In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [36]
He had sent Goss and his photographers down but he had not entered the tunnels himself. He was a man who understood the continuity of the city, the daily consumptions of water, the speed of raw water through a filter bed, the journeys of chlorine and sulphur-dioxide to the island filtration plant, the 119 inspections by tugboats each year of the various sewer outfalls, and the approximate number of valves and caissons of the East Toronto pumping stations, and the two miles a year of water-main construction – from the St. Clair Reservoir to the high-level pumping station, and the construction of the John Street surge tank.…
This was choreography in 1930.
In those photographs moisture in the tunnel appears white. There is a foreman’s white shirt, there is white lye daubed onto rock to be dynamited. And all else is labour and darkness. Ashgrey faces. An unfinished world. The men work in the equivalent of the fallout of a candle. They are in the foresection of the cortex, in the small world of Rowland Harris’ dream as he lies in bed on Neville Park Boulevard.
Such a strange dream for him. The silence of men coming out of a hole each within an envelope of steam. Horses under Lake Ontario. Swallowing the water one-and-a-quarter miles away, bringing it back into his body, and spitting it out clean.
* * *
Patrick ate most of his meals at the Thompson Grill on River Street where the waitress, through years of habit, had reduced to a minimum the action of pouring coffee or flipping an egg. He could spot the oil burns on her wrists, the permanent grimace in her eye from the smoke.
If she looked at those who ate here it occurred when they were not aware of it. She seemed self-sufficient, something underwater in the false yellow light of the narrow room against the street, the flawed glass creating shadows in the air. There was something transient about her though she had been there for years. Most of the chewers at the Thompson Grill had that quality.
Patrick would sit at an uncleared section so he could watch the fingers of her left hand pluck up the glasses and cups while the other hand, the muscles in intricate movement under the skin, swabbed the counter clean. It was several months before he became aware of the tattoo high on her arm, seeing it through a tear in the seam where the cotton had loosened.
He came to believe she had the powers of a goddess who could condemn or bless. She would be able to transform the one she touched, the one she gripped at the wrist with her tough hand, the muscles stiffening up towards the blue-black of the half-revealed creature that pivoted on the bone of her shoulder. His eyes wanted to glimpse nothing else.
He pinned the note, saying Waterworks – Sunday 8 p.m. to the wall above his bed in case he forgot, though it had been his only invitation in two years. “The cheese stands alone,” he’d sing to himself, while buying groceries along Eastern Avenue. Patrick loved that song. He found himself muttering “The farmer takes the dog … the farmer takes the dog” among the Macedonians, as if perfecting a password. The southeastern section of the city where he now lived was made up mostly of immigrants and he walked everywhere not hearing any language he knew, deliriously anonymous. The people on the street, the Macedonians and Bulgarians, were his only mirror. He worked in the tunnels with them.
He had discovered the Macedonian word for iguana, gooshter, and finally used it to explain his requests each evening at the fruit stall for clover and vetch. It was a breakthrough. The woman gazed at him, corrected his pronunciation, and yelled it to the next stall. She came around the crates and outlined the shape of a lizard. Gooshter? Four women and a couple of men then circled him trying desperately to leap over the code of languages between them. His obsession with vetch had puzzled them. He had gone at one point into the centre of the city, bought some, and returned to the Macedonians to