Divisadero (20 page)

Dorn put the boy down and
stood there a moment. Then he walked over to his wife and slid his arm around
her, listening while she continued talking to a friend. Ruth looked at Dorn,
and he moved his hand down her arm, not letting the contact go even for a
moment. He gave her a little tug, and she followed him to a side door. Coop
watched the man they said was his friend pro
fi
led in the doorway, where coloured
triangular
fl
ags of red and blue and yellow and white
fl
oated in a light breeze. Ruth kept
staring at Dorn as he spoke, then turned away to look into the dark beyond the
fl
ags. She was hearing about America
bombing a civilian city.

Coop began walking towards
them, his brain struggling to hold on to something. He heard Ruth say, as he
approached, ‘Look at your friend, even he’s not innocent. No one here is. Not
me. Not you. Not even you. We’re the barbarians too. We keep letting this
happen.’ Dorn was not responding, until her hand ripped at his neck and a
hundred small shells paused on his chest for a second, then clattered to the
fl
oor. Children began scrambling for them.
Coop in his silence had something by the tail, and he couldn
’
t name it. He stood in front of them and
didn
’
t know what to say. He
could see tears on Ruth’s face. The music got louder, suddenly.

What had he been about to
say to them?
Something about her?
Something he’d seen?
She went up to him, weeping, and put her arms around him. ‘Dance with me, Coop.
Will you?’ He put his arms up and she moved gently in against him, remembering
the bruises. They aligned themselves to the dance. More and more children came
onto the
fl
oor,
then adults, as if coupled in another time, at an outbreak in the Hundred Years
’
War. Much later, Dorn, very drunk,
grabbed the mandolin from a six-foottall teenager and joined the band,
insisting on the endless version of ‘Fire on the Mountain.’

The next
morning nobody woke early, except for Coop, who sat alone at the kitchen table.

Was this his life before
this life? What he was looking at felt familiar only because he had been here
in this very same place the day before. There was nothing older than a few days
in what he remembered. And what he held now, like a smooth doorless object in
his mind, was his dance with the woman named Ruth. He had been able to tell
right away that if he had danced in his earlier life he could not have been
good. He had thought about this for a moment and then said it out loud to her.
And she had said, ‘That’s right.’ ‘Begin the Beguine,’ he said. And she had not
responded.

He pondered now her
manner, the way she had said, ‘That’s right.’ As in, ‘It was certainly a
well-known fact among us.’ What was she to him?
A friend?
Nothing?
Was she speaking only of the present when she
said, ‘That’s right’? But that was not the way the remark had been said to him.
Who was Ruth? She had a name as small as a keyhole. She had danced with him.
She’d wept in his arms.

Coop’s mind held only a
few distant things. A Polaroid of him by the highway, an owl on the road, a
woman bent over a blue flame, a dance to the sound of
fl
ags. Otherwise his mind was this scrubbed
table that could barely remember holding cups, or plates, or slices of bread,
or a girl
’
s tired head.
D
riving to San Francisco, Claire reaches for Coop’s hand.

I need you to meet my
father.
Your father . . . Why?
He brought you up, Coop. And he’s old now.
So old.
After

you
went away, and after my sister
went away, he barely talked.

Not even to me. He made
himself alone. I want you to see him. I don’t know him.
He will want to meet you, Coop. And you need to say your

good-byes
. Perhaps this is important
for you.

She did not want to
explain any more to him, knowing this act could be terrible, even brutal. Or it
would be generous. Or break her father’s heart again. All of these things were
possible. But so much had been wasted. She had only a distant father, and now
Coop, like this, a boy remembering nothing. She wanted to fold the two halves
of her life together like a map. She imagined her father, standing now on the
edge of the corn
fi
eld, his white beard speckled by the shadows of the long green
leaves, an awkward, solitary man, hungry for the family he had brought together
and then lost
—
his wife in childbirth, this orphan son of
a neighbour, and Anna, whom he had loved probably most of all, who was lost to
them forever. There was just herself, Claire, not of his blood, the extra
daughter he had brought home from the hospital in Santa Rosa.

From San Francisco they
drove north over the Golden Gate Bridge, then left the highway and took a
country road until they came into Nicasio. She said she was tired and asked
Coop to drive. They went on, and saw the bent tree growing out of the great
rock by the reservoir. The car wound along the Petaluma road into the hills,
bordered on one side by giant poplars. She bit her tongue, looked out of her
window seemingly unconcerned. As the car reached the peak he swerved the
steering wheel with one hand casually to the right and they drove down the
narrow farm road. He turned the key off, and they were gliding between fences
towards the farmhouse. They went over the old speed bump of tires, and she saw
her horse approaching the fence, and she saw Coop looking over the steering
wheel into the old world.

R
afael
and I follow the river that disappears under a chaos of boulders and emerges
once more a few hundred yards further in the forest. We walk in silence beside
it. Eventually we come to a ford where our river meets a road and covers it, or
from another perspective, where the road has come upon the river and sunk below
its surface, as if from a life lived to a life imagined. We have been following
the river, so that now we must look on the road as a stranger. The depth of
water is about twelve inches, more when the spring storms come racing at low
level over the
fi
elds and leap into the trees so nests capsize and there is the crack
of old branches and then silence before each plummets in their fall. The
forest, Rafael says, always so full of revival and farewell.

They merge, the river
and the road, like two lives, a tale told backwards and a tale told
fi
rst. We see a vista of
fi
elds and walk through the clear water
that
fl
oods the gravel path, leaving the background of forest with each
step.

The writer Lucien Segura
moved through an overgrown meadow abundant with insects that sprang into the
air as he approached. He had been following a path. The grass was chesthigh,
even higher, so he was using his arms in a swimming motion to move forward. How
long
was it
since this grass was last cut down or
burned? A
generation,
or more? About the time when he
was a boy?

After ten minutes he stood
motionless in the claustrophobia and heat. He had no idea how far and for how
long he would have to keep moving to be free of it. There seemed to be a
clearing about thirty metres away, for some charm trees stood there, barely
moving. As he looked at them he saw, unbelievably, a peacock flying over the
sealike surface of the rough pasture. The bird reached and settled within the
darkness of one of the trees, its blue shape disguised now as a horizontal
branch.

A poem from his youth
about a strange bird from the foothills had been one of his most famous verses,
memorized, explicated,
exfoliated
in schools until
there was nothing left but a throat bone and a claw. The lines had become a
mockery for him. There had been, in fact, no such rare bird in his youth. None
had ever
fl
own
across his stepfather
’
s
fi
elds. And now, suddenly, one existed as a
reality.

He wished he had worn a
hat. And the shirt he was wearing was wrong for this labour. He’d simply begun
walking into the field as part of a brief reconnaissance of a property he might
purchase. The house had come with a formal driveway of plane trees and several
hectares of abandoned land. He began moving forward again and, unable to see
what was below him, stumbled across a wooden object.
A bench
or a pump.
He got to his knees, cleared the grass away, and discovered
it was a wooden boat. The sound of insects thickened around him, and he felt
even more alone.

Three weeks earlier he had
left his home near Marseillan, which his stepfather had willed to his mother
and which his mother had willed to him, and he had left his wife and family.
Lucien Segura, in old age, was traversing the region of the Gers in a
horse-drawn cart, in search of a new home. Now and then he gave travellers a
ride in order to escape the strictness of this new solitude. They were of
varying ages, from all walks of life, some alone, some who swung themselves
onto the cart with one or two children and a dog. He conversed with them
openly, as he always did with strangers, and heard the stories about forests
they had worked in, their settlements by rivers, the gardens they manicured for
a week’s pay. As he listened, he entered their worlds invisibly.

Until suddenly, one day,
Lucien Segura had clambered off the cart and asked the family that was
travelling with him to stay with his belongings. Then he had slowly walked like
a pawn along the formal pathway of trees and found a shuttered and closed-up
house. He broke the lock off with a heavy stone and entered a hallway full of
dusty light. A door led into a kitchen, another to a dining room. He walked
along the hollow-sounding corridor not even glancing at rooms, reached the back
door and pushed it free of an old clasp, then stepped into the garden and
beyond that into the depth of the long grass.

Now on his knees, the old
writer touched the porous planks of the abandoned boat. It was the size of a
child’s bed, half boat, half raft, with space between the planks. There was a
manaclelike remnant of an oarlock on the side, and the tail of a rudder. It was
a dried-up object, baked for years by the sun and tunnelled into for years by
insects. But it meant there was possibly water nearby, and as soon as he
assumed that, he began to smell it in the air and stood up, lifting his face to
the sky. He bustled forward and within moments came upon the small lake. He
stripped down and slipped into the water, all the scratches and bites on him
covered now in its coldness.

For most of his life he
had been regarded as a solitary. He was described once by an acquaintance as
being ‘dif
fi
cult as a bear,
’
and this rough, impolite
image projected onto the contained world around him was useful as well as
false;
it
gave him space, and a border. But it was
true that in spite of the gregarious situation of his family he lived mostly an
imaginary life. When his marriage was dying, he found somewhere within himself
the
grisette
Claudile and wrote three books about her divergent life.
The
fi
ctional
girl had kept him company. If this was sickness or a perversion of life, it was
a sickness that had helped him overcome that dif
fi
cult time, and he would never demean it,
or her. He would remain faithful to this person in the town of Auch whose fate
he’d invented and shared with readers. Some had come to love her, and wrote him
letters as though he knew her in real life, not just in a
fi
ction.

Cher
Monsieur—

I have recently
reminded myself of a dinner in which Claudile Rothère and her sister spoke of
fi
g jam, telling how they love it.

So I have kept a pot
for you, made by a friend living in the countryside of Cahors. I hope, sir, you
enjoy it.

With my
deepest regards, Sarah S

Lucien had received this
package a few days before leaving Marseillan, and now and then on his journey
he carefully reopened the envelope and reread the letter—the formality and
kindness of it—as if it were a billet-doux. He had brought the
fi
g jam with him, and during the afternoons
he would, with a similar formality, open it and share it with whoever was in
the cart with him, most recently with three travellers—an ‘old thief,’ as the
man called himself, and his younger wife and their son. They had been with him
for several days, and by now Lucien
was
accustomed to
them. Like him they were looking for a new home, so theirs was a journey
similar to his. ‘La con
fi
ture de figue!
’
he announced.
‘
Faite par une dame
à
Cahors.
’
The eyes of the young son at
fi
rst pretended to gaze at nothing, like a falsely polite dog. Then he
watched the knife
’
s spread of
the jam, and like that dog, he watched the adults eat
fi
rst, swallowing when they swallowed, so
he could feel he had already eaten three portions of it before he consumed his
own.