Divisadero Page 7

  I’m embarrassed by the size of the other rooms.

  Rafael sat on the bed, watching the strip of her energy, tall, erect. Dark jeans, blue shirt, a rolled-up sleeve on her brown arm. He noticed a mirror positioned low on the wall, a low sink.

  This room belongs to a child.

  This ‘smallest possible space’ is where Anna wishes to be now. The truth of her life comes out only in places like this. There are times when she needs to hide in a stranger’s landscape, so that she can look back at the tumult of her youth, to the still-undiminished violence of her bloodied naked self between her father and Coop, the moment of violence that deformed her, all of them. Anna, who keeps herself at a distance from those who show anger or violence, just as she is still fearful of true intimacy. Her past is hidden from everyone. She has never turned to a lover or friends when they speak about families (and she always inquires of their families) and spoken of her childhood. The terrible beating of Coop, the weapon of glass entering her father’s shoulder as she tried to kill him. Even now she cannot enter that afternoon’s episode with safety. A wall of black light holds her away from it. But she knows it damaged all of them, including Claire. She can imagine her sister riding her horse in the Sierras, wearing small bells on her wrists to warn wildlife of her approach, conscious of all the possibilities of danger. Just as she herself works in archives and discovers every past but her own, again and again, because it will always be there.

  She and Rafael keep between them a formality that makes them careful with each other. They have stepped into this friendship the way solitaries in medieval times might have bundled together for the night before journeying on towards a destination of marriage or war. So that Anna is not aware that the casualness in Rafael she witnesses is inconsistent with his nature (save for the territorial precision with which he flicked that bee off his guitar in her presence a few days earlier), while he knows scarcely a thing about her. Who is she? This woman who has led him into this medicine cabinet of a room where most of her possessions exist—books, journals, passport, a carefully folded map, archival tapes, even the soap she has brought with her from her other world. As if this orderly collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.

  Early in her stay at Dému, Anna watched three hawks flying low over the fields, half covered by mist, hunting for life. She noticed how the poplars held thrushes and blackbirds, how sumac built itself beside the wall of the house. One day while crossing a field, she trod her way beside a neighbour’s linen drying on the grass and saw an empty wheelbarrow that must have carried the wet clothes there. Later a green lizard ran across the palm of her hand while she dozed in a kitchen chair. She has read in old manuscripts that troubadours in this region were famous for their ability to imitate birdcalls and, as a result, may have altered natural habits of migration. She has been told by Madame Q that at the first hint of winter her husband will wrap the water pump with straw and burlap, and likewise wrap the trunks and low branches of the almond trees on the terrace.

  These are details that can construct a partial background of a writer’s life. She knows that everything here in Europe has touched history or a literature. Besançon became prominent because Julien Sorel attended its seminary in Le Rouge et le Noir. The rough stone structure still exists, the dusk around it thick with the smell of limes from a nearby arbor. And there are all the other towns and villages etched by Balzac, page by page. Angoulême. Saint-Lange. Sceaux. ‘I was born in Balzac—he was my cradle, my forest, my travels … he invented everything,’ Colette wrote, glancing back to her youth. Just as she herself later created her landscape at Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. And here in Gascony, where the fictional D’Artagnan was born, the writer Lucien Segura lived, composed his strange poems and novels, and disappeared.

  Anna pulls her face back from an orange lily, aware of its pollen and of the hovering bee. Its ancestors must have done the same, shimmering down a stem of chicory some day in 1561, here or beside the church in the distance. She has noticed the gardien cycle past to unlock its doors. There must have always been a bee here to hear Catholic music and witness a verger’s arrival. The past is always carried into the present by small things. So a lily is bent with the weight of its permanence. Richard the Lion-Heart may have stepped up to this same flower on his journey to a Crusade and inhaled the same presence Anna does before he rode south into the Luberon.

  Within a few days of meeting him, she is conscious of Rafael’s secular knowledge of every field. The row of linden trees that leads to the graveyard—he knows their height from when he was a child, for he walked between them then as though they were giants. Just as he has taken her back to the middle of that pasture where they first met, and said, ‘This is where the old writer drowned. In the old days there was a small lake here.’

  As a boy, Rafael crept from his parents’ caravan before daybreak and stood on a wagon to watch the journeying light in the fields. The first evening he slept with Anna, he rose from her bed, left that smallest of rooms, and walked down the stairs in darkness, then made his way through the night fields. In the noisy pasture where everything was invisible he aligned himself with the rustle of a tree and moved in a straight line towards the trailer.

  Where do you go? she asked later. Back to your home?

  Yes.

  I could come with you.

  You wouldn’t sleep well in that narrow bunk.

  Outside, then.

  We could, someday.

  What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language. There were nights when he did not bother to even light the oil lamp that hung in the doorway of his trailer. He reached for the guitar and stepped down the three laddered steps into the field, carrying a chair in his other hand. ‘I don’t work, I appear’—he remembered the line of Django Reinhardt’s and imagined the great man slipping out from the shadows grandly and disappearing efficiently into his craft. The alternative was to arrive, as most musicians did, like an eighteenth-century king entering a city, preceded by great fires on the hills that signalled he had crossed the border, and then by the ringing of bells. But Rafael was not even appearing. Dissolving perhaps, aware of night bugs, the river on the edge of his hearing. His open palm brushed a chord that was response, just response. He had not yet stepped forward. This was the late summer of his life, the year he met Anna, and he had no idea whether he would ever be able to return to the corralling work that art was, to have whatever he needed to make even a simple song. Dissolving into darkness was enough, for now. Or playing from memory an old song by a master, something his mother had loved or his father had whistled, when he accompanied his father on a walk, for there was one specific song his father always muttered or whistled. In the past Rafael had travelled from village to village, argued a salary, invented melodies, stolen chords, slashed the legs off an old song to use just the torso—but he had come to love now most of all the playing of music with no one there. Could you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal?

  Earlier that day Anna had come behind him and slid the earphones of a CD player gently over his ears. He was, he remembers, skinning kidneys, and the music was almost skeletal, a bare list, a sketch. He knew who it was by, but not what the piece of music was. ‘Bach,’ she said, ‘later Bach.’ He listened, watching the blade slow its movement, now slicing the innards, then the mushrooms, a sleepwalking knife, his hand pouring a splash of brandy and dry mustard into a pan, while he was in this spare thicket of music. As if the half-uttered gestures and emotion of the musician were the desultory conversations of a wood pigeon.

  Now he brushed the strings of his guitar into life with the calluses of his palm, and listened to what it was. What was adjacent to music was music. The night air held everything and pressed into his coat and his face.

  Tell me about your father, Anna said.

  Oh …

  Is he a big shadow in your life? Did you tell me he
met your mother while he was robbing a police station?

  He wasn’t quite robbing the police station, he was trying to take something off a man who was being held prisoner there. It was more difficult.

  He wanted to rob a prisoner? So the prisoner was not a friend?

  The prisoner had something that was important to a friend of my father’s. I don’t know why.

  And where was this friend of his? Why couldn’t he do it?

  It was a woman. And she was another prisoner. In the same jail. It usually held men.

  Naturally.

  Sometimes there were more women than men. Not this time.

  And your mother worked in the police station.

  Yes, she came in for an hour or so while the jailer went on his lunch break. She was not supposed to go anywhere near the prisoners, but she had been given the keys, in case there was a fire. This was in a small town near the Belgian border. These were not major criminals in there. My father just needed to rob one of them. But it was going to be challenging.

  Then?

  He came into the police station, in a sort of outfit—an invented uniform, really—with a hose and a tank attached to his back, saying he was sorry he was late. ‘I was supposed to be here earlier,’ he said. ‘I have to do this quickly, because I have three other jails today.’ My mother, at the desk, had no idea what he was talking about. No one had said anything to her about his visit. He said, ‘You will have to sign this when I finish.’ He brought out some forms with carbon paper between them. This was shortly after the war, and you could hardly move with the red tape then. ‘All men, are they?’ he asked, and was told there was one woman, and he pretended to worry about that. ‘Then you might have to help.’

  What he needed to do, he told her, was DDT the cells, hose them down, and hose the prisoners too, which meant they had to push all their belongings and clothes out of the cells so they wouldn’t get sodden. ‘Sodden?’ She asked him what that meant. ‘Damp. Damp. Wet. Like flooded.’ ‘Ah. Je comprends.’

  Je comprends, Anna said, lying beside him in the bed.

  So my father explained all this to the male prisoners while my future mother explained it to the woman. The men had to undress completely and push their clothes forward, through the bars. My father (not yet a father) took the clothes and carried them into the front office, then went and sprayed the DDT, essentially for lice and ticks—there had been a serious outbreak, he told them, that was tumbling through the region, two prisoners in another jail had even died. After spraying the cells, now devoid of sheets and books and papers, he sprayed the men’s bodies, front and back. He then told them to stand still for ten minutes before they got dressed.

  Meanwhile my mother had to get the woman prisoner to disrobe, and bring her clothes to the front office—as my father would have to check them for ticks and lice, and sprinkle DDT powder on them. The woman did not have to be hosed down, because, my father said, strangely the creatures never settled on women—a fact that my mother found peculiar, but if the man knew, the man knew. So my father sorted out the clothes, got the crucial piece of paper or whatever it was from the male prisoner’s pocket and put it in the female prisoner’s shoe, and everyone got settled back into their cells. He thanked the prisoners, he told the woman there had been three ticks in her clothes, he shook the hand of my mother and left.

  He had made my mother sign the papers. She’d apparently needed to put down her age, other professions, and where she lived. She was a ‘traveller,’ she had told him then, what they used to call gitans, Gypsies. She was a ‘manouche.’ Of course, the guards at the police station did not know this—she would hardly have been allowed to work there if they had known. She didn’t really have an address, just a location she’d pointed towards, near the southwest edge of the town. Her family lived in a caravan. In this way my father met the enigma that was Aria.

  No one was aware of what had taken place. The returning jailer held his nose at the smell of what seemed to be disinfectant. Maybe twenty-four hours later there was a cry of complaint from one of the prisoners. But by then my father had come courting, and had asked for ‘Aria,’ whose name he knew from the filled-out forms. He had been journeying up from Italy after the war ended, and had found himself in Belgium, where it was easier to obtain money the way he usually did. He’d been injured but now seemed to be back at his old criminal activities.

  So he stayed with her and married her?

  They never married, but she was his wife, yes. He stayed and lived in the caravan with her. My mother told me he had had another wife, before the war, but she referred to it only once. The war was a chasm for most. There was one life before and one life afterwards. Many decided not to go back to what they had been.

  It’s a good excuse. The war.

  Yes. In this case it was because my father was besotted with my mother. She was quite a bit younger. He had never been a jealous person—after all, he was a thief who believed property was ‘communal’—but he gave up everything he was and began living with her in the way she wanted to live. There was a strict moral code around her group.

  So Aria …

  Yes. Aria. And my father.

  Turn around and face me… . Is that all true?

  It’s probably been aged a bit. But that was how my father, the DDT inspector, met her.

  I suppose there are a lot more stories about him.

  Oh, yes. For one whole month, when the police were suspicious of that community of caravans, he dressed as a woman. He was a woman for all that time, until the police gave up. He had been in jail during his youth, and he was never going back.

  Then you can’t blame him.

  No. But the real reason he feared going to jail was that he became jealous of other men’s interest in my mother. Though she was consistently faithful, as far as I know, but then, who knows …

  Aria, she said again. As if it was some taste on her tongue.

  After the disinfecting, his father noticed that there was still about fifteen minutes before the jailer was scheduled to return, so he sat down opposite the young woman and wondered aloud whether they would, and could, meet again. She was looking down at some cards. He watched her hands scoop them this way and that. Her dark hair was tied back with a few inches of green ribbon. Without a word she arced the Tarot pack across the table in front of him. He cut it, pulled a card out, and let it lie there. He knew nothing about what the cards meant, and he watched as she moved the other cards around it. She made him select another. He glanced at the clock above her beautiful head. ‘I do not wish to be rude, but I must leave now.’ She said nothing, continuing to move the cards from side to side, as if evidence, acknowledging him with a slight nod as he opened the door and slipped out.

  She knew she’d see him again, and what she had on the table in front of her was considerably more significant than the need to look up and see his face or his strange dark hands again. When he passed the window, he glanced inside and saw her profile bent even closer to the table, studying the cards.

  The next night he visited her caravan. She looked him up and down, making certain this was what she wanted. She’d seen a possible jealousy in his nature; perhaps the war had made him desire too much security.

  So in the moment he was abandoning his wife and betraying her with Aria, he began insisting on no betrayal on Aria’s part. As at the jailer’s desk, she remained silent and uncommitted to this insistence. She refused to deny chance and fate with a permanent agreement, there was no such thing, and he himself was on no moral pinnacle to be able to negotiate. Through all their years together, she refused to give the needed comfort about her faithfulness to this man who was suddenly conscious of the sacredness of property.

  Rafael did not recount their entire story to Anna. Even as a seven-year-old, lying beside his mother, he had been aware of Aria as the central being, his arms enclosing her, the way a boy embraced a dog with all the right in the world. When he was twenty he’d still undress and swim in rivers with her. So
that nakedness was natural to him, as when Anna watched him standing by the north window, focused only on the smoking of his cigarette, listening to the sound of doves that had found harbour in the damaged wall of the house. If she had asked him, he might or might not have explained how his mother protected this mystery of her faithfulness, which was like a moat that no one could cross with certainty—there was always the mixture of carefulness and open desire in her. She would whisper something into his ear and then kiss it, to seal it there, so he could never give it away to another.

  You’re lucky you had a mother, such a mother.

  I know.

  It felt to Rafael that he had just turned from resting his face against Aria years earlier and placed it against the warmth of Anna.

  Anna wakes early in the morning to begin translating the sparse texts by Lucien Segura that she has on her desk. For much of his life the man was unknown, save that he was a poet and later the author of a jeremiad about the Great War. And in the years since his death, knowledge of him has sunk into the fabric and soil of this region, so he is almost forgotten by his countrymen. Anna loves such strangers to history; for her they are essential as underground rivers. She wakes in this last house that Lucien Segura lived in, solitary in her bed, makes coffee, and is at work by eight. Rafael is absent from her thoughts until early afternoon, when he crosses the fields with a plan for lunch. He is her ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger,’ or perhaps she is his. In the afternoon, they nestle together in her small bedroom, and later, half dressed, still curious about the interior of the house, he will enter other rooms and glance at paintings, open what were once linen cupboards, and look down at the avenue of trees from an upstairs window.

  During one of these reconnaissances he hears what sounds like a river’s whispering in the corridor. He realizes the noise comes from above, from a closed-off section above the ceiling. He wanders off, returns with a ladder, and ascends through a trapdoor into a room where the air is thick with bird heat. As he rolls in shirtless, feathers paste themselves onto his back. When Rafael was a boy, he knew there was a pigeonnier attached to the house. But over the years the wall separating the dovecote from the attic must have partially collapsed, and now birds swoop in, assemble, pause in the portal for a moment, and fly out. It is a room busy with entrances and escapes. He has never desired to be a pigeon, but many times has wished to be a bird in flight over the landscape, moving in a long slide towards a copse, where its high secret entrance, invisible to humans, reveals at the last moment a path into the forest. What you experience in the high air is the petite life on earth, a drifting of voices, the creak of a wagon, the retort and smoke from a gun among the almond trees, somewhat like the music Anna has played for him in the kitchen, with only the essential notes of life reaching you through that distance of air.