The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [34]
SMUGGLED AMONG THE BELONGINGS of the ayurvedic from Moratuwa was a cache of datura leaves and seeds from Pakistan. He had purchased the plant for Sir Hector to dispel the recent disruptions on his body, and also to retard the onset of hydrophobia. Datura was to be the most successful potion the millionaire took during his sea journey. The drug had a reputation for being versatile yet unreliable. Supposedly, if you were laughing when its white flower was picked, it resulted in much laughter, or dancing if that was the activity during the gathering. (As a flower it was most fragrant in the evening.) It was good for fevers and tumours. However, as part of its wayward nature, while under its influence a person would also respond to questions with no hesitation and with utter truthfulness. And Hector de Silva was known as a cautiously untruthful man.
The millionaire’s wife, Delia, always considered him maddeningly private. Now, days after leaving Colombo on the Oronsay, with the administration of the ayurvedic’s drug, she had a chance to uncover the man she had married. Every little crumb from his youth came into view. He exposed the terror from his father’s whippings that compartmentalized him and eventually made him a brutal financier. He spoke of his secret visits to his brother, Chapman, who had run away from home, taking a neighbouring girl with whom he was in love, who was known to have an extra finger. They had it chopped off in Chilaw and were living a sane and quiet life in Kalutara.
Delia discovered too the way in which her husband had diverted his money into many underground tributaries. Much of this information was being revealed around the time of the cyclone during which Hector de Silva rolled from side to side on his large bed as the vessel bucked and dove. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself, while his wife and the rest of the retinue scurried from his bed to vomit in their adjacent cabins. The datura had snuffed out any concern in him, as well as any side effect of sickness, and any quality of guardedness. If it was an aphrodisiac, it turned him from a lean and distant partner into a benign companion. At first this character change went unnoticed. The whole ship was in the midst of the storm. A small fire had broken out in the engine room when he began telling the truth for the first time in his adult life. And the dangerous weather had brought out the pickpockets, who always thrived in unstable situations where physical help was needed. Added to this, a whole compartment of grain had got wet and burst loose in the hold, altering the very balance of the ship, so emergency crews were down there shovelling it back as carpenters rebuilt the borders. They worked in darkness in the depths of the hold, with only the spray of an oil lamp, doing “gravedigger’s work,” as Joseph Conrad called it, waist deep in the grain. Meanwhile Sir Hector was recalling to his little retinue a small, sweet memory of a gliding car he had driven as a boy at a fair in Colombo. He told the story again and again, unwrapping it as if it were new each time, to his wife and daughter and the three uninterested medical aides.
Whatever the fate might have been for our ship, which was now travelling like a coffin in the cyclone, Sir Hector enjoyed a few good days letting free the truth about his wealth, his hidden pleasures, his genuine affection for his wife, while the vessel plunged into the bowels of the sea and then emerged like an encrusted coelacanth, the ocean pouring off its features, so that machinists, thrown against the red-hot engines, burned their arms, and the supposed cream of the cream of the East stumbled against pickpockets in the long corridors, and band members fell off the dais in the midst of “Blame It on My Youth,” as Cassius and I lay spread-eagled on the Promenade Deck, under the rain.
Gradually the decks and the dining rooms repopulated. Miss Lasqueti came up to us with