Divisadero (24 page)

From then on she wished to
share everything he consumed from a book. During the late mornings, after
helping with household duties, she learned the letters of the alphabet from his
mother, and during the afternoons listened to this drug of stories as she and
Lucien sat together on the porch or within the shade of the dwarf apple tree by
the river. They had both grown up far from the intrigue of cities, and now they
fell upon Dumas as a guide into those cities that were always in peril and
where the sight of an emerald on a neck could betray a family dynasty. They
accompanied horsemen who carried crucial documents across
fl
ooded plains and kept assignations with
foes and lovers at midnight. The books were stuffed with unbearable love.
“
She gave a plaintive moan and
fl
ed, trying in vain to sti
fl
e the beating of her heart. Cornelius, left alone, could do no more
than breathe in this sweet scent of Rose
’
s hair, which
lingered like a captive between the bars.
”
Lying on the
slim ribbon of porch, they felt at times that they could scarcely breathe, that
there could be no normal life ever again.

He read as if speaking in
tongues, with such adult knowledge he was like someone wise who had been
wounded in a distant battle or by a passion. And it was as if she
were
learning of the great world through him—it was
he
(and
he felt it himself) who was introducing Marie-Neige at court, or riding beside
her from city to city under the moon. They discovered how it was possible to
send a messenger pigeon as far as The Hague, which might change everything,
though more often it was necessary to ride the great distance oneself. If
Lucien hesitated, shocked sometimes by a woman
’
s
deceit or a violent beating in the
fi
ction he was reading, Marie-Neige would interfere from within her silence,
to examine what seemed to him a
fl
aw in the carefully made fabric, and they would speak about it,
discussing how, exactly, a man or a woman, a husband or a wife, might behave.
For instance the line
“
What she wanted was beyond the
power of this man, and she had to take him with his weakness.” If there were
aspects he did not fully understand, or was simply bored by, she would wonder
out loud why that was. He realized she had a sly wit within her—just as she had
her preferences for a speci
fi
c musketeer
’
s charm.

They came
to know, in this way, about each other’s interests
Divisadero

and
hesitations. She noticed how he raced over sections about
childhood, for he found characters under the age of twenty too familiar. He
already knew what youth contained. He wished only for the intricacies of adults
and travel, war and battles, marriages. When he blurted this out to her he
paused, embarrassed at the wall between them concerning that. She put her thin
brown hand up to his cheek and kept it there not even a second. Someday you
will marry. And then we will talk about that as well. No, he had said,
We
will not. I’m certain we will not. He stepped back into
formality, so that they were like two
fl
ammable matches side by side in a tinderbox.

All this was during their
fi
rst year together. By late afternoon
Roman would have returned, and she would return to her real life. And he
—
he would race into the
fi
elds, cartwheel, aim at thin trees with a slingshot, and throw
himself like a spear into the river. He
’
d burn through the water, eyes open in its darkness, certain he
could
fi
nd
silver or a lost sword or a branch that would attempt to entangle him
underwater. Something made him return to being just a boy in those moments
after their separation.

She would go to her narrow
back window and see him leap up to a branch. If she was helping Roman bathe at
the rear of their house, soaping his shoulders, she might hear a splash that
reached her from the distance of his world. If Roman desired her, if he
returned tumescent and hungry, he would not even walk the few feet to their
bed, she
’
d lie back on the kitchen table, her feet
dangling, barely touching the
fl
oor, and he would crash himself into her, her hands gripping
whatever edge of the table she could hold on to, half thrilled by him, their
heads and shoulders under the swaying unlit lamp, the skin at her spine moving
up and down against the wood, cushioned only by her open cotton dress. The boy
would be hardly down to the river, and their coupling and mutual satisfaction
would be over. Roman would put out his hand and she’d hold it with both of hers
and he would pull her off the table into the air. He was an older, stronger
man, nothing like the boy, and she saw his eyes lost in bitterness and
frustration, in a fury about the state of their lives. He would
fl
ing a chair into the wall of curtain that
divided their one room, and she knew it could just as easily have been her body
that was thrown towards that dark corner. Once or twice she saw his personality
in the musketeer, Porthos, and had even seen the possibility of Porthos in him,
and that was her way of remaining faithful to all Roman believed in.

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 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
fi
rst 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
fi
ngers, 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 ri
fl
e, 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
fi
red the ri
fl
e 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
fi
ve years younger, and they found it dif
fi
cult 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
fi
re 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
fi
rst 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
re
fl
ected 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
fi
rst 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.’