In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [71]
When Clara Dickens joined Ambrose Small after he evaporated from the world of financial power she thought she would see the vista of his nature. But during the years that she lived with Ambrose she would know him only as he wanted to be known by her. There was no other road towards him. She was too close to him now – to his new daily obsessions, his temporary charm. She wanted to climb above him even once and gaze down, see the horizon that held him together.
What she discovered in the end – when he sat on the floor of the emptied room in Marmora nothing else around him but Clara and the walls and the wood floor and the curtainless windows so he could sleep at night neatly within the coffin of moonlight – was much worse.
In the days before he died, Small’s mind slipped free of its compartments as if what had kept all his diverse worlds separate had been pulled out of him like a spine. So as he talked and muttered towards Clara, events fell against each other – a night with a lover, a negotiation at the Grand Opera House. Strangers and corpses of his past arrived in this sparse room with its one lamp lit during the day, so the shadows were like moon-tides around it.
Words fell from his mouth and shocked her in the intricacy of his knowledge of so many women, such deep interiors of the financial sea. She heard his varied portraits of her which had gone unspoken for years, his affections and passions and irritations and reversals, his sweet awe at her sense of colour with certain flowers, the memory of her standing in a hall years earlier and smelling each of her armpits when she thought she was alone.
Clara crouched in front of Ambrose and now he could not see her. He was sitting lotus, bare-chested, his hands moving over his face sensuously rubbing the front of his skull, as he revealed the mirrors of himself, his voice slowing as his fingers discovered his right ear. Then he bent forward as he sat so his head would touch the floor in a long grace-attempted bow, ascetic. A heron stretching his head further underwater, the eyes open within the cold flow, open for the fish that could then be raised into the air and dropped moving in the tunnel of the heron’s blue throat.
She sat on the floor, ten feet away from Ambrose, the lamp beside her, attacked by all the discontinuous moments of his past. Who were these women? Where did those destroyed enemies go? Ambrose spoke slowly, the uninterested words came from his dark, half-naked shape as if all this was just the emptying of pails to be free of ballast. The theatres, his wife, his sisters, the women, enemies, Briffa, even Patrick, spilled free.
The only clarity for him now was this bare room where Clara brought him food. He had imploded, had become a Gothic child suddenly full of a language which was aimed nowhere, only out of his body. Bitten flesh and manicures and greyhounds and sex and safe-combinations and knowledge of suicides. She saw his world as if she were tied to a galloping horse, caught glimpses of faces and argument and there was no horizon. After all these years she would not be satisfied, would not know him. She pulled back.
Now his face serene. Now his upper torso bent forward long and athletic and the mouth of the heron touched the blue wood floor and his head submerged under the water and pivoted and saw in the fading human light a lamp that was the moon.
The girl was shaking him from side to side as he slept in the kitchen chair, in the apartment on Albany Street. Fragments of lobster were scattered across the table.
– Patrick! Patrick! You’ve got to wake up.
– What …
– It’s urgent. I don’t know how I forgot but I forgot. Wake up, Patrick, please. She was going to wait. I don’t know how I forgot.
– What is it?
– Someone called Clara Dickens. She’s on the phone.
– What is this? Where am I?
– It’s important, Patrick.
– I’m sure it is.
– Can you get to the phone?
– Yup. You go to bed.
He put his face under the kitchen tap. Clara Dickens. After a hundred years.
He stood there