In the Skin of a Lion

The scene is the Kingston Penitentiary. Three prisoners, among them Patrick and Caravaggio (a thief who first appeared in the novel as a laborer on the viaduct in Chapter 2), are painting the roof blue—the same shade as the sky. (Patrick has been jailed for his arson attack on the Muskoka Hotel.) The third prisoner is named Buck. Although Patrick appears in this chapter, he is not the viewpoint character; the entire chapter is narrated from Caravaggio’s perspective. Patrick and Buck help Caravaggio escape by painting his entire body blue (including clothes and hair) so that he is camouflaged against the roof and the sky.

As a professional thief, Caravaggio is most comfortable under the dark of night with only “a sliver of new moon […] A thief’s moon” (180). This is a crucial example of the novel’s motif of freedom in darkness. Caravaggio struggles to find a way to remove the blue paint from his body and hair, knowing that news of an escaped prisoner painted blue will have spread throughout the region. He meets a boy named Alfred and convinces him to bring him turpentine. He tells the boy his name is Caravaggio, “the painter” (182). (This is a reference to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, an Italian painter active in the 1590s and 1610s.) He sees himself in a mirror for the first time in months and notices the scar on his neck from “the prison attack three months earlier” (182)—the first allusion to an event narrated later in the chapter. Caravaggio expertly breaks into a lake cottage and falls asleep. He has a scattered nightmare (part fantasy, part flashback) about prison, about Patrick, and about being attacked by three men and having his neck cut.

The next morning Caravaggio meets Anne, a neighbor, paddling a canoe on the lake. She spots a bit of blue paint and pointedly asks if he is an artist; both of them realize she knows he is the escaped prisoner.

Caravaggio was Patrick’s cellmate when he returned from the hospital after being attacked. Patrick asked him if he was the thief with the red dog. It’s later explained that this dog was Caravaggio’s partner in crime, a lookout who warned him with a single bark when he was in danger of being caught. The dog’s failure to bark at the right time on one occasion is what landed Caravaggio in prison.

Caravaggio recounts his first robbery of a mushroom factory in his home country of Italy. He “injured himself leaping from a second-storey window” (190) and had to hide in the factory for days, hoping to find merciful help. He was less cautious in his early days of thieving. He recounts how he was inspired by other professional thieves and “trailed each of them for a week in order to watch their performances” (191). A woman named Giannetta, a worker in the mushroom factory, eventually found him, took pity, and brought him food. As she nursed him, the two fell in love. It’s later revealed that they married and immigrated to Canada together.

The scene returns to the present, where Caravaggio is stalking Anne’s home. He watches her as she writes. He breaks into the house to use the telephone to call his wife Giannetta, to tell her he escaped from prison. Anne discovers him in her home. The two have a strangely friendly conversation. Her husband is not around, and she tells Caravaggio that she has “literally fallen in love with the lake” (203). Caravaggio counters that he has “always had a fear of water creatures” (203).

Caravaggio remembers that after he married Giannetta, she demanded he find a partner in crime because his work was causing him too much stress. When he said he could never trust a partner, Giannetta yelled, “Then get a dog!” (203). Caravaggio did so; he trained a red fox terrier to be his partner.

The chapter ends with Caravaggio’s return to Giannetta and their subsequent wild lovemaking.