The Caravaggio Conspiracy by Walter Ellis Page B

meant that for the next three months doctors and nurses, wearing masks and speaking to him in French, were his only contact with the world. Each morning, to a background of Mozart, Berlioz and Strauss, specialist technicians would scrape away the dead tissue from his back, buttocks and thighs – an excrutiating procedure known as debridement. In a bid to promote the generation of healthy tissue beneath, whole layers of scabs were removed. But the worst part came when grafts from a specially bred pig were attached to the still-forming sub-cutaneous layers of his skin. It was as if he were being robbed of the last remaining vestige of his humanity and turned into someone, or something, else. Yet dreadful though all of this had been, nothing was as bad as the overwhelming sense of solitude. If it was true that a drowning man reviewed his whole life in the minute or so it took him to die, it was also the case that a man staring at the floor for six months revisited again and again and again every decision he had ever taken, every mistake he ever made, every girl he ever slept with. He was bound to his past like Prometheus to his rock, constantly reminded of his failings, waking each morning to be devoured alive.
    Prominent among the spectral presences was the shade of his father, who moved through secret doors inside the chambers of his memory, turning up when he was least wanted, asking questions to which there were no answers. He had never understood the nature of their relationship. Perhaps they didn’t have one. Perhaps they had just lived in the same house. He told himself that if his mother had survived, everything would have been different. She would have given him love and understanding. The farm would have known laughter as well as whiskey fumes. But that was just fantasy. After she died giving birth to him, the old man, like Miss Havesham in Great Expectations , became suspended in time. His long silences, interrupted only by prayer and periodic torrents of abuse, had persisted for more than twenty years.
    Not that his own life since had lacked variety. There had even been moments of sublime black comedy. A week after his father died, as he lay face down in France, unable to attend the funeral, his fiancée, Siobhán, wrote to him from Dublin to tell him she was sorry, but she couldn’t cope with his injuries and was breaking off their engagement. ‘I know I must seem heartless,’ she had written, ‘and I want you to know how dreadful I feel about leaving you like this. I can only ask you to see the situation from my perspective.’ He saw it well enough. Given everything else that had happened, the blatant egoism of her decision had made him laugh out loud – which hurt. The duty nurse, who had read him the letter in her heavily accented English, only half understanding it, thought he was out of his mind and summoned the doctor, who gave him a sedative.
    The last he heard, Siobhán had married a hedge fund manager whose brother played cricket for Ireland. Cricket! Well, good luck to her. It had been a foolish relationship to begin with, which would never have lasted. She’d have divorced him inside of three years, pausing only to take him to the cleaners.
    But time, as the cliché had it, was the great healer. Having never believed it, he now knew it was true. The scars on his back would always be there, but the ones inside his head had begun to close. He could feel life returning, like sap rising in a tree after a long winter. It had come back not only in the muscles of his back and the wasted sinews of his arms and legs, but in his altered view of the world and its possibilities. He had learned things about himself that he could never have known otherwise. He was less carefree since Iraq, less self-obsessed. He was more thoughtful, more discriminating. But the other side was always there, too. There were things he had learned that you weren’t supposed to know until you were old. The fragility of human life