In the Skin of a Lion (13 page)

Patrick embraces the last of the light on the walk home. In
the dry air the clay hardens on clothing, whitens his arms and hair. He takes a knife and cuts free the mud between his boots and trouser cuffs, brushes the blade over the laces to loosen them. In his Wyatt Avenue room he drops all his clothes in a corner, feeds the iguana, and crawls into bed. He picks the clothes up again at six in the morning hard as armour and bangs them against the wall of the fire escape till they crack apart and soften, the dust in the air around him. At the Thompson Grill he eats breakfast in ten minutes. He reads no paper, just watches the hands of the waitress break open the eggs. As he goes underground the humidity will fall back into his clothes quick as rain.

Carrying three lanterns, the crew of nine men walks towards the end of the tunnel. Already they can smell each other and the sweat from the previous days, the lamp wick raised to burn out odour. They can hear the mules and pit-horses who live down here, transporting the dug earth and mud barrels to the ladder. When these creatures were lowered down the shaft by rope they had brayed madly, thinking they were being buried alive. Patrick and the others walk silently, remembering the teeth of the animals distinct, that screaming, the feet bound so they wouldn’t slash out and break themselves, lowered forty feet down and remaining there until they died or the tunnel reached the selected mark under the lake. And when would that be? The brain of the mule no more and no less knowledgeable than the body of a man who dug into a clay wall in front of him.

Above ground, like the blossoming of a tree, the excavations and construction were also being orchestrated. The giant centrifugal pumps, more valuable than life, were trolleyed into
place with their shell-shaped impellers that in Commissioner Harris’ dream would fan the water up towards the settling basins. Cranes lowered 800 tons of steel sheet piling rolled in Sault Ste. Marie. Trucks were driving in the bricks from Cooksville.

From across the province the subcontractors brought in their products and talents to build a palace for water. Richie Cut Stone Company, Raymond Concrete, Heather & Little Roofing and Sheet Metal, ornamental iron from Architectural Bronze and Iron Works, steel sashes from Canadian Metal Window and Steel Works, elevators from Otis-Fenson and Turnbull, glazing from Hobbs Glass, plasterers from Strauss & Scott, overhead doors from the Richard Wilcox Canadian Company. The Bavington Brothers sent painters, Bennett and Wright were responsible for heat and ventilation, the linoleum came from T. Eaton Company, the mastic flooring from Vulcan Asphalt. Mazes of electricity were laid down by Canadian Comstock, Alexander Murray composed the floor design. The tiling and terrazzo were by Italian Mosaic and Tile Company.

Harris had dreamed the marble walls, the copper-banded roofs. He pulled down Victoria Park Forest and the essential temple swept up in its place, built on the slope towards the lake. The architect Pomphrey modelled its entrance on a Byzantine city gate, and the inside of the building would be an image of the ideal city. The brass railings curved up three flights like an immaculate fiction. The subtle splay on the tower gave it an Egyptian feel. Harris could
smell
the place before it was there, knew every image of it as well as his arms – west wing, east wing. The Depression and the public outcry would slow it all down, but in spite of that half of it would be completed within a year. “The form of a city changes faster than the heart of a mortal,” Harris liked to remind his critics, quoting Baudelaire.
He was providing jobs as he had in the building of the Bloor Street Viaduct, the St. Clair Reservoir, the men hired daily for grading, clearing bush, removing stumps, and rip-rapping the sides of streams. The Commissioner would slide these facts out, bounce them off his arms like oranges to journalists.

But Harris was building it for himself. For a stray dream he’d always had about water, water they should have taken across the Bloor Street Viaduct as he proposed. No one else was interested in water at this time. Harris imagined a palace for it. He wanted the best ornamental iron. He wanted a brass elevator to lead from the service building to the filter building where you could step out across rose-coloured marble. The neo-Byzantine style allowed him to blend in all the technical elements. The friezes depicted stylized impellers. He wanted herringbone tiles imported from Siena, art deco clocks and pump signals, unfloored high windows which would look over filter pools four feet deep, languid, reflective as medieval water gardens.

But first he needed to finish the spear of tunnel a mile out under the lake, and organize the human digging and the human and mule dragging of pipes all the way out there for the intake of water. This was the other tentacle of his dream. The one that reached out and clung to him in a nightmare where faces peered out, working in that permanent rain of condensation.

He had sent Goss and his photographers down but he had not entered the tunnels himself. He was a man who understood the continuity of the city, the daily consumptions of water, the speed of raw water through a filter bed, the journeys of chlorine and sulphur-dioxide to the island filtration plant, the 119 inspections by tugboats each year of the various sewer outfalls, and the approximate number of valves and caissons of the East Toronto pumping stations, and the two miles a year of water-main construction – from the St. Clair Reservoir to the high-level
pumping station, and the construction of the John Street surge tank.…

This was choreography in 1930.

In those photographs moisture in the tunnel appears white. There is a foreman’s white shirt, there is white lye daubed onto rock to be dynamited. And all else is labour and darkness. Ash-grey faces. An unfinished world. The men work in the equivalent of the fallout of a candle. They are in the foresection of the cortex, in the small world of Rowland Harris’ dream as he lies in bed on Neville Park Boulevard.

Such a strange dream for him. The silence of men coming out of a hole each within an envelope of steam. Horses under Lake Ontario. Swallowing the water one-and-a-quarter miles away, bringing it back into his body, and spitting it out clean.

Patrick ate most of his meals at the Thompson Grill on River Street where the waitress, through years of habit, had reduced to a minimum the action of pouring coffee or flipping an egg. He could spot the oil burns on her wrists, the permanent grimace in her eye from the smoke.

If she looked at those who ate here it occurred when they were not aware of it. She seemed self-sufficient, something underwater in the false yellow light of the narrow room against the street, the flawed glass creating shadows in the air. There was something transient about her though she had been there for years. Most of the chewers at the Thompson Grill had that quality.

Patrick would sit at an uncleared section so he could watch
the fingers of her left hand pluck up the glasses and cups while the other hand, the muscles in intricate movement under the skin, swabbed the counter clean. It was several months before he became aware of the tattoo high on her arm, seeing it through a tear in the seam where the cotton had loosened.

He came to believe she had the powers of a goddess who could condemn or bless. She would be able to transform the one she touched, the one she gripped at the wrist with her tough hand, the muscles stiffening up towards the blue-black of the half-revealed creature that pivoted on the bone of her shoulder. His eyes wanted to glimpse nothing else.

He pinned the note, saying
Waterworks – Sunday 8 p.m
. to the wall above his bed in case he forgot, though it had been his only invitation in two years. “The cheese stands alone,” he’d sing to himself, while buying groceries along Eastern Avenue. Patrick loved that song. He found himself muttering “The farmer takes the dog … the farmer takes the dog” among the Macedonians, as if perfecting a password. The southeastern section of the city where he now lived was made up mostly of immigrants and he walked everywhere not hearing any language he knew, deliriously anonymous. The people on the street, the Macedonians and Bulgarians, were his only mirror. He worked in the tunnels with them.

He had discovered the Macedonian word for iguana,
gooshter
, and finally used it to explain his requests each evening at the fruit stall for clover and vetch. It was a breakthrough. The woman gazed at him, corrected his pronunciation, and yelled it to the next stall. She came around the crates and outlined the shape of a lizard.
Gooshter
? Four women and a
couple of men then circled him trying desperately to leap over the code of languages between them. His obsession with vetch had puzzled them. He had gone at one point into the centre of the city, bought some, and returned to the Macedonians to show them what he needed. The following week, a store owner had waved it to him as he came down Eastern Avenue. Vetch was
fee-ee
. But now they were onto serious things. A living creature, a
gooshter
, had been translated. He was surrounded. They were trying to discover how many he had. Was raising them one of his professions? They knew where he lived, of course, had seen his yellow light looking down on Wyatt Avenue, knew he was alone, knew down to the very can of peaches what he ate in a week. Peaches on Friday. They had sent someone to find Emil, who spoke the best English, and when the boy arrived he said, “Peaches on Friday, right?”

Patrick felt ashamed they could discover so little about him. He had reduced himself almost to nothing. He would walk home at dusk after working in the lake tunnel. His radio was on past midnight. He did nothing else that he could think of. They approved of his Finnish suit.
Po modata eleganten!
which meant stylish! stylish! He was handed a Macedonian cake. And suddenly Patrick, surrounded by friendship, concern, was smiling, feeling the tears on his face falling towards his stern Macedonian-style moustache. Elena, the great Elena who had sold him vetch for over a year, unpinned the white scarf around her neck and passed it to him. He looked up and saw the men and women who could not know
why
he wept now among these strangers who in the past had seemed to him like dark blinds on his street, their street, for he was their alien.

And then he had to remember new names. Suddenly formal, beginning with Elena. The women shook his hand, the men embraced and kissed him, and each time he said Patrick.
Patrick. Patrick. Knowing he must now remember every single person. And now, because it was noon, the King Street Russian Mission Brass Band fifty yards down the road, they invited him to lunch which was set up on tables beside the stalls and crates. He was guest of honour. Elena on one side of him, Emil on the other, and a table of new friends.

He was brought a plate of cabbage rolls –
sarmi
, Elena said, and suddenly the awful sulphurous odour he had smelled for the last year since moving was explained. Emil was describing the technique of soaking cabbage leaves in a solution of salt and water and a bit of vinegar and leaving it there for days. Patrick ate everything that was put in front of him. During coffee, Kosta, the owner of the Ohrida Lake Restaurant, sent along a question to Emil. Emil asked two or three others first to see if this question was apt. Then he turned to Patrick. “What else can you do?” The table was silent. Elena put her hand on his and sent a qualifier via Emil. “It does not matter if you don’t do anything.” The others down the table nodded.

Emil’s translation created an even greater silence. Patrick could hear every note of the Russian Mission Band down the street. Then Kosta jumped up and yelled something at Patrick. His face looked at him with anger, full of passion. Emil turned to Patrick now, having to yell above the sudden din at the table. “He says ‘Me too, me too.’ ” Kosta grabbed a round loaf of bread, leapt free of the bench, and booted it down the road in the direction of the Russian Mission Band.

Later that afternoon when Patrick was showing the iguana to the street, the man Kosta said, “The waterworks at eight, Sunday night. A gathering.” Then he drifted away, not allowing Patrick to reply or question the invitation.

An hour after dusk disappeared into the earth the people came in silence, in small and large families, up the slope towards the half-built waterworks. Emerging from darkness, mothlike, walking towards the thin rectangle of the building’s southern doorway. The movement was quickly over, the wave of bodies had seemed a shadow of a cloud over the slope.

Inside the building they moved in noise and light. It was an illegal gathering of various nationalities and the noise of machines camouflaged their activity from whoever might have been passing along Queen Street a hundred yards away. Many languages were being spoken, and Patrick followed the crowd to the seats that were set up around a temporary stage. He saw Kosta, who was busy greeting and shepherding people, and he watched him until Kosta caught his eye. Patrick waved and Kosta raised his hand and continued with what he was doing. Patrick felt utterly alone in this laughing crowd that traded information back and forth, held children on their laps.