The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [80]
I glanced around—at the families, staff, celebrities, who were being given this gift—and then I saw Horace listening to the continuing music. It was as if he were peering at it. Everything else seemed to have disappeared for him. Then I realized he was focussed on the cellist, a woman who was joined utterly to the technique and spirit of her art, and I saw there was nothing that could unlock his gaze. I assumed at first she was his sexual prey. But this was, I had to admit, more. Horace might just as easily have been infatuated with the pianist, whose adept fingers raced alongside the cello music and carried it without any gravity, in the act of an engineer as much as a hypnotist. Their art was this shared skill made up of small coils and screws and resin and chords and a learned pace. These rooted this nondescript cellist in black sensually to the earth. And it made me feel deeply content that she was in a realm Horace could never enter, with all his power and his wealth. He could seduce her and hire her and toast her with his wit. He could collect her and swan around her, but he could never reach the place she was in.
At the bottom of the last page she had written years earlier, Miss Lasqueti had added a note:
Where are you, dear Emily? Will you send me your address, or write to me? I wrote this to give to you during our time on the Oronsay. Because, as I said, I had become aware that like me in my youth, you were under someone’s spell. And I thought I could save you. I’d seen you with Sunil from the Jankla Troupe, and it seemed you were caught up in something dangerous.
But I never gave it to you. I feared … I don’t know. All these years I have wondered about you. If you got free. I know that I became for a while dark and bitter to myself, till I escaped that circular state. “Despair young and never look back,” an Irishman said. And this is what I did.
Write to me,
Perinetta
TWO YEARS AFTER I RECEIVED that correspondence from Miss Lasqueti, I was in British Columbia for a few days, and a phone call came through to my hotel room. It was about one in the morning.
“Michael? It’s Emily.”
There was a long pause until I asked her where she was. I was expecting some distant time zone, some European city where it was already morning. But she said she was only a few miles away, on one of the Gulf Islands. It was clearly one a.m. where she was as well. She had, she said, tried several hotels.
“Can you get away? I saw that piece about you in The Georgia Straight. Can you come see me?”
“When?”
“Tomorrow?”
I agreed, got the details, and after she hung up I lay there on the tenth floor of the Hotel Vancouver, unable to sleep. “Get the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Bowen Island. The two-thirty ferry. I’ll meet you there.”
So I did as I was told. I had not seen her for fifteen years.
The Overheard
WE WERE STILL IN THE MEDITERRANEAN, days away from England. The Jankla Troupe was to give an afternoon performance, and during the encore they invited passengers onto their makeshift stage to perform alongside them. One of them was Emily. Soon she was being whirled until she was horizontal, as if about to fly out of the grip of Sunil.
The other volunteers along with Emily were then persuaded to become the top layer of a human pyramid. And once they were up there, this pyramid began to move ponderously across the deck like a many-sleeved creature. As they reached the ship’s railing, the acrobats forming the lower part of the pyramid began swaying back and forth, terrifying the volunteers on the top, who began screaming either in fear or with some strange joy they had discovered in themselves. Then this edifice of humans, a few still crying out, turned in a slow wheel and walked back to us. Among the volunteers, only Emily was