The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [89]
A writer, I cannot remember who, spoke of a person having “a confusing grace.” With an uncertainty alongside her warmth, that is how Emily has always been for me. You trusted her but she didn’t trust herself. She was “good,” but she was not that way in her own eyes. Those qualities still had not balanced out somehow, or agreed with each other.
She sat there, her hair was pinned up, and she was hugging her knees. Her face in the morning light was beautiful in a more human way. What does that mean? I suppose it means I could read all aspects of her beauty now. She was at ease, her face reflected more of herself. And I understood how the darker aspects were folded within that generosity. They did not negate a closeness. I realize that for most of my life the one I have never been able to let go of is Emily, in spite of our disappearances and separations.
“You have a ferry to catch,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Now you know where I live, come and see me.”
“I will.”
The Key in His Mouth
EMILY DROVE ME DOWN TO THE HARBOUR and I walked onto the ferry with the other passengers. She had said good-bye to me in the car, but didn’t get out, though the car stayed there and she must have watched my progress through the glaze of the windshield that made her invisible to me. I climbed the two flights to the upper deck and looked back at the island, its cottages littering the hill, and by the dock the red car that held her inside. The ferry lurched and we set off. It was cold but I stayed up there on the top deck. A twenty-minute ferry ride that felt like an echo, a small rhyme from the past, as my cousin Emily had been to me during this last day and night.
I once had a friend whose heart “moved” after a traumatic incident that he refused to recognize. It was only a few years later, while he was being checked out by his doctor for some minor ailment, that this physical shift was discovered. And I wondered then, when he told me this, how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us. Emily. Myself. Perhaps even Cassius. How have our emotions glanced off rather than directly faced others ever since, resulting in simple unawareness or in some cases cold-blooded self-sufficiency that is damaging to us? Is this what has left us, still uncertain, at a Cat’s Table, looking back, looking back, searching out those we journeyed with or were formed by, even now, at our age?
And then I thought, for the first time in years, about Ramadhin’s wayward fibrillating heart, that he was aware of, and took such care of during that voyage, treating himself like someone in an incubator while Cassius and I ran about joyful and dangerous around him. It had been so long since that voyage and since those afternoons with him in Mill Hill. But it was Ramadhin, the unwild one, who did not survive. So what was better for us all—an ignorance, or a cautiousness like his, towards our own hearts?
I was still on the upper deck of the ferry, looking back over the stern towards that green island. Imagining Emily winding her way back to her new home, so far from the place she was born into. A small cabin on a temperate coast, that she shared sometimes with a man. She had journeyed after all these years to another island. But an island can imprison you as well as protect you. “I don’t think you can love me into safety,” she had said.
And then, from this angle and cold perspective, I imagined the two of them, Niemeyer and his daughter, in the dark water—this still-dangerous and to us unforgiven man who would eternally be that: a Magwitch and his daughter—struggling in the water that was rolling with noise, and heaving from the propeller of the ship that had abandoned them there. They cannot see each other, and he can barely feel her within his arms because of the cold. And breath … time is running out and they surface into the black air and inhale everything into themselves, gasp more