In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [59]
A cook turns at the crash to see Patrick on his back surrounded by double-diamond glass. Patrick puts a finger to his lips, keeping it there till the man nods and moves to close the door. Patrick gets down off the table, glass all around him. On deck the pause in conversation is replaced by louder laughter, cheers for the dropped tray or whatever they thought caused the noise. The cook walks over with a broom and sweeps while Patrick stands there removing his wet clothes. There is a cut near his ribs and on his thigh. Then the cook mimes going to sleep and is gone like a ghost out of the room. Patrick walks to the switch and dims out the kitchen light.
It must be around midnight. The noise on deck is ceaseless with the orchestra weaving its way through suspicious love, tentative love. The frail music filters down into this large kitchen which he seems to own. He knows he will be caught, probably imprisoned, but for now he thrills to this brief freedom.
He squeezes out the clothes, turns on the large ovens, spreads his shirt and trousers flat, and slides them in with a baker’s paddle. Then he looks for food. There are some cooked potatoes. He pulls out a slab of raw meat from the fridge and crouches behind the counter. He eats only the potato demurely. He cuts the meat into strips with a sharp knife and eats it, licking the juice that dribbles down his arm. Now and then he gets up to drink from the taps and to keep an eye on his clothes cooking at low heat in the oven.
3
CARAVAGGIO
THERE WAS A blue tin jail roof. They were painting the Kingston Penitentiary roof blue up to the sky so that after a while the three men working on it became uncertain of clear boundaries. As if they could climb up further, beyond the tin, into that ocean above the roof.
By noon, after four hours, they felt they could walk on the blue air. The prisoners Buck and Lewis and Caravaggio knew this was a trick, a humiliation of the senses. Why an intentional blue roof? They could not move without thinking twice where a surface stopped. There were times when Patrick Lewis, government paintbrush in hand, froze. Taking a seemingly innocent step he would fall through the air and die. They were fifty yards from the ground. The paint pails were joined by rope – one on each slope – so two men could move across the long roof symmetrically. They sat on the crest of the roof during their breaks eating sandwiches, not coming down all day. They leaned the heels of their hands into the wet paint as they worked. They would scratch their noses and realize they became partly invisible. If they painted long enough they would be eradicated, blue birds in a blue sky. Patrick Lewis understood this, painting a bug that would not move away alive onto the blue metal.
Demarcation, said the prisoner named Caravaggio. That is all we need to remember.
And that was how he escaped – a long double belt strapped under his shoulders attaching him to the cupola so he could hang with his arms free, splayed out, while Buck and Patrick painted him, covering his hands and boots and hair with blue. They daubed his clothes and then, laying a strip of handkerchief over his eyes, painted his face blue, so he was gone – to the guards who looked up and saw nothing there.
When the search had died down, and the lights-out whistle had gone off, Caravaggio still remained as he was, unable to see what he knew would be a sliver of new moon that gave off little light. A thief’s moon. He could hear Lake Ontario in this new silence after the wind died. The flutter of sailboats. A clatter of owl claw on the tin roof. He began to move in his cocoon of dry paint – at first