Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  Roman was an inconstant hero, witty with his lover and sullen with his enemies, but sometimes quick-witted with his enemy and sullen with his lover. He never seemed to be fully understood by his author, and so no one could ever be sure of him, not even his accomplices. In a later century, he might have been considered manic-depressive or bipolar, but in his time in France he got away with it. Often he went into depressions or was violent. He rarely proclaimed his anger out loud, instead hiding it (rather unfairly, some thought) from his victim, who was therefore unaware of the stalking and hunt. During the last third of a book a villain’s financial empire would crumble, his allies would turn against him, and le Conte de Porcelain would remain in the dark about which of his vices someone had taken exception to—a badly timed application of the droit du seigneur, perhaps, or the eviction of a sick family, or some financial razzle-dazzle with a publishing house in Lyons that had bankrupted all but Porcelain. This policy of silent anger was the reason Roman was forced in his last act of retribution to nail proclamations onto some nearby surface, before he and Marie-Neige and the sidekick Jacques (more about him later), who were the central trio of each book, galloped away at the end of every adventure.

  The Dog in the Gartempe River and The Yellow Dress swept through France. Meanwhile no one, even within his family, was aware of the link between Lucien Segura and the author of the Roman stories, that whore of popular success who somehow seemed to understand the intrigues of the publishing world too well for the comfort of many within it. And the swordsman Roman was not beyond quoting the poetry of Verlaine or Pierre Le Cras out loud in the middle of a fracas, sometimes mockingly, but usually with a sense of recognition of their worth. In one novel, he strolled through a famous art gallery in Munich, humming Don Ottavio’s ‘Dalla sua pace,’ his fingers stroking the textured paint. So while people read him for swordplay and romance and moral vengeance, they absorbed everything else. Roman’s obsession with art and poetry was strange, and may have had to do with the fact that he was illiterate. The verses he sang or recited were taught him by his seemingly unworthy companion ‘One-Eyed Jacques,’ a libertine and socialist, who bandaged Roman’s wound when his arm was slashed open—if Marie-Neige was nowhere to be found—and who was also a master of disguises: he would infiltrate enemy courts sometimes as a foolish dauphin, sometimes as a wealthy countess. There were many sequences in the novels when Jacques and Roman wrestled around campfires over the subjects of poverty, foreign wars, the Black Goyas, incest, the selling of children, Balzac’s Vautrin, and the banking system in Paris. Their adventures always took place alongside the events of the day.

  All this, until the very last book, when Marie-Neige succumbs, dying in an epidemic while Roman is off adventuring in Brittany, so only Jacques is with her in the final hours. He has discovered her alone in her farmhouse, overtaken by a fever. Slowed into confusion, barely able to breathe, she keeps asking for Roman in her last hours. She whispers to the old ally Jacques to assist her in getting a message to Roman, and there is nothing Jacques can do but lie. He nurses her, changes the sheets wet from the fever, and feeds her. In the last hours, as she drifts off, he undresses and takes from a chest the clothes of Roman and puts them on, and cuts his long hair and darkens it. He enters her room noisily as her lover, wakes her and speaks in his voice so that in the haze of her vision she sees him. She beckons him to lie beside her, and the old degenerate sidekick, who knows and loves these two people more than any others, enters the bed beside this village queen he has travelled and worked with and conspired alongside all these years. At all those campsites in the Ardèche or the Loire, during their adventures in earlier works such as The Girl on a Horse and Baptiste’s Breath, he has slept on one side of the campfire while Roman and Marie-Neige slept together on the other.

  She whispers to him now, touching his hair, looking deep into his tired, caring face. It looks to her almost like the Madonna’s in this semi-darkness. He whispers back, reminding her of their times in the past, of the sunlit afternoon when the two of them travelled with Jacques through a grove of oaks, and the clicking branches sounded like rain, of a river swim, of his love for her.... So he accompanies her into her final sleep. He kisses her mouth and lies in the bed beside her all that dark night, until the first grains of light, when he is able to see her again. She has hardened into the position of an effigy, and the heat of fever that consumed her has departed with her soul. But there is also a dry whiteness on her lips he did not see before. And so he waits for more sunlight to fill the room and pries open her mouth and sees the flecks of white sores on her tongue. Diphtheria has been sweeping into villages and killing children as well as those who nursed them. When Roman returns from his adventures in Brittany to the farmhouse, he is surrounded by this truth. The disease has destroyed the two who are dearest to him in his life. It is not war or finance or greed or power, all those easily corrupting things, but this small membrane of death in the throat.

  It was to be a horrifying conclusion for those readers of the Roman adventures, and what actually became of Roman remained a mystery. As readers left the final pages of Whiteness, he disappeared, and Lucien stopped writing, near the village of Marseillan, at his neighbours’ table. The seven adventures of Roman came to a close. Lucien had said all he knew and remembered about Marie-Neige in these stories, the sound of her wheelbarrow, how she lit a fire, the moment of a yawn, the way she had talked about a thistle in a ditch. She was within him now.

  He diverted a modest sum of francs into a new account. He collected some notebooks, climbed into a horse-drawn cart, much like the one his mother had used to search for the lost father in the corridas of Vic-Fézensac, and disappeared, barely a mustard seed in his pocket. He would not write again.

  A half-year later he used one of his notebooks to keep score during a card game in Dému with the boy named Rafael. There are three notebooks (one of them blank) in the archives in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. There are some childish maps indicating where he had planted certain vegetables in his new garden. ‘You are a gardener?’ the fortune-teller had asked him. There is a scale drawing of his house and property with its small lake and avenue of trees. There is an illustration, in another hand, of how to make a nest for insects by partially stripping a cob of corn.

  One afternoon, in Lucien’s last garden in Dému, the boy mentioned that he was reading the series of adventures about Roman, but Lucien Segura said nothing. He simply took the book from him to see what Astolphe’s son was using as a bookmark, then responded that he had heard of this writer of escapes and revenge, of love and adventure, but he had not read him.

  ‘We have art,’ Nietzsche says, ‘so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.’ For the raw truth of an episode never ends, just as the terrain of my sister’s life and the story of my time with Coop are endless to me. They are the possibilities every time I pick up the telephone when it rings suddenly, some late hour after midnight, and I hear the beeps and whirs that suggest a transatlantic call, and I wait for that deep breath before Claire will announce herself. I will be for her an almost unrecognizable girl save for an image in a picture.

  Every evening our father used to walk the property of our Petaluma farm before dinner, until finally, on the far hill, he would step from the dark shadows of the trees and come down in the last sunlight. We always saw him do this, although he never knew he was being watched by the three children. One evening a fox appeared behind him, running up and down along the edge of the copse, but my father, looking the other way, ambled down into the valley. Claire saw it first and nudged us. The creature moved lightly, as if on springs, barely glancing at the human near him. My father, sensing something was wrong, paused. He turned then and saw it, and began to walk backwards, cautiously, keeping it in view, the fox moving with its light step as if mocking him, back and forth, back and forth, on a different tangent.

  With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode f
rom another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can. The awareness of a flag fluttering noisily within its colour brings me into a sudden blizzard in Petaluma. Just as a folded map places you beside another geography. So I find the lives of Coop and my sister and my father everywhere (I draw portraits of them everywhere), as they perhaps still concern themselves with my absence, wherever they are. I don’t know. It is the hunger, what we do not have, that holds us together.

  I see Lucien Segura for the last time with the boy Rafael, who recalls the old man sitting out of doors in the glare of the day. Rafael appears with bread. They tear up the loaf and eat it with an onion or some herbs. If Lucien is thirsty he walks over to a pond, immerses his hand, and lifts it cupped to his mouth and drinks. This is how I remember him, Rafael tells me.

  Lucien must have walked into that depression of the earth that was once a mare and sat at his blue table, the only furniture he had brought with him in that journey by cart. A few years earlier at Marseillan, in the middle of describing a tense scuffle of a swordfight, he had suddenly become curious about how long and how wide the table he wrote on was. He began measuring it with his hands. From elbow to fingertip twice, and then twice from wrist to fingertip. So the length was slightly over a metre. About one metre in width. It was made out of two pine boards, with a narrow runnel down the middle, where they joined. The table always a fraction below his notebooks, always out of focus as he wrote. The six nails that held it together, the colour of the paint, that exact height for him to bend over, as if over a mirror, to see what could be found. His constant companion.

  Astolphe’s boy would turn up and sit on the stool across from him, with his grin, his desire for, it seemed, every possibility in this world. Perhaps Lucien himself looked like that when young. Like a slim combed hound, mouth open, breathing fast with eagerness, hoping for everything. Even rain would not keep the boy away. Lucien would look down from his bedroom window and see Rafael arrive, and see him shelter himself for a while under the oak tree before leaving. He was curious about what Rafael would remember of their afternoons. Would it be the card games or his own fragmentary thoughts like half-told secrets? Or his avuncular air, the holding of his hand above his good eye when the sun fell onto him like a weight? Would he be even a fragment in the boy’s future?

  He would see Rafael coming towards him, pause, and turn back to the herb garden. No. Come here, he’d say out loud. And the boy would return and sit across from him. And what Lucien had been remembering disappeared into his clenched fist.

  Then even these friends left him.

  Rafael’s father strolled down the driveway of plane trees with two horses he had received in exchange for something. (The object of trade was in fact one of Lucien Segura’s peacocks, which a distant farmer coveted. The disappearance of the bird was not noticed yet; it was whimsical in its wanderings and may simply have followed a layer of warmth that came after a storm. And as far as the old thief was concerned, to separate an owner from fish or fowl or undomesticated hound was not quite robbery; there was always the opportunity for it to return, even from seven or eight farms away.) So Rafael’s father walked guiltlessly beside the house where sumac bordered the walls, whistling, in contrast to his earlier departure at four a.m. in silence, when he carried the struggling bird—it was almost a mammal, he thought—within his long coat.

  Lucien witnessed his return, his head alongside two nodding horses, and not wishing to inquire too directly, waited until the next afternoon, when the family crossed the small lake in the boat, to ask what they were doing with the new animals. They were going to live further north for a while, he was told. They gave no reason and he did not ask for one. Perhaps there was easier commerce there, or the father needed to evade a rumour of his existence in the area. And ‘for a while’ was as precise as they wished to be about the period of time they would be away. A few days later, shockingly soon to the old writer, the entourage rumbled along the narrow path beside the house and then departed along the straight lane between the trees. It was almost dawn, and Lucien in his narrow bed listened to the muffled clang of pans at the end of each sway of the caravan, and Aria’s clear voice talking with the boy. When he came outside and stood there ten minutes later, he detected a faint remnant of cigarette smoke that had caught against the rough brick of his house.

  After they left he must have remained, alone, through the dark fortnights of the moon, the arrival and departure of winter. The vegetable garden slept under snow, revealing only a frail fence, and a tent, a pyramid of stick and cloth where the travellers used to store their tools during other seasons. He walked one day across the hard and brittle vegetable beds and entered the tent’s light-filled emptiness and simply stood within it. It had been Aria’s garden. He would often see her early in the morning. The mist would slowly lift and she would be there on her knees plucking away snails or dead leaves from the soft, damp earth after night rains. It was as if she had been there all night in that posture of almost obsessive prayer, waiting for the darkness to lift, and then for the white mist to disperse, until Lucien saw her in her green shawl.

  He was still Lucien Segura, after all his years, after all these changes and escapes. He was, he realized, still more responsible to the boy he had been, than to the father he had become. In spite of everything he had not been a paternal man. But here, where the late-winter storm fell on him, protected by this thin pyramid of a tent, with its hidden bulbs and grains frozen under the snow that would be alive again in the future, he saw he had used up his life. He stood in the shelter that had belonged to Aria, and then walked back to the house, and the only footprints were his; there were not even those of the peacock, whose warm three-toed feet would have revealed the green under the snow.

  The lake throws up a sparkle between the trees. Lucien takes a moment to struggle into his cardigan and walks into the shadows of the oaks. He does not feel this present life is real without the boy. The essential necessity of Rafael. They have shared things cautiously. He has reached for some fragments of his life to give to this almost adopted boy, and in return Rafael has described the eclipse he and his mother witnessed near Plaisance, its terrible wind that was more terrible than the darkness. And what Lucien wants now is a storm.

  Among all the great works of art he stood before, as a younger man, was Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, by the painter Ilya Repin. He has remembered it all these years. The old despot cradling the son he has killed accidentally with a blow to the head—and the patriarch’s eyes on fire, and all around him the future darkness. A week later, in another city, there was another painting, another nightmare, Peter the Great interrogating his son for conspiracy, and in the father’s eyes a sure knowledge of the young man’s guilt.

  He will never know what becomes of his children. He will not know whether he has nurtured them or damaged them. A girl travels down the long California valley in a commercial refrigeration truck, hardly able to speak, as a result of her fear or her bravery, listening to every word of the good stranger. Lucette in Paris sips absinthe with her lover. The boy Rafael will meet me, a woman from the New World… . And Coop? And Claire? Will these children, in their eventual cities, turn out to be the heroes of their own lives?

  I have recently been reading, in a monograph, a haunting thing about a missing father. ‘And so I hoped that someone would come, a man, why not my father, at nightfall. He would stand in front of the door, or on the path leading from the forest, with his old white shirt, the everyday one, in shreds, dirtied by mud and his blood. He would not speak in order to preserve what can be, but he would know what I do not.’

  Oh, this older need for a lullaby, not a storm.

  He comes out from the shadows of the trees and walks the length of the meadow until he reaches the edge of the water, until he stands beside that oldest of boats. He remembers finding it in the grass that first morning in Dému, believing at first that the struts were the ribs of an animal. It lies in the mud, and a loose knot ties it
to a tree. Rafael often sculled across the lake in the evenings, for no reason but glorying in his energy.

  Lucien pushes the boat free of the mud shelf and strides beside it through the cloudy water and climbs in. He turns his back to the far shore and rows towards it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house. Water laps up between the boards, and he feels he is riding a floating skeleton. He is able to distinguish the shape of his small home in the quickening dusk. He wants to stand, to see everything clearly, and at the very moment of his thinking this, a board cracks below him, like the one crucial bone in the body that holds sanity, that protects the road out to the future. His gaze holds on to this last, porous light. Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks most of all to Susie Schlesinger as well as to Jean-Hubert Gailliot and France David for the help they gave me during the writing of this book. Thank you also to Bill and Sakurako Fisher of San Francisco and San Anselmo; to Theresa Salazar, Anthony Bliss, and David Duer at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, California; to Alfredo Vea of Oakland; to David Ben, with his magical talents, in Toronto; to Glen Garrod and Ruth Winningham, Dave Walden, and Janis Arch in Nevada City, Lake Tahoe, and San Francisco. To Sandra Compain of Quincy; Rick Simon at Coach House Press, Toronto; Madeleine Duffort and Paulette Latarget of Barran; Guy Bodéan in Dému; and Oliver Maack in Petaluma. To Caroline Richardson and Susie Schlesinger for horse lore. To Robert Creeley and Roy Kiyooka. To E. F. C. Ludowyck, many years ago. To Karen Newman, Lucy Jacobs, Agnes Montenay, David Warrell, Alexandra Rockingham, Mary Lawlor, and Julie Mancini; the architect Jon Fernandez, video-installation artist Douglas Gordon, David Young and Anthony Minghella, and Baltic Avenue. As well as Graham Swift—for his care of a river. Also Le Daroles bar in Auch and Jet Fuel in Toronto.