Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  In her memory later, in her unforgetfulness of that day, she sensed she had been present everywhere. With Claire by the stove in the farmhouse, saying, ‘Oh, I got caught in the rain.’ And Claire coming forward to help her, to (again!) undress. ‘No, it’s all right, I’ll do it myself.’ Or she was sheltered under the green curling trees across the gully, watching their two fragile, unprotected bodies on the deck. Anna and Coop, with the sun coming out from under the brief rainstorm so that there were actual shadows on her when his fingers moved back and forth on her stomach as if he were thoughtlessly or thoughtfully trailing them in a river. She watched his dark arm, his wild hair in this light, turned her head away and saw the damp hand-rolled cigarette he had placed on the lip of the deck, still burning.

  He was, it felt to her, no longer Coop beside her, on top of her, his hands pinning her shoulders too hard into the wood so she was trying to shrug him off. Anna, he said, finally, as if that word was naked in his throat, so much an admission. Then his palms releasing the grip that held her against the deck, so that his chest now was on her and she could no longer see him, only his hair against her eyes and face, in this changing light.

  They were on their sides facing each other. ‘A fox’s wedding,’ he said, sharing the familiar phrase he had heard in their household; but it embarrassed her now, she wanted no evidence of a familial link, wanted wordlessness. As if … as if … if they did not say anything, all this physicality wouldn’t exist, could not be tangible evidence anywhere.

  Some days she would come up to the cabin and just watch him work. She would offer to hammer planks alongside him, but he did not want that. Sometimes she brought a library book and sat reading in the shadow of the corrugated roof’s overhang until the sound of his sawing and hammering disappeared and she was in another country, in Italy with The Leopard, or in France with a musketeer. There were days they barely touched, when they would try to talk themselves out of this desire, and there were days when she would bring her book and there was no reading, no talking, in this sparse cabin that was colourless. One afternoon she brought an old gramophone that she had found in the farmhouse, along with some 78s. They wound it up like a Model T and danced to ‘Begin the Beguine,’ wound it up and danced to it again. The music made them belong to another time, no longer a part of this family or place.

  Anna was sitting on the deck, hugging his black t-shirt to her stomach, watching him. She leaned over and opened her little satchel and unstrung the set of Buddhist flags she had bought through a mail-order catalogue. She put on his t-shirt and looked at the struts that bolstered the overhang by the door. ‘Can you help me, Coop? I need to get up there. We can tack this to the rain lip over the door.’ She already had his hammer in her hand, and a nail. He crouched so she could sit on his shoulders. ‘Time for the heart and the mind,’ she sang. ‘You need to be wind-blessed!’ He could feel her wetness at the back of his neck, as she reached up and attached one end of the strip of flags so the snake of it fluttered loose, free of the earth.

  There are five flags, she explained. The yellow one is earth, the green is water, the red is fire—the one we must escape—and white is cloud, and blue is sky, limitless space or mind. Coop, I don’t know what to do. She was on his shoulders, in mid-air, looking into space.

  Do you think Claire knows?

  Claire talks to me every night, and I don’t say a word about you, and she must wonder why I don’t say a word about you.

  Then Claire knows.

  Some afternoons she spoke to him in an earnest schoolgirl French—as though she were not someone who had grown up alongside him, almost a sibling. Or she’d move away from his desire and read him a description of a city. Sometimes she snuggled against his brown shoulders and after making love burst into tears. There were times she needed this boy or man, whatever he was, to cry as well, to show he understood the extremity of what was happening between them. When he was in her, about to come, looking down on her, his passive face looked torn open, but still he was wordless. It was easier for him. He did not accompany her down to the farmhouse each evening and eat a meal with her father and sister, and play a game of whist during which she’d look up suddenly to see Claire staring at her, attempting to break into her privacy. They were long, maddening, sterile games of chance and counting and collecting pairs or runs, with her father keeping score obsessively. (Besides, Coop was the only one among them good at cards. There were games in the past, Anna remembered, when he would sit laughing at their incompetence.) Worst of all, she had to sleep in the bed next to Claire in mutual silence.

  Then Claire knows.

  Had Coop loved anyone else? Did you love anyone else? she asked. He was shy at first. Then he said, ‘A woman in Tulare.’ Tell me about her. ‘No.’ Tell—. ‘No.’ What am I like compared to her? ‘It was just one night I slept with her.’ Ah good, you slept. She kissed him on his doubtful face, then dressed and walked down the hill alone. Halfway home she approached tears, but refused them. She tried to imagine sleeping with anybody else. No one could ever know her as well as Coop did. No one knew Coop as well as she did. She felt this gave her some power, in her walk down to her other life. She was sixteen years old. Almost nothing.

  Anna went into Rex’s Hardware in Petaluma and bought a can of blue paint, a specific blue to match the blue on one of the flags, and lugged it uphill to the cabin. Coop brought his table out onto the deck. She eased the top off the can and stirred the paint. The weather was strange that day, the heat interrupted by gusts of wind, and they watched the flags bucking, almost breaking loose. Anna remembers every detail. She wound up the gramophone for music. They waited to make love. She sanded down the wood while conjugating French verbs out loud and then began painting the table. All that colourless wood in the cabin had driven her mad, and this blue was a gift for Coop. The wind died suddenly into silence and she looked up. The sky was a dark green, the clouds turbulent like oil.

  Thunder exploded over the deck while they were lying there, holding on to each other, as if it had come down a funnel onto their nakedness. They didn’t dare let go. It felt to Anna that whatever was in each of them had leapt out into the body of the other. That she’d replaced her heart with Coop’s. She could hear nothing, the thunder crash still in her ears. She was trembling in his arms. Then she saw a hand come forward out of nowhere and grip the hair on Coop’s head and pull it back, pull him off her, so that she saw sky for a moment and then her father’s head looking down at her.

  He had ridden up to the cabin to warn the boy of a storm, a possible tornado, had slipped off his quarter horse that was shying under the claps of thunder, and walked round the cabin onto the deck. It was not embarrassment that overcame him at that moment, but a fear. He picked up his daughter, naked as an infant, by her shoulders and flung her off the deck onto the slope of wet earth. Coop stood there not moving. Her father walked towards him, with a three-legged stool, and swung it into his face. The boy fell back through the collapsing wall of glass into the cabin. Then he stood up slowly and turned to look at the man who had raised him, who was now coming towards him again. He didn’t move. Another blow on his chest knocked him onto his back. Anna began screaming. She saw Coop’s strange submissiveness, saw her father attack Coop’s beautiful strong face as if that were the cause, as if in this way he could remove what had happened. Then her father was kneeling above Coop, reaching for the stool again and smashing it down, until the body was completely still.

  Coming out of shock, realizing that her father was not going to stop, that he was going to kill him, Anna ran onto the deck and tried to pull her father away. But she could not separate them. Coop looked unconscious, wasn’t moving. The stool came down hard on his chest once more, and blood came out of his mouth. Again she tried to embrace her father and pull him away from the body, but she was nothing against his strength. She turned away from him, lifted a large shard of glass and pierced it into his shoulder, pushing it deeper and deeper into his flesh through the checkered shirt. T
here was a sound like that from a bull, and he turned and struck her with an arm that now held only half its power. He looked backwards and saw the triangle of glass still in him. Anna evaded him until her nakedness was between him and Coop. Her lover. Again her father swept her away. Again she put herself between her father and Coop’s body. His strong left arm came up slowly and clutched her neck and began to crush her windpipe. Then everything began darkening and she dropped to her knees and went limp. She was near to Coop, she brought her face beside him and listened for the sound of his breath beneath that of her own frantic breathing, and finally heard a whisper of it. But he was so still. She nudged him and there was nothing. One eye badly closed, covered in blood. She stayed beside him, her arms around her chest, as if protecting Coop’s heart safe within her.

  Her father stared down at them. Then he walked slowly over to the bed, picked up a sheepskin, and came back and covered her with it. He ignored Coop’s body. He carried his daughter over the broken glass until they were away from the cabin and he could put her down, back on the earth. Then he took her by the hand, and never let go of her on the twenty-minute walk down the hill to the farmhouse, the quarter horse nodding beside them, and Anna screaming his name.

  He could see nothing, he sat up and could see no frontier between land and sky. Storms had filled the valley. Rain and then sleet. Hail clattering on the corrugated roof. He found himself in the very centre of the room, as far as he could get from the smashed window that sucked in the gale. Outside, the five bannered flags that Anna had strung up a few weeks earlier flew parallel to the ground. Blue, red, green, the hint of yellow, and the now unseen white.

  Only the cuts on his face felt sharp and alive. The rest of his body was numb and cold. He was going to die here. He would die here, or walking down the hill. Who was at the farmhouse now? He stood up slowly. The noise around him was so loud he could not hear his own footsteps when he walked across the room, as if he did not exist. He sat at the half-painted table and picked up a book of Anna’s. It felt cold.

  When he woke he realized he had been asleep at the table. There seemed to be a momentary clearing, but the wind swivelled back and the cabin was again cut off by the storm. Just the flags snapping. He put his hand through the broken window, to test the weather. Was Anna at the farmhouse? All those times she had risen from the deck, laughing nervously, so that at first he believed she was laughing against him, or worse, at both of them. But she was frailer than he knew. She had pointed twenty yards away and said, ‘That’s what I want. A bathtub out there someday.’ As if denying all that was happening between them.

  An hour later he was on his knees, on the bare hill, scared he might veer from the path and be fully lost in the unseen landscape. He was keeping to the narrow path by holding on to its texture, brushing away snow to find gravel or mud rather than grass. After leaving the cabin, he had walked into a clutch of barbed wire, cutting open his cheek and tearing his thin coat. He had turned back. When he reached the cabin, banging his arm against its corrugated walls and moving alongside it to find the steps, his face brushed the flags, and he grasped them, wound them around his wrist, and pulled them loose. Come with me, Anna. And turned back down the hill.

  The sky was darkening with sleet and he could sense leaves circling in the wind all around him. But nearly everything was invisible. The dead eye just ached. If you were a Buddhist, you would rise above this. It would be a good thing, no? He kept moving forward. A heavy push of water flung him sideways. He must have got onto the footbridge and the sluice water had risen over it, and he was tumbling within it down the hill, his clothes suddenly full of water and stones. His back slammed across a tree, and that held him. He had a fury in his head, and he didn’t allow himself to lose it. Not letting go of the tree trunk, he stood up until he was touching the lowest horizontal branch, and moved along under it. His face was unprotected from the sleet, but he kept holding the branch, moving further; then his fingers touched the pesticide bag hanging from the tree. So he knew where he was. He knew that if he walked forward, in the direction the branch pointed, he would hit the fence just above the gate. As he began climbing the angle of the hill, he hung on to that small line of a direction. His body stepped into the fence, and he promised himself when he was on the other side he would sit for a while, rest forever. But when he was over it he kept walking, one hand holding the fence wire, in the direction of their farmhouse. It would be only a hundred yards more. He had no idea who would be there. The wire burned his hand and he didn’t let go, but then he had to leave it, to cross the thirty yards of open space to the house.

  Ten minutes later he was lost, wandering about in darkness. He brushed against a barrel and thumped it to make noise. He took another step forward and a vehicle blocked his way. At first he was angry. He discovered the door of the car and pulled at it. Nothing moved, but then it gave a little, so it wasn’t locked, just a coat of ice. He pushed all his weight against it and then pulled the handle again. This time the door came free. He eased himself in stiffly and closed the door. It was quiet. He could hear his breath. He turned on the interior light. With a numb hand he brushed the felt on the ceiling and saw black blood on his fingers. If there was a key he could turn on heat, but there was no key. He pressed the horn for a long time and would not stop. Otherwise he might die here. He was listening to her, Yellow is earth and green is water and red is fire and white is cloud and blue is sky, limitless space, mind. Then he passed out.

  Unlike her, you did not want to die. You got down here.

  Did she want to die?

  She did. Oh yes, I think she did.

  Who was talking? Someone pressing down on his stiff bent knees. He was on the floor in front of the stove, stretched out and wrapped in blankets. A spark flipped over to him. Soon he was smelling burning wool. A good smell. Like food. He liked it.

  Don’t throw away my clothes.

  Why?

  I want the … things.

  What?

  The … the …

  Flags, she said. Did Anna give you the flags?

  Yes. They’re not supposed to touch ground.

  Well, unlike her you didn’t wish to die, somehow you got yourself down here.

  It was Claire talking.

  Where is she?

  They were here. He took her. She wouldn’t say a word, even to me. She was screaming when they both came into the farmhouse. She wanted to die. He put Anna in the truck and drove off with her. There was blood on him. They were here just ten minutes.

  He said nothing. He didn’t know what Claire knew.

  There was blood all over him, Coop. All over his clothes. I thought he was the injured one.

  She’d had no idea that Coop had remained in the cabin during the storm; her father had said he was somewhere else, before he drove off with Anna. Then Claire had heard what she thought was a car horn, and she opened the door to a thick curtain of sleet. But there was nothing out there. A short while later she heard it again, and went onto the porch once more and looked out. The storm had lessened and she saw a faint orange light, and as she peered into the blackness, it faded. A minute later she would have missed it altogether. An interior car light. Thunder broke loose above the house. She stood very still for a while, then unravelled a circle of rope, tied one end to the porch railing, the other around her waist, and went into the storm in the direction of the light she had seen.

  When she saw him through the windshield, she thought he was dead. Then his hands twitched in the ochre of her flashlight. The thunder began again while she was under it. Claire could hardly lift him, but she managed to pull him down out of the car and then to drag him across the hard stubble of the yard to the house and then up the steps. She untied the lifeline of the rope and wrapped him in a blanket and stretched him out before the fire in the empty, dark house.

  The next morning there was a faint sunlight. She woke and remembered everything, what had happened to them all. In the barn Claire held the bridle up, and the horse d
ipped his head and brought his ears through the upper straps. She placed the blanket and saddle high on the animal’s back and cinched the girth, keeping it loose for now. She leaned forward to smell his neck, there was always something about that smell.

  The cypress trees along the driveway were still and she felt her senses fully alive riding out after the storm. The horse climbed the hill slowly while Claire’s eyes skimmed every ridge for any small bump of life that might look like burlap or rock that could be a calf or some other creature. Going after lost things was as uncertain as prayer. Branches and fence posts were scattered across the slopes. An oil drum had rolled in from another farm during the night. The landscape off-kilter. She rode past their river, black with a mud that had probably never surfaced before. From the first hilltop she looked back and saw that the water tower had buckled under its weak legs.

  Coop had left. Already. And where Anna was, where her father was, she didn’t know. She was alone, sixteen years old, on a horse that bristled with nervousness and temper after his night in a barn full of crashing thunder. She talked quietly, constantly to him, the creature yearning to gallop, wanting to use the energy that Claire was containing.

  A swath of buckeye trees had come down across from Coop’s cabin. She dismounted and walked onto the deck. It was littered with glass. Through the broken window she saw the cat, Alturas, stretched out on the bed. Claire had never witnessed the cat indoors before. Its head was actually on a pillow, not expecting a soul. Even this one had been changed by the chaos of the weather. She gathered the dozing creature into a pillowcase, before it was fully awake, leaving his head free, and stood in the coldness of Coop’s cabin. Years before, she loved camping here alone, when there had been just a pallet and a fireplace. It had been an eagle’s nest for her in those days. Before it had become Coop and Anna’s. Now, with the storm’s destruction, it looked humble again. She was imagining what she could do to it. She imagined herself riding back and turning to see the building on fire, the black plume of smoke in the air. But this cabin was all there was left of the past, their youth.