Caravaggio allows her to loosen the bandages and change them, and Hana sees that someone removed both of his thumbs. Hana refuses to leave the English patient.Ĭaravaggio and Hana go for a walk in the garden.

He comes to the villa and begs Hana to leave because she cannot stay with all the bombs still left underground, undefused. Soon, a new character emerges: a man with bandaged hands named Caravaggio, who Hana used to know. Hana is only 20 years and won't leave the English patient even though he is destined to die and the villa is unsafe. The villa was abandoned after the Allied victory, but there are still buried mines all over the property. Books are Hana's only refuge in the Villa San Girolamo, which used to be an army hospital. At night the patient rarely sleeps, so the nurse reads to him from whatever book she finds in the library.

They saved him, but he had no memory of who he is: after the accident, he knew only that he was English. His plane crashed in the Sand Sea, and nomadic Bedouins saw him stand up naked from the burning plane, on fire.

The nurse asks him how he was wounded, and he replies that he 'fell burning into the desert' from a plane. Hana tends to the burned English patient in a room of their Italian villa. The English Patient tracks the convocation of four people at an Italian villa - a nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief, and a badly burned Englishman - who come to forge an unlikely family, and together discover the secrets of their respective pasts, and the emotional wounds they share.

The english patient by michael ondaatje