<b>"THE ALTAR CLOTH AND THE POPE"
by T. Wignesan
(in Bunga Emas: An Anthology of Contemporary Malaysian Literature, 1930-63. London: Anthony Blond Ltd. with Rayirath (Raybooks) Publications, Kuala Lumpur, 1964, 272p.
Re-published in Bunga Emas and Tracks of a Tramp. Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish Books, 2014, 287p.) </b>
"Ah ye serious?" the salesgirl said.
"Yeah, says I," he said. O'Brien's beady eyes had that faraway look that barely dipped below the rim of his pint of bitter. For a few absorbing moments he held that look as he drew in the precious liquid. The tips of his right hand pressed against the chipped pentagonal shapes of the glass. In the distance, it looked like a tiny octopus clasping a honey-drenched hive, its tentacles draining the bitter-nectar through the holes of the hive. As he blinked to continue his tale, the clearer spaces of the glass gave the impression of a magnified eye of a fly.
And the salesgirl at Schabbys walked right away to the buyer with a request to attend to O'Brien. It made her feel important when she had to go to her immediate boss with a request. The buyer listened to O'Brien and was not impressed, but was willing to grant that it was an interesting enough story to bring to the notice of the director.
So up they went, O'Brien first into the lift, patronisingly ushered in by the staid, serious-minded buyer. They were followed for no apparent reason by the salesgirl who trailed rather hesitantly on the threshold, looking at the buyer for his consent. Since it was an exceptional circumstance even in their store, he looked away as if to say, "You can come in on this if you want, but I'm not saying anything."
The director pondered over the long-term effects of the occasion and seemed amused. He got up, smothering O'Brien with coaxing glances, much as though he had already witnessed O'Brien's triumphant return from Rome and was now smiling his best before the local press photographers. If it came to that, he thought, he would give his own version of the adventure as though it had all started from his desk.
He summoned his store artist and proclaimed that no altar cloth would be fit for the Pope's eyes that did not carry the magnificent crest of his establishment.
"See that you give this gentleman cost price, you understand!" he announced without taking his eyes off bewildered O'Brien's face. At which voice, the salesgirl felt that the message was directed to her, and showed her unnoticed self to their surprise by crying out: "Thank yew, Sir, thank yew . . ." as though the concession was made in her favour.
The day O'Brien made up his mind to hitch-hike to Rome to present an altar cloth to the Pope was when he returned to Dublin after his peregrinations in England. He had left behind in Dublin a life that he would sooner cry over than forget. Before his father gave up drinking, he made sure he gave up his job as well. That was his father's logic. "Yew can't have money and not drink as well," he would say. So his mother went out to the fashionable district as a cleaner to keep the home. Then, it was, the days when O'Brien waited for father to return with the dinner were gone. Now mother was sure to bring pastries and plums that he had already grown to link up with the other rich district. But O'Brien loved his father. There was the time when all the boys of the neighbourhood were showing off their confirmation suits, and O'Brien cried all night for fear of the morning.
But when morning came, Dad was there knocking early on O'Brien's waking ears. Hardly were they soaped, and Dad dragged him along to main street and woke up the draper with gusto and fitted O'Brien out grand in a boastful suit.
"Oye know it now, he played at Bingo hard all night and won," O'Brien reminisced.
But when Dad died, O'Brien went through a strange awakening. Just at that time too Matt Talbot died, flogging himself to death, as penance for his ruin in drink and as a tribute to "He that walked barefoot and came on an ass feeding the poor." Matt became a household word for him, and mother was always there to wash his and Dad's sins in Matt's wounds. O'Brien grew to worship the saintliness of Matt's act of self-mortification.
He had returned to Dublin only after Mother was buried. It was only when he went to cry at Mother's grave that the whole world changed for him. Mother, by some uncanny chance, was buried at the foot of Matt Talbot's grave. That was when all his ideas came to him. That was when the poor for whom the St. Vincent de Paul's bothered, did not seem quite right. All these young lads and girls talking shop about charity did not mean anything to him, especially when they indulged the good money in fireside teas, between work, no doubt. The shanty towns of Hong Kong became as much of his life's care. And now, years after, driving his London bus up Edgware Road, he worried over his West Indian conductor as much as he was unquestioning when his only son, he is educating in college, demanded forty quid for a holiday.
That day when he set out from Dublin, only those at Schabbys held out any hope for him, especially the director. Others who had helped him to organise a concert for the passage money gave up the idea when Kennedy walked right into the pub with the collection-box. Once over the channels, his route was less tiresome. There were peaches and plums all the way to Rome. And when he arrived at the Irish Embassy in Rome, broken, dirty but cheerful, the man behind the counter was quick to offer him a box of twenty Afton Majors. Soon he was packed off to the Central Committee of Pilgrims, and a thousand lire piece and free clothes and food and putting up for a week, during which time, his request to present the altar cloth personally met with little encouragement though it was accepted with good grace. When he was just about to leave for Dublin, the old priest with the long beard turned up and asked him to prepare himself for an audience with the Pope.
"I've never seen any face like his. I can describe your face. I can't describe his eminence. When I told him how I hitchhiked, his face lighted up, and he looked up and laughed happily. He seemed to give off joy. And when I told him how I got the cloth at cost price with the free painting on it after the concert failed to raise money, he laughed out loud, kissed his ring and gave me his blessing."
The news flashed back that O'Brien had seen and given the altar cloth to the Pope. The director prepared himself, cancelled his holiday to the Hebrides, and came down to all the departments. He saw to it that everybody would recognise O'Brien as soon as he came in. He saw to it that a generally better state of cleanliness was observed for so pure a being now as O'Brien that sheltered in the Vatican in the presence of the Pope must of needs consecrate the store. And he issued an edict that all O'Brien's relatives should be given cost price in the linen department.
Many times he had felt he should call up the local newspaper and give away the authoritative version of the story. But then he was satisfied, his version had already taken deep root in all the buyers' minds with strict instructions that it was no secret. For days now, the director was on all floors, in order not to be out of the picture, should O'Brien suddenly breeze in. After all the townsfolk were saying of O'Brien that he was a "right little god, that is!
O'Brien handed around free salmon sandwiches at the opening of a pub on Charing Cross Road and declared: "If I had my way, I mean, if I win the pools or something, what would I do with the fifty thousand. I'd build a house with a huge kitchen, and in the middle there would be a cauldron, and in it, I'll put good old prime beef, a lot of it, and I'll make a stew. I'll let the word out that it is free, full twenty-four hours of it, no, twelve hours of it. And those that are proud and can't make it during the day, I'll ask them to come by cover of night, and if they are still stubborn, I'll have a van out there, and I'll go from door to door, sneak in by the back door and fill out their pots. Yes, sir, that's what I'll do!"
"Why don't you go out there if you feel that way about them," I asked.
"They think I'm a little god, I can't work miracles!"
(c) T. Wignesan - London/Paris, 1964/2014
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