II In Near Ruins

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    THE MAN WITH BANDAGED HANDS had been in the military hospital in Rome for more than four months when by act he heard about the burned patient and the nurse, heard her name. He turned from the doorway and walked bato the clutch of doctors he had just passed, to discover where she was. He had been recuperating there for a long time, and they knew him as an evasive man. But now he spoke to them, asking about the name, and startled them. During all that time he had never spoken, unig by signals and grimaces, now and then a grin. He had revealed nothing, not even his name, just wrote out his serial number, which showed he was with the Allies.

    His status had been double-checked, and firmed in messages from London. There was the cluster of known scars on him.

    So the doctors had e ba,  the bandages on him. A celebrity, after all, wanting silence. A war hero.

    That was how he felt safest. Revealing nothing. Whether they came at him with tenderness or subterfuge or knives. For more than four months he had not said a word. He was a large animal in their presence, in near ruins when he was brought in and given regular doses of morphine for the pain in his hands. He would sit in an armchair in the darkness, watg the tide of movement among patients and nurses in and out of the wards and stos.

    But now, walking past the group of doctors in the hall, he heard the woman’s name, and he slowed his pad turned and came up to them and asked specifically which hospital she was w in. They told him that it was in an old nunnery, taken over by the Germans, then verted into a hospital after the Allies had laid siege to it. In the hills north of Florence. Most of it torn apart by bombing. U had been just a temporary field hospital. But the nurse and the patient had refused to leave.

    Why didn’t you force the two of them down?

    She claimed he was too ill to be moved. We could have brought him out safely, of course, but nowadays there is no time tue. She was in rough shape herself.

    Is she injured?

    No. Partial shell shock probably. She should have bee home. The trouble is, the war here is over. You ake anyone do anything anymore. Patients are walking out of hospitals. Troops are going AWOL before they get sent bae.

    Which villa? he asked.

    It’s ohey say has a ghost in the garden. San Girolamo. Well, she’s got her own ghost, a burned patient. There is a face, but it is unreizable. The nerves all gone. You  pass a match across his fad there is no expression. The face is asleep.

    Who is he? he asked.

    We don’t know his name.

    He won’t talk?

    The clutch of doctors laughed. No, he talks, he talks all the time, he just doesn’t know who he is.

    Where did he e from?

    The Bedouin brought him into Siwa Oasis. Then he was in Pisa for a while, then... One of the Arabs is probably wearing his ag. He will probably sell it and we’ll get it one day, or perhaps they will never sell it. These are great charms. All pilots who fall into the desert—none of them e back with identification. Now he’s hol藏书网ed up in a Tus villa and the girl won’t leave him. Simply refuses. The Allies housed a hundred patients there. Before that the Germans held it with a small army, their last stronghold. Some rooms are painted, ea has a different season. Outside the villa is a ge. All this is about twenty miles from Florence, in the hills. You will need a pass, of course. robably get someoo drive you up. It is still terrible out there. Dead cattle. Horses shot dead, half eaten. People hanging upside down fres. The last vices of war.

    pletely uhe sappers haven’t gone in there yet to clear it. The Germareated burying and installing mines as they went. A terrible place for a hospital. The smell of the dead is the worst. We need a good snowfall to  up this try.

    We need ravens.

    Thank you.

    He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber otom. I need gelato.

    He found it difficult to fall asleep orain, shaking from side to side. The others in the partment smoking. His temple banging against the window frame. Everyone was in dark clothes, and the carriage seemed to be on fire with all the lit cigarettes. He noticed that whehe train passed a cemetery the travellers around him crossed themselves. She’s in rough shape herself.

    Gelato for tonsils, he remembered. Apanying a girl and her father to have her tonsils out. She had taken one look at the ward full of other children and simply refused. This, the most adaptable and genial of children, suddenly turned into a stone of refusal, adamant. No one was ripping anything out of her throat though the wisdom of the day advised it. She would live with it in, whatever “it” looked like. He still had no idea what a tonsil was.

    They ouched my head, he thought, that was strahe worst times were when he began to imagine what they would have do, ext. At those times he always thought of his head.

    A scurry in the ceiling like a mouse.

    He stood with his valise at the far end of the hall. He put the bag down and waved across the darkness and the itent pools of dlelight. There was no clatter of footsteps as he walked towards her, not a sound on the floor, and that surprised her, was somehow familiar and f to her, that he could approach this privacy of hers and the English patient’s without loudness.

    As he passed the lamps in the long hall they flung his shadow forward ahead of him. She turned up the wi the oil lamp so it enlarged the diameter of light around her. She sat very still, the book on her lap, as he came up to her and then crouched beside her like an uncle.

    “Tell me what a tonsil is.” Her eyes staring at him.

    “I keep remembering how you stormed out of the hospital followed by two grown men.” She nodded.

    “Is your patient in there?  I go in?” She shook her head, kept shaking it until he spoke again.

    “I’ll see him tomorrow, then. Just tell me where to go. I don’t need sheets. Is there a kit? Such a strange journey I took in order to find you.” When he had gone along the hall she came back to the table and sat down, trembling. Needing this table, this half-finished book in order to collect herself. A man she knew had e all the way by train and walked the four miles uphill from the village and along the hall to this table just to see her. After a few minutes she walked into the Englishman’s room and stood there looking down on him. Moonlight across the foliage on the walls. This was the only light that made the trompe ’oeil seem ving. She could pluck that floin it onto her dress.

    The man named Caravaggio pushes open all the windows in the room so he  hear the noises of the night. He undresses, rubs his palms gently over his ned for a while lies down on the unmade bed. The noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish boung off the leaves of asters outside. The moon is on him like skin, a sheaf of water. An hour later he is on the roof of the villa. Up on the peak he is aware of the shelled ses along the slope of roofs, the two acres of destroyed gardens and orchards that neighbour the villa. He looks over where they are in Italy.

    In the m by the fountaialk tentatively.

    “Now you are in Italy you should find out more about Verdi.” “What?” She looks up from the bedding that she is washing out in the fountain.

    He reminds her. “You told me once you were in love with him.” Hana bows her head, embarrassed.

    Caravaggio walks around, looking at the building for the first time, peering down from the loggia into the garden.

    “Yes, you used to love him. You used to drive us all mad with your new information about Giuseppe. What a man! The best in every way, you’d say. We all had to agree with you, the cocky sixteen-year-old.” “I wonder what happeo her.” She spreads the washed sheet over the rim of the fountain.

    “You were someoh a dangerous will.” She walks over the paved stones, grass in the cracks. He watches her black-stoged feet, the thin brown dress. She leans over the balustrade.

    “I think I did e here, I have to admit, something at the bay mind made me, for Verdi. And then of course you had left and my dad had left for the war.... Look at the hawks. They are here every m. Everything else is damaged and in pieces here. The only running water in this whole villa is in this fountain. The Allies dismantled water pipes when they left.

    They thought that would make me leave.” “You should have. They still have to clear this region. There are unexploded bombs all over the place.” She es up to him and puts her fingers on his mouth.

    “I’m glad to see you, Caravaggio. No one else. Don’t say you have e here to try and persuade me to leave.” “I want to find a small bar with a Wurlitzer and drink without a fug bomb going off. Listen to Frank Sinatra singing. We have to get some music,” he says. “Good for your patient.” “He’s still in Africa.” He is watg her, waiting for her to say more, but there is nothing more about the English patient to be said. He mutters.

    “Some of the English love Africa. A part of their brain reflects the desert precisely. So they’re not fhere.” He sees her head nod slightly. A lean face with hair cut short, without the mask and mystery of her long hair. If anything, she seems calm in this universe of hers. The fountain gurgling in the background, the hawks, the ruined garden of the villa.

    Maybe this is the way to e out of a war, he thinks. A burned man to care for, some sheets to wash in a fountain, a room painted like a garden. As if all that remains is a capsule from the past, long before Verdi, the Medicis sidering a balustrade or window, holding up a dle at night in the presence of an invited architect—the best archite the fifteenth tury—and requesting something more satisfying to frame that vista.

    “If you are staying,” she says, “we are going to need more food. I have planted vegetables, we have a sack of beans, but we need some chis.” She is looking at Caravaggio, knowing his skills from the past, not quite saying it.

    “I lost my nerve,” he says.

    “I’ll e with you, then,” Hana offers. “We’ll do it together. You  teach me to steal, show me what to do.” “You don’t uand. I lost my nerve.” “Why?” “I was caught. They nearly chopped off my rug hands.”  At night sometimes, when the English patient is asleep or even after she has read aloside his door for a while, she goes looking for Caravaggio. He will be in the garden lying along the stone rim of the fountain looking up at stars, or she will e across him on a lower terrace. In this early-summer weather he finds it difficult to stay indoors at night. Most of the time he is on the roof beside the broken ey, but he slips down silently when he sees her figure cross the terrace looking for him.

    She will find him he headless statue of a t, upon whose stub of nee of the local cats likes to sit, solemn and drooling when humans appear. She is always made to feel that she is the one who has found him, this man who knows darkness, who when drunk used to claim he was brought up by a family of owls.

    Two of them on a promontory, Florend her lights in the distance. Sometimes he seems frantic to her, or he will be too calm. In daylight she notices better how he moves, notices the stiffened arms above the bandaged hands, how his whole body turns instead of just the neck when she points to something farther up the hill. But she has said nothing about these things to him.

    “My patient thinks peacock bone ground up is a great healer.” He looks up into the night sky. “Yes.” “Were you a spy then?” “Not quite.” He feels more fortable, more disguised from her in the dark garden, a flicker of the lamp from the patient’s room looking down. “At times we were sent in to steal. Here I was, an Italian and a thief. They couldn’t believe their luck, they were falling over themselves to use me. There were about four or five of us. I did well for some time. Then I was actally photographed.  you imagihat?

    “I was in a tuxedo, a monkey suit, in order to get into this gathering, a party, to steal some papers. Really I was still a thief.

    No great patriot. No great hero. They had just made my skills official. But one of the women had brought a camera and was snapping at the German officers, and I was caught in mid-step, walking across the ballroom. In mid-step, the beginning of the shutter’s noise making me jerk my head towards it. So suddenly everything iure was dangerous. Some general’s girlfriend.

    “All photographs taken during the war were processed officially in gover labs, checked by the Gestapo, and so there I would be, obviously not part of any list, to be filed away by an official when the film went to the Milan laboratory. So it meant having to try and steal that film baehow.”  She looks in on the English patient, whose sleeping body is probably miles away in the desert, being healed by a man who tio dip his fingers into the bowl made with the joined soles of his feet, leaning forward, pressing the dark paste against the burned face. She imagihe weight of the hand on her own cheek.

    She walks down the hall and climbs into her hammock, giving it a swing as she leaves the ground.

    Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing eaent into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations. Caravag-gio has for instance given her something. His motive, a drama, and a stolen image.

    He leaves the party in a car. It ches over the slowly curving gravel path leading out of the grounds, the automobile purring, serene as ink within the summer night. For the rest of the evening during the Villa a gathering he had been looking at the photographer, spinning his body away whenever she lifted the camera to photograph in his dire. Now that he knows of its existence he  avoid it. He moves into the range of her dialogue, her name is Anna, mistress to an officer, who will be staying here in the villa for the night and then in the m will travel north through Tusy. The death of the woman or the woman’s sudden disappearance will only arouse suspi. Nowadays anything out of the ordinary is iigated.

    Four hours later, he runs over the grass in his socks, his shadow curled under him, painted by the mooops at the gravel path and moves slowly over the grit. He looks up at the Villa a, at the square moons of windoalace of war-women.

    A car beam—like something sprayed out of a hose—lights up the room he is in, and he pauses once again in mid-step, seeing that same woman’s eyes on him, a man moving on top of her, his fingers in her blonde hair. And she has seen, he knows, even though now he is he same man she photographed earlier in the crowded party, for by act he stands the same way now, half turned in surprise at the light that reveals his body in the darkness. The car lights sweep up into a er of the room and disappear.

    Then there is blaess. He doesn’t know whether to move, whether she will whisper to the man fug her about the other person in the room. A hief. A naked assassin. Should he move—his hands out to break a owards the couple on the bed?

    He hears the man’s lovemaking tinue, hears the silence of the woman—no whisper—hears her thinking, her eyes aimed towards him in the darkness. The word should be think-ering. Caravaggio’s mind slips into this sideration, another syllable to suggest colleg a thought as oinkers with a half-pleted bicycle. Words are tricky things, a friend of his has told him, they’re much more tricky than violins. His mind recalls the woman’s blonde hair, the black ribbon in it.

    He hears the car turning and waits for another moment of light. The face that emerges out of the dark is still an arrow upon him. The light moves from her face down onto the body of the general, over the carpet, and then touches and slides over Caravaggio once more. He o longer see her. He shakes his head, then mimes the cutting of his throat. The camera is in his hands for her to uand. Then he is in darkness again. He hears a moan of pleasure now from her towards her lover, and he is aware it is her agreement with him. No words, no hint of irony, just a tract with him, the morse of uanding, so he knows he ow move safely to the verandah and drop out into the night.

    Finding her room had been more difficult. He had ehe villa and silently passed the half-lit seveh-tury murals along the corridors. Somewhere there were bedrooms like dark pockets in a gold suit. The only way he could get past guards was to be revealed as an i. He had stripped pletely a his clothes in a flower bed.

    He ambles naked up the stairs to the sed floor, where the guards are, bending down to laugh at some privacy, so his face is almost at his hip, nudging the guards about his evening’s invitation, alfresco, was that it? Or sedu a cappella~?

    One long hall ohird floor. A guard by the stair and o the far end twenty yards away, too many yards away. So a long theatrical walk, and Caravaggio now having to perform it, watched with quiet suspi and sfully by the two bookended sehe ass-and-cock walk, pausing at a se of mural to peer at a painted donkey in a grove. He leans his head on the wall, almost falling asleep, then walks again, stumbles and immediately pulls himself together into a military gait.

    His stray left hand waves to the ceiling of cherubs bum-naked as he is, a salute from a thief, a brief waltz while the mural se drifts haphazardly past him, castles, blad-white duomos, uplifted saints on this Tuesday during the war, in order to save his disguise and his life. Caravaggio is out oiles looking for a photograph of himself.

    He pats his bare chest as if looking for his pass, grabs his penis and pretends to use it as a key to let him into the room that is being guarded. Laughing, he staggers back, peeved at his woeful failure, and slips into the  room humming.

    He opens the window and steps out onto the verandah. A dark, beautiful night. Then he climbs off it and swings onto the verandah one level below. Only now  he ehe room of Anna and her general. Nothing more than a perfume in their midst. Printless foot. Shadowless. The story he told someone’s child years ago about the person who searched for his shadow—as he is now looking for this image of himself on a piece of film.

    In the room he is immediately aware of the beginnings of sexual movement. His hands within her clothing thrown onto chair backs, dropped upon the floor. He lies down and rolls across the carpet in order to feel anything hard like a camera, toug the skin of the room. He rolls in silen the shape of fans, finding nothing. There is not even a grain of light.

    He gets to his feet and sways his arms out slowly, touches a breast of marble. His hand moves along a stone hand—he uands the way the woman thinks now—off which the camera hangs with its sling. Then he hears the vehicle and simultaneously as he turns is seen by the woman in the sudden spray of car light.

    Caravaggio watches Hana, who sits across from him looking into his eyes, trying to read him, trying to figure the flow of thought the way his wife used to do. He watches her sniffing him out, searg for the trace. He buries it and looks back at her, knowing his eyes are faultless, clear as any river, unimpeachable as a landscape. People, he knows, get lost in them, and he is able to hide well. But the girl watches him quizzically, tilting her head in a question as a dog would when spoken to in a tone or pitch that is not human. She sits across from him in front of the dark, blood-red walls, whose colour he doesn’t like, and in her black hair and with that look, slim, tanned olive from all the light in this try, she reminds him of his wife.

    Nowadays he doesn’t think of his wife, though he knows he  turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weight of her wrist on his heart during the night.

    He sits with his hands below the table, watg the girl eat. He still prefers to eat alohough he always sits with Hana during meals. Vanity, he thinks. Mortal vanity. She has seen him from a window eating with his hands as he sits on one of the thirty-six steps by the chapel, not a fork or a knife in sight, as if he were learning to eat like someone from the East. In his greying stubble-beard, in his dark jacket, she sees the Italian finally in him. She notices this more and more.

    He watches her darkness against the brown-and-red walls, her skin, her cropped dark hair. He had known her and her father in Toronto before the war. Then he had been a thief, a married man, slipped through his chosen world with a lazy fidence, brilliant i against the rich, or charm towards his wife Giaa or with this young daughter of his friend.

    But now there is hardly a world around them and they are forced ba themselves. During these days in the hill town near Florence, indoors during the days of rain, daydreaming in the one soft chair i or on the bed or on the roof, he has no plots to set in motion, is ied only in Hana. And it seems she has ed herself to the dying man upstairs.

    During meals he sits opposite this girl and watches her eat.

    Half a year earlier, from a window at the end of the long hall in Santa Chiara Hospital in Pisa, Hana had been able to see a white lion. It stood alone on top of the battlements, linked by colour to the white marble of the Duomo and the Camposanto, though its roughness and naive form seemed part of another era. Like some gift from the past that had to be accepted. Yet she accepted it most of all among the things surrounding this hospital. At midnight she would look through the window and know it stood within the curfew blackout and that it would emerge like her into the dawn shift. She would look up at five or five-thirty and then at six to see its silhouette and growiail. Every night it was her sentinel while she moved among patients.

    Even through the shelling the army had left it there, much more ed about the rest of the fabulous pound—with its mad logic of a tower leaning like a person in shell shock.

    Their hospital buildings lay in old monastery grounds. The topiary carved for thousands of years by too careful monks was no longer bound within reizable animal forms, and during the day nurses wheeled patients among the lost shapes. It seemed that only white stone remained perma.

    oo became shell-shocked from the dying around them. Or from something as small as a letter. They would carry a severed arm down a hall, or swab at blood that opped, as if the wound were a well, and they began to believe in nothing, trusted nothing. They broke the way a man dismantling a mine broke the sed his geography exploded. The way Hana broke in Santa Chiara Hospital when an official walked down the space between a hundred beds and gave her a letter that told her of the death of her father.

    A white lion.

    It was sometime after this that she had e across the English patient—someone who looked like a burned animal, taut and dark, a pool for her. And now, months later, he is her last patient in the Villa San Girolamo, their war over, both of them refusing to return with the others to the safety of the Pisa hospitals. All the coastal ports, such as Sorrento and Marina di Pisa, are now filled with North Ameri and British troops waiting to be sent home. But she washed her uniform, folded it aur to the departing he war is not over everywhere, she was told. The war is over. This war is over. The war here. She was told it would be like desertion. This is not desertion. I will stay here. She was warned of the uncleared mines, lack of water and food. She came upstairs to the burned man, the English patient, and told him she would stay as well.

    He said nothing, unable even to turn his head towards her, but his fingers slipped into her white hand, and when she bent forward to him he put his dark fingers into her hair a it cool within the valley of his fingers.

    How old are you?

    Twenty.

    There was a duke, he said, who when he was dying wao be carried half the tower in Pisa so he could die looking out into the middle distance.

    A friend of my father’s wao die while Shanghai-dang. I don’t know what it is. He had just heard of it himself.

    What does your father do?

    He is

    .. he is in the war.

    You’re in the war too.

    She does not know anything about him. Even after a month or so of g for him and allotting him the needles of mor-phihere was shyness at first within both of them, made more evident by the fact that they were now alohen it was suddenly overe. The patients and doctors and nurses and equipment and sheets and towels—all went back down the hill into Florend then to Pisa. She had salted away codeiablets, as well as the morphine. She watched the departures, the line of trucks. Good-bye, then. She waved from his window, bringing the shutters to a close.

    Behind the villa a rock wall rose higher than the house. To the west of the building was a long enclosed garden, and twenty miles away was the carpet of the city of Florence, which often disappeared uhe mist of the valley. Rumour had it one of the generals living in the old Medici villa  door had eaten a nightingale.

    The Villa San Girolamo, built to protehabitants from the flesh of the devil, had the look of a besieged fortress, the limbs of most of the statues blown off during the first days of shelling. There seemed little demarcatioween house and landscape, between damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth. To Hana the wild gardens were like further rooms. She worked along the edges of them aware always of unexploded mines. In one soil-rich area beside the house she began to garden with a furious passion that could e only to someone who had grown up in a city. In spite of the burh, in spite of the lack of water. Someday there would be a bower of limes, rooms of green light.

    Caravaggio came into the kit to find Hana sitting hunched over the table. He could not see her face or her arms tucked in under her body, only the naked back, the bare shoulders.

    She was not still or asleep. With each shudder her head shook over the table.

    Caravaggio stood there. Those who weep lose more energy than they lose during any other act. It was not yet dawn. Her face against the darkness of the table wood.

    “Hana,” he said, and she stilled herself as if she could be camouflaged by stillness. “Hana.” She began to moan so the sound would be a barrier between them, a river across which she could not be reached.

    He was uain at first about toug her in her nakedness, said “Hana,” and then lay his bandaged hand on her shoulder.

    She did not stop shaking. The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything.

    She raised herself, her head down still, then stood up against him as if dragging herself away from the mag of the table.

    “Dont touch me if yoing to try and fuck me.” The skin pale above her skirt, which was all she wore in this kit, as if she had risen from the bed, dressed partially and e out here, the cool air from the hills entering the kit doorway and cloaking her. Her face was red a.

    “Hana.” “Do you uand?” “Why do you adore him so much?” “I love him.” “You dont love him, you adore him.” “Go away, Caravaggio. Please.” “Youve tied yourself to a corpse for some reason.” “He is a saint. I think. A despairing saint. Are there such things? Our desire is to protect them.” “He doesnt even care!” “I  love him.” “A twenty-year-old who throws herself out of the world to love a ghost!” Caravaggio paused. “You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone elses poison— thinking you  cure them by sharing it—you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.” “Leave me alone.”  When she is solitary she will sit, aware of the  her ankle, damp from the long grasses of the orchard. She peels a plum from the orchard that she has found and carried in the dark cotton pocket of her dress. When she is solitary she tries to imagine who might e along the old road uhe green hood of the eighteen cypress trees.

    As the Englishman wakes she bends over his body and places a third of the plum into his mouth. His open mouth holds it, like water, the jaw not moving. He looks as if he will cry from this pleasure. She  sehe plum being swallowed.

    He brings his hand up and wipes from his lip the last dribble, which his tongue ot reach, and puts his finger in his mouth to suck it. Let me tell you about plums, he says. When I was a boy...

    After the first nights, after most of the beds had been burned for fuel against the cold, she had taken a dead man’s hammod begun to use it. She would bang spikes into whatever walls she desired, whichever room she wao wake in, floating above all the filth and cordite and water on the floors, the rats that had started to appear ing down from the third storey.

    Eaight she climbed into the khaki ghostline of hammock she had taken from a dead soldier, someone who had died under her care.

    A pair of tennis shoes and a hammock. What she had taken from others in this war. She would wake uhe slide of moonlight on the ceiling, ed in an old shirt she always slept in, her dress hanging on a nail by the door. There was more heat now, and she could sleep this way. Before, when it had been cold, they had had to burn things.

    Her hammod her shoes and her frock. She was secure in the miniature world she had built; the two other men seemed distant plas, ea his own sphere of memory and solitude. Caravaggio, who had been her father’s gregarious friend in ada, in those days was capable of standing still and causing havoc within the caravan of women he seemed to give himself over to. He now lay in his darkness. He had been a thief who refused to work with men, because he did not trust them, who talked with men but who preferred talking to women and when he began talking to women was soon caught is of relationship. When she would sneak home in the early hours of the m she would find him asleep on her father’s armchair, exhausted from professional or personal robberies.

    She thought about Caravaggio—some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their pany. You o grab their hair and clutch it like a drowner so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise they, walking casually dowreet towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months. As an uncle he had been a disappearer.

    Caravaggio would disturb you by simply enfolding you in his arms, his wings. With him you were embraced by character.

    But now he lay in darkness, like her, in some outpost of the large house. So there was Caravaggio. And there was the desert Englishman.

    Throughout the war, with all of her worst patients, she survived by keeping a ess hidden in her role as nurse. I will survive this. I won’t fall apart at this. These were buried sentences all through her war, all through the towns they crept towards and through, Urbino, Anghiari, Monterchi, until they entered Florend the farther and finally reached the other sea near Pisa.

    In the Pisa hospital she had seen the English patient for the first time. A man with no face. An ebony pool. All identification ed in a fire. Parts of his burned body and face had been sprayed with tannic acid, that hardened into a protective shell over his raw skin. The area around his eyes was coated with a thick layer of gentian violet. There was nothing tnize in him.

    Sometimes she collects several blas and lies uhem, enjoying them more for their weight than for the warmth they bring. And when moonlight slides onto the ceiling it wakes her, and she lies in the hammock, her mind skating. She finds rest as opposed to sleep the truly pleasurable state. If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.

    To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgement. A bath in the sea, a fuck with a soldier who never knew your enderowards the unknown and anonymous, which was a tendero the self.

    Her legs move uhe burden of military blas. She swims in their wool as the English patient moved in his cloth plata.

    What she misses here is slow twilight, the sound of familiar trees. All through her youth in Toronto she learo read the summer night. It was where she could be herself, lying in a bed, stepping onto a fire escape half asleep with a<mark></mark> cat in her arms.

    In her childhood her classroom had been Caravaggio. He had taught her the somersault. Now, with his hands always in his pockets, he just gestures with his shoulders. Who knew what try the war had made him live in. She herself had been trai Women’s College Hospital and the overseas during the Sicilian invasion. That was in

    The First adian Infantry Division worked its  Italy, and the destroyed bodies were fed back to the field hospitals like mud passed back by tunnellers in the dark. After the battle of Arezzo, when the first barrage of troops recoiled, she was surrounded day and night by their wounds. After three full days without rest, she finally lay down on the floor beside a mattress where someone lay dead, and slept for twelve hours, closing her eyes against the world around her.

    When she woke, she picked up a pair of scissors out of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair, not ed with shape or length, just cutting it away—the irritation of its presence during the previous days still in her mind—when she had bent forward and her hair had touched blood in a wound. She would have nothing to lio lock her, to death. She gripped what was left to make sure there were no more strands and turned again to face the rooms full of the wounded.

    She never looked at herself in mirrain. As the war got darker she received reports about how certain people she had known had died. She feared the day she would remove blood from a patient’s fad discover her father or someone who had served her food across a ter on Danforth Avenue. She grew harsh with herself and the patients. Reason was the only thing that might save them, and there was no reason. The thermometer of blood moved up the try. Where was and what was Toronto anymore in her mind? This was treacherous opera. People hardened against those around them—soldiers, doctors, nurses, civilians. Ha closer to the wounds she cared for, her mouth whispering to soldiers.

    She called everyone “Buddy,” and laughed at the song that had the lines  Each time I ced to see Franklin D.

    He always said “Hi, Buddy” to me.

    She swabbed arms that kept bleeding. She removed so many pieces of shrapnel she felt she’d transported a ton of metal out of the huge body of the human that she was g for while the army travelled north. One night when one of the patients died she ignored all rules and took the pair of tennis shoes he had with him in his pad put them on. They were slightly too big for her but she was fortable.

    Her face became tougher and leahe face Caravaggio would meet later. She was thin, mostly from tiredness. She was always hungry and found it a furious exhaustion to feed a patient who could or didn’t want to, watg the bread crumble away, the soup cool, which she desired to swallow fast. She wanted nothiic, just bread, meat. One of the towns had a bread-makiion attached to the hospital and in her free time she moved among the bakers, inhaling the dust and the promise of food. Later, when they were east of Rome, someone gave her a gift of a Jerusalem artichoke.

    It was strange sleeping in the basilicas, or monasteries, or wherever the wounded were billeted, always moving north. She broke the small cardboard flag off the foot of the bed when someone died, so that orderlies would know glang from a distahen she would leave the thick-stoned building and walk outside int or winter or summer, seasons that seemed archaic, that sat like old gentlemen throughout the war. She would step outside whatever the weather. She wanted air that smelled of nothing human, wanted moonlight even if it came with a rainstorm.

    Hello Buddy, good-bye Buddy. g was brief. There was a traly until death. Nothing in her spirit or past had taught her to be a nurse. But cutting her hair was a tract, and it lasted until they were bivouacked in the Villa San Gi-rolamo north of Florence. Here there were four other wo doctors, one hundred patients. The war in Italy moved farther north and they were what had bee behind.

    Then, during the celebrations of some local victory, somelaintive 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 salihs for the keloided skin aensive burns. She was told the hospital was uhe hat 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 frands.

    She still refused to leave, got out of her nurse’s uniform, unbuhe brown print frock she had carried for months, and wore that with her tennis shoes. She stepped away from the war. She had moved bad forth at their desire. Till the nuns reclaimed it she would sit in this villa with the Englishman. There was something about him she wao 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 wao 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 aowards 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 ba’s length, her hand wavering.

    She watched the little portrait of herself as if ws my niame when I was a kid. Pico.

    Yes, I think a lot happened here. This fountain in the wall. Pid 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 im-ported a giraffe, a rhinoceros, a dodo. Toselli dres of the world based on correspondeh merts. They sat in this room with a bust of Plato and argued all night.

    And then came Savonarola’s cry out of the streets: “Repentahe deluge is ing!” 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 bohe 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 turhe pages of his onplace book ahe 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, watg 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 wihe 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 rown garden he would e across a square foot of grass snipped down with her nurse’s scissors. If he ha<u>..</u>d 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 unbalahe 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 Caravaggiht?

    They had handcuffed him to the thick legs of an oak table. At one point he rose with it in his embrace, blood p 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 tents, ahought perhaps there was a gun that he could use. Then Ranumasoni picked up the razor and came over to him. Caravaggiht? He still wasn’t sure.

    As he lay uhe 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 i had ged him just by produg 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 phoh 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. Walkedpast 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 tact. He arced into a side street, not looking baever 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 bao sounds.

    Earlier, when he had walked, his hands in his wet pockets, there had been the manient of tanks and jeeps.

    As he lay there the mined bridge exploded and he was flung upwards and then doart 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 uer.

    There was a bearded head beside him in the shallow water of the Arno. He reached towards it but couldn’t even . Light  into the river. He s to the surface, parts of which were on fire.

    Wheold Hana the story later that evening she said, “They stopped t you because the Allies were ing. 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 stant 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 Mohis to the blank page at the bad 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,  think. He is in a time of darkness, has no fidence. 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 ceals 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 aly pulled free the lit dle 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 dle in his hands, mog a deathlike posture, wax falling unnoticed onto his wrist. As if he reparing himself, as if he wao slip into his owh 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  slit a vein and the blood is black.

    She o move from the room. Suddenly she was claustrophobitired. She strode down the hall a dowairs a out onto the terrace of the villa, then looked up, as if trying to dis the figure of the girl she had stepped away from. She walked bato 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 er of the room hauling it in after her, a winding-cloth, a  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 ch sound, redug 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 tinued, plag 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 ged room.

    Her arms down her sides, one bare foot on the bass pedal, tinuing with the song her mother had taught her, that she practised on any surface, a kit 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 unity tre on Saturday ms and play there, but all week she practised wherever she was, learning the chalked hat her mother had drawn onto the kit 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 catg its shape on her first day there through the French doors. In ada pianos needed water. You opened up the bad 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 erhaps mice.

    A lightning flash across the valley, the storm had been ing all night, and she saw one of the men was a Sikh. Now she paused and smiled, somewhat amazed, relieved anyway, the a 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 ons.

    Hell. She was surrounded by fn men. Not one pure Italian. A villa romance. What would Poliziano have thought of this  tableau, two men and a woman across a piano and the war almost over and the guns in their wet brightness whehe lightning slipped itself into the room filling everything with colour and shadow as it was doing now every half-mihunder crag all over the valley and the musitiphonal, the press of chords, When I take my sugar to tea

    ..

    Do you know the words?

    There was no movement from them. She broke free of the chords and released her fingers into intricacy, tumbling into what she had held back, the jazz detail that split open notes and angles from the chestnut of melody.

    When  take my sugar to teaAll the boys are jealous of me, So  ake her where the gang goes When I take my sugar to tea.

    Their clothes wet while they watched her whehe lightning was in the room among them, her hands playing now against and within the lightning and thunder, ter to it, filling up the darkness between light. Her face so trated they khey were invisible to her, to her brain struggling to remember her mother’s hand ripping neer aing it under a kit tap and using it to wipe the table free of the shaded he hopscotch of keys. After which she went for her weekly lesson at the unity hall, where she would play, her feet still uo reach the pedals if she sat, so she preferred to stand, her summer sandal on the left pedal and the metroig.

    She did not want to end this. To give up these words from an old song. She saw the places they went, where the gang never went, crowded with aspidistra. She looked up and owards them, an aowledgement that she would stop now.

    Caravaggio did not see all this. Wheurned he found Hana and the two soldiers from a sapper unit i making up sandwiches.

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