I was trying to explain to the General last week that it’s animals that make country life wonderful.
He was standing in the kitchen, blustering about how he was fed up with rural life and that he wanted to go to Moscow because he got an email from someone called Svetlana after he put his address on to a dating site.
“Go,” I said. “But Moscow won’t last. Eventually you’ll end up on your own in some tiny urban apartment, trying to convince yourself that you were right to leave your wife, as you sit glued to the blue of a computer screen, chatting to prostitutes in Russia.”
“What’s so marvellous about animals?” he demanded.
“For one thing,” I replied, “the badgers have stolen the little solar lights I had on the patio. At least that’s what I imagine. They probably rolled them with their snouts to badger city, a warren on the cliff at the end of the garden. I can just imagine them in their underground home wondering why their dark world suddenly brightened up.”
Through the window, I could see two magpies gathering twigs and I was thinking about Ronnie, the Mullingar cat, who came to Leitrim with me two years ago. She could open the cat flap from the outside, by pulling it with her claw; it is a dexterity beyond the capabilities of the Leitrim pussy, and so Ronnie became top cat, and would eat the other cat’s food to demonstrate this superiority.
“Eventually she got so overweight,” I said, “that she died of a heart attack and now magpies are strutting around on her grave.”
The General saw neither eloquence nor irony in the story.
“Magpies,” I explained, “mate for life. They’re not sidetracked from reality by trivial details, like an email from a love sick Russian.”
“That’s because magpies can’t read,” he said.
“Look,” I concluded, “allow me to place this in a philosophical context: animals connect us with the ‘fact-ness’ of being, in all its varied erotic manifestations.”
Sometimes I just use the word erotic randomly to check if the General is listening. It has the same effect on him as the sound of milk squirting from a bottle has on a human baby; it gets his attention.
“What do you mean erotic?” he bellowed.
“I mean a visible sign of something invisible.”
He agreed with this definition, although for him it could only mean lingerie.
“Every morning,” I told him, “I fill three bird feeders with peanuts.”
“So?”
“So it’s a ritual of connection with other sentient beings and through it there comes some kind of erotic fragrance issuing not from a human realm but from the living wilderness.”
“You’re sick,” he declared.
Then I told him a story.
Long ago I was in a hotel bar in Donegal, and there was a woman in the far corner, with a navy blue silk scarf, a white jacket and the teeth of a superior being. I was so terrified of making an approach that I drank my beer alone and she did the same. But when the last holidaymaker had staggered away, she walked over to me and I secured two whiskeys from the barman, who was stacking chairs on tables and sweeping the floor. We played with our room keys, and teased each other about who might have the best bath.
Eventually, we went to my room. She undressed in a flamboyant swirl, collapsed on the bed and went unconscious. I still had her key so I went off to her room. The following morning, I found her on the floor looking for a contact lens. “Maybe they are in the bath,” I joked.
“It,” she snapped as she poked under the bed. “I have only one lens.”
For a long time afterwards I wondered why she would have only one lens. Was it because she had lost the other one previously and was winging it like a car on one headlight, or because she didn’t want to buy a new pair, or did she have one normal eye and one with impaired vision?
But as I explained to the General, it didn’t matter. I awoke alone in her bed and the birds were singing outside the window, and I experienced the kind of sweet pleasure that Wordsworth used to write about: that erotic intensity which peaks in solitude, and in the absence of other humans; a soft presence or “otherness” that calls to us in the song of wild birds and surprises us everywhere, with the signs of a living wilderness, like the tracks of a badger.