Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  That night, lying flat on her back, Claire heard someone moving in the dark around her bed. She could hear breathing close by. She feared it might be the men who had beaten him, who had just come into the house. There was a leap, and Dorn’s dog, who had been deciding from which side to enter the bed, burrowed next to her under the covers, its claws towards her. For a while it was still, and then, wanting more space, it pressed the claws gently, then more firmly, like tuning forks into her back.

  By eight the next morning, Ruth had left for work. Dorn spread a large piece of velour over the sofa and with Claire’s help began stitching costumes for the medieval feast that was an annual local event. It was to be held that night in the historic Miners Foundry, now a community centre, where everyone would be arriving in royal, peasant, or troubadour costumes. Dorn interrupted his brutal sewing by flinging a giant flank of meat, gar-licked and herbed, on the barbecue. He insisted that Claire and Coop participate in the ceremonies. It was just a local crowd. He broke into his favourite songs all afternoon while they worked on capes and hoods. ‘In Delaware when I was younger …’ He sang verse after verse of that song, and made up a few others. ‘Now, that’s a great song. Great song!’ Ruth and their daughter returned home at five, and soon they were all transformed into fourteenth-century European villagers, Dorn’s nonremovable beads and shells the only hints of the contemporary. Coop and Dorn carried the giant platter of meat, and Ruth brought a bowl of edamame beans. But the narrow streets of Nevada City were full of war protesters amid the music of mandolins and flutes. Twelve years after the American bombing of the Gulf in 1991, America was poised to attack Iraq again, and Pacifica and NPR stations had been updating information all day. So Claire found herself alongside medieval monks carrying antiwar placards to the event.

  Dorn pulled his squirming daughter out for the first dance of the evening, and fifteen minutes later dragged Claire out too, crushing her to his doublet. She leaned against this Delaware-born (as in the song) anarchic hippie conspiracy-theorist, now a comfortably successful poker player living like a gentleman farmer in this town in the foothills.

  The night ended with Dorn’s breaking the time capsule of the Middle Ages by persuading the high school band to play ‘Fire on the Mountain.’ But much had happened before that. During the dinner, a five-year-old sat beside Coop at one of the decorated trestle tables. There was almost no conversation between them, because the boy was listening intently to a transistor radio. Finally he switched it off and turned to Coop and told him the Americans were bombing Baghdad. Coop was startled. The child was speaking about it casually, and insisted on giving him details, until Coop said, ‘Tell that man over there,’ pointing to Dorn, who was with a chiropractor, submitting himself to a complex arm hold. So the boy went over and waited until Dorn was released, then tugged at his arm. The two adults bent down, and the boy said something they could not catch because of the noise around them. Dorn lifted the boy into his arms. ‘What’s up, Finnegan?’ Coop heard him say. And the boy told him.

  Dorn put the boy down and stood there a moment. Then he walked over to his wife and slid his arm around her, listening while she continued talking to a friend. Ruth looked at Dorn, and he moved his hand down her arm, not letting the contact go even for a moment. He gave her a little tug, and she followed him to a side door. Coop watched the man they said was his friend profiled in the doorway, where coloured triangular flags of red and blue and yellow and white floated in a light breeze. Ruth kept staring at Dorn as he spoke, then turned away to look into the dark beyond the flags. She was hearing about America bombing a civilian city.

  Coop began walking towards them, his brain struggling to hold on to something. He heard Ruth say, as he approached, ‘Look at your friend, even he’s not innocent. No one here is. Not me. Not you. Not even you. We’re the barbarians too. We keep letting this happen.’ Dorn was not responding, until her hand ripped at his neck and a hundred small shells paused on his chest for a second, then clattered to the floor. Children began scrambling for them. Coop in his silence had something by the tail, and he couldn’t name it. He stood in front of them and didn’t know what to say. He could see tears on Ruth’s face. The music got louder, suddenly.

  What had he been about to say to them? Something about her? Something he’d seen? She went up to him, weeping, and put her arms around him. ‘Dance with me, Coop. Will you?’ He put his arms up and she moved gently in against him, remembering the bruises. They aligned themselves to the dance. More and more children came onto the floor, then adults, as if coupled in another time, at an outbreak in the Hundred Years’ War. Much later, Dorn, very drunk, grabbed the mandolin from a six-foot-tall teenager and joined the band, insisting on the endless version of ‘Fire on the Mountain.’

  The next morning nobody woke early, except for Coop, who sat alone at the kitchen table.

  Was this his life before this life? What he was looking at felt familiar only because he had been here in this very same place the day before. There was nothing older than a few days in what he remembered. And what he held now, like a smooth doorless object in his mind, was his dance with the woman named Ruth. He had been able to tell right away that if he had danced in his earlier life he could not have been good. He had thought about this for a moment and then said it out loud to her. And she had said, ‘That’s right.’ ‘Begin the Beguine,’ he said. And she had not responded.

  He pondered now her manner, the way she had said, ‘That’s right.’ As in, ‘It was certainly a well-known fact among us.’ What was she to him? A friend? Nothing? Was she speaking only of the present when she said, ‘That’s right’? But that was not the way the remark had been said to him. Who was Ruth? She had a name as small as a keyhole. She had danced with him. She’d wept in his arms.

  Coop’s mind held only a few distant things. A Polaroid of him by the highway, an owl on the road, a woman bent over a blue flame, a dance to the sound of flags. Otherwise his mind was this scrubbed table that could barely remember holding cups, or plates, or slices of bread, or a girl’s tired head.

  Driving to San Francisco, Claire reaches for Coop’s hand.

  I need you to meet my father.

  Your father … Why?

  He brought you up, Coop. And he’s old now. So old. After you went away, and after my sister went away, he barely talked. Not even to me. He made himself alone. I want you to see him.

  I don’t know him.

  He will want to meet you, Coop. And you need to say your good-byes. Perhaps this is important for you.

  She did not want to explain any more to him, knowing this act could be terrible, even brutal. Or it would be generous. Or break her father’s heart again. All of these things were possible. But so much had been wasted. She had only a distant father, and now Coop, like this, a boy remembering nothing. She wanted to fold the two halves of her life together like a map. She imagined her father, standing now on the edge of the cornfield, his white beard speckled by the shadows of the long green leaves, an awkward, solitary man, hungry for the family he had brought together and then lost—his wife in childbirth, this orphan son of a neighbour, and Anna, whom he had loved probably most of all, who was lost to them forever. There was just herself, Claire, not of his blood, the extra daughter he had brought home from the hospital in Santa Rosa.

  From San Francisco they drove north over the Golden Gate Bridge, then left the highway and took a country road until they came into Nicasio. She said she was tired and asked Coop to drive. They went on, and saw the bent tree growing out of the great rock by the reservoir. The car wound along the Petaluma road into the hills, bordered on one side by giant poplars. She bit her tongue, looked out of her window seemingly unconcerned. As the car reached the peak he swerved the steering wheel with one hand casually to the right and they drove down the narrow farm road. He turned the key off, and they were gliding between fences towards the farmhouse. They went over the old speed bump of tires, and she saw her horse approaching the fence, and she saw Coop
looking over the steering wheel into the old world.

  Rafael and I follow the river that disappears under a chaos of boulders and emerges once more a few hundred yards further in the forest. We walk in silence beside it. Eventually we come to a ford where our river meets a road and covers it, or from another perspective, where the road has come upon the river and sunk below its surface, as if from a life lived to a life imagined. We have been following the river, so that now we must look on the road as a stranger. The depth of water is about twelve inches, more when the spring storms come racing at low level over the fields and leap into the trees so nests capsize and there is the crack of old branches and then silence before each plummets in their fall. The forest, Rafael says, always so full of revival and farewell.

  They merge, the river and the road, like two lives, a tale told backwards and a tale told first. We see a vista of fields and walk through the clear water that floods the gravel path, leaving the background of forest with each step.

  TWO

  The Family in the Cart

  The House

  The writer Lucien Segura moved through an overgrown meadow abundant with insects that sprang into the air as he approached. He had been following a path. The grass was chest-high, even higher, so he was using his arms in a swimming motion to move forward. How long was it since this grass was last cut down or burned? A generation, or more? About the time when he was a boy?

  After ten minutes he stood motionless in the claustrophobia and heat. He had no idea how far and for how long he would have to keep moving to be free of it. There seemed to be a clearing about thirty metres away, for some charm trees stood there, barely moving. As he looked at them he saw, unbelievably, a peacock flying over the sealike surface of the rough pasture. The bird reached and settled within the darkness of one of the trees, its blue shape disguised now as a horizontal branch.

  A poem from his youth about a strange bird from the foothills had been one of his most famous verses, memorized, explicated, exfoliated in schools until there was nothing left but a throat bone and a claw. The lines had become a mockery for him. There had been, in fact, no such rare bird in his youth. None had ever flown across his stepfather’s fields. And now, suddenly, one existed as a reality.

  He wished he had worn a hat. And the shirt he was wearing was wrong for this labour. He’d simply begun walking into the field as part of a brief reconnaissance of a property he might purchase. The house had come with a formal driveway of plane trees and several hectares of abandoned land. He began moving forward again and, unable to see what was below him, stumbled across a wooden object. A bench or a pump. He got to his knees, cleared the grass away, and discovered it was a wooden boat. The sound of insects thickened around him, and he felt even more alone.

  Three weeks earlier he had left his home near Marseillan, which his stepfather had willed to his mother and which his mother had willed to him, and he had left his wife and family. Lucien Segura, in old age, was traversing the region of the Gers in a horse-drawn cart, in search of a new home. Now and then he gave travellers a ride in order to escape the strictness of this new solitude. They were of varying ages, from all walks of life, some alone, some who swung themselves onto the cart with one or two children and a dog. He conversed with them openly, as he always did with strangers, and heard the stories about forests they had worked in, their settlements by rivers, the gardens they manicured for a week’s pay. As he listened, he entered their worlds invisibly.

  Until suddenly, one day, Lucien Segura had clambered off the cart and asked the family that was travelling with him to stay with his belongings. Then he had slowly walked like a pawn along the formal pathway of trees and found a shuttered and closed-up house. He broke the lock off with a heavy stone and entered a hallway full of dusty light. A door led into a kitchen, another to a dining room. He walked along the hollow-sounding corridor not even glancing at rooms, reached the back door and pushed it free of an old clasp, then stepped into the garden and beyond that into the depth of the long grass.

  Now on his knees, the old writer touched the porous planks of the abandoned boat. It was the size of a child’s bed, half boat, half raft, with space between the planks. There was a manaclelike remnant of an oarlock on the side, and the tail of a rudder. It was a dried-up object, baked for years by the sun and tunnelled into for years by insects. But it meant there was possibly water nearby, and as soon as he assumed that, he began to smell it in the air and stood up, lifting his face to the sky. He bustled forward and within moments came upon the small lake. He stripped down and slipped into the water, all the scratches and bites on him covered now in its coldness.

  For most of his life he had been regarded as a solitary. He was described once by an acquaintance as being ‘difficult as a bear,’ and this rough, impolite image projected onto the contained world around him was useful as well as false; it gave him space, and a border. But it was true that in spite of the gregarious situation of his family he lived mostly an imaginary life. When his marriage was dying, he found somewhere within himself the grisette Claudile and wrote three books about her divergent life. The fictional girl had kept him company. If this was sickness or a perversion of life, it was a sickness that had helped him overcome that difficult time, and he would never demean it, or her. He would remain faithful to this person in the town of Auch whose fate he’d invented and shared with readers. Some had come to love her, and wrote him letters as though he knew her in real life, not just in a fiction.

  Cher Monsieur—

  I have recently reminded myself of a dinner in which Claudile Rothère and her sister spoke of fig jam, telling how they love it.

  So I have kept a pot for you, made by a friend living in the countryside of Cahors. I hope, sir, you enjoy it.

  With my deepest regards,

  Sarah S

  Lucien had received this package a few days before leaving Marseillan, and now and then on his journey he carefully reopened the envelope and reread the letter—the formality and kindness of it—as if it were a billet-doux. He had brought the fig jam with him, and during the afternoons he would, with a similar formality, open it and share it with whoever was in the cart with him, most recently with three travellers—an ‘old thief,’ as the man called himself, and his younger wife and their son. They had been with him for several days, and by now Lucien was accustomed to them. Like him they were looking for a new home, so theirs was a journey similar to his. ‘La confiture de figue!’ he announced. ‘Faite par une dame à Cahors.’ The eyes of the young son at first pretended to gaze at nothing, like a falsely polite dog. Then he watched the knife’s spread of the jam, and like that dog, he watched the adults eat first, swallowing when they swallowed, so he could feel he had already eaten three portions of it before he consumed his own.

  The thief would disappear early in the mornings, before anyone was awake, returning at noon with berries, fresh herbs, sometimes a hare, all rescued, as he called the act, from the surrounding fields. Coming over a rise, they would first smell the smoke of a fire and then see him beside it, cooking by the edge of the road. He had a rough grey stubble that made him appear ponderous, as if used to lazy movement, but he could disappear in an instant or arrive just as quickly, providing the alfresco lunch. Lucien therefore felt he himself should be responsible for other meals—first of all, beverage and fig jam at four in the afternoon, and then dinner, to be purchased at an inn in one of the villages they passed through.

  The cart would halt whenever Lucien smelled the possibility of an available house. He spoke with mailmen and carpenters as to where there might be an abandoned farmhouse for sale. Meanwhile the thief’s young wife would go off on the spare horse, the boy riding behind her, to search along the side roads for a possible settlement for her family. The three of them were travellers, Gypsies, gitans, who had left their caravan in the south and were coming north to find a new home. They might, he knew, at any moment curl off and decide to remain in some anonymous field. Already Lucien felt he woul
d miss them. He was enjoying the man’s company, as well as the woman’s singing in the mornings. Which had come first, he asked her, her name, which was Aria, or her pleasure in singing? ‘Who knows,’ the husband said, ‘She’s Romani, they have so many names. The secret name, which is never used but is her truest name, which only her mother knows, that’s hidden to confuse supernatural spirits—it keeps the true identity of the child from them. And the second name, which is a Roma name, is usually used only by them. And that one is Aria.’

  And your name, then? Lucien asked.

  I am not Roma, the husband said. I have simply attached myself to her, I live in her world. I am not important.

  The whole family felt half dreamt, especially in the way each of them wandered off whimsically, the man in the morning, the woman and the boy in the afternoon. Sometimes Lucien would be in front, guiding the horse, talking about something, and would realize all at once that there was no one else with him. They had slipped off, as if from a boat, and were swimming towards those poplars.

  No, I don’t have a name, a permanent name, the husband said, when asked again. I know the Roma language, enough to survive, but … His sentences were halfhearted, unpersuasive. He appeared uncertain of all things, and was content to reside in a state as humble as a sparrow. The boy, whose name was Rafael, longed for information and practical lessons and constantly asked the opinions of the old writer. Because of this, Lucien assumed there might be a jealousy from the father, but the man turned out to be happiest listening to their discussions, while pretending to take none of them in.

  From the beginning each man regarded the other almost as a mirror. Two or three times a day one would catch the gaze of the other. Even Aria recognized the echo between them. They had a similar build, and the writer, in spite of his supposed fame, had a hesitancy that made him as guarded as this shyest of thieves. If the man was a thief. Lucien would never witness any illegal act by him. And while the writer was considerably older, it was Aria’s husband who was not quite of this world, his remarks porous, his talents invisible, the paths he took almost erased. Once Lucien picked up a book that the thief had been reading, and saw a sprig of absinthe leaves used as a bookmark. That felt like the only certain thing about the man, and from then on, every few days, the writer carefully noted the progress of the absinthe, making its own journey through the plot.