In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [73]
In his dressing-gown, at two in the morning, Commissioner Harris was happy in the cocoon of humming machines. He would get up and roam through the palace of water which he had dreamed and desired and built. Every electrical outlet blazed, lighting up disappearing corridors as if Viennese streets, turning the subterranean filter pools into cloudy ballrooms. The building pulsed all night in the east end of the city on the edge of Lake Ontario. It was rumoured that people on the south shore in New York State could see the aura from it.
The filtration plant was one corner of a triangle of light that seemed to chart the city on this Saturday night in the summer of 1938. Another was a river of lights moving north up Yonge Street from the lake. And third was the dazzle from the Yacht Club on Toronto Island – holding its summer costume ball, with water taxis ferrying bizarrely dressed society across the bay on the one-mile trip over rough water.
Such dance floors the rich spent their evenings on! Strutting like colts in a warm barn, out of the rain. And in bed the following morning they would reconstruct the choreography of temptations which had carried them from the crowded periphery of the hall to the sprung dance floor beneath the thirty-foot coconut palms – clusters of which adorned the ballroom that seemed to have no ceiling, only false stars and false moonlight. In each set of trees was a live monkey, never able to reach the diners because of a frail chain. The animals had to dodge the champagne corks aimed at them – if you hit a monkey you were brought a free bottle. Sales of champagne soared and only now and then was there a shriek followed by a cheer.
There was a silk canopy over the band. Along the walls were dioramas. Sometimes cotton snowballs were distributed and a battle broke out promptly, the guests soaking them in champagne or butter before flinging them around the room. The ballroom was lit indirectly; it seemed they were all in a moment of time that resembled the half-hour before the sun comes up over an oasis.
There is an image of Caravaggio among the rich which Patrick will always remember: meticulous, rude, and confident. A parting in his dark hair like Yonge Street at midnight. Dressed as a pirate, he had leapt off the motor launch on that midsummer night with his dog and Giannetta and Patrick, yelled his greetings to total strangers, and strolled into the false moonlight of the Yacht Club ballroom claiming to be Randolph Frog. Society women accepted his name with a straight face – the rich, being able to change everything but their names and looks, would defend these characteristics with care. In this circle a man with the face of a pit bull was considered distinguished.
They had not been invited. Caravaggio was eating canapés with his left hand and patting women on the ass with his right. When the orchestra’s playing brought out the couples, Caravaggio lifted his dog into his arms and waltzed among them kissing August wildly, exclaiming over the beauty of his moles. For the next hour he danced with women who noted to themselves the odour of hound on his neck. Patrick and Giannetta meanwhile hung back on the periphery of the ballroom, refusing to leave it as if they might fall into a snakepit. But Caravaggio was a man who had traipsed through the gardens and furnishings of the wealthy for many years. He nudged men, told jokes, discussed china and crystal with wives and connoisseurs, complaining about getting Louis XIV chairs