The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [78]
I see my time in Florence through flawed glass, which confuses the pleasure of those days with irony. I would after making love with him in his various ways watch him. The oblong of sunlight coming down the east wall onto his body, all that hair I had not seen on a man, satyr-like, it felt I had co-habited with another species, forest-raised. The green scarf around my English shoulders, as I strolled alongside the smell of the paints and the chestnut smell of our love-making. I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
Now and then he’d bring out some painting, something Japanese, or a master sketch that he had bought for a fortune. He would take the index finger of my hand, that had loved him intimately a half-hour earlier, and guide it over the outline of a bowl or a bridge or a cat’s back—I still remember quite specifically a drawing of a woman’s lap, with hands holding on to a struggling cat. Using my finger he traced the lines as if he were creating them, his attempted brush against immortality.
He asked what I did when I was not at work, and made me describe my small room that he would not visit. He was curious about where else I had been, and what else excited me. There was a tentative courtship when I was at school … but really I was now running out of things to tell him. Then one afternoon I remembered the tender incident with Clive and the tapestry. I told him of the moment I’d descended the circular staircase in the Grand Rotunda and seen him gently brushing the coat of a dog that was standing in the foliage.
Horace was only half listening to me. And must have thought at first that I was describing a reality, and then he froze and said, “What dog?”
The rule between us, his rule, had been that there were to be no recognitions and repercussions outside the studio, beyond our hours there. If there were thrown pebbles, they needed to fall through water silently, and without a single enlarging circle. In fact when I was at work I rarely saw him. I shared my tea time with other members of the staff, and took my lunch out onto the second terrace of the garden, so I would have that angry statue of the Colossus brooding over me. I liked to be undisturbed, and if possible read during my spare hour. It was while I was relaxing there one Thursday that I began to hear a frantic breathing, someone nearby attempting to weep or even howl, though all that was able to be expressed was this disturbed repetitive breath. I got to my feet, followed the sound, and found the boy. His father must have punished him. When he saw me, blood rushed into his face and he ran from me as if I had done whatever it was to him. And of course I had. It was my little pre-coital anecdote about him and the dog.
The next afternoon I argued with Horace about his betrayal, howled in the way his son had been unable to. I wasn’t breathless. I had prepared my anger and I had come to wound him in any way I could for what he had done to the child. I saw him for what he was, a bully who hid in his courteous power and authority. And I knew he would slip that way through people all his life, learning nothing. When I saw my words would not hurt him, I swept my arm back, then towards him, and he enclosed my fist and swerved it back on to me. The scissors I held pierced the side of my belly with all the force and hate I had flung towards him. He would no doubt claim he had simply diverted the act of anger, craziness. I was bent in two, my head, my hair, almost down to my heels, the scissors still in me. I was silent. I was not moving and most of all refusing to cry. I was just like the boy. Horace tried to pull me up and I clutched my legs. I needed to remain folded, to be a smaller target against him. I suspected there was even a thrill in him for what had happened, and given a different response from me that involved helpless weeping and clinging to him, we would have