Divisadero Read online

  Of course she had an arc light in the trunk of her car, and she lifted it out and beamed it towards the strange steeple that rose high into the darkness like a spear, or a giant beanstalk, though what it reminded me of mostly was the shambling water tower that we used to climb as children. But this was stranger. Built in the thirteenth century, the belfry had been constructed like a coil or a screw. It had one of those unexpected, helicoidal shapes— the surface like a helix—so that as it curved up it reflected every compass point of the landscape. We circled the church in the dark. Who had conceived and constructed this? Branka said that early historians claimed its builders were inspired by the form of a snail shell. Other explanations were that carpenters had used wood that was too fresh, so it ultimately warped, or that a very strong wind had created the torsion. My friend disregarded these theories of fresh wood or strong winds. The belfry was for her an example of visionary craftsmanship, its fifty-metre elevation ‘like a fire in the sky.’ She added there had been a fight during the recent restoration, in which a man had almost been killed.

  We returned to the car and drove towards Dému.

  All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

  There was now not a single lit streetlamp in the villages we passed, just our headlights veering and sweeping along the two-lane roads. We were alone in the world, in nameless and unseen country. I love such journeying at night. You have most of your life strapped to your back. Music on the radio comes faint and intermittent. You are wordless at last. Your friend’s hand on your knee to make sure you are not drifting away. The black hedges coax you on.

  Whenever there is thunder I think of Claire. I imagine her, content by herself, though as far as I know she could be comfortably married. There is a poem of Henry Vaughan’s that describes the way ‘care moves in disguise.’ I don’t know if this is what I am doing, from this distance, imagining the life of my sister, and imagining the future of Coop. I am a person who discovers archival subtexts in history and art, where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story. In my story the person I always begin with is Claire.

  Claire’s limp made her appear serious to those who did not know her well. It was the result of her having had polio as a child, and I remember our father during that period carrying her constantly from room to room. The limp always led to ardent gestures of courtesy towards her. Men on a trolley car or the Larkspur Ferry would rise and give her their seats. But Claire never felt this seriousness in herself. It is in fact I, Anna, who should be identified as the serious sister, who always insisted on some determined path to be taken. Claire was in many ways the adventurous one, with a wildness in her. Her journals about her travels—on horseback, of course—contained a range of friends unknown to the rest of us. …

  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 find 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 five 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 fire. 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 twenty-year-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 field. 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 fish. 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 fire 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 ou
t 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 Highway 101, 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 highway 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 finger across her lips and her eyes caught fire, 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 third-person voice protects us. Just as there is, in the real landscape of Paris in Les Misérables, that small fictional street Victor Hugo provides for Jean Valjean to slip into, in which to hide from his pursuers. What was that fictional 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 fields 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 fire. 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 horse-drawn 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 final 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.

  The Central Valley of California that we drove through had been, in an earlier time, a sea of flowers. John Muir describes how it used to be a ‘continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich … your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step.’ And at times the region had resembled a sea. ‘The whole Valley was turned into an ocean. Most of its people were drowned. Some tried to swim away but frogs and salmon caught them and ate them. Only two people got away, swept into the Sierras,’ says a Maidu myth on the birth of the Great Central Plain. Explorers came and gave the Sacramento and Merced rivers their names. Sacrament. Mercy. The trapper Kit Carson hunted along the ‘shaggy river-beds.’ It was raw, unstable country then, with gunfighters and thieves—Joaquín Murrieta (who claimed to ha
ve eaten ostrich), Johnny Sonntag, Tres Dedos (Three-Fingered Jack), the Daltons. They camped around Visalia, now a sleepy atonal town. Succinct histories tell us something—that anything peaceful has a troubled past.

  Nowadays this flattened stark land is etched by railway crossings and a remarkable symmetry of river channels, as if God has impressed a circuitry down onto the earth and given it reason. So we have the low hill civilizations of Pixley and Porterville, the lights of Buttonwillow and Tulare. Coop once slept with a girl in Tulare, that tense, frantic night of his remembered with a coy term. He had ‘slept’ with the girl in Tulare as he had ‘slept’ with me. The damnation that came down on us is not quite extinct. Someone from the past might still say of me, ‘There’s a black flag in that woman’s life.’ But this is unlikely to happen. A family keeps its secrets. Just as all that remains from the Central Valley’s past are muted rumours of anarchic outlaw girls and the furious Eugene Key, who took over as sheriff in Tulare and cut off the left hand of Three-Fingered Jack, and sent it to Visalia by Wells Fargo as evidence, to celebrate a victory of sorts.

  Our truck that day crossed that antique seabed. We slipped past fruit farms, entered brief bouts of rain. I have read up ever since on the history of the Great Central Plain, about cattle in Fowler’s Junction, and about the beautiful and haunting Allensworth. I’ve read The Octopus, in which Tulare is renamed Bonnerville, and read about the waves of immigrants who came here with their music of languages—Tagalog, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese—to cut open the ditches for irrigation, to turn swamps into fruitland, or to mine asphalt in the intense heat, as my maternal grandfather did, working practically naked, coated in that oil they used for flux for what they were mining near the spur line of Asphalto. Just another place named after a mineral on the map of the world. How many are there? A greater number, I suspect, than named for royalty.