It is important to die in holy places. That was one of the secrets of the desert. So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act.
When I turned her around, her whole body was covered in bright pigment. Herbs and stones and light and the ash of acacia to make her eternal. The body pressed against sacred colour. Only the eye blue removed, made anonymous, a naked map where nothing is depicted, no signature of lake, no dark cluster of mountain as there is north of the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti, no lime-green fan where the Nile rivers enter the open palm of Alexandria, the edge of Africa.
And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory of this country she enters now and becomes part of. We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography—to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
I carried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.
Almasy’s face fell to the left, staring at nothing —Caravaggio’s knees perhaps.
“Do you want some morphine now?”
“No.”
“Can I get you something?”
“Nothing.”
X
August
CARAVAGGIO CAME DOWN the stairs through darkness and into the kitchen. Some celery on the table, some turnips whose roots were still muddy. The only light came from a fire Hana had recently started. She had her back to him and had not heard his steps into the room. His days at the villa had loosened his body and freed his tenseness, so he seemed bigger, more sprawled out in his gestures. Only his silence of movement remained. Otherwise there was an easy inefficiency to him now, a sleepiness to his gestures.
He dragged out the chair so she would turn, realize he was in the room.
“Hello, David.”
He raised his arm. He felt that he had been in deserts for too long.
“How is he?”
“Asleep. Talked himself out.”
“Is he what you thought he was?”
“He’s fine. We can let him be.”
“I thought so. Kip and I are both sure he is English. Kip thinks the best people are eccentrics, he worked with one.”
“I think Kip is the eccentric myself. Where is he, anyway?”
“He’s plotting something on the terrace, doesn’t want me out there. Something for my birthday.” Hana stood up from her crouch at the grate, wiping her hand on the opposite forearm.
“For your birthday I’m going to tell you a small story,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Not about Patrick, okay?”
“A little about Patrick, mostly about you.”
“I still can’t listen to those stories, David.”
“Fathers die. You keep on loving them in any way you can. You can’t hide him away in your heart.”
“Talk to me when the morphia wears off.”
She came up to him and put her arms around him, reached up and kissed his cheek. His embrace tightened around her, his stubble like sand against her skin. She loved that about him now; in the past he had always been meticulous. The parting in his hair like Yonge Street at midnight, Patrick had said. Caravaggio had in the past moved like a god in her presence. Now, with his face and his trunk filled out and this greyness in him, he was a friendlier human.
Tonight dinner was being prepared by the sapper. Caravaggio was not looking forward to it. One meal in three was a loss as far as he was concerned. Kip found vegetables and presented them barely cooked, just briefly boiled into a soup. It was to be another purist meal, not what Caravaggio wished for after a day such as this when he had been listening to the man upstairs. He opened the cupboard beneath the sink. There, wrapped in damp cloth, was some dried meat, which Caravaggio cut and put into his pocket.
“I can get you off the morphine, you know. I’m a good nurse.”
“You’re surrounded by madmen.…”
“Yes, I think we are all mad.”
When Kip called them, they walked out of the kitchen and onto the terrace, whose border, with its low stone balustrade, was ringed with light.
