Divisadero (31 page)

He walked up the road to
the farmhouse in total darkness. The world around him was moonless, not a star.
Not one candle flame. He let go of the animal and just stood there. Then
stepped up onto the porch, found his way in, and soon had his house awake with
light. He moved from room to room, speaking loudly to himself, every now and
then saying a name. He removed the damp burlap coat and saw himself in a hall
mirror. It was so long since he had seen himself. The clothes he put on now
seemed too big. He looked from a window and there was no neighbouring light. So
they had gone too. The rise of hill was black. A paraf
fi
n light or a candle would have shown.

He went out into the dark
and led the horse to the barn to feed it. Returning, he smelled something, the
remnant of a
fi
re. Smoke could have come from more than a dozen
fi
elds away, caught in a pocket of the
wind. If there had been rain, smoke would have been pounded down and a thread
of it might have remained in the grass. But he wanted to make certain no one
was next door. This was his homecoming, and he had not seen a soul in the
village or for most of the days of his ride. And not even his mother’s ghost
had met him. He walked up the hill into that black landscape, leaving the
lights on behind him.

There was no wagon or
horse in their barn. He knocked at the farmhouse and waited. He lifted the
latch and walked forward slowly until his thighs touched the table. He knew the
table. He knew its old blue colour when it existed there in daylight.
So often he had sat there playing cards, or talking, when he was
younger.

Lucien had no idea where
they could have gone. He called out both their names.
First
Roman’s, then hers, although he rarely used her name when they spoke.
It
had always felt too formal for what there was between them.
Even
her simple, lovely name.
He thought he heard a cat. He walked to the
cupboard where they stored candles, and swept his hands back and forth on the
shelf. He lit one and it warped light onto the walls. He heard the cat sound
again and, carrying the candle, drew back the curtain that separated their
bedroom. She was
lying
on her back like a corpse,
covered in a black blanket, her head moving from side to side. He saw a spasm
overtake her, and the cat noise came out of her. She was alone in the
farmhouse, and there had been no light or heat. But when he touched her
forehead his hand slid off the slickness, she was perspiring so much. This was
chills and fever.
Marie-Neige?
He whispered her name
as if he did not wish to disturb her, as if at the same time he needed to wake
her discreetly, without scaring or confusing her, so she could be aware of his
presence.
Where is Roman?
All her lips seemed able to do was blow out air. And when he

bent
over and looked at her closely, her eyes kept edging over— as if
signalling—to something behind him in the other part of the room.

He had thought during his
journey to the farmhouse how much he wished to talk with her about what he had
witnessed in the war these last few months, when he had felt the presence of
her within him. He needed to realign himself alongside her. If they found
themselves alone, then perhaps they would lie in a bed and sleep together. But
that path had now changed beneath his feet. He needed to care for her in her
fever. He began telling her about the time he was alone, when he had been ill
and delirious in his tent and all that had saved him was his history with her.
Marie-Neige’s eyes stilled for a moment, then she convulsed, so much her head
rose off the pillow; then she lay back breathing hard, twice as exhausted. In
Compiègne, he had seen horses with the ‘thumps,’ whose bodies convulsed because
of the lack of calcium.

I saved you?
she
said, barely audible, as if to herself, as if he did not
exist there except as somebody she was imagining.
Yes. It was as if you were the only one who would visit me in that cold tent.
He lowered the candle he was holding to the
fl
oor and placed his palm on her forehead.
It was still damp, her hair wet. He raked his stiff
fi
ngers through her hair slowly, again and
again. It was a gesture he used in love, and now, sensing this was a comfort to
her, he did not stop.
Most of the light the candle gave off collected on the low ceiling of the room,
so they were dark outlines to each other.
Now and then a
glint on her cheekbones.
She was about to convulse again and he held her
shoulders. Her body jerked up violently, then fell back, a stone
fi
gure in a vestry. She must have felt
capable of death. She drifted somewhere, and he sensed he had lost her. He left
the candle where it was, on the
fl
oor beside her bed, and returned to the kitchen and lit another.
‘
She
’
s with us,
’
his mother said, beside him.
He ripped up some old cardboard to use as kindling and opened the iron door of
the stove. There was a slope of wood, cobwebbed, against the wall, and he lit
the
fi
re.
Where was her husband? It felt to him that the house had been deserted for some
time; the stones on the wall and the
fl
oor held an old cold. The cracking and banging of the burning wood
woke her, and he heard her say,
Roman?
He came back and wiped her face
dry with the blanket. ‘Lucien. It’s me. Let me change your bedding, it feels as
wet as you.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. In the cupboard he found a
fl
annel sheet. It looked familiar. His
mother must have at one time handed it down to her. He spread it over a chair
in front of the
fi
re.
He opened a can of soup, put it on the stove,
then
brought the warm sheet to her. When he pulled the coarse blanket down, her
chest heaved as if freed of the weight, and her head came up coughing with each
spasm. She was bent almost in two, a naked hairpin. When she lay back, the
shadow of her ribs broke his heart, her thin whiteness re
fl
ecting the candlelight from the ceiling.
He wrapped her in the warmed sheet and covered her with the blanket. Then he
brought soup to the bed and began spooning it into her. She was drinking it
eagerly.
Roman.
No. It’s Lucien.
It’s Lucien, she repeated slowly, as if confusedly shifting dance partners.
Yes, he con
fi
rmed. Where is Roman? But as he said that, he saw he’d lost her
again, her mind elsewhere, in the shadows.
He must have fallen asleep in the chair. When he opened his eyes he couldn’t
see her. He thought he’d just felt a hand on his shoulder. But the candle
wavered then, and he saw her face on the pillow, looking at him.
Her eyes signalling something.
You, my
friend.
You have to take me out. Do you understand?
She
closed her eyes again, giving up, as if she’d been shouting at him through
thick glass. He didn’t understand. But she kept turning to him for help, there
was something else.
Do you...
Suddenly he understood. He was a fool. The
blanket wrapped tight around her, he gathered her into his arms, crossed the
room, pushed the door open, and carried her into the cold night. He didn’t have
a light with him, but he knew where it was—the small shack that was the
outhouse. ‘Thank you,’ she was saying. ‘Thank you, Roman.’
In the cubicle he lifted the blanket so she could sit down, and then sat next
to her so he could hold her upright. After a minute she nudged his arm.
All right?
She nodded, with almost a smile. Again he
gathered her like a frail branch and carried her to the farmhouse, and put her
back into the bed. She was already asleep, and calm; he drew the curtain across
so she would not be wakened by daylight.

He woke in the morning,
his head on the kitchen table, his eye against the blue of it—the scratched and
cut-into blue, a history of them all. So he knew where he was, coming out of
the deepest sleep, in the instant of waking.

He sat up in the chair.
Light from the east window revealed dust across the
fl
oor. He noticed the stove and went
forward and touched it tentatively, but it was cold. There was a pan on it with
the remnants of solidi
fi
ed food. He stood there not moving. The room, the air, was so still
that he felt he could not be
existing
within it. He
could hear nothing. He looked down at his feet, then at his hands held out in
front of him, to make certain he was fully alive.

All he wanted to hear was
a cough, or the movement of a bedspring. He walked forward and looked at the
bare faded landscape of trees and a river depicted on the curtain that cut the
room in half. As though it was another spectrum of life he could now almost
enter. He had not breathed for so long. He drew the curtain back and there was
nothing there.

He walked into Marseillan
and at the police station discovered that what he had warmed and carried in his
neighbours’ house was a splinter of memory or light within
himself
.
Marie-Neige had died during the last months of the war. And there was no longer
evidence of Roman in the records of the prison. He had enlisted, but they were
not sure he would ever return, even if he was alive. Lucien walked back to the
farmhouse alone. For the first time in his life he had no one around him. He
did not have a neighbour. His neighbours’ home was empty. He slept that night
in the one room that had belonged to her and Roman. He sat at their table. He
rode his horse into Marseillan and gave it away, then went by train to Paris,
collected his family, and brought them home.

Lucien Segura completed
the report on his time in the military camps and
fi
eld hospitals, exposing what he had
witnessed there. The
fi
rst chapter was read, then the report was shelved. Almost no one
read the work. His experience was questioned. How had this writer moved from a
complex,
fi
nely
tuned poetry to a blunt, coldly prepared vendetta? It irritated the literary
populace of Paris, and they hoped once again for the slim volumes of verse. But
he knew poetry would demand everything from him.

Roman did not return. And
Lucien moved his workplace from his stepfather’s room into Roman’s farmhouse.
He began to write again, and as he wrote he waited for her arrival, usually halfway
through a book, long after a location and a plot had been established. She
entered the story sometimes as a lover, sometimes as a sister. And in this way
he spent most of his days with Marie-Neige as an ally in the court, or as a
village girl who saves the hero without his being aware of it. Marie-Neige as a
lost twin, Marie-Neige as a jongleuse the central character falls in love with,
who, disguised within her craft as singer-acrobat, robs the great châteaux of
the Bordelais, Marie-Neige who in one book guides a blind father out of a
foreign city.

Often there was in these
fi
ctions a
fi
nite love or an unrecognized affection.
But for the most part Lucien gave his readers the happiness of a resolution. As
the stories were completed, he mailed them to a small press in Toulouse, where
the success of the books brought stability to the publisher. With the printing
of these tales, the central characters became popular public
fi
gures, especially as no one knew who the
author,
‘
La Garonne,
’
was.
Lucien had composed them in secrecy, in much the same way he had walked and
dreamt as a boy surrounded by copses and thickets and rivers that had been his
true intimates. The books hardly seemed the work of a well-regarded poet, or
the author of the bitter jeremiad on the recent and already forgotten war.

The adventures had a hero
who was at times awkward and at times gregarious, at times cautious, at times
foolhardy. Before he plunged his rapier into a villain’s heart he would fling
out the line ‘Say your good-byes.’ Whenever readers saw the line ‘Say your
good-byes,’ they would know the very necessary death would occur in the next
paragraph. It was a signal for final music as ‘Roman,’ after slaying the Count
de Guispelle at the Académie Française and nailing a proclamation of motive to
the imperious oak doors, leapt from the second floor into the waiting hay wagon
driven by a Mathilde or a Melicante or a Marie-Neige.

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
fi
nancial 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
fi
nancial razzledazzle 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.