The Cat's Table

by Michael Ondaatje

  I think back, not just to this conversation during a meal on a ship, but also to my teenage evenings in Mill Hill. Massi and Ramadhin and I have quickly eaten a curry dinner at their house and are rushing out to catch the 7.05 train into the city. We have heard of a jazz club. We are sixteen and seventeen. This is the look, the long-distance gaze towards her son, with his unsafe heart, that I would have seen on Ramadhin’s mother’s face.

  LAST NIGHT, MY first dream of Massi. It is years since we separated. I was among alpine houses, the living quarters raised because the ground level was for animals. I have not seen her in a dream, let alone in real life, for a considerable time.

  I was hidden when she came out. Her hair was short and dark, which distinguished her from the way she looked when she lived with me. It made her face clearer, there were interesting new angles. She looked healthy. I knew I could have fallen in love with her again. Whereas I could not have fallen in love with her again as she had been in the past, surrounded by a mutual history and a familiar look.

  A man came out, helped her up onto a table, and I saw that she was in the beginning of a pregnancy. They heard something and came towards me. I leapt over a hedge, fell on my knees, then started running along a road where there were merchants, blacksmiths and carpenters, all at work. The noise of their tools sounded like weapons. It became music and I realised suddenly that I was not running, it was Massi who was running between the dangerous rhythms of anvils and saw blades. I was disembodied, no longer in the scene, no longer part of her existence. And it was she, newly pregnant, who was in full life racing to escape the dangers. Massi, with her short, dark hair, determined to reach something beyond where she now was.

  I must have been taught, or somehow learned early in my life, to break easily away from intimacy. When Massi and I split, no matter what pain there was, I did not fight back. We parted almost too casually. So that, long after my relationship with her ended, but still within the spin and eddy of it, I found myself searching for something to explain or excuse it. I stripped our story down to what I thought was the essential truth. But of course it was only a partial truth. Massi said that sometimes, when things overwhelmed me, there was a trick or a habit I had: I turned myself into something that did not belong anywhere. I trusted nothing I was told, not even what I witnessed.

  It was, she said, as if I had grown up believing that everything was perilous. A deceit must have done that. ‘So you give your friendship, your intimacy, only to those distant from you.’ Then she asked me, Did I still believe that my cousin had been involved in a murder? That if I opened myself up and spoke the truth about what I knew, she would continue to be in danger? ‘Your goddamn cautious heart. Who did you love that did this to you?’

  ‘I loved you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I loved you.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Someone damaged you. Tell me what happened when you came to England.’

  ‘I went to school.’

  ‘No, when you came. Because something must have happened. I thought you were okay, when I saw you again, after Ramadhin died. But I don’t think so. What?’

  ‘I said I loved you.’

  ‘Yeah, loved. You’re leaving my life, aren’t you.’

  In this way, valid or not, we burned the few good things remaining between us.

  EVERY AFTERNOON, FROM the time we left Port Said, the orchestra, in their usual plum-coloured clothes, played waltzes on the Promenade Deck, and everyone came out to take in the milder sun of the Mediterranean. Mr Giggs walked among us, shaking hands. And there was Mr Gunesekera, with his red scarf around his neck, bowing as he passed. Miss Lasqueti wore her pigeon jacket with the ten cushioned pockets, each housing a tumbler or a jacobin, their heads staring out while she strode the decks to give them sea air. But there was no Mr Mazappa. His wild, raucous humour was gone. There were only a few excitements, the most important being that the O’Neal Weimaraner was believed to have jumped overboard and swum ashore around the time we left the harbour at Port Said. But we were sure that if the dog had gone overboard, Mr Invernio would have leapt after it into the sea. Still, we were pleased that with the disappearance of this two-time Crufts Dog Show winner, our Captain had yet another problem on his hands. So far it had not proven to be his most successful voyage. One more crisis, Miss Lasqueti said, and this might be his last. In the privacy of our cabin Mr Hastie hinted that the Weimaraner had been stashed away somewhere by Invernio, since it was clear he was besotted with the creature and did not seem too upset at its disappearance. Mr Hastie said he would not be surprised if Mrs Invernio – if there was a Mrs Invernio – was seen in a few weeks walking the pedigree creature in Battersea Park.

  An outdoor concert was given one night on the Promenade Deck, with the sound of the sea filling our ears. It was classical music, something Cassius, Ramadhin and I had never heard about, and because the three of us had grabbed seats in the front row, we were not able to get up and leave, unless we pretended to be overcome by illness. I was not really listening, trying instead to invent a dramatic walk away from my seat while clutching my stomach. But I was hearing now and then something familiar. The sounds were coming from a redheaded woman on the stage, who tossed her hair this way and that, playing her violin by herself while the other musicians were quiet. Something was very familiar about her. Perhaps I had seen her in the pool. A hand from behind me squeezed my shoulder, and I turned around.

  ‘I think she could be your violinist,’ Miss Lasqueti whispered into my ear.

  I had complained to her about the noises next to my cabin during the afternoons. I looked at the programme that had been left on my seat. Then I looked at the woman pushing her wild hair back whenever she could find a pause in the music. So it was not her face that was familiar, but the notes and squawks that were now beginning to link with the music coming from the others. It was as if they were accidentally joining in on a similar melody. It must have felt to her like a wonderful thing, this, after all those wretched hours in the high temperatures of her cabin.

  EXAMINATION BOOKLET ENTRY #30:

  Crimes Committed (So Far) by the Captain of the ORONSAY

  1. The biting to death of Mr de Silva by an animal.

  2. The complete lack of safety for children during a dangerous storm.

  3. Bad and rude language in front of children.

  4. Unfair dismissal of Mr Hastie, Head Kennel Keeper.

  5. The recital of a very insulting poem at the end of a dinner ceremony.

  6. The misplacing of the valuable bronze statue of Mr de Silva.

  7. The loss of a prize-winning Weimaraner.

  Miss Lasqueti: A Second Portrait

  RECENTLY I SAT in on a master class given by the filmmaker Luc Dardenne. He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they; we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves. We should not feel assured or certain about their motives, or look down on them. I believe this. I recognise this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.

  In our first impressions of Miss Lasqueti, she had appeared spinsterish and cautious. The worlds she spoke of had no interest for us. She enthused about brass rubbings and tapestries. But then she had revealed she was responsible for two dozen messenger pigeons billeted somewhere on the ship that she was ‘bringing over for a plutocrat’, a neighbour of hers in Carmarthenshire. What, we wondered, would a plutocrat want with pigeons? ‘Radio silence,’ she had said enigmatically. When we heard later of her contacts with Whitehall, the link to the pigeons became clearer. The plutocrat had been a fiction.

  But at the time we were more interested in what appeared to be her affection for Mr Mazappa. We were less aware of her growing curiosity about the prisoner and the two officers (one of them still unseen) who were escorting Niemeyer to England. ‘The prisoner is just my baggage,’ Mr Giggs ha
d remarked to a group of his admirers during dinner, claiming his authoritative role with a false modesty. But what was Miss Lasqueti’s ‘baggage’? We didn’t know. Was it something I might have witnessed during a visit to her cabin earlier in the journey, when she had wanted to discuss my affiliation with the Baron? For if there was ever an unusual moment in my dealings with Miss Lasqueti, it happened one afternoon, when she asked me to come to her cabin at teatime.

  So I make my way along an almost forgotten path to that indelible afternoon. I am surprised to find Emily there with her, as if Miss Lasqueti has invited her to join us in order to discuss something serious with me. There is tea and biscuits on the table. Emily and I sit upright on the only chairs in the room, while Miss Lasqueti positions herself at the foot of the bed, leaning forward to talk. The cabin is much larger than mine, full of unusual objects. There is something like a heavy carpet beside her. I am told later that this is a tapestry.

  ‘I was telling Emily that my first name is Perinetta. I believe it is a type of apple, found in the Netherlands.’ She murmurs the name to herself again, as if it has not been used enough around her. Then she begins to talk. About herself when she was young, her love of languages, how she got into trouble in the early days, ‘until something happened that allowed me to save myself.’ When Emily questions her about it, she says, ‘I’ll tell you about that some other time.’

  In retrospect, I see that this description of her past must have been presented in order to ease herself into warning me about my involvement with the Baron, which somehow she had learned about. Beside her, Emily’s serious look and constant nodding seem to emphasise that this is most important. But I am hardly listening. I have caught the eye of another face, in a corner of the room. It belongs to a mannequin-like statue with a few of Miss Lasqueti’s clothes draped over its bare shoulders and arms. As she continues speaking, I make out a scar on the alabaster belly that looks as if it has been drawn or painted by a recent hand. But it is the face that searches me out, looking openly at me, as if it has no defence. It is like a youthful and less controlled version of Miss Lasqueti, but of course with a wound. The realisation comes to me only now, as I write this, that it may have been a statue of a bodhisattva. I wonder, that secular accepting face … Miss Lasqueti’s conversation goes on. And if my gaze stayed away from her that afternoon, as she spoke about my connection to the Baron, it was only because I was caught up in that understanding look. Perhaps she had intentionally placed herself on the bed so the figure would beckon to me from behind her.

  Later, as we were leaving, she brought me over to what had preoccupied me, and moved the almost transparent piece of clothing that had been covering the cut in the flesh.

  ‘See this? You get over such things in time. You learn to alter your life.’

  The sentence meant nothing to me, but I still remember her words. And I saw the realistic wound up close for a moment before the fabric fell back over it. Everything was in plain sight.

  Miss Lasqueti had an authority I had not suspected. Looking back, I believe she must have persuaded the Baron to leave the ship at Port Said, warning him that he would be exposed if he remained on board. Then there was a moment so hallucinatory that it could actually have been remembered from a dream, when either Cassius or I had been walking towards her, one night. It was dusk, and whichever one of us it was thought he saw her cleaning, with the edge of her blouse, what looked like a small pistol. This was not a fully believed piece of grit in our portrait of her. As children we were imagining and accepting all kinds of things. We did know she was fond of us. She spent a few afternoons with Cassius, who had become interested in her sketchbook. She was easy to talk to.

  There was one further episode that connected in our minds with that possible pistol. On one of the afternoons Cassius spent with Miss Lasqueti, she lent him a fountain pen. He forgot about it completely until he felt it in his trouser pocket after dinner. He came upon her at a table deep in conversation with someone, her handbag on the chair beside her. He leaned over to drop the pen into it without disturbing them, but her bare arm snaked out quickly and she caught his hand that held the pen and took it from him. She had not even turned her head to look at him. ‘Thank you, Cassius. I’ve got it,’ she said, and carried on her conversation.

  This to us was further evidence.

  In spite of all of her opinions, she never appeared judgemental. I think the only person who continually annoyed her was Mr Giggs, and it was because she found him boastful. She said he always spoke of his skill as a marksman, being a good shot. The revelation that Miss Lasqueti was also ‘a good shot’ was to come much later, with our discovery of a photograph of a young Perinetta Lasqueti, striding away from a perfect target score at the Bisley Trials, laughing with the Polish war hero Juliusz Grusza, who would later represent England in the 50-metre rapid-fire pistol category at the Empire Games. It was in the article on Grusza that Miss Lasqueti’s prowess was mentioned, although more space was given to the possible romance between the couple in the picture. She wore a houndstooth jacket and the sunlight shone on her blonde hair, so we now had an alternative vision of the pale spinster who did sketches on the Oronsay and now and then threw books over the rail.

  It was Ramadhin who had come across the article and picture when we were both living in England. He discovered it in an old copy of the Illustrated London News. The two of us had been loafing through the Croydon public library, and we would not have recognised Miss Lasqueti without her name in the cutline. By the time we read it, in the late 1950s, her companion in the photograph, Juliusz Grusza, had become a national celebrity as an Olympic medallist, as well as a force in Whitehall, where Miss Lasqueti supposedly had affiliations. If Ramadhin and I had known how to contact Cassius we would have made a copy of this pre-Olympic profile and sent it to him.

  She had not been, in our eyes, a beautiful woman. If we found her attractive it was because of the various aspects we were discovering in her. She’d been aloof at first only from a guarded shyness. Then it was as if you had come across a box of small foxes at a country fair. The name Lasqueti suggested some European background, but she existed comfortably alongside that specific breed of garden aristocracy among the English.

  She certainly had a knowledge of the variety of Englishness. We were, for instance, startled by information she gave out at the Cat’s Table during a discussion on hiking, claiming to know certain hikers (one was a second cousin of hers) who, when they went for weekend cross-country walks, wore nothing but their socks and boots, and a haversack over their shoulders. They traversed forests and open fields and forded salmon streams this way. If you ran across them, they ignored you, as if you were invisible, as they assumed they would be to you. Coming to a village at dusk, they would dress on the outskirts, enter an inn, eat a solitary meal, and take a room for the night.

  This highly visual piece of information from Miss Lasqueti brought silence to our table. Most passengers were well-read Asia hands who could not quite link their portrait of English life derived from Jane Austen and Agatha Christie with these naked striders. The wayward and uncalled-for anecdote was the first thing to alter Miss Lasqueti from the faded-wallpaper manner she had first presented to us. The hiker story had silenced our table until Mr Mazappa leapt in to return to the inexplicable faces of Madonnas, which she had spoken about earlier in the meal.

  ‘The trouble with all those Madonnas,’ he said, ‘is that there is a child that needs to be fed and the mothers are putting forth breasts that look like panino-shaped bladders. No wonder the babies look like disgruntled adults. I have seen only one image where the child looks as if He is being well fed and intent on the milk He’s drinking. It’s at La Granja, the summer palace near Segovia, on a very small tapestry, and the Madonna is not looking out into the future. She is watching the Christ child enjoying the breast.’

  ‘You speak as if you know breastfeeding,’ someone at the table said to him. ‘Do you have children?’

  The slight
est of pauses, then Mazappa said, ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I am so glad you like tapestries, Mr Mazappa,’ Miss Lasqueti chimed into the new silence that followed this information. Mr Mazappa had said nothing more. Not how many children he had, or their names. ‘I wonder who your tapestry maker was? Perhaps it was a woman, of the Mudéjar tradition. That is, if it was done in the fifteenth century. I’ll look it up when I’m in London. I worked for a while with a gentleman who collected such things. He had good taste but was tough as nails, though he did teach me to appreciate the fabric arts. It is surprising when you learn such things from men.’

  We pocketed these revelations. Who was the gentleman ‘tough as nails’? And the second cousin who was the hiker? Our spinster seemed to have a knowledge not just of pigeon life and sketching.

  *

  SOME YEARS AGO, in my present life, I received a package that had been posted from Whitland in Carmarthenshire and then forwarded to me by my English publisher. It contained several colour photocopies of drawings as well as a letter from Perinetta Lasqueti. The letter had been written after she heard me on a BBC World Service programme on the topic of ‘Youth’, during which I had briefly mentioned my journey to England on a ship.

  I looked at the drawings first. I saw my young lean self, a sketch of Cassius smoking, a beautiful one of Emily wearing a feather-blue beret. The Emily who had since disappeared from my life. Eventually I began recognising other faces such as the Purser, and Mr Nevil, and locations buried deep in my past – the cinema screen at the stern of the ship, the piano in the ballroom with a smudged figure sitting there, sailors at fire drill, this and that. All of them depicting our ship’s journey, in 1954, from Colombo to Tilbury.