An excerpt from my novel, Utopia Closes.
“FOR A LONG TIME I had been in the habit of a swim after my morning walk around the Castle yards, a salubrious exercise I would undertake in the Castle Baths, as they were and are known–though they have fallen, for reasons that shall become obvious, into subsequent disuse–a private pool I had had installed some six months after I became President, swimming being an activity I had for a long time abhorred, never having been much good at it (indeed at the Saturday morning sessions my teachers used to take us to at a school baths in a nearby town further along the coast I used to disconsolately oscillate between the Beginners and Improvers categories having, it seemed, no technical appetite for, or expertise in, the aquatic arts whatsoever) but having, as an adult, moreover an adult charged with the responsibility of being the most adult of adults in my young country, the responsibility to conquer my dislikes in the name of any obvious Good, either private or public, and furthermore with the parallel need, when official duties chained me to desks for the majority of my time, to exercise as fully and intensely as possible, I set about the refurbishment of the pool (what am I saying? I should say I set about the sinking, so to speak, of the pool, for naturally the British had no use for swimming pools in the first place nor, indeed, had there been one there by the time of Irish independence would it have lasted a month under the new administration) as soon as I was humanly able, choosing as its theme that of the Roman baths I have only ever seen, curiously enough, in replica form at William Randolph Hearst’s estate while visiting San Simeon, albeit non grata on my way to a celebration of the United Nations being held in San Francisco at a date much later than that with which we are concerned here, though incidentally in the days when that empty-headed lackey of NATO’s was still sympathetic to, and respectful of, Hibernia’s bold program of anti-capitalism, the date of which I am talking has become the watershed date of my life as it turns out, the day neither of my wedding, nor my wife’s death, nor even the day of the Revolution itself, but the day on which I put to death all idealism and locked my conscience into its long and solitary confinement deep in the dungeons of my soul, a confinement which has but recently been relieved as you have seen, venerable Monsignor, through the intercession of your mysterious offices, unsought yet beneficent, a day which began normally enough with breakfast at my home and which, as I have said, proceeded along its usual fault lines until, as I have said, I went for my morning walk in the park and thence to the pool for my customary swim where it was I came upon my cousin who had, so he told me, come to see me on a matter of some urgency, an assertion borne out by his suit, which was in a state of urbane disarray, and his hair, which was sticking from the crown of his head like Stanley Laurel’s–this proving nothing as it happens since his hair generally laid itself down upon his scalp only long after lunchtime–and to seek my help, having got himself into a scrape with the police over the public drunkenness to which he was periodically prone, to which request I replied curtly and to negative effect, having no time at all for nepotism or string-pulling of any sort, particularly where alcohol–for so long the bane of this country–was concerned, saying that I couldn’t help him in the least bit, at which intelligence his face fell pitifully, a short jail sentence being the likeliest outcome, and he turned away from me without further protest, a resignation to circumstance which struck me somehow as the height of insolence–but then again anything other than abject fawning in my presence struck me as the height of insolence in those days–and burrowing through that sense there arose an intense and all but excruciating irritation at this sorry individual my cousin, my peer in age and looks, in fact better looking than me, taller, and born into better circumstances, and yet so singularly deficient in that nous for life which even in the smallest degree will see the average Joe clear of the prison cell for life, I was seized with an urge to do away then and there with this creature, to rid him of the planet which so tried him as much as the planet of him who was so trying, to get him away from me, to stop him pestering me, to remove the one remaining fly–a fly I had not perceived until that moment–in the ointment of my Hibernia, and so, taking a deep breath, I fell upon his back with all my strength, the full force of my hatred carrying him over the edge of the pool and into the water, pushing him all the way down to the floor of the pool with one hand holding his head by the hair and deploying that purchase to the fatal purpose of dashing his brains out against the blue mosaic surface, slamming the heavy skull over and over as it released a cloudy discharge of blood and cranial fluids which drifted about us like veils and then into my nostrils and ears, at which point I felt myself, President of Hibernia and Living Saviour of the Nation, dissolve into two beings, the Murderer and the Observer of the Murderer, this latter a detached being who could not help marvelling at the intensity of feeling the other had access to, at the purity of that feeling, at the compliance of the victim in the inevitable exercise of that emotion, at the strange metamorphosis of that directed murderous emotion into objectless quasi-sexual arousal billowing up, like the blood and gore, in inverse proportion to the ebbing life of the victim, a passion but a little while afterward to be sated in the embraces of my wife, at the climax of whose attentions the Murderer passed away at last and with him the various creatures I have been and upon whose shoulders murder had been made possible: the Only Child, the Chafing Autodidact, the Romantic Mercenary, the Automatic Revolutionary, the Passionate Idealist, the Enterprising President, leaving in his place (the Murderer’s) only the detached Observer in his eternally mute condition, with a black hole for a conscience, blank sheets for dreams, postures for emotions, and long pointless years of repression to look forward to in the years ahead, at the terminus to which lies oblivion at last, that sweet annihilation for which we crave, it being no wonder at all, all told, that the pool, so magnificent and blue, was immediately drained and the building in which it was housed sealed up until the present day.”
*
There was a pause after the Marshal had finished. Both men chewed on their cigarillos. At length the Monsignor reached forward. The Marshal, in turn, leaned up against the grille. “Have you any penance for me, Monsignor?” asked the Marshal.
“Your penance is this, motha” said the Monsignor. And with that he shut off the confessional light and yanked the curtain to, casting the Marshal into darkness.
“Now,” moaned the Marshal to himself in a terror as complete as any that his victims had ever know, “Now I am surely dead.” Weeping and gasping for air then, he ran from the box and into the arms of his bodyguards.