Emerald Magic Page 4

  DUBLINERS HAVE AN AMBIVALENT RELATIONSHIP, at best, to their landmarks and civic statuary.Whether they love them or hate them, the landmarks are given names that don’t necessarily reflect the desires of the sculptors, but certainly sum up the zeitgeist.

  The first one to become really famous had been the statue of Molly Malone at the top of Grafton Street. Some well-meaning committee had set there a bronze of the poor girl, representing her wheeling her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow; and popular opinion had almost instantaneously renamed this statue The Tart with the Cart.Within weeks, the bright brass shine of the tops of her breasts (as opposed to her more normal patina elsewhere) seemed to confirm as widespread a friend’s opinion that Miss Molly was peddling, as one wag delicately put it, “more than just shellfish” around the streets broad and narrow.

  The convention swiftly took hold in Dublin, as all things do there that give the finger to propriety. The chimney of a former city distillery, turned into a tourist attraction with an elevator and a glassed-in viewing platform on top, became The Flue with the View. The attempt to put a Millennium Clock into the river had overnight become The Time in the Slime. And the bronze statue around which we now stood, the natty little man in his fedora, standing looking idly across O’Connell Street toward the GPO—the wild-tongued exile himself, the muse of Irish literature in the twentieth century, James Joyce himself had been dubbed The Prick with the Stick.

  And so here we stood around him, none of us insensible to what everybody called the statue—and by extension, the man. We’d all done it. And now we needed him.Was this going to be a problem?

  The Eldest Leprechaun raised his hands in the air before the statue and spoke at length in Gaeilge, an invocation of great power that buzzed in all our bones and made the surrounding paving blocks jitter and plate-glass windows ripple with sine waves: but nothing happened.

  Glances were exchanged among those in the gathered crowd. Then one of the Washers at the Ford raised her voice and keened a keen as it was done in the ancient days, though with certain anarchic qualities—a long twelve-tone ululation suggestive of music written in the twenties, before the atonal movement had been discredited.

  And nothing happened at all.

  The Eldest Leprechaun stood there thinking for a moment. “Working with effigies isn’t going to be enough,” he said. “It might be for one of us . . . but not for him, a mortal. We’ve got to go to the graveside and raise his ghost itself.”

  “Where’s he buried?” said another leprechaun. “We’ll rent a van or something . . .”

  “You daft bugger,” said another one, “he’s not buried here. He was never at home after they banned his books. It was always Trieste or Paris, all these fancy places with faraway names . . .”

  Finally, I could contribute something.“Zürich,” I said. “It was Zü-rich. A cemetery above the city . . .”

  “We’ll go,” said the Eldest. “You’ll come with us. And one or two others.We’ll fly to Zürich tomorrow . . . wake him up, and at the very least get his advice. If we can, we’ll bring him back. Until then,” the Eldest said, “everyone travel in groups. Stay off the streets at night if you can.We won’t be long.”

  LEPRECHAUNS STILL HAVE SOME ACCESS TO GOLD, or at least to gold cards: we flew out on Swiss at lunchtime the next day, the direct flight to Zürich. That evening, about five,we were on the ground, and nothing would satisfy the Eldest but that we go straight to the grave, immediately.

  I’d been in Switzerland once or twice, and I was against it. “I’m not sure you should do that,” I said. “The Swiss are very big on not going into places after they’re officially closed . . .”

  The Eldest gave me a look.

  As a result we immediately took the feeder train from the airport to the main station, and the Number 6 tram from the main station tram depot to the Zürichbergstrasse.At Zürichbergstrasse 129 are the gates to Fluntern Cemetery. We got out and found the place locked and apparently deserted behind its high granite walls; but there was a little iron-barred postern gate that was open—or at least, it opened to the Eldest Leprechaun.We went in.

  The cemetery is beautifully kept, and we headed around and up several curving pathways, climbing, for the cemetery is built against the slope of the Zürichberg mountain that leans above the city. Finally, we found the spot.Under a stand of trees, in a sort of semicircular bay, were some tasteful plantings, a bronze of Joyce sitting on a rock and admiring the view, a plaque in the ground saying who was buried there, with dates of birth and death, and a stern sign in German, French, and Italian saying WALKING ON THE GRAVE IS FORBIDDEN.

  The other leprechauns took off their hats. Once more the Eldest raised his arms and spoke that long, solemn invocation in Irish. All around us, the wind in the aspens and birches fell quiet. And suddenly there were three men standing there; or the ghosts of three men.

  One was tall, one was short, and one was of middle height. They were all wearing clothes from the turn of the twentieth-century—loose trousers held up over white shirts with suspenders. They looked at us in some confusion.

  “Where is James Joyce?” said the Eldest Leprechaun.

  “He’s dead,” said the shortest of the three.

  The Eldest Leprechaun rolled his eyes. “I mean,where is he now?”

  “He is not here,” said the middle-sized figure.“He is risen.”

  The tallest of them checked his watch. “And being that it’s the time that it is,” he said, “why would he still be here at all? He’s in the pub.”

  The leprechauns looked at each other.

  “We should have known,” one of them said.

  “Pelikanstrasse?” the Eldest said to the three shadowy figures.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Thanking you,” said the Eldest, and we went straight back out of the cemetery to catch the tram back down the hill.

  At Pelikanstrasse is one of the bigger complexes of one of the bigger Swiss banks. There, in a little plaza by Bahnhofstrasse, you see a number of granite doorways, all leading nowhere; and past them the street curves down into what seems at first a nondescript arc of shop windows and office doorways.

  “Those three guys—”

  “They’re something from Finnegans Wake,” said the leprechaun who was walking next to me, behind the Eldest. “Three guys always turn up together with the initials H, C, and E.Never got into that one, too obscure, don’t ask me for the details. But the pub’s in there too, and in Ulysses . . .”

  He told me how once upon a time, the bar had been the Antique Bar in the first Jury’s Hotel, in Dame Street. There, at a corner table, a little man in round-framed glasses and a slouch hat could often have been seen sitting in front of a red wine and a gorgonzola sandwich, when he could afford them, relaxing in the dim pub-misted afternoon sunlight, while other languages, other universes, roiled and teemed in his brain.

  “But someone had a brain seizure,” the leprechaun said. “Jury’s sold off their old property in Dame Street and arranged to have the hotel knocked down. Urban renewal, progress, all that shite. They wanted the money for the land: that was all. And, they said to themselves, we’ll auction off the innards and get a few extra bob for it. If not,we’ll just throw it all in the tip, and in any case we’ll build a much better bar somewhere else, in a nice new hotel, all covered with lovely Formica.” The leprechaun grimaced. “But then along came, would you believe it, the head of the Swiss security services. He was afraid the Russians would invade his country, and he was looking for a safe house in Ireland where the Swiss government could hide if that happened. And wouldn’t you know he was a Joyce fan. He found out about Jury’s auctioning off the bar, and he got one of the big Swiss banks and some people from the government to buy the whole thing. And then the Swiss came along and took it to bits and numbered every piece, and put it back together in Zürich, and here it is.”

  The leprechaun lowered his head conspiratorially toward mine.

  “The Swiss,�
�� he whispered, “are Celts, do you know.”

  I nodded. “The Helvetii,” I said after few moments. “They made cheese. It’s in the Gallic Wars.”

  “And why wouldn’t they have,” the leprechaun said with relish, “seeing that the furious and bloody Queen Maeve herself was killed by being slung at and hit in the forehead by her stepson with a great lump of the Irish version of Parmesan.”

  He fell silent.

  “Or it might have been Regato,” he added.

  We came to the door of the bar—a simple wooden door, nothing exciting about it—pulled it open, and went in.

  An Irish country-house chef I know once described Zürich to me, under his breath, as “a kick-ass party town.” And so it is. It has many sleek, slinky bars, jumping with the sound of the moment, well hidden from the tourists whom such relentless buzz would confuse. But here, in that busy and congenial city, is something completely different—a corner that is forever Ireland. Here Irish-strength cigarette and cigar smoke tangles (ever so briefly) under the lights before being sucked away by the relentlessly efficient Swiss ventilation system. Here voices converse at Irish volume levels, nearly enough to curl the turbine fans on a Concorde. Here Irish craic (if there is such a word) seeps out of the teak-paneled, glinting, polished walls.

  And here we found Joyce.He was dead, but he didn’t mind, for he was in his local.

  He sat at the back corner table, by himself; amazing that the rest of the place was practically pullulating with people, but this one island of quiet remained. His hat sat on the red leather banquette next to him, his cane leaned against the table, and a glass of red wine sat on the table before him. He looked very much the dapper young man of a statelier time . . . though there was something else about him, something in his eyes, that brought the hair up on the back of my neck. It was more than just being dead.

  Respectfully we approached him, and the Eldest Leprechaun stood by Joyce’s table.“Mr. Joyce,” he said, “you’re needed.”

  You would have wondered, if you’d been watching Joyce’s eyes earlier, whether he was quite in this time and place, or wandering in mind or spirit to some other time, the twenties or thirties perhaps. Now, though, those eyes snapped into the here and now.

  The Eldest Leprechaun spoke to Joyce, quietly and at some length, in Irish. While he did, the narrow, wise little eyes rested on each of us in turn, very briefly. And when he spoke, he sounded annoyed.

  “Well, this is tiresome,” Joyce said.

  Everyone who had the sense to do so, cringed. I didn’t. Later I found out that “tiresome” was as close as Joyce ever got to saying F.

  “What can be done, sir?” said the Eldest Leprechaun.

  Joyce looked thoughtful for a moment. “There is only one hope,” he said. “We must conjure the river.”

  The Eldest Leprechaun blanched.

  “We must raise up Anna Livia,” Joyce said, “the Goddess of the Liffey, and put your case to Her. Only She can save your people now. She may refuse. She is Herself, and has Her own priorities. But I think She will be kindly disposed toward you.And if anyone can raise Her for you, I can. S he and I . . . we were an Item.” And his eyes glinted.

  “You’ll come back with us tomorrow, then?”

  “First thing,” Joyce said.

  AND SO IT CAME TO PASS. I have no idea how one handles airline ticketing for dead people these days, but he was right there with us in business class the next morning, Saturday morning—critiquing the Swiss wines on board and flirting with the flight attendants. Two hours later, just in time for lunch, we were home.

  A minivan-cab took us back to town. “Bloomsday early this year, is it?” said the cab driver to Joyce.

  Joyce smiled thinly and didn’t answer. On June 16 of every year the city was full of counterfeit Joyces. “There was a statue of Anna Livia in town, wasn’t there?” he said.

  “Oh, the Floozie in the Jacuzzi,” the driver said. “They moved it.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “North Quay.”

  “Then that’s where we’re going,my good man.”

  He took us there.We paid him off, and after he’d left, Joyce went over to the statue and looked at it rather sadly.

  It had always resembled a dissolute, weedy-haired woman in a concrete bathtub at the best of times, when it had been installed in the middle of O’Connell Street and running with the music of flowing water.Now, though, sitting dusty, high and dry on wooden pallets in the middle of the stones of an unfinished memorial plaza, surrounded by marine cranes and dingy warehouses, the statue just looked ugly.

  Joyce looked at it and frowned. “Well, we have no choice,” Joyce said. “For this we need the concrete as well as the abstract.”

  He walked over to the waterside. The Eldest Leprechaun went with him. Joyce took off his hat and handed it to the leprechaun. Then he stood straight, his cane in one hand, and suddenly was all magician . . .

  “O tell me all about Anna Livia,” he said in that thin, singing little tenor voice: and though he didn’t raise that voice at all, the sound hit the warehouses and the freighters and the superstructure of the East-link Bridge half a mile away, and ricocheted and rattled from building to building until the water itself started to shake with it, rippling as if from an earth tremor underneath. “I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear—”

  The water inside the river walls leapt and beat against the banks, soaking us all. I began to wonder if we would die: I hadn’t seen the river like this since the last hurricane. Joyce spoke on, and the wind rose, and the stones under our feet shook. “Then, then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slung over her shoulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, forth of her bassein came—!”

  “I hear, I wake,” said a tremendous voice in response. If you’ve once heard it, you will never forget it; Liffey in spate, a thunder, a roar between Her banks, lightning trapped in the water, a green-and-white resistless fury pushing everything before Her into the Bay.

  She rose up. Those who had the sense to do so, covered their eyes. The rest of us were immediately showered with sodden sneakers, slime-laden Coke cans, ancient tattered plastic Quinnsworth bags, and much other, far less printable detritus of urban Dublin existence. She towered up, towered over us. She was water, water in the shape of a woman: Her hair streamed with water, streamed down and became part of Her again; Her gown was water, and the water glowed. She looked up Her river, and down Her river, and said; “Where am I?”

  There was a profound silence all around that had nothing to do with the awe and majesty of Herself.

  “Where am I?” said Anna Livia again, in a tone of voice that suggested someone had better F ing tell Her.

  One lone voice that raised itself, unafraid, over the dead stillness.

  “North Quay,” Joyce said.

  There was a long, long pause.

  “North Quay?” said the gracious Goddess, looking around Her. “What the F am I doin’ here? I was in O’Connell Street last time I looked out this ugly thing’s eyes, with wee babies playin’ in me in the hot weather! When we had it, which was not often. Remind me to destroy Met Eireann when I have a moment to rub together. F ing global warming, I know who’s responsible, them and their peat-burning power stations, and all these F ing SUVs.”

  And then She peered down. “Can that be you?” She said in an accent more of the Gaiety Theatre than anything else. “Jimmy, you son of a bitch, my love, my great and only love, what the F are you doing here? You were at peace this long while, I thought, after they put you in the ground far from home, thanks to that F ing deValera—”

  She went on for some minutes, splendidly, but ran down at last.

  “You didn’t wake me up for nothing, James my love,” She said at last. “What’s to do?”

  “There is a tiger eating our people,” Joyce said. “A Celtic one. It preys on the Old Ones and tries to kill Old Ireland—”

  She was look
ing around Her at the skyline. Not much had changed in terms of tall buildings—the Irish don’t approve of skyscrapers—but much,much else was different, and we were all watching Her face with varying degrees of nervousness.

  “Sure I can smell it,” She said. “Nasty tomcat stink, they’ll always be spraying all over everything. Marking their territory. Their territory indeed!”

  For a long moment more She stood there, head raised against the blue-milk sky, sniffing the air. “Lady,” the Eldest Leprechaun said, “it only comes out at night—”

  “It lies up by day,” She said. “Aye, can’t I just smell it. Hiding won’t help it today. Come on—”

  Anna Livia strode on down the river, slowly, looking from side to side at Her city, while we pursued Her on land as best we could. She was looking increasingly annoyed as She went.Maybe it was the traffic on the Quays, or the pollution, or the new one-way system, which drove everybody insane: or maybe it was some of the newer architecture. One glance She gave the Millennium Spire, erected at last three years late. That glance worried me—Dubliners are sufficiently divided on the Spire that they haven’t yet decided which rude name is best for it—but Anna Livia then turned Her attention elsewhere, looking over the intervening rooftops, southward. Four or five blocks inland stood the International Financial Services Centre, next to one of the city’s two main train stations. It was an ugly building, a green-glass-and-white-marble chimera, dwarfing everything around it—a monument to money, built during the height of the Tiger time.

  “Yes,” She said softly, “there it is, I’ll be bound. Kitty, kitty, kitty!”

  She came up out of the river, then, and started to head crosstown. What other Unsighted mortals were able to make of the sudden flood that leapt up out of the Liffey, I don’t know: but the water got into the underground wiring and immediately made the traffic lights go on the blink, bringing traffic on the Quays to a halt. Maybe it’s a blessing, I thought, as I ran after the others, trying to keep out of the flood of water that followed the colossal shape up out of the river.