The Cat's Table

by Michael Ondaatje

  Whitland,

  Carmarthenshire

  Dear Michael,

  Please excuse the informality, but I knew you, oh years ago, as a boy. The other night I heard you speak on the radio. And at one point, when you mentioned coming to England on the Oronsay, I quickly focused more on what was being said, for I too had been on that ship in 1954. So I kept listening, but I still did not know who you were. I could not connect the voice on the radio and the career you have had to who it was on the ship, until you mentioned your nickname, “Mynah”. And then I remembered you three boys, especially Cassius, that always watching child. And I remembered Emily.

  One afternoon I invited you and Emily to my cabin for tea. I do not suppose you will remember this. Why should you. I was curious about all of you. The Whitehall in me made me curious I suppose. There was not much else going on during the sea journey, apart from you boys constantly getting into trouble … But let me continue with my further reason for this letter, apart from sending you a delighted greeting.

  It has been a wish of mine for quite some time to get in touch with Emily. I think of her often. For there was something I had wished to say to her during that journey but did not. I had thought that afternoon of simply removing you from the clutches of the Baron. But it was Emily I should have wanted to save. For I had run into her with the Jankla Troupe chap a few times and her relationship with him seemed fraught and dangerous. There was also something I had promised myself to give her that might be useful to her, to help her out, but again I never did. It was hardly apt. It was, shall we say, a future truth, though it was a story from years ago, from my own youth. So I have enclosed in this package that original missive, to be forwarded to your cousin. I did not know Emily well, but she struck me as one who, in spite of her generous self, needed protecting. I would appreciate it if you would send this enclosed package on to her.

  I have made copies of some drawings I did on that voyage, perhaps you might enjoy them.

  Thank you,

  with affection,

  Perinetta

  It was a two-page letter, but the package she wished me to send on, with Emily’s name on it, was thick with pages, slightly yellowed.

  I opened it. Writers are shameless. But let me just say, I had not seen Emily for years, and had no clue as to where she was. The last time we had spoken was at her wedding to a man named Desmond, just before they went abroad. I could not even remember to which country. After a brief hesitation, I opened Emily’s package and began reading the many pages, written in a small cursive script, as if to underline the privacy and intimacy of the letter. And as I read, I felt that this was about the incident in Miss Lasqueti’s past that she had referred to during that afternoon when I had gone to her cabin and found Emily already there. At some point that afternoon, Emily asked Miss Lasqueti what she’d alluded to, about an earlier moment in her life that had allowed her to save herself. And Miss Lasqueti had said, ‘I’ll tell you about that some other time.’

  I went to Italy in my twenties, for the language. I was fluid with languages and I loved Italian best. Someone suggested I apply to the Villa Ortensia for a job. A wealthy American couple, Horace and Rose Johnson, had bought it and were turning it into a great archive of art. They interviewed me twice and then took me on as a translator – of correspondence as well as for research and cataloguing. I’d cycle to work each day, arriving at the villa to work for six hours, then cycle home to a very small room I was renting in the city.

  The owners had a son who was seven years old. He was a sweet boy and funny. He liked to watch me arrive on the bicycle, flustered, for I was nearly always late. He’d stand by the stone gate at the end of the villa’s long drive that was bordered by cypresses. Each day at 9.00 or just after, I’d be coming down the 400-yard driveway and he’d be waving his arms and then pretend to look at a watch on his small wrist as if he were timing me. I noticed one day he was not the only one watching as I cycled with the long green scarf around my neck and a satchel across my shoulder. Unseen by the boy, one floor up in the building behind him, was a figure in the window, and as I reached the stone gate it disappeared. I could not tell who it was. The next day I saw it again, that distinct ghost, and so I waved up at it. After that I did not see the figure in the window again.

  It was busy and difficult work at the institute. Paintings and tapestries and sculptures were arriving at a fast rate, all to be catalogued. There was also the work to be done on the re-invention of the gardens, with Mrs Johnson attempting to transform them back into their original Medici structure. So there was much scurrying about in the halls and terraces, with huge arguments among the gardeners, who had been plucked from estates all over Europe – so we, the translators, rushed in to help communicate the opinions and the irritations.

  Horace and Rose Johnson appeared now and then like gods. They strolled into our offices, or were suddenly off to Naples or even the Far East. They came into our work spaces in a very different way from how Clive, their son, would visit us. His entrance was more like a small shell rolling in accidentally, so he’d be there for some time before we were even aware of his presence. Once I came down the staircase in the Grand Rotunda and saw him crouched, brushing the image of a dog in the foliage that was in the lower half of one of the hanging tapestries: Verdura with Dog, it was called. From sixteenth-century Flanders. I loved the piece. It warmed up and humanised the great circular hall. Anyway, the boy had got hold of a dog brush and he was brushing very tenderly the coat of the hound. It was a delicate tapestry, a classic of provincial weaving from the Netherlands.

  ‘Be very gentle, Clive,’ I said. ‘It’s valuable.’

  ‘I am,’ he said.

  It was summer, the boy had no dog of his own in this villa, even with those vast grounds. The parents were away, one of them attempting to get to Khartoum, who knows why, or for what piece of art to be attained. I thought that for the seven-year-old boy the father’s absence must have felt like centuries, and I wondered what the surroundings meant to him. A child looks at a vista, or a painting, and he sees something entirely different from what a father sees. The boy saw a dog he did not have. That is all.

  Most of the tapestries in the villa were symbolic, the religious ones weighted with icons and parables. The secular ones (of which Verdura with Dog was one) were versions of an Earthly Paradise, or about the dangerous or blissful powers of love – depicted usually by hunting scenes. So the dog in the tapestry was in fact a boar-hunting dog. Other tableaux showed a hawk overpowering a dove in a cloudless blue sky – an example of the ‘conquering’ that comes with love. Love as murder then, or annihilation of the weaker party. But when you saw those works hanging in the Grand Rotunda or in the spacious but cold rooms, you saw their true purpose, which was to bring a garden into a bare stone house. These were tapestries that had been woven in cold attics in some northern country – places that may never have seen a wild boar or a dove or the lush greenery that was found in them. They were beautiful in this new context. They had a dignity. The colours used were humble, background colours, so that a live Florentine beauty who walked a few paces in front of one might appear somehow distinguished by it. Or they would be at times political, to do with ownership or status. They showed the Medici crest – the five red balls of the solar system as well as the blue one added after the Medicis and the French aligned their families.

  ‘This art feels safe, doesn’t it?’

  Horace and I were in the Capone Room, surrounded by its frescoes, when I realised he was talking directly to me. I had been working there for over a month and he had never acknowledged me. His hand reached out as if to pluck a painted bird from its blue sky.

  ‘But art is never safe. All of this is only one small room in a life.’ For a man who supposedly loved art, I felt he was scorning it.

  ‘Come with me.’ And he took my elbow carefully, precisely, as if this was one place on the anatomy which was socially acceptable to touch and therefore take part ownership of. He wa
lked me down the hall until we were in the Grand Rotunda, where a sixty-foot tapestry hung. He lifted a corner and held it up so I could look at the underside, where the colours were suddenly brilliant and forceful.

  ‘This is where the power is, you see. Always. The underneath.’

  He walked away from the tapestry to the centre of the circular hall, knowing his voice would carry to the perimeter as well as up towards the distant ceiling.

  ‘Probably more than a hundred women worked on this for a year. They fought for the chance to work on it. This thing fed them. This kept them alive in the year 1530, during a Flanders winter. That is what gives truth, depth, to this sentimental tableau.’

  He waited in silence until I joined him.

  ‘So tell me, Perinetta – it is Perinetta, yes? – who made this? One hundred women with their cold and chapped hands? The man who conceived the scene? What made this was simply a year and a place. It was a time when the only way to identify an artist was by where he came from or where he ended up working. Towns claim half the great art of Europe. Look here – you can see the city mark of Oudenaarde. But of course, one also must consider which of the Medicis bought it for a small nation’s fortune, and transported it to Italy, protected by guards and thugs, a thousand miles …’

  When he talked like that I could have slid with ease into his assured pocket. I was very young the first time he spoke to me. The thing is that men, with the kind of power that comes with money and knowledge, assume the universe. It allows them an easy wisdom. But such people close doors on you. Within such a universe there are codes, rooms you must not enter. In their daily life there is always a cup of blood somewhere. He was aware of that. Horace Johnson knew the kind of animal he was riding. There’s a brutality that comes with such knowledge. I didn’t know it then. Not that afternoon when he steered me into the Grand Rotunda holding just my elbow and with that same hand lifted the corner of the tapestry, as if it was a servant’s skirt, to reveal the bright underside.

  I continued living in that world for three seasons, and eventually discovered I did not control any of the paths I thought I had freely chosen. I was unaware of the trapdoors and moats among the rich. I was unaware that a man like Horace treated even those he loved, and those he desired to have in his presence, in the same way that he must have treated his enemies, placing them where there was no chance of retaliation.

  In Siena, if you go to the corner of the via del Moro and via Sallustio Bandini and look up, you can read Dante’s lines from the Purgatorio –

  ‘That one is’ he replied ‘Provenzan Salvani;

  and he is here because he had the ambition

  to carry all of Siena in his hands.’

  And at the top of the via Vallerozzi where it meets the via Montanini, you discover, cut into the yellow stone –

  Wise Savia I was not, even though Sapìa

  I was called, and about the misfortunes of others

  I was much happier than about my own good luck.

  In the great centres of power, you see, competition is based not so much on winning but on stopping your enemy from achieving what he or she really wants.

  One Christmas there was a fancy-dress party for the staff, and during it I became suddenly conscious of him circling me, on the half-empty patio. I had arrived as Marcel Proust, my blonde hair hidden and with a slim moustache pasted on, and wearing a cape. Was this what interested him? Did this somehow allow a disguise for his intentions?

  He asked if he could get me anything. ‘Nothing,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you wish to dance across the great cities of Europe?’

  I laughed. ‘I have my own small cork-lined room,’ I said, ‘that’s probably enough.’

  ‘I see. Then let me paint you. As you are now. Have you been painted before?’

  I said I hadn’t.

  ‘You could wear that green scarf of yours.’

  So it began that way, with me stepping into his consciousness dressed as a man. And I should tell you there is still perhaps his portrait of me in one of the basement vaults of that villa. In that probably still-unfinished portrait I am fully clothed, but post-coital. Though I look demure, as if a gauche little provincial heiress, or the innocent daughter of a friend.

  He had of course been the figure in the upper windows watching me cycle to work every morning. He had taken his time searching me out. He continued now in equally slow motion. He interspersed his sketching with endless conversation: his knowledge of tinctures, the choreography of a fresco, the virtues of alabaster. And I, in order to hesitate at the start of this courtship, wore for the first few days my Proust moustache, so that as he greeted me in the studio, he had to embrace and kiss me with the moustache between us. I wore it for some days in his company, forgetting I had it on as we spoke and as I shared stories of my youth with him. I handed all of that information sleepily over to his great curiosity.

  He was wise as well as clever. He made me his friend. He was older, and older skills are different, seemingly more gracious perhaps. And I had never had a younger lover to compare him with – or in fact any lover. All occurred with an ebb and flow that was as much conversation as physical revealing. The removal of the green scarf from my neck as I entered the studio, and then one afternoon, when it was a burning August day, he proposed more. One small step. It was perhaps the spell of his words, my education. I discovered how to fold my naked back into him, to go beyond what at first seemed only pain, until even that became a habit of our desire.

  Of course I know there’s a tradition for this. But to me, then, it was a stunning country, delirious, shocking, full of tastes to be accepted and fulfilled. I’d move around that well-furnished studio afterwards, my skin, my ‘tincture’, alive to the air that slipped through the open louvres. Wearing just socks, I walked around and touched with the shadow of my hand those earlier demure sketches he had done of me. Often it felt I was all alone in the room, as if he were not there watching and swallowing my presence – something unwrapped for the first time in this room. I was tumbling in that mixture of knowledge and desire. The weight of his arm, the overall weight of him, my sounds against the sound of my lover, how little light was needed to fall on someone’s shoulder in a painting to suggest grief or concealment, how close that cup of Caravaggio’s rested to the table edge to suggest the tension of falling.

  I read Perinetta Lasqueti’s letter into the afternoon, catching the flame of another time, the details of the past still ablaze in her memory. A letter so private and intense, in such a different voice from what I was expecting, that it felt it was for an imagined reader.

  That was when my spirit grew, in his studio on the via Panicale, where the bells of the city sounded like a recall order during our criminal hour. He looked at me bent over him. He looked over my naked shoulder as I leafed through one of his heavy books of art. Glancing up, I saw our reflected tableau in the mirror, and remembered a similar moment of his son reading on a large sofa of the Capone Room while Horace – as a father this time – stood behind the boy looking down at him. We were the same, myself and that boy, under the father’s control.

  That day, on the Oronsay, why did I invite you to my cabin along with your young cousin? During the journey I had watched you, and I feared that perhaps you too were being caught in a situation. I recognised the ease of it, and where you were going. But I was not sure. Instead I warned your cousin about the Baron. What I did not fully perceive, or know, that afternoon, was that the truly endangered one was you. I had chosen to protect the wrong child. Why did I not see it?

  I see my time in Florence through flawed glass, which confuses the pleasure of those days with irony. I would after making love with him in his various ways watch him. The oblong of sunlight coming down the east wall onto his body, all that hair I had not seen on a man, satyr-like, it felt I had co-habited with another species, forest-raised. The green scarf around my English shoulders, as I strolled alongside the smell of the paints and the chestnut smell of our love-ma
king. I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.

  Now and then he’d bring out some painting, something Japanese, or a master sketch that he had bought for a fortune. He would take the index finger of my hand, that had loved him intimately a half-hour earlier, and guide it over the outline of a bowl or a bridge or a cat’s back – I still remember quite specifically a drawing of a woman’s lap, with hands holding on to a struggling cat. Using my finger he traced the lines as if he were creating them, his attempted brush against immortality.

  He asked what I did when I was not at work, and made me describe my small room that he would not visit. He was curious about where else I had been, and what else excited me. There was a tentative courtship when I was at school … but really I was now running out of things to tell him. Then one afternoon I remembered the tender incident with Clive and the tapestry. I told him of the moment I’d descended the circular staircase in the Grand Rotunda and seen him gently brushing the coat of a dog that was standing in the foliage.

  Horace was only half listening to me. And must have thought at first that I was describing a reality, and then he froze and said, ‘What dog?’

  The rule between us, his rule, had been that there were to be no recognitions and repercussions outside the studio, beyond our hours there. If there were thrown pebbles, they needed to fall through water silently, and without a single enlarging circle. In fact when I was at work I rarely saw him. I shared my teatime with other members of the staff, and took my lunch out onto the second terrace of the garden, so I would have that angry statue of the Colossus brooding over me. I liked to be undisturbed, and if possible read during my spare hour. It was while I was relaxing there one Thursday that I began to hear a frantic breathing, someone nearby attempting to weep or even howl, though all that was able to be expressed was this disturbed repetitive breath. I got to my feet, followed the sound, and found the boy. His father must have punished him. When he saw me, blood rushed into his face and he ran from me as if I had done whatever it was to him. And of course I had. It was my little pre-coital anecdote about him and the dog.