“I don’t think the bullet killed him.”
“Well, we can’t tell where it hit him, Hawks goes off too quickly. The guy just puts his hand up to his stomach and then drops.”
“If he got hit in the liver he’s had it. Don’t forget, this is Missouri in eighteen-fuck-knows-when.”
“Yeah. What’s his name?”
“Who?”
“The guy shot.”
“Valance. Cherry Valance.”
“Cherry? You mean like Jerry, or Cherry, like apple.”
“Cherry Valance, not Apple Valance.”
“And he’s Montgomery’s friend.”
“Yeah, Montgomery’s friend Cherry.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t think it hit him in the liver. Look at the angle of the shot. The trajectory seems to be going up. Popped a rib, I suspect, or glanced off it.”
“. . . Maybe glanced off and killed some woman on the sidewalk?”
“Or Walter Brennan . . .”
“No, some dame on the sidewalk that Howard Hawks was fucking.”
“Women remember. Don’t they know that? Those saloon girls are gonna remember Cherry. . . .”
“You know, Leaf, we should do a book. A Forensic Doctor Looks at the Movies.”
“The film noir ones are tough. Their clothes are baggy, it’s too dark.”
“I’m doing Spartacus.”
In Sri Lankan movie theatres, Anil told Leaf, if there was a great scene—usually a musical number or an extravagant fight—the crowd would yell out “Replay! Replay!” or “Rewind! Rewind!” till the theatre manager and projectionist were forced to comply. Now, on a smaller scale, the films staggered backwards and forwards, in Leaf’s yard, until the actions became clear to them.
The film they worried over most was Point Blank. At the start of the movie, Lee Marvin (who once played Liberty Valance, no relation) is shot by a double-crossing friend in the abandoned Alcatraz prison. The friend leaves him for dead and steals his girl and his share of the money. Vengeance results. Anil and Leaf composed a letter to the director of the film, asking if he remembered, all these years later, where on the torso he imagined Lee Marvin was shot so that he could get to his feet, stagger through the prison while the opening credits came up and swim the treacherous waters between the island and San Francisco.
They told the director that it was one of their favourite films, they were simply inquiring as forensic specialists. When they looked at the scene closely they saw Lee Marvin’s hand leap up to his chest. “See, he has difficulty on his right side. When he swims later in the bay he uses his left arm.” “God, it’s a great movie.”
LAST INK
In certain countries aromas pierce the heart and one dies half waking in the night as an owl and a murderer’s cart go by
the way someone in your life will talk out love and grief then leave your company laughing.
In certain languages the calligraphy celebrates
where you met the plum blossom and moon by chance
—the dusk light, the cloud pattern,
recorded always in your heart
and the rest of the world—chaos,
circling your winter boat.
Night of the Plum and Moon.
Years later you shared it
on a scroll or nudged
the ink onto stone
to hold the vista of a life.
A condensary of time in the mountains
—your rain-swollen gate, a summer
scarce with human meeting.
Just bells from another village.
The memory of a woman walking down stairs.
Life on an ancient leaf
or a crowded 5th-century seal
this mirror-world of art
—lying on it as if a bed.
When you first saw her,
the night of moon and plum,
you could speak of this to no one.
You cut your desire
against a river stone.
You caught yourself
in a cicada-wing rubbing,
lightly inked.
The indelible darker self.
A seal, the Masters said,
must contain bowing and leaping,
“and that which hides in waters.”
Yellow, drunk with ink,
the scroll unrolls to the west
1
a river journey, each story
an owl in the dark, its child-howl
unreachable now
—that father and daughter,
that lover walking naked down blue stairs
each step jarring the humming from her mouth.
I want to die on your chest but not yet,
she wrote, sometime in the 13th century
of our love
before the yellow age of paper
before her story became a song,
lost in imprecise reproductions
until caught in jade,
whose spectrum could hold the black greens
the chalk-blue of her eyes in daylight.
Our altering love, our moonless faith.
Last ink in the pen.
My body on this hard bed.
The moment in the heart
where I roam restless, searching
for the thin border of the fence
to break through or leap.
Leaping and bowing.
VINTAGE BOOKS BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Anil’s Ghost
This powerful novel transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the modern world by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her home-land as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder. Fiction/Literature/0-375-72437-0
The Cinnamon Peeler
An electrifying volume of stylish yet endlessly surprising poetry exploring friendship and passion, family history and personal mythology. Spanning twenty-seven years, The Cinnamon Peeler is a masterpiece of intelligence and ardor, informed by rueful wit, sensitivity to nature, and an exultant love of language. Poetry/0-679-77913-2
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a visionary novel about an icon of American violence. Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje traces Billy’s passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-76786-X
Coming Through Slaughter
This novel brings to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era. It is the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players, some say the originator of jazz, who was a genius, a guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-76785-1
The English Patient
During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion is woven, leaving them inextricably connected by the brutal circumstances of the war. Winner of the Booker Prize.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74520-3
Handwriting
Handwriting is a collection of exquisitely crafted poems of delicacy and power—poems about love, landscape, and the sweep of history set in the poet’s first home, Sri Lanka. The falling away of culture is juxtaposed with an individual’s sense of loss, grief, and remembrance as Ondaatje weaves a rich tapestry of images.
Poetry/0-375-70541-4
In the Skin of a Lion
This is the story of Patrick Lewis, a backwoods Canadian immigrant who arrives in 1920s Toronto and earns a living searching for a vanished mi
llionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick’s life intersects with those of characters who reappear in The English Patient.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-77266-9
Running in the Family
In the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje returned to his native country of Sri Lanka. Recording his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of the island, Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family.
Memoir/Literature/0-679-74669-2
READERS
Authors available in this series
Martin Amis
Nicholson Baker
James Baldwin
A. S. Byatt
Willa Cather
Sandra Cisneros
Joan Didion
Richard Ford
Langston Hughes
Barry Lopez
Alice Munro
Haruki Murakami
Vladimir Nabokov
V. S. Naipaul
Michael Ondaatje
Oliver Sacks
Representing a wide spectrum of some of our most significant
modern authors, the Vintage Readers o fer an attractive,
accessible selection of writing that matters.
Michael Ondaatje
VINTAO ONDAATJE
Michael Ondaatje is the author of four novels— Coming Through Slaughter, the story of the New Orleans jazz musician Buddy Bolden, In the Skin of a Lion, which is set in Toronto, The English Patient , and Anil’s Ghost. His memoir, Running in the Family , is about his family in Sri Lanka, where he was born. He has also written several books of poetry, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid , There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do, Secular Love, The Cinnamon Peeler, and Handwriting. His novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize and Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Award, the Giller Award, and the Prix Medicis. Both works won the Governor General Award. His most recent work is The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. He has been an editor for Coach House Press and the Canadian literary magazine BRICK. He lives in Toronto, Canada.
BOOKS BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Prose
Coming Through Slaughter (1976)
Running in the Family (memoir) (1982)
In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
The English Patient (1992)
Anil’s Ghost (2000)
Poetry
The Dainty Monsters (1967)
The Man with Seven Toes (1969)
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970)
Rat Jelly (1973)
Elimination Dance (1976)
Claude Glass (1979)
There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do (1979)
Tin Roof (1982)
Secular Love (1984)
The Cinnamon Peeler (1991)
Handwriting (1998)
Nonfiction
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art
of Editing Film
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, OCTOBER 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Michael Ondaatje
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Selection from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, copyright © 1970 by Michael
Ondaatje. “Light,” “Claude Glass,” “The Cinnamon Peeler,” “Elimination Dance,” and “To a
Sad Daughter” from The Cinnamon Peeler , copyright © 1989, 1991 by Michael Ondaatje.
Selection from Coming Through Slaughter, copyright © 1976 by Michael Ondaatje. “Trav-
els in Ceylon,” “The Passions of Lalla,” and “Photograph” from Running in the Family,
copyright © 1982 by Michael Ondaatje. “The Bridge” from In the Skin of a Lion, copyright
© 1987 by Michael Ondaatje. “Katharine” and “In Situ” from The English Patient, copy-
right © 1992 by Michael Ondaatje. “The Great Tree,” “The Story,” “Step,” and “Last Ink”
from Handwriting, copyright © 1998 by Michael Ondaatje. “Linus Corea” and “Anil” from
Anil’s Ghost, copyright © 2000 by Michael Ondaatje.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ondaatje, Michael, 1943–
Vintage Ondaatje / Michael Ondaatje.
p. cm.
“A Vintage original”—T.p. verso.
I. Title.
PR9199.3.O5 A6 2004
818’.54—dc22
2004052609
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43003-8
v3.0
Michael Ondaatje, Vintage Ondaatje
(Series: # )
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