Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  ‘I went to the war and I never came back,’ the thief said, crossing a field with the writer one day, and it was the most personal thing that would ever be revealed by this new friend. It had come in response to the writer’s speaking of what he had witnessed in an earlier war.

  What is his name? Lucien had asked the wife that first day as the family climbed into the cart.

  You will need to ask him that, she said.

  That had been the start of the evasiveness.

  I cannot call you a thief all the time. I shall certainly acknowledge the title when it is apt, but I need a name.

  Aùguste? Peloque? Liébard? Any of those …

  All right, Liébard it is.

  He kept the man’s joke to himself, he was fond of Un Coeur Simple. So the name Liébard was used for a while, the first of many aliases, though Lucien eventually forgot most of them. What he did remember was that in all their time together he rarely saw Liébard eat, even if he had just cooked their meal. Aria would shrug if Lucien brought it up, as if that was an explanation, as if she was saying, Men.

  Each evening during the journey, they arrived at an inn where the writer would buy them a meal; he himself would then sleep there while the family camped in the fields. The country air and the journeying brought an appetite for sleep. But one night, Lucien Segura woke, not knowing where he was. He was suffocating and threw off his blankets. Then he unbuttoned his nightshirt and went to the window. There in the darkness he saw Liébard walking along a narrow wall that ran along one side of the inn’s garden. There was enough moonlight for Lucien to recognize his travelling companion and this strange act in the middle of the night. He clapped his hands, and Liébard paused and looked up and gave a slow wave. Lucien put a coat on and went outside. They began talking quietly. He told the thief he’d been unable to sleep. Then you should not sleep, he was told. Darkness has many potent hours. It is often a waste of time dreaming through it.

  I need your help, my friend.

  Liébard was instantly silent. Lucien paused also, waiting for a reply to his dramatic statement, but there was just the invitation of the man’s silence. After a moment Lucien continued. I need you to kill someone for me. A further silence. I feel my wife has become a nightmare. She will damage our children. I feel that for the rest of my life she will haunt me.

  I have a wife too, in another life. (Liébard was talking cautiously, as if aware this might be remembered against him.) There are other ways to stop a haunting. I agree that men and women haunt each other, but your children will take care of themselves. The problem, the difficulty, is not the killing. It is harder to steal a healthy chicken and cook a good meal. There’s no skill in killing, it’s not equal combat. And as well, it will destroy you. You have lost or misplaced your wits. Perhaps your breathing, your sense of suffocation, is related to this, may have brought this on. I can tell you of an herb—la bourrache—the flower is like a little blue star and is good for your heart. It will calm you. We can locate some.…

  Lucien had not thought about his difficult, abandoned wife for weeks. So it was peculiar that she had all at once risen to the surface of his thoughts on this night as an enemy. Now he was embarrassed he had said such a thing to a stranger he had known for mere days. He thought perhaps he might still be in a dream or in half-sleep.

  Forgive me, he muttered.

  No, I am honoured that you trusted me with the possibility, said the calm voice back to him. Lucien did not quite laugh, but smiled in the darkness.

  It was the morning after the last of the fig jam, that is how the boy Rafael would remember it, shortly after they had passed through the village of Dému, that they found the home for the writer. They were resting in the back of the cart—the writer, the boy, and his mother—when they felt it halt, breaking the sleepy rhythm, as if they had stopped casually at the edge of a precipice. The boy’s father sat up front with the horse, looking silently to his left. What was tempting him was a lack of care along that pathway of trees. The grass had not been scythed for months, and the branches of the plane trees tangled into the opposing limbs. The writer sat up and followed the gaze. ‘Yes, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps. Will you wait here?’ All first investigations of possible houses were to be made alone. The family in the cart could not select a home for the man any more than he would know how to choose the correct field for the family—he would not know, for instance, that it should contain a number of exits for them to feel secure. Finding the final home for one’s remaining days was like a decision to be made in a fairy tale, with the prince or princess needing to select a marriage partner before twilight. It had to be a wise but also private desire, knowing what was honestly needed, although at first it might seem appalling—a blind girl instead of a chatelaine, a hedgehog instead of a blue-blooded suitor. The outside world would not know best. And so the family remained in the cart and watched the writer kick his legs to remove the stiffness of sleep and begin his cautious and suddenly youthful walk towards the possible home.

  Astolphe

  Two days after the writer bought the house along with the nine hectares of land that surrounded it, the two men, Lucien and Liébard, entered the chest-high grass with scythes. Within minutes they had disappeared from each other. Only if one of them paused could he hear the other’s movement, the ceaseless sweep of a blade or, during longer silences, the sharpening of its metal with a stone. They began before dawn, while it was still cool and half dark, and even then insects rose into the air and surrounded them. Their scythes swept above the ground to avoid stones and roots. It would truly have been easier to burn the grass. But Liébard, who was helping Lucien in his campaign to reclaim the overgrown field, had insisted that the meadow needed the ant and the cricket whose lives would be destroyed by such a fire. The unseen traffic was necessary. And the writer might long for that cricket in the grass, or a cicada within the trees in the future.

  They pulled the tough blueberry roots out of the ground and burned vines along with the cut grass on the perimeters of the field. They raked open the soil and began crop-seeding it so that bacteria in the mustard and clover would eventually draw in nitrogen. At dusk they walked onto other properties, gathered seeds, and returned with légumineuses, scattering this family of beans and peas onto the writer’s land. Why not? demanded Liébard, who was as much of a traveller in some ways as a blown seed or a bee.

  Liébard knew what comforted winged creatures in terms of domicile. He proposed not just birdhouses, but holes drilled into blocks of wood for flying insects. He collected sunflowers and split their stalks and tied them against branches to create a home for bugs. He crammed hay into jars for centipedes to use, for they would eventually eat the larvae of bugs that attacked fruit trees. He was aware of the awkward moral balance in nature. You gave and you took away. Wasps lay eggs that ate the larvae of butterflies, but then wasps were better for plant life than the beautiful flutterers, just as Liébard knew that it was lazy wealth in the fluttering class that made them mean-spirited. In his mépris he knew a thing or two about them—the result of sightings and witnessings over the years, first in towns and now in fields. Although Liébard would never claim to be a moral man. He himself could be diverted by a feather.

  On the second day some distance from the writer’s house, the boy discovered a field full of exits. Hearing of this, Lucien suggested the family camp there if they wished. Before actually making the offer, he told them he was giving them a field, not suggesting that he needed companionship. Perhaps they would not even talk much again, but he had a limit of hectares and it was unlikely he would ever journey beyond the small lake. And the field in question was a distance beyond that.

  The proposal was this: If Liébard would help him clear the overgrown fields beside the house and clarify the lawns under the full-branched chestnut trees, then he and his family were welcome to stay on that land for as long as they desired. Lucien would sign any formal document if Liébard wished, but Liébard waived that possibility. He disapp
roved of putting pen to paper—that and excessive dialogue had always got him into trouble in the past. And while they were talking, in a footnote to the conversation, Liébard announced that he was relinquishing the name he’d been using, and was now taking the name Astolphe.

  Within an hour the boy, who was used to these changes, began calling his father Astolphe. Lucien realized the man used names like passwords, all of them with a brief life span. But this time the thief wished that he had owned the name earlier in his life. He spent the first day imagining moments from his past when he could have been ‘Astolphe,’ when he might have behaved and participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such a name. It led to the kind of biographical reconsideration a man might make when looking at photographs of a wife or lover in an earlier time, in her teens or twenties, which always brought the wish to have known her then—even that dress from another decade, whose tender buttons he might carefully unfasten; even to taste the fruit in the flowering tree behind her.... The thief liked the sound of the name, its aftereffect, its airiness, with a hint of an echo. With such a name it would almost be possible for this thickset man to turn into a three-ounce bird or a subtle grammatical form.

  The writer watched him with the absinthe-smelling book on his lap. The name Astolphe appeared in the sixteenth-century Orlando Furioso. How had this man come across it? Would he have stolen such a book in the past—did thieves even steal books? How did he gather such things into his pockets?

  Journey

  While the two men worked in the fields, Aria and the boy returned south, to where they had previously lived, to collect their caravan. Their journey on horseback took several days, and they crossed the fan of rivers—the Ardour, the Baïse, the Gimone. They went south and east, riding into the fertile lands. On the fourth evening they arrived in darkness at the outskirts of Saint-Martory, where they had left their horses and caravan. There was a bonfire and music, and they sat talking to others for a few hours and later slept in their narrow familiar beds. The next day they dug up herbs and plants from their small plot that would survive the journey back to Dému, and decided what goods and property to leave behind.

  Soon they were heading north, returning by a different route because with the swaying caravan they needed wider roads. There could be no more shortcuts by simply opening gates and crossing fields, or even fording a stream where the water was deep; there was too much weight for the horses to pull from the sandy soil. They were going towards Plaisance, and from there they would leave the company of the Arros River and turn west.

  They took their time and stopped wherever they wished. Rafael built a fire while Aria coursed over the fields, looking for things to eat. An onion or two, rosemary, leeks. Lunch was a collection of minor plants and shoots as if gathered by a pair of birds rushing and diving over the fields. It was barely there on their tongues. When the meal was over, if the stream or river was private enough, they would strip off their clothes and swim. Aria was determined that Rafael never have a fear of water like his father, so she would laugh as she ran down the bank and then grin at him when she surfaced out of the river. She did not want a fearful child. The boy swam into her arms and embraced her, kissed her shoulders. There was a sensuality between them, as there was between the boy and his father in their cuddling affection. Back on dry land she bowed her head and he dried her long, dark hair with his shirt.

  Sometimes during their journey great storms came at night, out of the west, from the ocean, near Ségalas, at Buzon; and when they were west of Saint-Justin, lightning lit up the river like a path through history and she grabbed the boy to stop him from leaping into its brief beauty. It was a season of storms. She imagined the old writer up at Dému, trying unsuccessfully to persuade her husband to sleep in the mostly empty house.

  She and Rafael kept the caravan in the middle of open fields and let the horses loose. Released, they hardly moved, as if pretending that there was nothing dangerous, that it was safer than galloping into darkness. There were evenings when Aria and Rafael stood on the dry night-grass with a hundred layers of stars above them. Uncountable. A million orchestras. The boy could scarcely store the delirious information. That journey south with his mother and the return north broke his heart again and again with happiness. It was when he felt most clearly that there was no distinction between himself and what was beyond him—a tree’s sigh or his mother’s song, could, it seemed, have been generated by his body. Just as whatever gesture he made was an act performed by the world around him.

  They were a few miles north of Plaisance when the eclipse paused over the Gers. The darkness came fast into the afternoon. Rafael was lifting a pail for a nervous horse to drink from and became conscious of the darkness only because it was growing cold. He spun around and saw his mother looking at him with concern. Grey rain started falling in the half-light, though it was the wind that bewildered everything, arcing the trees down so they hovered almost parallel to the ground. He saw the horse’s eye lolling, distracted, in front of him as if it too were part of this peculiar nature. He didn’t know what an eclipse was. He thought it might be some vengeance that came with the end of the world. He was holding the horse’s neck, looking for rope to secure the animal, but there was none, so he held on to the mane with his hands. If the horse got loose they would never find it. When the animal began to pivot, he swung himself onto its back, just as his mother yelled out No! and the horse burst through the trees into further darkness with the boy upon it.

  Rafael put his head down against the horse’s neck, and he became the animal’s eyes, witnessing the quick choices of direction. He was saddle-less, clinging to the wet-coated creature in its stumbles and swerves until it emerged into a vast field where the sky was a shade lighter than under the trees. The horse now doubled its speed and flung itself into the open. The boy could hear his own breath alongside the breath of the horse, he could hear the hooves in the long grass, their sudden clatter over a wooden bridge after the muted sound of the earth. He was holding on to the warm blood of the animal. For perhaps a minute— time was measureless now—they had gone through a village where only the two of them moved in the blackness, the boy’s leg brushing a cart, then a child, and then they had come through it, into fields again beside a river. Then there was a slow return of light, and there was heat once more around them and in the wet grass. Time was in a broken state. The sky appeared filled with a bright moonlight, though it was day. The horse calmed, aware now of the flylike rider whose knees clutched it, the boy’s feet bare from another time, when they were serene under the trees, and he had approached this animal with a pail of water.

  Rafael rode back slowly, field after field. They were all new to him. He looked for the village, but whatever community they’d rushed through he never encountered again. They crossed over the wooden bridge, then saw the black horizon of forest and soon he could make out his mother pacing on the edge of it. He never hurried the horse. He finally dismounted lying back and sliding off the slippery wall of the animal. He could hardly stand in front of Aria, though he did, shaken by her and then embraced.

  Two Photographs

  There are two photographs pinned up on the wall of the kitchen in Dému. One is a picture taken of Lucien Segura in this last phase of his life, sitting on a garden bench with a dark branch fanning out above him. There is a sense of formality as well as disorder in the picture. And the disorder comes from the appearance of the writer—his unironed shirt, his moustache, which looks like something borrowed from an animal—though what is most informal is the openness of his face, as if it has just been blessed. His laugh, for instance—there is no attempt to hide the shaggy randomness, or even the unsightly gap of a missing tooth. This was a discreet man who used to laugh internally, in a hidden way.

  On the righthand side of the picture is a dark blur, something unknown, like raw paint imposed on an otherwise immaculate canvas, or perhaps it is a bat in the daylight, caught flying between camera and writer. This
is the only photographic capturing of Lucien’s friend Liébard, or Astolphe, who turned on the photographer with a surprising belligerence when he heard the shutter begin to slip into place, turning so quickly that he was able to dissolve his appearance.

  The other picture, taken on the same grounds, was snapped all these years later by the belligerent and blurred subject’s son, Rafael. It is of the woman he met in the writer’s house. He used her camera, and the image has been blown up to be the same size as the other, so it is, in a way, a partner to it.

  We are much closer to the subject in this picture. Photography has moved in from the middle distance as the century progressed, eliminating vistas, the great forests, the ranging hills.

  The woman’s figure is naked from the waist up, moving forward, just about to break free of focus. The tanned body willful, laughing, because she has woven the roots of two small muddy plants into her blond hair, so it appears as if mullein and rosemary are growing out of the plastered earth on her head. There’s a wet muck across her smiling mouth, and on her lean shoulders and arms. It is as if her energy and sensuality have been drawn from the air surrounding her. We look at this picture and imagine also the person with the camera, walking backwards at the same pace as the subject so that she remains in focus. We can guess the relationship between the unseen photographer and this laughing muddy woman, weeds around the fingers of her hand gesturing to him in intimate argumentative pleasure. This person who is barely Anna.