Read Online In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michael Ondaatje
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for Ambrose. And you must never follow me.
– It takes me a long time to forgive.
– Don’t worry, Patrick. Things fill in. People are replaced.
He wondered if at first she had been something he wanted to steal, not because she was Clara but because she belonged to the enemy. But now there was her character. This daughter of the foreman at Wheeler Needle Works, who seemed to have entered him like a spirit, bullying his private nature. She had been the lover, of Ambrose Small, had been caught in the slow discreet wheel of the rich. And she would have learned those subtle rules that came alongside their gifts.
She started laughing, the hair on her temples still wet after their lovemaking. He sensed suddenly the sweat on himself as well. As he held her, he still didn’t know who she was.
After midnight Clara strolls behind her friend Alice, removes the shawl from her shoulders, and ties it on as a headband. Patrick watches Clara intently – the bones, the planes of lamplight on her face, hair no longer in the way. Follow me, she could say in her shawl headband, and he would be one of the Gadarene swine.
– Did I tell you, Clara laughs, how I helped my father shave dogs? A true story. My father loved to hunt. He had four redbone hounds, with no names – they disappeared so often we used numbers. During the summer, hunters steal dogs and my father was always worried about theft. So we’d drive to the worst barber in Paris and ask him to clip the dogs. He was always insulted by this, though he had not much other business.
I’d sit in the barber chair and hold the dog in my lap while it got clipped, and then we drove back with naked dogs. At home my dad got out his cow razor. He’d shave the midriffs to the skin, then we’d hose them and leave them to dry in the sun. After lunch my father wrote out DICKENS 1 , DICKENS 2, and DICKENS 3 with tree paint in neat letters on their sides. I was allowed to paint the name on the last dog. We had to hold them to the ground until the paint dried properly. I wrote DICKENS 4.
Those were favourite times. All day we’d talk about things I was not sure of. About plants, what wine tasted like. He put me right on how to have babies. I thought I had to take a watermelon seed, put it between two pieces of bread and drink lots of water. I thought this was how my parents talked when they were alone. We’d chat to the dogs too who were nonplussed, looking thin and naked. Sometimes it seemed to me I’d just had four babies. Great times. Then my father died of a stroke when I was fifteen. Dammit.
– Yeah, says Patrick, my father too.… My father was a wizard, he could blow logs right out of the water.
– What happened?
– He got killed setting charges in a feldspar mine. The company had tried to go too deep and the section above him collapsed. There wasn’t an explosion. The shelf just slid down with him into the cave and drowned him. He was buried in feldspar. I didn’t even know what it was. They use it in everything – chinaware, tiles, pottery, inlaid table tops, even in artificial teeth. I lost him there.
– Here’s to holy fathers, Alice says, holding up her glass.
Conversation dips again into childhood but the friend Alice plucks only details from the present to celebrate. She reveals no past, remains sourceless, like those statues of men with wrapped heads who symbolize undiscovered rivers.
All night as they talk the sky and the fields outside seem potent with summer storm. The night kitchen with these two actresses is overwhelming. Clara and Alice slip into tongues, impersonate people, and keep each other talking long into the night. Patrick is suddenly an audience. They imitate the waymen smoke. They discuss how women laugh – from the raucous to the sullen to the mercenary. He is in a room full of diverse laughter, looking back and forth from Clara’s vividness and erotic movement, even when she stretches, to Alice’s paleness and suppressed energy. “My
– It takes me a long time to forgive.
– Don’t worry, Patrick. Things fill in. People are replaced.
He wondered if at first she had been something he wanted to steal, not because she was Clara but because she belonged to the enemy. But now there was her character. This daughter of the foreman at Wheeler Needle Works, who seemed to have entered him like a spirit, bullying his private nature. She had been the lover, of Ambrose Small, had been caught in the slow discreet wheel of the rich. And she would have learned those subtle rules that came alongside their gifts.
She started laughing, the hair on her temples still wet after their lovemaking. He sensed suddenly the sweat on himself as well. As he held her, he still didn’t know who she was.
After midnight Clara strolls behind her friend Alice, removes the shawl from her shoulders, and ties it on as a headband. Patrick watches Clara intently – the bones, the planes of lamplight on her face, hair no longer in the way. Follow me, she could say in her shawl headband, and he would be one of the Gadarene swine.
– Did I tell you, Clara laughs, how I helped my father shave dogs? A true story. My father loved to hunt. He had four redbone hounds, with no names – they disappeared so often we used numbers. During the summer, hunters steal dogs and my father was always worried about theft. So we’d drive to the worst barber in Paris and ask him to clip the dogs. He was always insulted by this, though he had not much other business.
I’d sit in the barber chair and hold the dog in my lap while it got clipped, and then we drove back with naked dogs. At home my dad got out his cow razor. He’d shave the midriffs to the skin, then we’d hose them and leave them to dry in the sun. After lunch my father wrote out DICKENS 1 , DICKENS 2, and DICKENS 3 with tree paint in neat letters on their sides. I was allowed to paint the name on the last dog. We had to hold them to the ground until the paint dried properly. I wrote DICKENS 4.
Those were favourite times. All day we’d talk about things I was not sure of. About plants, what wine tasted like. He put me right on how to have babies. I thought I had to take a watermelon seed, put it between two pieces of bread and drink lots of water. I thought this was how my parents talked when they were alone. We’d chat to the dogs too who were nonplussed, looking thin and naked. Sometimes it seemed to me I’d just had four babies. Great times. Then my father died of a stroke when I was fifteen. Dammit.
– Yeah, says Patrick, my father too.… My father was a wizard, he could blow logs right out of the water.
– What happened?
– He got killed setting charges in a feldspar mine. The company had tried to go too deep and the section above him collapsed. There wasn’t an explosion. The shelf just slid down with him into the cave and drowned him. He was buried in feldspar. I didn’t even know what it was. They use it in everything – chinaware, tiles, pottery, inlaid table tops, even in artificial teeth. I lost him there.
– Here’s to holy fathers, Alice says, holding up her glass.
Conversation dips again into childhood but the friend Alice plucks only details from the present to celebrate. She reveals no past, remains sourceless, like those statues of men with wrapped heads who symbolize undiscovered rivers.
All night as they talk the sky and the fields outside seem potent with summer storm. The night kitchen with these two actresses is overwhelming. Clara and Alice slip into tongues, impersonate people, and keep each other talking long into the night. Patrick is suddenly an audience. They imitate the waymen smoke. They discuss how women laugh – from the raucous to the sullen to the mercenary. He is in a room full of diverse laughter, looking back and forth from Clara’s vividness and erotic movement, even when she stretches, to Alice’s paleness and suppressed energy. “My
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