Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [100]
I see Lucien Segura for the last time with the boy Rafael, who recalls the old man sitting out of doors in the glare of the day. Rafael appears with bread. They tear up the loaf and eat it with an onion or some herbs. If Lucien is thirsty he walks over to a pond, immerses his hand, and lifts it cupped to his mouth and drinks. This is how I remember him, Rafael tells me.
Lucien must have walked into that depression of the earth that was once a mare and sat at his blue table, the only furniture he had brought with him in that journey by cart. A few years earlier at Marseillan, in the middle of describing a tense scuffle of a swordfight, he had suddenly become curious about how long and how wide the table he wrote on was. He began measuring it with his hands. From elbow to fingertip twice, and then twice from wrist to fingertip. So the length was slightly over a metre. About one metre in width. It was made out of two pine boards, with a narrow runnel down the middle, where they joined. The table always a fraction below his notebooks, always out of focus as he wrote. The six nails that held it together, the colour of the paint, that exact height for him to bend over, as if over a mirror, to see what could be found. His constant companion.
Astolphe’s boy would turn up and sit on the stool across from him, with his grin, his desire for, it seemed, every possibility in this world. Perhaps Lucien himself looked like that when young. Like a slim combed hound, mouth open, breathing fast with eagerness, hoping for everything. Even rain would not keep the boy away. Lucien would look down from his bedroom window and see Rafael arrive, and see him shelter himself for a while under the oak tree before leaving. He was curious about what Rafael would remember of their afternoons. Would it be the card games or his own fragmentary thoughts like half-told secrets? Or his avuncular air, the holding of his hand above his good eye when the sun fell onto him like a weight? Would he be even a fragment in the boy’s future?
He would see Rafael coming towards him, pause, and turn back to the herb garden. No. Come here, he’d say out loud. And the boy would return and sit across from him. And what Lucien had been remembering disappeared into his clenched fist.
Then even these friends left him.
Rafael’s father strolled down the driveway of plane trees with two horses he had received in exchange for something. (The object of trade was in fact one of Lucien Segura’s peacocks, which a distant farmer coveted. The disappearance of the bird was not noticed yet; it was whimsical in its wanderings and may simply have followed a layer of warmth that came after a storm. And as far as the old thief was concerned, to separate an owner from fish or fowl or undomesticated hound was not quite robbery; there was always the opportunity for it to return, even from seven or eight farms away.) So Rafael’s father walked guiltlessly beside the house where sumac bordered the walls, whistling, in contrast to his earlier departure at four a.m. in silence, when he carried the struggling bird—it was almost a mammal, he thought—within his long coat.
Lucien witnessed his return, his head alongside two nodding horses, and not wishing to inquire too directly, waited until the next afternoon, when the family crossed the small lake in the boat, to ask what they were doing with the new animals. They were going to live further north for a while, he was told. They gave no reason and he did not ask for one. Perhaps there was easier commerce there, or the father needed to evade a rumour of his existence in the area. And ‘for a while’ was as precise as they wished to be about the period of time they would be away. A few days later, shockingly soon to the old writer, the entourage rumbled along the narrow path beside the house