The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [73]
She had not been, in our eyes, a beautiful woman. If we found her attractive it was because of the various aspects we were discovering in her. She’d been aloof at first only from a guarded shyness. Then it was as if you had come across a box of small foxes at a country fair. The name Lasqueti suggested some European background, but she existed comfortably alongside that specific breed of garden aristocracy among the English.
She certainly had a knowledge of the variety of Englishness. We were, for instance, startled by information she gave out at the Cat’s Table during a discussion on hiking, claiming to know certain hikers (one was a second cousin of hers) who, when they went for weekend cross-country walks, wore nothing but their socks and boots, and a haversack over their shoulders. They traversed forests and open fields and forded salmon streams this way. If you ran across them, they ignored you, as if you were invisible, as they assumed they would be to you. Coming to a village at dusk, they would dress on the outskirts, enter an inn, eat a solitary meal, and take a room for the night.
This highly visual piece of information from Miss Lasqueti brought silence to our table. Most passengers were well-read Asia hands who could not quite link their portrait of English life derived from Jane Austen and Agatha Christie with these naked striders. The wayward and uncalled-for anecdote was the first thing to alter Miss Lasqueti from the faded-wallpaper manner she had first presented to us. The hiker story had silenced our table until Mr. Mazappa leapt in to return to the inexplicable faces of Madonnas, which she had spoken about earlier in the meal.
“The trouble with all those Madonnas,” he said, “is that there is a child that needs to be fed and the mothers are putting forth breasts that look like panino-shaped bladders. No wonder the babies look like disgruntled adults. I have seen only one image where the child looks as if he is being well fed and intent on the milk he’s drinking. It’s at La Granja, the summer palace near Segovia, on a very small tapestry, and the Madonna is not looking out into the future. She is watching the Christ child enjoying the breast.”
“You speak as if you know breast-feeding,” someone at the table said to him. “Do you have children?”
The slightest of pauses, then Mazappa said, “Yes, of course.”
“I am so glad you like tapestries, Mr. Mazappa,” Miss Lasqueti chimed into the new silence that followed this information. Mr. Mazappa had said nothing more. Not how many children he had, or their names. “I wonder who your tapestry maker was? Perhaps it was a woman, of the Mudéjar tradition. That is, if it was done in the fifteenth century. I’ll look it up when I’m in London. I worked for a while with a gentleman who collected such things. He had good taste but was tough as nails, though he did teach me to appreciate the fabric arts. It is surprising when you learn such things from men.”
We pocketed these revelations. Who was the gentleman “tough as nails”? And the second cousin who was the hiker? Our spinster seemed to have a knowledge not just of pigeon life and sketching.
SOME YEARS AGO, in my present life, I received a package that had been mailed from Whitland in Carmarthenshire and then forwarded to me by my English publisher. It contained several colour photocopies of drawings as well as a letter from Perinetta Lasqueti. The letter had been written after she heard me on a BBC World Service programme on the topic of “Youth,” during which I had briefly mentioned my journey to England on a ship.
I looked at the drawings first. I saw my young lean self, a sketch of Cassius smoking, a beautiful one of Emily wearing a feather-blue beret. The Emily who had since disappeared from my life. Eventually I began recognizing other faces such as the Purser, and Mr. Nevil, and locations buried deep in my past—the cinema screen at the stern of the ship, the piano in the ballroom with a smudged figure sitting there, sailors at fire drill, this and that. All of them depicting our ship’s journey,