Read Vintage Ondaatje Page 5


  Drifting slower she tried to hold onto things. A bicycle hit her across the knees. She saw the dead body of a human. She began to see the drowned dogs of the town. Cattle. She saw men on roofs fighting with each other, looting, almost surprised by the quick dawn in the mountains revealing them, not even watching her magic ride, the alcohol still in her—serene and relaxed.

  Below the main street of Nuwara Eliya the land drops suddenly and Lalla fell into deeper waters, past the houses of “Cranleigh” and “Ferncliff.” They were homes she knew well, where she had played and argued over cards. The water here was rougher and she went under for longer and longer moments coming up with a gasp and then pulled down like bait, pulled under by something not comfortable any more, and then there was the great blue ahead of her, like a sheaf of blue wheat, like a large eye that peered towards her, and she hit it and was dead.

  Photograph

  My Aunt pulls out the album and there is the photograph I have been waiting for all my life. My father and mother together. May 1932.

  They are on their honeymoon and the two of them, very soberly dressed, have walked into a photographic studio. The photographer is used to wedding pictures. He has probably seen every pose. My father sits facing the camera, my mother stands beside him and bends over so that her face is in profile on a level with his. Then they both begin to make hideous faces.

  My father’s pupils droop to the south-west corner of his sockets. His jaw falls and resettles into a groan that is half idiot, half shock. (All this emphasized by his dark suit and well-combed hair.) My mother in white has twisted her lovely features and stuck out her jaw and upper lip so that her profile is in the posture of a monkey. The print is made into a postcard and sent through the mails to various friends. On the back my father has written “What we think of married life.”

  Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humour, and the fact that both of them are hams of a very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making.

  It is the only photograph I have found of the two of them together.

  LIGHT

  for Doris Gratiaen

  Midnight storm. Trees walking off across the fields in fury

  naked in the spark of lightning.

  I sit on the white porch on the brown hanging cane chair

  coffee in my hand midnight storm midsummer night.

  The past, friends and family, drift into the rain shower.

  Those relatives in my favourite slides

  re-shot from old minute photographs so they now stand

  complex ambiguous grainy on my wall.

  This is my Uncle who turned up for his marriage

  on an elephant. He was a chaplain.

  This shy looking man in the light jacket and tie was

  infamous,

  when he went drinking he took the long blonde beautiful

  hair

  of his wife and put one end in the cupboard and locked it

  leaving her tethered in an armchair.

  He was terrified of her possible adultery

  and this way died peaceful happy to the end.

  My Grandmother, who went to a dance in a muslin dress

  with fireflies captured and embedded in the cloth, shining

  and witty. This calm beautiful face

  organized wild acts in the tropics.

  She hid the milkman in her house

  after he had committed murder and at the trial

  was thrown out of the court for making jokes at the

  judge.

  Her son became a Q.C.

  This is my brother at 6. With his cousin and his sister

  and Pam de Voss who fell on a penknife and lost her eye.

  My Aunt Christie. She knew Harold Macmillan was a spy

  communicating with her through pictures in the news-

  papers.

  Every picture she believed asked her to forgive him,

  his hound eyes pleading.

  Her husband, Uncle Fitzroy, a doctor in Ceylon,

  had a memory sharp as scalpels into his 80’s,

  though I never bothered to ask him about anything

  —interested then more in the latest recordings of Bobby

  Darin.

  And this is my Mother with her brother Noel in fancy

  dress.

  They are 7 and 8 years old, a hand-coloured photograph,

  it is the earliest picture I have. The one I love most.

  A picture of my kids at Halloween

  has the same contact and laughter.

  My Uncle dying at 68, and my Mother a year later dying

  at 68.

  She told me about his death and the day he died

  his eyes clearing out of illness as if seeing

  right through the room the hospital and she said

  he saw something so clear and good his whole body

  for a moment became youthful and she remembered

  when she sewed badges on his trackshirts.

  Her voice joyous in telling me this, her face light and

  clear.

  (My firefly Grandmother also dying at 68.)

  These are the fragments I have of them, tonight

  in this storm, the dogs restless on the porch.

  They were all laughing, crazy, and vivid in their prime.

  At a party my drunk Father

  tried to explain a complex operation on chickens

  and managed to kill them all in the process, the guests

  having dinner an hour later while my Father slept

  and the kids watched the servants clean up the litter

  of beaks and feathers on the lawn.

  These are their fragments, all I remember,

  wanting more knowledge of them. In the mirror and in

  my kids

  I see them in my flesh. Wherever we are

  they parade in my brain and the expanding stories

  connect to the grey grainy pictures on the wall,

  as they hold their drinks or 20 years later

  hold grandchildren, pose with favourite dogs,

  coming through the light, the electricity, which the storm

  destroyed an hour ago, a tree going down by the highway

  so that now inside the kids play dominoes by candlelight

  and out here the thick rain static the spark of my match

  to a cigarette

  and the trees across the fields leaving me, distinct

  lonely in their own knife scars and cow-chewed bark

  frozen in the jagged light as if snapped in their run

  the branch arms waving to what was a second ago the

  dark sky

  when in truth like me they haven’t moved.

  Haven’t moved an inch from me.

  CLAUDE GLASS

  He is told about

  the previous evening’s behaviour.

  Starting with a punchbowl

  on the volleyball court.

  Dancing and falling across coffee tables,

  asking his son Are you the bastard

  who keeps telling me I’m drunk?

  kissing the limbs of women

  suspicious of his friends serenading

  five pigs by the barn

  heaving a wine glass towards garden

  and continually going through gates

  into the dark fields

  and collapsing.

  His wife half carrying him home

  rescuing him from departing cars,

  complains this morning

  of a sore shoulder.

  And even later

  his thirteen-year-old daughter’s struggle

  to lift him into the back kitchen

  after he has passed out, resting his head on rocks,

  wondering what he was looking for in dark fields.

  For he h
as always loved that ancient darkness

  where the flat rocks glide like Japanese tables

  where he can remove clothes

  and lie with moonlight on the day’s heat

  hardened in stone, drowning

  in this star blanket this sky

  like a giant trout

  conscious how the heaven

  careens over him

  as he moves in back fields

  kissing the limbs of trees

  or placing ear on stone which rocks him

  and then stands to watch the house

  in its oasis of light.

  And he knows something is happening there to him

  solitary while he spreads his arms

  and holds everything that is slipping away together.

  He is suddenly in the heat of the party

  slouching towards women, revolving

  round one unhappy shadow.

  That friend who said he would find

  the darkest place, and then wave.

  He is not a lost drunk

  like his father or his friend, can,

  he says, stop on a dime, and he can

  he could because even now, now in

  this brilliant darkness where

  grass has lost its colour and it’s all

  fucking Yeats and moonlight, he knows

  this colourless grass is making his bare feet green

  for it is the hour of magic

  which no matter what sadness

  leaves him grinning.

  At certain hours of the night

  ducks are nothing but landscape

  just voices breaking as they nightmare.

  The weasel wears their blood

  home like a scarf,

  cows drain over the horizon

  and the dark

  vegetables hum onward underground

  but the mouth

  wants plum.

  Moves from room to room

  where brown beer glass

  smashed lounges at his feet

  opens the long rust stained gate

  and steps towards invisible fields

  that he knows from years of daylight.

  He snorts in the breeze

  which carries a smell

  of cattle on its back.

  What this place does not have

  is the white paint of bathing cabins

  the leak of eucalyptus.

  During a full moon

  outcrops of rock shine

  skunks spray abstract into the air

  cows burp as if practicing

  the name of Francis Ponge.

  His drunk state wants the mesh of place.

  Ludwig of Bavaria’s Roof Garden—

  glass plants, iron parrots

  Venus Grottos, tarpaulins of Himalaya.

  By the kitchen sink he tells someone

  from now on I will drink only landscapes

  —here, pour me a cup of Spain.

  Opens the gate and stumbles

  blood like a cassette through the body

  away from the lights, unbuttoning,

  this desire to be riverman.

  Tentatively

  he recalls

  his drunk invitation to the river.

  He has steered the awesome car

  past sugarbush to the blue night water

  and steps out

  speaking to branches

  and the gulp of toads.

  Subtle applause of animals.

  A snake leaves a path

  like temporary fossil.

  He falls

  back onto the intricacies

  of gearshift and steering wheel

  alive as his left arm

  which now departs out of the window

  trying to tug passing sumac

  pine bush tamarack

  into the car

  to the party.

  Drunkenness opens his arms like a gate

  and over the car invisible insects

  ascend out of the beams like meteorite

  crushed dust of the moon

  . . . he waits for the magic star called Lorca.

  On the front lawn a sheet

  tacked across a horizontal branch.

  A projector starts a parade

  of journeys, landscapes, relatives,

  friends leaping out within pebbles of water

  caught by the machine as if creating rain.

  Later when wind frees the sheet

  and it collapses like powder in the grass

  pictures fly without target

  and howl their colours over Southern Ontario

  clothing burdock

  rhubarb a floating duck.

  Landscapes and stories

  flung into branches

  and the dog walks under the hover of the swing

  beam of the projection bursting in his left eye.

  The falling sheet the star of Lorca swoops

  someone gets up and heaves his glass

  into the vegetable patch

  towards the slow stupid career of beans.

  This is the hour

  when dead men sit

  and write each other.

  “Concerning the words we never said

  during morning hours of the party

  there was glass under my bare feet

  laws of the kitchen were broken

  and each word moved

  in my mouth like muscle . . .”

  This is the hour for sudden journeying.

  Cervantes accepts

  a 17th Century invitation

  from the Chinese Emperor.

  Schools of Chinese-Spanish Linguistics!

  Rivers of the world meet!

  And here

  ducks dressed in Asia

  pivot on foreign waters.

  At 4 a.m. he wakes in the sheet

  that earlier held tropics in its whiteness.

  The invited river flows through the house

  into the kitchen up

  stairs, he awakens and moves within it.

  In the dim light

  he sees the turkish carpet under water,

  low stools, glint

  of piano pedals, even a sleeping dog

  whose dreams may be of rain.

  It is a river he has walked elsewhere

  now visiting moving with him at the hip

  to kitchen where a friend sleeps in a chair

  head on the table his grip

  still round a glass, legs underwater.

  He wants to relax

  and give in to the night

  fall horizontal and swim

  to the back kitchen where his daughter sleeps.

  He wishes to swim

  to each of his family and gaze

  at their underwater dreaming

  this magic chain of bubbles.

  Wife, son, household guests, all

  comfortable in clean river water.

  He is aware that for hours

  there has been no conversation,

  tongues have slid to stupidity on alcohol

  sleeping mouths are photographs of yells.

  He stands waiting, the sentinel,

  shambling back and forth, his anger

  and desire against the dark

  which, if he closes his eyes,

  will lose them all.

  The oven light

  shines up through water at him

  a bathysphere a ghost ship

  and in the half drowned room

  the crickets like small pins

  begin to tack down

  the black canvas of this night,

  begin to talk their hesitant

  gnarled epigrams to each other

  across the room.

  Creak and echo.

  Creak and echo. With absolute clarity

  he knows where he is.

  THE CINNAMON PEELER

  If I were a cinnamon peeler

  I would ride your bed


  and leave the yellow bark dust

  on your pillow.

  Your breasts and shoulders would reek

  you could never walk through markets

  without the profession of my fingers

  floating over you. The blind would

  stumble certain of whom they approached

  though you might bathe

  under rain gutters, monsoon.

  Here on the upper thigh

  at this smooth pasture

  neighbour to your hair

  or the crease

  that cuts your back. This ankle.

  You will be known among strangers

  as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

  I could hardly glance at you

  before marriage

  never touch you

  —your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.

  I buried my hands

  in saffron, disguised them

  over smoking tar,

  helped the honey gatherers . . .

  When we swam once

  I touched you in water

  and our bodies remained free,

  you could hold me and be blind of smell.

  You climbed the bank and said

  this is how you touch other women

  the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.

  And you searched your arms

  for the missing perfume

  and knew

  what good is it

  to be the lime burner’s daughter

  left with no trace

  as if not spoken to in the act of love

  as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

  You touched