gloomy little town. Loneliness seized us, we felt sad, deserted between moss, old walls, and the many painfully white milk bottles that seemed destined for people long dead; even the children swinging from the sides of beef in the unlit butcher shops seemed like ghosts. There is a way of fighting the loneliness that can seize one suddenly in a strange town: buy something; a picture postcard, or some chewing gum, a pencil or cigarettes: hold something in your hand, participate in the life of this town by buying something—but would there be anything to buy here in Limerick, on a Thursday at half-past ten in the morning? Would we not wake up all of a sudden tofind ourselves standing in the rain beside the car somewhere on the highway, and Limerick would have disappeared like a mirage, a mirage of the rain? So painfully white were the milk bottles—not quite so white the screaming gulls.
The old part of Limerick stands in relation to the new part like the Ile de la Cité to the rest of Paris, with the proportion of old Limerick to the Ile de la Cité being about one to three and that of the new Limerick to Paris one to two hundred. Danes, Normans, much later the Irish, occupied this lovely somber island in the Shannon; gray bridges link it to the banks, the gray Shannon rushes by, and up there, where the bridge joins the land, a monument has been erected to a stone—or a stone has been placed on a pedestal. At this stone the Irish were promised freedom of religious expression and a treaty was concluded that was later revoked by the English parliament, so Limerick is also sometimes called “the town of the broken treaty.”
In Dublin we had been told: “Limerick is the most devout city in the world.” So we would only have had to look at the calendar to know why the streets were so deserted, the milk bottles unopened, the shops empty: Limerick was at church, at eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning. Suddenly, before we had reached the center of modern Limerick, the church doors opened, the streets filled up, the milk bottles were removed from the doorways. It was like an invasion: the inhabitants of Limerick were occupying their town. Even the post office was opened, and the bank opened its wickets. Everything looked disconcertingly normal, close, and human, where five minutes ago we seemed to be walking through an abandoned medieval town.
We bought a number of things to reassure ourselves of the existence of this town: cigarettes, soap, picture postcards, and a jigsaw puzzle. We smoked the cigarettes, sniffed the soap, wrote on the postcards, packed up the jigsaw puzzle, and went cheerfully off to the post office. Here there was a slighthitch—the postmistress had not yet returned from church, and her subordinate was unable to clarify what had to be clarified: how much did it cost to send printed matter (the jigsaw puzzle) weighing eight ounces to Germany? The young lady looked imploringly at the picture of the Madonna, with the candle flickering in front of it; but Mary was silent, she only smiled, as she has been smiling for four hundred years, and the smile said: patience. Strange weights were brought out, a strange scale, bright green Customs forms were spread out in front of us, tariff books open and closed, but there remained only one solution: patience. We practiced it. After all, who would want to send a jigsaw puzzle as printed matter from Limerick to Germany in October? Who does not know that the Feast of the Rosary, although not a whole holiday, is more than a half-holiday?
Later on, though, long after the jigsaw puzzle lay in the letter box, we saw the scepticism flowering in hard, sad eyes: melancholy shining in blue eyes, in the eyes of the gypsy selling pictures of saints on the street, and in the eyes of the hotel manageress, in the eyes of the taxi driver—thorns around the rose, arrows in the heart of the most devout city in the world.
Limerick in the Evening
Ravished, robbed of their seals, the
The old part of Limerick stands in relation to the new part like the Ile de la Cité to the rest of Paris, with the proportion of old Limerick to the Ile de la Cité being about one to three and that of the new Limerick to Paris one to two hundred. Danes, Normans, much later the Irish, occupied this lovely somber island in the Shannon; gray bridges link it to the banks, the gray Shannon rushes by, and up there, where the bridge joins the land, a monument has been erected to a stone—or a stone has been placed on a pedestal. At this stone the Irish were promised freedom of religious expression and a treaty was concluded that was later revoked by the English parliament, so Limerick is also sometimes called “the town of the broken treaty.”
In Dublin we had been told: “Limerick is the most devout city in the world.” So we would only have had to look at the calendar to know why the streets were so deserted, the milk bottles unopened, the shops empty: Limerick was at church, at eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning. Suddenly, before we had reached the center of modern Limerick, the church doors opened, the streets filled up, the milk bottles were removed from the doorways. It was like an invasion: the inhabitants of Limerick were occupying their town. Even the post office was opened, and the bank opened its wickets. Everything looked disconcertingly normal, close, and human, where five minutes ago we seemed to be walking through an abandoned medieval town.
We bought a number of things to reassure ourselves of the existence of this town: cigarettes, soap, picture postcards, and a jigsaw puzzle. We smoked the cigarettes, sniffed the soap, wrote on the postcards, packed up the jigsaw puzzle, and went cheerfully off to the post office. Here there was a slighthitch—the postmistress had not yet returned from church, and her subordinate was unable to clarify what had to be clarified: how much did it cost to send printed matter (the jigsaw puzzle) weighing eight ounces to Germany? The young lady looked imploringly at the picture of the Madonna, with the candle flickering in front of it; but Mary was silent, she only smiled, as she has been smiling for four hundred years, and the smile said: patience. Strange weights were brought out, a strange scale, bright green Customs forms were spread out in front of us, tariff books open and closed, but there remained only one solution: patience. We practiced it. After all, who would want to send a jigsaw puzzle as printed matter from Limerick to Germany in October? Who does not know that the Feast of the Rosary, although not a whole holiday, is more than a half-holiday?
Later on, though, long after the jigsaw puzzle lay in the letter box, we saw the scepticism flowering in hard, sad eyes: melancholy shining in blue eyes, in the eyes of the gypsy selling pictures of saints on the street, and in the eyes of the hotel manageress, in the eyes of the taxi driver—thorns around the rose, arrows in the heart of the most devout city in the world.
Limerick in the Evening
Ravished, robbed of their seals, the
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