Running in the Family Read Online Free PDF Page B

eating the berries and come down drunk, would stagger over the lawn pulling up flowers or come into the house to up-end drawers of cutlery and serviettes. Me and my polecat, my father said after one occasion when their drunks coincided, my father lapsing into his songs—baila or heartbreaking Rodgers and Hart or his own version of “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean”—
    My whiskey comes over the ocean
My brandy comes over the sea
But my beer comes from F.X. Pereira
So F.X. Pereira for me.
F.X.… F.X.…
F.X. Pereira for me, for me.…
    He emerged out of his bedroom to damn whoever it was that was playing the piano—to find the house empty—Maureen and the kids having left, and the polecat walking up and down over the keys breaking the silence of the house, oblivious to his human audience; and my father wishing to celebrate this companionship, discovering all the bottles gone, unable to find anything, finally walking up to the kerosene lamp hanging in the centre of the room at head level, and draining
that
liquid into his mouth. He and his polecat.
    Gillian remembered some of the places where he hid bottles.
Here
she said,
and here
. Her family and my family walked around the house, through the depressed garden of guava trees, plantains, old forgotten flowerbeds. Whatever “empire” my grandfather had fought for had to all purposes disappeared.

DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT MATISSE

TABULA ASIAE

    On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations—by Ptolemy, Mercator, François Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt—growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle, and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India. Around it, a blue-combed ocean busy with dolphin and sea-horse, cherub and compass. Ceylon floats on the Indian Ocean and holds its naive mountains, drawings of cassowary and boar who leap without perspective across imagined “desertum” and plain.
    At the edge of the maps the scrolled mantling depicts ferocious slipper-footed elephants, a white queen offering a necklace to natives who carry tusks and a conch, a Moorish king who stands amidst the power of books and armour. On the south-west cornerof some charts are satyrs, hoof deep in foam, listening to the sound of the island, their tails writhing in the waves.
    The maps reveal rumours of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travellers’ tales appears throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records. The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape—Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems”), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon—the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language.
    This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed and intermarried—my own ancestor arriving in 1600, a doctor who cured the residing governor’s daughter with a strange herb and was rewarded with land, a foreign wife, and a new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling language. And when his Dutch wife died, marrying a Sinhalese woman, having nine children, and remaining. Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point on the map.

ST. THOMAS’ CHURCH

    In Colombo a church faces west into the sea. We drive along Reclamation Street through markets and boutiques. The church ahead of us is painted a pale dirty blue. Below us, an oil-tanker dwarfs the harbour and the shops. We get out, followed by the children. A path about twelve feet wide bordered by plantain trees. The gothic doors give a sense, as