The English Patient: Chapter I Summary & Analysis

Hana stops working in the garden and stands up. She can feel the weather changing, and a breeze shakes the nearby trees. Turning toward the house, Hana heads for the kitchen, but she doesn’t stop. She continues up the dark stairs to a room at the back of a hallway. Light pours from the room, which is painted like a garden. A man, the English patient, lies in a bed in the center of the room. As Hana enters, he turns to look at her.

Hana bathes the English patient every four days. She starts at his feet, wrecked and mangled by fire, and squeezes water from a washcloth up his legs. His shins are the worst, and bone is visible below the open and weeping wounds. She has been caring for him for months, and she knows every inch of his body. “Hipbones of Christ,” Hana thinks as she washes up his body. She has come to think of the English patient as her “despairing saint.” Her favorite part of his body is the indentation below his lowest rib. She looks at this “cliff of skin,” and draws a plum from her pocket. She removes the plum’s skin with her teeth and passes it into the English patient’s mouth. He begins to tell her a story.

The English patient tells Hana about the desert and picnics with a woman who used to kiss his body that is now covered with burns. Hana asks how he was burned, and he says that he fell from the desert sky. The Bedouin, the nomadic Arab people of North Africa, had carried him across the desert on a “boat of sticks.” The Bedouin were used to men falling from the sky. Since 1939, planes frequently crashed in the desert. The Bedouin did not know him, and he did not know them. Hana again asks the English patient for his name, but he doesn’t remember it—he only knows that he is English.  

The English patient can never sleep at night, so Hana finds a book in the library and reads to him. If it is cold, she climbs into bed with him, careful not to touch him, and reads late into the night. He listens to Hana’s voice in the candlelight, “swallowing her words like water.”

The Bedouin had placed cloth soaked in oils over the English patient’s burnt skin, “anointing” him. Each evening at nightfall, they would change the bandages and inspect his charred skin. One man, who never spoke, stayed with the English patient 24 hours a day and fed him dates that he would first chew in his mouth. 

As Hana reads to the English patient, she looks down the hall, but she knows that no one is coming. The abandoned villa had been a makeshift war hospital, and Hana had lived here with the others nurses. The others nurses, however, are long gone. The war has moved north and is nearly over. Living in the villa alone with the English patient, books are Hana’s only escape. She looks down at the book on her lap and stares at page 17 for several minutes, noticing the bend at the corner of the page where someone previously marked their spot.

Hana has planted enough vegetables in the orchard near the Villa San Girolamo to keep the English patient and herself alive, and she occasionally trades hospital supplies for meat and beans with a man in town. The villa is a shell of what it once was. Large sections of the building have been destroyed by bombs and many rooms cannot even be entered. Much of the roof is missing, allowing rain and moonlight to spill in. 

The Bedouin taught the English patient how to raise his hands and arms to the sky to draw energy from the universe. One day, the English patient heard the sound of wind chimes, and a man wearing a large yoke with hundreds of hanging bottles approached him. The man carried different ointments in the bottles, and after propping the yoke between two sticks, he mixed different ointments together in a “skin cup” made with the soles of his feet. He rubbed the ointment—made of ground peacock bone, “the most potent healer”—onto the English patient’s burnt chest.

The villa’s library sits between the kitchen and the chapel. Although there have been holes blown into the walls and roof by bombs, the library seems safe enough to Hana. A piano sits in the middle of the room, and birds and weather often enter the space. The rain has soaked many of the books, and the shelves groan under the added weight of the water. A set of doors at the far end of the room have been boarded up. If Hana could go through them, it would lead down the 36 “penitent steps” to the chapel. The Germans placed mines in many of the buildings before retreating, so any room that isn’t absolutely necessary is blocked off.

In the library, Hana takes The Last of the Mohicans off a shelf and walks backward out of the room, stepping into her own footprints. She takes the book to the English patient’s room and sits in the window alcove. Opening the book, Hana is about to enter the lives of others. She loves losing herself in stories and going back in time, “her body full of sentences and moments,” like waking from a dream she can’t quite remember.

The Italian town where the Villa San Girolamo is located had been besieged for weeks, and the villa, which had previously been a nunnery, was the last stronghold of the German army. When the Allies took over, they converted the villa into a hospital. The medical staff and patients were transferred south to a safer area, but Hana insisted on staying behind with the English patient. They have no electricity, and the winter has been cold. Much of the villa was blown up by bombs, including the lower stairs of the large staircase, which Hana rebuilt by nailing books together.

There are few beds remaining in the villa—Hana prefers to sleep in a hammock. She frequently sleeps in different rooms, at times in rooms that have very few standing walls, and she occasionally sleeps in the English patient’s room. Hana lives “like a vagrant,” while the English patient is “reposed in his bed like a king.” Hana is 20 years old, and completely untouched by concerns of safety. Now that the war is ending, she has drawn up a new set of rules for herself, and she will no longer carry out orders for the good of others. 

Hana carries the six-foot crucifix from the chapel to the orchard and erects it as a scarecrow near her seedbed. Empty sardine cans hang from the cross, clanking and clinking in the wind. Her only possessions include a small suitcase containing letters, some clothing, and extra medical supplies. She could burn down all of this if she wanted to. 

Hana picks up the copy of The Histories by Herodotus from the English patient’s bedside table. He had brought the book with him to the villa, and pages from other books have been glued into it. The English patient’s handwriting fills the pages and margins, and Hana begins to read. Herodotus writes of the different winds that cross the desert, including the africo, which can blow all the way to Rome, and the hot and dry ghibli, which blows out of Tunis and can cause anxiety. The khamsin from Egypt blows for 50 days and nights, and is known as the ninth plague.

Hana reads about the —, a wind out of Arabia whose name was erased by a king after it killed his son. She reads about other winds and learns that there are millions of tons of dust floating about the air at any given moment, waiting to bury entire armies and civilizations. Herodotus writes of the simoom, a wind so evil that a nation once declared war on it and marched into it dressed in full battle gear.

The English patient interrupts Hana’s reading and tells her that the Bedouin kept him alive for a reason. The English patient can recognize any location on a map, and he is extremely knowledgeable. Whenever he enters someone’s house, the English patient says, he goes directly to the bookshelves and “inhales” the books. “So history enters us,” he tells Hana. He knew all about the Bedouin’s customs and culture when he crashed his plane, and even though they were in the desert, he knew they were once “water people.”  

The English patient saw engravings on the rocks in Tassili depicting Sahara people hunting water horses, and in a cave in Wadi Sura, he saw paintings of people swimming. At one point, the English patient says, there was a large lake in the desert. We don’t know much about Africa, he says to Hana. Now, armies of thousands of men move across the desert, but the English patient isn’t sure who the enemy is. Who are the allies of the desert, he asks Hana, as all of Europe fights their way across North Africa?

The Bedouin kept the English patient alive “because of the buried guns.” They handed him eight guns along with ammunition, and he identified each one. There were guns from different countries and time periods, and he said each name out loud, both in French and in the tribe’s language. This was his payment in exchange for the Bedouin saving his life.

In the desert, the only thing that is celebrated is water. Nothing is permanent, everything drifts, and some of the wells are considered cursed. Small towns spring up out of nowhere, and desert people dig down into ancient water nests, remnants of an “old sea” that had once been there. 

Hana stands at a sink after leaving the English patient. She splashes water on her face and stands staring at the wall. She has long since removed all the mirrors in the villa and stored them in an unused room. She wets her hair and, walking outside, cool “breezes hit her, erasing the thunder.”