Free Songdogs by Colum McCann Page A

opened the envelope with one hand, using the nail of his little finger to reach in under the flap. It was from a magazine in San Francisco, courting him with the offer of a huge sum of money, or at least what seemed like a huge sum of money then. A weekly salary. Bylines. An explosion of his own name. It had come as a result of photos he had sent of the copper mines – he assured the townspeople that they too would be famous, their faces and thick arms would appear on news-stands in California. A party was held in his honour that night. Backs were slapped. Jugs were passed. Music coughed out around the town, and my father played the spoons – coins were dropped in his big brown hat for the going. Rolando stood up and sang ‘ Las Golondrinas, ’ a song of leaving, offering lodging to a lost swallow. My mother stood at the edge of that crowd with other women, watching, listening to the song. She might have wondered about the paucity of grief that my father showed for the departure, reeling his way around, singing. A wind without any definite colour must have gathered her in as she shoved her hands down deep into dress pockets.
    Rolando brimmed with a toothless grin – he saw the gaps as some sort of autograph now and he chugged his way beside my father. A picture was taken of Rolando, his finger pointing at his mouth in pride, the other hand clenched in a fist, a hat askew on his head, his face a field of stubble.
    But the greatest pictures were not the ones of the copper mines, or of the people in the town. They were the ones of Mam’s body. My father had taken them in their bedroom. She was nude, not flagrantly so, but her stomach was smooth and dark, it held no creases, her legs curved softly, white sheets exposed small tufts of hair. Some of the shots were hazy beneath mosquito nets, so they took on a Victorian attitude of lounge and lust, as if being peeped at through a curtain, black and white photos that never even suggested colour, a cheek propped up on a hand, the body a streambed running down from it, cavorting through bedsheets and a canyon of desire, once or twice a suggestion of quiet lechery, a tongue held out against a lip, fingers in a V around a dark nipple, a sideways shot of her by the washbasin with her hand bellied on brown, fingers spread out; a hazy portrait of her wearing panties and stepping into a long white dress, hitching up her chest into it, the eyebrows raised in an attitude of impishness. When I first saw them – years ago now – they made me sick to the stomach. I hardly even realised it was her at first, and unlike the ones of the women in Spain, I never again looked at them in the attic, never found myself part of them. I knew what they had done to her and I couldn’t understand why she had let them be taken.
    She almost seemed to leaf her way into the lens, a brooding silence of body, an acceptance of danger, an ability to become anything that he wanted her to become – and never once the feeling that she didn’t want to do it. The photos revealed a peculiar fascination with a beauty mark on her lower right hip. Even now I shudder to imagine her with her head thrown back in laughter, in some dark room sealed to mosquitoes and Peeping Toms, light reflected off a cheap umbrella, licking her lips at the camera, her dress in a formless puddle at her feet, while outside white hydrangeas closed their petals in a row underneath a woodwormed window.
    Just before they left town, José with the Sewn Lip broke into my father’s darkroom and found some of the prints, somewhat underexposed. He ran around screaming – he finally got his voice back, the people said – flinging the photos of my mother around the town courtyard like so many pieces of confetti. A picture of her was found – impaled on a hitching post – down by the courthouse steps, and the joke was that there was a new candidate around for mayor. But the poppyseed priest wasn’t happy, and the women in town weren’t happy,