In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [52]
His love of the theatre was that of an amateur. He picked up gossip, mementoes, handbills. He loved technique, to walk backstage and see Ophelia with her mad face half rubbed off. This was humanity in theatre, the scar – the old actor famous for playing whimsical judges, who rode the Queen streetcar east of the city and ate his dinner alone before joining his sleeping wife. Patrick liked that. He wanted to be fooled by the person he felt could not fool him, who stopped three yards past the side curtain and became somebody else.
But with Alice, after the episode at the waterworks and in other performances, he can never conceive how she leaps from her true self to her other true self. It is a flight he knows nothing about. He cannot put the two people together. Did the actor – holding her on stage, reciting wondrous language, holding his painted face inches away from her painted face, kissing her ear in drawing-room comedies – know the person she had stepped from to be there?
In the midst of his love for Alice, in the midst of lovemaking even, he watches her face waiting for her to be translated into this war bride or that queen or shopgirl, half expecting metamorphosis as they kiss. Annunciation. The eye would go first, and as he draws back he will be in another country, another century, his arms around a stranger.
There had been an earring missing beside the bed or at the sink in the kitchen. He had watched her move around the room half-naked, dressing, bending down to a pile of clothes in his room without furniture, a long time ago, saying Can’t find my earring, does it matter? As if another woman would find it. Alice departing with one ear undressed. If we meet again we can say hello, we can say goodbye.
Dear Alice –
The only heat in this bunkhouse is from a small drum stove. In the evenings air is thick from the damp clothes in the rafters above the fire and from tobacco smoke. To avoid suffocating, the men in the upper bunks push out the moss chinking between logs.
Patrick reads slowly, knowing he will be given the letter only once, on this summer night under the one lightbulb of the room, far from winter weather. Hana sits on the bed and watches him. For what? He thinks as he reads what his face should express to the letter-writer’s daughter. He holds the grade-school notebook which the words fill. She has removed it from the suitcase and presented it to him. Dear Alice, scrawled, the handwriting large and hurried but the information detailed as if Cato was trying to hold everything he saw, at the lumber camp near Onion Lake, during his final days.
I write at a table hammered permanently into the floor. The log bunks are nailed into the walls. Fires die out at night and men wake with hair frozen to damp icicles on the wall. “In the bleak mid-winter – Frosty wind made moan – Earth stood hard as iron – Water like a stone.” That was the first hymn I learned in English, written by someone in an English village. And it describes this place better than anything else.
Patrick sees Cato writing by tallow light … sealing the letter, passing the package to someone leaving the camp the next morning. When Alice opens the package five weeks later she pulls the exercise book to her face and smells whatever she can of him, for he has been dead a month. She smells the candle-wax, she imagines the odour of the hut, the cold pencil he has sharpened before beginning to write his unsigned letters about camp conditions and strike conditions. Cato sits dead centre, at the food table, the pipe smoke moves live and grey around him. His hair smells of it, it has entered deep into his shirt and sweater, it hangs against his stubbled beard.
None of the camp bosses knows who he is or of