Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

to The Rape of Ganymede , thought to have been by Titian, by Damiano Mazza, in which the rapist eagle has a decurved beak and wings with ctenoid edges—like the teeth of a comb, Ganymede’s buttocks resolved for penetration while coral-pink drapery liberates itself from his body.
    François Boucher’s Cupid with his love arrows in a gold-topped scarlet pouch is examined.
    Even a child with golden hair and painted cheeks in biscuit (marble-like) unglazed porcelain by the eighteenth-century Düsseldorf sculptor Johann Peter Melchior is scrutinized.
    Sent by the girlfriend of a boy dying of AIDS, I’d thought it for many years to have been a depiction of Melchior, one of the three wise men, his name meaning king of light.
    An older detective seems unsettled by Franz von Lebach’s The Little Sbepherd : boy in scarlet waistcoat, short trousers like the ones Hugo von Hofmannsthal wore in his prodigious Viennese boyhood, lying among poppies.
    The young detective picks up the Penguin edition of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes with a black-and-white photograph of a boy’s naked torso on the cover, an ignudo shadowed by leaves.
    Certain evidence of paedophilia and he consults with the clerkish older detective.
    I had a copy of this book as a child with Sisley’s Small Meadows in Spring on the cover . . .black-stockinged girl by poplars . . .blue ribbon around her hat . . .head dipped as if she’s admiring a flower in her hand . . .Augustin Meaulnes used to gather the eggs of the red-headed moorhen in meadows such as these for his mother.
    The great black-backed gull eats other gulls.
    Earlier I was arrested on the strand by the young detective.
    A file of five guards or detectives came into my chalet like Spanish inquisitors in their cone hats.
    A stout, rugby-playing ban garda (woman garda) looks through my album with images from the Národní Gallery in Prague, the State Gallery in Stuttgart, collections in Arnhem, Cracow.
    My shoes are confiscated and I am put in a cell with a ground latrine and the name Dinny scrawled on the wall.
    Mudlarks with bumfluff moustaches and German shepherd dogs alongside them search for golf balls in the shallow river of this town.
    I am interrogated under video camera.
    I make no comments.
    On my return to my chalet, despite the fact I’m next door to the garda station, I find the two windows broken.
    A gang of boys approach the chalet four times, completely demolishing the back-lane window glass so people can climb through.
    A heavy rock is thrown in at me.
    ‘Come out here. But call the ambulance first.’
    ‘That was only a crowd of young lads who did that,’ a young ginger-haired guard, who arrives on the scene, tells me.
    After four nights of terror I abandon the chalet in haste.
    The curtains of the bedroom I move into in Tralee have been rubbed with faeces.
    A drunken youth tries to break into my room one night, accusing me of stealing a Radiohead CD.
    One of the house residents served with Global Strategy Mercenaries in Iraq, saw the North Gate of Baghdad, and when I try to ask him about his experiences he threatens me with the IRA.
    ‘What do you want to know about that for?’
    I stayed in the Salvation Army hostel in Edinburgh once and this is just like it.
    There was a former professor from St Andrews University who’d made the hostel his home.
    I swim near a lighthouse.
    The ringed plover— feadóg an fháinne —lives in abundance here.
    When threatened it drags its body along the ground, tail spread, one wing extended and flapping as if it was injured.
    I recognize the black armpits of the grey plover— feadóg ghlas —which you can see in flight.
    I move into a tiny room near the Lee River that flows into Trá Lí Mic Dedad (the beach of Lí, son of Dedad).
    I frequently spot a heron by the river.
    Cinder-sifter boys search for discarded carbonators by this river, which can be used for plumbing or heating.
    Girls sit on the crossbars of boys’ bicycles like visiting aristocracy in the howdah on an elephant’s back.
    ‘I thought someone just left it here,’ a boy tells me as I stop him stealing my bicycle.
    A crowd of school children bang on my back-lane window.
    I look out.
    ‘Queer,’ one calls back.
    A few evenings later, a Friday evening, there is a knock on the window.
    It is the same boy. A tall gander-like boy. An adolescent gorilla.
    His T-shirt says: ‘I’m a workaholic. Every time I work I need a beer.’
    He asks if he can come in.
    ‘I