A loneliness so far from the heart of darkness

WHEN I’M travelling with a theatre show, I stay in different hotels. I move about the country like a shadow. I imagine my jeep is a ghost gliding through the 19th century, and that the horses in the fields are standing in a long-ago time. I imagine that on the wide streets of old towns like Cahir and Kilmallock people of the 1800s are still standing around, and that they can see me moving through their world, driving my ghostly stagecoach without horses.

And I love the anonymity of hotels; they are places where I can be both close to other people, and yet utterly aloof.

Like a bewildered cleric, pacing the cloister, I pace the hotel foyer, and I am close to other people without being intimate.

Although the clerics I knew usually had more time for golf courses than for monasteries – over-active and forever on the go – their cars were always full of camogie players. They needed others around them all the time, which is a sign of great loneliness.

Even the General likes to say that the loneliest place to be is in a crowd, or in the arms of a person one no longer loves.

The Irish clergy were a paradox: lonely, yet gregarious, living in the fish bowl world of the parochial house, where anyone could walk into their private space and take a piece of it.

I had a distant cousin who was a priest in Nigeria; he used to arrive without warning, from the airport, in a Volkswagen, and buzz around the drumlins, visiting old friends and relations.

My mother used to cook him dozens of rashers and puddings in the middle of the day, because she said he was half-starved in Africa, and over the years he brought her an enormous number of handbags made from crocodile skin.

He had a red face, which I presumed was from too much sun, and sometimes the crimson flesh appeared to be on the verge of seeping blood. I always suspected that he had health problems, so I wasn’t surprised when he finally arrived home one November with cancer, and died quietly in a nursing home in Wicklow.

He never boasted about his work in Africa, or tried to gather up the narrative of his deeds and make them heroic. In fact, he never said anything about his work in Africa at all.

If he came in summertime, he would idle about with his country cousins, winning hay or footing turf, and if he came in winter he would just sit by the fire for a few weeks, his red face dripping beads of sweat as he sat, and I’d ask him what was life like “in the bush”, because that’s what Cavan people called Africa in those days.

He’d say, “Africans are lovely people.” That’s all. “Lovely people.” Sometimes he’d show us photographs of himself with a cluster of women sitting at a well, or perhaps standing outside a school with a gang of little boys.

I remember seeing him one morning in the Volkswagen outside our house. He had slept in it all night because he didn’t want to wake us. And when I opened the curtains he was praying from his breviary and there was something serene and calm in his eyes that I envied. He was like a ghost in my world and he was enveloped in a solitude I have sought ever since.

In hotels, I wrap myself in solitude, as I stand in the lift, or sauna, or lounge bar. It is as if at last I am a ghost in the world of others. At night I hear people orgasming in distant rooms, just as a dying person might hear children playing outside the window. But I’m not lonely. It’s just that I have given up on life, for a moment, and solitude is nothing more nor less than the realisation that one’s day, or even one’s life, has been uneventful, and not worth holding on to.

Solitude is sitting in the sauna, with equanimity, and without desire, no matter who is sitting on the other bench. Solitude is being at home in the poverty of one’s own bones.

So a good hotel is about the only degree of intimacy I can bear, especially after being on stage all evening in the theatre. To know that there is love out there beyond the wall; that is enough. And to know that where I sleep, I am safe from harm.