Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“Well?”

“Men come for only two reasons. Love or death.” She paused. She watched him move as if in some discomfort in the seat. “You are not a man in love.”

“Is it true, then?” he asked her.

Yes,” she said.

“He is dead?”

“He is.”

For a moment Finbar did not react. He was like one transfixed before an altar. His face betrayed no expression. His eyes did not move from the eyes of the fortune-teller. And he stayed so.

“Tell me,” he said.

Then, as the air of that room grew steadily warmer, the fortuneteller told him the story of Finan, his twin. She told him Finan had sailed from his own country and gone south and arrived in a port in the country of France. His heart was heavy and his soul could find no ease in the world, she said. He met a priest there and confessed his sins, and though the priest did not understand his language he absolved these but told him he was one called by God. He kept Finan with him in a monastery for five years and then one day told Finan he must sail to the continent of Africa and do God’s work there.

“More?” said the fortune-teller.

“More.”

He boarded a ship then and was on the sea for many weeks, she said. He arrived in the port of Sierra Leone in the blaze of summertime. His head burned, his ears crisped. He moved among slavers and callous men and others who had come there to live outside the law and the rules of human decency. He wore the black clothes of a priest and in these suffered the heat like a further penance. He preached in vain, for none there would listen to him. He grabbed a man by the arm to stop him beating a slave and was himself knocked down and beaten in the dirt.

The fortune-teller paused. She asked Finbar again if he wished her to continue, for she knew the story that lay ahead.

“Tell me,” he said again.

“He did not know what good he could do there,” she said. “He asked God and got no answer and went from there eastward.”

He crossed scorched places in the dry interior of that country where there was none, or where passed figures silent and nomadic. The first signs of malaria were already in his eyes. He walked toward the foothills of the Wologisi Mountains. There was a tribe there that scattered when he came. He travelled open country past herds of elephants and came to swamps of stewed heat where herds of pigmy hippopotamus lay. At a place where caves opened in the ground he came upon a wretched tribe withered with the scabs of leprosy.

“Here he stayed awhile. He tended to them, for they were frightened and dying and had been long outcast and lost the trust of human contact.”

In the night he told them the word for God, she said, and he pointed at the heavens and they mistook God for the stars. But when God could not cure them, his faith weakened. He asked God many times to come and show a sign. But there was none. Then when his own sickness was worsening he left there and walked on.

“I see a forest of trees dripping. There are trees of fig and palm and rubber.”

“And he is there?” Finbar asked.

“Yes.”

He was in that forest where monkeys screeched and crashed above and where the bright wings of birds fluttered and vanished in the high branches. He was unable to walk now and sat down and tried to pray, but no prayers could form in his mind and he suffered delusions and saw in mirage the face of God. But it was the face of his father. His mind buckled then and he was not sure if there was a God or if he had had a vocation and if his devotion was not simply the expression of lost love. There was only the long figure of the father who had not seen Finan as a child in his own right and who had vanished in the river before the boy had become a man. There was only the boy’s longing for his father to acknowledge and know and love him and that this impossibility had become his yearning for God.

“And with that revelation he cried out there in the forest,” the fortuneteller said. “He cried out your name.”

She stopped and waited a moment and the heat in the room was such now that it was difficult for Finbar to breathe.

“He cried it out loud and then the other names of his brothers and then cried for his mother. He cried out and saw one coming to save him. He saw it as clear as if it were real and that was the one he had prayed to and was his own father, who in his vision then lifted him like a child in his arms and bore him away to a place distant and lovely as the stars.”

She stopped. Finbar held his face in his hands. Sweat glistened in the creases of his brow.

“He died alone there?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Yesterday,” she said.

Africa lingered in that room for a spell. Time passed, or did not. The heat of the room rose and rose then to such a degree that at last there appeared in translucent mirage the wavering, sunburned figure of the lost twin Finan Foley. He stood there before them, his face placid and his arms by his sides. Then Finbar could bear it no longer and let out a cry and reached his left hand to his brother and at once the image like a fever broke and was gone.

“Now” said the fortune-teller as the room cooled, “what will you do?”

Finbar touched his side where the ache had passed. “I will go home,” he said.

He got up then and paid the woman and went back down the street to Cait and his six children. He told her to get ready, they were going on the road.

Her hands flew to her mouth, as if she had to hold her hope a moment. “Where?” she asked him.

“To dip our daughters in the sea where I found you,” he said.

Then he went outside with a shovel and dug at the grass that had covered the wheels of the caravan. He dug for two hours, and some of the gypsies came outside to see what he was doing and some were glad and others vaguely ashamed. He told them he was going on the road and any were welcome. He was not going to seek their ancient home, he said, for a Magyar traveller had told him that it was not Romania but a place in the north of the country India from which they had long ago been banished and come across Asia Minor and Byzantium like seeds in the wind. He was going west and north, he said, to see the sea again. He unrolled for those that were gathered in curiosity the map of Benardi, and upon it he traced a route like one showing the way to the lost.

Then he went and bought two horses and hitched these and after some efforts moved the caravan for the first time from the deep ruts in which it was foundered. And with the first great sway of motion in their cages, the canaries sang. Two other families of the gypsies joined them. Their caravans were beyond recovery and they came instead on foot with bundles tied. Then, without further announcement, in the warmth of the afternoon, they left there, Finbar Foley and Cait and, with the two youngest, the now half dozen Roses. The caravan creaked out the road past the lake, some following behind in slow file and the children of others skipping and hopping alongside for part of the way as if witnesses to some strange and fabulous carnival.

If the story of Emer Foley could be told, the telling would take the days and nights of the rest of her lifetime. The sorrow of the words themselves would weigh so upon her that her heart would crack, making weep the skies and blacking the stars. Such was Teige’s understanding the moment he knelt before her in the town of Killaloe, for so it seemed written in the lineaments of her face. He did not ask her where she had been. He touched her face and told her he was Teige. Those assembled murmured and pressed forward the better to witness the scene of annunciation, and to them Teige raised his right hand and said nothing and did not take his eyes from his mother. The beggars stopped. They clustered there as if at the edge of some invisible arc drawn about the man and woman, as if these were upon a stage and they the chorus. The mother’s face crinkled in a puzzle.