In the Skin of a Lion

by Michael Ondaatje

  She gets to her knees, dazed, and looks around. Patrick is grabbing a part of the sheet towards his face. He is snuffling, blood begins to come out of his nose onto the sheet. The blindfold is around his neck like a collar. He looks up at her and, as if he can’t see her, turns back to the sheet as he continues to bleed.

  – You moved. I told you not to. You moved.

  She still cannot stand up from the pain and the dizziness. She knows if she tries to stand she will fall over again. So she sits where she is. Patrick is bent over watching the sheet in his hands.

  So much for the human element, he thinks.

  All his life Patrick Lewis has lived beside novels and their clear stories. Authors accompanying their heroes clarified motives. World events raised characters from destitution. The books would conclude with all wills rectified and all romances solvent. Even the spurned lover accepted the fact that the conflict had ended.

  After Clara leaves him, Patrick cleans his room on Queen Street obsessively. Soap crystals fizz in a pail, the mop slices the week’s dust. Then he sits in the only dry corner where he has previously placed cigarettes and smokes the Roxy, dropping ash into the bucket beside him. The room smells like a clean butchershop. The furniture – a table, a chair, and an iguana cage – is piled on the bed at the street end of the room.

  Sometimes he leaves a book in this corner. He has already smelled the pages, touched the print’s indentations. Now he can devour it like a loaf of bread with his bare hands. He wipes cigarette ash off his arm and opens Wild Geese. “It was not openly spoken of, but the family was waiting for Caleb Gare. Even Lind Archer, the new school teacher, who had come late that afternoon all the way from Yellow Post with the Indian mail carrier and must therefore be hungry, was waiting.” Clara wiping his forehead with her handkerchief. “The rocker seemed to say, ‘Caleb! Caleb! Caleb!’ It amused the Teacher, rather wanly.” Her ear listening to the skin that covered Patrick’s heart.

  He feeds the iguana, holding the vetch an inch from the neutral mouth. Only the eyelid sliding down changes its expression. An animal born of another planet. He strokes the jaw with the flower. Through the window he sees men appear in the blue Toronto sky, inching into the air, scaffolding it. Pieces of Clara float around him.

  A kiss at Union Station, her mouth half-open.

  – I’m sorry to ask you but I can’t take it across the country, will you keep him?

  – What is this, a door prize?

  – Don’t talk like that, Patrick.

  – Let it free, dammit.

  – It’s blind!

  Stumbling back from argument.

  – Feed it clover and vetch, lots of water. Rattle the cage before you put food in. Just to let him know.

  So he had watched Clara climb, prim, silver-buckled, into the train. He walked home with the cage banging against his knee, threw in a cabbage, and left the animal alone for a week. It heard his tirades, the broken cups and glasses. The iguana knew Clara Dickens, knowledge of her was there within its medieval body. Patrick believed in archaic words like befall and doomed. The doom of Patrick Lewis. The doom of Ambrose Small. The words suggested spells and visions, a choreography of fate. A long time ago he had been told never to follow her. If Patrick was a hero he could come down on Small like an arrow. He could lead an iguana on a silver leash to its mistress.

  Dear Clara

  All these strange half-lit lives. Rosedale like an aquarium at night. Underwater trees. You in a long black dress walking without shoes in Ambrose’s long garden while his wife slept upstairs. Howling up to disturb her night. The soft rich.

  Ambrose had class because he had you. That’s what they all knew – those half-formed people who were born with money and who did nothing except keep it like a thermometer up their ass. The mean rich. The soft rich. I know why you went with Ambrose. He was the harbour rat. An immigrant rat. He had to win or he lost everything. The others just had to get their oldest son into Upper Canada College. Crop rotation. The only one who could slide over the wall, skip along the broken glass, was Small. But I don’t want Small, I want you.…

  Dear Clara

  All night the tense and bitter conversations of lovers after they exit from the Greenwood bar across the street from my room. I lie by the window for summer air, and late-night couples assuming privacy seduce or accuse or fight. No I didn’t. I’m sorry. Goddamn you! Whispered. The slap, the blow of scorned love, the nails of the other in their rake across his eyes. This battle for territory, Clara, ownership and want, the fast breath of a fuck, human or cat – supernatural moans, moon talk – her hands over the face making him less anonymous, the back of her coat against brick. You were telling him something, what were you telling him? Damn you! What! Nothing!

  I keep waking to sudden intimacy. Once I heard a strange humming below and looked out. A man with a carpet draped over his shoulder accompanied by a red dog. It was the neighbourhood thief, Caravaggio, returning from work. He passed calmly under me absorbed in the eating of Sicilian ice cream.…

  I woke to your voice in danger. You were whispering. I thought at first it was dialogue from the street but it was you and I froze in the darkness – a possible dream I did not wish to let slip. I know your hesitations, your cracking voice when you are lying or getting drunk. These are familiar to me. Clara? I said into the darkness, it’s okay, it’s okay. I was standing on the mattress at the foot of the bed. I could have touched the ceiling with both hands. But you didn’t listen. I was aware of wind coming in off the street. A male voice laughed in your company. I turned and saw the lit cream-yellow of the radio dial. It was Mystery Hour, a replay from two or three years back. I had slept through hours of broadcasting and woke only to the pitch of your breaking voice. You had a bit part. In the plot you had fallen on bad times.

  At Union Station I refused to leave you. Your face angry against the Bedford limestone, Damn you, Patrick, leave me alone! Your hair crashes against it as you gesture and break free of me.

  At Gate 5 you stop, pause in the steam, putting your hands up in surrender like a cowboy. A truce. No we did not walk up those steps our fingers locked like cogs. You were escaping the claustrophobia an obsessed lover brings. We placed our arms on each other’s shoulders, panting. Your face poured its look out.

  Dear Clara

  I came up to you and asked for a dance. The man with you punched me in the face. I asked you once more and he punched me in the face. I wiped off the blood below my eye. Five minutes later I came back to your table and his men attacked me, leaving me in a back alley. In this dream I hadn’t seen you for a long time and I loved you in your dress. It was a big celebration of some sort, you were with honourable company. I would be looking at your face and a hand would hit me. I would fall to the floor. I’d be lying there looking at your dress, then dragged away. I finally came back and asked you to dance. Two things happened. For a brief while we were dancing. I wanted to hold you close but I did not want to get blood on you and you said, “It’s all right, Patrick,” and then I was watching your face as they began forcing me back to the alley. The dream ended with me plotting with the Chinese to break up the party.

  He opened the door to her and stepped back quickly, appalled. He had not expected her.

  He walked into the empty rooms, gesturing towards the broken things he was trying to assemble, broken glass and crockery, things he had flung long ago, after Clara had gone.

  – What are those things?

  – Glass, a crossword puzzle … a story.

  Alice grinned at him. How much did she know about him and Clara anyway.

  – I’m trying to get my life in order, he said.

  – Well, this should begin it.

  She moved around the room, touching nothing, as if everything in the sparse living room was potent and part of his cure.

  – How long has she been gone? A year and a half?

  Two years?

  – Longer. Not long enough.

  He spoke in bursts. Senten
ces needed additions, parentheses, to clarify not the information but his state.

  – Give me a coffee, Patrick.

  There was more than five feet between them. When she moved closer towards a news clipping attached to the wall, he automatically moved further back. He felt dangerous. Alice seemed older, confident. She removed her coat and lay it on the ground by the door. He followed her into the kitchen, pumped water into the saucepan for coffee, and lit the gas. There were no chairs so she sat on the counter opposite, watching him at the stove. She was safe there.

  – You look tired, she said.

  – Oh, I’m okay. Physically I’m fine, just my mind. I’m lucky, whatever state I’m in my body takes care of itself.

  It was his longest speech for months.

  – I’m the reverse. That’s the only way I can tell if I’m in bad shape mentally, through my body.

  – Well, you’re an actress, right?

  – That’s right.

  His eyes were on everything but her, a bad sign. She slid off the counter and approached him, then stopped, inches away. His eyes caught hers, moved away, and then settled safely on her cheek.

  – The next move, Patrick.

  His first smile for months. He leaned forward and clung to her to stop her vanishing. She was smaller than he imagined. She wasn’t thin, or very small, but he had thought her body against him would be a different size. He could see the red in her hair by the temples, the lines under her eyes.

  The water in the saucepan was boiling and they did not move. They stood together feeling each other’s spines, each other’s hair at the back of the neck. Relax, she said, and he wanted to collapse against her, be carried by her into foreign countries, into the ocean, into bed, anywhere. He had been alone too long. This was a time when returning from work he would fall nightly into a cave of dreams, so later he was not sure it happened. It had been sudden, nothing was played out to conclusion, nothing solved by their time together, but it somehow kept him alive. She had come that day, he thought later, not for passion, but to save him, to veer him to some reality. If anyone knew where Clara was, she did.

  He had almost walked past Alice the previous week, outside the Parrot Theatre. He had not seen her since the farmhouse near Paris Plains, two years earlier, and he had hardly recognized her. But she had yelled his name.

  – Were you at the play?

  – No …

  He shrugged distractedly. His face and eyes were wild, were seeing nothing on the street around him. His clothes old, unironed, the collar bent up.

  – What are you doing now? she asked.

  He moved himself away from her extended arm.

  – I’m working at a lumber yard.

  – Come and see the play some night. Meet me afterwards.

  – Yes, all right.

  The ‘yes’ was so he could get away. He had wanted to shake her to pieces, blame her for Clara. It seemed it was all a game of theatre the two of them had performed against him. A woman’s education, removing his cleverness, even his revenge. He had turned and walked away from her.

  Now, taking Alice’s smallest finger, he walked with her from the kitchen.

  – How long have you lived here?

  – Almost a year.

  – There’s just a bed!

  – There’s an iguana.

  – Oh you’ve got him.

  In bed her nature, her transparency, had startled him. As did her sudden animal growl onto his shoulder when she lay on top of him. They lay there in the blank room.

  – I think her mother knows where she is, Patrick.

  – Possibly.

  – You should look for her.

  – She told me not to.

  – You must remove her shadow from you.

  – I know that.

  – Then when we meet again we can talk … we can say hello.

  She said that so strangely he would later recall it differently – clothed in sarcasm or tentative love or sadness.

  She had lost an earring when she got up. She said it didn’t matter, that it was artificial.

  He went to see Clara’s mother in Paris and had a late dinner with her.

  – When she married she eloped. But that didn’t last long.

  – She married Stump Jones?

  – And divorced him. Anyway, too many people laughed at his name. It was a terrible thing to live with and he would not change it. She was only eighteen. He said he’d gotten used to it.

  – What was he like?

  – Stump was good-looking and bad-tempered. It was the snickering over hotel registers that got to her. Patrick Lewis, now, that’s a brick of a name. She told me a good deal about you.

  – What did she say?

  – That you were probably a romantic Bolshevik from southern Ontario.

  – Well, I’m an eastern Ontario boy. Go on.

  – She said she seduced you.

  – She said that … she said things like that to you?

  – Yes.

  – Did she ever keep in touch with Stump?

  – I don’t think so.

  – Do you have a photograph of them?

  Mrs. Dickens got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen. He thought she was angry, felt him rude, so he followed her and started apologizing.

  – Forget her, Patrick, it’s been over two years.

  He laughed.

  She pulled open the cupboard drawer and handed him the honeymoon photograph. Both of them against some damn rocks. Stump looked okay, but it was her face he kept gazing at. So young, her hair almost blonde then, not dark as it was now. A fuller face, innocent.

  – It’s a foolish face, he said, not quite believing it was the same person.

  – Yes, said her mother, she was foolish then.

  – Where is she?

  – I don’t like him.

  – Nobody does. Do you know where she is?

  – In a place Small knows you will never look … in a place he knows you will never go back to.

  – What do you mean?

  But he knew then. Knew exactly where they were. He had been the searcher who had gazed across maps and seen every name except the one which was so well-known it had remained, like his childhood, invisible to him.

  Patrick stares at the thin layer of moonlight on the wall. His body feels like the shadow of someone in chains. He had awakened once to Clara whispering at the foot of his bed in this Paris hotel room. Soaking wet. Two in the morning. She’d slid the buttons through the damp holes of her dress.… And another time crawled from their bed to warm her hands on the radiator.… He undreams himself, remembers she has left him. Gets out of bed and walks to the wall beside the radiator against which she had leaned.

  He is standing in their old room at the Arlington Hotel. Without turning on any light he bends down and puts his face close to the wall at stomach level. Here they had pushed in frenzy, sexual madness. He finds the faint impression of her backbone on the white paint.

  Ambrose Small holds a wooden match above his head, its glare falling onto the shoulders of his nightshirt. Four in the morning. Above him a silk bag holds naphtha. He has heard noises. His other hand turns a brass handle. Now the flame and gas combine and his room breaks open in yellow light. Patrick Lewis is sitting in an armchair, overcoat on, looking straight at him.

  Small draws up a chair. A mutual excitement, as if each were looking into a mirror.

  – Where do you want me to begin, says Small, with my childhood?

  Patrick smiles.

  – I don’t want to talk about you, Small. I want Clara. Something about her cast a spell on me.… I don’t know what it is.

  – It’s her unfinished nature, Ambrose says quietly.

  – Perhaps.

  – Who else knows I am here?

  – No one. I came just to talk to her.

  – I’ll wake Clara. Go outside, she’ll come out and listen to you.

  Patrick steps outside into the dark night and sits in one of the two
chairs on the grass. He is among blue trees, he can smell gum on the branches. He can hear the river. He knows this place from his childhood, the large house belonging to the Rathbun Timber Company, which he had passed every day during the log drives. A last remnant from that era. He walks to the window and looks in. There is no longer light. Ambrose must have carried the lamp back into the bedroom of the house.

  Water from the eaves dribbles onto Patrick’s coat, some on his neck, and he steps back, stretching in the darkness. But there had been no rain. He notices a metal smell. He moves his eyes above the ledge of the window and simultaneously knows it has nothing to do with rain. He smells and feels kerosene pour across his shoulders, hears the rasp of the match that will kill him in the hand of Small who crouches on the roof. Patrick sees it fall like a knighthood towards his shoulders.

  He is running along the rock path to the river before he knows for certain he is on fire. His hand pulls the knife out of his pocket and uses it to slice open the coat as he runs. He stops and begins to laugh. He is all right. Then he sees light in the trees around him and knows he is a hunchback of fire, and he runs – past the barrel for burning garbage, past the boat on the sand – and falls stomach down in the shallows, splashing forward. The air caught in his coat is a bubble on fire burning above the water. He turns and falls onto his back.

  He remains in the water, only his head visible, scared to allow his shoulders into the air. There is no pain except in his hands which still hold onto the knife. He sticks it into the river bottom. Patrick can feel the cuts in his palm. He can feel the itch on his chest from slashing open the coat.

  He looks past his hand just in time. Ambrose is standing on the beach. The bottle with the burning-cloth neck is travelling in the air and the explosion when it hits the water makes the river around him jump like a basket of fish, makes the night silver. Patrick’s left eye goes linen white, and he knows he is possibly blind there. He reaches for the knife and stumbles out, wading free of the water. Ambrose hasn’t moved. He doesn’t move as Patrick steps up to him and cuts him at the shoulder.