The Cinnamon Peeler

by Michael Ondaatje

  back from logging on Vancouver Island

  with men who get rid of crabs with Raid

                 2 minutes bending over in agony

                 and then into the showers!

  Last night I joined him for The Prisoner of Zenda

  a film I saw three times in my youth

  and which no doubt influenced me morally.

  Hot coffee bananas and cheese

  we are ready at 11.30 for adventure.

  At each commercial Sky

  breaks into midnight guitar practice

  head down playing loud and intensely

  till the movie comes on and the music suddenly stops.

  Skyler’s favourite hours when he’s usually alone

  cooking huge meals of anything in the frying pan

  thumbing through Advanced Guitar like a bible.

  We talk during the film

  and break into privacy during commercials

  or get more coffee or push

  the screen door open and urinate under the trees.

  Laughing at the dilemmas of 1920 heroes

  suggestive lines, cutaways to court officials

  who raise their eyebrows at least 4 inches

  when the lovers kiss …

  only the anarchy of the evil Rupert of Hentzau

  is appreciated.

                 And still somehow

  by 1.30 we are moved

  as Stewart Granger girl-less and countryless

  rides into the sunset with his morals and his horse.

  The perfect world is over. Banana peels

  orange peels ashtrays guitar books.

  2 a.m. We stagger through

  into the slow black rooms of the house.

  I lie in bed fully awake. The darkness

  breathes to the pace of a dog’s snoring.

  The film is replayed to sounds

  of an intricate blues guitar.

  Skyler is Rupert then the hero.

  He will leave in a couple of days

  for Montreal or the Maritimes.

  In the movies of my childhood the heroes

  after skilled swordplay and moral victories

  leave with absolutely nothing

  to do for the rest of their lives.

  SALLIE CHISUM/LAST WORDS

  ON BILLY THE KID 4 A.M.

  for Nancy Beatty

  The moon hard and yellow where Billy’s head is.

  I have been moving in my room

  these last 5 minutes. Looking for a cigarette.

  That is a sin he taught me.

  Showed me how to hold it and how to want it.

  I had been looking and stepped forward

  to feel along the windowsill

  and there was the tanned moon head.

  His body the shadow of the only tree on the property.

  I am at the table.

  Billy’s mouth is trying

  to remove a splinter out of my foot.

  Tough skin on the bottom of me.

  Still. I can feel his teeth

  bite precise. And then moving his face back

  holding something in his grin, says he’s got it.

  Where have you been I ask

  Where have you been he replies

  I have been into every room about 300 times

  since you were here

  I have walked about 60 miles in this house

  Where have you been I ask

  Billy was a fool

  he was like those reversible mirrors

  you can pivot round and see youself again

  but there is something showing on the other side always.

  Sunlight. The shade beside the cupboard.

  He fired two bullets into the dummy

  on which I built dresses

  where the nipples should have been.

  That wasn’t too funny, but we laughed a lot.

  One morning he was still sleeping

  I pushed the door and watched him from the hall

  he looked like he was having a serious dream.

  Concentrating. Angry. As if wallpaper

  had been ripped off a wall.

  Billy’s mouth at my foot

  removing the splinter.

  Did I say that?

  It was just before lunch one day.

  I have been alive

  37 years since I knew him. He was a fool.

  He was like those mirrors I told you about.

  I am leaning against the bed rail

  I have finished my cigarette

  now I cannnot find the ashtray.

  I put it out, squash it

  against the window

  where the moon is.

  In his stupid eyes.

  PURE MEMORY/CHRIS DEWDNEY

  ‘Listen, it was so savage and brutal and powerful that even though it happened out of the blue I knew there was nothing arbitrary about it’

  CHRISTOPHER DEWDNEY

  1

  On a B.C. radio show the man asked me, coffee half way up to his mouth, what are the books you’ve liked recently? Christopher Dewdney’s A Palaeozoic Geology of London Ontario. Only I didn’t say that, I started stumbling on the word Palaeozoic … Paleo … Polio … and then it happened on Geology too until it seemed a disease. I sounded like an idiot. Meanwhile I was watching the man’s silent gulps. The professional silent gulping of coffee an inch or two away from the microphone. Unconcerned with my sinking ‘live’ all over the province.

  2

  I can’t remember where I first met him. Somewhere I became aware of this giggle. Tan hair, tan face, tan shirt and a giggle-snort as his head staggered back. His arms somewhere.

  3

  The baby. He shows me the revolving globe in the 4-month-old kid’s crib. Only it has been unscrewed and the globe turned upside down and rescrewed in that way so Africa and Asia all swivel upside down. This way he says she’ll have to come to terms with the shapes all over again when she grows up.

  4

  He comes to dinner, steps out of the car and transforms the 10-year-old suburban garden into ancient history. Is on his knees pointing out the age and race and character of rocks and earth. He loves the Norfolk Pine. I give him a piece of wood 120 million years old from the tar sands and he smokes a bit of it.

  5

  When he was a kid and his parents had guests and he was eventually told to get to bed he liked to embarrass them by running under a table and screaming out Don’t hit me Don’t hit me.

  6

  His most embarrassing moment. A poetry reading in Toronto. He was sitting in the front row and he realized that he hated the poetry. He looked around discreetly for the exit but it was a long way away. Then to the right, quite near him, he saw another door. As a poem ended he got up and officially walked to the door quickly opened it went out and closed it behind him. He found himself in a dark cupboard about 2 feet by 3 feet. It contained nothing. He waited there for a while, then he started to laugh and giggle. He giggled for 5 minutes and he thinks the audience could probably hear him. When he had collected himself he opened the door, came out, walked to his seat and sat down again.

  7

  Coach House Press, December 1974. I haven’t seen him for a long time. His face is tough. Something has left his face. It is not that he is thinner but the face has lost something distinct and it seems like flesh. But he is not thinner. He is busy working on his new book Fovea Centralis and I watch him as he sits in the empty back room upstairs all alone with a computer typesetting terminal. I can’t get over his face. It is ‘tight’, as if a stocking were over it and he about to perform a robbery. He plucks at the keys and talks down into the machine. I am relieved when he starts giggling at something. I tell him I’m coming down to London in a week and he says he will show me his butterflies, he has bought two mounted butterflies for a very good price. If I don’t tell anyone he wil
l let me know where I could get one. A Chinaman in London Ontario sells them. I start to laugh. He doesn’t. This is serious information, important rare information like the history of rocks – these frail wings of almost powder have their genealogies too.

  8

  His favourite movie is Earthquake. He stands in the middle of his apartment very excited telling me all the details. He shows me his beautiful fossils, a small poster of James Dean hitting his brother in East of Eden, and the two very impressive mounted butterflies.

  9

  On the bus going back to Toronto I have a drawing of him by Robert Fones. Wrapped in brown paper it lies above me on the luggage rack. When the bus swerves I put my arm out into the dark aisle ready to catch him if it falls. A strange drawing of him in his cane chair with a plant to the side of him, reading Frank O’Hara with very oriental eyes. It was done in 1973, before the flesh left his face.

  10

  His wife’s brain haemorrhage. I could not cope with that. He is 23 years old. He does. Africa Asia Australia upside down. Earthquake.

  BEARHUG

  Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight

  I yell ok. Finish something I’m doing,

  then something else, walk slowly round

  the corner to my son’s room.

  He is standing arms outstretched

  waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

  Why do I give my emotion an animal’s name,

  give it that dark squeeze of death?

  This is the hug which collects

  all his small bones and his warm neck against me.

  The thin tough body under the pyjamas

  locks to me like a magnet of blood.

  How long was he standing there

  like that, before I came?

  Elimination Dance

  (an intermission)

  ‘Nothing I’d read prepared me for a body this unfair’

  JOHN NEWLOVE

  ‘Till we be roten, kan we not be rypen’

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER

  Those who are allergic to the sea

  Those who have resisted depravity

  Men who shave off beards in stages, pausing to take photographs

  American rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leaf hockey sweaters

  Those who (while visiting a foreign country) have lost the end of a Q tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem

  Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman’s stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs

  All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform

  Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool

  Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens along with the dessert

  Any person who has had the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice

  Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail

  All those belle-lettrists who feel that should have been ‘an urine sample’

  Anyone who has had to step into an elevator with all of the Irish Rovers

  Those who have filled in a bilingual and confidential pig survey from Statistics Canada. (Une enquête sur les porcs, strictement confidentielle)

  Those who have written to the age old brotherhood of Rosicrucians for a free copy of their book ‘The Mastery of Life’ in order to release the inner consciousness and to experience (in the privacy of the home) momentary flights of the soul

  Those who have accidently stapled themselves

  Anyone who has been penetrated by a mountie

  Any university professor who has danced with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Jean Genet

  Those who have unintentionally locked themselves within a sleeping bag at a camping goods store

  Any woman whose i.u.d. has set off an alarm system at the airport

  Those who, after a swim, find the sensation of water dribbling out of their ears erotic

  Men who have never touched a whippet

  Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts

  Those who have pissed out of the back of moving trucks

  Those who have woken to find the wet footprints of a peacock across their kitchen floor

  Anyone whose knees have been ruined as a result of performing sexual acts in elevators

  Those who have so much as contemplated the possibility of creeping up to one’s enemy with two Bic lighters, pressing simultaneously the butane switches – one into each nostril – and so gassing him to death

  Literary critics who have swum the Hellespont

  Anyone who has been hired as a ‘professional beater’ and frightened grouse in the direction of the Queen Mother

  Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine’s Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis

  Those who have come across their own telephone numbers underneath terse insults or compliments in the washroom of the Bay Street Bus Terminal

  Those who have used the following techniques of seduction:

  small talk at a falconry convention

  entering a spa town disguised as Ford Madox Ford

  making erotic rotations of the pelvis, backstage, during the storm scene of King Lear

  underlining suggestive phrases in the prefaces of Joseph Conrad

  Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law

  Any writer who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in one of the following poses: sitting in the back of a 1956 Dodge with two roosters; in a tuxedo with the Sydney Opera House in the distance; studying the vanishing point on a jar of Dutch Cleanser; against a gravestone with dramatic back lighting; with a false nose on; in the vicinity of Macchu Pichu; or sitting in a study and looking intensely at one’s own book

  The person who borrowed my Martin Beck thriller, read it in a sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to the floor, stapled them together and returned the book, thinking I wouldn’t notice

  Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board

  Anyone with pain

  Secular Love

  ‘You’re an actor, aren’t you?’

  The man nodded silently and averted his eyes.

  ‘I’ve seen you in films. You always seem embarrassed at the thought of what you have to say next.’

  The man laughed and again averted his eyes.

  ‘Your trouble, I believe, is that you always hold back something of yourself. You’re not shameless enough for an actor. In my opinion you should learn how to run properly and scream properly, with your mouth wide open. I’ve noticed that even when you yawn you’re afraid to open your mouth all the way. In your next film make a sign to show that you’ve understood me. You haven’t even been discovered yet. I’m looking forward to seeing you grow older from film to film.’

  PETER HANDKE The left-handed woman

  Claude Glass

  A somewhat convex dark or coloured hand-mirror, used to concentrate the features of the landscape in subdued tones.

  ‘Grey walked about everywhere with that pretty toy, the claude glass, in his hand, making the beautiful forms of the landscape compose in its luscious chiaroscuro.’ Gosse (1882)

  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 ga
tes

  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 has 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