The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [92]
Then I saw Emily stride past in her white dress and, pausing, turn her head to look back at me. It was as if everything had stopped and reversed for a moment. Her face gave me a careful smile. Then she walked back and put her hands, her warm hands, over mine that were there on my mother’s back. A gentle touch, then a deeper press, like some sort of signal. Then she walked away.
I thought she had said something.
“What did Emily say?” I asked my mother.
“Time to go to school, I think.”
From the distance, before she disappeared into the world, Emily waved.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional—from the captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat down to the narrator. And while there was a ship named the Oronsay (there were in fact several Oronsays), the ship in the novel is an imagined rendering.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CREDITS
Robert Creeley for a stanza from his poem “Echo” (this page); a line by Kipling from “The Sea and the Hills”; a verse by A. P. Herbert. A paragraph from Joseph Conrad’s “Youth,” a passage by R. K. Narayan, and a line by Beckett about despair. The remark by Proust appears in a letter to René Blum, 1913. The lines from Jelly Roll Morton’s “Winin’ Boy Blues” appear in Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll (1950). Other songs quoted, or referred to, are by Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, Sidney Bechet, and Jimmie Noone. Some information on Sidney Bechet is drawn from Whitney Balliett’s wondrous American Musicians II (included is a quote by Richard Hadlock that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner). Thanks to the Daily News, Sri Lanka, for the germ of the “Sir Hector” story that had its basis in a long-ago incident. The characters, names, and dialogue in this novel however are pure invention, as is placing Sir Hector on a sea voyage. Material on triremes is drawn from The Lords of the Sea by John R. Hale. Eudora Welty wrote the two lines (quoted below) on embarcation in The Optimist’s Daughter. Mr Mazappa’s “good book” is The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. The scrawled lines in the visitors’ book at Cassius’s art show were written by his friend, Warren Zevon, who was visiting from New Jersey.
THANKS
To Larry Schokman, Susie Schlesinger, Ellyn Toscano, Bob Racie, Laura Ferri, Simon Beaufoy, Anna Leube, Duncan Kenworthy, Beatrice Monti, Rick Simon, Coach House Press, Jet Fuel in Toronto, the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California. Also John Berger, Linda Spalding, Esta Spalding, Griffin Ondaatje, David Young, Gillian and Alwin Ratnayake, Ernest Macintyre—for the loan of a character, Anjalendran, Aparna Halpé, and Sanjaya Wijayakoon. To Stewart Blackler and Jeremy Bottle, as well as David Thomson some years later. And Joyce Marshall, who once smoked a cane chair.
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Thank you to Ellen Levine, Steven Barclay, Tulin Valeri, Anna Jardine, Meagan Strimus, Jacqueline Reid, and Kelly Hill. Thanks to all at Knopf, USA—Katherine Hourigan, Diana Coglianese, Lydia Buechler, Carol Carson, and Pei Loi Koay. Many thanks to Louise Dennys and Sonny Mehta and Robin Robertson. A very special thank-you to my Canadian editor and publisher Ellen Seligman.
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For Stella, the sweet hunter—no more thunderstorms.
For Dennis Fonseka, in memorium.
The boat came breasting out of the mist and in they stepped.
All new things in life were meant to come like that …
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Ondaatje is the author of five previous novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. The English Patient won the Booker Prize; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix M