Colum McCann - Songdogs

I set about cleaning the place when he went down to hunt out his big salmon. ‘Going to catch that bastard, tonight,’ he said. Off he went with the rods on his shoulder after he fluffed out his flies in a stream of steam from the kettle, rejuvenating the hair and feather dressings.

Some spiders were living in the mop when I got it from the cupboard. Took it outside and ran it under the spigot. They scuttled away. Strange to feel the drizzle settle on my hair. The wind blew it in from the bog as I rinsed out the bucket. That’s a smell that has always lived inside me — the pungent black earth all slashed through with turf-cutters, although I could smell the factory belching out its slaughter, too. It left a scent of offal in the air, fanning out over the land.

It was when the factory came that the old man and I stopped our swimming in the river, our dawn race against the current. One morning we were out there shivering on the bank — I was eleven years old — when bits of offal from slaughtered cows starting floating down past us, blotches of blood in the water, stringy ligaments and guts spinning away on the surface. They came in spurts, a punctured vein on the river. The old man stared at it and ran his fingers along his body, walked away from the river, disgusted. Mam collected some pieces in a bucket and went up to the factory and dumped them on the factory floor. We never went swimming anymore after that. Mam got up in the early mornings and walked down to the water’s edge by herself, sat and watched the pieces flow by. She was silver-haired by then and I suppose much of the bitterness had settled in.

But they’ve cleaned up their act these days, and I don’t see any scum on the river, although the gates have slowed the water down to its pathetic trickle.

I saw a few men in their blue uniforms moving down past the end of the laneway on their bicyles, back from the meat factory. I went and got one of the old man’s cameras with a zoom lens to get a closer look, couldn’t make out any of the faces. They were trudging along. A few kids were out playing, too. Every now and then their heads bobbed up above the hedge. Four boys came down along our laneway and stopped to pick up conkers from under the chestnut tree. They were all fighting with each other, fooling around, throwing big punches that missed. From the distance one of them looked like Miguel’s son — hair in a black ramble on his head. I moved away from the window into the kitchen, put some washing-up liquid in the bucket, swirled it around with the handle of a wooden spoon, started cleaning the floor while the evening rolled on. Otherwise this place’ll be swimming in filth and he’ll just wade through it for the rest of his days. Swirl the mop in a circular motion. Let it glide through your hands.

* * *

That was a hot summer morning, four years ago, walking with Miguel through the town, looking for their old house. I was nineteen years old, just arrived from London, stupid with hope.

Miguel’s son — another Rolando, named after his late grandfather — held on to Miguel’s hand like it was glued there. Little Rolando wore a sailor’s suit and scoured his finger up his nose. He was scared of all the strange words coming from us. I had only a smattering of Spanish, picked up from a phrase book I’d bought in London, and Miguel’s English was useless. We walked slowly down the street, in the gathering heat; through the market, where the ribs of pigs dangled in the air on hooks and men in overalls with splatters of blood cried out as if they themselves had just been butchered; past women with sun-dried faces as they sold bananas and apples and reams of boxed vegetables, impervious to the flies that were buzzing around them; out to the street where a lorry coughed fumes; beyond a giant white adobe house with roses growing in the courtyard, a hipheavy woman out watering red and white geraniums; past a café advertising tamales; alongside some slum houses, a dog slinking through dustbins; the sun flailing down as we skirted the edges of a dry-soiled park where two old men played chess. Children were out on bicyles — they were raggedy but there were no open sewers for them to negotiate. The town had changed from the one Mam and my father told me about. Underneath the Mexican flag in the plaza the Star-Spangled Banner fluttered. A boulevard in town had been renamed to welcome American business.

Miguel had a puffy face that pillowed itself into silence. He must have known all along — it was as if he was trying to stall me — but the house had been replaced by a clinic that was run by a young man from Italy, a rainbow of freckles across his cheeks, his hair shiny and black around his ears. He had knocked the house down, darkroom and all, and built the clinic, a low white affair, where he gave his services free of charge. I looked through the gate and foot-scuffled at stones. Miguel ran a hand across the top of his brow, where beads of sweat had settled.

A row of scraggly kids waited with their mothers outside the house, where the chickens used to peck. The Italian was wrapping a white bandage around a teenage girl’s leg and he was humming some tune, maybe something about his own mountains far away. He saw me, with the backpack huge on my shoulders, and beckoned me over with a tug of his head. ‘Come,’ said Miguel, taking my arm, ‘meet Antonio.’ But I didn’t want to meet Antonio. I didn’t want to meet anyone. Little Rolando was screaming at the top of his voice. Miguel slapped him on the bare legs and he stopped. We went back along the road, great silence between us.

‘Did she ever come back?’ I asked later, in his house.

‘She no return,’ said Miguel emphatically.

‘Are you sure?’

‘You ask many questions,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay. You will have una cabita? She come again no.’

His wife, Paloma, prepared glasses of rum and Coca-Cola for us. Maps hung on the walls. They dotted the hallway, light coming on them from a fancy glass chandelier. Miguel had grown artistically. Now he made faces from contour maps — geological and ordinance surveys with eyes from history staring out of them. All sorts of Mexican revolutionaries were drawn within the valleys and the troughs, the towns sometimes used for eyes, hills for hair, the rivers for arms. He located Riley for me, a tiny figure drawn from the contours of a hanging valley. His head was leaning against the knee of Santa Anna who was slumped beneath the shoulders of Emiliano Zapata. The strange thing was that Miguel didn’t have to distort the lines — he had stayed true to the contours and the faces were fluid within them. He made a good living from it, sold them to galleries all over the country. Someone had commissioned a portrait of Salinas. Miguel was working on it. He said his art had nothing to do with his politics, but the face of Salinas looked chubby and wobbly, and it seemed as if there was an American eagle on his shoulder with television sets for eyes.

The drink was served in cut glasses with gold around the rims. I sat and sipped. The day’s heat pushed us down. Paloma held her glass with her little finger extended daintily. An emerald ring bobbed on it. Her fingers caressed the air as she spoke. She sounded as if she’d been sucking on helium.

‘You stay?’

They offered me a bed on their porch, mosquito screen all around so that it made something of an outdoor room, an old army cot with the cleanest of sheets standing in the corner, a Bible on a bedside table, candles in silver holders beside it.

But I moved on — wanted to be on my own — and booked myself into a hotel down near the courthouse, in the old part of town.

The hotel stonework was arthritic. Bits of it crumpled down into the street. The hallway carpet had cigarette marks on it. Soap operas rang out from neighbouring rooms. In the back of the hotel there was a pool of water in a blue tarp that hung above the patio. The mosquitoes gathered in the tarp as if in communion. At dusk they would enter my room, even through the smoke of a mosquito coil. I swatted them with a towel, leaving marks on the wall, along with thousands of others from previous tenants. Even the ceiling was splattered, a collage of red spots. A cleaning lady came in early one morning, when I was sleeping late. Hipheavy in her uniform. She looked up at the wall, counting the fresh stains. ‘Te la pasaste matando moscos anoche, verdad?’ she said to me. You spent the whole night killing mosquitoes, true? A fat brown finger wagged in the air and she laughed. She came over to my bed and ruffled my hair, ran her fingers along my cheek, and for a moment I thought she was going to climb in beside me. Instead she dipped her cloth in a bucket and wiped a few of the marks on the wall away, said she’d be back later to make the bed. I went down the corridor to the broken urinal down the hall, where the water was constantly flushing, wet my bandana in the sink and came back to the room to wipe the spots off, but fell asleep in the heat instead.