ignacio padilla
 

Galatea in Brighton

Translated by Idra Novey


It took me several months to comprehend that Sibhoan Kearney was the hopeless name of at least two different women.  And when I could finally appreciate the full dimensions of this sad homonym, it was so late that it would have been better not to have known.  I often asked myself how long I’d heard my parents refer to this name before I began to lose sleep over it.  It’s never easy to decide in what precise moment a fortuitous mention or a face comes to take a role in our insomnia.  Legions of traits, phrases, and words upset us every day without earning a space for themselves in our minds.   Perhaps we exchange looks with a stranger, read the funeral notices with relief, or cede our seat on the bus to a young woman whose beauty we’ll immediately forget.   We erase it all to defend against pure memory.  We ignore these things because we don’t want everyone to mean something to us.  We forget it all, ultimately, because in the end we know that anonymity, as much, or more than fame, is one of the unacknowledged desires of any existence. 

I write this and discover, with shame, that the second Sibhoan Kearney was denied this right to be no one.   I’d bet that she, toward the end of her days, would have given anything for her name to bear no particular meaning, or at least not to those for whom it meant so much that they would be willing to kill her.   I imagine her before all of this, when she was a girl or a teenager, happy or not, who knows, but surely unconcerned about her name.  When, until that awful moment when my father discovered it in the files of his bank office, Sibhoan Kearney was a name like any other, meaningful only to those who loved her or hated her before us: her widowed mother, a brother that only managed to write her two letters from the trenches of Somme, a possibly spiteful boyfriend who had repeated the syllables of love at the end of the street that led to her modest apartment in Cockfosters.  A sweet and neutral name, a name that nevertheless, and without her knowledge, would become fatally charged in the spiritualist sessions over which Madame Doucelin officiated in our ancestral home in Brighton.

* * *

Madame’s devout followers always arrived at five: broad, elegant, adept as anyone in the delicate ways of those who have spent years sharing paltry transgressions.   They would fill their wait with my mother’s pastries and launch into the banal conversations that only made Madame Doucelin’s tardiness more enervating.  It always seemed intolerably late when the medium’s immense figure cast its shadow over the threshold of our house.  Her mere presence, however, was enough for the members of her little society to forgive her everything: her informality, the perfumed grossness of her mannerisms, the hundred plus kilos of her scandalously French self.   It was painful to see them so submissive to the spiritual strength of that enormous woman, so willing to glorify her rebuffs and fulfill her most trivial desires as if she were a telluric divinity, provident and terrible all at once.   As for Madame, she allowed herself to be both loved and feared, to play awhile with the community’s anxiety and only made a gesture to begin the session when it was completely dark out and the vehemence of her devotees had become truly insufferable.   This period of prolonging was as frequent and studied as the sessions themselves, and it didn’t surprise me that Madame would see it as part of her ultra-mundane ritual, a necessary erosion of the defenses of her society’s members and make them more willing to blindly believe in the things that she, transfigured and solemn in the candle light, would say later from the fragile frontier that separates us from the dead.

* * *

I don’t know how, or how many times, I was witness to Madame Doucelin’s prodigious spiritualists.   Surely it was many times, as her visits to Brighton were never kept secret, or even treated with discretion.   My father would speak of the sessions as if he were commenting on a cricket game, and my mother would prepare for them with the same meticulousness as if she were putting together the menu for a Sunday meal.   When they alluded to the specters who had responded to their invocations the previous evening, they would speak as if referring to a disgraced politician or a soprano who had sung an impressive aria in Covent Garden.

Naturally, my parents and the other members of the group had their preferences for what they liked visitors from the other side to do: certain names would be repeated during dessert till they become almost ordinary, others would impassion them, cause squabbles between them, fall into disgrace, or become so loaded that no one would refer to them again, or invoke them.  And although I never understood what etiquette could win the affection of a soul in anguish or the disdain of the living, I quickly became accustomed to cohabitating with them and tolerating them throughout my childhood as others come to do with relatives who refuse to stay at a distance or with the ubiquitous offspring of adults who were in the same class as our parents in school.

I would be lying if I said the first deceased Sibhoan Jearney was an exceptional figure from the beginning for Madame Doucelin’s followers.  Her first apparitions in the Brighton house barely incited their curiosity in her wretched life or the details of her suicide with barbiturates that, in reality, didn’t differ much from the death of many of the specters the ventral voice of the medium invoked.   After all, it wasn’t unusual for suicides to abound in the sessions to tell the living morbid details of their last moments in the world.   Certainly these cases aroused some interest in the group, but the enthusiasm or morbidity they generated would die out as quickly as they came, almost always displaced by the confessions of another, more eloquent narrative of a suicide, more audacious, or, at least, more embellished.

It isn’t all that unlikely then that Sibhoan’s ghost was about to pass into oblivion when my father discovered the young woman who, unfortunately, went by the same name without knowing it.   To blame it entirely on coincidence seems as absurd to me today as believing, with one’s eyes shut, that the first Sibhoan had willed it from the very  depths of hell.   Before fate or the designs of the entombed, the ones truly responsible for this skirmish were the living, those of flesh and bone whose guide was no other than my own father.   In the end, it was he recognized Sibhoan Kearney’s name in the list of small proletariat clients one day in his London bank.  And it was he who celebrated this finding that same afternoon among the devout followers of Madame Doucelin, innocent at first, then enthusiastic, and later delirious when he noticed that they, his fellow members, also saw something more than mere coincidence in the fact, who took it, perhaps, as a sign, an undeniable invitation to refresh their spiritualist game a bit, that maybe, at this point, had begun to bore them.  

  * * *

I don’t doubt that at the beginning they had conceived of it this way, as a game, a more or less innocent game, something similar to speculating on the stock market with a few hundred pounds, audaciously administered by my father, which would strongly enrich the collection of anecdotes they had amassed in their little Brighton society.   None of this, however, absolves them from having continued with their macabre pastime when they realized how far they’d have to take it to feel that their investment had been worth it.   As for Madame Doucelin, her part in this business seems to me, today, strangely blurred: sometimes I see her as the ultimate artifice in the debacle of the second Sibhoan, other times I see her as unwilling to participate in it, and others, most often, I lose her among the faces of her devotees as if, in effect, the medium had been merely an instrument, a slab of white and resonant flesh submitted in her entirety to the designs of the first Sibhoan, the deceased one.

From this unstable vortex of memories, I can hardly recover with any clarity the night my father told his accomplices the particulars of his first encounter with the new Sibhoan Kearney.  I see him reclining on the salon that presided over the room, smiling, proud as a patriarch preparing himself to speak of the mishaps of his youth.   Beside him, raised on a small stool, my mother smiles as well, and I can almost assure that she would have applauded if it weren’t for her strict sense of decorum.    Nevertheless, my mother didn’t stop prodding my father to tell the others at once what they were all anxious to hear: they want to know what the girl was like, if she felt intimidated by the bank’s celebrated opulence, if she initially accepted my father’s generous treatment well, or if she showed any interest in the deceased, whose fortune she was about to usurp without knowing that with it she would also be assuming its turbulent destiny.

And so applauded by his accomplices and friends, my father finally narrates and paints a portrait for them.  In two strokes, he describes the provincial girl who had entered his office that morning fingering a letter that he himself had written suggesting that she invest part of her saving in the iron industry.   Then he imitates Sibhoan Kearney’s timid voice when she said that it had to be an error, that she had never seen such a sum of money.   My father, then, exaggerates his own surprise when he went over the bank registries with feigned attention and swore he’d fire the idiotic employee who didn’t know how to distinguish between the two accounts.   Finally, abusing the silence into which his listeners had fallen, he wrinkles his brow again, studies the girl, pretends to meditate and tells her with a wink of complicity that surely the money would be better off in her hands, as it was evident that the original owner hadn’t needed it for some time and it would be a shame, Miss Kearney, for this small fortune to simply pass into the bank’s coffers.

Hearing this, the crowd eagerly applauds my father’s acting.  Now there isn’t any reason to ask him what happened next.   The little Brighton society clearly knows that the girl, with or without repairs, has accepted this propitious turn of the wheel of fate.   Who wouldn’t in that situation?   They can already imagine the girl smiling in her new dresses, taking a taxi she’d needed so many times when the rain surprised her in Southgate’s open country, applauding in row zero of the Strand that she had never believed she would be able to attend.   At this point, the people present, especially my mother, had already begun to conceive a thousand ways to best take advantage of the illusion my father had planted that morning for the yearning Sibhoan Kearney. Now that they know her well enough to almost touch her, they want to possess her completely, to own her, woo her, and redeem her of her embarrassing mediocrity.   They look, then, for a way to control her fortune with the same illusion that a child believes someday he will be able to govern the uncontainable force of the tides or the stars.

  * * *

It has always frightened me the energy and efficacy with which the little society in Brighton carried out its plans to revise Sibhoan Kearney’s destiny during those months.  It was as if authentic powers from the other side had confabulated to ensure that the second Sibhoan’s act of fraudulence would be an unprecedented success.   At my father’s invitation, her guardian angel, the girl began to visit us at Brighton, where the women of the group quickly took it upon themselves to court her, redeem and instruct her on how to respond with dignity to fate’s supposed generosity.  Somewhere between joking and earnestness, they congratulated her for wishing on the right star, initiated her in the basic elements of etiquette that she should respect if she wanted to be accepted in society, chose her dresses for her, her makeup, and even her haircut with which she would begin to attend the opera and the racetrack.   As for the girl, she submitted herself to the transformation with the meekness of a rag doll in the hands of a group of enormous, excited girls.    With something close to joy, she obeyed each of the instructions and tried on each of the hats they assigned to her, gave her attention without any cynicism to the exhausting sessions in which they improved her accent and even educated her so that her ignorance about music and politics seemed a virtue of a well-raised girl rather than a defect due to her modest origins.   Her submissiveness was so total that in less than two months it would have been impossible to recognize in her the humble girl from Cockfosters with whom my father had met once in his bank’s London office.

I should point here that the tenacious metamorphosis of Sibhoan Kearney had its limits, perhaps because none of her fairy godmothers would entirely give up the pleasure of exhibiting the grotesqueness at the heart of it, the stiff Cinderella quality of it all.    More than beautiful or refined, the girl ended up resembling a turbid catalog of good manners, a mask that could never disguise the hybrid and monstrous character of the condition in which that mask was held.   As a result of the group’s indiscretion and boasts, the truth about the origin of Miss Kearney’s small fortune was quickly spread about the select circles of London’s high society, and to such an extent, that the girl quickly became the temporary toy of Ascot and Covent Garden, in a kind of circus-like marvel fed by applause and false flattery that, given her extreme naiveté, the girl happily accepted as indisputable evidence that she had in fact been accepted by those that had previously wooed the original owner of her name, her money, and her fate. 

  * * *

One night, not too long ago, I asked my father if he had considered that sooner or later it would have been necessary to tell the girl the truth.  My father looked at me strangely and shrugged his shoulders as if this inevitable phase of his game never entered his thoughts.  Even worse, as if at this point the name Sibhoan Kerney didn’t mean anything to him.   I realized then that the story of this girl had been as important to him as a business trip to Newcastle, or a hunt in Brittany.    Undoubtedly, the time during which Sibhoan Kerney had paraded through London’s salons and theaters had given him a significant amount of satisfaction, but in the end it had also been a calamity that he determined was best forgotten as quickly as the girl disappeared from our lives and from the world.  

More than embarrassing him, the undoing of that game only provoked a fleeting burst of anger in my father, temporarily threatened his sense of order, perhaps, like the defeat of a horse on which he had bet more than was prudent.   The same could be said of the other members of the Brighton group, who at heart never forgave the girl for her excessive gullibility.   When her state of affairs no longer seemed a novelty, my father and his accomplices began to see in Sibhoan Kearney’s enthusiasm a symptom of her incurable bad taste.  They were indignant that the girl would believe she had effectively reached our status and, above all, that she would believe in the honesty of flowers and perfumed dollars with which a forty-something man from Bristol began to woo her.  The women of the group took it as an insult that the girl stopped coming to see them in order to submit herself to a happiness that none of her creators could grant or take away.  I can still hear the irritated voice of my mother commenting on the painful spectacle of seeing the girl in the brace of that fortune-hunter, of that boar who only wanted her for her money.   Our money, she would add as she would also say our Sibhoan, our creature.   The other women in the group grew increasingly incensed with the girl as well, scoffed at the ingratitude of ordinary women, but what can one really expect, my friends, from those people.

The little society in Brighton should have taken from this, or another indignation, the strength they lacked to put an end to their game.  Perhaps a more just or pious player would have proposed they speak seriously with the girl, warn her of the dangers that threatened her if she kept getting together with the bachelor from Bristol, advise her as a mother would, affectionately, but firmly.   But this sort of passion was forbidden in the cynics of Brighton: Sibhoan Kearney was not their daughter, and they should be careful not to get trapped in vain sentimentalisms.   More than her fairies, the members of the group had to assume their own fate, and were obliged to act accordingly if, in reality, they wanted to avoid letting the girl make them out as definitively ridiculous.

  * * *

As one would suppose, the responsibility of cutting the threads that united the two Sibhoans fell once again to my father.  The operation, simple and thankless, was performed with an almost surgical cleanliness.   My father didn’t meet with the girl in Brighton but rather in his office at the bank where it all began.  He didn’t embrace her or bless her.  He didn’t even refer to her having snubbed the group or her flirtations with the gentleman from Bristol.  He simply announced, without commentary, that an inheritor had appeared for the defunct Ms. Kearney and that, with all fairness, had reclaimed the fortune that, with the best intentions, he had taken disposed.    Therefore, he added, he would take charge of assuming the significant reduction in poor Ms. Kearney’s estate which his rash act of altruism had occasioned, but I don’t need to tell you, Miss, that lamentably it will no longer be possible to continue helping you as we have until now.

Not on this or any other afternoon could the little Brighton society entertain itself with a histrionic retelling of my father’s new encounter with the unfortunate girl.  It’s even possible that they preferred not to meet this night, not to see my father’s face when he sat down for dinner and announced everything was taken care of, and that’s all.   My mother, for her part, remained silent.   I remember her jaw distracted with the chewing of a particularly tough piece of meat, in her mind, perhaps, concentrating on an image of the girl’s livid face at the blow of having to return to penury, her hands grasping a sumptuous black leather chair that doesn’t suffice to sustain her, her eyes shut because they already anticipate the day the gentleman from Bristol leaves her sitting alone on a bench in the Kensington gardens until nightfall and she understands that only an excessive dose of barbiturates will permit her to go on being Sibhoan Kerney, the only Sibhoan Kerney.