A café worker’s lunchtime break at an art gallery inspires thoughts of her place in the New Ireland in this story from a promising 21-year-old writer from Blackrock, Co Dublin

The clock above the empty blue vase, to which Balinda’s eyes had been moving helplessly back and forth all morning, finally showed twelve thirty. It was breaktime, lunchtime, her hour of freedom, and as she dealt with the enquiries of a fussy old man who had ordered a raisin cake with his coffee, and was currently undergoing a grave change of heart, she tried not to appear too distant, too relieved.

She had been a waitress at the Bean and Gone Café for almost a year now, and these few minutes leading up to her lunch hour, charged with impatience and expectancy as they were, always brought on a girlish, foot-tapping, clock-watching restlessness of the kind that otherwise she’d long outgrown. The customer eventually made up his mind – he would try the raisin cake after all – and, as she took from him his crushed ten euro note, she attempted to make eye contact with Donal, the owner, her boss, who was sitting at a table in the corner, biting his lip over a folder of numbers and figures. He looked up after a moment, recognised the appeal in her eyes, and nodded curtly.

In a small windowless room beside the till, which served both as a coat room and a storage space, Balinda pulled off her apron, set it down on an unopened crate of kitchenware, and, in a gesture which never failed to delight or console, freed her long brown curls from the unflattering hair net she was always made to wear. For the next hour, the café would be crowded with noisy students, young professionals, drivers, builders, bankers and their wives – a whole procession of city creatures – and their sandwich deals and coffees and teas would not be her problem. No– this hour was hers and nobody else’s; the only hour, really, in which she could treat herself to something nice, or, indeed, could afford to be treated.

Today she was resolved that the treat would be a visit to the National Gallery of Ireland. She’d been told that there was a reasonably priced restaurant there, and even though Donal granted her “caffeine privileges” – his eccentric term for “free coffee” – she was tired of the food and drink there, tired of handling it and smelling it all day, and nothing seemed more refreshing than having your coffee surrounded by beautiful sculptures and paintings.

Stepping out onto the street, acknowledging the rain with a sulky tightening of the lips, she set off towards the National Gallery. It was the kind of Irish rain she’d come to expect, and even to love; soft and light and tranquil, hardly a rain at all, more like a fine bluish mist, very far from the livid tempests and monsoons of her childhood in Lagos. The Irish always complained about the weather, or, at any rate, were obsessed by it. She couldn’t understand. This was the sort of weather, in Nigeria anyway, that wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. But then, the Irish were strange. If something wasn’t worth mentioning, then all the more reason to mention it! Even if they had nothing to say, they’d say it anyway. That seemed to be the thinking.

She’d been warned by a friend that the Irish loved to talk. Nigerians loved to talk, too. Loved to sing and dance. The two nations were cousins. She’d felt that from the moment, fifteen, seventeen years ago, when she first heard the Luke Kelly record that her father was so fond of. She turned onto Nassau Street, which was surprisingly resonant with life; pairs of young girls in tartan scarves complaining about boys, skyward-gazing tourists from places like China, places like Spain, businessmen frowning into handheld screens. She quickened her pace to match the general increase in tempo. Now and then a passing gaze would settle on her with a kind of benign curiosity. She was used to it. She almost never detected hostility in those passing eyes. A black face was still an uncommon sight here, especially in this part of town. The fact that her physical distinction wasn’t any source of fear or resentment – but seen rather as a somewhat exotic asset to be appreciated, understood, even embraced – was not just a source of relief, but of outright joy.

After her coffee, which was brewed, rather disappointingly, with the same machine they used in the café, and therefore identical in every way to her daily caffeine privileges, Balinda wandered around the gallery, immersed herself in the grand lunar-white statues that lined the walls of the sculpture room (all those divine musclescapes, all that classical grandeur), briefly took in the European masterpieces that the free guide recommended (the Dutch serenity of the Vermeer, the strangeness and obscurity of the Rembrandt, and Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, with its aura of violence and betrayal, and the haunting darkness around its edges, darkness that gestured, she thought, towards an other-worldy darkness) and eventually sat down on a bench opposite Velazquez’s The Kitchen Maid.

The painting depicted a black woman with gorgeous anthracite skin, the maid of the title, surrounded by jugs and bowls and other kitchen apparatus. Behind her, through a window, Jesus could be seen in conversation: his famous Supper at Emmaus. What thrilled Balinda about the picture was not its religious power, nor the consummate skill of the old master’s brushstrokes, but something stranger and more personal. The woman looked like her. It couldn’t be denied. She had the same overworked slump in posture, the same humorous eyes. Even the turban or scarf on the maid’s head looked eerily like Balinda’s hated hair-net. For the briefest of moments, she felt cold with terror, as though she’d discovered her doppelgänger, fixed inside a frame by cracked pigment and luminous mud. But the terror quickly subsided, and the following reaction, which was to be the enduring one, was a deep sense of mirth. A smile that threatened embarrassing laughter formed on her face, a face which she saw reflected back at her, and – suddenly – another thought came to her. 

Here she was, in Dublin, sitting before one of Ireland’s most treasured works of art: an ostensibly Catholic painting by a Spaniard of Jewish descent, whose enigmatic subject was African. And it didn’t feel anomalous or ridiculous at all. It felt right. Just like it felt right that this nation which she’d adopted was changing visibly around her. The singular was giving way to the plural, and Ireland’s beautiful paradoxes were shining through. For no serious nation was defined in simple terms; all attempts to simplify and purify inevitably led to evildoing. And this was a nation that accepted, celebrated, its complexity: a nation, after all, that was both deeply European but pitched at an acute angle to European civilisation, a nation with American dreams and the soul of Africa. A nation that had spread its children around the earth, and was now seeing them return – those famished barquentines of old repenetrating the fog – and they were coming along with others, strangers, dreamers, people like her, like Balinda, for whom this dark shining rock was never bemoaned as a point of departure but yearned for as a point of arrival. A nation defined by song and dance but equally defined by silence, stillness, solitude – those gaps between history. All of it was beautiful, all of it was good. And there it all was: in the faded browns and yellows of a seventeenth century painting.

Freshly energised by her little epiphany, Balinda set off back to work, stepping once more, with a hop, with a smile, into the soft, cool, ever-falling rain.