Vintage Ondaatje Read online

  You didn’t know me for instance when I was with the Brewitts, without Nora. Three of us played cards all evening and then Jaelin would stay downstairs and Robin and I would go to bed, me with his wife. He would be alone and silent downstairs. Then eventually he would sit down and press into the teeth of the piano. His practice reached us upstairs, each note a finger on our flesh. The unheard tap of his calloused fingers and the muscle reaching into the machine and plucking the note, the sound travelling up the stairs and through the door, touching her on the shoulder. The music was his dance in the auditorium of enemies. But I loved him downstairs as much as she loved the man downstairs. God, to sit down and play, to tip it over into music! To remove the anger and stuff it down the piano fresh every night. He would wait for half an hour as dogs wait for masters to go to sleep before they move into the garbage of the kitchen. The music was so uncertain it was heartbreaking and beautiful. Coming through the walls. The lost anger at her or me or himself. Bullets of music delivered onto the bed we were on.

  Everybody’s love in the air.

  For two hours I’ve been listening to a radio I discovered in your cupboard of clothes. Under old pyjamas. You throw nothing away. Nightshirts, belts, some coins, and sitting in the midst of them all the radio. The wiring old. I had to push it into a socket, nervous, ready to jump back. But the metal slid in and connected and the buzz that gradually warmed up came from a long distance away into this room.

  For two hours I’ve been listening. People talking about a crisis I missed that has been questionably solved. Couldn’t understand it. They were not being clear, they were not giving me the history of it all, and I didn’t know who was supposed to be the hero of the story. So I’ve been hunched up on the bed listening to voices, and then later on Robichaux’s band came on.

  John Robichaux! Playing his waltzes. And I hate to admit it but I enjoyed listening to the clear forms. Every note part of the large curve, so carefully patterned that for the first time I appreciated the possibilities of a mind moving ahead of the instruments in time and waiting with pleasure for them to catch up. I had never been aware of that mechanistic pleasure, that trust.

  Did you ever meet Robichaux? I never did. I loathed everything he stood for. He dominated his audiences. He put his emotions into patterns which a listening crowd had to follow. My enjoyment tonight was because I wanted something that was just a utensil. Had a bath, washed my hair, and wanted the same sort of clarity and open-headedness. But I don’t believe it for a second. You may perhaps but it is not real. When I played parades we would be going down Canal Street and at each intersection people would hear just the fragment I happened to be playing and it would fade as I went further down Canal. They would not be there to hear the end of phrases, Robichaux’s arches. I wanted them to be able to come in where they pleased and leave when they pleased and somehow hear the germs of the start and all the possible endings at whatever point in the music that I had reached then. Like your radio without the beginnings or endings. The right ending is an open door you can’t see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.

  An abrupt station shut down. Voices said goodnight several times and the orchestra playing in the background collapsed into buzz again, a few yards away from me in your bedroom.

  My fathers were those who put their bodies over barbed wire. For me. To slide over into the region of hell. Through their sacrifice they seduced me into the game. They showed me their autographed pictures and they told me about their women and they told me of the even bigger names all over the country. My fathers failing. Dead before they hit the wire.

  There were three of them. Mutt Carey, Bud Scott, Happy Galloway. Don’t know what they taught me for the real teachers never teach you craft. In a way the stringmen taught me more than Carey and his trumpet. Or Manuel Hall who lived with my mother in his last years and hid his trumpet in the cupboard and never touched it when anyone was around. It was good when you listened to Galloway bubble underneath the others and come through slipping and squealing into neighbourhoods that had nothing to do with the thumper tunes coming out of the rest. His guitar much closer to the voice than the other instruments. It swallowed moods and kept three or four going at the same time which was what I wanted. While the trumpet was usually the steel shoe you couldn’t get out of because you led the music and there was an end you had to get to. But Galloway’s guitar was everything else that needn’t have been there but was put there by him, worshipful, brushing against strange weeds. So Galloway taught me not craft but to play a mood of sound I would recognize and remember. Every note new and raw and chance. Never repeated. His mouth also moving and trying to mime the sound but never able to for his brain had lost control of his fingers.

  In mirror to him Carey’s trumpet was a technician— which went gliding down river and missed all the shit on the bottom. His single strong notes pelting out into the crowds, able to reach any note that he wished for but always reaching for the purest. He was orange juice he was exercise, you understand. He was a wheel on a king’s coach. So that was technique.

  Drawn to opposites, even in music we play. In terror we lean in the direction that is most unlike us. Running past your own character into pain. So they died eventually maybe suiciding for me or failing because of a lost lip who knows. Climbing over them still with me in the sense I have tried all my life to avoid becoming them. Galloway in his lovely suits playing his bubble music under shit bands— so precise off the platform so completely alone in his music he wished to persuade no one into his style, and forgotten by everyone who saw him. A dull person off stage. And he’d lie and make himself even duller to keep people away from him. Who remembers him? Even I forgot him for so long until now. Till you ask these questions. He slipped back into my memory as accidentally as a smell. All my ancestors died drunk or lost but Galloway continued to play till he died and when he failed to show up was replaced. Had a stroke during breakfast at sixty-five and was forgotten. So immaculate when he fell against his chair even the undertaker could not improve on him.

  So I suppose I crawled over him.

  And Scott who kept losing his career to neurotic women.

  And Carey who lost his hard lip too young and slept himself to death with the money he made. Floating around the bars to hear good music, having a good time and then died. Attracted to opposites again, to the crazy music he chose to die listening to, bitching at new experiments, the chaos, but refusing to leave the table and go down the street and listen to captive jazz he himself had generated. A dog turned wild in pasture.

  He was my father too in the way he visited me and Nora at the end. Not liking my music damning my music but moving in for a month or so before he died, trying to make passes at my pregnant wife by getting up early in the morning when she got up and I was still in bed or in a bath. Perhaps even hurt by me not bothering to be jealous because I took my time getting downstairs. We would fight about everything. Even the way I held the cornet or shouted out in the middle of numbers. And still he’d come every night and listen and be irritated and enjoy himself tremendously. And then one morning in the room he shared with my first kid he stayed in bed and shook and shook, unable to move anything except for those massive shoulders. Arms struck dead. Get the sweat out of my eyes get the sweat out of my eyes fuckit I’m going to die, and then dead in the middle of a shake. I leaned over his wet body and put an ear to his mouth wanting more than anything then to hear his air, the swirl of air in him but there was none. His open mouth was an old sea-shell. I turned my head slowly and kissed the soft old lips. I then went over the barbed wire attached to his heart.

  The black dog I picked up a few miles south of your place has snuggled against me. No woman for over a month has been as close to my body as he is tonight. I got up to make a drink and returned to find him sitting on the sofa where my warmth had been. Dogs on your furniture, Webb. He is quite dirty and I’ll bathe him tomorrow. Just dusty for the most part but there are pointed knots of mud
under the belly—probably collected by going through wet evening grass. He is not used to living in houses I can tell, although he immediately climbs onto furniture. He is not used to softness and every few hours throughout the night he moves from chair to sofa and finally finds the floor to be the answer. I came back into the room and he looked up expecting me to reclaim my place. I’ve snuggled against his warmth. Have just bent over and notice his claws are torn.

  The heat has fallen back into the lake and left air empty. You can smell trees across the bay. I notice tonight someone has moved in over there. One square of light came on at twilight and changed the gentle shape of the tree line, making the horizon invisible. Was annoyed till I admitted to myself I had been lonely and this comforted me. The rest of the world is in that cabin room behind the light. Everyone I know lives there and when the light is on it means they are there. Before, every animal noise made me suspect people were arriving. Rain would sound like tires on the gravel. I would run out my heart furious and thumping only to be surrounded by a sudden downpour. I would stand shaking, getting completely wet for over a minute. Then come in, strip all my clothes off and crouch in front of the fire.

  Webb I’m tired of the bitching tonight. The loneliness. I really wanted to talk about my friends. Nora and Pickett and me. Robin and Jaelin and me. I saw an awful thing among us. And that was passion could twist around and choose someone else just like that. That in one minute I knew Nora loved me and then, whatever I did from a certain day on, her eyes were hunting Pickett’s mouth and silence. There was nothing I could do. Pickett could just stand there and he had her heart balanced on his tongue. And then with Robin and me—Jaelin stood there far more intelligent and sensitive and loving and pained and it did nothing to her, she had swerved to me like a mad compass, aimed east east east, ignoring everything else. I knew I was hurting him and I screwed her and at times humiliated her in front of him, everything. We had no order among ourselves. I wouldn’t let myself control the world of my music because I had no power over anything else that went on around me, in or around my body. My wife loved Pickett, I think. I loved Robin Brewitt, I think. We were all exhausted.

  From the very first night I was lost from Robin.

  The cold in my head and the cough woke me. Walking round your house making hot water grapefruit and Raleigh Rye drinks. That was the first night that was four weeks ago. And now too my starving avoiding food. Drunk and hungry in the middle of the night in this place crowded with your furniture and my muttering voice. Robin lost. Who slid out of my heart. Who has become anonymous as cloud. I wake up with erections in memory of Robin. Every morning. Till she has begun to blur into Nora and everybody else.

  What do you want to know about me Webb? I’m alone. I desire every woman I remember. Everything is clear here and still I feel my brain has walked away and is watching me. I feel I hover over the objects in this house, over every person in my memory—like those painted saints in my mother’s church who seem to always have six or seven inches between them and the ground. Posing as humans. I give myself immaculate twenty minute shaves in the morning. Tap some lotion on me and cook a fabulous breakfast. Only meal of the day. So I move from the morning’s energy into the later hours of alcohol and hunger and thickness and tiredness. Trying to overcome this awful and stupid clarity.

  After breakfast I train. Mouth and lips and breathing. Exercises. Scales. For hours till my jaws and stomach ache. But no music or tune that I long to play. Just the notes, can you understand that? It is like perfecting 100 yard starts and stopping after the third yard and back again to the beginning. In this way the notes jerk forward in a spurt.

  Alone now three weeks, four weeks? Since you came to Shell Beach and found me. Come back you said. All that music. I don’t want that way any more. There is this other path I beat the bushes away from with exercise so I can walk down it knowing it is just stone. I’ve got more theoretical with no one to talk to. All suicides all acts of privacy are romantic you say and you may be right, as I sit here at 4.45 in the middle of the night, sky beginning to emerge blue through darkness into the long big windows of this house. Here’s an early morning ant crossing the table . . .

  Three days ago Crawley visited me. I made you promise not to say where I was but you sent him here anyway. He came in his car, interrupted my thinking and it has taken me a couple of days to get back. With a girl fan he came in his car and played some music he’s working on, while she was silent and touching in the corner. I could have done without his music, I could have done with her body. Music quite good but I could have finished it for him, it was a memory. I wanted to start a fight. I was watching her while he was playing and I wanted the horn in her skirt. I wanted her to sit with her skirt on my cock like a bandage. My old friend’s girl. What have you brought me back to Webb?

  The day got better with the opening of bottles and all of us were vaguely drunk by the time they left and me rambling on as they were about to leave, leaning against the driver’s window apologizing, explaining what I wanted to do. About the empty room when I get up and put metal onto my mouth and hit the squawk at just the right note to equal the tone of the room and that’s all you do. Pushing all that into the car as if we had a minute to live as if we hadn’t talked rubbish all day.

  You learn to play like that and no band will play with you, he says.

  I know. I want to get this conversation right and I’m drunk and I’m making it difficult.

  Shouting into his car, standing on the pebble driveway, the sweat on me which is really alcohol gone through me and bubbled out. I said I didn’t want to be a remnant, a ladder for others. So Crawley knowing, nodding. I ask him about Nora, tells me that she’s living with Cornish. And I’ve always thought of her as sad Nora, and my children, all this soft private sentiment I forgot to explode, the kids who grow up without me quite capable, while I sit out this drunk sweat, thinking along a stone path. I am terrified now of their lost love. I walk around the car put my head in to kiss Crawley’s girl whose name I cannot even remember, my tongue in her cool mouth, her cool circling answer that gives me an erection against the car door, and round the car again and look at Crawley and thank him for the bottles he brought. His brain with me for two days afterwards.

  Alcohol sweat on these pages. I am tired Webb. I put my forehead down to rest on the booklet on the table. I don’t want to get up. When I lift my head up the paper will be damp, the ink spread. The lake and sky will be light blue. Not even her cloud.

  Travels in Ceylon

  from RUNNING IN THE FAMILY

  Ceylon falls on a map and its outline is the shape of a tear. After the spaces of India and Canada it is so small. A miniature. Drive ten miles and you are in a landscape so different that by rights it should belong to another country. From Galle in the south to Colombo a third of the way up the coast is only seventy miles. When houses were built along the coastal road it was said that a chicken could walk between the two cities without touching ground. The country is cross-hatched with maze-like routes whose only escape is the sea. From a ship or plane you can turn back or look down at the disorder. Villages spill onto streets, the jungle encroaches on village.

  The Ceylon Road and Rail Map resembles a small garden full of darting red and black birds. In the middle of the 19th century, a 17-year-old English officer was ordered to organize the building of a road from Colombo to Kandy. Workers tore paths out of the sides of mountains and hacked through jungle, even drilled a huge hole through a rock on the hairpin bend of the Kadugannawa Pass. It was finished when the officer was thirty-six. There was a lot of this sort of casual obsession going on at that time.

  My father, too, seemed fated to have an obsession with trains all his life. Rail trips became his nemesis. If one was to be blind drunk in the twenties and thirties, one somehow managed it on public transport, or on roads that would terrify a sober man with mountain passes, rock cuts, and precipices. Being an officer in the Ceylon Light Infantry, my father was allowed free train pass
es and became notorious on the Colombo-Trincomalee run.

  He began quietly enough. In his twenties he pulled out his army pistol, terrified a fellow officer—John Kotelawala— under his seat, walked through the swaying carriages and threatened to kill the driver unless he stopped the train. The train halted ten miles out of Colombo at seven-thirty in the morning. He explained that he expected this trip to be a pleasant one and he wanted his good friend Arthur van Langenberg who had missed the train to enjoy it with him.

  The passengers emptied out to wait on the tracks while a runner was sent back to Colombo to get Arthur. After a two-hour delay Arthur arrived, John Kotelawala came out from under his seat, everyone jumped back on, my father put his pistol away, and the train continued on to Trincomalee.

  I think my father believed that he owned the railway by birthright. He wore the railway as if it was a public suit of clothes. Trains in Ceylon lack privacy entirely. There are no individual compartments, and most of the passengers spend their time walking through carriages, curious to see who else is on board. So people usually knew when Mervyn Ondaatje boarded the train, with or without his army revolver. (He tended to stop trains more often when in uniform.) If the trip coincided with his days of dipsomania the train could be delayed for hours. Messages would be telegraphed from one station to another to arrange for a relative to meet and remove him from the train. My uncle Noel was usually called. As he was in the Navy during the war, a naval jeep would roar towards Anuradhapura to pick up the major from the Ceylon Light Infantry.

  When my father removed all his clothes and leapt from the train, rushing into the Kadugannawa tunnel, the Navy finally refused to follow and my mother was sent for. He stayed in the darkness of that three-quarter-mile-long tunnel for three hours stopping rail traffic going both ways. My mother, clutching a suit of civilian clothing (the Army would not allow her to advertise his military connections), walked into that darkness, finding him and talking with him for over an hour and a half. A moment only Conrad could have interpreted. She went in there alone, his clothes in one arm—but no shoes, an oversight he later complained of—and a railway lantern that he shattered as soon as she reached him. They had been married for six years.