Ida, now, ah, our gentle Ida. She came to us when we stopped at noon, bringing our food, and sat with Sophie on the grass at the side of the road while we ate. The girl and the baby watched us with the same intent gaze, as though they were witnessing the celebration of some outlandish rite. The spectacle of two fellows eating their dinner was as mysterious and baffling today as it was yesterday, and all the days before that, but whereas Sophie would, like the rest of us, cease to seek the meaning of human gestures once she had learned to perform them, Ida would never lose her childlike vision. The world for her was a perpetual source of wonder. She had never recognised the nature of habit, the ease which it brings, and therefore it was the continuing oddity of things that fascinated her. It was not innocence, but, on the contrary, a refusal to call ordinary the complex and exquisite ciphers among which her life so tenuously hovered.
A figure approached up the road we had travelled, a tall woman in a long dress carrying a big stick. She strode along at a fast clip, swinging her arms, a mighty creature. Mario, hunched over his plate, chewed slower and slower the nearer she drew, and his eyebrows climbed up his forehead. There was indeed something exceeding strange about her. On she came, her swinging gait expressing, even at that distance, a pent-up driving irascibility. She drew level with the caravan, and flounced past, fixing us with a sullen glare. On her large head sat a frilly bonnet. Her big black boots made the stones fly. She marched past, halted, abruptly swung around, came back, and planted herself in front of us. I stared at the square blue jaw, the horny hands and thick wrists, the swollen muscles doing violence to the arms of the dress. It was a man.
‘I could do with some of that grub,’ he growled, and tossed the stick menacingly from one hand to the other. Mario, with his mouth full of bread, cast a cautious look up the road. Our caravan was parked on a bend, and the others were out of sight. He shrugged, and nodded to Ida, who rose and gathered together what was left of the food, two cold spuds and a lump of bread. The fellow in the dress dropped his stick and snatched the plate out of her hands and, folding his legs like a pair of scissors, plopped down in the middle of the road and began to stuff the food into his mouth, watching us the while from under his black brows. Sophie chortled, and pointed her little fat finger at him. His jaws stopped working and he scowled, and slowly began to chew again as Ida silenced the baba. He swallowed the last potato whole and threw the tin plate aside, heaved a sigh, and suddenly with an angry grunt snatched the bonnet off his head.
Tucking yoke,’ he muttered, glaring at it with great disgust.
Now, behind him, two new figures appeared on the road, one short and fat, the other tall and thin, comical fellows in blue, jogging toward us. Mario laughed.
‘Eh, signora, look whosa coming.’
Our guest peered wildly over his shoulder, swore, and leapt to his feet and pounded off around the bend at high speed. The two policemen arrived, panting and heaving. They stopped, whipped off their helmets, mopped their brows, hauled up their sagging belts. Sophie chuckled again, delighted with them. The fat one jammed his helmet back on his head and pointed a threatening finger at us.
‘Youse crowd,’ he announced, ‘are just looking to be lifted.’ The finger turned and pointed up the road. ‘That lad is after splitting open a man's skull. Just asking for it, youse are, and I'm the man to do it. You can tell them Sergeant Trouncer said so.’
The other one, a consumptive hulk with a sheep's long grey face, who had hovered by his superior's shoulder nodding vigorous support, now said,
‘That's right, tell them that.’
We said nothing. Our apathy in the face of their threats disconcerted him. He thought for a bit.
‘Just asking to be-’
‘Come on, Jem, for Jesus’ sake,’ Trouncer roared. They galloped away. Mario laughed again, and sprang nimbly up on the ditch to watch the chkse, and Ida leaned across to me with her eyes wide and her lip trembling and whispered, as though she had uncovered some enormous secret,
‘Gabriel, it was a…a man!
27
THE EXOTIC, once experienced, becomes commonplace, that is a great drawback of this world. One touches the gold and it turns to dross. It was not so with Prospero's band. I travelled with them for a year, borne onward always amid an always new and splendid oddness which sprang not merely from the excitement of new sights and sites, a new sea of faces every night, but was the essence of these fickle things joined with something more, a sense of strange and infinite possibilities: There was something always ahead of us, a nameless promise never reached and yet always within reaching distance. Perhaps because of this, the fixing of my gaze on a luminous and mythical horizon, I remember best not the circus proper, its halts and performances, but the travelling, the grate of wheels on stony roads, the thick scent of the horses, the voices floating back from the forward caravans, and the land, revolving in great slow circles around our slowly moving centre, the sad land, the lovely land.
Later in the day that we left the town, as we {leaded toward the distant mountains, evening sunlight broke through the clouds, and Mario, suddenly gay, began to sing. Shadows crept across the sparkling meadows. Rain fell briefly. O mi amove, mi amove. The road sailed down a hill toward tall sand dunes. The sun disappeared, the light around us turned a misty blue. A sulphurous glow rose and trembled above the dunes. The wind sang in the tall reeds, the unseen sea muttered. We struck away inland again, climbing now, and when I looked back I saw, in the fast-failing light, a boat with a black mast, bearing no sign of life, glide out in silence from behind a headland, a mysterious silent ship. Hill fog settled on the thorns. Night fell.
We went up into the foothills under a huge sky of stars. Black dark it was, moonless and still. Moths reeled in the glow of our lanterns. In a valley away to our left a cluster of lights bespoke a village, but the winding road we wearily followed refused to lead us there. The horses, heads bent, half asleep, traipsed on, locked in their stride. No one called a halt. A strange torpor descended on us. The air up here was thin. I sat beside Mario on the driving seat, swaying with the sway of the caravan, heedless and at peace. Vague music reached my ears. At first it seemed to come from everywhere at once, this tiny song, as though the little lights and vivid stars, the far small noises, as though the night itself were singing, but then ahead I saw at the side of the road the glow of lamplight on the undersides of leaves, and I identified the wail of pipes, the skirl of a bodhran, and Mario sprang awake and swore as the caravan ahead of us halted abruptly. A pub!
We gathered on the road. Silas stamped his feet and vigorously rubbed his backside, and the golden children yawned. Sybil, rocking Sophie in her arms, muttered under her breath. The pub was a low dingy place with a thatched roof. There was a brown opaque window dimly lit, a lantern hanging beside a crooked door, and a suggestion of turf smoke up in the darkness. Tall poplars glimmered. The wild music issued forth along with a gush of porter fumes through an open vent above the door. Silas entered, and the uproar inside ceased immediately. We shuffled in behind him, pushing and shoving sleepily. He stuck his hands into his pockets and considered the upturned faces of old men and boys, flushed youths, wild-eyed women. He grinned.