In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [58]
– Put perumel on this. A balm.
– I am wanted by the police.
– For?
– For wilful destruction of property.
She laughs.
– Don’t resent your life.
They are a frieze, a statue in this garden, a woman with her soft palms covering a tall man’s face, blinding him.
When she moves her hands away from his eyes she feels the gasp on his face which is not shock or disgust but something else.
– What is it?
Her green eye echoes somewhere within him. Aetias Luna – and its Canadian name, papillon lune. Lunar moth. Moon moth. Her other eye is simply not there, the old loose flesh of the eyelid covering nothing. But this eye is forest green, moth green, darting all over as if to catch his gaze, moving with delight over his shoulders, alighting on his ear, his nose. He had loved the lunar moth, its flare of the lower wing like a signature, a papyrus textured object whose small furred body he used to see pulsing on a branch or rock within his lantern light. The woman shifts the watery green mirror of her eye attempting to reflect everything around her.
– What is it?
Patrick allows her to guide him back to the bench. They sit and she grips his hand, not letting go of him. He feels she receives all of his qualities, in this still garden, raucous with noise. The blue veins are narrow and clear in the tight skin of her hands. He is unable to talk, even if all he said would be hidden within her blindness. Alice Gull, he could say, who once pushed her hands up against the slope of a ceiling and spoke of a grand cause, who leapt like a live puppet into his arms, who died later on a bloody pavement, ruined in his arms.
No one else enters the garden as they sit there. Beside the wooden seat is mint pepper, rosemary. In the flower-bed to the right of where they sit is artemesia advacumculas, whose human name she says she doesn’t know. The muscles in her hand finally loosen and he turns to look at her face. She is now resting, leaning back, gently asleep. He moves his hand from her grip and leaves her.
Now he is part of the evening water, the reflection of dock lights rolling off him. Six stars and a moon. The news of the fire has left the Muskokas in an uproar and Patrick struggles to get free of the current off Page Island in order to swim towards that boat. It has crept across the blackness of the lake at a snail’s pace and is now about 500 yards off shore. A night cruise with dancing – he can hear music as he swims, voices and tambourine falling like muffled glass into the water. A half-moon, a few stars, a loop of dock lights.
Somewhere in his past he has dreamed such a moment: a criminal swimming in darkness to a lighted ship. He feels removed from any context of the world, wanting to sleep at this moment, wanting to swim back into the current he has just escaped, return to the Garden of the Blind, and sleep. But he is magnetized to the nameless steamer.
A deadhead touches him in the ribs, comes up under him, and Patrick hears himself shout out in the shriek of an animal. The dreams he had of swimming to a ship involved tropic winds and crocodiles. He splashes out to discover what touched him, but it is gone. “It was a deadhead,” he says to himself, talking out loud now, determined, the fear suddenly an energy in him. Brushed by this deadhead he is fully alive, feral, exhilarated. He remembers his departure from the world, stepping out onto the porte-cochère of the Muskoka Hotel, flames behind him. Now he will be a member of the night. He sees his visage never emerging out of shadows. Unhistorical.
He swims on, smelling traces of hickory smoke from the campfires on the island. He is delirious with hunger. Music from the boat. “Beware of frozen ponds, peroxide blondes, stocks and bonds.…” the singer’s voice over the muffle of orchestra. And what will they do as they see him climb up a rope into their company, lake weed draped over his shoulder, the blood from the log’s glance on his ribs?
He is alongside the boat, in the