In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [18]
What remained in Patrick from his childhood were letters frozen inside mailboxes after ice storms. What he remembered was loving only things to do with colour, hating the whiteness, stepping into the warm brown universe of barns, the breath and steam of cattle rolling out, the acrid shit and urine he could summon up even now in the heart of Toronto. The smell had paraded grandly over his first seduction in a hay bed, the angry girl slapping him when both were full and guilty. What he remembered was frozen laundry, carrying overalls like a body into the kitchen and seating them in a chair, hoping his father would see them before they melted and lolled over the table.
Then summer. Blackflies and mosquitoes. Leaping not into hay but into the black underwater colour of creek, walking naked to the farmhouse, chewing rhubarb, clothes under one arm. You bit the glossy skin of the raw rhubarb and ripped its fibres open and sucked the flavour out. You put the smallest pellet of raspberry onto your tongue and opened it delicately with your teeth. You stood in a field on a hot day obsessed with this precise taste.
Now, in the city, he was new even to himself, the past locked away. He saw his image in the glass of telephone booths. He ran his hands over the smooth pink marble pillars that reached up into the rotunda. This train station was a palace, its niches and caverns an intimate city. He could be shaved, eat a meal, or have his shoes coloured.
He saw a man with three suitcases, well-dressed, shouting out in another language. The man’s eyes burned through everyone who at first received his scream personally. But the phrases were for angels in the air to assist him or for demons to leave him. Two days later Patrick returned to pick up his luggage from a locker. He saw the man again, still unable to move from his safe zone, in a different suit, as if one step away was the quicksand of the new world.
Patrick sat on a bench and watched the tides of movement, felt the reverberations of trade. He spoke out his name and it struggled up in a hollow echo and was lost in the high air of Union Station. No one turned. They were in the belly of a whale.
When Ambrose Small, the millionaire, disappeared in 1919, it was discovered that the police had his Bertillon record. Between 1889 and 1923 the Bertillon identification system was used to locate criminals and missing persons. Bertillon’s method consisted of the measurement of certain parts of the body: the length of head, width of head, length of right ear, length of left foot, length of left middle finger, the length of left forearm. In homes and prisons and mortuaries all over North America limbs were measured and the results sent in to the Toronto police. During the fever of the case over 5,000 people claimed to be Ambrose Small. They claimed they had amnesia, were kidnapped in a brown sack, were disfigured, were hidden in geological holes in the Scarborough Bluffs, were stretched to longer than five foot six inches on racks, were overfed, had all their hair removed, had their memories wiped clean by certain foods, had their pigmentation altered, were turned into women, had the length of their right ear changed, were in the meantime hungry and penniless and would someone mail $500 to Nelson, B.C., or Wichita, Kansas, or Cornerbrook, Newfoundland.
A woman in Hamilton saw Ambrose with his throat cut. She woke one morning to feel blood on the pillow, looked up and saw someone was sawing her neck, and she said I am Ambrose Small. Then she woke up again.