Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  THREE

  The House in Dému

  Lucien Segura Archives, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. Tape 3

  The large clock above the mirrors at Le Daroles bar has remained at twenty minutes past eleven for the last two weeks. The clockmaker has still not arrived, being somewhere in the south, correcting time along the small villages of the Pyrenees. He will come when he does with rags and oil and needle-fine tools. He will lift the heavy machine into his arms, be guided down the ladder by others, and place it on the marble counter of the bar, intentionally taking up the prime space of trade in the cafe. What will occur then is ceremonial. He will insist on his taut espresso, and behave with a ponderous authority as if he has been summoned into this town to correct the weakening eyes of the mayor’s daughter. He soaks petite flags of cloth in a sauce of oil and with tweezers inserts them into the unseen depths of the giant clock… .

  They are a strange breed, clockmakers, some surly and insensitive to all save the machine about to whir into life, some uncertain as poets about their gift. Because my stepfather—my mother’s second husband—was one, I have studied their natures. He, my first clockmaker, never felt his talent as anything special. There were just a few procedures to learn; now and then the Italians or Belgians would produce something that reversed the cause and effect, but he did not feel himself to be in any way different from the market gardener in the way he spoke about his work. And I learned the cautious and also incautious habit of my own work from him. You are given a trade, not a gift. There need not be intensity or darkness in the service of it. Still, I met no other clockmaker like him. By watching him, I learned enough to correct the pace on my own watch, but I would still take any failing timepiece to clockmakers in Toulouse so I could study the ‘grandeur’ they brought to their skill.

  I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin—as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place. One of my pleasures, when I was a boy, was to ride alongside the Garonne to where four steam engines were set up on the river-bank, pumping water out for the city of Toulouse. In all that be-stilled countryside, where you could hear a single croak of a duck, the engines suddenly roared into life, like grand apes spitting and shoving against the edge of the water. I was hypnotized. It was as if they were adults in their noisy complex labours. It was as if they could bring on darkness.

  The clock at Le Daroles in Auch was overtaken by fatigue at least once a year, and Chamayou, the proprietor, would send me a message to let me know when the clockmaker was expected, and I would travel to town for the procedure and stay at the Hotel de France to witness the event. Up close, once the great object was on the marble counter of the bar, you could read the smaller letters on the clock face. A LAMARGUERE. The clock-maker wiped the appearance of mildew or foxing off the white portal of the dial and then lifted it off the mechanism. I, in order to remain close by, needed to appear humble—he insisted on a papal-like authority—and when told I was a writer, or at least was known to be a writer, he would speak to me rather than the other spectators, as if we were on another, professional level of existence. When it was clarified that I was a poet, my status slipped a rung or two and he muttered some line I didn’t quite hear that got a laugh somewhere to his left, a laugh guided by his own.

  The skill of writing offers little to a viewer. There is only this five-centimetre relationship between your eyes and the pen. Any skill in the divining or dreaming is invisible, whereas the clock-maker visiting Auch removed his dark cotton jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, at which point I would part company from Claudile at the small round table by the window and come closer to the unrolled oilskin and its slim pockets that held tools and oil capsules, and his little flashlight for the machine’s dungeons. Soon I was almost within the pleasure of his serious demeanour. I could imagine his even greater status in those villages in the Hautes-Pyrénées, towns like Laruns, Gavarnie, Ogeu, where he must have travelled as if on the raised authority of a palanquin. I enjoyed all of this. But I believe only in the humbleness my stepfather had, who would stop in mid-operation—on hearing a song thrush—and walk to a window to search it out. Or he would pass me one of his essential knives to sharpen my blunt pencils. He constructed objects for us out of those wheels and dials that were no longer being used, so they’d move like half-formal animals across the dining room table. He was not my father, but he raised me. I learned, I suppose, a manner from him. Also that any trade or talent could be shaped discreetly without the sparks of exaggerated drama. And yet, with all his modesty, he loved the grandeur of Victor Hugo— and those slow, obedient descriptions that walked towards revolution.

  And he loved my mother. I saw him on the last days of his life lift that oil-scented right hand and enter its fingers into her ordered hair and rustle it free of its pins as if he had been offered velvet or the fur of a rare animal. Forever I hold that gesture. For me it was perhaps the last remembered pleasure belonging to him. It is the unspoiled core of whatever I know of love and family (and I have not been successful at the craft of it). Our shyness at embracing each other—it rarely happened—did not matter. I felt safe and comforted in his house. There was a calm, the two clocks in the house were silent but precise and we were safe in time. For just five years he gave us all that.

  Marseillan

  His mother, Odile Segura, had been born in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, where the Spanish influence whipped down from the Pyrenees fifty kilometres away. Miguel Invierno had crossed the Spanish border to work as a roofer in the town. She had been courted by him before he departed without warning a few months later with a trio of fellow Spaniards. In the village of Vic-Fezensac, to the north, there was a corrida every June, and each year she took her small child with her, hoping to find her lover among the crowd, but she never encountered Lucien’s father again. Instead she married the clockmaker, and she and the boy came to live with him in his home outside the village of Marseillan.

  The boy was four when he entered his stepfather’s house for the first time. There, in its gardens, with the river’s spark through the trees and a gardener’s dog sleeping in sunlight, he learned to distinguish the voices of each field. Soon he had been taught which section of the sky to search for stars during different seasons and which tree it was that held a mockingbird. Each year, for their birthdays, his mother made salade de gésiers—a plate composed of a small egg upon salad leaves, with goose gizzard, potato, chives, and a grainy mustard that Lucien would find nowhere else. Each year, in the last week of May, she would give the house a spring cleaning, weed the garden, wash and iron her husband’s shirts, and then gather the boy into a cart and travel to the corrida at Vic-Fézensac, searching the streets day and night, until she returned home empty-handed and with a mixture of disappointment and relief. The clockmaker never felt he reached the intimacy with his wife that existed between the boy and his mother. Perhaps he never was sure that, if his new wife did stumble across the Spaniard during the celebrations, she would return to their home.

  With the stepfather’s unexpected death, in spite of some inherited wealth, Odile Segura and the boy reduced their way of life. There had been little protecting the boy’s world save for that careful man. Now Lucien became more cautious and secretive. In classrooms, the others heard his closeted speech patterns. He had spent too long conversing with just himself. As he grew older he had private words, as if collected twig by twig from an open field. He spoke a few sentences to himself about a rusted gate, or an animal’s nervousness on entering a boat, and that spoken scene would become indelible to him. Already he protected himself with words, with the small and partial clarity they brought.

  The Arrival

  One evening at suppertime their silence was broken by the sound of a c
art. Their house was only a short distance from the journeying road, so it meant they had a visitor. But as the boy and his mother rose from their meal, opened the door, and looked out, an overburdened two-horse cart went past them and up the rise of the hill. It struggled another hundred metres and stopped at the one-room farmhouse that had been a vacant neighbour to them for years. Lucien and his mother stood by the doorway, halted in their expected greeting. They watched the couple in the distance descend and stretch themselves, looking like mere outlines on the crest of the hill, a man and a woman. The farmhouse had stood for years as the one inert obstacle on their horizon. The idea that it was now to contain people was exciting to the sixteen-year-old boy. It meant that he would have to be more curious, and yet cautious with his own secrecies.

  They gave the couple half an hour, and then, just before darkness, he and his mother walked over, carrying bread and milk and candles, along with a few cuttings of meat. The man and the woman were still unloading the cart. Beside the road were a modest bed in two sections, two chairs, a painted table, an iron stove and its L-shaped pipe. Amidst this minimal furniture and one basket of clothing stood the man and what now looked like a girl. As the couple turned towards the two who appeared, the young woman reached for the man’s hand briefly in some gesture or other—the boy could not tell what emotion was there, within that movement. She looked slight and the man was heavy. Lucien had seen him pacing around the small building with grandeur, as if it were a walled city he had inherited and had somehow to revive, or teach a lesson to. The boy had been reading the Greek epics and in that moment these strangers felt to him like part of a foreign army or delegation.

  If his mother had not been there, perhaps no one would have spoken, but she learned that their names were Roman and Marie-Neige. They had rented the farmhouse sight-unseen from the owner, who lived in Marseillan. Roman accepted their gift of food but refused any help in moving the furniture, even though it was becoming dark. He would do that alone. He’d already carried, while they attempted conversation, the sections of bed indoors. And the girl remained silent. Her mouth had made some movement when they were introduced, that was all. To the boy she seemed too thin, her dark hair cut short so that it barely reached her neck. He felt the man could have folded her into some part of his clothing and made her disappear. Lucien walked back downhill with his mother, turning for a last time before going in. The man had placed a lamp on the cart, and he was moving back and forth and blotting out the light every minute or so. Lucien went indoors and sat at the table and thought of what had happened. It felt as if his whole life had changed.

  They discovered that the couple had been recently married. The wife did not seem to be much older than Lucien. For the first two weeks the boy and his mother rarely saw her, for she was as cautious as wildlife. His mother made every effort to befriend the couple, especially the wife. Perhaps she had glimpsed something in that young, stunned face. So Marie-Neige was eventually coaxed under Odile Segura’s assured wing.

  The girl would enter their home tentatively, as if she first had to learn the many rules that came with this scale of ownership. The house must have seemed palatial. The boy was aware suddenly of the extra metre that rose to the ceiling, the extra breadth and paces within each room. Roman seldom came, he would be in the fields most of the day, but Lucien’s mother would bustle uphill to the farmhouse and invite the girl, who appeared traumatized in her new role. He heard his mother say to someone that Marie-Neige had nothing to do but clean their little cabinet of a house and service her husband. Lucien would ponder that line later, when he thought more about their relationship. She was as thin as a bride could be. In fact, she represented no sense of that word. Physically and in age she was Lucien’s equal—and he was only a youth. But she was married, officially translated into an adult. She had the knowledge of such a world, as if she’d earned some abstract honour in a foreign place.

  ‘Lean as a haricot,’ he had described her to his mother’s friends when the girl was not there. And for a while, after that burst of laughter, ‘Le Haricot’ was how they all referred to her. He was showing off, and while it was the perfect naming, he felt he had committed a betrayal. ‘Well, she will soon grow some bumps on her,’ his mother said. And there was more laughter.

  The Great World

  The two families nestled gradually. His mother began teaching Marie-Neige to read. And on Saturdays, Lucien walked over to help Roman, digging turnips in the fields, or rebuilding a wall along the boundary line. To the sixteen-year-old boy, Marie-Neige’s husband was an unknown force, the dangerous possibility of a figure of a father he no longer had. They rarely spoke, and didn’t see each other during the week, for Roman worked in Marseillan or sometimes even further away. Meanwhile the youth was immersed in The Black Tulip, and one afternoon when Marie-Neige sat beside him in silence he decided to read the Dumas out loud to her. “On the way to his imprisonment in Buitenhof Prison, our Cornelius heard nothing but the barking of the dog and saw nothing but the face of a young woman… .” Le Haricot looked at him with her mouth open. He could not tell whether she believed he was inventing what he spoke or whether she was already hypnotized by the fragment. He continued. Marie-Neige was in fact a year or so older; yet as he read, she began to seem full of innocence to him.

  From then on she wished to share everything he consumed from a book. During the late mornings, after helping with household duties, she learned the letters of the alphabet from his mother, and during the afternoons listened to this drug of stories as she and Lucien sat together on the porch or within the shade of the dwarf apple tree by the river. They had both grown up far from the intrigue of cities, and now they fell upon Dumas as a guide into those cities that were always in peril and where the sight of an emerald on a neck could betray a family dynasty. They accompanied horsemen who carried crucial documents across flooded plains and kept assignations with foes and lovers at midnight. The books were stuffed with unbearable love. “She gave a plaintive moan and fled, trying in vain to stifle the beating of her heart. Cornelius, left alone, could do no more than breathe in this sweet scent of Rose’s hair, which lingered like a captive between the bars.” Lying on the slim ribbon of porch, they felt at times that they could scarcely breathe, that there could be no normal life ever again.

  He read as if speaking in tongues, with such adult knowledge he was like someone wise who had been wounded in a distant battle or by a passion. And it was as if she were learning of the great world through him—it was he (and he felt it himself) who was introducing Marie-Neige at court, or riding beside her from city to city under the moon. They discovered how it was possible to send a messenger pigeon as far as The Hague, which might change everything, though more often it was necessary to ride the great distance oneself. If Lucien hesitated, shocked sometimes by a woman’s deceit or a violent beating in the fiction he was reading, Marie-Neige would interfere from within her silence, to examine what seemed to him a flaw in the carefully made fabric, and they would speak about it, discussing how, exactly, a man or a woman, a husband or a wife, might behave. For instance the line “What she wanted was beyond the power of this man, and she had to take him with his weakness.” If there were aspects he did not fully understand, or was simply bored by, she would wonder out loud why that was. He realized she had a sly wit within her—just as she had her preferences for a specific musketeer’s charm.

  They came to know, in this way, about each other’s interests and hesitations. She noticed how he raced over sections about childhood, for he found characters under the age of twenty too familiar. He already knew what youth contained. He wished only for the intricacies of adults and travel, war and battles, marriages. When he blurted this out to her he paused, embarrassed at the wall between them concerning that. She put her thin brown hand up to his cheek and kept it there not even a second. Someday you will marry. And then we will talk about that as well. No, he had said, We will not. I’m certain we will not. He stepped back into formality, so tha
t they were like two flammable matches side by side in a tinderbox.

  All this was during their first year together. By late afternoon Roman would have returned, and she would return to her real life. And he—he would race into the fields, cartwheel, aim at thin trees with a slingshot, and throw himself like a spear into the river. He’d burn through the water, eyes open in its darkness, certain he could find silver or a lost sword or a branch that would attempt to entangle him underwater. Something made him return to being just a boy in those moments after their separation.

  She would go to her narrow back window and see him leap up to a branch. If she was helping Roman bathe at the rear of their house, soaping his shoulders, she might hear a splash that reached her from the distance of his world. If Roman desired her, if he returned tumescent and hungry, he would not even walk the few feet to their bed, she’d lie back on the kitchen table, her feet dangling, barely touching the floor, and he would crash himself into her, her hands gripping whatever edge of the table she could hold on to, half thrilled by him, their heads and shoulders under the swaying unlit lamp, the skin at her spine moving up and down against the wood, cushioned only by her open cotton dress. The boy would be hardly down to the river, and their coupling and mutual satisfaction would be over. Roman would put out his hand and she’d hold it with both of hers and he would pull her off the table into the air. He was an older, stronger man, nothing like the boy, and she saw his eyes lost in bitterness and frustration, in a fury about the state of their lives. He would fling a chair into the wall of curtain that divided their one room, and she knew it could just as easily have been her body that was thrown towards that dark corner. Once or twice she saw his personality in the musketeer, Porthos, and had even seen the possibility of Porthos in him, and that was her way of remaining faithful to all Roman believed in.