, tiny amounts of desert dust stinging her bare ankles. And they claimed that they heard a coyote singing in the distance, a magnificent howl that broke its way through the air. Endless dancing and fighting and loving and drinking were surely done that night, people in sweaty white open-necked shirts, kicking against the dry soil and brown skin of a land that, years later, swamped its heat over me.
* * *
He came back from the river for lunch and didn’t eat a single thing, again. Told him that he’s just going to fade away.
‘Jaysus, now there’s an idea,’ he said.
He walked out to the grey-stone firepit to burn the rubbish, carrying one Spar bag, full to the brim with bread crusts and tea bags and hardly anything else. He says it’s two weeks’ worth of rubbish. He has this curious bend to him as he walks, looks hugely lopsided. The wind was raving and he had his collar pulled up around his neck. I went outside to help him, but he was already at the pit, dumping the bags out, the crusts falling, thick brown shafts into the ash. I came up behind him.
‘Can I give ya a hand?’
He turned to me: ‘What are ya doing out without a coat on, for fucksake? You’ll catch your bloody death.’
I reached down to pick up the red petrol can at the side of the firepit and unscrewed the top, but he took it from me. ‘Right now, I can do it on my own.’ He sprinkled petrol over the rubbish, took out an old army Zippo from his pocket, hunkered down, lit the top of a long piece of straw, held it out. The fire whooshed up momentarily, a sucking updraft, died down.
‘Go on so, I’m grand,’ he said, looking down at the flames as if he might stand there for days, incalculably patient.
No point in pissing him off, so I ambled back to the house, put the kettle on, and watched from the living room, where he had another fire lit. His photos of Mam in Mexico are still around, although they look tired now, a binge of them around the room. The painting job that we once did has faded.
I dragged a chair to the window, propped my elbows on the big high armrests, watching him in the farmyard. When he was done with the burning he turned to come back from the pit, and still the whole of his body was leaning over, walking at an angle, paying some sort of homage to the ground. He shuffled back along the little muddy trail, stopped and scratched at his head, then moved his fingers curiously along his right cheek as if trying to ruddy it, walked over to the wheelbarrow. For a moment he took hold of the handles and lifted it. He shoved the wheelbarrow forward a couple of feet as if it were an empty flying seat at some carnival, but it ground itself down into a hole in the middle of the yard, let out a few sparks, stopped. Scrunched up his lips and let out a glob of spit from the side of his mouth. Took his glasses off, had a look at his watch, wound it, glanced back at the house. I gave him a wave but he didn’t respond, even with the glasses back on. Perhaps the light was glinting on the window, but I was sure he couldn’t see me — most likely his eyes are on their way, too. Bodies fall like rain at that age — drops collide into one another.
His mouth was drawn downwards across the falling. He looks closer to his nineties than he does to his seventies.
He stopped for a moment and lit up — it’s not me who’ll catch my death at all. In the living room, even with the waft of peat, it smelled musty and dank, the tobacco having sunk into the wood. I took all the ashtrays out to the bin and dumped them, cleaned them with a rag. Got them shiny and black. Maybe this way he’ll see how much he smokes — used to be he only took a few drags from each one, put it out, but now they’re all smoked down to the quick, dark around the filters. They’ll whisk him away before he knows it, sucked up on the ember updraft of himself. I’ve heard it’s more difficult than going cold turkey. Not long after leaving Ireland, I met an Algerian in one of the cheap hotels on Bedford Street in London. He was trying to kick cocaine. He had set up a dartboard in his next-door room to occupy himself. But one afternoon he sold the dartboard for a line of coke that he did in the public toilets in Victoria Station. Even paid his tenpence to get in and snort it. Afterwards he had nothing left and he locked himself away in the room, where I could hear him scratching at the walls, shouting for another line of coke and a cigarette.
Those days of mine in London were long and grey. Eighteen years old, having just left home. In a train station, in black drainpipe trousers and a shirt of tentative blue, I pondered my dual heritage, the Irish in me, the Mexican. An explosion of blood made the shape of a flower around my nose, where I had failed to make a place for a small silver stud. I had wanted to announce my manhood with a nose-ring. An old landlady brought me to a bathroom to put Dettol on the side of my face where the blood had strayed, saying: ‘You hacked your bloody face, son, what in the world are ya doing?’ And me thinking it could have been my own mother tentatively dabbing a cotton ball against my nose. I moved through London as if wounded, working on building sites where they changed my name to Paddy. A plethora of paddies in knitted hats and construction belts moving their way around scaffolding. I checked in and out of small rooms all over the city. Walked around with a skin of doubt — dark, but with a field of freckles across the cheekbones. A childish voice inside me asking: ‘Who the hell are you anyway?’ In bookshops on Charing Cross Road I looked at guidebooks to Mexico, wondering if my mother might step out from the pages and appear to me, maybe a sarape around her, maybe standing under a clothesline, fluttering her thinness out towards the Chihuahuan desert. In those bookshops — with the smell of words, the promise of existing in another place, the feet moving by me as I sat lotus-legged on the floor, the clerks staring me down from the register — I decided that I would make my trip to my mother’s country, find her, make her exist for me again.