Vintage Ondaatje
This infuriated the actors, especially when a line such as “Who put the stove in the living room, Kristin?”—which had originally brought the house down—was now spoken simultaneously by at least seventy people and so tended to lose its spontaneity. When the matinee idol Wayne Burnett dropped dead during a performance, a Sicilian butcher took over, knowing his lines and his blocking meticulously, and money did not have to be refunded.
Certain actors were popular because they spoke slowly. Lethargic ballads, and a kind of blues where the first line of a verse is repeated three times, were in great demand. Sojourners walked out of their accent into regional American voices. Nicholas, unfortunately, would later choose Fats Waller as his model and so his emphasis on usually unnoticed syllables and the throwaway lines made him seem high-strung or dangerously antisocial or too loving.
But during the time he worked on the bridge, he was seen as a recluse. He would begin sentences in his new language, mutter, and walk away. He became a vault of secrets and memories. Privacy was the only weight he carried. None of his cohorts really knew him. This man, awkward in groups, would walk off and leave strange clues about himself, like a dog’s footprints on the snowed roof of a garage.
Hagh! A doctor attending his arm, this is what woke him, brought him out of his dream. Hah! It was six hours since he had fallen asleep. Kosta was there. He saw that the veil and his shirt had been cut open by the doctor. Somehow, they said, he had managed to get his arm back into the socket.
He jerked his hand to the veil, looking at it closely.
She had stayed until Kosta came down in the early morning. She talked to him about the arm, to get a doctor, she had to leave. She spoke? Yes yes. What did she sound like? Hah? What more did Kosta know about her? He mentioned her black skirt. Before he left, Nicholas looked around the bar and found strips of the black habit she had cut away to make a skirt for the street.
When he walks into the fresh air outside the Ohrida Lake Restaurant, on the morning after the accident on the bridge, he sees the landscape as something altered, no longer so familiar that it is invisible to him. Nicholas Temelcoff walks now seeing Parliament Street from the point of view of the woman—who had looked through his belt-satchel while he slept, found his wide wire shears, and used them to cut away the black lengths of her habit. When he walks out of the Ohrida Lake Restaurant that morning it is her weather he grows aware of. He knows he will find her.
There are long courtships which are performed in absence. This one is built perhaps on his remark about her hair or her almost-silent question as he was falling off some tower or bridge into sleep. The verge of sleep was always terrifying to Nicholas so he would drink himself into it blunting out the seconds of pure fear when he could not use his arms, would lie there knowing he’d witness the half-second fall before sleep, the fear of it greater than anything he felt on the viaduct or any task he carried out for the Dominion Bridge Company.
As he fell, he remembers later, he felt a woman’s arm reaching for him, curious about his name.
He is aware of her now, the twin. What holds them together is not the act which saved her life but those moments since. The lost song on the radio. His offhand and relaxed flattery to a nun with regard to her beauty. Then he had leaned his head back, closed his eyes for too long, and slept.
A week later he rejoins the flatbed truck that carries the tar and fire, jumps on with the other men, and is back working at the bridge. His arm healed, he swings from Pier D to Pier C, ignores the stories he hears of the nun who disappeared. He lies supine on the end of his tether looking up towards the struts of the bridge, pivoting slowly. He knows the panorama of the valley better than any engineer. Like a bird. Better than Edmund Burke, the bridge’s architect, or Harris, better than the surveyors of 1912 when they worked blind through the bush. The panorama revolves with him and he hangs in this long silent courtship, her absence making him look everywhere.
In a year he will open up a bakery with the money he has saved. He releases the catch on the pulley and slides free of the bridge.
ELIMINATION DANCE
(an intermission)
A crowded dance floor. The band halts in the middle of a number. The Master of Ceremonies steps to the microphone: “Any person who has had a tentative o fer from Reader’s Digest to have their novel condensed.” All dancers thus described retire. The music resumes, pauses again: “Women who have given up the accordian because of pinched breasts.” In this way the ranks of the eliminated swell.
“Elimination Dance” is based on those dances where a caller decides, seemingly randomly, who is forbidden to continue dancing. The last remaining couple wins a prize.
Those who are allergic to the sea
Those who have resisted depravity
Men who shave off beards in stages, pausing to take photographs
American rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leaf hockey sweaters
Those who (while visiting a foreign country) have lost the end of a Q-Tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem
Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman’s stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs
All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform
Anyone who has mistaken a flasher’s penis for a loaf of bread while cycling through France
Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool
Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens with the dessert
Any person who has the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice
Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail
Those who have noticed and then become obsessed with the fly crawling over Joan Fontaine’s blouse during a key emotional scene in September A fair
Anyone who has had to step into an elevator with all of the Irish Rovers
Those who have filled in a bilingual and confidential pig survey from Statistics Canada. (Une enquête sur les porcs, strictement confidentielle)
Those who have written to the age old brotherhood of Rosicrucians for a free copy of their book The Mastery of Life in order to release the inner consciousness and to experience (in the privacy of the home) momentary flights of the soul
Those who have accidently stapled themselves
Anyone who has been penetrated by a mountie
Those currently working on a semaphore edition of War and Peace
Any university professor who has danced with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Jean Genet
Those who have unintentionally locked themselves within a sleeping bag at a camping goods store
Those who, after a swim, find the sensation of water dribbling out of their ears erotic
Men who have never touched a whippet
Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts
Those who have pissed out of the back of moving trucks
Those who have woken to find the wet footprints of a peacock across their kitchen floor
Anyone whose knees have been ruined as a result of performing sexual acts in elevators
Those who have so much as contemplated the possibility of creeping up to one’s enemy with two Bic lighters, pressing simultaneously the butane switches—one into each nostril—and so gassing him to death
Literary critics who have swum the Hellespont
Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine’s Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis
Anyone who has consumed a dog’s heart pills during seasons of passion
Those who have come across their own telephone numbers underneath terse insults or compliments in the washroom of the Bay Street Bus Terminal
Those who have used the following techni
ques of seduction:
small talk at a falconry convention
entering a spa town disguised as Ford Madox Ford
making erotic rotations of the pelvis, backstage, during the storm scene of King Lear
underlining suggestive phrases in the prefaces of Joseph Conrad
Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law
Any writer who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in one of the following poses: sitting in the back of a 1956 Dodge with two roosters; in a tuxedo with the Sydney Opera House in the distance; studying the vanishing point on a jar of Dutch Cleanser; against a gravestone with dramatic back lighting; with a false nose on; in the vicinity of Macchu Pichu; or sitting in a study and looking intensely at one’s own book
The person who borrowed my Martin Beck thriller, read it in a sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to the floor, stapled them together and returned the book, thinking I wouldn’t notice
Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board
Anyone with pain
Katharine
from THE ENGLISH PATIENT
The first time she dreamed of him she woke up beside her husband screaming.
In their bedroom she stared down onto the sheet, mouth open. Her husband put his hand on her back.
“Nightmare. Don’t worry.”
“Yes.”
“Shall I get you some water?”
“Yes.”
She wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t lie back into that zone they had been in.
The dream had taken place in this room—his hand on her neck (she touched it now), his anger towards her that she had sensed the first few times she had met him. No, not anger, a lack of interest, irritation at a married woman being among them. They had been bent over like animals, and he had yoked her neck back so she had been unable to breathe within her arousal.
Her husband brought her the glass on a saucer but she could not lift her arms, they were shaking, loose. He put the glass awkwardly against her mouth so she could gulp the chlorinated water, some coming down her chin, falling to her stomach. When she lay back she hardly had time to think of what she had witnessed, she fell into a quick deep sleep.
That had been the first recognition. She remembered it sometime during the next day, but she was busy then and she refused to nestle with its significance for long, dismissed it; it was an accidental collision on a crowded night, nothing more.
A year later the other, more dangerous, peaceful dreams came. And even within the first one of these she recalled the hands at her neck and waited for the mood of calmness between them to swerve to violence.
Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you? Towards a person you never considered. A dream. Then later another series of dreams.
He said later it was propinquity. Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said. He loved the word—the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours. Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps. In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you.
When he talked like that she hated him, her eyes remaining polite, her mind wanting to slap him. She always had the desire to slap him, and she realized even that was sexual. For him all relationships fell into patterns. You fell into propinquity or distance. Just as, for him, the histories in Herodotus clarified all societies. He assumed he was experienced in the ways of the world he had essentially left years earlier, struggling ever since to explore a half-invented world of the desert.
At Cairo aerodrome they loaded the equipment into the vehicles, her husband staying on to check the petrol lines of the Moth before the three men left the next morning. Madox went off to one of the embassies to send a wire. And he was going into town to get drunk, the usual final evening in Cairo, first at Madame Badin’s Opera Casino, and later to disappear into the streets behind the Pasha Hotel. He would pack before the evening began, which would allow him to just climb into the truck the next morning, hung over.
So he drove her into town, the air humid, the traffic bad and slow because of the hour.
“It’s so hot. I need a beer. Do you want one?”
“No, I have to arrange for a lot of things in the next couple of hours. You’ll have to excuse me.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “I don’t want to interfere.”
“I’ll have one with you when I come back.”
“In three weeks, right?”
“About that.”
“I wish I were going too.”
He said nothing in answer to that. They crossed the Bulaq Bridge and the traffic got worse. Too many carts, too many pedestrians who owned the streets. He cut south along the Nile towards the Semiramis Hotel, where she was staying, just beyond the barracks.
“You’re going to find Zerzura this time, aren’t you.”
“I’m going to find it this time.”
He was like his old self. He hardly looked at her on the drive, even when they were stalled for more than five minutes in one spot.
At the hotel he was excessively polite. When he behaved this way she liked him even less; they all had to pretend this pose was courtesy, graciousness. It reminded her of a dog in clothes. To hell with him. If her husband didn’t have to work with him she would prefer not to see him again.
He pulled her pack out of the rear and was about to carry it into the lobby.
“Here, I can take that.” Her shirt was damp at the back when she got out of the passenger seat.
The doorman offered to take the pack, but he said, “No, she wants to carry it,” and she was angry again at his assumption. The doorman left them. She turned to him and he passed her the bag so she was facing him, both hands awkwardly carrying the heavy case in front of her.
“So. Good-bye. Good luck.”
“Yes. I’ll look after them all. They’ll be safe.”
She nodded. She was in shadow, and he, as if unaware of the harsh sunlight, stood in it.
Then he came up to her, closer, and she thought for a moment he was going to embrace her. Instead he put his right arm forward and drew it in a gesture across her bare neck so her skin was touched by the whole length of his damp forearm.
“Good-bye.”
He walked back to the truck. She could feel his sweat now, like blood left by a blade which the gesture of his arm seemed to have imitated.
She picks up a cushion and places it onto her lap as a shield against him. “If you make love to me I won’t lie about it. If I make love to you I won’t lie about it.”
She moves the cushion against her heart, as if she would suffocate that part of herself which has broken free.
“What do you hate most?” he asks.
“A lie. And you?”
“Ownership,” he says. “When you leave me, forget me.”
Her fist swings towards him and hits hard into the bone just below his eye. She dresses and leaves.
Each day he would return home and look at the black bruise in the mirror. He became curious, not so much about the bruise, but about the shape of his face. The long eyebrows he had never really noticed before, the beginning of grey in his sandy hair. He had not looked at himself like this in a mirror for years. That was a long eyebrow.
Nothing can keep him from her.
When he is not in the desert with Madox or with Bermann in the Arab libraries, he meets her in Groppi Park—beside the heavily watered plum gardens. She is happiest here. She is a woman who misses moisture, who has always loved low green hedges and ferns. While for him this much greenery feels like a carnival.
From Groppi Park they arc out into the old city, South Cairo, markets where few Europeans go. In his rooms maps cover the walls. And in spite of his attempts at furnishing there is still a sense of base camp to his quarters.
They lie in each other’s arms, the pulse and
shadow of the fan on them. All morning he and Bermann have worked in the archaeological museum placing Arabic texts and European histories beside each other in an attempt to recognize echo, coincidence, name changes—back past Herodotus to the Kitab al Kanuz, where Zerzura is named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan. And there too the slow blink of a fan’s shadow. And here too the intimate exchange and echo of childhood history, of scar, of manner of kiss.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do! How can I be your lover? He will go mad.”
A list of wounds.
The various colours of the bruise—bright russet leading to brown. The plate she walked across the room with, flinging its contents aside, and broke across his head, the blood rising up into the straw hair. The fork that entered the back of his shoulder, leaving its bite marks the doctor suspected were caused by a fox.
He would step into an embrace with her, glancing first to see what moveable objects were around. He would meet her with others in public with bruises or a bandaged head and explain about the taxi jerking to a halt so that he had hit the open side window. Or with iodine on his forearm that covered a welt. Madox worried about his becoming suddenly accident-prone. She sneered quietly at the weakness of his explanation. Maybe it’s his age, maybe he needs glasses, said her husband, nudging Madox. Maybe it’s a woman he met, she said. Look, isn’t that a woman’s scratch or bite?
It was a scorpion, he said. Androctonus australis.
A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.
Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you.
The rest of the time I feel it doesn’t matter
if I ever see you again. It isn’t the morality,
it is how much you can bear.
No date, no name attached.
Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumour of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city.