Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

“It’s a nightingale floor,” our grandmother told us. “It warns us of thieves in the night.”

For someone like The Darter, who was so one-sided in his opinions as to the role women ought to have in the world, he appeared to have an almost suicidal tendency to select highly independent women to go out with.

The Darter appeared more complex and shaded now, with this generous flaw in him that preferred the company of a woman who contradicted his opinions.

His ancestors were generations of lightermen and thus he had a river body that showed an accent only on land.

his intricately dovetailed relationships with women.

All I knew was that the political maps of his era were vast and coastal and I would never know if he was close to us or had disappeared into one of those distances forever, a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.

it was only with her that the purpose of his work slid from him. He desired her. All those inches of her. Her mouth, her ear, the blue eyes, the quiver at her thigh, her skirt lifted and bunched: was it to satisfy him? His hand wishing to be there. Everything left his mind but that tremor.

she loved the name Marsh. It sounded as if he went on and on and was difficult to cross, to fully understand, that she would get her feet wet, that burrs and mud would attach themselves to her. I think it was then, after their night by the stove, that she decided to return safely to who she still was, and remain separate from him, as if suffering was always a part of desire.