Divisadero (25 page)

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 con
fi
dence, 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
fi
nished 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, revealed 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
fi
rst 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
fi
rst 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
fl
ank. 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 sword
fi
ght 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
fi
elds. She noticed his brown arms, his broken voice,
its
shrill husk falling away. He was no longer the boy she
had
fi
rst met.
He had begun to move with con
fi
dence 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.

She had met Roman at a
fair in the village of Saint-Didier-surRochefort, 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
fi
rst 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
fi
ve 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. MarieNeige 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
fi
elds 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
fi
elds brightening around them.

They barely paused through
the Ardèche, 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
fi
lled the rolled-open doorway. Crouching, he realized the
fl
oor 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
fl
esh a tint of blue, and the green
fi
elds 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
fi
ngers. 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
fi
nd work they needed to ask others. But they kept to themselves. The
fairs they 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
fi
elds 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
fi
relight. 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.

A
veillée
held the
community together, it was where everyone volunteered work, even if exhausted.
Outside was a de
fi
ant landscape where the crops hardly grew, where life was a
constantly repeating wheel, so the truisms the men passed around had a
clear-eyed meanness.
‘Swineherd in this world, swineherd
in the next.’
It was the only place where Roman and
Marie-Neige ate properly. By the end of a day’s work they were already in a
state of exhaustion, but they donated hours to the
veillée
because of
the available food. He could see her across the room, near the fire, involved
with the night laundry, looking like a child among the other women. Courtships
took place in the half-dark peripheries, even as lovers overheard the bitter
wisdoms about desire. So that Marie-Neige was often approached by youths or men
as old as Roman, while she twisted the wet sheets and hung them to dry against
the
fi
relight.

These were the most
exciting days of her life. There was the adventure of disguise. And sleep was
easy, without fear. In the barn, crowded with others, she felt a wall of
security beside Roman, now forced to be platonic in his caring. When they
wished or needed to make love, the lack of privacy and the seeming sin of
brotherly love that surrounded the act made the tension and desire... magni
fi
cent. Every wish for sound between them
was impossible and could be translated only into a half-lit glance. His hand on
her back in the night, which had become gentle with this caution, was enough
for her. So she would turn slowly from the blunt advances of others during the
veillée
and gaze towards the darkness of the workingmen, where she knew Roman would
be watching her, and run her
fi
ngers through her hair and shrug.