Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  Rafael stands quietly in the middle of the room. He knows what he will be able to see from the portal, from this breadbox-sized opening. He could look towards the wooded valley east of Dému, the Bois de Mazères, where the silent burial of his mother took place many years ago … he and his father digging and four others watching, and then, at the end of his mother’s commitment to the earth, all of them stepped away from the grave and went their own ways like the spokes of a cart wheel, all of them carrying their own version of Aria, none of them wishing to share it, or dilute it within a group. No words were spoken. He was asked to play but did not; he would play later, when she inhabited him more, when she abided in him. Then he could represent her, just as he knew his father would take into himself the qualities of Aria he might unconsciously have fought against in the past. In this way she would remain with them. He can almost see the clearing in the forest where they took her that morning. They slipped her into the ground within three hours, so she lived the briefest death on the earth, as if earth were a boat that forced a quick embarkation. They had brought her back to the landscape she was most fond of. It was about five in the morning, and bird life was wild around them, as if it was his mother’s leaving.

  Rafael turns and walks along the struts of the loft. He thinks he has heard Anna calling. She has moved the ladder away and is standing there undressed, laughing at him when his head appears through the rectangle. He drops his legs through the hole and hangs on with his hands. When she sees he isn’t going to ask her for the ladder, she scrambles to provide it, but he has already dropped the fifteen feet to the floor.

  She stands there stranded, as if discovered naked on a stage with a ladder in her arms. He walks in slow circles around her, hemming her in… .

  You’ve got feathers on you.

  I’ve got feathers, at least I am partially dressed.

  Let’s have a bath. I will draw it.

  No. The river. As you are. There will be nobody there. You need to just cross the meadow, then you will be in the trees.

  His callused fingers hold her at the wrist again. So she goes with him down to the kitchen and out the back.

  Next time don’t move the ladder.

  Oh, next time I will.

  It isn’t much more than a trout stream, so they lie on their backs against pebbles in order to be fully submerged. She sees a curl of water sculpt his hair and shoulders, as if he’s being transformed. This is a first, she thinks. Then realizes so much is a first with him, her running up and down the corridor naked, the loose grip even now on her wrist, his almost sleepy sexuality where there seems no boundary between passion and curiosity and closeness, unlike one of her earlier lovers, who had been ardent but selfish.

  And yet he keeps far away from her what else he is. As though he wishes in some way to remain a stranger. Why does that happen … with such an otherwise generous man? These men with art, like nineteenth-century botanists who, though wise and obsessive, claim only professional affection for the world around them.

  But the next day, standing in the meadow, he invites Anna to visit the trailer, and she hesitates, thinking the offer is a commitment on his part, even a tentative one. It implies too much knowledge of the other—his home could be a capsule of the past or of a possible future. Her own hesitation at breaking their formality is interpreted by Rafael as shyness, or modesty, or a desire not to take the relationship further. And in some way this is not a misinterpretation of Anna. For she too has lived a stranger’s life. There are layers of compulsive secrecy in her. She knows there is a ‘flock’ of Annas, and that the Anna beside this unnamed river of Rafael’s is not the Anna giving a seminar at Berkeley on one of Alexandre Dumas’ collaborators and plot researchers, is not the Anna in San Francisco walking into Tosca’s or eating at the Tadich Grill on California Street.

  She stands looking at Rafael in the middle of that meadow. Why doesn’t she wish to visit her lover’s home? She is curious, after all. But she knows this romance is a romance, in no way an agreement towards permanence, even though much of her wants to see his silhouette moving within that suitcase of a home that once belonged to the mysterious Aria. She wants to climb onto his narrow bed with him and brace her arms against the ledge of the window, look down on his weathered face and slowly bring her head to the patch of his body that smells of basil, next to his heart.

  One of the dearest possessions that Anna has is an old map—La Carte du Tendre Pays—sweetly named, of emotions that fit into the shape of France. It was composed by women in an earlier century, during an era of male exploration and mapmaking. But this was a map of yearnings that courteously avoided sexual love, except for a darkly etched thicketed region in the north, listed as ‘Terres Inconnues.’ Well, times change. By the time she earned and saved enough money to pay for her university studies in French, she was told by a dean that the best way to learn French was to take a French lover.

  In spite of everything that had existed between Coop and Anna for those two months on the Petaluma farm, they had remained mysterious to each other. They’d really been discovering themselves. In this way they could fit into the world. But years later, never having married, never having lived with anyone in a relationship that intended permanence, she still sidled beside her lovers as if she were on Coop’s deck, glowing in secret with the discovery of herself. So there had always been and perhaps always would be a maze of unmarked roads between her and others. That emotional map of France was still true in the present, full of subtexts, social intricacies, unspoken balances of power. One still needed to move warily, with hesitance, within it.

  She sits on his bunk, next to the sacred guitar.

  So this is it.

  Yes.

  No books.

  No.

  No pictures.

  He brings out a photograph of Aria. Anna looks for the person who has distilled in her mind as a result of his stories. There’s a whimsy in his mother’s face that Anna had not expected.

  And your father? Do you have one of him?

  He does not respond to this at first.

  Somewhere I have a photograph that he is in, but you cannot see him clearly. He didn’t like being photographed. You get in their books, he’d say, and you can never get out. If he ever needed a passport, he would use someone else’s. Someone roughly the same age and hair colour. No one looks like their passport picture. Do you? Do you have a sister? You could probably use your sister’s passport if you needed to.

  I don’t have a sister.

  Don’t you? I thought you did.

  She shook her head.

  She was lying again to a lover. Had a sister. Had a past. She would not tell him. Later, if she were brave enough. About their father turning like an axe on Coop, and her praying for his breath beside him, even for a small rise of his chest, the rest of her life splintered at that moment, with her becoming a creature of a hundred natures and voices, and with a new name. She envied this man beside her, as close as Coop had been to her on that cabin floor. This man’s life seemed innocent. She envied the delightful adventures of his father and Aria. Perhaps she needed a man as content as this to tell her past to.

  All your stories, Rafael—tell me, was there nothing terrible?

  Oh, many things. Many things changed me. There was a love affair with a woman that silenced me, there was the writer who lived in the house you are staying in, there were the donkeys… .

  See, that’s what I mean!

  Rafael’s first encounter with a girl was when he was seventeen. On a Friday evening he was to walk the few miles into town, have a picnic with her beside the bridge, and then go to a cinema. He carefully picked some marigolds, and then, because he was late, decided to hitchhike. He felt the evening should go only one way, which was that he simply must not embarrass himself with a member of the opposite sex. If one minor thing went wrong, he was fated to die solitary. He could already list almost a hundred areas of danger, for at seventeen we are perfectionists.

  He walked
under the avenue of trees, his arm out every time he heard a motorcar, but no one stopped for him. Finally a Citroën ‘Tube’ stopped, with two men and a woman taking up the front. He walked to the back of the van, opened the rear door, and in his white shirt and ironed trousers, stepped into complete darkness. As the van took off, he began being nudged by three indistinct shapes that turned out to be donkeys. It was the longest ride of his life, and Anna insists that he relive every second of it for her, and the appointment that followed.

  Le rendez-vous, he says, n’a pas eu lieu. The girl took one quick look at him when the van dropped him by the town fountain, staggering out with his shirt loose and his shoes wet and shat upon, and his hands holding—in an attempt at nobility— seven or so stumps of what had been flowers. His time in the Citroën had been spent mostly attempting to save the bouquet, holding it high, so that his frame was abandoned to the animals, which had been locked in the van since the start of their journey in Montricoux.

  So what was the very worst thing about it? Anna asks.

  The worst thing was that by the time I got home, after the girl left, saying, ‘My father is ill, I must go,’ after I had washed my arms and neck and cleaned the shit off my shoes at the fountain, after going to the cinema and seeing a Gabin all alone and then walking home along the dark road with the night sky so bright that I was beginning to feel good again—I’d bought some bread and herbs, as I was hungry, and I was walking with this food with a strange kind of joy, that was something to do with escape—the worst thing was that by the time I got home everyone in the village of Dému already knew about it. Even now, if you ask about the ‘donkey boy’ or the ‘Citroën story,’ they will know who you are talking about.

  Rafael has added, in the many years since, a layer of casual irony to the trauma of the event. I try to imagine, he says, my donkey-odoured hand attempting to touch her naked waist or her sixteen-year-old shoulder during La Bête Humaine. I became used to the braying when I entered classrooms. And there was a sudden realistic neigh during the end-of-year exam a month later that made the students break into laughter, even cheering, and caused a knowing smile from the teacher.

  I had no more ‘appointments’ with girls for the next four years—and then, knowing that the worst that could happen had already happened, I breezed into meetings with them unconcerned, the most relaxed suitor for my age. But during those four years I was in exile and I concentrated on the guitar. I owe my career to a bunch of marigolds and three donkeys.

  So Rafael discovered the privacy of music, its hidden chords, all those disguised narratives. From then on, conflicts were to be within his art. And, being surrounded by the intimacy of his parents, he knew he had to somehow protect it. He was still the playful and loved son, but his mother noticed him removing himself easily from the conversations in their trailer. He had found his own enchantment, he had his own ‘emergency.’ He had an escape from the world. As if the chair he sat in was a horse to gallop into unknown distances.

  Who taught him this secret? Once, as a young musician, he witnessed a pair of dancers who began rehearsing on their own, before anyone had taken out an instrument, to a recording of piano music that they pulled across like a screen between themselves and the others who were there. They were alone already, in their intimate preparation. And he remembers something else—for Anna has asked him if he knew the writer—how, while he was a boy living near this writer’s house, he spent long afternoons with him in the garden. The old man would sit at his table in the deep hollow that was once a mare, a notebook and a pen and ink in front of him, but would not write. So Rafael found another chair and walked down into the hollow and sat with him. He remembers how there was always birdsong falling out of the tree. The writer asked what was happening in the fields beyond, and Rafael said—a bonfire, a tilling, an execution of crows, and explained how his father had sculpted a large crow out of wood, placed it on a fence, and then with bloodcurdling screams attacked it violently with a knife. He claimed this kept crows away from their garden. I see, said the man at the table, looking beyond the lake towards that site of possible activity. Rafael visited him often at the blue table in the shade of the great oak.

  When I wrote, the man said, that was the only time I would think. I would sit down with a notebook and a pen, and I would be lost in a story. The old writer, seemingly at peace, thus casually suggested to Rafael a path he might take during his own life, and taught him how he could be alone and content, guarded from all he knew, even those he loved, and in this strange way, be fully understanding of them. It was in a sense a terrible proposal of secrecy—what you might do with a life, with all those hours being separated from it—that could lead somehow to intimacy. The man had made himself an example of it. The solitary in his busy and crowded world of invention. It was one of the last things the writer talked to him about.

  It was three a.m. Rafael took the lamp off the hook and went outside. In the meadow there were two chairs, and he placed the lamp on one of them and lit the wick, then moved his own chair away so he would not be in the spill of light. He sat there, hands curled on his lap.

  Before coming outside he had been listening to Anna’s breathing in the dark trailer. She’d swept her arm back during the night and had relaxed into all of the bed. She was leaner than he was, but was used to American space. Asleep, Anna disappeared into her world, where even she was a stranger, and Rafael found himself alone once more. This was his night hour, when he was fully awake, conscious of the life of those trees that circled the field, the faint moon. Yet he was alone. The last time Rafael had laid eyes on his father was the morning he had seen him walk from Aria’s grave. Rafael had needed him in the months that followed, to coax him back into the world. But there was no communication or evidence of his father’s whereabouts. There was a maze of small towns, even cities, he could have been in. Rafael had become parentless. It was as if neither of his parents could exist without the presence of the other. Rafael had lost each wing of protection.

  Anna came up behind him in silence and put her hands on his shoulders.

  You went away again.

  No, I am still here.

  Good, I want to talk to you about something.

  To do with us …

  Not us, she said. Something about me.

  Then suddenly Anna stopped thinking, her hesitation disappeared. Ahead of them a hare was peering from the border of darkness. She waited for it to take a leap into the light. Curiosity, courage, it was what they both wished for beneath their pounding hearts.

  Out of the Past

  For some years Claire had been living two distinct lives. During the week she had a job in San Francisco with a lawyer named Vea, a senior deputy in the Office of the Public Defender. The work was mostly arduous research, and Vea had walked Claire through the craft and process of it, noting there was something carefully obsessive in this woman who was able to recognize a mouse of information miles away. Then, on weekends, Claire disappeared. She would drive out of the city to the farm south of Petaluma and spend an hour or two of the Friday night with her father.

  They sat and ate dinner across from each other. She noticed how much older he seemed. She was aware of how his clothes looked loose on him now, although he still appeared a severe man, precise as a utility in the way he moved and the way he talked at the kitchen table. He was the one who, in his twenties, had cleared most of the land, working long days, and fought back coyotes and badgers that were supposedly as ferocious as wolverines. She and Anna had heard that he’d once tracked a cougar for several days with a pair of bluetick hounds that eventually treed the two-hundred-pound animal, and that he had shot it out of the branches. The girls had yearned for him to dramatize such incidents, turn them into great adventures from his youth. But he had refused, always laconic and silent about the landscape of his past. Even now, he and Claire circled the episode that led to the absence of Anna in their lives, never speaking of it. It was as if the loss of Anna had consumed him and then exhau
sted him, until he had in some way concluded his emotion, the way he had probably done after the death of his wife, when his daughters were too young to know about it. And even if the pain and his fierce love of Anna were still somewhere, loose in his skin, he and this remaining daughter would now be silent about it. The last time Claire had spoken of Anna, her father had raised his palm into the air with an awful plea for her to stop. There was no longer a closeness between him and Claire; whatever intimacy had once existed had always been engineered by Anna.

  During these visits Claire would see him again for a brief moment the next morning, before she rode into the hills with a rain slicker, water, and food for the next thirty-six hours in a pannier. She and the horse climbed into hills that some part of her had always believed were her true home. Here she was uninterpreted by family life, could be dangerous to herself, feeling the thrill at coming upon a campsite at night after being surrounded by a ground fog, that divine state of being half lost, half bewildered, and conscious of a wisp of smoke from some campfire.