« Who are you ?
I don’t know. You keep asking me.
You said you were English. »
« What great nation had found him, he wondered. What
country invented such soft dates to be chewed by the man beside him and then
passed from that mouth into his. »
« This was the time in her life that she fell upon
books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world. »
« So the books for the Englishman, as he listened
intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms,
missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if
plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night. »
« She lifted both if his hands to her face and smelled
them – the odour of sickness still in them. »
« Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog’s
paws. Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over
and smell the skin at the base of its
paw. This, he would say, as if coming from a brandy snifter, is the greater
smell in the world ! A bouquet ! Great rumours of travel ! She
would pretend disgust, but the dog’s paw was a wonder : the smell of it
never suggested dirt. It’s a cathedral ! her father had said,
so-and-so’s garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen – a
concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the
day. »
« Where was he ? What civilisation was this that
understood the predictions of weather and light ? »
« Up close the glass was rough and sandblasted, glass
that had lost its civilisation. »
« The rest of the room had adapted itself to his wound,
accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds. »
« She sat in the window alcove in the English patient’s
room, the painted walls on one side of her, the valley on the other. She opened
the book. The pages were joined together in a stiff wave. She felt like Crusoe
finding a drowned book that had washed up and dried itself on the shore. A
Narrative of 1757. Illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. As in all the best books, there
was the important page with the list of illustrations, a line of text for each
of them.
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it
feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched
back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from
sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams. »
« She herself preferred to be nomadic in the house with
her pallet or hammock, sleeping sometimes in the English patient’s room,
sometimes in the hall, depending on temperature or wind or light. »
« She was living like a vagrant, while elsewhere the
English patient reposed in his bed like a king. »
« They were protected by the simple fact that the villa
seemed a ruin. But she felt safe here, half adult and half child. »
« The Samiel from Turkey, ‘poison winds,’… »
« I am a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its
skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a
person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a
volume and inhales it. So history enters us. I knwe maps of the sea floor, maps
that depict weakness in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that
contain the various routes of the Crusades. »
« When I was lost among them, unsure of where I was,
all I needed was the name of a small ridge, a local custom, a cell of this
historical animal, and the map of the world would slide into place. »
« They had passed wells where water was cursed. »
« In the desert you celebrate nothing but water. »
« She wets her hands and combs water into her hair till
it is completely wet. This cools her and she likes it when she goes outside and
the breezes hit her, erasing the thunder. »
« That was how he felt safest. Revealing
nothing. »
« Which villa ? he asked.
It’s one they say has a ghost in the garden. San Girolamo.
Well, she’s got her own ghost, a burned patient. There is a face,
but it is unrecognizable. The nerves all gone. You can pass a match across his
face and there is no expression. The face is asleep. »
« The smell of the dead is the worst. We need a good
snowfall to clean up this country. We need ravens. »
« She turned up the wick in the oil lamp so it enlarged
the diameter of light around her. She sat very still, the book on her lap, as
he came up to her and then crouched beside her like an uncle. »
« The moon is on him like skin, a sheaf of
water. »
« You were someone with a dangerous will. »
« Listen to Frank Sinatra singing. We have to get some
music,’ he says. ‘Good for you patient. ‘ »
« Some of the
English love Africa. A part of their brain reflects the desert precisely. So
they’re not foreigners there. »
« A lean face with hair cut short, without the mask and
mystery of her long hair. If anything, she seems calm in this universe of hers.
The fountain gurgling in the background, the hawks, the ruined garden of the
villa. »
« I was in a tuxedo, a monkey suit, in order to get
into this gathering, a party, to steal some papers. Really I was still a thief.
No great patriot. No great hero. They had just made my skills official. »
« She imagines the weight of the hand on her own
cheek. »
« Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive,
leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her
like a child with schoolboks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until
these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and
situations. Caravaggio has for instance given her something. His motive, a
drama, and a stolen image. »
« Nowadays anything out of the ordinary is
investigated. »
« Words are tricky things, a friend of his has told
him, they’re much more tricky than violins. »
« He pats his bare chest as if looking for his pass,
grabs his penis and pretends to use it as a key to let him into the room that
is being guarded. »
« Nowadays he
doesn’t think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every
move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weight of her wrist on his heart
during the night.
He sits with his hand below the table, watching the girl
eat. He still prefers to eat alone, though he always sits with Hana during
meals. Vanity, he thinks. Martal vanity. She has seen him from a window eating
with his hands as he sits on one of the thirty-six steps by the chapel, not a
fork or a knife in sight, as if he were learning to eat like someone from the
East. In his greying stubble-beard, in his dark jacket, she sees the Italian
finally in him. She notices this more and more. »
« In the Pisa hospital she had seen the English patient
for the first time. A man with no face. An ebony pool. All identification
consumed in fire. Parts of his burned body and face had been sprayed with
tannic acid, that hardened into a protective shell over his raw skin. The area
around his eyes was coated with a thick layer of gentian violet. There was
nothing to recognize in him.
Sometimes she collects several blankets and lies under them,
enjoyng them more for their weight than for the warmth they bring. And when
moonlight slides onto the ceiling it wakes her, and she lies in the hammock,
her mind skating. She finds rest as opposed to sleep the truly pleasurable
state. If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and
favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the
locked door.
To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without
judgement. A bath in the sea, a fuck with a soldier who never knew your name.
Tenderness towards the unknown and anonymous, which was a tenderness to the
self.
Her legs move under the burden of military blankets. She
swims in their wool as the English patient moved in his cloth placenta. »
« When she woke, she picked up a pair of scissors out
of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair, not concerned with
shape ot length, just cutting it away – the irritation of its presence during
the previous day still in her mind – when she had bent forward and her hair had
touched blood in a wound. She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to
death. She gripped what was left to make sure there were no more strands and
turned again to face the rooms full of the wounded.
She never looked at herself in mirrors again. »
« She wanted nothing exotic, just bread, meat. One of
the towns had a bread-making section attached to the hospital and in her free
time she moved among the bakers, inhaling the dust and the promise of
food. »
« She wanted air that smelled of nothing human, wanted
moonlight even if it came with a rainwtorm. »
« Till the nuns reclaimed it she would sit in this
villa with the Englishman. There was something about him she wanted to learn,
grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There
was som little waltz in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought. She
wanted to save him, this nameless, almost faceless man who had been of the two
hundred or so placed in her care during the invasion north. »
« ‘It is a strange time, the end of a war.’
‘Yes. A period of adjustment.’
‘Yes. ‘ »
« When I was a child I though of you always as the
Scarlet Pimpernel, and in my dreams I stepped onto the night roofs with you.
You came home with cold meals in your pockets, pencil cases, sheet music off
some Forest Hill piano for me. »
« Hana listened as the Englishman turned the pages of
his commonplace book and read the information glued in from other books – about
great maps lost in the bonfires and the burning of Plato’s statue, whose marble
exfoliated in the heat, the cracks across wisdom like precise reports across
the valley as Poliziano stood on the grass hills smelling the future. Pico down
there somewhere as well, in his grey cell, watching everything with the third
eye of salvation. »
« He noticed her civilisation in the small wildflowers,
the small gifts to herself. Even in the overgrown garden he would come across a
square foot of grass snipped down with her murse’s scissors. If he had been a
younger man he would have fallen in love with this. »
« They had all grown older, but he still did not feel
he had wisdom to go with his aging. »
« She disliked his lying there with a candle in his
hands, mocking a deathlike posture, wax failing unnoticed onto his wrist. As if
he was preparing himself, as if he wanted to slip into his own death by
imitating its climate and light. »
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
