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A firmament in the midst of the waters: Dimensions of love in The English Patient
Literature Film Quarterly, 1998 by Stenberg, Douglas
Hana feels that the English patient is "a pool for her" (41 )-an "ebony pool" (48)-while "the rattle in her intimate breath" is "as deep as stones within a river" (105). When playing music, she has "paused after each set of notes as if bringing her hands out of water to see what she had caught, then continued, placing down the main bones of the tune" (63). She is "focused and submerged within [Almasy's] crabbed handwriting in his thick-leaved seabook of maps and texts. There is even a small fern glued into it" (97-98). Hana wants to show Kip the rivers of Canada while "Caravaggio would explain to her how she could sink into love . . . sink into cautious love" (130). Even Almasy's imprint before the Cave of Swimmers is echoed with Hana and Kip: "Her hand gripped him as mud had clung along the bank of the Moro River, his fist plunging into the wet earth to stop himself slipping back into the already crossed torrent" (104).
Almasy plunges into a "well of memory" (4), swallows Hana's "words like water" (5), and smells "an odour of the sea" in the Bedouin doctor's perfumes (10). He claims, "I have always had information like a sea in me" (18) and knows, based on rock engravings in Tassili, that "the Sahara people hunted water horses from reed boats" (18). Almasy also believes that "in the desert you celebrate nothing but water" (23). Indeed, for the early Egyptians the world ended where there was no water (135), and we are told to ask
a mariner what is the oldest known sail, and he will describe a trapezoidal one hung from the mast of a reed boat that can be seen in rock drawings from Nubia. Pre-dynastic. Harpoons are still found in the desert. These were water people. Even today caravans look like a river. Still, today it is water who is the stranger here. Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth. (19)
Water symbolizes the essence of Almasy's love for Katharine: "Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth" (173). Almasy "sees her in differing hours and locations that alter her voice or nature, even her beauty, the way the background power of the sea cradles or governs the fate of lifeboats" (219). And the question is asked regarding their relationship, "Seas move away, why not lovers?. . The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn" (238). For Almasy, the most loved waters in the desert, "like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hand, enter your throat. One swallows absence. A woman in Cairo curves the white length of her body up from the bed and leans out of the window into a rainstorm to allow her nakedness to receive it" (141). Almasy in fact researches "back past Herodotus to the Kitab al Kanuz, where Zerzura-is named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan" (153). In the film, his drawing of Zerzura and the location of the Cave of Swimmers seem to be one. As Ondaatje indicates, time and water merge through their love:
