In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [49]
He took a step forward. Now he was walking slowly, approaching a street-band, and the click of his footsteps unconsciously adapted themselves to the music that began to surround him. The cornet and saxophone and drum chased each other across solos and then suddenly, as Patrick drew alongside them, fell together and rose within a chorus.
He saw himself gazing at so many stories – knowing of Alice’s lover Cato and Hana’s wanderings in the baker’s world. He walked on beyond the sound of the street musicians, aware once again of the silence between his individual steps, knowing now he could add music by simply providing the thread of a hum. He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves.
If Alice had been a nun …
The street-band had depicted perfect company, with an ending full of embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web – all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a daredevil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire – the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned.
* * *
The articles and illustrations he found in the Riverdale Library depicted every detail about the soil, the wood, the weight of concrete, everything but information on those who actually built the bridge. There were no photographers like Lewis Hine, who in the United States was photographing child labour everywhere – trapper boys in coal mines, seven-year-old doffer girls in New England mills. To locate the evils and find the hidden purity. Official histories and news stories were always soft as rhetoric, like that of a politician making a speech after a bridge is built, a man who does not even cut the grass on his own lawn. Hine’s photographs betray official history and put together another family. The man with the pneumatic drill on the Empire State Building in the fog of stone dust, a tenement couple, breaker boys in the mines. His photographs are rooms one can step into – cavernous buildings where a man turns a wrench the size of his body, or caves of iron where the white faces give the young children working there the terrible look of ghosts. But Patrick would never see the great photographs of Hine, as he would never read the letters of Joseph Conrad. Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle.
Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.
Within two years of 1066, work began on the Bayeux Tapestry, Constantin the African brought Greek medicine to the western world. The chaos and tumble of events. The first sentence of every novel should be: “Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.” Meander if you want to get to town.
* * *
I have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal.
Her favourite sentence hovers next to Patrick as he wakens. By dawn he is on the livid floor of the tannery with the curved pilot knife. All day long as he cuts into the leather his mind moves over the few details she has given him about her life. Even in the farmhouse at Paris Plains there had been a silence about her youth, even with Cato she gave out only his war name. If Alice Gull had been a nun? A rosary, a sumac bracelet …
At six in the evening he returns from work and her open palms press into his ribs. He lifts Alice into his arms and Hana jumps onto her mother’s back. So they move, cumbersome, through the small room,