In the Skin of a Lion

by Michael Ondaatje

  She smiled, then continued.

  – They are very difficult to live with.

  – I think I have a passive sense of justice.

  – I’ve noticed. Like water, you can be easily harnessed, Patrick. That’s dangerous.

  – I don’t think so. I don’t believe the language of politics, but I’ll protect the friends I have. It’s all I can handle.

  She sat on the mattress looking up at him, the cat purring in her lap as she dried it with a towel.

  – That’s not enough, Patrick. We’re in a thunderstorm.

  – Is that a line from one of your tracts?

  – No, it’s a metaphor. You reach people through metaphor. It’s what I reached you with earlier tonight in the performance.

  – You appealed to my sense of compassion.

  – Compassion forgives too much. You could forgive the worst man. You forgive him and nothing changes.

  – You can teach him, make him aware …

  – Why leave the power in his hands?

  There was no reply from him. He turned away from her, back to the open window and the rain.

  – You believe in solitude, Patrick, in retreat. You can afford to be romantic because you are self-sufficient.

  – Yes, I’ve got about ten bucks to my name.

  – I’m not talking about money. Working in the tunnels is terrible, I know that. But you have a choice, what of the others who don’t?

  – Such as.

  – Such as this kid. Such as three-quarters of the population of Upper America. They can’t afford your choices, your languor.

  – They could succeed. Look at –

  – Come on, Patrick, of course some make it. They do it by becoming just like the ones they want to overtake. Like Ambrose. Look at what he became before he disappeared. He was predatory. He let nothing cling to him, not even Clara. I always liked you because you knew that. Because you hated that in him.

  – I hated him because I wanted what he had.

  – I don’t think so. You don’t want power. You were born to be a younger brother.

  She stood up now and began pacing. She needed to move her arms, be more forceful.

  – Anyway we’re not interested in Ambrose any more. To hell with him, he’s damned.

  The power of the girl’s father was still in her. Patrick couldn’t tell how much of a role it was. She spoke slowly now.

  – There is more compassion in my desire for truth than in your ‘image’ of compassion. You must name the enemy.

  – And if he is your friend?

  – I’m your friend. Hana there sleeping is your friend. The people tonight in the audience were your friends. They’re compassionate too. Listen, they are terrible sentimentalists. They love your damn iguana. They’ll cry all through their sister’s wedding. They’ll cry when their sister says she has had her first kiss. But they must turn and kill the animals in the slaughter-houses. And the smell of the tanning factories goes into their noses and lungs and stays there for life. They never get the smell off their bodies. Do you know the smell? You can bet the rich don’t know it. It brutalizes. It’s like sleeping with the enemy. It clung to Hana’s father. They get skin burns from the galvanizing process. Arthritis, rheumatism. That’s the truth.

  – So what do you do?

  – You name the enemy and destroy their power. Start with their luxuries – their select clubs, their summer mansions.

  Alice stopped pacing, put a hand up to the low slope of the ceiling and pushed against it.

  – The grand cause, Patrick.

  He knows he will never forget a word or a gesture of hers tonight, in this doll-house of a room. He sits on the bed looking up at the avid spirit of her.

  – Someone always comes out of the audience to stop me, Patrick. This time it was you. My old pal.

  – I don’t think you will convert me.

  – Yes. I can.

  – If it was valuable to some cause for me to kill someone would you want me to do it?

  She picked up the cat again.

  – Would the girl’s father have done that?

  – I don’t think I’m big enough to put someone in a position where they have to hurt another.

  It had stopped raining. They climbed out onto the fire escape, Alice carrying the sleeping girl, the air free and light after the storm. She was smiling at the girl. He felt he was looking at another person.

  – Hana is nine years old. Already too smart. Not enough a child, and that’s sad.

  – You’ve got a lot more time with her.

  – No. I feel she’s loaned to me. We’re veiled in flesh. That’s all.

  They looked out over the low houses of Queen Street, the metal of the fire escape wet around them, cool, a shock to their arms on this summer night. The rain had released the smells from the street and lifted them up. He lay back like the child, a raindrop now and then touching his shirt like a heartbeat.

  – I don’t know, she whispered, near him.

  He reached to where she was and she put her hand against him. The sky looked mapped, gridded by the fire escape. Above and below them a few neighbours came out onto the frail structures, laughing with relief at the cooler air. They would wave now and then, formally, to Alice and her companion. He was suddenly aware that he had a role.

  A bottle of fruit whiskey on the end of a long piece of twine swung from side to side in front of them. Alice caught it and pulled it in. “To impatience,” she said. She drank, offered him some, and then holding the rope let the bottle down to another level. In this way it moved among the others.

  To the south they could see the lights of the Victory Flour Mills. The Macedonians, who disliked the raindrops on their hair, asked their wives to pass them their hats through the window, and felt more secure. They saw Alice’s man who worked in the tunnels. They sat among their families, looking towards the lake. The vista was Upper America, a New World. Landscape changed nothing but it brought rest, altered character as gradually as water on a stone. Patrick lay back again beside Alice and the girl Hana.

  – You should sit up, she said after a while. You will see something beautiful.

  A rectangle of light went on below them. Then another. The night-shift workers were starting to get up. They could be seen in grey trousers and undershirts, washing at their kitchen sinks. The neighbourhood was soon speckled with light while the rest of the city lay in sleep. Soon they could hear doors closing on the street below them. Figures filed out, Macedonians and Greeks, heading for the killing floors and railway yards and bakeries.

  – They don’t want your revolution, Patrick said to Alice.

  – No. They won’t be involved. Just you. You’re a mongrel, like me. Not like my daughter here. But like me.

  – So what do you want?

  – Nothing but thunder.

  Alice and Hana were still on the fire escape, curled up together, when he left. He closed the door on them quiet as a thief.

  He would have to go back to his room, take his clothes out into the alley and beat the hardened mud out of them, then walk to work. It was about five A.M., his head and body buzzing, overloaded with false energy. Later, he knew, he would be unable to lift his arms above his head, would stagger under the weight of a pickaxe. But for now the dawn in him, the sun, wakened his blood.

  He remembered Clara in the Paris hotel talking about how Alice had been after the child’s father had died. “Hana wasn’t born yet. But Cato died and I think she went into madness, into something very alone. He was killed up north when she was pregnant.”

  In the Thompson Grill, the counter radio was already playing songs about the heart, songs about women who let their men go as casually as a river through their fingers. The waitress with the tattoo gave him his coffee. The music this morning threw him across eras. He was eighteen again and he fell into a girl’s arms, drunk and full of awe during his first formal dance, painted moonlight on the ceiling, the floating lights through the scrims that bathed the co
uples translating them. He had stepped up cocky and drunk onto the sprung floor and was suddenly close enough to see the girl’s lost eyes, undisguised by the colours, and he too was lost. A chameleon among the minds of women.

  – What did you think of my friend?

  – I liked her.

  – She’s a great actress.

  – Better than you, is she?

  – By a hundred miles, Patrick.

  – Yes, I liked her.

  His mind skates across old conversations. The past drifts into the air like an oasis and he watches himself within it. The girl’s eyes that night when he was eighteen were like tunnels into kindness and lust and determination which he loved as much as her white stomach and her ochre face. He saw something there he would never fully reach – the way Clara dissolved and suddenly disappeared from him, or the way Alice came to him it seemed in a series of masks or painted faces, both of these women like the sea through a foreground of men.

  These were days that really belonged to the moon.

  He was restless and full of Alice Gull. When the tunnel at the waterworks was completed, Patrick got a job at Wickett and Craig’s tannery. His flesh tightened in this new dry world, his damp stiffness fell away.

  All day he thought of her as he cut skins in the Cypress Street leather factory. Jobs were still scarce and it was only through Alice’s friends that he was hired. Patrick’s shoulder nudged the bolster that released rolls of leather onto the floor and he waded into the brown skins with the pilot knife, slicing the hides in straight lines. When his line was finished he would stand breathing in the cold air till someone else came off the cutter’s alley. He was no longer aware of the smell from the dyers’ yards. Only if it rained would the odour assault his body.

  He was one of three pilot men. Their knives weaved with the stride of their arms and they worked barefoot as if walking up a muddy river, slicing it up into tributaries. It was a skill that insisted on every part of the body’s balance. Alice would smell the leather on him, even after he had bathed in the courtyards when work was over, the brief pelt of water and steam on the row of them standing on the cobblestones. They were allowed only ten seconds of water. The men who dyed the leather got longer but the smell on them was terrible and it never left.

  Dye work took place in the courtyards next to the warehouse. Circular pools had been cut into the stone – into which the men leapt waist-deep within the reds and ochres and greens, leapt in embracing the skins of recently slaughtered animals. In the round wells four-foot in diameter they heaved and stomped ensuring the dye went solidly into the pores of the skin that had been part of a live animal the previous day. And the men stepped out in colours up to their necks, pulling wet hides out after them so it appeared they had removed the skin from their own bodies. They had leapt into different colours as if into different countries.

  What the dyers wanted, standing there together, the representatives from separate nations, was a cigarette. To stand during the five-minute break dressed in green talking to a man in yellow, and smoke. To take in the fresh energy of smoke and swallow it deep into their lungs, roll it around and breathe it up so it would remove with luck the acrid texture already deep within them, stuck within every corner of their flesh. A cigarette, a star beam through their flesh, would have been enough to purify them.

  That is how Patrick would remember them later. Their bodies standing there tired, only the heads white. If he were an artist he would have painted them but that was false celebration. What did it mean in the end to look aesthetically plum-aged on this October day in the east end of the city five hundred yards from Front Street? What would the painting tell? That they were twenty to thirty-five years old, were Macedonians mostly, though there were a few Poles and Lithuanians. That on average they had three or four sentences of English, that they had never read the Mail and Empire or Saturday Night. That during the day they ate standing up. That they had consumed the most evil smell in history, they were consuming it now, flesh death, which lies in the vacuum between flesh and skin, and even if they never stepped into this pit again – a year from now they would burp up that odour. That they would die of consumption and at present they did not know it. That in winter this picturesque yard of colour was even more beautiful, the thin layer of snowfall between the steaming wells. Below-zero weather and the almost naked men descend into the vats at the same whistle and cover themselves later with burlap as they stand waiting.

  The only virtue to winter was the removal of smell. They did not want a cigarette then, they could hardly breathe. Their mouths sent forth plumes. They stood there, the steam coming through the burlap. And when they stopped steaming they knew they were too cold and had to go in. But during October, as Patrick watched them during his break from the hide-room, they desired a cigarette. And they could never smoke – the acid of the solutions they had stepped into and out of so strong that they would have ignited if a flame touched them.

  A green man on fire.

  They were the dyers. They were paid one dollar a day. Nobody could last in that job more than six months and only the desperate took it. There were other jobs such as water boys and hide-room labourers. In the open cloisters were the sausage and fertilizer makers. Here the men stood, ankle-deep in salt, filling casings, squeezing out shit and waste from animal intestines. In the further halls were the killing-floors where you moved among the bellowing cattle stunning them towards death with sledge hammers, the dead eyes still flickering while their skins were removed. There was never enough ventilation, and the coarse salt, like the acids in the dyeing section, left the men invisibly with tuberculosis and arthritis and rheumatism. All of these professions arrived in morning darkness and worked till six in the evening, the labour agent giving them all English names. Charlie Johnson, Nick Parker. They remembered the strange foreign syllables like a number.

  For the dyers the one moment of superiority came in the showers at the end of the day. They stood under the hot pipes, not noticeably changing for two or three minutes – as if, like an actress unable to return to the real world from a role, they would be forever contained in that livid colour, only their brains free of it. And then the blue suddenly dropped off, the colour disrobed itself from the body, fell in one piece to their ankles, and they stepped out, in the erotica of being made free.

  What remained in the dyers’ skin was the odour that no woman in bed would ever lean towards. Alice lay beside Patrick’s exhausted body, her tongue on his neck, recognizing the taste of him, knowing the dyers’ wives would never taste or smell their husbands again in such a way; even if they removed all pigment and coarse salt crystal, the men would smell still of the angel they wrestled with in the well, in the pit. Incarnadine.

  “I’ll tell you about the rich,” Alice would say, “the rich are always laughing. They keep saying the same things on their boats and lawns: Isn’t this grand! We’re having a good time! And whenever the rich get drunk and maudlin about humanity you have to listen for hours. But they keep you in the tunnels and stockyards. They do not toil or spin. Remember that … understand what they will always refuse to let go of. There are a hundred fences and lawns between the rich and you. You’ve got to know these things, Patrick, before you ever go near them – the way a dog before battling with cows rolls in the shit of the enemy.”

  In Kosta’s house he relaxes as Alice speaks with her friends, slipping out of English and into Finnish or Macedonian. She knows she can be unconcerned with his lack of language, that he is happy. She converses with full energy in this theatre of the dinner table, her face vivid; a scar, a mole will exaggerate when not disguised by the content of conversation. He in fact pleasures in his own descant interpretations of what is being said. He catches only the names of streets, the name of Police Chief Draper, who has imposed laws against public meetings by foreigners. So if they speak this way in public, in any language other than English, they will be jailed. A rule of the city. The broncos will have them arrested as many already have been in
various rallies in High Park or in the Shapiro Drug Store clash with the Mounties in the previous year.

  He watches each of her friends and he gazes at the small memory painting of Europe on the wall – the spare landscape, the village imposed on it. He is immensely comfortable in this room. He remembers his father once passing the foreign loggers on First Lake Road and saying, “They don’t know where they are.” And now, in this neighbourhood intricate with history and ceremony, Patrick smiles to himself at the irony of reversals. Before the meal, Kosta’s wife had come up to him, pointed to one of the pictures and named her village, then she had pressed the side of her stomach with both hands sensually to make clear to Patrick that she would be serving liver.

  If only it were possible that in the instance something was written down – idea or emotion or musical phrase – it became known to others of the era. The rejected Carmen of 1875 turning so many into lovers of opera. And Verdi in the pouring rain believing he was being turned into a frog – even this emotion realized by his contemporaries.

  Patrick listens now as Alice reads to him from the letters of Joseph Conrad – an extract which she has copied. She has already asked him who he likes to read and he has mentioned Conrad. “Yes, but,” she says rising as the child cries, “have you read his letters?” In the other room she comforts the girl Hana out of a nightmare.

  “Wait,” she continues, “I’ve got something to show you.” Very excited now, as if she fears he will get up and leave before she can present this gift. She too likes Conrad. She likes his theatrical style. There are some novelists whose work actors love but who could not write a simple scene for the stage. They write the scenes actors dream, and Conrad was that for Alice.

  – Listen: “An idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense.”