The English Patient

Which villa? he asked.

It’s one they 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 unrecognizable. The nerves all gone. You can pass a match across his face and 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 come 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 name tag. 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 come back with identification. Now he’s holed up in a Tuscan 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, each room has a different season. Outside the villa is a gorge. All this is about twenty miles from Florence, in the hills. You will need a pass, of course. We can probably get someone to drive you up. It is still terrible out there. Dead cattle. Horses shot dead, half eaten. People hanging upside down from bridges. The last vices of war. Completely unsafe. The sappers haven’t gone in there yet to clear it. The Germans retreated 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 clean up this country. 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 on the bottom. I need gelato.

   He found it difficult to fall asleep on the train, shaking from side to side. The others in the compartment 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 whenever the train passed a cemetery the travellers around him crossed themselves. She’s in rough shape herself.

Gelato for tonsils, he remembered. Accompanying 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 never touched my head, he thought, that was strange. The worst times were when he began to imagine what they would have done next, cut next. 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 intermittent pools of candlelight. 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 comforting 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 wick on 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? Can 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 kitchen? 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 come 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 l’oeil seem convincing. She could pluck that flower and pin it onto her dress.

The man named Caravaggio pushes open all the windows in the room so he can hear the noises of the night. He undresses, rubs his palms gently over his neck and for a while lies down on the unmade bed. The noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish bouncing 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 sections 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 morning by the fountain they talk 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