Excerpt
girlish infatuation for a youth so different from all the other boys she knew; a youth who was already a man and yet still a child; strong and independent yet suffering periodically his strange and frightening seizures; a youth of solitary ways, yet hungry for the company and the sympathy of others.
Caitlin had given him her company and her sympathy, and ravenously he accepted them. She offered him her body too, her physical as well as her emotional love, but he refused it as a child refuses a distasteful dish.
Caitlin recalled the last time she had tried to seduce the unwilling Padraig. She had brought lunch to him on the lonely slopes of Donevan. They had eaten together on the bank of Tamnagh Burn and lain back in the short, warm grass to watch the fleet of fair-weather clouds sail by overhead. Desire for Padraig overcame her. She reached her hand to his; their fingers interlocked; they turned their faces to each other and smiled. His shy smile, full of love, sent a warm flow of sexual longing through her body. She drew the skirt-of her summer dress up to her navel and placed Padraig’s hand, palm downwards, on the coarse hair of her naked vulva.
Padraig’s smile vanished. He looked at her with the expression of Jesus saying, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” As he withdrew his hand his wild eyes showed his hurt, his disillusionment, his sense of love and trust betrayed. Without a word he rose and walked away through the purple-flowered heather and the scattered rocks. That was the first of several times he huddled below the tors on Donevan and had his vision of the spectral cross.
Caitlin pulled herself free of the cling of memory. “Padraig left here as innocent as he came. And I dare say he will grow old and die in his innocence. What a waste of manhood and of life.”
“You expect all men to be like your father,” Michael said. He hunkered beside Caitlin and threw more turf on the fire. The old cottage felt warm now. The light from the fire jigged across the sheepskins and the earthen floor and reeled along the whitewashed walls. It pirouetted round the table, the two wooden chairs, the dresser. As a boy Michael used to lie in his bed in his parents’ house on the other side of the mountains and watch the antic dance of firelight and shadows, believing they were the ghosts of leprechauns who used to caper on the site before the house was built. He did not know if leprechauns died and became ghosts, but in any case those dancing shadows never frightened him. They were lively and light and mischievous in a lovable way and they used to amuse him before he fell asleep. But the ghosts of human beings were a threat in the night…
Libros Libertad 