The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [77]
I laughed. “I have my own small cork-lined room,” I said, “that’s probably enough.”
“I see. Then let me paint you. As you are now. Have you been painted before?”
I said I hadn’t.
“You could wear that green scarf of yours.”
So it began that way, with me stepping into his consciousness dressed as a man. And I should tell you there is still perhaps his portrait of me in one of the basement vaults of that villa. In that probably still-unfinished portrait I am fully clothed, but post-coital. Though I look demure, as if a gauche little provincial heiress, or the innocent daughter of a friend.
He had of course been the figure in the upper windows watching me cycle to work every morning. He had taken his time searching me out. He continued now in equally slow motion. He interspersed his sketching with endless conversation: his knowledge of tinctures, the choreography of a fresco, the virtues of alabaster. And I, in order to hesitate at the start of this courtship, wore for the first few days my Proust moustache, so that as he greeted me in the studio, he had to embrace and kiss me with the moustache between us. I wore it for some days in his company, forgetting I had it on as we spoke and as I shared stories of my youth with him. I handed all of that information sleepily over to his great curiosity.
He was wise as well as clever. He made me his friend. He was older, and older skills are different, seemingly more gracious perhaps. And I had never had a younger lover to compare him with—or in fact any lover. All occurred with an ebb and flow that was as much conversation as physical revealing. The removal of the green scarf from my neck as I entered the studio, and then one afternoon, when it was a burning August day, he proposed more. One small step. It was perhaps the spell of his words, my education. I discovered how to fold my naked back into him, to go beyond what at first seemed only pain, until even that became a habit of our desire.
Of course I know there’s a tradition for this. But to me, then, it was a stunning country, delirious, shocking, full of tastes to be accepted and fulfilled. I’d move around that well-furnished studio afterwards, my skin, my “tincture,” alive to the air that slipped through the open louvres. Wearing just socks, I walked around and touched with the shadow of my hand those earlier demure sketches he had done of me. Often it felt I was all alone in the room, as if he were not there watching and swallowing my presence—something unwrapped for the first time in this room. I was tumbling in that mixture of knowledge and desire. The weight of his arm, the overall weight of him, my sounds against the sound of my lover, how little light was needed to fall on someone’s shoulder in a painting to suggest grief or concealment, how close that cup of Caravaggio’s rested on the table edge to suggest the tension of falling.
I read Perinetta Lasqueti’s letter into the afternoon, catching the flame of another time, the details of the past still ablaze in her memory. A letter so private and intense, in such a different voice from what I was expecting, that it felt it was for an imagined reader.
That was when my spirit grew, in his studio on the via Panicale, where the bells of the city sounded like a recall order during our criminal hour. He looked at me bent over him. He looked over my naked shoulder as I leafed through one of his heavy books of art. Glancing up, I saw our reflected tableau in the mirror, and remembered a similar moment of his son reading on a large sofa of the Capone Room while Horace—as a father this time—stood behind the boy looking down at him. We were the same, myself and that boy, under the father’s control.
That day, on the Oronsay, why did I invite you to my cabin along with your young cousin? During the journey I had watched you, and I feared that perhaps you too were being caught in a situation. I recognised the ease of it, and where you were going. But I was not sure. Instead I warned your cousin about the Baron. What