Colum McCann - Songdogs

The dead soldier’s name was Wilfred Owen, an echo of the World War One poet. Years later my father’s life might invoke a line of the poet’s for me: ‘Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.’

He bartered his way into another pair of shoes — rope-soled alpargatas, and as the weather got colder, snow in countryside drifts, he bought new boots. The holy medal still shone at his throat and, by the time he reached Madrid, he was well able to sing the praises of nationalism.

He waited outside the city among the gum trees and watched the bread being loaded onto airplanes to swell the nostrils of a pilot. Thousands of loaves. Some of the dough still rising. He stood in the camps as the planes flew off and wondered what it was that had brought him here, took shots of the nationalists as they waited for the planes to return, drilling their way through time and howitzers and dark-haired whores. There were as many pictures of prostitutes as there were of bread. The prostitutes held a peculiar fascination for him, girls who rolled their skirts up on the rubble of their thighs. It was fashionable to be a little plump, so the girls sometimes wore four or five skirts over one another to give breadth to their hips. The men around them were articulate with their penises, a natural extension from the barrel of a rifle to the absurd freckle sitting on any man’s undershaft. One of the shots shows a line of men in a tent, Germans, Spaniards and Moroccans, impatient with sweat, waiting in queue for a thin pockmarked whore in baggy underwear, panties around one ankle. She is kneeling down in front of an equally thin soldier with her mouth at his crotch. At the back of the queue another soldier raises an air-punch in anticipation of the soldier’s climax. His fly is already open and his scrotum leaks out like an underwater polyp.

In makeshift hospital tents there was as much syphilis as shrapnel. Years later, when I went through boxes in our attic, there were shots of women naked in lamplight, women parading in front of his camera, women with sheets pulled coyly around them, women with their heads tilted sideways and an eye in half a wink. I was a teenager when I discovered them. I’d sit, perched on a slat of wood in the attic, thumping away at my body, in the beginning of its own articulation. I became the camera, became the cameraman, and all the time hated my father for being privy to these visions. I walked into the photos, parted the canvas doors of the tents, stood, bemused at first, talked to the women. The women smiled at my curious appearance, beckoned me backwards to the 1930s, asked me sly questions. I hung in behind the camera as outside the planes droned in the clouds with their bounty. The women would move around in the photographs for me, come behind the camera, take me by the hand and lead me somewhere no lens could watch, let me touch them, open my shirt buttons with a flick of their fingers, let me wander, sleep beside them. Sometimes I swore that I could hear the bread falling outside.

When Madrid surrendered, the graveyards of Spain were full of men the world could not do without — other wars would need them.

Manley was found in the charnel of the city, minus one leg in a bombed-out house, babbling, a row of stale loaves around him. The doors and windowframes had been torn off and used for firewood. Manley was strewn out on a mattress that smelled of urine. Unshaven. Huge boils on his neck. He spat in my father’s face when he saw the holy medal, but the old man wandered around the city that day and bought some forged papers for his friend. They were in the name of Gordon Peters. Manley became a man who crawled around on crutches and invented a new past for himself. He and a few other stray Republicans hid in the city with their new identities. My father still had his inheritance, pinned away in plastic at the back of his trousers. He and Manley made arrangements to leave the city together, but Manley disappeared one morning while out buying provisions. My father sat in the shell of the house and waited, days giving way to weeks, cameras gathering dust, the mattress beginning to fester. He searched for his friend, walked around in a stupefied ache, couldn’t find him.

One afternoon he found Manley’s crutch along the banks of the Manzanares — it had been carved with the initials G. P. — and he felt sure his friend was dead, although the body couldn’t be found.

The photos that they had taken years before in Mayo, with Manley in his outrageous suits, became my father’s most vibrant memory of his friend. When the old man talked of Manley he remembered him as a sixteen-year-old with a lustful glint in his eye, rather than a legless soldier who reeked of piss at night. It was something the old man often did — if a moment existed in a photograph, it was held in that particular stasis for ever. It was as if by taking a photo he could, at any moment, reinhabit an older life — one where a body didn’t droop, or hair didn’t fall out, or a future didn’t have to exist. Time was held in the centre of his fist. He either crumpled it or let it fly off. It was as if he believed that something that was has the power to be what is. It was his own particular ordering of the universe, a pattern that moved from past to present, with the ease of a sheet dropped into a chemical bath. Manley was sixteen once and, because of that, Manley was sixteen forever.

Even today I suppose he might still believe that there’s a loaf of bread in flight above Madrid, a single one, or a parachute-load of it, making its way gracefully through the air from the belly of a high-flying bomber, preparing itself to fall.

* * *

After the whiskey he fell asleep in the chair. He woke when I knocked over the kettle in the kitchen by mistake. Pulled the blanket from around himself, clacked his lips together, reached into his shirt pocket, took out a box of Major. After a few minutes he fell asleep again with a cigarette burning down in the ashtray. I stubbed it out, went upstairs and took a hot bath in the iron-coloured water. A bit of a waft from my clothes, though not as bad as him. He’s fairly pungent. The smell was hanging all around the house. A deep unwashed odour, the disappearance of himself, the sort that smells like old campfire. When Mam was around all those years ago, she would wash our clothes in the sink — exiled in a farmhouse kitchen, watching the vagaries of Irish weather, black crows defiling low over a brown bog, telling stories of the colour that once used to exist in her life. She would lift me up and sit me on the sink, gaze out at the columns of crows, talk of other birds — vultures, grackles, red-winged hawks — in other places. She had a couple of sarapes and sometimes they would animate themselves on the washing line, fluttering out over the land, reds and yellows and greens. Mexico existed on the washing line for her, hung out to dry, the woollen ponchos full of life beside the ordinary clothes of our days, my father’s vests, his trousers, his underwear, the banality of them held tight with wooden pegs.

These days, without Mam around, the old man has let the rings of dirt settle down around him — eleven years of it on his shirt collars.

In the bathroom, clumps of hair sat in the sinkhole, under the waterlines. A tiny sliver of soap in the dish. I got some shampoo out of my backpack, sank down into the bath. It was nice, that black silence outside the bathroom window, no mosquitoes or dune bugs battering against the air. Only a couple of harmless moths throwing themselves stupidly against the window. I lay in the bathtub until the water grew cold. At midnight I woke the old man to see if he wanted to go upstairs to his bed, but he grunted sleepily: ‘I’m grand here, it’s comfortable, I sleep here all the time.’

The edge of the chair made a red line on his face, which ran down to the sparse grey beard. His beard may have its own entropy, so that instead of growing outwards it is shrinking inwards to his skin. It looked like a stubble of only one or two weeks, but it has probably been there for months. Two large patches on his cheeks, where the hair doesn’t grow anymore, adding symmetry to his bald pate. I watched him as he woke. He rubbed the red line away from his cheek, coughed, reached for the stubbed butt in the ashtray, smelled it, flicked it towards the fireplace, lit a new one. ‘They taste bloody awful when they’ve been stubbed out,’ he said. He held the new smoke between his teeth, looked around the room. ‘Jesus, it’s chilly enough though, isn’t it?’