【有声英语文学名著】英国病人 58

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“At least I have a name.” 

“Yes.” 

Caravaggio sits in Hana’s chair. Afternoon sun fills the room, revealing the swimming motes¹.The Englishman turns to him. “There’s a painting by Caravaggio, done late in his life. David with the Head of Goliath. In it, the young warrior² holds at the end of his outstretched arm the head of Goliath, ravaged³ and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one’s own mortality. I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David.” Caravaggio sits there in silence, thoughts lost among the floating motes. War has unbalanced him and he can return to no other world as he is, wearing these false limbs that morphine promises. He is a man in middle age who has never become accustomed to families. All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy⁴. 

He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos⁵, the way thieves leave reduced houses. He watches the man in the bed. He needs to know who this Englishman from the desert is, and reveal him for Hana’s sake. Later, sitting with kip and Hanna he said.

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