The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

In her childhood her classroom had been Caravaggio. He had taught her the somersault. Now, with his hands always in his pockets, he just gestures with his shoulders. Who knew what country the war had made him live in. She herself had been trained at Women’s College Hospital and then sent overseas during the Sicilian invasion. That was in 1943. The First Canadian Infantry Division worked its way up Italy, and the destroyed bodies were fed back to the field hospitals like mud passed back by tunnellers in the dark. After the battle of Arezzo, when the first barrage of troops recoiled, she was surrounded day and night by their wounds. After three full days without rest, she finally lay down on the floor beside a mattress where someone lay dead, and slept for twelve hours, closing her eyes against the world around her.

When she woke, she picked up a pair of scissors out of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair, not concerned with shape or length, just cutting it away—the irritation of its presence during the previous days still in her mind—when she had bent forward and her hair had touched blood in a wound. She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death. She gripped what was left to make sure there were no more strands and turned again to face the rooms full of the wounded.

She never looked at herself in mirrors again. As the war got darker she received reports about how certain people she had known had died. She feared the day she would remove blood from a patient’s face and discover her father or someone who had served her food across a counter on Danforth Avenue. She grew harsh with herself and the patients. Reason was the only thing that might save them, and there was no reason. The thermometer of blood moved up the country. Where was and what was Toronto anymore in her mind? This was treacherous opera. People hardened against those around them—soldiers, doctors, nurses, civilians. Hana bent closer to the wounds she cared for, her mouth whispering to soldiers.

She called everyone “Buddy,” and laughed at the song that had the lines

Each time I chanced to see Franklin D.

He always said “Hi, Buddy” to me.

She swabbed arms that kept bleeding. She removed so many pieces of shrapnel she felt she’d transported a ton of metal out of the huge body of the human that she was caring for while the army travelled north. One night when one of the patients died she ignored all rules and took the pair of tennis shoes he had with him in his pack and put them on. They were slightly too big for her but she was comfortable.

Her face became tougher and leaner, the face Caravaggio would meet later. She was thin, mostly from tiredness. She was always hungry and found it a furious exhaustion to feed a patient who couldn’t eat or didn’t want to, watching the bread crumble away, the soup cool, which she desired to swallow fast. She wanted nothing exotic, just bread, meat. One of the towns had a bread-making section attached to the hospital and in her free time she moved among the bakers, inhaling the dust and the promise of food. Later, when they were east of Rome, someone gave her a gift of a Jerusalem artichoke.

It was strange sleeping in the basilicas, or monasteries, or wherever the wounded were billeted, always moving north. She broke the small cardboard flag off the foot of the bed when someone died, so that orderlies would know glancing from a distance. Then she would leave the thick-stoned building and walk outside into spring or winter or summer, seasons that seemed archaic, that sat like old gentlemen throughout the war. She would step outside whatever the weather. She wanted air that smelled of nothing human, wanted moonlight even if it came with a rainstorm.

Hello Buddy, good-bye Buddy. Caring was brief. There was a contract only until death. Nothing in her spirit or past had taught her to be a nurse. But cutting her hair was a contract, and it lasted until they were bivouacked in the Villa San Girolamo north of Florence. Here there were four other nurses, two doctors, one hundred patients. The war in Italy moved farther north and they were what had been left behind.

Then, during the celebrations of some local victory, somewhat plaintive in this hill town, she had said she was not going back to Florence or Rome or any other hospital, her war was over. She would remain with the one burned man they called “the English patient,” who, it was now clear to her, should never be moved because of the fragility of his limbs. She would lay belladonna over his eyes, give him saline baths for the keloided skin and extensive burns. She was told the hospital was unsafe—the nunnery that had been for months a German defence, barraged with shells and flares by the Allies. Nothing would be left for her, there would be no safety from brigands. She still refused to leave, got out of her nurse’s uniform, unbundled the brown print frock she had carried for months, and wore that with her tennis shoes. She stepped away from the war. She had moved back and forth at their desire. Till the nuns reclaimed it she would sit in this villa with the Englishman. There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There was some little waltz in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought. She wanted to save him, this nameless, almost faceless man who had been one of the two hundred or so placed in her care during the invasion north.

In her print dress she walked away from the celebration. She went into the room she shared with the other nurses and sat down. Something flickered in her eye as she sat, and she caught the eye of a small round mirror. She got up slowly and went towards it. It was very small but even so seemed a luxury. She had refused to look at herself for more than a year, now and then just her shadow on walls. The mirror revealed only her cheek, she had to move it back to arm’s length, her hand wavering. She watched the little portrait of herself as if within a clasped brooch. She. Through the window there was the sound of the patients being brought out into the sunlight in their chairs, laughing and cheering with the staff. Only those who were seriously ill were still indoors. She smiled at that. Hi Buddy, she said. She peered into her look, trying to recognize herself.

Darkness between Hana and Caravaggio as they walk in the garden. Now he begins to talk in his familiar slow drawl.

“It was someone’s birthday party late at night on Danforth Avenue. The Night Crawler restaurant. Do you remember, Hana? Everyone had to stand and sing a song. Your father, me, Giannetta, friends, and you said you wanted to as well—for the first time. You were still at school then, and you had learned the song in a French class.

“You did it formally, stood on the bench and then one more step up onto the wooden table between the plates and the candles burning.

“ ‘Alonson fon!’

“You sang out, your left hand to your heart. Alonson fon! Half the people there didn’t know what the hell you were singing, and maybe you didn’t know what the exact words meant, but you knew what the song was about.

“The breeze from the window was swaying your skirt over so it almost touched a candle, and your ankles seemed fire-white in the bar. Your father’s eyes looking up at you, miraculous with this new language, the cause pouring out so distinct, flawless, no hesitations, and the candles swerving away, not touching your dress but almost touching. We stood up at the end and you walked off the table into his arms.”

   “I would remove those bandages on your hands. I am a nurse, you know.”

“They’re comfortable. Like gloves.”

“How did this happen.”

“I was caught jumping from a woman’s window. That woman I told you about, who took the photograph. Not her fault.”

She grips his arm, kneading the muscle. “Let me do it.” She pulls the bandaged hands out of his coat pockets. She has seen them grey in daylight, but in this light they are almost luminous.

As she loosens the bandages he steps backwards, the white coming out of his arms as if he were a magician, till he is free of them. She walks towards the uncle from childhood, sees his eyes hoping to catch hers to postpone this, so she looks at nothing but his eyes.

His hands held together like a human bowl. She reaches for them while her face goes up to his cheek, then nestles in his neck. What she holds seems firm, healed.

“I tell you I had to negotiate for what they left me.”

“How did you do that?”

“All those skills I used to have.”

“Oh, I remember. No, don’t move. Don’t drift away from me.”

“It is a strange time, the end of a war.”

“Yes. A period of adjustment.”

“Yes.”

He raises his hands up as if to cup the quarter-moon.

“They removed both thumbs, Hana. See.”

He holds his hands in front of her. Showing her directly what she has glimpsed. He turns one hand over as if to reveal that it is no trick, that what looks like a gill is where the thumb has been cut away. He moves the hand towards her blouse.

She feels the cloth lift in the area below her shoulder as he holds it with two fingers and tugs it softly towards him.

“I touch cotton like this.”

“When I was a child I thought of you always as the Scarlet Pimpernel, and in my dreams I stepped onto the night roofs with you. You came home with cold meals in your pockets, pencil cases, sheet music off some Forest Hill piano for me.”

She speaks into the darkness of his face, a shadow of leaves washing over his mouth like a rich woman’s lace. “You like women, don’t you? You liked them.”

“I like them. Why the past tense?”

“It seems unimportant now, with the war and such things.”

He nods and the pattern of leaves rolls off him.

“You used to be like those artists who painted only at night, a single light on in their street. Like the worm-pickers with their old coffee cans strapped to their ankles and the helmet of light shooting down into the grass. All over the city parks. You took me to that place, that café where they sold them. It was like the stock exchange, you said, where the price of worms kept dropping and rising, five cents, ten cents. People were ruined or made fortunes. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Walk back with me, it’s getting cold.”

“The great pickpockets are born with the second and third fingers almost the same length. They do not need to go as deep into a pocket. The great distance of half an inch!”

They move towards the house, under the trees.

“Who did that to you?”

“They found a woman to do it. They thought it was more trenchant. They brought in one of their nurses. My wrists handcuffed to the table legs. When they cut off my thumbs my hands slipped out of them without any power. Like a wish in a dream. But the man who called her in, he was really in charge—he was the one. Ranuccio Tommasoni. She was an innocent, knew nothing about me, my name or nationality or what I may have done.”

When they came into the house the English patient was shouting. Hana let go of Caravaggio and he watched her run up the stairs, her tennis shoes flashing as she ascended and wheeled around with the banister.

The voice filled the halls. Caravaggio walked into the kitchen, tore off a section of bread and followed Hana up the stairs. As he walked towards the room the shouts became more frantic. When he stepped into the bedroom the Englishman was staring at a dog—the dog’s head angled back as if stunned by the screaming. Hana looked over to Caravaggio and grinned.

“I haven’t seen a dog for years. All through the war I saw no dog.”

She crouched and hugged the animal, smelling its hair and the odour of hill grasses within it. She steered the dog towards Caravaggio, who was offering it the heel of bread. The Englishman saw Caravaggio then and his jaw dropped. It must have seemed to him that the dog—now blocked by Hana’s back—had turned into a man. Caravaggio collected the dog in his arms and left the room.

   I have been thinking, the English patient said, that this must be Poliziano’s room. This must have been his villa we are in. It is the water coming out of that wall, that ancient fountain. It is a famous room. They all met here.

It was a hospital, she said quietly. Before that, long before that a nunnery. Then armies took it over.

I think this was the Villa Bruscoli. Poliziano—the great protégé of Lorenzo. I’m talking about 1483. In Florence, in Santa Trinità Church, you can see the painting of the Medicis with Poliziano in the foreground, wearing a red cloak. Brilliant, awful man. A genius who worked his way up into society.

It was long past midnight and he was wide awake again.

Okay, tell me, she thought, take me somewhere. Her mind still upon Caravaggio’s hands. Caravaggio, who was by now probably feeding the stray dog something from the kitchen of the Villa Bruscoli, if that was what its name was.

It was a bloody life. Daggers and politics and three-decker hats and colonial padded stockings and wigs. Wigs of silk! Of course Savonarola came later, not much later, and there was his Bonfire of the Vanities. Poliziano translated Homer. He wrote a great poem on Simonetta Vespucci, you know her?

No, said Hana, laughing.

Paintings of her all over Florence. Died of consumption at twenty-three. He made her famous with Le Stanze per la Giostra and then Botticelli painted scenes from it. Leonardo painted scenes from it. Poliziano would lecture every day for two hours in Latin in the morning, two hours in Greek in the afternoon. He had a friend called Pico della Mirandola, a wild socialite who suddenly converted and joined Savonarola.

That was my nickname when I was a kid. Pico.

Yes, I think a lot happened here. This fountain in the wall. Pico and Lorenzo and Poliziano and the young Michelangelo. They held in each hand the new world and the old world. The library hunted down the last four books of Cicero. They imported a giraffe, a rhinoceros, a dodo. Toscanelli drew maps of the world based on correspondence with merchants. They sat in this room with a bust of Plato and argued all night.

And then came Savonarola’s cry out of the streets: “Repentance! The deluge is coming!“ And everything was swept away—free will, the desire to be elegant, fame, the right to worship Plato as well as Christ. Now came the bonfires—the burning of wigs, books, animal hides, maps. More than four hundred years later they opened up the graves. Pico’s bones were preserved. Poliziano’s had crumbled into dust.

Hana listened as the Englishman turned the pages of his commonplace book and read the information glued in from other books—about great maps lost in the bonfires and the burning of Plato’s statue, whose marble exfoliated in the heat, the cracks across wisdom like precise reports across the valley as Poliziano stood on the grass hills smelling the future. Pico down there somewhere as well, in his grey cell, watching everything with the third eye of salvation.

He poured some water into a bowl for the dog. An old mongrel, older than the war.

He sat down with the carafe of wine the monks from the monastery had given Hana. It was Hana’s house and he moved carefully, rearranging nothing. He noticed her civilisation in the small wildflowers, the small gifts to herself. Even in the overgrown garden he would come across a square foot of grass snipped down with her nurse’s scissors. If he had been a younger man he would have fallen in love with this.