In the Skin of a Lion

by Michael Ondaatje

  Two hours later he stumbled on a settlement of long barns, not certain what they were till he was gathered in the smell. A mushroom factory. Only the hallways and offices were lit, the long dormitories where the mushrooms were grown were in permanent darkness. He knew what he needed. In the main lobby were the helmets with battery lamps attached to them. Now it was almost dawn. A Sunday. He had a day without being disturbed. Later in the sunlight he cut open his boot and sock. He made a splint and strapped it with electrical tape. Worse than the pain was his hunger. He looked at his stolen drawing in the sunlight, the clean lines, the shaky signature.

  Around dusk he hobbled across the road to a vegetable garden, pulled up a few carrots and dropped them into his shirt. He tried to catch a chicken but it sped up its walk and left him behind. He returned to the minimal light in the halls of the mushroom factory. He read the punch cards of the workers. Salvatorelli, Mascardelli, Daquila, Pereira, De Francesca. Most of them Italian, some Portuguese. Shifts from eight to four. He felt safer. In the office he looked through the drawers and cabinets.

  He knew people who took shits on desks whenever they broke into office buildings but he wasn’t one of them. It was, he was told, a formal act. Most amateur thieves could not control themselves. With all their discipline focused on the idea of robbery, there was no governor of the body. The act implied grossness, but the professional thief turned from this gesture to a medicinal clarity in his survey of the room. Detailed receipts memorized, key pages razor-bladed. At the centre of the symmetrical plot was this false act of madness.

  When Caravaggio joined the company of thieves he was struck first of all by their courtesy. Even the shitters looked refined and wore half-moon glasses; they would have taken snuff but for the fact it would destroy their sense of smell. The cafés in the west end of Toronto were full of these men who had no work in the afternoons, who woke at noon and, after shaving, lunched with their friends. Caravaggio was welcomed into their midst and lectured with great conservatism on the art of robbery. Some were “displacers,” some stole animals, some kidnapped dogs and wives, some would deal only in meat products or paper information. They were protective of their style and area of interest. They tried to persuade the young man that what they did was the most significant but at the same time they did not wish to encourage too much competition.

  He was young. He was in awe of them, wanted to be all of them in their moments of extreme crisis. He hung around them not so much to learn their craft but to study the way they lived when they stepped back into the world of order. He still had that to learn. He was twenty-two at the Blue Cellar Café and he was fascinated only by character. He was a young man stepping into a mansion and being overcome with the generosity of envy. He slid his hand down the smoothness of a banister and his palm and fingers luxuriated in it. The intricate light switches! The carpets your feet melted into! He did this with their character – he walked away with their mannerisms and their brand names, the rhythm and abstract tone of their musings.

  Later he trailed each of them for a week in order to watch their performances. Some of them went into houses and spent three hours and came out with objects so small they fit into a side pocket. Some removed every moveable object on the ground floor in half an hour.

  And now, in the midst of his first robbery, Caravaggio read through the finances of the mushroom factory and came across a till of cash. Never steal where you sleep. All this inquiry was out of boredom. He wanted a book, he wanted meat. If he was going to have to hole up for a few days he wanted chicken and literature. Caravaggio switched on the light attached to the foreman’s helmet and stepped into one of the mushroom dormitories he had selected earlier as his. Shelves at various levels ran the length of the long room. There were troughs on the shelves which held manure and earth and young growing mushrooms.

  Now he was in a dark prison with millions of them. He snuggled into a space beneath the low shelf at the end farthest away from the door, his Jeffreys drawing beside him. He switched off the helmet, breathed in the thick vegetable air. He had not slept for a day and a half, had chloroformed his first dog, jumped out of a window, tried to race down a chicken …

  Something brushed his face. Without opening his eyes he moved back. Earlier he had awakened with fragments of light above him as figures leaned over the troughs to select mushrooms. The mushrooms were grown at different stages, a few weeks apart, so there would always be a section ready. He had fallen back to sleep among the sounds of overalls rubbing against the shelves. Now the cloth against his face startled him. A woman on his right stood tentatively on one foot. She struggled with a shoe, leaning against the plaster wall in a slip, the upper half of her body naked. Her helmet balanced on the top shelf was facing her so she could see what she was doing as she dressed. Her black shadow moved parallel to her whiteness.

  He remained still. Raven hair and an angular face, her body reaching up to pull down a blouse from a hook, more secure now with both shoes on.

  – Psst.

  She looked sternly out into darkness, picked up the helmet, and diverted light across the room through the shelves.

  – Angelica? Is that you? she called out.

  She pulled on her skirt with one hand holding the helmet, stopped, put the helmet on, and did up the buttons. She began singing to herself. He had to get her attention without terrifying her. He started humming along with her. Her helmet light came down fast to where he was and she lashed out, kicking his face. After a yell of pain he began to laugh.

  – Please, tomorrow bring me something to eat.

  – Perchè?

  – I’m a thief. I’ve broken my ankle.

  She bent down and put her hand out.

  – Tartufi? What are you stealing? Mushrooms?

  Her hands were on his foot, felt the ankle strapped up, and believed everything, knowing already he was gentle by his laugh.

  – I broke it a mile or two from here. I’m very hungry. Please bring me some chicken tomorrow.

  He could not see her face at all just the hem of the skirt at her knees where the light bounced as she crouched. Now all he could know of her was a voice, confident, laughing with him.

  – Come si chiama?

  – Giannetta.

  – I’m Caravaggio.

  – A thief.

  – Sicuro.

  – I’ll bring you some chicken tomorrow. And a bible.

  – Let me see your face.

  – Basta! Ha visto abbastanza.

  She patted his foot.

  – Do you need anything else?

  – Ask what I should do about my ankle.

  There was darkness again and he yearned for light. The thin beam from her helmet, the delicate ribs as she reached up for the blouse, her shadow overcoming his memory so he had to begin the scene again, a small loop of film, seven or eight seconds, until she reached for the lamp and put herself in darkness. He repeated it again and again and then turned to her voice. Strange how he wanted chicken above all else. It was that useless chase in the yard across the road, itching in his memory.

  The next morning she arrived and asked him to turn his head while she changed. She told him how each of the workers chose a room or one corner for changing into and out of their overalls. She unwrapped a large cloth and gave him the food. Chicken and some salad and milk and banana cake. It was the worst banana cake he had eaten up to that point in his life.

  – Devo partire. Ritornerò.

  In the afternoon Giannetta and three other women workers came by to have a look at him. There were the expected jokes, but he enjoyed the company after so much solitude. When they left, noisily, she put her hand out. She touched his mouth gently. Then she brought out bandages and restrapped his ankle.

  – Cosí va meglio.

  – When can I get out of here?

  – We’ve planned something for you.

  – Bene. Let me see your face.

  Her lamp remained still at his foot. So he reached back for his forem
an’s helmet and shone it on her. She remained looking down. He realized his right hand was still holding her ankle from when she had removed the electrical tape off him painfully.

  – Thank you for helping me.

  – I am sorry I kicked you so hard.

  The next day Giannetta crouched beside him, smiling.

  – We must shave off your moustache. Only women work here.

  – Mannaggia!

  – We have to get you out as a woman.

  He reached out his hand and put his fingers into her hair, into that darkness.

  – Giannetta.

  – You have to put your arm down.

  Her hand rested at his shoulder, holding onto the straight razor. He would not let her go.

  Their faces darkened as they leaned forward, her lamp shining past his head. He could smell her skin.

  – Here comes the first kiss, she whispered.

  She handed him the dress.

  – Non guardare, please. Don’t look.

  He realized he was standing exactly where she had been a few days earlier. He switched on his lamp so it beamed onto her, then began to take off his shirt, paused, but she kept looking at him. He saw his own shadow on the wall. She came forward, smiling, calming his balance as he stood on his good foot.

  – Here, I’ll show you how to put on a dress. Unbutton this first.

  She held the cloth bunched over his nakedness.

  – Ahh Caravaggio, shall we tell our children how we met?

  This time he did not take the canoe. He had already walked the shoreline before dusk, remembering the swamp patches. Now, dressed in dark clothes, he traced his path towards the compound belonging to the woman with the canoe – the main building, outlying cottages, a boathouse, an icehouse. He had no idea what the lake was called. He had passed a sign when he was running that claimed the area was Featherstone Point. That was when he saw the telephone wires which he knew must come from her group of houses.

  He came through the last of the trees into the open area and everything was in darkness, as if the owners had packed up and left. He had expected to see rectangles of light. Now he lost all perspective and did not know how fully he would have to turn to be aimed back at his cottage. He needed some context of the human. A dog on a chain, a window, a sound. He turned once more and saw moonlight on the lake. But there was no moon. He realized it had to be light from the boathouse. The landscape, the blueprint of the compound, sprang back into his brain. He walked towards the water knowing where the low shrubs were, the stone hedge, the topiary he could not see. He slipped inside the boathouse and listened for sounds of activity. Nothing. With a pulley-chain used for hoisting up boat engines he swung up onto the first roof which was like a skirt around the upper cabin. He walked up the slope. The woman named Anne was sitting inside at a table.

  Light from an oil lamp. She faced the water, her night window, and was writing hunched over the table unaware of anything else in the room. A summer skirt, an old shirt of her husband’s, sleeves rolled up. She glanced up from the page and peered into the kerosene of the lamp. The mind behind the gaze did not know where it was. Caravaggio had never witnessed someone writing before. He saw her put down the fountain pen and later pick it up, try it, and realizing the nib was dry, lift the tail of her shirt to wipe the dry ink off the nib, preening the groove, as if the pause was not caused by the hesitation of her mind but the atrophy of the pen. Now she bent over earnestly, half-smiling, the tongue moving in her mouth.

  If she had turned to her right she would have seen his head at one of the small panes of glass, the light from the oil lamp just reaching it. He thought of that possible glance and moved back further. He thought of all those libraries he had stepped into in Toronto homes, the grand vistas of bookcases that reached the ceiling, the books of pigskin and other leathers that fell into his arms as he climbed up the shelves looking for whatever valuables he imagined were there, his boots pushing in the books to get a toe-hold. And then from up there, his head close to the ceiling, looking down on the rectangle of the rooms, hearing his dog’s clear warning bark, not moving. And the door opening below him – a man walking in to pick up the telephone and dialling, while Caravaggio hung high up on the bookcases knowing now he should move the second he was seen up there in his dark trousers and singlet, as still as a gargoyle against Trollope and H.G. Wells. He could land on the leather sofa and bounce into the man’s body before he even said a word into the phone. Then go through the French doors without opening them, a hunch of his body as he breaks through the glass and thin wood, then a blind leap off the balcony into the garden, where he would curse his dog for the late warning, and take off.

  But this boathouse had no grandeur. The woman’s bare feet rested one on top of the other on the stained-wood floor. A lamp on the desk, a mattress on the floor. In this light, and with all the small panes of glass around her, she was inside a diamond, mothlike on the edge of burning kerosene, caught in the centre of all the facets. He knew there was such intimacy in what he was seeing that not even a husband could get closer than him, a thief who saw this rich woman trying to discover what she was or what she was capable of making.

  He put his hands up to his face and smelled them. Oil and rust. They smelled of the chain. That was always true of thieves, they smelled of what they brushed against. Paint, mushrooms, printing machines, yet they never smelled of the rich. He liked people who smelled of their trade – carpenters cutting into cedar, dog-catchers who carried the odour of wet struggling hounds with them. And what did this woman smell of? In this yellow pine room past midnight she was staring into a bowl of kerosene as if seeing right through the skull of a lover.

  He was anonymous, with never a stillness in his life like this woman’s. He stood on the roof outside, an outline of a bear in her subconscious, and she quarried past it to another secret, one of her own, articulated wet and black on the page. The houses in Toronto he had helped build or paint or break into were unmarked. He would never leave his name where his skill had been. He was one of those who have a fury or a sadness of only being described by someone else. A tarrer of roads, a house-builder, a painter, a thief – yet he was invisible to all around him.

  He leapt through darkness onto the summer grass and then walked up to the main building. Without turning on lights he found the telephone in the kitchen and phoned his wife in Toronto.

  – Well I got out.

  – Lo so.

  – How?

  – The police were here. Scomparso. Not that you escaped but that you disappeared.

  – When did they come there?

  – Last week. A couple of days after you got away.

  – How’s August?

  – He’s with me. He misses his night walks.

  She began to talk about her brother-in-law’s house, which she had moved into. This time through a darkness which was distance.

  – I’ll be back when I can, Giannetta.

  – Be careful.

  She was standing in the centre of the living room in the darkness as he came away from the phone. His ear had been focused to Giannetta’s voice, nothing else. His head imagining her – the alabaster face, the raven head.

  – Non riuscivo a trovarti.

  – Speak English.

  – I couldn’t find you to ask.

  – You found the cottage, you found the phone, you could have found me.

  – I could have. It’s a habit … usually I don’t ask.

  – I’m going to light a lamp.

  – Yes, that’s always safer.

  She lifted the glass chimney and held the match to the wick. It lit up the skirt and shirt and her red hair. She moved away from it and leaned against the back of the sofa.

  – Where were you calling?

  – Toronto. My wife.

  – I see.

  – I’ll pay for it.

  She waved the suggestion away.

  – Is that your husband’s shirt?

  – No. My husband’
s shirts are here, though. You want them?

  He shook his head, looking around the room. A fireplace, a straight staircase, bedrooms upstairs.

  – What do you want? You are a thief, right?

  – With cottages all you can steal is the space or the people. I needed to use your phone.

  – I’m going to eat something. Do you want some food?

  – Thank you.

  He followed her into the kitchen feeling relaxed with her – as if this was a continuation of his conversation with Giannetta.

  – Tell me …

  – David.

  – David, why I am not scared of you?

  – Because you’ve come back from someplace.… You got something there. Or you’re still there.

  – What are you talking about?

  – I was on the roof of the boathouse. I did find you.

  – I thought there was a bear around tonight.

  She sits across from him laughing at the story of his escape, not fully believing it. A fairy tale. She cups her hand over the glass chimney and blows the lamp out. Two in the morning. As they go into darkness his mind holds onto the image of her slightness, the poreless skin, the bright hair leaning into the light. The startling colours of her strange beauty.

  – I can’t stand any more light, she says.

  – Yes, this is the night. Allow the darkness in.

  – I had to stay in a dark room once … with measles.

  Her voice is exact, crystal clear. He has his eyes closed, listening to her.

  – I was a kid. My uncle – he’s a famous doctor – came to see me. In my room, all the blinds were down, the lights drowned. So I could do nothing. I wasn’t allowed to read. He said I’ve brought you earrings. They are special earrings. He pulled out some cherries. Two, joined by their stalks, and he hung them over one ear and took out another pair and hung them over the other ear. That kept me going for days. I couldn’t lie down at night without carefully taking them off and laying them on the night table.