He opened his mouth. He sang.
The sweet clear baritone voice which rang over O’Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a quiver, not a flaw, anywhere. The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free.
“Fine,” said John, “lovely.”
“Lovely,” I said. “Oh, yes.”
We listened while he sang the full irony of Dublin’s Fair City where it rains forty days a month the winter through, followed by the white-wine clarity of Kathleen Mavourneen, Macushla, and all the other tired lads, lasses, lakes, hills, past glories, present miseries, but all somehow revived and moving about young and freshly painted in the light spring, suddenly-not-winter rain. If he breathed at all, it must have been through his ears, so smooth the line, so steady the putting forth of word following round-belled word.
“Why,” John murmured, “he should be on the stage. He’s too good to be standing here.”
“I’ve thought that often.”
John fumbled with his wallet. I looked from him to the beggar singing, the rain washing his bare head, streaming through his shellacked hair, trembling on his earlobes.
And then, the strange perversity. Before John could move to pay, I took his elbow and pulled him to the other side of the bridge. John resisted, gave me a look, then came along, cursing.
As we walked off, the man started another song. Glancing back, I saw him, head proud, black glasses taking the pour, mouth open, and the fine voice clear:
I’ll be glad when you’re dead
in your grave, old man,
Be glad when you’re dead
in your grave, old man.
Be glad when you’re dead,
Flowers over your head,
And then I’ll marry the journeyman …
“Why won’t you give him, of all people, money!?” said John.
The beggars of Dublin, who bothers to wonder on them, look, see, know, understand?
I for one did not in the next days.
When I did, I was sure that that stone-gargoyle man taking his daily shower on O’Connell Bridge while he sang Irish opera was not blind. Then again, his head to me was a cup of darkness.
One afternoon I found myself lingering before a tweed shop near O’Connell Bridge, staring in at a stack of good thick burly caps. I did not need another head cover, I had a life’s supply collected in a suitcase, yet in I went to pay out money for a fine warm brown-colored cap, which I turned round and round in my hands, in a trance.
“Sir,” said the clerk. “That cap is a seven. I would guess your head, sir, at a seven and one half.”
“This will fit me. This will fit me.” I stuffed the cap into my pocket.
“Let me get you a sack, sir—”
“No!” Hot-cheeked, suddenly suspicious of what I was up to, I paid and fled.
And there waited the bridge in the soft rain. All I need do now was walk over and—
In the middle of the bridge, the capless blind beggar was gone.
In his place stood an old man and woman cranking a great piano-box hurdy-gurdy, which ratcheted and coughed like a coffee grinder eating glass and rocks, giving forth no melody but a grand and melancholy sort of iron indigestion.
I waited for the tune, if tune it was, to finish. I kneaded the new tweed cap in my sweaty fist while the hurdy-gurdy prickled, spanged, and thumped.
“Be damned to ya!” the old man and old woman, furious with their job, seemed to say, their faces thunderous pale, their eyes red hot in the rain. “Pay us! Listen, but we’ll give you no tune! Make up your own!” their mute lips said.
And standing there on the spot where the beggar always sang without his cap, I thought: Why don’t they take one fiftieth of the money they make each month and have the thing tuned? If I were cranking the box, I’d want a song, at least for myself! If you were cranking the box! I answered. But you’re not! And it’s obvious they hate the begging job—who’d blame them—and want no part of giving back a familiar song as recompense.
How different from my capless friend.
My friend?
I blinked with surprise, then stepped forward and nodded.
“Beg pardon. The man with the concertina …”
The woman stopped cranking and glared at me.
“Ah?”
“The man with no cap in the rain.”
“Ah, him!” snapped the woman.
“He’s not here today?”
“Do you see him?” cried the woman.
She started cranking the infernal device.
I put a penny in the tin cup.
She peered at me as if I’d spit on her hand.
I added another penny.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked.
“Sick. In bed. The damn cold! We heard him go off, coughing.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“No!”
“Do you know his name?”
“Now, who would know that!”
I stood there, feeling directionless, thinking of the man somewhere off in the town, alone. I looked at the new cap foolishly.
The two old people watched me.
I put a last shilling in the cup.
“He’ll be all right,” I said to no one.
The woman heaved the crank. The bucketing machine let loose a fall of glass and junk in its hideous interior.
“The tune,” I said. “What is it?”
“You’re deaf!” snapped the woman. “It’s the national anthem! Do you mind removing your cap?”
I showed her the new cap in my hand.
She glared up. “Your cap, man, your cap!”
“Oh!” Blushing, I seized the old cap from my head.
Now I had a cap in each hand.
The woman cranked. The “music” played. The rain pelted my head, my eyelids, my mouth.
On the far side of the bridge, I stopped for the hard, the slow decision: which cap to pull on my drenched skull?
During the next week I passed the bridge often, but there was always just the old couple there with their pandemonium device, or no one there at all.
And then on a Friday night John brought a bottle and a retyped script to my room. Our talk was long and constructive, the hour grew late, there was a fire like an orange lion on the hearth, big and lively, and brandy in our glasses, and silence for a moment in the room, perhaps because quite suddenly we found silence falling in great soft flakes past the high windows.
John, glass in hand, watched the continual lace, then looked down at the midnight stones and at last said, under his breath, “ ‘There’s only a few of us left.’ ”
I waited a moment and said: “I heard one of those beggars say that. What does it mean!”
John watched all those figures down there standing in the shadows and sipped his whiskey.
“Once I thought it meant he fought in the Troubles and there’s just a few of the IRA left. But no. Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that too. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren’t many ‘human beings’ left to look, see, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running, jumping, there’s no time to study one another. But I guess that’s bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.”
John turned from the window, walked over and took the new tweed cap from where I had placed it off the mantel and said, “Did you see the paper today?”
“No.”
John took a crumpled tear sheet out of his pocket.
“There’s just the item, bottom half of page five, Irish Times. It seems that beggar on O’Connell Bridge just got tired. He threw his concertina into the River Liffey. And jumped after it.”
He was back again, then, yesterday! I thought. And I didn’t see!
“The poor bastard.” John laughed with a hollow exhalation. “What a funny, horrid way to die. That damn silly concertina—I hate concertinas, don’t you?—wheezing on its way down, like a sick cat, and the man falling after. I laugh and I’m ashamed of laughing. Well. They didn’t find the body. They’re still looking.”
“Oh, God!” I cried, getting up. “Oh, damn!”
John watched me carefully now. “You couldn’t help it.”
“I could! I never gave him a penny, not one, ever! I’ve been around town, shoveling out pennies. But never to him! Hell!”
I was at the window now too, staring down through the falling snow. “I thought his bare head was a trick to make me feel sorry. Damn, after a while you think everything’s a trick! I used to pass there winter nights with the rain thick and him there singing, and he made me feel so cold I hated his guts. I wonder how many other people felt cold and hated him because he did that to them? So instead of getting money, he got nothing in his cup. I lumped him with the rest. But maybe he was one of the legitimate ones, the new poor just starting out this winter, not a beggar ever before, so you hock your clothes to feed a stomach and wind up a man in the rain without a cap.”
The snow was falling fast now, erasing the lamps and the statues in the shadows of the lamps below.
“How do you tell the difference between them?” I asked. “How can you judge which is honest, which isn’t?”
“The fact is,” said John quietly, “you can’t. There’s no difference between them. Some have been at it longer than others and have gone shrewd, forgotten how it all started a long time ago.
On a Saturday they had food. On a Sunday they didn’t. On a Monday they asked for credit. On a Tuesday they borrowed their first match. Thursday a cigarette. And a few Fridays later they found themselves, God knows how, in front of
