The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [45]
But Cassius was not there. It was a Saturday afternoon. I got to the gallery and was told the show had opened a few evenings earlier and that Cassius had made his appearance then. I did not know much about the habits of the art world. It was a disappointment, but his absence did not matter. For what I saw in the paintings was Cassius himself. They were large canvasses that filled the three rooms of the Waddington Gallery. About fifteen of them. They were all about that night in El Suweis. The very same sulphur lights above the night activity that I still remembered, or at least began to remember that Saturday afternoon. And the open fires. The ancient-looking logbook being filled urgently by the scribe at the table in the crisp night air. I had thought the paintings were abstractions at first. There was a sense in them that things were taking place on the edge of or just beyond the painted colours. But once I knew where we were, everything altered. I even found Ramadhin’s small dog gazing up at the boat. All this enlarged me, and I did not know why. I suppose it clarified how close Cassius and I had been, real brothers. For he also had witnessed the people I saw that night, with whom we had felt so oddly aligned, whom we would never see again. Only there. In that night city of another world. We had not talked of this, but it had somehow come to both of us. And now they were here with us.
I walked over to the visitors’ book, where people were expected to write comments. Some of them were quite grand, overly intellectual, some just said “Delightful!” A loose scrawl that took over a whole page said, “LITTLE OLD LADY GOT MUTILATED LATE LAST NIGHT.” It must have been written by one of Cassius’s drunken friends. No one else had written on that page, and the sentence exposed itself there, quite solitary. I leafed through the rest of the pages for a while and came across Miss Lasqueti’s name, with a sweet praising of Cassius’s art. I put down the date, and I wrote: “The Oronsay tribe—irresponsible and wiolent.” Then I added, “Sorry to miss you. Mynah.” I left no address.
I went outside but something else held me, so I decided to walk through the gallery again, this time glad there was hardly anyone else there. And when I understood what it was that drew me, I circled the gallery once more, to make sure. I read somewhere that when people first celebrated the distinct point of view of Lartigue’s early photographs, it took a while before someone pointed out that it was the natural angle of a small boy with a camera looking up at the adults he was photographing. What I was seeing now in the gallery was the exact angle of vision Cassius and I had that night, from the railing, looking down at the men working in those pods of light. An angle of forty-five degrees, something like that. I was back on the railing, watching, which was where Cassius was emotionally, when he was doing these paintings. Good-bye, we were saying to all of them. Good-bye.
Ramadhin’s Heart
FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I HAVE KNOWN there was nothing I could give Cassius that would be of any use to him. But I felt I could have given something to Ramadhin. He allowed me affection. There was a bitter appeal for Cassius about his own privacy. I saw it even in the paintings, in spite of his evocation of that night in El Suweis. But I always thought I could have helped Ramadhin in a difficult situation. If I had known. If he had come and talked to me.
In the early 1970s, while I was working for a brief period in North America, I received a cable from a distant relative. I remember it was my thirtieth birthday. Leaving what I was doing, I managed to get on a red-eye flight to London, where I checked into a hotel and slept for a few hours.
At noon I took a taxi that dropped me off in Mill Hill, by a small chapel.