Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  A veillée held the community together, it was where everyone volunteered work, even if exhausted. Outside was a defiant landscape where the crops hardly grew, where life was a constantly repeating wheel, so the truisms the men passed around had a clear-eyed meanness. ‘Swineherd in this world, swineherd in the next.’ It was the only place where Roman and Marie-Neige ate properly. By the end of a day’s work they were already in a state of exhaustion, but they donated hours to the veillée because of the available food. He could see her across the room, near the fire, involved with the night laundry, looking like a child among the other women. Courtships took place in the half-dark peripheries, even as lovers overheard the bitter wisdoms about desire. So that Marie-Neige was often approached by youths or men as old as Roman, while she twisted the wet sheets and hung them to dry against the firelight.

  These were the most exciting days of her life. There was the adventure of disguise. And sleep was easy, without fear. In the barn, crowded with others, she felt a wall of security beside Roman, now forced to be platonic in his caring. When they wished or needed to make love, the lack of privacy and the seeming sin of brotherly love that surrounded the act made the tension and desire... magnificent. Every wish for sound between them was impossible and could be translated only into a half-lit glance. His hand on her back in the night, which had become gentle with this caution, was enough for her. So she would turn slowly from the blunt advances of others during the veillée and gaze towards the darkness of the workingmen, where she knew Roman would be watching her, and run her fingers through her hair and shrug.

  And so wait for night. The hand on her shoulder. Touching the soft untouched back of her knee. They lay there, a brother and sister, silent and calm save for this brush of him against her. If someone lit a rush-light, its flood of ochre would reveal a nearness that might seem to have occurred accidentally during sleep. But hours of darkness cloaked them. She pushed back briefly against him and waited. He was already within her and held on to the stasis of this, did not wish it to end. A whisper. When he felt himself coming, his hand covered her mouth to silence it, though all noise came from the violence of his breath at her ear. And now, if a rush-light were held up in the middle of the great barn, the posture of the two would seem like a strangling, a brother in an old feud with a sister.

  In the beginning this posing as siblings had made them anonymous to each other, but later, blindfolded this way, in a role, they knew each other’s truthful desires. And what they discovered was not only conjugal love, but the quick danger of life around them. They were caught in the attempt at survival among strangers, these two who were strangers to each other. And they saw that anything, everything, could be taken away, there was nothing that could be held on to except each other in this ironlike world that appeared to stretch out for the rest of their lives.

  Billet-doux

  When Lucien Segura’s mother died, a few weeks before his own wedding, Le Haricot entered the house, for the first time uninvited, drew a chair beside the coffin, and rested her head against the black pine. She would not move away. She had been befriended and had grown magically in the shadow cast by this woman. And then with the recent imprisonment of Roman, the result of his assaulting a carpenter in Barran, Marie-Neige had been close to losing their farmhouse, until Lucien’s mother had paid the rent. Thus, when Marie-Neige keened and wailed beside the coffin, Lucien believed she might in part be fearing the loss of her home, and he had taken her aside and told her it was still hers and he would cover the rent; she stared at him with a look of scorn and turned away. She sat down in the chair again and put her head against the black pine. Lucien realized he had insulted her, misinterpreted her sorrow. After that he did not see her for a long time, and when he did she would not speak to him. Nothing he could say would remove the damage.

  In the years between their first meeting and his wedding, there were two indelible versions of Marie-Neige that Lucien had been unable to adjust and combine into one, as if gazing into a flawed stereoscope. There was the seventeen-year-old woman in a yellow cotton dress. She wore it constantly during those early years in the fields, while carrying water from the river to the barn animals, or when visiting their house. And then the person now ten years older, who had become this woman, with Lucien almost unaware of it. If he was conscious of any growing in those years, it was more to do with himself, his tentative beard, the removal of his beard, his mother’s pallor. Not her.

  Now, with the insult, he felt he had lost her. Marie-Neige would scarcely acknowledge him. But there was a moment at his wedding when she surprised him by touching his shoulder and, as he turned, slipped into his arms wordlessly to dance. He was more startled than was courteous. But she did not seem to care. He said something to break the tension, nothing really, a bit of small talk, but she did not answer him, just looked up and watched his face, watched this essential friend who was now finally married, like her, who had once said they would not talk about it. Her expression then was the quizzical and knowing look an animal can give, as if she already knew what excuse or evasion he would provide. So he forgot words for the rest of the dance and held her not too close, in order that he could look at her properly. He could feel the ‘bumps’ his mother had joked about years before. She wore, of course, a simple cotton dress, but one he had never seen. And her thick black hair was combed precisely, clean as the night. He leaned forward and smelled it. The smell of the river. Marie-Neige had taken care, even with this simplicity, in preparing herself for his wedding. It could be she had spent as much time as the bride. And now they were dancing, both of them unconcerned with any rules to do with steps, and remembering it had been his mother who had taught both of them how to waltz.

  He thought her beauty came because of her familiarity to him, though this was not the person he had grown up with. When he put the two mental photographs of her onto a stereoscope, side by side, he could see echoes of a look. But there was also a tug in him, a recognition that within this woman was a private nature he always felt close to. It was not just her face and body. He assumed he was marrying the face and body he wanted and desired. But here was something much larger, more confusing, here was a whole field, yet more intimate, a heart that was beyond him, who had chosen Porthos among the musketeers, and he had never understood why.

  And as the music ended he saw her, like a woman in a romance, pull from her cotton sleeve a note that she pushed into his breast pocket. It would burn there unread for another hour as he danced and talked with in-laws who did not matter to him, who got in the way, whose bloodline connection to him or his wife he could not care less about. Everything that was important to him existed suddenly in the potency of Marie-Neige. He could tell what the shallow frieze of the wedding party that surrounded them would continue to be, and yet the one he knew best—he could not conceive how she would behave or respond to him in a week, or even in an hour. She had stepped into more than his arms for a dance, had waited for the precise seconds so it was possible and socially forgivable—the sunlit wedding procession, the eternal meal—and she had passed him a billet-doux as if they were within a Dumas. The note she had written said Good-bye. Then it said Hello. And then it reminded him that A message sent by pigeon to The Hague can sometimes change everything. She had, like one of those partially villainous and always evolving heroines, turned his heart over on the wrong day.

  Night Work

  Time passed before he saw her again. Lucien and his bride left Marseillan and journeyed north, to the forests of southern Brittany, then Paris, and when they returned three months later the formality of his relationship with Marie-Neige had hardened again. He had entered the central and compromising realm of a marriage; he had also realized that, if he was going to be more than just a married man, he had to take his own work seriously.

  He wrote during the late mornings and afternoons in what had once been his stepfather’s workroom. The view from that window still held most of the natural world of his childhood, though the river was
hidden now by overgrown trees. Then, after dinner, when his wife or any visitors had retired, he returned to its quiet and darkness, and before turning on the lamp, allowed himself to become conscious of the smell of the clockmaker’s oils that had once filled this space. He sat there weighing what was already written, half-dreamt during the day, until he fell on a scrap of sentence, something uncommitted, that would open a door for him. He worked for much of the night, aware of the darkness beyond his lamp. Only the pen and notebooks were alive, the rest of the world somewhere in the cliff-fall of dreams. Now and then he heard words spoken into a pillow in a far bedroom, a clue of another reality, like a juniper root shifting within the earth. He read out loud to himself, the way she had read to him, when his mother was alive, when Marie-Neige was seventeen, and Balzac was still too difficult for them. They’d entered the great world this way. Was he in such a place now?

  He pushed the glass doors open and walked into the night so the coldness filled his shirt. He noticed the square of a lit window on the slope of the hill. There was a tightrope between the two farms, and below it an abyss.

  In-laws

  He was never fully certain as to what made him write. He had seen his mother dance at her wedding with the clockmaker, just a few embraced steps. And once with a cat—his mother dancing with a cat in a meadow, he remembered that. It had become for him this delicious, witnessed example. It was a way he could enter the world as himself.

  The few women who knew him well (a mother, the neighbouring woman) saw how his early success altered him. He turned from uncertainty into a more determined and more private youth. He camouflaged his life. He seemed to them like a creature who had slipped into a mistaken garden of celebrity. He was now in a well-lit place, such as those zoos in distant countries where one is able in the hours of night to witness the behaviour of animals that assume they are cloaked in darkness.

  When he had been about to marry, his fiancee’s family recommended a fortune-teller for them, someone who was known to predict accurate fates to those living in the village. The man read their stars and then whispered some safe sentences about the future. They were about to return to the sunlight of Blaziet when the seer grabbed Lucien Segura’s sleeve and asked, ‘You are a good gardener?’ No, he said, refusing to reveal his profession. The man looked at him with disbelief, then let go of his arm. Lucien and his future wife left the curtained parlour and walked arm in arm for an hour or two along a road banked with poppies, and into a marriage that created two daughters. There would be years of compatibility, and then bitterness, and who knew when that line was traversed, on what night, at what hour. Over what betrayal. They slipped over this as over a faint rise in the road, like a small vessel crossing the equator unaware, so that in fact their whole universe was now upside down.

  Essays were being published in cities about his career, his craft, his psychosis, his landscape, the lack of close friends, his secretive and diverse nature, his soul. They reproduced maps of the town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and the Fan of Gascony, and Marseillan. Every local cleric, neighbouring butcher, and mailman came out from the quiet corners of Lucien Segura’s world with a story or an insight that would expose his silence. It turned out that his wife had kept a journal of fury towards him. He had assumed their relationship was affectionate. He read a few pages and realized how each of them was truly invisible to the other. He saw the disfigured man who was portrayed. He was the nocturnal animal in that night zoo, revealed in the darkness, who growled or bit his fellow creatures and ate his children.

  Sometimes he lost that crucial part of himself that allowed him to feel secure. Segura. The irony of his name was not lost on him. The safe world disappeared. One of his daughters, it was probably Lucette, would enter the darkened parlour and witness him with a thin plaid blanket over his shoulders. She had been sent in to make him talk and bring him away from himself. Papa! Her mother had insisted she carry in a plate of food, but the girl did not place it on his lap. She was sixteen. She wished to be an accompanist, not a messenger, desired only to spell him through the darkness. He knew darkness well, all the footfalls within it. She sat on the floor, her back against his legs like a spaniel, as if she were owned by his silent body. Lucette remembers the heat in the room, the boredom of the hours there, until she recognized each minimal gesture of his as a kind of talking. She began to speak about what she feared, what drove her to jealousy, what she imagined of the future, and eventually Lucien muttered how he himself had behaved when he’d been caught as a boy in a similar place or with a similar fear. He would never recall for certain which daughter had been with him that long day in the dimly lit room with its small window, when he had felt the thin blanket was his only skin, when only a careful breathing could release the rubble of what he contained.

  He recalled a metal pencil box he had owned as a child, he remembered the young grisette he once shared a train carriage with, whom he would name Claudile in three of his books. Her companion was dangerous, she told him. The man had kept her captive, jealous of her friendships, and had overthrown her sense of perspective. There was no one to give an alternative opinion that countered his. Lucien sat across from her in that train carriage, and they spoke as if the oldest of friends in a night brasserie. She seemed wise in all things but her acceptance of this man. How easy it was to be caught within another’s personality.

  He wondered whether he was like that to his own wife, knowing how dark their union was. When he returned home he considered his role within the family, recognizing the controlling element in himself. It was true he had found himself more compassionate and empathetic to the woman he had spoken with on the train for those three hours. He already missed her, even in his busy life. He began to invent the days and nights of this woman without having taken a single step into her life. For more than a year he wrote of Claudile and her belligerent companion, the rooms they lived in, her visits to meet a writer in Auch for desire, and for a few thin luxuries. He watched and described her exhausted face during sleep, the pace of her breath during sexual excitement, the obsessive reading of the books the avuncular writer smuggled to her. He lived almost fully in her world for a year. When he completed the trilogy of tales about Claudile, he opened his study door and it felt to him that an era had passed. He found a chaos of in-laws around him on the estate at Mar-seillan. He was responsible for a many-headed family, and this left him unable to act for himself anymore.

  It is difficult to recognize your own vices in a son-in-law. He ought to have watched over the youth from a more neutral zone. If Lucien was objective about what he was witnessing in the young man, he could have blown whistles and surrounded the monster. His daughter would have hated him for a season, but all would have ultimately been perceived and resolved. Yet he felt mocked and finessed by the man, an up-and-coming poet, whom Lucien once caught winking at his patriarchal role, which the young suitor did not believe for a second, any more than Lucien believed in the man’s flattery and attempts at family courtesy.

  Whereas the truth of what was occurring was more anarchic. His daughter Lucette, now twenty-two, was engaged to Henri Courtade. His nineteen-year-old daughter, Thérèse, was being courted by the young poet Pierre Le Cras. Regarding these romances from a parental height, Lucien could recognize an essential truth. Pierre Le Cras was drawn more to the graciously mannered Lucette, and she was clearly unable to let go of any glance that he threw towards her. Lucien watched their smothered gestures. He witnessed a hand’s pressure in the passing of a napkin, the too-long stare as Lucette entered the rowboat, the sharing of songs at the piano. And there was the photograph that recorded everything. During a gathering when everyone was formally watching the camera and no one was looking at them, Lucette and Pierre gazed openly at each other, forgetting the witness of the camera itself. Lucien kept the evidence of this now permanent gaze in his workroom.

  Perhaps he should have remained silent with this knowledge. There is no need for a father to oversee his daughters’ territories f
or them. Adult children are no longer children; they know more than they appear to, they can put up with more than a parent thinks. But Lucien took these betrayals upon himself, coaxing each clue from the shifting group around him. The lovers would hold their breath as he walked the corridors of the large house at night. The youth had gall and the charm of an arriviste, and dis-armingly, he was a good poet. Lucien Segura did not know what to do.

  When Lucette confided to her father that she was pregnant and that her wedding needed to be moved forward, Lucien insisted they take a walk across the fields and discuss it. But once alone with him, Lucette refused to admit to Pierre’s existence within her emotions. She stared at her father’s seeming madness when he brought up the young poet’s name, and took shelter in mentioning the very goodness of her own fiancé. Then she referred casually to the possibility of her sister’s marriage in the near future. Lucien began to doubt his suspicions; perhaps his cast of mind had become jaded over the years. It was to be a brief walk, and Lucette was married three weeks later, and at the wedding he performed like a contented father. For all he knew, she had ended her affair with the talented, deceitful poet.

  Shortly afterwards, Pierre Le Cras published a remarkable sequence of poems dedicated to his future wife, Thérèse. They were vague enough to prevent any physical identifications, so the poems had a ‘universal’ quality. But at the same time the emotion within the verses was heartbreaking and generous, and soon Paris was celebrating the young writer. All this led to plans for a second wedding. Thérèse was ecstatic, her mother delighted. There was, Lucien felt, a fever in the household. It was all a false portrayal. He watched them and listened to them and saw no awareness of an alternative truth. The true portrait was the photograph in his study, where the two lovers simply watched each other openly. This man had swept into their home as if under a protected spell, which Lucien could not control. Lucette had grown up with a natural grace and politeness, rising from her chair for any new guest or messenger. She was determined to be a writer like her father, constantly improving herself, perfecting herself, just as she would carefully erase her faults on a page and pencil in a better rhyme or metaphor. In recent years, she had even helped him clear away a sentiment or two in his own work. He’d watched her small bony hand brush away the curled fragments that contained the erased phrase from a page of his, so that she could write in a more modest word, asking him tentatively with her eyes if this might be better. Sometimes with a work, such as an astronomical treatise by Flammarion, he would purchase two copies so he and Lucette could read simultaneously, so they could share the landscape of the same book as each of them roamed through it. She had come to think like him, he believed.