Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  She was letting her hair grow longer. She felt tethered to their one-room farmhouse, and this was one small independence. She was rarely ever more than forty yards from the house, save when she went for her reading lessons or when Roman took her in the cart to the village.

  The Dog

  The boy was daydreaming by the window, enclosed by the deep sill, looking out. Gradually his eyes focussed into the distance, where there was a dog moving haphazardly. As it came closer he could see it was large and black. He mentioned to his mother, who was behind him, that the animal might be rabid, dangerous, and she came beside him and looked out for a moment and said, Perhaps. Don’t go out. No, he agreed.

  They were about to have lunch. He went to the north window to see whether Roman and Marie-Neige happened to be outside. He saw no sign of them, and returned to the first window and sat close to the glass and watched the creature. It was still ranging about, not barking, just moving as if it had a curse within. It charged towards the porch of the house, saw the outline of the boy’s upper body in the window, and then retreated. It’s going away, he told his mother. Good. The animal was rubbing its snout on the ground, then looked up and charged, bounded onto the porch, and threw itself at the window. Its paws smashed the thin glass and its forefeet touched the boy, and splinters speared his eye. He stood there for a moment, then fell to the ground. He believed the dog was in the house and the pain meant his face was being eaten. He couldn’t scream. It was his mother who was screaming. She saw blood all over his face and shirt, and along the wall by the windowsill. The dog had pulled its paws back through the jagged glass and leapt back onto the dust in front of the porch.

  She knelt by her son and touched his stiff body. The boy dared not move. She was screaming at him, assuming he had been bitten, but the boy made no noise, made no movement, and gradually she quieted down into frantic breathing. He couldn’t see, and his brain read that sound as the panting of the dog circling him.

  Then his mother left him, and he was alone on the kitchen floor.

  In spite of the presence of the dog somewhere in the vicinity, she ran up the hill and returned with Roman and the young wife. Now his mother lifted her son’s head and cradled it, and the girl stirred up a saline solution in a bowl and carefully washed away the loose blood, looking for the wound. There seemed to be no cut on his face at all. Finally she got to his left eye. There were two splinters of glass within it. He was staring up, unable to close that eyelid. Without pausing she plucked one of the jagged pieces out with her fingers, and his hand thrashed out. Can you see? But he could not. Even with the other eye? He didn’t know, there was just pain. The socket of the other eye, the right eye, had become a pool of blood, and she could not tell whether that meant something, or whether it was safe, innocent. But for certain there was still another splinter in the left eye, which had gone deep. She did not think she could remove it, and wasn’t sure if she should.

  Roman carried him to the cart and placed him along the back bench so his head was resting once more on his mother’s lap. She held a cheesecloth over his face to keep the dust away. The other two rode in front. Lucien’s mother had brought the rifle, and it was there on the front seat between the couple.

  After they had gone a few hundred metres, the dog appeared again, keeping its distance, following them. It was clear that the creature still intended to attack them. It ran beside the cart, snapping its jaws at the horse’s hooves. They could see the blood, wet at its feet. Shoot him, the mother said, and Roman passed the reins to his wife, aimed and fired the rifle into the dust near the charging dog. The creature calmed suddenly and sat down as the cart raced on towards Marseillan, separating them from the animal. The young wife kept looking back, if not at Lucien, then at the dog in the growing distance. She had always wanted a dog in her life and had tried persuading her husband. Now she would never have one. She reached back and took Lucien’s hand for a moment.

  The doctor at the hospital, Monsieur Porcelain, was nervous and also certain of his authority. There was, he said, the possibility of infection spreading to the undamaged eye. He was determined to save some sight at least, and he convinced the youth’s mother that the left eye be removed and that the socket, or ‘cave,’ that remained be cleansed thoroughly. This way no infection would reach the right eye, in its frail state. Lucien was not part of this decision, and for years he would remain bitter towards those who had defaced him.

  By the time he came home, he could see faintly, just colours and shapes surrounding him. But that would improve. However, he was told he could not read for a year, and strangely, it was advised that during this period of time he must not cry. He was almost eighteen when this was demanded of him. It seemed that a cold anger was the only emotion allowed in response to the accident. He continued to blame the three who had taken him to the hospital in Marseillan. He blamed Roman for not killing the dog, so that it had disappeared before being tested for disease. He blamed Le Haricot for using a possibly impure saline solution on his eyes. Most of all, he blamed his mother for permitting the removal of his eye. He was behaving as if he were five years younger, and they found it difficult to make him respond in any way to them. He preferred to be alone in his room. In his anger he refused a false eye. As an adult he rarely spoke of the period when he could or should have been only weeping.

  A month after the catastrophe some books he had ordered from Toulouse arrived in the mail. He had thrown them into a corner and walked back into his room. If there had been a fire nearby he would have burned them. His mother let them remain where they were until the girl came by for one of her lessons. Lucien was sitting on the porch when she approached him and announced the credits on the title page and began to read. ‘Chapter One—The Three Presents of D’Artagnan the Elder. On the first morning of the month of April, 1625

  Everything froze within him. He refused to step out to meet her words. She was awkward with her accent, full of hesitations. He was aware this was equally or even more humiliating for her, this pretending to be worldly, this pretence that the Parisian prose style reflected her natural tongue. It was all that stopped the insult on his lips. But he could not give in to her. Tomorrow he would simply not come outside. The reversal of roles was embarrassing, galling. This neighbour’s servant wife, who had been coaxed out of the quicksand of illiteracy by his mother … The book was on her lap and she was gripping the knife beside her that she was using to cut the pages. Black hair shielding her face. He could barely hear her voice mispronouncing the names of cities and lineages. All he was truly conscious of was her left arm quivering. He watched only that, would not be caught up in the story.

  When she ended the chapter, she closed the book and without looking at him took it with her to her house. She didn’t appear the next day. The day after that, she was helping his mother with some curtains when he asked her if she would clarify something he had missed, not understood within that first chapter. She looked up. ‘I don’t think I remember, I was too nervous.’ There was a sort of response from him. ‘Shall I go back and read it again?’ ‘No, just go on. Not knowing something essential makes you more involved.’

  Roman undressed her, having drawn open the curtain to their bedroom so the kitchen light was on her. She was taller and stronger now, her long hair more womanly. When they wrestled on the bed he saw her confidence, her less passive enjoyment. Her arms pushed at him and she stared back as an equal, without shyness at what he was doing. When he came into her, her mouth reached up and bit into his beard and tugged him down to her. It was a duel more than the passion that had happened before, and in the half-light when they finished he could see the sweat on her, unaware it was on him as well until she leaned up again and licked the taste of it off his forehead, a gesture he thought performed by some stranger within her.

  When he was asleep, she couldn’t sleep. She lay there aware of the time rolling slowly and their bodies jammed against each other, her leaping mind awake. The light in the kitchen was still on, revea
led by the open curtain. She looked for her shift and pulled it over her head and wiped herself between her legs. She bent over and watched Roman’s face, so calm and content in sleep, which always surprised her. She believed this was when he was happiest, unaware of the world. Then she knelt by the bed and reached under it for her old towel and unwrapped the book within. She drew the curtain so he was in darkness, and sat down at the kitchen table and began rereading the first chapter. She was not one to be content with gaps in a story; she would discover its secrets and would tell her friend whenever he wanted or needed to know them.

  Lucien began helping Roman build troughs for his pigs. At dawn and at dinnertime he poured gruel into the hog feeder and rubbed their backs as they ate in the twilight. All his life he would remember the texture of their taut skin, the tough bristles, their delicate leaps in moments of nervousness. A good number of years later, when he was called upon to give injections to soldiers in a Belgian village, he remembered the first needle he’d given—to a large pig whose mouth had become infected. He had needed to sidle the creature into a corner of the barn, then come up behind it and lift it onto its hind feet, so that it fell back helpless into his arms while he himself leaned back with all this weight into the stone corner. He held it that way with one arm for those few seconds, and with the other hand reached for the syringe and stabbed the needle into the pig’s flank. Roman had told him what to do, and was watching all of this with a laughter that was rare but reassuring. And then Lucien had let the seemingly unconcerned creature loose.

  The stories Lucien and Marie-Neige read together had become hers now. And he became accustomed to her voice, the way she read the fracas of a swordfight or described with unhidden amazement how the leaves in a book had been poisoned in order to kill a Protestant. The world out there was terrible with guile. The few times he corrected her pronunciation, it was done in no way to embarrass her but to protect her from embarrassment later in life among strangers. She read to him two or three times a week. They were equals again, sharing the alternative possibilities of a motive before it was revealed, arguing over the best musketeer, above all loving the fact that D’Artagnan, like him, was a Gascon and came from the Gers.

  She saw him change as a result of his labour in the fields. She noticed his brown arms, his broken voice, its shrill husk falling away. He was no longer the boy she had first met. He had begun to move with confidence now, with the sureness she would never have. Again she hesitated within her world before stepping into the light and into the pleasure she got from him.

  Charivari and Veillée

  She had met Roman at a fair in the village of Saint-Didier-sur-Rochefort, and their marriage took place after an hour of bartering by an uncle who had raised her since the death of her parents. During the spring, all over the neighbouring valleys—in Perize, in Challons—there were marriage fairs. Marie-Neige was sixteen and Roman was in his thirties, and they sat at a small table while the scribe wrote out the marriage contract.

  That evening whatever frail bond existed between them was met with derision by a gang of twenty or more who made up a charivari. It was a time when any union outside what was familiar was considered insulting to a community. A wedding too soon after the death of a spouse, a marriage between known adulterers, a marriage where there was a great age difference, would result in the humiliation of a bride and groom. If a woman was wealthy and a man poor, banners would proclaim the adage ‘If the purse is big, a man will marry a bear.’ When adulterers married, tumescent manikins were carried jostling beside them on the street. Some charivaris lasted two months; some, if the gangs were paid off, a few hours. Being poor and having no social power, Roman and Marie-Neige became easy victims. Although Roman was a powerful man, the manikin representing him depicted him as ancient and weak, and his young wife as a baby on his knee. There had been stories in the recent past of couples driven mad by a charivari; in one case a husband insulted beyond care stabbed to death the first jeering man he could reach with an awl. So that there was a wedding and then an execution.

  All night her uncle’s home was surrounded by torches and drumming and the bray of obscene songs. Roman stood for hours at the window, then slipped from the house before dawn and attacked two men who had been left to watch the house while the others slept, strangling one until he fainted and breaking the wrists of the other. He stood there alone with the bodies in the pasture. It was about five in the morning and there would be darkness only for a brief while more. His new bride came out carrying a lamp and he extinguished it. He put his hands on her shoulders and for a moment leaned his head against hers. Marie-Neige was dressed in the clothes of a boy and had cut her hair short. They did not go back into the house. They haltered her uncle’s horse and walked with it silently through the village in the last of the darkness. When they were in the open fields he climbed on, reached his hand down, and pulled his wife up into the air and swung her behind him onto the animal. They rode south with the morning, the fields brightening around them.

  They barely paused through the Ardéche, eating only what could be found on bushes, trees, and in vegetable gardens. Approaching Nîmes, they turned west and travelled through the departments of the Tarn and the Haute-Garonne, and by the time they reached the Gers, she had removed her boy’s disguise and wore a yellow cotton dress. They found work at a fruit farm and slept with the other labourers in a crowded barn. The two had still not slept together as lovers, as husband and wife, and on the third night he woke her and they went into the warmth of an adjacent horse barn. The animals woke quickly, conscious of their presence, so there was a tense silence. He went up to each of the animals and calmed them, stroking their foreheads. Seven horses. Then he came back to the sixteen-year-old girl sitting on a bench, watching him. The light from the moon outside filled the rolled-open doorway. Crouching, he realized the floor was muddy straw. He went to the rain barrel by the entrance and washed his hands, then washed his arms and neck and stood in the night wind drying himself. She came out beside him and immersed her thin arms in the cold water, washed her face, carried scoops of it onto her legs.

  All the landscape was blue around them. Years later, when Roman was in prison for assault, he would return to this moment, Marie-Neige bending to wash her legs and her feet with rainwater, her flesh a tint of blue, and the green fields blue, so the only thing another colour was the moon. He made her lean over the barrel and raised her yellow cotton dress but she turned around and looked at him and kissed the hands that had calmed horse after horse as if there would be all the time in the world, as if those seven animals were the only civilized creatures they had met since their wedding, in that place that now felt like another country altogether. He touched the soft and small delight of her face, then her neck and the dampness in her hair where she’d raked her fingers. She put her palms against his rough shirt and kissed the open triangle of his neck. After that she turned and put her arms out along the thick rim of the barrel where in the water was the moon and the ghost of her face. Roman moved against her, and in the next while, whatever surprise there was, whatever pain, there was also the frantic moon in front of her shifting and breaking into pieces in the water.

  ‘Who comes from afar, can lie more easily.’ But the next day someone they thought was a stranger recognized them and passed around the scandal of their marriage and Roman’s brutality. Within half an hour they left the farm and that memory of the blue countryside at night. He proposed they travel as brother and sister, and they rode further west on her uncle’s horse. For the next few weeks there was hardly any food to eat, and eventually she stopped having her period. The few times they did make love, when they could touch each other late in the night, there was little pleasure to be found anywhere within their weariness. They would be travelling most of the day, and the only thing alive in them was hunger. All they owned was a wineskin of water for thirst in the night. Neither could read, so if they wished to find work they needed to ask others. But they kept to themselves. The fairs th
ey came upon were the only places they knew to look for work. At the village of Barran, west of Auch, they found themselves within the sounds of a great crowd. Around them were magicians, and craftsmen who could pull out your teeth, and soothsayers who would reveal your future as if it were a hidden serpent. She realized, seeing the stalls, she should have waited and sold her long hair so that it could have been made into a wig.

  At the fair, the person who carried a live pig the greatest distance would win it, and Roman did so, collapsing beyond the others with the animal in his arms. He sold it to a farmer before he even got up off the grass, then changed his mind and promised it to the man for nothing in return for a job. The farmer agreed, and offered the pig-carrier and his gamine of a sister work in his fields and a place to sleep in his barn. A few days later Roman and Marie-Neige were invited by that man to the neighbourhood veillée. The communal gathering was held in a large chalk-walled structure. It felt like a night market or congregation, with the women sitting in rows, sewing and embroidering, peeling apples or blanching chestnuts close by the firelight. Further back the men repaired or sharpened tools, boasted and tossed pearls of rough wisdom. Roman sat with them, dressing hemp and burning the ends. A woman walked among them with a shovel of hot ash, from which they picked chestnuts and potatoes; another followed with a jug of mulled wine.