Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [0]
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