Divisadero (11 page)

Rafael turns and walks
along the struts of the loft. He thinks he has heard Anna calling. She has
moved the ladder away and is standing there undressed, laughing at him when his
head appears through the rectangle. He drops his legs through the hole and
hangs on with his hands. When she sees he isn
’
t going
to ask her for the ladder, she scrambles to provide it, but he has already
dropped the
fi
fteen feet to the
fl
oor.

She stands there stranded,
as if discovered naked on a stage with a ladder in her arms. He walks in slow
circles around her, hemming her in....

You’ve got feathers on
you.
I’ve got
feathers,
at least I am partially dressed.
Let’s have a bath. I will draw it.
No.
The river.
As you are.
There will be nobody there. You

need
to just cross the meadow, then
you will be in the trees.

His callused
fi
ngers hold her at the wrist again. So she
goes with him down to the kitchen and out the back.
Next time don’t move the ladder.
Oh, next time I will.
It isn’t much more than a trout stream, so they lie on their backs against
pebbles in order to be fully submerged. She sees a curl of water sculpt his
hair and shoulders, as if he’s being transformed. This is a
fi
rst, she thinks. Then realizes so much is
a
fi
rst with him, her
running up and down the corridor naked, the loose grip even now on her wrist,
his almost sleepy sexuality where there seems no boundary between passion and
curiosity and closeness, unlike one of her earlier lovers, who had been ardent
but sel
fi
sh.
And yet he keeps far away from her what else he is.
As though
he wishes in some way to remain a stranger.
Why does that happen...with
such an otherwise generous man?
These men with art, like
nineteenth-century botanists who, though wise and obsessive, claim only
professional affection for the world around them.
But the next day, standing in the meadow, he invites Anna to visit the trailer,
and she hesitates, thinking the offer is a commitment on his part, even a
tentative one. It implies too much knowledge of the other—his home could be a
capsule of the past or of a possible future.
Her own
hesitation at breaking their formality is interpreted by Rafael as shyness, or
modesty, or a desire not to take the relationship further. And in some way this
is not a misinterpretation of Anna.
For she too has lived a
stranger’s life.
There are layers of compulsive secrecy in her. She
knows there is a ‘
fl
ock
’
of Annas, and that the Anna beside this
unnamed river of Rafael
’
s is not the Anna giving a
seminar at Berkeley on one of Alexandre Dumas
’
collaborators and plot researchers, is not the Anna in San Francisco walking
into Tosca
’
s or eating at the Tadich Grill on California
Street.
She stands looking at Rafael in the middle of that meadow. Why doesn’t she wish
to visit her lover’s home? She is curious, after all. But she knows this
romance is a romance, in no way an agreement towards permanence, even though
much of her wants to see his
silhouette
moving within that suitcase of a
home that once belonged to the mysterious Aria. She wants to climb onto his
narrow bed with him and brace her arms against the ledge of the window, look
down on his weathered face and slowly bring her head to the patch of his body
that smells of basil, next to his heart.
One of the dearest possessions that Anna has is an old map—
La Carte du
Tendre Pays
—sweetly named, of emotions that
fi
t into the shape of France. It was
composed by women in an earlier century, during an era of male exploration and
mapmaking. But this was a map of yearnings that courteously avoided sexual
love, except for a darkly etched thicketed region in the north, listed as
‘Terres Inconnues.’ Well, times change. By the time she earned and saved enough
money to pay for her university studies in French, she was told by a dean that
the best way to learn French was to take a French lover.
In spite of everything that had existed between Coop and Anna for those two
months on the Petaluma farm, they had remained mysterious to each other. They’d
really been discovering themselves. In this way they could fit into the world.
But years later, never having married, never having lived with anyone in a
relationship that intended permanence, she still sidled beside her lovers as if
she were on Coop’s deck, glowing in secret with the discovery of herself. So
there had always been and perhaps always would be a maze of unmarked roads
between her and others. That emotional map of France was still true in the
present, full of subtexts, social intricacies,
unspoken
balances of power. One still needed to move warily, with hesitance, within it.

She sits on his bunk, next
to the sacred guitar.
So this is it.
Yes.
No books.
No.
No pictures.
He brings out a photograph of Aria. Anna looks for the person who has distilled
in her mind as a result of his stories. There’s a whimsy in his mother’s face
that Anna had not expected.
And your father?
Do you have one of him?
He does not respond to this at
fi
rst.
Somewhere I have a photograph that he is in, but you cannot

see
him clearly. He didn’t like being photographed. You get in their
books, he’d say, and you can never get out. If he ever needed a passport, he
would use someone else’s.
Someone roughly the same age and
hair colour.
No one looks like their passport picture. Do you? Do you
have a sister? You could probably use your sister’s passport if you needed to.

I don’t have a sister.
Don’t you? I thought you did.
She shook her head.
She was lying again to a lover.
Had a sister.
Had a past.
She

would
not tell him. Later, if she were brave enough. About their father
turning like an axe on Coop, and her praying for his breath beside him, even
for a small rise of his chest, the rest of her life splintered at that moment,
with her becoming a creature of a hundred natures and voices, and with a new
name. She envied this man beside her, as close as Coop had been to her on that
cabin
fl
oor.
This man
’
s life seemed
innocent. She envied the delightful adventures of his father and Aria. Perhaps
she needed a man as content as this to tell her past to.

All your stories,
Rafael—tell me, was there nothing terrible? Oh, many things. Many things
changed me. There was a love affair with a woman that silenced me, there was
the writer who lived in the house you are staying in,
there
were the donkeys....
See
, that’s what I mean!

Rafael
’
s
fi
rst encounter with a
girl was when he was seventeen. On a Friday evening he was to walk the few
miles into town, have a picnic with her beside the bridge, and then go to a
cinema. He carefully picked some marigolds, and then, because he was late,
decided to hitchhike. He felt the evening should go only one way, which was
that he simply must not embarrass himself with a member of the opposite sex. If
one minor thing went wrong, he was fated to die solitary. He could already list
almost a hundred areas of danger, for at seventeen we are perfectionists.

He walked under the avenue
of trees, his arm out every time he heard a motorcar, but no one stopped for
him. Finally a Citroën ‘Tube’ stopped, with two men and a woman taking up the
front. He walked to the back of the van, opened the rear door, and in his white
shirt and ironed trousers, stepped into complete darkness. As the van took off,
he began being nudged by three indistinct shapes that turned out to be donkeys.
It was the longest ride of his life, and Anna insists that he relive every
second of it for her, and the appointment that followed.

Le rendez-vous,
he says,
n’a pas eu lieu.
The girl took one quick look at him
when the van dropped him by the town fountain, staggering out with his shirt
loose and his shoes wet and shat upon, and his hands holding—in an attempt at
nobility— seven or so stumps of what had been
fl
owers. His time in the Citroën had been
spent mostly attempting to save the bouquet, holding it high, so that his frame
was abandoned to the animals, which had been locked in the van since the start
of their journey in Montricoux.

So what was the very worst
thing about it? Anna asks. The worst thing was that by the time I got home,
after the girl left, saying, ‘My father is ill, I must go,’ after I had washed
my arms and neck and cleaned the shit off my shoes at the fountain, after going
to the cinema and seeing a Gabin all alone and then walking home along the dark
road with the night sky so bright that I was beginning to feel good again—I’d
bought some bread and herbs, as I was hungry, and I was walking with this food
with a strange kind of joy, that was something to do with escape—the worst
thing was that by the time I got home everyone in the village of Dému already
knew about it. Even now, if you ask about the ‘donkey boy’ or the ‘Citroën
story,’ they will know who you are talking about.
Rafael has added, in the many years since, a layer of casual irony to the
trauma of the event. I try to imagine, he says, my donkey-odoured hand
attempting to touch her naked waist or her sixteen-year-old shoulder during
La
Bête Humaine.
I became used to the braying when I entered classrooms. And
there was a sudden realistic neigh during the end-of-year exam a month later
that made the students break into laughter, even cheering, and caused a knowing
smile from the teacher.
I had no more ‘appointments’ with girls for the next four years—and then,
knowing that the worst that could happen had already happened, I breezed into
meetings with them unconcerned, the most relaxed suitor for my age. But during
those four years I was in exile and I concentrated on the guitar. I owe my
career to a bunch of marigolds and three donkeys.
So Rafael discovered the privacy of music, its hidden chords,
all
those disguised narratives. From then on, con
fl
icts were to be within his art. And,
being surrounded by the intimacy of his parents, he knew he had to somehow protect
it. He was still the playful and loved son, but his mother noticed him removing
himself easily from the conversations in their trailer. He had found his own
enchantment,
he had his own ‘emergency.’ He had an escape
from the world.
As if the chair he sat in was a horse to
gallop into unknown distances.
Who taught him this secret? Once, as a young musician, he witnessed a pair of
dancers who began rehearsing on their own, before anyone had taken out an
instrument, to a recording of piano music that they pulled across like a screen
between themselves and the others who were there. They were alone already, in
their intimate preparation. And he remembers something else—for Anna has asked
him if he knew the writer—how, while he was a boy living near this writer’s
house, he spent long afternoons with him in the garden. The old man would sit
at his table in the deep hollow that was once a
mare,
a notebook and a
pen and ink in front of him, but would not write. So Rafael found another chair
and walked down into the hollow and sat with him. He remembers how there was
always birdsong falling out of the tree. The writer asked what was happening in
the
fi
elds
beyond, and Rafael said
—
a bon
fi
re, a tilling, an execution of crows, and
explained how his father had sculpted a large crow out of wood, placed it on a
fence, and then with bloodcurdling screams attacked it violently with a knife.
He claimed this kept crows away from their garden. I see, said the man at the
table, looking beyond the lake towards that site of possible activity. Rafael
visited him often at the blue table in the shade of the great oak.
When I wrote, the man said, that was the only time I would think. I would sit
down with a notebook and a pen, and I would be lost in a story. The old writer,
seemingly at peace, thus casually suggested to Rafael a path he might take
during his own life, and taught him how he could be alone and content, guarded
from all he knew, even those he loved, and in this strange way, be fully
understanding of them. It was in a sense a terrible proposal of secrecy—what
you might do with a life, with all those hours being separated from it—that
could lead somehow to intimacy. The man had made himself an example of it.
The solitary in his busy and crowded world of invention.
It
was one of the last things the writer talked to him about.

It was three a.m. Rafael
took the lamp off the hook and went outside. In the meadow there were two
chairs, and he placed the lamp on one of them and lit the wick, then moved his
own chair away so he would not be in the spill of light. He sat there, hands
curled on his lap.