In the Donegal of my distant childhood it’s fair to say we were not overrun with strangers. Yes, through July and August, most of Scotland decamped here in throngs – the Glasgow fair, the Greenock fair, the Paisley fair; packing the shores, the dancehalls and pubs; spending their hard-earned wages saved for the big fortnight across the water; generous, defying any nonsense about meanness.
In those less damaged days, they were content to be regarded as our own, for our cultures connected as deeply as our dialects. So, when it came to outsiders, I remember clearly a niece of our neighbour, Nurse Kelly – the local midwife who delivered the lot of us – visiting from Carrick-on-Shannon. We all regarded her, much to the poor girl’s consternation, as quite the exotic creature, surely a first for anyone from Leitrim.
The North had not yet exploded, turning the world upside down. My home town, Buncrana, was a sheltered place. At least it was on the streets. What went on behind closed doors stayed there. One thing I’ll say about us, we could keep our secrets. And one secret that was not told formed the basis of my novel, Arimathea.
Only years later, through my uncle Hugh, I discovered that the first paintings I had ever seen, the Stations of the Cross in our local Catholic oratory, were by an Italian, A Mariani, who’d come to Ireland specifically to undertake that task the best part of a hundred or more years ago. He stayed there till the job was done and left to go where? No one knew. I could find no information on him, but it seems he was born, like the Emperor Augustus, in Velletri, south of Rome. Was the A of his name Antoni? Angelo? I did not find any answers.
He became Gianni in the book; I set it in the 50s, and while to the majority of my townspeople, he could have come from Mercury, so alien did he look and sound, I let him hail from Arezzo, where every day he could see Piero della Francesca’s glorious sequence of The True Cross located in the Cappella Maggiore of San Francesco there.
In the town he transforms many lives – the family with whom he lodges, mother, father, daughter, the Catholic and Anglican priests of the parish, the lonely niece of the Protestant minister. Each and every one tells their stories about him, and at the core of the book, he reveals what has made him the artist he will now, in this distant location far from Italy, prove himself to be. The Stations of the Cross themselves bear testimony to what he has endured at the hands of his enigmatic, mysterious parents and how he has survived the riddles they set for him.
Novels and plays are different beasts, demanding different petting, and to bring Arimathea into existence I had to cheat at all levels and pretend to my imagination it was a character from my play The Hanging Garden who was really completing this fiction. That was how I managed to write it, convincing myself this was research. Whether I’ll be able to pull off another trick like that – well, that’s up for grabs.
Extract
He came from out foreign and he spoke wild funny. All the older girls thought he was the last word from the day and hour they set eyes on him but they were stupid, and he would no more look at them than if he was the man in the moon. I don’t know where that shower got the notion that he was the kind of fellow listened to the likes of them. Was it because of the way some of them sprawled in front of him, were they expecting him to draw them? I doubt if he even noticed they were making a show of themselves. He certainly didn’t breathe a word in front of me if his stomach was turning at the sight of those eejits. Maybe he was blathering to himself in his own language, so we would never make out what he thought of them.
It was hard to know what he thought. My mother said, he keeps himself to himself, and will you let the poor stranger alone? He has his work to do, he wants to do it and get home. Like the rest of us, he’s missing his own bed.
More about Frank McGuinness
Review: “His greatest success … is in his handling of the concealed cruelties of this insular community as it wrestles with its congenital fear of the unknown, of the stranger, the city, war and God. Yet even the pervading sense of anxiety that constantly threatens to burst forth into violence is shot through with a lightness that has more in common with the short stories of Frank O’Connor than the works of Irish miserabilists past.” Eimear McBride
Interview: “You hear this thing in your head for a long time and then suddenly it’s not yours any more.”
Buy the book
Arimathea is published by Brandon Books at £11.99 and is available from the Guardian bookshop at £9.59
