A History of Loneliness: A Novel by John Boyne

Author:John Boyne [Boyne, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Psychological
ISBN: 9780374713027
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

NINE

1978

I arrived in Italy in January 1978. I had never left Ireland nor traveled on a plane before, and the excitement of both was intense. The passport had to be ordered—Mam dug out my birth certificate and brought it into Molesworth Street, standing in line for the guts of five hours before her turn came and making sure to tell the girl behind the counter why I needed it—and when the passport arrived, I read every word of it, as if it were a great piece of literature.

That I should have been chosen from all the students in my year at Clonliffe College to undertake my final year of studies in Rome came as a surprise to me. Traditionally, one or two boys from each year were selected, but conventional wisdom had it that Kevin Samuels—“the Pope”—would be offered the place. Or perhaps the Kerry lad, Seamus Wells, who had always been a great favorite of the priests and was a talented athlete as well as an accomplished scholar, which always stood well with the high-ups. But no, they chose me. Yes, I had received a First with Distinction in my philosophy degree at UCD and had performed consistently in my seminary exams—of which there were an extraordinary number—but I hadn’t allowed myself to think that I had a chance. I had an aptitude for languages, though, having mastered Latin, French, Italian, and a little German, and perhaps that was what swung it. Poor Kevin Samuels never got over the shock and didn’t even have the good grace to congratulate me. Curiously, the next time I heard from him was fourteen years later, when, to my astonishment, I received a letter from him asking whether I would officiate at his wedding to a girl he had met while hitchhiking across America. This was a couple of years after he’d renounced his vows, of course. But that’s another story.

“God only knows who they’ll give me now,” complained Tom on the morning I left, as he sat on his bed and watched me pack my belongings in the same suitcase I had unpacked six years earlier. We had stayed as cellmates through all that time and had got to know each other as well as only those thrust into such close proximity—seminarians, astronauts, or prisoners—can. “Some gobshite probably.”

“They’ll leave you on your own,” I told him. “Sure there’s no one to put in here, is there?”

“I suppose not. I’m going to miss you, Odran.”

“We’re nearly finished anyway. Only a year to go.”

“Still and all.”

The truth was that I didn’t think I would miss him particularly. I was nearly twenty-three years old by now. I had been living in the seminary since I was sixteen, and as contented as I’d been there, an adventure was ahead of me; I had no intention of wasting my time worrying about who was or wasn’t going to be sharing a room with Tom Cardle in his final year. He’d changed over the course of our time at Clonliffe.

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