Divisadero (17 page)

January
7.
We rode the cliffs looking for Keene’s dog. He was always yelling
at him, goddammit this, goddammit that, but we knew he loved it. We split up
going along the creeks, looking for something that was either dead or alive, we
didn’t know. We all had done this before, looking for animals,
then
we would come across them dead, as if there had been a
small massacre in the snow. In the late afternoon, we found the dog, shaking
beside the creek at Richardson Bend. He had never been a friendly animal,
except to his master, and now he had almost too much company. We crouched and
‘paid court,’ as Anna would say. Keene wrapped George in a blanket, and the
rest of us led our horses into the water. I listened to the sound of their
drinking, soosh soosh soosh, the sound a baby makes at a breast. A buck
appeared, about twelve points—a deity. It came out of the trees and looked
around. That must have been what it was like around George all that time when
we thought he was alone. Keene so relieved, he held the dog in his arms and
talked nonstop all the way home.

October
3.
Old white trees.
We take a
brush light in one hand and ride into the aspens at night. There were horses in
there, half asleep, walking like an ocean inland. I was there for two hours
smelling their necks. I wanted to
fi
nd one and sleep on her back.

December
5.
Bobby has a girlfriend so thin she gets hammered on one beer.
When Bobby’s father died, she crawled into Bobby’s bed and quietly embraced
him. White-Jacket by
Melville, that
was Bobby’s
favorite book. Men like
him,
it’s almost as if they
are hiding behind depth.

In my work I sometimes
borrow Claire’s nature, as well as her careful focus on the world. Though no
general reader will recognize my sister, not even she, I suspect, if she would
happen to pick up a book of mine. For I have changed my name. Perhaps, if she
were reading my work, she might be impressed by my details about halter buckles
and cinches in some medieval episode, or by the realism of the swivel of a walk
caused by childhood polio. It was a swivel, not really a
limp,
and I have parsed that walk of hers carefully—how it would be different on a
hill, on grass as opposed to pavement, how she could disguise it in a room of
strangers.

And like Claire, I have
become cautious of what I take in and nurture—the carefully chosen portion of
experience. I once read an essay by a writer who was asked to imagine an ideal
career, and he replied that he would like to be responsible for just a brief
stretch, perhaps two hundred yards or so, of a river. I think this would have
charmed Claire
utterly,
she would have safely put her
life in that author’s hands. Perhaps it is because small things repeat their
importance on a farm and make them indelible in our memory. She will remember
Coop picking her up after a birthday party, and how they drove home along the
coast road with the sky yellow and the hills purple-black. And the time he
stood on the top of the water tower as the two of us watched him.
And Alturas the cat.
And probably the
strange episode with the fox.
I am sure Claire could draw a diagram of
the cup of wine and the heel of bread and the deep gold of the cheese on the
table at
fi
ve a.
m
. in that dark kitchen of our childhood before milking
began, and recall how even at that hour it felt raucous with the noise of the
starting
fi
re. But
then, I remember that too.

I feel I can imagine most
things about Claire accurately. I know her. But Coop I know only in one
distinct way—as the twentyyear-old I fell in love with, who took one step
beyond the intimacy that was handed to him. It is almost natural, is it not? He
had grown up alongside these two sisters, an orphan, in our small desirous
fi
eld. He had taught Claire and me how to
build a rail fence, how to grind up a buckeye nut and sprinkle it on the
surface of a river to tempt
fi
sh. All these rules and habits had created a bond between us. But
when I reconstruct the arc of Coop’s life I can take it only as far as the knot
of the moment when he, that shy alien one, became my secret lover, ironically
at the very moment when he was exposing himself by this act of sharing.

The discovery of us in
each other’s arms, under that green sky, a father attempting to murder a boy, a
daughter trying to attack a father, is in retrospect something very small,
something that might occur within just a square inch or two of a Brueghel. But
it set
fi
re to
the rest of my life. I was witness to madness
—
fully mad
myself
—
clawing his body and face with a piece of glass
to be free of him, as he held my neck in that grasp. I have come to believe
that no girl has had such an intimacy with a father, who was trying perhaps to
strangle the devil out of her. Whatever anger existed, there must have been
some grains of a fearful love for me. But I did not believe that then. All I
thought was that I still had Coop’s heart in me as my father lifted my body out
of that cabin, gripped my hand and took me down the hill. I was screaming when
we entered the farmhouse. He said nothing to Claire. Minutes later he forced me
into the truck and drove me away, down the coast, as if distance would dilute
whatever existed between Coop and me. I had only a moment to collect what I
wanted. I ripped out from a photograph album a picture of myself and
Claire,
took one of her journals. I knew already I would not
be back.

I would never see Coop
again.
And then, somewhere south of San Jose, at a truck stop on I5, I slipped away. I
went in one door and immediately out another and caught a ride. I disappeared.
I was probably ten minutes ahead of him by the time he realized what had
happened. He must have careened down the interstate looking into the windows of
every car he passed along the coastal route, alerting the police about his lost
daughter, searching for me in towns like Gilroy and Santa Clara and San Juan
Bautista. He would not have gone back to the farm for several days. And by then
the abnormal ice storm and blizzard that hit the region had left the Petaluma
hills. I was now a runaway. And Coop would no doubt be gone.
Who recovers from such events? You meet people even in middle age and discover
that at some point, in the delicate path of life, they have been turned into
the Jack of Hearts or the Five of Clubs. This is what has happened, I suspect,
to Coop and to me. We have become unintelligible in our secrets, governed by
our previous selves.
Just as Claire, in some way, will always
be adjacent to our romance, the one who lost her family because of it.
‘One fetal twin may absorb the other without malice, and retain in its body a
loose relic or two of one of the absorbed twin’s femurs. (The living twin grows
and becomes an adult; the femur stays fetal.)’ That marvel, Annie Dillard,
wrote that. And perhaps this is the story of twinship. I have smuggled myself
away from who I was, and what I was. But am I the living twin in the story of
our family? Or is it Claire?
Who is the stilled one?

Those who have an orphan’s
sense of history love history. And my voice has become that of an orphan.
Perhaps it was the unknown life of my mother, her barely drawn
portrait, that
made me an archivist, a historian.
Because if you do not plunder the past, the absence feeds on you.
My career exhumes mostly unknown corners of European culture. My best-known
study is of Auguste Maquet, one of Alexandre Dumas’ collaborators and plot researchers.
Another is a portrait of Georges Wague, the professional mime who gave Colette
lessons in 1906 to prepare her for music-hall melodramas. I work where art
meets life in secret. An archive is Utopia to me, a poet said, and my
acquaintances no doubt feel contemporary life must seem a thin and less
interesting pasture for me. That may be true. When Rafael asks, for instance,
in which historical moment I desire to live, I say, without pause, Paris, the
week Colette died, when at her state funeral Georges Wague made certain a
thousand lilies were sent by the Association of Music Halls and Circuses.... I
want to be there, I tell him, in my ‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’ t-shirt, looking up
at her apartment on the premier étage of the Palais-Royal, where ‘no more amorously
selected words would align themselves on the pale blue paper under the light of
the blue lamp.’

Georges Wague, who taught
Colette mime, taught her two important things. He had recognized a hidden art
in her, that she could represent herself not just with words. This woman, he
could see, contained other qualities. She could be as powerful when she was
speechless. He took her hand and they walked away from others in Natalie Barney
’
s garden, and as she began to speak he put a
fi
nger across her lips and her eyes caught
fi
re, full of life. They watched his face
for a signal. He let his hand fall back in
a surrender
so she knew he was not manipulative, and they walked on. He told her then that
mimes live long lives. The second thing he told her she already knew.
That there was nothing more assuring than a mask.
Under the
mask she could rewrite herself into any place, in any form.

This is where I learned
that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save
ourselves, where a thirdperson voice protects us. Just as there is, in the real
landscape of Paris in
Les Misérables,
that small
fi
ctional street Victor Hugo provides for
Jean Valjean to slip into, in which to hide from his pursuers. What was that
fi
ctional street
’
s name? I no longer remember. I come from Divisadero Street.
Divisadero, from the Spanish word for ‘division,’ the street that at one time
was the dividing line between San Francisco and the
fi
elds of the Presidio. Or it might derive
from the word
divisar,
meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance.’
(There is a ‘height’ nearby called El Divisadero.) Thus a point from which you
can look far into the distance.

It is what I do with my
work, I suppose. I look into the distance for those I have lost, so that I see
them everywhere.
Even here, in Dému, where Lucien Segura
existed, where I ‘transcribe a substitution / like the accidental folds of a
scarf.’

I am uncertain, even now,
what made me fall upon the life of Lucien Segura and wish to write about him.
Or what made me explore in the Berkeley archives the almost worn-out paths of
his life in the Gers. I had read the French writer while studying at
Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. But then, more important, in a carrel in the
Bancroft Library at Berkeley, I heard for the first time his voice, reciting
his poems into a lacquered tin funnel as if into the large ear of a stranger.
This documentation by the Académie Française in an early-twentieth-century
recording had positioned him too far in the background, so that close by was what
sounded like a seacoast or a crackling
fi
re. Nonetheless I felt there was something in the articulated voice
that suggested a wound, the way one can sometimes recognize a concealed ailment
in the slow movement of a king in newsreels. And I remember that, after his
poems, Lucien Segura read something on that cylinder about his father—his
stepfather, really—who had been a clockmaker, and I looked up from the notes I
had been taking in Dr. Weber’s semester on peasant life and began to listen
more intently. There was a sweet shadow and hesitance in Segura. It was like a
ruined love, and it was familiar to me. Till then all I knew of his life was
his odd departure from his family; that late in life, comfortable, successful,
he had climbed into a horsedrawn cart, and disappeared. His voice with the
wound in it kept haunting me. I travelled to France, to the last house he had
lived in, during the
fi
nal stage of his life. I pieced together the landscapes he had
written about. I took long walks. I swam in the nearby
stream,
I walked his avenue of trees. I met Rafael.

Seven minutes after I
escaped from my father at the truck stop near San Jose, this person formerly
known as Anna climbed into the passenger seat of a vehicle going south. We
drove all night, a shy black man in his commercial refrigeration truck giving a
lift to someone he thought was a French girl. (I did not wish to talk or
explain anything.) We stopped now and then for food, though I barely ate, my
stomach hurting from fear. We sat in roadside diners and I watched him eat
guacamole and chiles rellenos, while the weather stations on every truck-stop
television screen reported the freak ice storm invading northern California. It
had been a sunny afternoon on Coop’s deck, before the windlessness and those moments
of thunder, and here I was, a day later, across the table from a polite and
generous stranger. I did not speak. English never escaped my lips, and the only
words that existed between us as we travelled into the Great Central Plain came
from the truck’s radio.