The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [11]
Then Mazappa told me about the dog. “It used to come on stage with Bash and growl when his master was playing…. And this is why Bechet broke up with Duke Ellington. The Duke wouldn’t allow Goola up there, in the lights, upstaging his white suit.” So, because of Goola, Bechet left Ellington’s band and opened the Southern Tailor Shop, a repair and cleaning operation, as well as a hangout for musicians. “This was when his best recordings were done—like ‘Black Stick,’ ‘Sweetie Dear.’ Someday you are going to have to buy all those records.”
And then the sexual life. “Oh, Bash was a repeater, often ending up with the same woman…. Women of all kinds attempted to discipline him. But you know, he had been on the road playing since he was sixteen, he had already met girls of every clime and purpose.” Every clime and purpose! From Natchez to Mobile …
I listened, nodding with incomprehension, while Mr. Mazappa clutched to his heart this example of a way of life and musical skill as if they were held inside the oval portrait of a saint.
C Deck
I SAT ON MY BUNK LOOKING at the door and the metal wall. It was hot in the cabin by late afternoon. I could be alone only if I came here, at this time. Most of my day was busy with Ramadhin and Cassius, sometimes Mazappa or others from the Cat’s Table. At night I was often surrounded by the whispering of my card-players. I needed to think backwards for a while. Thinking backwards I could remember the comfort of being curious and alone. After a while I would lie back and look at the ceiling a foot or two above me. I felt safe, even if I was in the middle of the sea.
Sometimes, just before darkness, I found myself on C Deck when no one else was there. I’d walk to the railing, which was the height of my chest, and watch the sea rush alongside the ship. At times it appeared to rise almost to my level, as if wishing to pluck me away. I would not move, in spite of this havoc of fear and aloneness in me. It was the same emotion I had when lost in the narrow streets of the Pettah market, or adapting to new, undiscovered rules at school. When I could not see the ocean, the fear was not there, but now the sea rose in the half-dark, surrounding the ship, and coiled itself around me. No matter how scared I was, I remained there, adjacent to the passing darkness, half wanting to pull myself back, half desiring to leap towards it.
Once, before I left Ceylon, I saw an ocean liner being burned at the far end of Colombo harbour. All afternoon I watched the blue acetylene cut into the flanks of the vessel. I realized the ship I was now on could also be cut into pieces. One day, seeing Mr. Nevil, who understood these things, I tugged at his sleeve and asked him if we were safe. He told me the Oronsay was healthy, it was only in mid-career. It had worked as a troop ship during the Second World War, and somewhere along one wall of the hold there was a large mural in pink and white of naked women astride gun mounts and tanks that had been painted by a soldier. It was still there, a secret, for the officers on the ship never went into the hold.
“But are we all right?”
He sat me down and, on the back of one of the blueprints he always carried, drew me what he said was a Greek warship, a trireme. “This was the greatest ship of the seas. And even it no longer exists. It fought the enemies of Athens and brought back unknown fruits and crops, new sciences, architecture, even democracy. All that because of this ship. It had no decoration. The trireme was what it was—a weapon. On it were just rowers and archers. But not even a fragment of one exists now. People still search for them in the silt of river coasts, but they have never found one. They were made out of ash and hard elm, with oak for the keel, and green pine they bent into the shape of the frame. The planks were sewn together with linen cords. There was no metal on the skeleton. So the ship could be burned on a beach, or if it sank, it dissolved in the sea. Our ship is safer.”
For some reason Mr. Nevil’s depiction of an old warship