Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [101]
After they left he must have remained, alone, through the dark fortnights of the moon, the arrival and departure of winter. The vegetable garden slept under snow, revealing only a frail fence, and a tent, a pyramid of stick and cloth where the travellers used to store their tools during other seasons. He walked one day across the hard and brittle vegetable beds and entered the tent’s light-filled emptiness and simply stood within it. It had been Aria’s garden. He would often see her early in the morning. The mist would slowly lift and she would be there on her knees plucking away snails or dead leaves from the soft, damp earth after night rains. It was as if she had been there all night in that posture of almost obsessive prayer, waiting for the darkness to lift, and then for the white mist to disperse, until Lucien saw her in her green shawl.
He was still Lucien Segura, after all his years, after all these changes and escapes. He was, he realized, still more responsible to the boy he had been, than to the father he had become. In spite of everything he had not been a paternal man. But here, where the late-winter storm fell on him, protected by this thin pyramid of a tent, with its hidden bulbs and grains frozen under the snow that would be alive again in the future, he saw he had used up his life. He stood in the shelter that had belonged to Aria, and then walked back to the house, and the only footprints were his; there were not even those of the peacock, whose warm three-toed feet would have revealed the green under the snow.
The lake throws up a sparkle between the trees. Lucien takes a moment to struggle into his cardigan and walks into the shadows of the oaks. He does not feel this present life is real without the boy. The essential necessity of Rafael. They have shared things cautiously. He has reached for some fragments of his life to give to this almost adopted boy, and in return Rafael has described the eclipse he and his mother witnessed near Plaisance, its terrible wind that was more terrible than the darkness. And what Lucien wants now is a storm.
Among all the great works of art he stood before, as a younger man, was Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, by the painter Ilya Repin. He has remembered it all these years. The old despot cradling the son he has killed accidentally with a blow to the head—and the patriarch’s eyes on fire, and all around him the future darkness. A week later, in another city, there was another painting, another nightmare, Peter the Great interrogating his son for conspiracy, and in the father’s eyes a sure knowledge of the young man’s guilt.
He will never know what becomes of his children. He will not know whether he has nurtured them or damaged them. A girl travels down the long California valley in a commercial refrigeration truck, hardly able to speak, as a result of her fear or her bravery, listening to every word of the good stranger. Lucette in Paris sips absinthe with her lover. The boy Rafael will meet me, a woman from the New World… . And Coop? And Claire? Will these children, in their eventual cities, turn out to be the heroes of their own lives?
I have recently been reading, in a monograph, a haunting thing about a missing father. ‘And so I hoped that someone would come, a man, why not my father, at nightfall. He would stand in front of the door, or on the path leading from the forest, with his old white shirt, the everyday one, in shreds, dirtied by mud and his blood. He would not speak in order to preserve what can be, but he would know what I do not.’
Oh, this older need for a lullaby, not a storm.
He comes out from the shadows of the trees and walks the length of the meadow