The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [9]
What was I in those days? I recall no outside imprint, and therefore no perception of myself. If I had to invent one photograph of myself from childhood, it would be of a barefoot boy in shorts and a cotton shirt, with a couple of friends from the village, running along the mildewed wall that separated the house and garden in Boralesgamuwa from the traffic on the High Level Road. Or it would be of me alone, waiting for them, looking away from the house to the dusty street.
Who realizes how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell away as soon as I was out the door. Though among ourselves we must have been trying to understand and piece together the adult world, wondering what was going on there, and why. But once we climbed the gangplank onto the Oronsay, we were for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults.
Mazappa
MR. MAZAPPA SIDLES UP BESIDE ME, as I am explaining to an ancient passenger the art of unfolding a deck chair in just two moves, links his arm with mine, and makes me walk with him. “From Natchez to Mobile,” he warns me, “from Memphis to Saint Joe …” He pauses at my confusion.
It is always the suddenness of Mr. Mazappa’s arrival that catches me off guard. As I end a lap in the pool he grips my slippery arm and holds me against the side, crouching there. “Listen, my peculiar boy, women will sweet-talk, and give you the big eye.… I am protecting you with what I know.” But as an eleven-year-old I do not feel protected, I feel wounded in advance with possibilities. It is worse, even apocalyptic, when he speaks to all three of us. “When I came home from my last tour, I found a new mule kicking in my stall…. You know what I mean?” We do not. Until it is explained. Most of the time, though, it is just me he speaks to, as if I am the peculiar one on whom an impression can be made. In that regard, he may be right.
Max Mazappa would wake at noon and eat a late breakfast at the Delilah Bar. “Give me a couple of one-eyed pharaohs, and a Nash soda, will ya,” he’d say, chewing a few cocktail cherries while he waited to be served. After the meal he carried his cup of java to the ballroom piano and placed it on the treble notes. And there, with the piano chords nudging him on, he introduced and educated whoever was with him to the important and complicated details of the world. One day it might be about when to wear a hat, or it could be about spelling. “It is an impossible language, English. Impossible! ‘Egypt,’ for instance. That’s a problem. I’ll show you how to spell it right every time. Just repeat the phrase ‘Ever Grasping Your Precious Tits’ to yourself.” And indeed, I never forgot the phrase. Even as I write this now, there is a subliminal hesitation while I capitalize the letters in my head.
But most of the time, he unearthed his musical knowledge, explaining the intricacies of three-quarter time, or recalling some song he had learned from an attractive soprano on a backstage stairway. So we were receiving a sort of feverish biography. “I took a trip on a train and I thought about you,” he grumbled, and we thought we were hearing about his sad wasted heart. Though today I realize that Max Mazappa loved the details of structure and melody, for not all of his Stations of the Cross had to do with the failures of love.
He was half Sicilian, half something else, he told us in his un-track-down-able accent. He’d worked in Europe, travelled briefly into the Americas, and gone beyond them until he found himself in the tropics, living above a harbour bar. He taught us the chorus to “Hong Kong Blues.” He had so many songs and lives under his belt that truth and fiction merged too closely for us to distinguish one from the other. It was easy to fool the three of us, who were naked with innocence. Besides, there were words to some of the songs that Mr. Mazappa muttered over the piano keys one afternoon as the ocean’s sunlight splashed onto the floor of the ballroom that