The English Patient

Caravaggio enters the library. He has been spending most afternoons there. As always, books are mystical creatures to him. He plucks one out and opens it to the title page. He is in the room about five minutes before he hears a slight groan.

He turns and sees Hana asleep on the sofa. He closes the book and leans back against the thigh-high ledge under the shelves. She is curled up, her left cheek on the dusty brocade and her right arm up towards her face, a fist against her jaw. Her eyebrows shift, the face concentrating within sleep.

When he had first seen her after all this time she had looked taut, boiled down to just body enough to get her through this efficiently. Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself.

He sneezed out loud, and when he looked up from the movement of his tossed-down head she was awake, the eyes open staring ahead at him.

“Guess what time it is.”

“About four-oh-five. No, four-oh-seven,” she said.

It was an old game between a man and a child. He slipped out of the room to look for the clock, and by his movement and assuredness she could tell he had recently taken morphine, was refreshed and precise, with his familiar confidence. She sat up and smiled when he came back shaking his head with wonder at her accuracy.

“I was born with a sundial in my head, right?”

“And at night?”

“Do they have moondials? Has anyone invented one? Perhaps every architect preparing a villa hides a moondial for thieves, like a necessary tithe.”

“A good worry for the rich.”

“Meet me at the moondial, David. A place where the weak can enter the strong.”

“Like the English patient and you?”

“I was almost going to have a baby a year ago.”

Now that his mind is light and exact with the drug, she can whip around and he will be with her, thinking alongside her. And she is being open, not quite realizing she is awake and conversing, as if still speaking in a dream, as if his sneeze had been the sneeze in a dream.

Caravaggio is familiar with this state. He has often met people at the moondial. Disturbing them at two a. m. as a whole bedroom cupboard came crashing down by mistake. Such shocks, he discovered, kept them away from fear and violence. Disturbed by owners of houses he was robbing, he would clap his hands and converse frantically, flinging an expensive clock into the air and catching it in his hands, quickly asking them questions, about where things were.

“I lost the child. I mean, I had to lose it. The father was already dead. There was a war.”

“Were you in Italy?”

“In Sicily, about the time this happened. All through the time we came up the Adriatic behind the troops I thought of it. I had continued conversations with the child. I worked very hard in the hospitals and retreated from everybody around me. Except the child, who I shared everything with. In my head. I was talking to him while I bathed and nursed patients. I was a little crazy.”

“And then your father died.”

“Yes. Then Patrick died. I was in Pisa when I heard.”

She was awake. Sitting up.

“You knew, huh?”

“I got a letter from home.”

“Is that why you came here, because you knew?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t think that he believed in wakes and such things. Patrick used to say he wanted a duet by two women on musical instruments when he died. Squeeze-box and violin. That’s all. He was so damn sentimental.”

“Yes. You could really make him do anything. Find him a woman in distress and he was lost.”

The wind rose up out of the valley to their hill so the cypress trees that lined the thirty-six steps outside the chapel wrestled with it. Drops of earlier rain nudged off, falling with a ticking sound upon the two of them sitting on the balustrade by the steps. It was long after midnight. She was lying on the concrete ledge, and he paced or leaned out looking down into the valley. Only the sound of the dislodged rain.

“When did you stop talking to the baby?”

“It all got too busy, suddenly. Troops were going into battles at the Moro Bridge and then into Urbino. Maybe in Urbino I stopped. You felt you could be shot anytime there, not just if you were a soldier, but a priest or nurse. It was a rabbit warren, those narrow tilted streets. Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying. It was important to remember their names. But I kept seeing the child whenever they died. Being washed away. Some would sit up and rip all their dressings off trying to breathe better. Some would be worried about tiny scratches on their arms when they died. Then the bubble in the mouth. That little pop. I leaned forward to close a dead soldier’s eyes, and he opened them and sneered, “Can’t wait to have me dead? You bitch!” He sat up and swept everything on my tray to the floor. So furious. Who would want to die like that? To die with that kind of anger. You bitch! After that I always waited for the bubble in their mouths. I know death now, David. I know all the smells, I know how to divert them from agony. When to give the quick jolt of morphine in a major vein. The saline solution. To make them empty their bowels before they die. Every damn general should have had my job. Every damn general. It should have been a prerequisite for any river crossing. Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility, expected to be wise as old priests, to know how to lead people towards something no one wanted and somehow make them feel comfortable. I could never believe in all those services they gave for the dead. Their vulgar rhetoric. How dare they! How dare they talk like that about a human being dying.”

There was no light, all lamps out, the sky mostly cloud-hidden. It was safer not to draw attention to the civilisation of existing homes. They were used to walking the grounds of the house in darkness.

“You know why the army didn’t want you to stay here, with the English patient? Do you?”

“An embarrassing marriage? My father complex?” She was smiling at him.

“How’s the old guy?”

“He still hasn’t calmed down about that dog.”

“Tell him he came with me.”

“He’s not really sure you are staying here either. Thinks you might walk off with the china.”

“Do you think he would like some wine? I managed to scrounge a bottle today.”

“From?”

“Do you want it or not?”

“Let’s just have it now. Let’s forget him.”

“Ah, the breakthrough!”

“Not the breakthrough. I badly need a serious drink.”

“Twenty years old. By the time I was twenty …”

“Yes, yes, why don’t you scrounge a gramophone someday. By the way, I think this is called looting.”

“My country taught me all this. It’s what I did for them during the war.”

He went through the bombed chapel into the house.

Hana sat up, slightly dizzy, off balance. “And look what they did to you,” she said to herself.

Even among those she worked closely with she hardly talked during the war. She needed an uncle, a member of the family. She needed the father of the child, while she waited in this hill town to get drunk for the first time in years, while a burned man upstairs had fallen into his four hours of sleep and an old friend of her father’s was now rifling through her medicine chest, breaking the glass tab, tightening a bootlace round his arm and injecting the morphine quickly into himself, in the time it took for him to turn around.

At night, in the mountains around them, even by ten o’clock, only the earth is dark. Clear grey sky and the green hills.

“I was sick of the hunger. Of just being lusted at. So I stepped away, from the dates, the jeep rides, the courtship. The last dances before they died—I was considered a snob. I worked harder than others. Double shifts, under fire, did anything for them, emptied every bedpan. I became a snob because I wouldn’t go out and spend their money. I wanted to go home and there was no one at home. And I was sick of Europe. Sick of being treated like gold because I was female. I courted one man and he died and the child died. I mean, the child didn’t just die, I was the one who destroyed it. After that I stepped so far back no one could get near me. Not with talk of snobs. Not with anyone’s death. Then I met him, the man burned black. Who turned out to be, up close, an Englishman.

“It has been a long time, David, since I thought of anything to do with a man.”