Divisadero

  DIVISADERO

  Michael Ondaatje

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ONE / Anna, Claire, and Coop

  The Orphan

  The Red and the Black

  Le Manouche

  Out of the Past

  The Person Formerly Known as Anna

  Stumbling on a Name

  TWO / The Family in the Cart

  The House

  Astolphe

  Journey

  Two Photographs

  THREE / The House in Dému

  Marseillan

  The Arrival

  The Great World

  The Dog

  Charivari and Veillée

  Billet-doux

  Night Work

  In-laws

  Le Bois de Mazères

  Fields

  Thinking

  War

  Furlough

  Return

  Say Your Good-byes

  Acknowledgments

  By the Same Author

  Imprint

  For John and Beverly

  and in loving memory of Creon Corea

  —remembered by us as ‘Egilly’

  When I come to lie in your arms, you sometimes ask me in which historical moment do I wish to exist. And I will say Paris, the week Colette died. … Paris, August 3rd, 1954. In a few days, at her state funeral, a thousand lilies will be placed by her grave, and I want to be there, walking that avenue of wet lime trees until I stand beneath the second-floor apartment that belonged to her in the Palais-Royal. The history of people like her fills my heart. She was a writer who remarked that her only virtue was self-doubt. (A day or two before she died, they say Colette was visited by Jean Genet, who stole nothing. Ah, the grace of the great thief…)

  ‘We have art,’ Nietzsche said, ‘so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.’ The raw truth of an incident never ends, and the story of Coop and the terrain of my sister’s life are endless to me. They are the sudden possibility every time I pick up the telephone when it rings some late hour after midnight, and I wait for his voice, or the deep breath before Claire will announce herself.

  For I have taken myself away from who I was with them, and what I used to be. When my name was Anna.

  ONE

  Anna, Claire, and Coop

  The Orphan

  By our grandfather’s cabin, on the high ridge, opposite a slope of buckeye trees, Claire sits on her horse, wrapped in a thick blanket. She has camped all night and lit a fire in the hearth of that small structure our ancestor built more than a generation ago, and which he lived in like a hermit or some creature, when he first came to this country. He was a self-sufficient bachelor who eventually owned all the land he looked down onto. He married lackadaisically when he was forty, had one son, and left him this farm along the Petaluma road.

  Claire moves slowly on the ridge above the two valleys full of morning mist. The coast is to her left. On her right is the journey to Sacramento and the delta towns such as Rio Vista with its populations left over from the Gold Rush.

  She persuades the horse down through the whiteness alongside crowded trees. She has been smelling smoke for the last twenty minutes, and, on the outskirts of Glen Ellen, she sees the town bar on fire—the local arsonist has struck early, when certain it would be empty. She watches from a distance without dismounting. The horse, Territorial, seldom allows a remount; in this he can be fooled only once a day. The two of them, rider and animal, don’t fully trust each other, although the horse is my sister Claire’s closest ally. She will use every trick not in the book to stop his rearing and bucking. She carries plastic bags of water with her and leans forward and smashes them onto his neck so the animal believes it is his own blood and will calm for a minute. When Claire is on a horse she loses her limp and is in charge of the universe, a centaur. Someday she will meet and marry a centaur.

  The fire takes an hour to burn down. The Glen Ellen Bar has always been the location of fights, and even now she can see scuffles starting up on the streets, perhaps to honour the landmark. She sidles the animal against the slippery red wood of a madrone bush and eats its berries, then rides down into the town, past the fire. Close by, as she passes, she can hear the last beams collapsing like a roll of thunder, and she steers the horse away from the sound.

  On the way home she passes vineyards with their prehistoric-looking heat blowers that keep air moving so the vines don’t freeze. Ten years earlier, in her youth, smudge pots burned all night to keep the air warm.

  Most mornings we used to come into the dark kitchen and silently cut thick slices of cheese for ourselves. My father drinks a cup of red wine. Then we walk to the barn. Coop is already there, raking the soiled straw, and soon we are milking the cows, our heads resting against their flanks. A father, his two eleven-year-old daughters, and Coop the hired hand, a few years older than us. No one has talked yet, there’s just been the noise of pails or gates swinging open.

  Coop in those days spoke sparingly, in a low-pitched monologue to himself, as if language was uncertain. Essentially he was clarifying what he saw—the light in the barn, where to climb the approaching fence, which chicken to cordon off, capture, and tuck under his arm. Claire and I listened whenever we could. Coop was an open soul in those days. We realized his taciturn manner was not a wish for separateness but a tentativeness about words. He was adept in the physical world where he protected us. But in the world of language he was our student.

  At that time, as sisters, we were mostly on our own. Our father had brought us up single-handed and was too busy to be conscious of intricacies. He was satisfied when we worked at our chores and easily belligerent when it became difficult to find us. Since the death of our mother it was Coop who listened to us complain and worry, and he allowed us the stage when he thought we wished for it. Our father gazed right through Coop. He was training him as a farmer and nothing else. What Coop read, however, were books about gold camps and gold mines in the California northeast, about those who had risked everything at a river bend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune. By the second half of the twentieth century he was, of course, a hundred years too late, but he knew there were still outcrops of gold, in rivers, under the bunch grass, or in the pine sierras.

  There was a book, not much more than a pamphlet with a white spine, I found high on a shelf in the mudroom of the farm. Interviews with Californios: Women from Early Times to the Present. As most of those women did not write, archivists from Berkeley had travelled with tape recorders to capture these lives and the ambience of the past. The monograph included accounts dating from the early 1800s to the present, from ‘The Dictation of Doña Eulalia’ to ‘The Dictation of Lydia Mendez.’ Lydia Mendez was our mother. It was here in this book that we discovered the woman who had died the week Claire and I were born. Only Coop, among the three of us, who’d worked on the farm since he was a boy, had known her as someone alive. For Claire and me she was a rumour, a ghost rarely mentioned by our father, someone interviewed for a few paragraphs in this book, and shown in a washed-out black-and-white photograph.

  All the people in the book had a humility, a sense that history was around them, not within them. ‘We grew up in the Central Plain, north-east of Los Angeles, where my father worked the asphaltum pits. I married when I was eighteen, and that night we danced so many times to “La Voquilla,” and “El Grullo”—the violin players and guitarists, my husband said, were the best in the region. The trestle table with food was set up by the great rock in the pasture. My husband’s father landed thirty years earlier in San Francisco, and the same day, I am told, he caught the steamer to Petaluma, and built this house. By the time I arrived here there were a thousand laying hens
. But my husband did not want others working on the farm so we kept only dairy cattle and grew corn—foxes were killing the hens and it took too much trouble to protect them. There were other animals in the hills— bobcats and coyotes, rattlesnakes in the redwoods, I saw a mountain lion once. But the devil’s curse was thistles. We fought to cut them back. The neighbours never did it right, and their thistle seeds flew onto our property.

  ‘There was a man further down the Petaluma Road who had a hundred goats, a gentle man. Sometimes he came and camped with his goats in our fields—a special small goat that ate thistles, and its digestion killed the seed, somehow it chewed the seed up properly. A cow doesn’t do that. A cow eats thistles and the seed goes right through. If you hate thistles, you could have loved this man… . There was a terrible violence on the farm next to ours. The Cooper family was killed by a hired hand who beat them to death with a wooden board. At first no one knew who had committed such an act, but their son had hidden in the crawl space under the floorboards of the house for several days. He was four years old and he came out eventually and told who had done it. We took the boy in, to stay and work on the farm.’

  This is all of the portrait we own of our mother. Whatever else she might have considered and thought remains in an unquestioned distance. She had spoken mostly of events that stumbled against her, so we had only her affection for the goat man, her brief joy in dancing, the details of the murder on the neighbouring farm that brought Coop into our household. There is nothing revealed here about her pleasures or her intelligence or her compassion. Things that must have been a guiding star for our father. Just two pages about this ‘Californio’ who would die in childbirth when she was twenty-three.

  What is not in the small white book, therefore, is the strange act of our father during the chaos surrounding her death, when he took on informally the adoption of a child from the same hospital where his wife was giving birth—the daughter of another mother, who had also died—bringing both children home and raising the other child, who had been named Claire, as his own. So there would be two girls, Anna and Claire, born the same week. People assumed that both were his daughters. This was our father’s gesture that grew from Lydia Mendez’ passing. The dead mother of the other child had no relatives, or was a solitary; perhaps that was how he was able to do this. It was a field hospital on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, and to put it brutally, they owed him a wife, they owed him something.

  Now and then our father embraced us as any father would. This happened only if you were able to catch him in that no-man’s-land between tiredness and sleep, when he seemed wayward to himself. I joined him on the old covered sofa, and I would lie like a slim dog in his arms, imitating his state of weariness—too much sun perhaps, or too hard a day’s work.

  Claire would also be there sometimes, if she did not want to be left out, or if there was a storm. But I simply wished to have my face against his checkered shirt and pretend to be asleep. As if inhaling the flesh of an adult was a sin and also a glory, a right in any case. To do such a thing during daylight would have been unthinkable, he’d have pushed us aside. He was not a modern parent, he had been raised with a few male rules, and he no longer had a wife to qualify or compromise his beliefs. So you had to catch him in that twilight state, when he had ceded control on the tartan sofa, his girls enclosed, one in each of his arms. I would watch the flicker under his eyelid, the tremble within that covering skin that signalled his tiredness, as if he were being tugged in mid-river by a rope to some other place. And then I too would sleep, descending into the layer that was closest to him. A father who allows you that should protect you all of your days, I think.

  More than a century before us, in August 1849, a group of men set up camp in a valley more than a hundred miles north of Petaluma. They built cabins at a place they called Badger Hill and began to search for gold. There were twenty of them panning the streams, standing knee-deep in the icy rivers, and they almost surrendered to the winter storms that overtook them. But within six months gold-laced quartz was unearthed in the place that would eventually be called Grass Valley. A hundred ramshackle hotels went up, and bizarre names for mines began to speckle the constantly reprinted maps— Slumgullion, Delirium Tremens, Bogus Thunder, Hell’s Delight, Graveyard, Lone Jack, Rich Hell, Ne Plus Ultra, Silver Fork, Rocking Horse, Sultana. Men would be stranded in the mountains with no supplies and become hunters out of necessity, killing grouse, cattle, bears, with shotguns and pistols. Butcher shops sprang up. Steamboats travelled inland to the furthest point of navigation—as far as the Feather River. And a many-headed civilization arrived. Gamblers, water entrepreneurs, professional shootists, prostitutes, diarists, coffee drinkers, whisky merchants, poets, heroic dogs, mail-order brides, women falling in love with boys who walked within the realm of luck, old men swallowing gold to conceal it on their return journeys to the coast, balloonists, mystics, Lola Montez, opera singers—good ones, bad ones, those who fornicated their way across the territory. Dynamiters blasted steep grades and the land under your feet. There were seventeen miles of tunnels beneath the town of Iowa Hill. Sonora burned. Weaverville burned. Shasta and Columbia burned. Were rebuilt and burned again and rebuilt again. Sacramento flooded.

  A hundred years later, at the time of Coop’s obsession, there would still be five thousand full-time gold miners along the banks of the Yuba and Russian rivers. They scouted out the old towns in the Sierras named after lovers and dogs and characters in novels—names that were a time capsule of hunger and desire for a new life. Ne Plus Ultra! At each filament-like dot on the county maps, something had happened. On this riverbank two brothers killed each other arguing about which direction to travel. At this clearing a woman was traded for a site. It was as if there were a novella by Balzac round every bend.

  Prospectors now drove up in Airstreams, pulling gas-fuelled dredges to suck up whatever remained on the river bottoms. A century of flooding and storms had knocked loose the gold from the prehistoric beds, sluicing it down into the rivers. Miners in wetsuits were ‘sniping’ the streams, and swam in the underwater darkness holding giant cauldrons of light.

  Everything about gold was in opposition to Coop’s life on our farm. It must still have felt to him that he came from nowhere, the horror of his parents’ murder never spoken of by us. He had been handed the habits and duties that came with farm life, so by now he could ride up to our grandfather’s cabin on the ridge with his eyes closed, knowing by the sound of the breeze in a tree exactly where he was and what direction he faced, as if he was within safe architecture. Our land had been cleared of stones and boulders, the wood planks on our kitchen table were wiped clean as a page, the fence gates chained and unchained, chained and unchained. But gold was euphoria and chance to Coop, an illogical discipline, a tall story that included a murder or mistaken identity or a love affair. He hitchhiked two hours northwest onto the Colfax–Iowa Hill road and watched the men with crevassing tools working in the north fork of the Russian River. He was seventeen years old when he impetuously hired himself out for a pittance and the chance of a bonus to man the Anaconda suction hoses. He came home at the end of the week with a twisted back. He remained wordless in front of us, these two girls, his curious listeners, as to where he had been. Wherever he had gone, we could see, he had been somehow altered, been part of a dangerous thing.

  He had jumped from the floating platform, the Anaconda hose in his arms, and sunk to the bottom of the river. A second later the generator broke awake and his body was flung from side to side as he tried to aim the live hose under boulders for the possibility of trapped gold. Sometimes, when it got loose from the suck of gravel, the jet hose leapt free of the water, into the air, Coop still riding it until he fell back onto the river’s hard surface, submerging once more with the glass and leather and iron of the diver’s helmet lolling rough at his neck while within it the thin line of air led amateurish and tentative and, he knew, unsafe into his mouth.

  Coop sat in the small, dark farmhou
se kitchen with us and attempted to talk of this, but he could barely take even one step into telling us of the absurdity and danger of what he had allowed himself to do. So we did not know what had occurred. I remember we sat there and chanted, ‘Coop’s lost week, Coop’s lost week. Where did he go? Who was he with? Who was the woman who must have so exhausted him?’

  The smooth rolling hills of our farm were green in the constant rains of winter and parched brown during summer and fall. Driving home, north out of Nicasio, we climbed to the peak of the hills, then abruptly swerved right onto the farm’s narrow dirt road, which went downhill a quarter-mile before it reached the barns, the car clobbering over speed bumps made from the rubber of tractor tires that had been hammered into the earth with spikes. When Claire and I were older, returning from parties in Glen Ellen, half asleep and with full bladders, we cursed the existence of the bumps. In the darkness, at the foot of the hill, we had to halt the car. My turn, I said, getting out in my new cotton dress and tight shoes to push the too-friendly and wide-awake mules off the path at the foot of the hill, so we could drive on.

  As sisters we reflected each other, competed with each other, and our shared idol was Coop. By the time he was in his late teens we discovered he had other lives, disappearing into the city, haunting pool halls, dances, returning just in time to drive Claire into Nicasio for her piano lessons. She’d watch his lean brown hands, how he handled the clutch, how he took corners as if guiding them through water, swerving back to the straight road in a single gesture. She loved Coop’s easy, minimal effort towards whatever was around him. A year later, picking her up in Nicasio, he shifted over to the passenger seat and threw her the keys, pulled a paperback out of the glove compartment and began reading while she, frantic and uncertain about everything, steered the suddenly massive car—she felt she was screaming— up the winding road to its crest and then slid down the hill to the farm. He never once looked up, never once said a word, maybe glanced at the face of an almost sideswiped mule as it caught his eye in the side mirror. From then on, Claire drove to and from piano lessons alone, missing Coop. Coop, who with his confidence would sweep a hay bale over his shoulder and walk to the barn lighting a cigarette with his free hand.