Running in the Family (2 page)

What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto. I was sleeping at a friend’s house. I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape. The noises woke me. I sat up on the uncomfortable sofa and I was in a jungle, hot, sweating. Street lights bounced off the snow and into the room through the hanging vines and ferns at my friend’s window. A fish tank glowed in the corner. I had been weeping and my shoulders and face were exhausted. I wound the quilt around myself, leaned back against the head of the sofa, and sat there for most of the night. Tense, not wanting to move as the heat gradually left me, as the sweat evaporated and I became conscious again of brittle air outside the windows searing and howling through the streets and over the frozen cars hunched like sheep
all the way down towards Lake Ontario. It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia.

Once a friend had told me that it was only when I was drunk that I seemed to know exactly what I wanted. And so, two months later, in the midst of the farewell party in my growing wildness—dancing, balancing a wine glass on my forehead and falling to the floor twisting round and getting up without letting the glass tip, a trick which seemed only possible when drunk and relaxed—I knew I was already running. Outside the continuing snow had made the streets narrow, almost impassable. Guests had arrived on foot, scarved, faces pink and frozen. They leaned against the fire-place and drank.

I had already planned the journey back. During quiet afternoons I spread maps onto the floor and searched out possible routes to Ceylon. But it was only in the midst of this party, among my closest friends, that I realized I would be travelling back to the family I had grown from—those relations from my parents’ generation who stood in my memory like frozen opera. I wanted to touch them into words. A perverse and solitary desire. In Jane Austen’s
Persuasion
I had come across the lines, “she had been forced into prudence in her youth—she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.” In my mid-thirties I realized I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood.

Asia
. The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be whispered, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled. It had none of the clipped sound of Europe, America, Canada. The vowels took over, slept on the map with the S. I was running to Asia and everything would change. It began with that moment when I was dancing and laughing wildly within the comfort and order of my life. Beside the fridge
I tried to communicate some of the fragments I knew about my father, my grandmother. “So how
did
your grandmother die?” “Natural causes.” “What?” “Floods.” And then another wave of the party swirled me away.

2:15 in the afternoon. I sit in the huge living room of the old governor’s home in Jaffna. The walls, painted in recent years a warm rose-red, stretch awesome distances away to my left to my right and up towards a white ceiling. When the Dutch first built this house egg white was used to paint the walls. The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling themselves from each other’s shoulders.

The fan hangs on a long stem, revolves lethargic, its arms in a tilt to catch the air which it folds across the room. No matter how mechanical the fan is in its movement the textures of air have no sense of the metronome. The air reaches me unevenly with its gusts against my arms, face, and this paper.

The house was built around 1700 and is the prize building in this northern region of Ceylon. In spite of its internal vastness
it appears modest from the outside, tucked in one corner of the fort. To approach the building by foot or car or bicycle one has to cross a bridge over the moat, be accepted by two sentries who unfortunately have to stand exactly where marsh gases collect, and enter the fort’s yard. Here, in this spacious centre of the labyrinth of 18th-century Dutch defense I sit on one of the giant sofas, in the noisy solitude of the afternoon while the rest of the house is asleep.

The morning has been spent with my sister and my Aunt Phyllis trying to trace the maze of relationships in our ancestry. For a while we sat in one of the bedrooms sprawled on two beds and a chair. The twin to this bedroom, in another part of the house, is dark and supposedly haunted. Walking into that room’s dampness, I saw the mosquito nets stranded in the air like the dresses of hanged brides, the skeletons of beds without their mattresses, and retreated from the room without ever turning my back on it.

Later the three of us moved to the dining room while my Aunt plucked notorious incidents from her brain. She is the minotaur of this long journey back—all those preparations for travel, the journey through Africa, the recent 7-hour train ride from Colombo to Jaffna, the sentries, the high walls of stone, and now this lazy courtesy of meals, tea, her best brandy in the evenings for my bad stomach—the minotaur who inhabits the place one had been years ago, who surprises one with conversations about the original circle of love. I am especially fond of her because she was always close to my father. When someone else speaks, her eyes glance up to the ceilings of the room, as if noticing the architecture there for the first time, as if looking for the cue cards for stories. We are still recovering from her gleeful résumé of the life and death of one foul Ondaatje who was “savaged to pieces by his own horse.”

Eventually we move out onto the wicker chairs of the porch which runs 50 yards along the front of the house. From ten until noon we sit talking and drinking ice-cold palmyra toddy from a bottle we have filled in the village. This is a drink which smells of raw rubber and is the juice drained from the flower of a coconut. We sip it slowly, feeling it continue to ferment in the stomach.

At noon I doze for an hour, then wake for a lunch of crab curry. There is no point in using a fork and spoon for this meal. I eat with my hands, shovelling in the rice with my thumb, crunching the shell in my teeth. Then fresh pineapple.

But I love the afternoon hours most. It is now almost a quarter to three. In half an hour the others will waken from their sleep and intricate conversations will begin again. In the heart of this 250-year-old fort we will trade anecdotes and faint memories, trying to swell them with the order of dates and asides, interlocking them all as if assembling the hull of a ship. No story is ever told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized. All day my Uncle Ned, who is heading a commission on race-riots (and so has been given this building to live in while in Jaffna), is at work, and all day my Aunt Phyllis presides over the history of good and bad Ondaatjes and the people they came in contact with. Her eye, which by now knows well the ceilings of this house, will suddenly sparkle and she will turn to us with delight and begin “and there is another terrible story.…”