The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje

  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 cafe 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 Tom-masoni. 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.

  He was no longer young. How did she see him? With his wounds, his unbalance, the grey curls at the back of his neck. He had never imagined himself to be a man with a sense of age and wisdom. They had all grown older, but he still did not feel he had wisdom to go with his aging.

  He crouched down to watch the dog drinking and he rebalanced himself too late, grabbing the table, upsetting the carafe of wine.

  Your name is David Caravaggio, right?

  They had handcuffed him to the thick legs of an oak table. At one point he rose with it in his embrace, blood pouring away from his left hand, and tried to run with it through the thin door and falling. The woman stopped, dropping the knife, refusing to do more. The drawer of the table slid out and fell against his chest, and all its contents, and he thought perhaps there was a gun that he could use. Then Ranuccio Tommasoni picked up the razor and came over to him. Caravaggio, right? He still wasn’t sure.

  As he lay under the table, the blood from his hands fell into his face, and he suddenly thought clearly and slipped the handcuff off the table leg, flinging the chair away to drown out the pain and then leaning to the left to step out of the other cuff. Blood everywhere now. His hands already useless. For months afterwards he found himself looking at only the thumbs of people, as if the incident had changed him just by producing envy. But the event had produced age, as if during the one night when he was locked to that table they had poured a solution into him that slowed him.

  He stood up dizzy above the dog, above the red wine-soaked table. Two guards, the woman, Tommasoni, the telephones ringing, ringing, interrupting Tommasoni, who would put down the razor, caustically whisper Excuse me and pick up the phone with his bloody hand and listen. He had, he thought, said nothing of worth to them. But they let him go, so perhaps he was wrong.

  Then he had walked along the Via di Santo Spirito to the one geographical location he had hidden away in his brain. Walked past Brunelleschi’s church towards the library of the German Institute, where he knew a certain person would look after him. Suddenly he realized this was why they had let him go. Letting him walk freely would fool him into revealing this contact. He arced into a side street, not looking back, never looking back. He wanted a street fire so he could stanch his wounds, hang them over the smoke from a tar cauldron so black smoke would envelop his hands. He was on the Santa Trinita Bridge. There was nothing around, no traffic, which surprised him. He sat on the smooth balustrade of the bridge, then lay back. No sounds. Earlier, when he had walked, his hands in his wet pockets, there had been the manic movement of tanks and jeeps.

  As he lay there the mined bridge exploded and he was flung upwards and then down as part of the end of the world. He opened his eyes and there was a giant head beside him. He breathed in and his chest filled with water. He was underwater. There was a bearded head beside him in the shallow water of the Arno. He reached towards it but couldn’t even nudge it. Light was pouring into the river. He swam up to the surface, parts of which were on fire.

  When he told Hana the story later that evening she said, ‘They stopped torturing you because the Allies were coming. The Germans were getting out of the city, blowing up bridges as they left.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I told them everything. Whose head was it? There were constant phone calls into that room. There would be a hush, and the man would pull back from me, and all of them would watch him on the phone listening to the silence of the other voice, which we could not hear. Whose voice? Whose head?’

  ‘They were leaving, David.’

  She opens The Last of the Mohicans to the blank page at the back and begins to write in it.

  There is a man named Caravaggio, a friend of my father’s. I have always loved him. He is older than I am, about forty-five, I think. He is in a time of darkness, has no confidence. For some reason I am cared for by this friend of my father.

  She closes the book and then walks down into the library and conceals it in one of the high shelves.

  The Englishman was asleep, breathing through his mouth as he always did, awake or asleep. She got up from her chair and gently pulled free the lit candle held in his hands. She walked to the window and blew it out there, so the smoke went out of the room. She disliked his lying there with a candle in his hands, mocking a deathlike posture, wax falling unnoticed onto his wrist. As if he was preparing himself, as if he wanted to slip into his own death by imitating its climate and light.

  She stood by the window and her fingers clutched the hair on her head with a tough grip, pulling it. In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black.

  She needed to move from the room. Suddenly she was claustrophobic, untired. She strode down the hall and leapt down the stairs and went out onto the terrace of the villa, then looked up, as if trying to discern the figure of the girl she had stepped aw
ay from. She walked back into the building. She pushed at the stiff swollen door and came into the library and then removed the boards from the French doors at the far end of the room, opening them, letting in the night air. Where Caravaggio was, she didn’t know. He was out most evenings now, usually returning a few hours before dawn. In any case there was no sign of him.

  She grabbed the grey sheet that covered the piano and walked away to a corner of the room hauling it in after her, a winding-cloth, a net of fish.

  No light. She heard a far grumble of thunder.

  She was standing in front of the piano. Without looking down she lowered her hands and started to play, just chording sound, reducing melody to a skeleton. She paused after each set of notes as if bringing her hands out of water to see what she had caught, then continued, placing down the main bones of the tune. She slowed the movements of her fingers even more. She was looking down as two men slipped through the French doors and placed their guns on the end of the piano and stood in front of her. The noise of chords still in the air of the changed room.

  Her arms down her sides, one bare foot on the bass pedal, continuing with the song her mother had taught her, that she practised on any surface, a kitchen table, a wall while she walked upstairs, her own bed before she fell asleep. They had had no piano. She used to go to the community centre on Saturday mornings and play there, but all week she practised wherever she was, learning the chalked notes that her mother had drawn onto the kitchen table and then wiped off later. This was the first time she had played on the villa’s piano, even though she had been here for three months, her eye catching its shape on her first day there through the French doors. In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars. She had never believed that but had at first thought it was perhaps mice.

  A lightning flash across the valley, the storm had been coming all night, and she saw one of the men was a Sikh. Now she paused and smiled, somewhat amazed, relieved anyway, the cyclorama of light behind them so brief that it was just a quick glimpse of his turban and the bright wet guns. The high flap of the piano had been removed and used as a hospital table several months earlier, so their guns lay on the far side of the ditch of keys. The English patient could have identified the weapons. Hell. She was surrounded by foreign men. Not one pure Italian. A villa romance. What would Poliziano have thought of this 1945 tableau, two men and a woman across a piano and the war almost over and the guns in their wet brightness whenever the lightning slipped itself into the room filling everything with colour and shadow as it was doing now every half-minute thunder crackling all over the valley and the music antiphonal, the press of chords, When I take my sugar to tea …