Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  She was older now. She had wept when she married, and then had seen her new husband try to murder someone during the darkness of her marriage night. He was a man who had grown up with the harsh etiquette of self-protection he had witnessed on a farm. But the world they were in was harsher. And Roman was now in a prison, having attacked a man near the square base of the belfry, almost killing him in a rage of jealousy. It had taken seven men to hold him down. As if he were a stag. When he had looked down at her among the carpenters from that great height, he did not know she was pregnant.

  Marie-Neige visited him every week in his cell in Marseillan. A month after he was imprisoned, while walking home, she had a miscarriage. She lay down in a stranger’s ditch and lost all of what she and Roman had created. She got up after an hour. One rich thistle had been growing next to Marie-Neige, and it became burned within her memory. She tied two sticks together into a cross and planted it by the roadside, gathered whatever was there into a fold of her yellow cotton dress, and brought it home and buried it in the horseshoe-shaped field near the house.

  She saw her life then for what it was. There would always be this pointless and impotent dreaming on farms, and there would always be a rich man on horseback who galloped across the world, riding into a forest just to inhale its wet birch leaves after a storm.

  ‘Where is your yellow dress?’ Lucien asked when giving her a lift into Marseillan, and her answer stuttered into silence. One evening shortly afterwards, she and Lucien talked for long hours into the night. Roman was still in prison, and she believed she herself did not have much more than the fate of a mule. She spoke to Lucien about everything, confessing her poverty, and he admitted his unawareness. Even though he was her closest neighbour, he had been preoccupied by his own life.

  He went to Marseillan and bought the property she lived on outright from the Simone family, partly with money and partly with an exchange of fields. A day or so later, everything was notarized and he walked up the hill to her farmhouse with the papers. He saw her by the well and called out her name, but she did not move. She kept staring down into the well. He came up to her, and her focus of intent hesitated at the sound of his voice and she turned to him. She had heard the news that someone was buying the farmhouse. He took her hand and she jerked it back. But he would not let go. He pulled her that way towards the house. It was the way Roman persuaded her into sexuality, and her heart beat fast from embarrassment for both of them. For him, her friend, as well as herself.

  He made her sit at the blue table. It was the table he would take away from that small farmhouse some years later, and it became the dearest possession in his life. She sat on his right, and he spread out the bill of sale in front of them. He went over all the clauses, reading them, explaining them. It was something other than shock when she noticed her name. She’d been given nothing in her life, on even the slightest scale.

  Then, a few minutes later, only halfway through the document, she relaxed, and he sensed it immediately.

  What is it? he asked. She shook her head and kept reading the paper before her. There’d been no gasp of breath or gesture, but he was so familiar with her nature he’d recognized the sudden lightness. What is it? he said again.

  She watched him, smiling. Nothing, she said.

  It was not connected with this grand gesture and the gift of property, but some realization by her that made the acceptance of it possible. They were old allies. And only she knew why, when they sat down side by side at the table, she had known automatically which of the two chairs to sit in. It was so his good eye would be next to her and could share the page they read together, while the other eye—his blindness, at all their differences in this life—was far from this intimacy.

  She made a sparrow’s dinner for them, and needing something to praise, he praised the freshness of her well water until she was laughing at him. He was always too shy and tentative to speak about his own work. Instead they discussed her plans for the fields, and that night, when he returned home, he took down the military pamphlet from his library shelf. He could sense her excitement about the farm’s possibilities, now that she owned the land. At one point during their meal he even said what had crossed her mind already—that she was now entering the world of the grower of the black tulip. She nodded. They were as close as that.

  And though she spoke that night far more than he did, she knew in essence all about him, the range of his successes, his two daughters, his wife. Then, just before he left, as he stood up she asked him to sit down again, and she told him about the miscarriage, and how she could not stand it. She could not stand it. She could not stand it.

  One solitary light in the room over the blue table. And him putting his hands out to reach for her thin fingers that had nothing in them.

  Thinking

  As close as she was to Lucien, the idea of physical passion between them had not existed in her mind. Her frolic of a dance with him at his wedding had been just that, a bookend to signal the end of their youth. They had been taught the steps of a waltz by his mother in the barnyard, who had stated that, if they were reading about life in Paris and Fontainebleau, they needed to practice their social skills, and that the three essential areas of training for a musketeer were horsemanship, swordsmanship, and dancing. Lucien’s interpretation of a dance, confirmed by his studying of engravings, had been that it was an act where you pushed the shoulders of your partner until you both reached the far end of a room, while the girl suspected dancing meant simply intermingling for a period of time under the spell of musicians. His mother had needed to educate them both.

  Still, the two of them were cautious around each other. In spite of their proximity, they had their own lives and separate beliefs. When Marie-Neige reconsidered his accident with the dog, she felt as if that partial blindness must have already been there in him. For someone so intuitive and empathetic, he was, for instance, unknowing of the true nature of his wife, believing that if there were errors in the marriage the cause was in him. And he was a dreamer in terms of his compassion, unaware of how the world was knit together unequally, so that the radius of his generosity was short. He had never veered much into the real world.

  She knew little of the great world herself, less perhaps than he did. There was for her no life outside her home. Every evening she sat in her kitchen, then slept in the bed behind the curtain. She could not write to Roman in prison about what she felt for him, about her hunger for him, because he was unable to read. She wished she had taught him, the way she had been taught, so he could escape his solitude, but he had always returned from work exhausted. When darkness came, she washed herself at the barrel of rainwater by the barn, then walked with the lamp towards the house. She’d pick up a book, but as soon as she sat down with it she fell asleep in her chair. She never got used to reading in indoor light, although every evening she attempted this. It was already a pleasure to rest in a soft chair and hold a book in her hands. Sometime later, after the lamp burned down, she opened her eyes. Perhaps the smoke from the burned-out wick woke her. She stood up, gathering her senses into almost clarity, and went through the darkness to her bed.

  War

  Because of his partial vision Lucien Segura did not fight in the war. He volunteered instead to be part of a commission that studied disease and trauma along the battle zones near the Belgian border. He arrived at the front with treatises and reports he’d translated from German texts of new rehabilitation techniques, but he was ignored by the young overworked doctors. Around him was the chaos of troops being destroyed by mortar and starvation and, above all, fear. They needed something else, not someone to study them. While he continued to file reports, he began working in the hospital tents. Within a month he had become another person, one of the anonymous wave of soldiers and attendants, his face gaunt, the goatee spread into a rough beard, while the impatience and anger in the missives he continued sending to Paris meant that they were seldom read, just buried in files.

  He caught the diphthe
ria in his second year. At first he had a mild fever, then difficulty swallowing. Two days later Lucien could barely talk, unable to make even the sound of a murmur, his palate paralyzed. The tissues of his neck were swelling and he was fighting for every breath. In the medical tent he could see others bleeding from their mouths and noses and guessed this was also a portrait of him. Lucien had been a passive and fateful man; now everything in him fought to overcome the exhausting pain, so that he could think clearly. He knew the disease’s first twelve days were the most unforgiving and dangerous. He knew too that there were other diseases prevalent in the camp and insisted on sleeping in the open, crawling outside to avoid the circling air of the wards. There was no solitude there, among those on the path to death, and he needed privacy to hold on to what strength he had. He swallowed only liquids that were certain to have been boiled, and refused offers of unknown water.

  The military reported his likely fate in a letter to his wife and she arrived, barely recognizing him among others in the sanatorium at Épernay. She discovered, when he was able to speak, that she could not understand his thought processes, or his bitterness like a poison towards the political world. He demanded she leave him alone with his ‘companions,’ though in reality he was fully solitary, studying only himself to be aware of the shifts in his illness, in the desire to survive.

  After twelve days, he and the others who were still alive were made to live alone in tents, made to wash themselves and prepare their own meals. They were still toxic. They still carried the ‘plague in the throat,’ the white membrane that might suffocate them. The Spanish called it garrotilla—1613 was ‘the year of the garrotilla.’ He felt he knew more about diphtheria than anyone else there, and he was vain and proud of this knowledge even as he was prostrate on the mud floor of his tent. Leeuwenhoek in the 1670s had discovered the microbes through a microscope, ‘shooting through spittle like a pike through water.’ A brother poet. American colonists saw the disease as ‘the fruit of strange sins,’ an act of God that would ravage and thus cleanse the new world. All responses to diphtheria were medieval until Napoleon’s army was being devastated by it, and he was forced to offer 12,000 francs for the best study for prevention of the disease. The essay that eventually resulted, by Bretonneau, which located the false membrane in the throat, would remain a classic of clinical medicine. Then Agostino Bassi, who studied diseases in silkworms, theorized the doctrine of parasitic microbes. But along the Belgian border, in 1917, and in the sanatoriums, there was still no cure, little more than prayer.

  Lucien Segura was still alive. There were days of delirium, then stillness, when he would lie on his narrow cot exhausted, just looking at the back of his hand. Or at the cover of a romance, one of several appallingly written books regularly left by soldiers outside his tent, until one afternoon someone left him Balzac’s Les Chouans, a story of ‘love and adventure.’ In his feverish daze, Lucien could swallow a volume a day.

  The solitude at Épernay gradually released him from the everyday world. He witnessed only what he saw through the open flaps of his tent. Once he overheard a strange rustling that confused him as to what was occurring outside until an officer was revealed attempting to fold up a large topographical chart. Sound, and thereby imagined plots of sound unwitnessed by the eye, became important… . He was lying on a daybed at Marseillan listening to the gradual approach of crows, and then their bickering in the poplars. He remembered the familiar hoofbeats of Marie-Neige’s cart horse, the rustle of the outdoor shower as it sprayed onto the earth, muted now and then by a body that stepped into it. He could make out the sound of scalpels in the medical tent being placed back onto rubber sheeting. There was a dying man’s cough three tents over, and in it the hidden fear that Lucien could recognize. He had these maps of sound, and they taught him to locate distances, to distinguish a footstep on mud as opposed to dust, or whether a voice was moving towards him or away.

  He continued writing his reports, hunched over in the tent. And with what remaining energy he had, Lucien wandered back into his youth, his half-formed adulthood, reconsidering incidents that might have altered him as this person here, now, under such dark skies. It was as if he had been handed a mirror for the first time and could see what he held only faintly in his memory. Those nightly seductions of Madame de Rênal in Le Rouge et le Noir, had they taught him something? Or deceived him? His dance with a light-boned writer. The Dog. The past was gate-less. An overlooked life came rushing into his dun-coloured canvas tent, till then so full of the certainty of death. It was November now, and at night many were dying in the constant rains. He had saved a partially used flashlight but would not waste it on the darkness except in an emergency. He knew that, like him, it was a mortal thing.

  He thought, strangely, not of his family but about Marie-Neige, with whom he had rarely spoken since his marriage. For a series of nights his mind leapt with excited freedom all around her. He would recall something and force himself to journey across the episode again, slowly. He had seen her rise from sewing and arch her back, slip her left hand up within the sleeve of the other arm and tug at the muscle there. If he had been more relaxed as a man, he would have crossed the room and kneaded the muscle free of its stiffness. There’d been some sibling-like desire in him towards her. He began sorting the evidence of that. Where he had turned right, he now turned left and entered a room with her, or helped her carry bundles of laundry when it started to rain—they rushed into the house, their arms full, his shirt and her blouse speckled, no, sodden, with rain. She picked up a towel from the basket and dried his hair. His palms rested on her thin shoulders while his head was bowed towards her, aware her taut body was made up only of essentials.

  In Épernay that November, all that kept him warm were her shoulders. His mind reached forward and lit them like a gas fire. He’d been a secretive man for most of his life, and now was disconcerted by the secrets he had kept from himself.

  Furlough

  The furlough allowed him ten days. He returned home and it was midsummer and the August storms, or the threat of them, came every night. Sometimes there was lightning but no rain. His thoughts and emotions were loose in him, random, similar to the abrupt cuts of light in the sky. He would walk in the fields by the river long past midnight, unable to lose his wakefulness. In the house, his wife and daughters were asleep. He had been home three or four days and was still not used to the quiet, was not used to the chance of a suddenly lit room while he waited for the nightmare or the dream. The lack of the war was like a frozen river around him. There was security only in the past, with Marie-Neige always somewhere, in the symmetrical rows of her garden, or steering a wheelbarrow full of wet clothes back from the river.

  What had touched him most on the day of his return was her greeting, the odour of the mud on her hands as she reached up to touch his new beard. He wanted to thank her, somehow, for saving him during the days and nights in Épernay. But he was cautious, fearing his strange obsession about her during the month of diphtheria was nakedly evident.

  He sat at his desk organizing his reports, hiding everything he felt. Twice he walked to Marseillan and back. The town had been devastated, losing almost all of its men in the German war. It was a village of widows. Marie-Neige told him Roman had been released, but only into the war as a soldier. Lucien wondered what his old neighbour had been told he was fighting for.

  At one or two a.m. he’d still be awake. He would dress and go outside and walk to the river. He’d leave the footpath as if splashing into long, coarse grass, and a wave of insects would lift around him so that anyone could be conscious of where he was by their sound.

  Another night. In his bed he could hear thunder, the formal distance of it. He listened for rain but it did not come, and the frustration hovered alongside him till he fell asleep. Then thunder again, like a cynical, dry hand-clapping, and he was awake, with hope once more.

  Another night.

  He had his shirt off and stood among the noise of cicadas and gr
asshoppers. The ochre colour of a lamp came through the trees like a lit vessel being carried over the sea. When she reached him they both were still and quiet, as if intent on listening for some pronouncement or signal in that hesitation, and then the silence was lost, as the chirp and clatter of insects rose like dirt once again into the air around them. There would be no privacy even here, even now, after all this time in their adjacent lives. A wakeful nature surrounded them. A mockingbird at a height beyond their reach in the new branches (he would never see the bird) was consistent and woeful.

  The lamp hung from her fingers beside her dress. But they said nothing. As if they knew that darkness was also a liquid, and just one uttered word thrown out would ripple back to the house. He held her hand and walked with her to the edge of the river. She dimmed the light, just enough so they could find this place again from the water, then moved away from the burn of the lamp and undressed and walked into the river. He could hear her wading movement. A few minutes later they faced each other. When his weaving hands touched her underwater, he pulled back in a courtesy or a shyness, she couldn’t tell which. Lucien could see no edge to the sky, not a star. He moved into the deeper darkness. He had not swum in a night river since he was a boy. He was with his sixteen-year-old self, and it was a while before he became aware of her absence.

  Marie-Neige was on the shore, near the light, a tin outline. She lifted the lamp above her head and called out his name and he said Yes and she turned. She could see the ribs on his thin body as he came into more and more light. She placed the lamp on the grass and picked up her cotton dress and began drying her hair, so it was no longer plastered around her face, then came nearer to him and rubbed his hair dry with the dress. So now they looked as they did in a room, or across a table, no longer appearing as strangers to each other. On his knees, behind her, he pulled her thighs back to him in a slow rocking, as if he wanted her now to search for him, the heat of her cave onto his coldness, missing each other, and she said his name again and he moved into her, her softness and the unknown warmth.