Houlihan's Wake

  Stanko hesitates. Yulia moves over to him and pushes him gently away from Goran.

  “His shirt is loose enough. Just stay out of the way while I take his pulse,” she says.

  She kneels beside Goran and takes hold of his thick wrist. We all close in, but draw back when Yulia glares at us.

  “His heart is still beating, but the pulse is faint. Help me move him into the shade.”

  Milena whips a cloth from a table and spreads it in the shadow of a beach-hut wall. Together, Yulia, Stanko and I lift Goran and carry him to it.

  “Lay him down gently.”

  “Recovery position?” I ask.

  “Right.”

  We lay Goran on his side on the makeshift groundsheet. He is unconscious, but sweating.

  “Anyone got any aspirin?” No answer.

  “I’ll go and get some from the pharmacy,” I tell them.

  “Quicker if I go,” snaps Stanko, and heads off at a run.

  Yulia looks distraught.

  “I’m going to do mouth-to-mouth.”

  She again kneels beside Goran, presses his cheeks to open his mouth, lays her mouth over his, and forces her breath into his lungs. After a few minutes, she stops, looks up.

  “He’s coming back to us.”

  So is Stanko, panting from his exertions, and clutching medicine in both hands.

  “I got some nitroglycerine as well. That’s what he needs, isn’t it?”

  “Does he have it on prescription?” Yulia asks.

  “He never has anything on prescription,” I point out.

  “But does he take it?”

  “He doesn’t take anything for his health except rakia,” I remind them.

  “In that case, it could do him more harm than good. Just the aspirin will be fine, when he comes round. Where’s the nearest phone? We need to call an ambulance.”

  I pull my mobile from my shorts pocket. “I can’t usually get a line here, but if you tell me the number, I’ll give it a try.”

  Milena tells me the emergency medical services number. They fall silent as I try to get through.

  A loud groan breaks the silence. We all look at Goran, who rolls onto his back.

  He tries to speak, but no words come out.

  “Stand back from him,” Yulia orders. She tells Goran to relax, not to move.

  “No line,” I murmur.

  “It’s quicker if we take him ourselves. Stanko, did you see a taxi in the village?”

  “No, but they come and go all the time. Maybe now …”

  “Goran’s Dodge is right here,” I tell them. “If someone can drive it.” I don't remember how to handle a car.

  “I can.” Milena smiles. “Don’t often get the chance to drive here.”

  Stanko looks crestfallen. “Goran was saying the ignition’s on the blink.”

  “No problem. I can hot-wire it. I knew I’d put that skill to honest use one day.”

  Yulia looks at Milena with wide eyes, then turns her attention to Goran.

  “Goran, nod if you can hear me.”

  Goran nods.

  “Are you in pain?”

  He nods again.

  “Where? Just nod if it hurts where I point to.”

  She points to her own chest, shoulders, neck, jaw, teeth, arms, abdomen. Each time, except for the teeth, Goran nods.

  “We’re going to drive you to the hospital in Pochatlu. It won’t be fun, but we’ll be there in half an hour. If you chew an aspirin, it’ll help with the pain. Can you manage that?”

  Goran nods once more.

  Yulia puts her hand behind his neck and lifts his head up.

  Stanko slips an aspirin into his mouth. Goran chews.

  Milena locks up the kitchen shack and goes off to start Goran’s car. Six minutes later, she drives it up between the rows of beach huts.

  Stanko and I again lift Goran, who moans softly. We lay him along the back seat. Then the two of us squeeze into the front seat, next to Milena.

  Yulia gets into the back and cradles Goran’s head in her lap. Goran groans.

  Milena reverses down the sandy path and on to the tarmac road.

  It is not yet noon when we unload Goran onto a stretcher outside the emergency department of Pochatlu hospital. The paramedics wheel him inside, and our group hurries after them.

  Milena, who is fluent in Spanish, explains to the duty nurse what has happened. The nurse glances at Goran, issues an emergency classification, gives Milena a sheaf of forms to fill in on Goran’s behalf, and goes off to arrange an immediate examination.

  Milena is still wading through the forms when the nurse returns with another team of paramedics. She tells Milena that a cardiologist will see Goran right away, but it’ll be a couple of hours before there will be any news.

  “That’s okay,” says Milena, “it’ll give me time to park.” She gives us an ironic smile.

  The paramedics converge on Goran. A look of panic passes across his face when they start to wheel him away. Then his features settle, and he fixes a gimlet stare on Yulia.

  “Vitosha’s rubbish! Absolute rubbish! Everyone knows the best mushrooms grow way down south.”

  Visions

  Colonial church towers shimmer and flash

  in the mirrorshade façade of the university,

  burn disapproval into our Europe-white necks

  as we jaywalk the freeway to the old

  academy ablaze with the light of Orozco,

  whose broad brush clarifies past with future,

  admonishes the wordwise, whose mighty pens

  inspired, then served, sword after sword.

  Below his frescoes, a cherub-cheeked,

  shifty-eyed gilded youth steps up

  to pocket a “Medalla al Valor Masonico”.

  Bright blood seeps from the pulp

  of a book clutched by a fanatic

  caught in righteous rictus above him.

  It thickens, drops, and brands the neck

  of the deserving young bulwark

  against the urge to freedom.

  Next door, Expiatoria’s gothic spires

  gleam with modern glass stained

  in reassuring colours to ward off

  Orozco’s bleak truths, to harvest

  more souls from acquiescent bodies

  for a hungry god.

  White Whale Island

  The needle pricks her finger, teasing out a drop of blood that amplifies the vibrations reaching Grace from White Whale Island. She lays aside the delicate lampshade she is crafting for the beachfront bar, gets to her feet and strides down to the water’s edge. The vibrations from the island resonate even more strongly in her head, and she stands transfixed, staring at it across the ocean breakers. She has heard it is sacred to the Mayas, a point where cosmic energy intersects with the Earth’s elements before dispersing in all directions. And she has seen wedding parties heading out to it in launches to overlay the Catholic ceremony with its benediction, like icing on the wedding cake. Grace has, of course, felt the mystical undertow at Ayer’s Rock and, to a lesser extent, at holy sites far from home, but never before has she felt so personal a call as that coming to her from White Whale Island. She has entered the water without thinking. Now she glances round to check the lifeguards’ yellow flag is still flying and, sure that she won’t be followed, dives under the first Pacific breaker. The strong, easy strokes that have served her so well in many of the world’s seas become a form of meditation; the vibrations are her compass. Before half an hour has slipped away, Grace is negotiating an inlet to make landfall on White Whale Island.

  In the late afternoon heat, Grace stands on the guano-encrusted rock, legs akimbo, arms spread, feeling the vibrations encircling her, like the Earth Goddess’s answer to Leonardo da Vinci. Happy, she opens her outer eyes, and is blinded by the sun’s rays refracted off the white rock stretching into more white rock ahead of her. Grace stumbles around her domain, and finds no sweetness,
no fresh water, no plants thrusting through the rock’s bird-shit crust, no insects. The birds themselves have deserted in search of food. The sound inside her head is overpowering. The strength leaves her legs. Grace struggles to achieve the lotus position, but consciousness disappears.

  The vibrations wake her. It is dark; the tide has turned. Her deep-tanned skin is burning; her head aches. She looks toward the shore: the few lights seem distant. Grace locates her entry point and releases herself from White Whale Island. The water’s coldness is a shock, but it wakes her completely. Grace soon hits her stride, but progress is slow: currents cross, and tides rip her in directions she does not want to go. Grace is tired, very tired. Yemenjá calls to her from below, and Grace feels how easy it would be to abandon herself in sacrifice to the goddess of the sea, but her thoughts spin off to her own mother, and to stem the tears--she is not sure whose--Grace ploughs all her attention into her stroke. The shore is nearer, but a second wave of tiredness strikes even harder than the first. The face of a child halts Grace as she slips down into the wave. It is her own face, but tinged with someone else. Past, present or future? Grace cannot tell, but her re-awoken curiosity gives her the energy to surge to the surface, establish buoyancy and cling to it, letting the waves take her where they will. Grace hears a breaker crashing on the shoreline. Surf envelopes her and toys with her as though she were a plastic doll. Coral sears her right leg and lets her know she is still alive. The sea deposits her on the sand and leaves her. In pain, she rises to her feet and hobbles towards the lights. She will beg them to call an ambulance or take her to the nearest hospital. No curandero this time. And if--when--she gets better, she will charge a proper price for her lampshades and for the haircuts she gives on the beach. Maybe she will even test the waters of human affection again. It will not be easy. But at least those damned vibrations have stopped.

  A Whole Year Without Drowning

  Houlihan discards his guilt at the water’s edge.

  Chill Pacific tentacles tow his ankles in.

  He dives below the surf, casts free his past,

  takes the salty secretions of Yemenjà into his lungs,

  lets her cross-currents tug their war

  over the sponge-like carcass he has sloughed.

  A pelican swoops at two bodies, veers off.

  One moves, rises on unsteady limbs,

  drags its fellow beyond the water’s reach,

  with hand and mouth, human skill and flattery,

  redeems its life from the sea-goddess,

  then offers it back to fate

  with kicks and blows and unkind blasphemies.

  The pelican intuits carrion, yet Houlihan twitches.

  The lifeguard has saved the year, Playa Chisme’s first

  with no drowning. He has gone to its fiesta.

  Houlihan is reborn, into a world of pain.

  He cries from every orifice, convulses with cold

  and possibilities, crawls among worlds in grains of sand

  back to our own.

  [end]

  Notes

  Houlihan's Wake

  The title tips its hat to Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce's novel in which a man comes back to life during his own wake. At the end, Houlihan intends to use the lifeguards' party to indulge his own feeling of being reborn.

  On my first day in “Playa Chisme”, I noticed a man sitting in a yoga pose on the beach, hatless in the noonday sun. I asked about him, and learned that he had come to Playa Chisme to die, because he wanted to spend his last days in a really beautiful place. It is an extraordinarily life-affirming place, and last time I visited the yoga man was still there, though he now wore a panama hat and hugged the shade. Houlihan, too, is determined to die there, and finds it just as impossible.

  First published in The View From Here.

  Phoenix Mexico

  I wrote this for the 2001 Biennale art exhibition in Venice. They set up a “Bunker Poetico” adjoining the exhibition space at the Arsenale site, where they displayed a selection of poems on the topic of peace, including this one. I was dead chuffed to be on view among the best of contemporary art, as I thought, but when I actually went there, it turned out that Venetian weather had taken its toll: summer rain had left most of the poems illegible. Fortunately, this one was included on the Biennale website, under the flag of Mexico. It is essentially a call to avoid romanticising the civilisations of the past. Their people deserved better; the survivors still do.

  Murals

  Mexico has a tradition of great mural painters, including Diego Rivera and Orozco. You can see some of Orozco's finest work at the Instituto Cultural de Cabanas in Guadalajara, a building which has been a lunatic asylum, a barracks, a jail and an orphanage holding up to 3,000 children. The best way to view the painting on the ceiling is to stretch out on a bench below them, especially if you're still suffering from jet-lag, which will make them seem more hallucinatory than they might otherwise appear: the human stain in all its gore.

  First published in Dead Snakes.

  Leaking Grail

  The small, picturesque town square in Ajijic was under threat from property development that would drive away the tourists it was meant to attract in place of the low-income artists who had come to live there. Down the road, the town's main draw, beautiful Lake Chapala, the country's largest natural lake, was being invaded by water hyacinth and drained away to provide Mexico City and Guadalajara with water. The construction workers epitomised the destruction of the ground beneath their feet.

  First published in Transparent Words.

  Missionary

  “Playa Chisme” is a fictionalised amalgam of villages on the Pacific coast of Mexico, some way south of Puerto Escondido. “Chisme” is the Spanish for “gossip”, which is one of the preferred occupations among those who live or sojourn there, as in countless small places. Latin men do tend to get bowled over by blondes, I guess because they seem exotic. “Elke” was easy on the eye and clever enough to let her body do the talking. In retrospect, I regret being influenced by the gossip, because adults can look after themselves. Nevertheless, she was supposedly there to look after disabled children, and I thought the way she made it clear how little that job meant to her revealed a colonialist attitude, so I lost respect for her.

  First published in Dead Snakes.

  Mazunte Jazz Hurts

  Mazunte is a small town on the Oaxaca coast, south of “Playa Chisme”. Wonder of wonders, it has a jazz festival. Each # represents a number played by the band in which Hamish plays. I have tried to make him as much of an outsider as possible to highlight the unifying power of good music. It is, of course, a speeded-up coming-of-age episode in which the hero fails to get the girl (who does not fall for his musical success) but finds himself. Even I find it hard to imagine dark futures at an open-air jazz festival on the Pacific coast of Mexico!

  First published in Pyrokinection.

  Dolores

  The story of the poem, Mazunte Jazz Hurts.

  First published in The Camel Saloon.

  Dog Day Sundown

  The residents of the beautiful, relatively unspoilt bay that houses “Playa Chisme” are divided over what to do with their golden egg. There are those who would tend it, content to see their poverty recede year after year. A minority would smash it and sell the contents to the highest bidder. To make it attactive to the concrete merchants, they have first to get rid of the superannuated hipsters and the youngsters who have drifted there from five continents. Although they cannot round up the hippies, who are mostly well integrated into the local community and its economy, they can, and sometimes do, round up their dogs and dispose of them in a variety of reputedly barbaric ways. The sunsets are amazing.

  First published in Dead Snakes.

  Mushrooms

  Most of the characters in this story are based on real people who live, or just hang out, on Mexico's Pacific coast. To preserve their privacy, I have turned them all
into Bulgarians and changed their physical appearance. Like the long-stay foreigners I met there, they argue violently about trivial things, yet when a real emergency arises, they immediately wake up and band together, and hidden talents come to the fore. I have put some nasty, racist statements into the mouth of the narrator, Ivaylo. He says things about immigrants in Bulgaria that I often hear said about immigrants in Italy, where I live, and which, years ago, I often heard said about Italian immigrants in London. I hope, by moving them to a new context, to make clear both the inevitability and the stupidity of such statements.

  Visions

  Masonic ceremonies were advertised in a building in Guadalajara adorned with frescoes by Orozco. I imagine him taking a small revenge. A church next door harnessed more-modern art to repackage the old lies through which Orozco saw so clearly.

  First published in Other Voices.

  White Whale Island

  The protagonist, Grace, is based on a young Australian woman whom I encountered in “Playa Chisme”. Her swim back to land and life, though, comes from the true story of a former student of mine in Angola. Despite being an Air Force helicopter pilot, which the Reagan régime had made a very dangerous occupation, he survived the civil war, became an air-taxi co-pilot, and crash-landed in the sea. He swam a long way to shore, the only survivor. He recounted how he had, several times, been tempted to give in to his exhaustion and let himself drown, but each time he had called up the image of his mother and of his daughter, and thus found the strength to go on.

  First published in Eunoia Review.

 

  A Whole Year Without Drowning

  The poem of Houlihan's Wake.

  First published in The Camel Saloon.

  About the Author

  Bryan Murphy travelled extensively as a teacher of English as a foreign language before settling in Italy, where he worked as a translator for a United Nations agency. He now concentrates on his own words.