The English Patient 精彩片段：
X August
CARAVAGGIO CAME DOWN the stairs through darkness and into the kitchen. Some celery on the table, some turnips whose roots were still muddy. The only light came from a fire Hana had recently started. She had her back to him and had not heardhis steps into the room. His days at the villa had loosened his body and freed his tenseness, so he seemed bigger, more sprawled out in his gestures. Only his silence of movement remained. Otherwise there was an easy inefficiency to him now, a sleepiness to his gestures.
He dragged out the chair so she would turn, realize he was in the room.
“Hello, David.” He raised his arm. He felt that he had been in deserts for too long.
“How is he?” “Asleep. Talked himself out.” “Is he what you thought he was?” “He’s fine. We can let him be.” “I thought so. Kip and I are both sure he is English. Kip thinks the best people are eccentrics, he worked with one.” “I think Kip is the eccentric myself. Where is he, anyway?” “He’s plotting something on the terrace, doesn’t want me out there. Something for my birthday.” Hana stood up from her crouch at the grate, wiping her hand on the opposite forearm.
“For your birthday I’m going to tell you a small story,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Not about Patrick, okay?” “A little about Patrick, mostly about you.” “I still can’t listen to those stories, David.” “Fathers die. You keep on loving them in any way you can. You can’t hide him away in your heart.” “Talk to me when the morphia wears off.” She came up to him and put her arms around him, reached up and kissed his cheek. His embrace tightened around her, his stubble like sand against her skin. She loved that about him now; in the past he had always been meticulous. The parting in his hair like Yonge Street at midnight, Patrick had said. Caravaggio had in the past moved like a god in her presence. Now, with his face and his trunk filled out and this greyness in him, he was a friendlier human.
Tonight dinner was being prepared by the sapper. Caravaggio was not looking forward to it. One meal in three was a loss as far as he was concerned. Kip found vegetables and presented them barely cooked, just briefly boiled into a soup. It was to be another purist meal, not what Caravaggio wished for after a day such as this when he had been listening to the man upstairs. He opened the cupboard beneath the sink. There, wrapped in damp cloth, was some dried meat, which Caravaggio cut and put into his pocket.
“I can get you off the morphine, you know. I’m a good nurse.” “You’re surrounded by madmen...” “Yes, I think we are all mad.” When Kip called them, they walked out of the kitchen and onto the terrace, whose border, with its low stone balustrade, was ringed with light.
It looked to Caravaggio like a string of small electric candles found in dusty churches, and he thought the sapper had gone too far in removing them from a chapel, even for Hana’s birthday. Hana walked slowly forward with her hands over her face.
There was no wind. Her legs and thighs moved through the skirt of her frock as if it were thin water. Her tennis shoes silent on the stone.
“I kept finding dead shells wherever I was digging,” the sapper said.
They still didn’t understand. Caravaggio bent over the flutter of lights. They were snail shells filled with oil. He looked along the row of them; there must have been about forty.
“Forty-five,” Kip said, “the years so far of this century. Where I come from, we celebrate the age as well as ourselves.” Hana moved alongside them, her hands in her pockets now, the way Kip loved to see her walk. So relaxed, as if she had put her arms away for the night, now in simple armless movement.