Divisadero (26 page)

And so wait for night.
The hand on her shoulder.
Touching the
soft untouched back of her knee.
They lay
there,
a brother and sister, silent and calm save for this brush of him against her.
If someone lit a rush-light, its
fl
ood of ochre would reveal a nearness that might seem to have
occurred accidentally during sleep. But hours of darkness cloaked them. She
pushed back brie
fl
y against him and waited. He was already within her and held on to
the stasis of this, did not wish it to end.
A whisper.
When he felt himself coming, his hand covered her mouth to silence it, though
all noise came from the violence of his breath at her ear. And now, if a
rush-light were held up in the middle of the great barn, the posture of the two
would seem like a strangling, a brother in an old feud with a sister.

In the beginning this
posing as siblings had made them anonymous to each other, but later,
blindfolded this way, in a role, they knew each other’s truthful desires. And
what they discovered was not only conjugal love, but the quick danger of life
around them. They were caught in the attempt at survival among strangers, these
two who were strangers to each other. And they saw that anything, everything,
could be taken away, there was nothing that could be held on to except each
other in this ironlike world that appeared to stretch out for the rest of their
lives.

When Lucien Segura
’
s mother died, a few weeks before his own wedding, Le
Haricot entered the house, for the
fi
rst time uninvited, drew a chair beside the cof
fi
n, and rested her head against the black
pine. She would not move away. She had been befriended and had grown magically
in the shadow cast by this woman. And then with the recent imprisonment of
Roman, the result of his assaulting a carpenter in Barran, Marie-Neige had been
close to losing their farmhouse, until Lucien’s mother had paid the rent. Thus,
when Marie-Neige keened and wailed beside the cof
fi
n, Lucien believed she might in part be
fearing the loss of her home, and he had taken her aside and told her it was
still hers and he would cover the rent;
she
stared at
him with a look of scorn and turned away. She sat down in the chair again and
put her head against the black pine. Lucien realized he had insulted her,
misinterpreted her sorrow. After that he did not see her for a long time, and
when he did she would not speak to him. Nothing he could say would remove the
damage.

In the years between their
fi
rst meeting and his
wedding, there were two indelible versions of Marie-Neige that Lucien had been
unable to adjust and combine into one, as if gazing into a
fl
awed stereoscope. There was the
seventeen-year-old woman in a yellow cotton dress. She wore it constantly
during those early years in the
fi
elds, while carrying water from the river to the barn animals, or
when visiting their house. And then the person now ten years older, who had
become this woman, with Lucien almost unaware of it. If he was conscious of any
growing in those years, it was more to do with himself, his tentative beard,
the removal of his beard, his mother’s pallor. Not her.

Now, with the insult, he
felt he had lost her. Marie-Neige would scarcely acknowledge him. But there was
a moment at his wedding when she surprised him by touching his shoulder and, as
he turned, slipped into his arms wordlessly to dance. He was more startled than
was courteous. But she did not seem to care. He said something to break the
tension, nothing really, a bit of small talk, but she did not answer him, just
looked up and watched his face, watched this essential friend who was now
finally married, like her, who had once said they would not talk about it. Her
expression then was the quizzical and knowing look an animal can give, as if
she already knew what excuse or evasion he would provide. So he forgot words
for the rest of the dance and held her not too close, in order that he could
look at her properly. He could feel the ‘bumps’ his mother had joked about
years before. She wore, of course, a simple cotton dress, but one he had never
seen. And her thick black hair was combed precisely, clean as the night. He
leaned forward and smelled it.
The smell of the river.
Marie-Neige had taken care, even with this simplicity, in preparing herself for
his wedding. It could be she had spent as much time as the bride. And now they
were dancing, both of them unconcerned with any rules to do with steps, and remembering
it had been his mother who had taught both of them how to waltz.

He thought her beauty came
because of her familiarity to him, though this was not the person he had grown
up with. When he put the two mental photographs of her onto a stereoscope, side
by side, he could see echoes of a look. But there was also a tug in him, a
recognition that within this woman was a private nature he always felt close
to. It was not just her face and body. He assumed he was marrying the face and
body he wanted and desired. But here was something much larger, more confusing,
here was a whole
fi
eld, yet more intimate, a heart that was beyond him, who had chosen
Porthos among the musketeers, and he had never understood why.

And as the music ended he
saw her, like a woman in a romance, pull from her cotton sleeve a note that she
pushed into his breast pocket. It would burn there unread for another hour as
he danced and talked with in-laws who did not matter to him, who got in the
way, whose bloodline connection to him or his wife he could not care less
about. Everything that was important to him existed suddenly in the potency of
Marie-Neige. He could tell what the shallow frieze of the wedding party that
surrounded them would continue to be, and yet the one he knew best—he could not
conceive how she would behave or respond to him in a week, or even in an hour.
She had stepped into more than his arms for a dance, had waited for the precise
seconds so it was possible and socially forgivable—the sunlit wedding
procession, the eternal meal—and she had passed him a billet-doux as if they
were within a Dumas. The note she had written said
Good-bye.
Then it
said
Hello.
And then it reminded him that
A
message sent by pigeon to The Hague can sometimes change everything.
She
had, like one of those partially villainous and always evolving heroines,
turned his heart over on the wrong day.

Time passed before he saw
her again. Lucien and his bride left Marseillan and journeyed north, to the
forests of southern Brittany, then Paris, and when they returned three months
later the formality of his relationship with Marie-Neige had hardened again. He
had entered the central and compromising realm of a marriage; he had also
realized that, if he was going to be more than just a married man, he had to
take his own work seriously.

He wrote during the late
mornings and afternoons in what had once been his stepfather’s workroom. The
view from that window still held most of the natural world of his childhood,
though the river was hidden now by overgrown trees. Then, after dinner, when
his wife or any visitors had retired, he returned to its quiet and darkness,
and before turning on the lamp, allowed himself to become conscious of the
smell of the clockmaker
’
s oils that had once
fi
lled this space. He sat there weighing
what was already written, half-dreamt during the day, until he fell on a scrap
of sentence, something
uncommitted, that
would open a
door for him. He worked for much of the night, aware of the darkness beyond his
lamp. Only the pen and notebooks were alive, the rest of the world somewhere in
the cliff-fall of dreams. Now and then he heard words spoken into a pillow in a
far bedroom, a clue of another reality, like a juniper root shifting within the
earth. He read out loud to himself, the way she had read to him, when his
mother was alive, when MarieNeige was seventeen, and Balzac was still too dif
fi
cult for them. They
’
d entered the great world this way. Was he
in such a place now?

He pushed the glass doors
open and walked into the night so the coldness
fi
lled his shirt. He noticed the square of
a lit window on the slope of the hill. There was a tightrope between the two
farms,
and below it an abyss.

He was never fully certain
as to what made him write. He had seen his mother dance at her wedding with the
clockmaker, just a few embraced steps. And once with a cat—his mother dancing
with a cat in a meadow, he remembered that. It had become for him this
delicious, witnessed example. It was a way he could enter the world as himself.

The few women who knew him
well (a mother, the neighbouring woman) saw how his early success altered him.
He turned from uncertainty into a more determined and more private youth. He
camou
fl
aged his
life. He seemed to them like a creature
who
had slipped
into a mistaken garden of celebrity. He was now in a well-lit place, such as
those zoos in distant countries where one is able in the hours of night to
witness the behaviour of animals that assume they are cloaked in darkness.

When he had been about to
marry, his
fi
anc
é
e
’
s family recommended a fortune-teller for them, someone who was
known to predict accurate fates to those living in the village. The man read
their stars and then whispered some safe sentences about the future. They were
about to return to the sunlight of Blaziet when the seer grabbed Lucien
Segura’s sleeve and asked, ‘You are a good gardener?’ No, he said, refusing to
reveal his profession. The man looked at him with disbelief, then let go of his
arm. Lucien and his future wife left the curtained parlour and walked arm in
arm for an hour or two along a road banked with poppies, and into a marriage
that created two daughters. There would be years of compatibility, and then
bitterness, and who knew when that line was traversed, on what night, at what
hour.
Over what betrayal.
They slipped over this as
over a faint rise in the road, like a small vessel crossing the equator
unaware, so that in fact their whole universe was now upside down.

Essays were being
published in cities about his career, his craft, his psychosis, his landscape,
the lack of close friends, his secretive and diverse nature,
his
soul. They reproduced maps of the town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and the Fan of
Gascony, and Marseillan. Every local cleric, neighbouring butcher, and mailman
came out from the quiet corners of Lucien Segura’s world with a story or an
insight that would expose his silence. It turned out that his wife had kept a
journal of fury towards him. He had assumed their relationship was
affectionate. He read a few pages and realized how each of them was truly
invisible to the other. He saw the dis
fi
gured man who was portrayed. He was the nocturnal animal in that
night zoo, revealed in the darkness,
who
growled or
bit his fellow creatures and ate his children.

Sometimes he lost that
crucial part of himself that allowed him to feel secure.
Segura.
The irony of his name was not lost on him. The safe world disappeared. One
of his daughters, it was probably Lucette, would enter the darkened parlour and
witness him with a thin plaid blanket over his shoulders. She had been sent in
to make him talk and bring him away from himself. Papa! Her mother had insisted
she carry in a plate of food, but the girl did not place it on his lap. She was
sixteen. She wished to be an accompanist, not a messenger, desired only to
spell him through the darkness. He knew darkness well, all the footfalls within
it. She sat on the
fl
oor, her back against his legs like a spaniel, as if she were owned
by his silent body. Lucette remembers the heat in the room, the boredom of the
hours there, until she recognized each minimal gesture of his as a kind of
talking. She began to speak about what she feared, what drove her to jealousy,
what she imagined of the future, and eventually Lucien muttered how he himself
had behaved when he’d been caught as a boy in a similar place or with a similar
fear. He would never recall for certain which daughter had been with him that
long day in the dimly lit room with its small window, when he had felt the thin
blanket was his only skin, when only a careful breathing could release the
rubble of what he contained.

He recalled a metal pencil
box he had owned as a child, he remembered the young
grisette
he once
shared a train carriage with, whom he would name Claudile in three of his
books. Her companion was dangerous, she told him. The man had kept her captive,
jealous of her friendships, and had overthrown her sense of perspective. There
was no one to give an alternative opinion that countered his. Lucien sat across
from her in that train carriage, and they spoke as if the oldest of friends in
a night brasserie. She seemed wise in all things but her acceptance of this
man. How easy it was to be caught within another’s personality.