Sweeping the sands: Geographies of desire in The English Patient

As noted above, Ondaatje withholds the identity of the unnamed English patient. Although the novel remains coy on the subject of the patient's identity, what it does make clear is the sense that any sure association between the patient and Almasy is a product of Caravaggio's investment in Almasy, whose activities he had been tracking. As Caravaggio notes:

Later, when I was sent to Italy, I lost the last part of your [Almasy's] story. I didn't know what had happened to you.... The last person I expected to find here in this shelled nunnery was Count Ladislaus de Almasy. Quite honestly, I've become more fond of you than most of the people I worked with. (Ondaatje 252)

For Caravaggio, then, there is a doubled stake in believing that the patient is Almasy. Caravaggio's wish to "close the book" on Almasy's activities in the desert combines with a growing fondness for the patient (and perhaps the desire to give him a noteworthy name or a remarkable history) to blur the distinction between professional and personal agendas. To the extent that Caravaggio's role as interlocutor mirrors the position of the novel's readers-Almasy insists, "You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book?"-narrative closure emerges, finally, as a function of desire. And Ondaatje problematizes the nature of that desire by implicating it in the politics of Caravaggio's spying and Almasy's Nazi sympathies; the reader's own desires are questioned once the ramifications of identifying the patient are revealed. How do we want the story to end? And what does it reveal about our own desires?

Ondaatje reinforces the triangulation of desire, narrative closure, and identification by dropping the patient from the narrative. The patient's death is not chronicled; Caravaggio simply notes that it occurred. Minghella, however, makes it the work of the film to unmask and fix the identity of the unnamed English patient. Although Almasy's story is related through a number of flashbacks, the film nonetheless employs its interplay of narration and memory to piece together that story. The centrality and the significance of Almasy's story is reinforced by foregrounding it at the expense of characters such as Kip and Hana. Thus instead of climaxing with Kip's reaction to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film slowly builds to Almasy's final revelation of the events leading up to his fall from a burning plane-the sequence with which the film opens. Not only does Minghella thus organize the filmic narrative around the figure of Almasy, but the dropping of the atomic bomb has been intentionally left out of the film. 10 As a result, cinematic climax arrives with narrative closure (and not racial awakening), and the narrative that achieves closure is the story of Almasy's doomed romance.

The elision of the atomic bomb combines with the centrality of Almasy's story to effect discomforting changes in meaning: private matters overshadow public events; individuals appear able to transcend or move beyond their own racialization and that of others; "history" becomes most poignant when it is most personal; and personal is all but equivalent to romantic. The centrality granted Almasy's tragic love affair underlines these notions, but they are further reinforced when the English patient is undoubtedly identified as Almasy and, especially, through the staging of his death.