Yesterday's Weather

SWITZERLAND

1.

She did him an injustice, she thought — the American. He was so full of himself. That was the way he arrived in her life, a cup that was brimful; a look on his face that said she didn’t know the half of it.

So talk to me, she said. Fill me in.

He was so healthy and new, with his recent blond hair and his fresh white teeth. He might have been made in the airport. He might have materialised in the hum of a security door frame.

Hello, Dublin.

So tell me about your grandfather, she said. About the cups wrapped in old newspaper that you found in a box under the stairs. Tell me about coffin ships and how you came from Connemara, really. Tell me about potatoes.

My great-aunt Louise, he said. When she went mad.

In the old country, she said.

In Connecticut. Rubbed the eyes off potatoes because she thought they were looking at her.

You just made that up.

No, it is true, he said. She went dotty. Quite literally. Ants, flies, mildew, mould — it was the spots that drove her crazy. She thought they were eyes. She thought the world was boiling with eyes. Gravel, for instance. Think about it.

Eyes or eyeballs? she said.

Actually, I made it up.

He wore a little fake history on his back; a white shirt, very thick cotton. It smelt of coppers and laundry blueing and the valet’s hands. It looked like something that fell out of a Lancashire loom into a little mill girl’s lap. But the cloth probably came from China — she told him — it fell out of a loom into a little China girl’s lap. Because everyone has money, these days.

He told her about the Mississippi Delta, the endless flat fields, and the cotton bales that are the precise size of the lorries that come to take them away. And the houses, which are the precise size of the cotton bales, as if the field workers live in lorry containers with a porch slapped on the front. He told her about a parade of African Americans walking down the road in the middle of nowhere, fantastically well dressed, following a slow hearse in the heat. Not another car in sight.

You win, she said. Take off that shirt.

What is this?

It is a competition. It is a poetry competition.

All right, he said. What about you?

Me. I’m the girl in the silk dressing gown with a magnolia tree flowering up the back. I am tired and overused. I like dark lipstick. Who are you?

As you said, I’m the American.

In the street he is handsome and long, but his legs — that look so easy under him — are large and massively hinged when he is in bed. He makes her feel like a child; his big body so indifferent and easy to scale.

I wish there was some other way of doing this, she said. Sex is just a shortcut, that’s all.

Well, yes it is, he said. But what the hell?

2.

In Dublin, he thought, the women fuck like we’re all in it together, like the place is one big orphanage and they’ve gone home for the night, and left us to play.

And it is all a joke. That’s the other thing about Dublin. The thing you don’t understand is that they are always only joking, even in bed. Until you leave — then they stand outside your window in the middle of the night screaming and throwing bottles. Or they take an overdose, maybe, just for a joke.

So he watched her.

Walking around her flat on the North Circular Road, or in his room in Harold’s Cross, trying to put a date on her, or a place — naked as she was — trying to fix her, even as he lost her to some small thing; the angle of her eyelashes, or the grain of skin pulled to a slant, when she turned to reach for the bedside lamp.

She said that sex was an act of the imagination, but he said it was a speech act. He felt that he was blurting something into her. And afterwards, he told her about his father’s death.

He remembered his mother’s friend, Caitlin, taking him and his brother to the park, to get them out of the house, leaving his mother to the extravagance of her grief. He was so young when it happened, he didn’t want to leave his mother behind. He thought she was being punished, somehow. He pictured her reeling from window to window, smashing things, stuffing her mouth with the back of her hand, when, what is more likely, she sat quietly in the dark, in a chair. There was no question that she loved his father. No question at all. And two years later she put on her gloves and walked out the door and got herself another one, another husband, just like that.

He liked the new guy well enough, but between the smiling lover and the dead father, he sometimes wondered how he grew up straight. For this, of course, they must thank his mother. Thank you, Mom. They must thank the extravagance of her grief. Because this is where he travelled now — into the heart of that disturbance. He was always running back to the house to look for her, and he found — sometimes one thing, sometimes another. In Thailand, he saw a model boat made out of chicken bones. In Berlin he saw a woman breastfeeding in a pavement café, and her eyes were animal; those big wide pavements with plaques every three yards to mark the houses of the slaughtered Jews. And in Dublin, he found …

You.

Ah, she said.

You know what I like about Irish women? he said. I like the way they still call themselves ‘girls’. And I like the weather in their hair. Which is romantic of me, but I am Irish too, you know. So I like your big family; all those brothers and sisters bubbling up, like the froth on milk. And, I hate to say this, but I love your accent. Also your dark lipstick, and all the history flowering up your back.

3.

They went to Venice for the weekend, and bought an umbrella.

They found it in a poky shop that sold umbrellas and nothing else. She thought it should be a black umbrella with a wooden handle — old-fashioned, because they were in Venice — but he picked up a green telescopic thing and said, What about this?

It has to be black.

What do you want a black one for?

Because we’re in Venice.

Already, the man behind the counter despised them. Tim picked up a big striped golf umbrella and tried to open it in the shop. Elaine ran into the street.

Come out. Come out here, she said. But he just kept working at the catch. She had to reach in to the dark shop and drag him out.

What? What? he said.

You can’t open it inside.

Why not?

The umbrella-seller was, by now, just about sickened by them; he was about to reach for his antacid tablets, or his gun.

It’s unlucky, she said.

Tim looked at her. Then he cocked his head and looked, for a long time, at the Venetian sky.

It was still raining.

All right, he said, and they went back in and asked for a black umbrella and they walked back out with it tucked under her arm and hoisted it in the narrow street, and then they lost it before dinner-time.

Everywhere they went in that town, she remembered the last time she was in Venice, with a different man some years before. It was like another town shifting under this one, a pentimento of cafés and churches that had all become smaller or bigger since she had last seen them; shops or squares that were always around the next corner, until she realised that the corner itself had disappeared. She chased a black-and-white church all the way into the Grand Canal and nearly walked into the water, so convinced she was that the church should be there. When she found it, somewhere quite different, the cool white-and-black marble had been overlaid with baroque gold. When did that happen? she said.

She had not been happy in Venice. The last time she was here the city had accused her of not being in love; or of being in love in some wrong or wrong-headed way. So here she was with Tim, making amends.

He insisted on using a map. Elaine said that if he didn’t bother with the map, then they wouldn’t get lost, because it didn’t matter where they went, it was all beautiful and all the same. Or all awful, maybe. After dinner, they ended up walking the periphery in the dark. There was a puzzle of streets to the left of them and, to the right, the open waters of the lagoon with real waves, just like the real sea. They walked a hopeful semicircle until the causeway came into view, then they cut back into the ghetto. They came across a fiesta in a small square, with trestle tables and bunting, accordion music and jugs of wine. The real people of Venice sat and laughed under a home-made banner for the Communist Party. They did not see the tourists pushing their way through the square, in the way that they did not see the pigeons at their feet.

Elaine lay in the hotel room, which was cheap for Venice, but which had, even so, a slightly tatty chandelier. It also had damp. She read the guidebook. It said that during the time of the Doges the prostitutes had to wear their underwear on the outside. Another guidebook said that they had to wear their clothes inside out. There was a problem of translation here — the prostitutes had to wear their inside clothes on the outside. They had to wear their hearts on their sleeves, they had to wear their wombs in a prolapse — not that that would be much use. She thought of wearing her bra outside her T-shirt, just here in the room, as a conversation piece, as a precursor to some vaguely syphilitic Venetian sex. But she just lay there until Tim came back, which he did, with a pistachio-flavoured ice cream to cheer her up. And because it was Venice, she had her period, so his penis was stained with the brown blood of it, marinating half the night, until he suddenly woke and went over to the wash-hand basin on the wall.

She thought that it was the cuttlefish in its dark ink that had brought it on. Or perhaps it was the canal, running black outside the restaurant door.

4.

In Mexico, they booked a beach hut from an old man who had lost the fingers of his right hand. He waved the stubs at them and mimed hauling in nets over the side of a boat.

‘Fiss,’ he said. ‘Fiss.’

They swam all day or hung in hammocks and tried to forget their diarrhoea. The coast road was full of crazy pick-ups with kids hanging off the back, but at dusk the people sank back into the forest and there was nothing left, except for a rare murmuring under the trees. The locals did not seem to shout much, or even speak. When they ate, their plates and spoons made no clatter.

Zipolite, the next beach up, was full of tourist trash who slept on the sand with their surfboards tied to their wrists; older types too, hippies and junkies who were madder than his great-aunt Louise.

One of them sat on the sand nearby as they were having dinner. He looked about seventy years old. A beach-bum, afflicted by sores — they were infected mosquito bites, or needle marks, perhaps. He stretched out his legs and looked in horror at the scabs, his face puzzling and straining, as though he expected maggots to crawl out of them. Then he attacked one with his nails, tearing at the skin.

It put them off their food.

Tim said he might have come down to dodge the draft.

They looked at him. History, there on the beach. Elaine said he looked more like a prisoner of war — the last GI, the one who couldn’t go home.

They paid the bill, and Elaine felt, as he put the money down, the pull in him to Be An American — a man who looked at the movies and saw his own home up there on the screen.

Do you ever want to go back?

You have no idea what my high school was like, he said. Everyone had a car. Everyone crashed their car. It wasn’t enough to score a girl, you had to score the girl’s coked-up mother. I went to school with guys so stupid, you look at them on the football field and you think, Why don’t we just eat them? The whole herd of them. That might be more useful.

The sun was sinking like a stone. The meal and the beer made their skin crawl in the heat. The food pulled at their blood, leaving the surface of them a sheet of sensation; prickles and irritations and the sense of someone at your shoulder, leaning in to whisper — what? — your name, or your other name, your secret. At the end of every day in Mexico they were brushed by shame; a dirty bird’s wing someone had dropped on the sand.

For fuck’s sake, she said. The whole world is about America, these days. It’s not a country, it’s a fucking religion. And I don’t mind. I am perfectly happy with you as you are. I am perfectly happy with you as an ethnic product. But can we, from now, for ever, forget the froth on the milk and the weather in my fucking hair?

The next morning at breakfast, she looked at the fried eggs on her plate and thought she must be pregnant, and she gripped the edge of the table in her fright.

But it was Tim who got sick. They went inland, and he stayed in the hotel room, while she took a day trip out of San Cristóbal de las Casas. There was talk of rebels in the hills. Elaine sat in the back of a pick-up truck, high up in the scrublands, and watched a group of men labouring uphill with sacks of coffee beans on their backs.

After an hour or so, they stopped at a café — just a roof with a table under it, and a broken fridge full of a bright pink cola. In the middle of the table there was a bowl of powdered coffee, turning to gleaming syrup on the communal spoon. A filthy little girl looked at them, with perfect awe as they drank out of plastic cups. Her eyes were the only clean things about her, apart from, when she laughed, the inside of her mouth.

The other people in the pick-up were Swiss. They worked for FIFA, the football organisation, they said: two men and a sharp, hilarious woman, all wearing company baseball caps. She didn’t know what they were here for. She didn’t see boys playing football in the villages they passed; she saw a lot of wooden, evangelical churches, and dirt.

They passed a coffee plantation and Elaine said it was a pity the people didn’t drink the coffee that was growing right there on their own hillsides, that they had to drink horrible dried Nestlé instead. The Swiss looked at her. After a moment, one of the men said, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes.’ He glanced at the woman and gave a little smirk. She smirked back at him. Then the other man chanced a sneaky little smile. They turned away from each other, airily, and went back to looking at the poor people on the side of the road.

The fucking Swiss. They spoke perfect English to her and perfect Spanish to the guide. They could probably say, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes,’ in French, Italian and German too. So geht es. C’est comme ça.

Is the war over yet? La guerre, est-elle terminée?

She tried to figure out which one of the men was sleeping with the woman; a good-time sort of girl, who wasn’t a girl any longer. Forty-five at least. She was having a brilliant time on the back of a pick-up truck in Chiapas.

The men were middle-aged. It happened to men all of a sudden, she thought. First the baldness thing, and then Boof! big lunches, cars, overtime, fat already. Well, that’s the way the world goes. She wondered if it would happen to Tim, stuck back in the hotel with what might be amoebic dysentry — at least that is what they thought it was, opening the guidebook every few hours to peer at diagrams of what looked like little shrimp, wondering if these were the things that were swimming around in his gut.

When she got back, he was feeling a bit better, and she told him about the Swiss bastards who were so pleased with the way the world went, because it always went their way. Tim started giving out about Nestlé reps going around in white coats with powdered-milk samples, telling women not to breastfeed. But this really annoyed her, somehow. This was not what she was talking about. He did not understand. She said it was almost a sex thing. They smirked because — all three of them — they liked being bad.

The way she said ‘bad’, they might have had sex themselves, if it weren’t for his little shrimp. Instead, they got irritated and fought. She found herself defending Switzerland, when she meant to say the opposite. The Swiss didn’t actually do anything wrong, she said, they just let other people do it. They made their money out of other people’s greed. Because that is the way the world goes. And, Yes, he said. Yes, exactly.

Later, in the dark, she said she was tired of the hurt she caused, just by being alive. She was tired of her own endless needs. And him too. She was tired of him, and of the fact that she would hurt him, too. She could do it now, if he liked, but certainly she would hurt him, over time.

He said it was up to him, really. All of that.

They were in San Cristóbal de las Casas. It was a beautiful town and there were books in the shops and real coffee in the tourist cafés. It was the centre of the rebel movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and Elaine felt that she was in an important place at an important time. She hoped it would work out well for the people here, and also for her and Tim, that they would always be in love, and drink good coffee, and that he would always keep his hair.

5.

Back in Dublin, she unpacked the dressing gown with the flowers on the back and said, I have to get another job, I have to do something, I can’t stand this fucking country. It’s all right for you.

We could live in France, he said.

She rounded on him and said, What do you do? What are you for?

He lifted his empty hands in the air.

This fucking country, she said. You have no idea. Come down to Cork with me. That’ll change your mind.

But he loved them all, and they loved him. Her brothers bringing him down to the local for a pint and her father talking about tornadoes in America, and was he ever in one, at all? And it was all the Big Yank in the front parlour, and no one asked them once about Italy, or Mexico, or the North Circular Road for that matter. No one asked anything, except would he like a cup of tea, because in this house, it became clear, questions were out of the question. She had never noticed this before. Questions were impolite. And Tim better at this game than any of them — not looking at the tablecloth or at the cup in his hand, or at any of their sad, accumulated objects, but instead engaging in a vast discussion about all kinds of weather, from the ice on Lake Michigan to the storm in Bucharest that made your hair stand up with the static.

You don’t say, said her father, his small stash of books behind him, dead on the shelf.

They gave him the sofa to sleep on, so Elaine crept downstairs in the middle of the night and they had the quietest sex known to mankind. They inched their way along the floor and ended up under the table where, looking up, Elaine saw a crayoned boat she had drawn, one endlessly idle afternoon, when she was nine or ten. A green boat with a blue sail. Her own secret sign.

Where do you want to go? he said. Where do you want to go, now?