Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [25]
I didn’t know you lived here. I was here once before, one night.
The fingers of his right hand swept over the strings, six notes spreading towards her like a fan. He smiled briefly at her, then fell into a melody and seemed to be playing everything—bells, drums, a missing voice.
This was a field, he told her sometime later, that he had sat in as a boy, playing alongside his mother’s singing. He would look not at the strings but at his mother’s face in order to catch her rapid swerves of melody; there would be no clue about her voice’s darting, except in her eyes—this starling, that wood thrush—and still he would be beside her, picking up notes as if counting kilometre stones as she flew down a road. As a boy he had always felt that his musical lessons were a net for holding everything around him—the insects in the field, the weather shifting in the trees—so that he could give it as a collected gift, like a hand cupped with cold water held up to a friend.
When he finished, he said, You did not sing. You did not join me.
No. I’d have been the extra wheel.
Music has many wheels, that’s what makes it joyous.
The other singer …
Anna did not know what to say, whether she should inquire. She comes from the village for lessons. Once a week I give lessons. You came from the house with the pigeonnier?
She nodded.
A bee landed on the neck of the man’s guitar, and he pursed his lips and blew it off. When it returned after a quick circuit in the air, he flicked it away with his middle finger, and it spun wounded into the grass.
My name is Rafael, if you want to know.
Ah yes, ah yes, I was told about you, by the owner of the manoir. He said you might be here. She glanced behind. I should go, I suppose.
He said he would accompany her. But then he took no direct path towards the house. He guided her, stepping over bushes. They had to bend almost double to walk under the low branches of the trees. He ignored a clear path a few yards to their right, as if he had the mind of a cow, or a crow in mid-air, perceiving a more natural route. If anything, going this way, they took longer to reach the house. The comfort she had felt in that field was replaced by scratches, and some annoyance towards him.
At the kitchen door she asked if he was thirsty and, under the gush of the tap, filled two cups and invited him to sit down at the table. It was covered with books and papers. His right arm pushed some of them aside to give himself more space, but he did not look at what they were. Instead his eyes searched around the room, the way a thief’s might. You did not invite strangers in for a drink like this, but Anna hadn’t spoken to anyone for days. He was looking at furniture and pictures, consuming them, the same way he had looked at her, with either curiosity or pleasure. That was how he now regarded the red enamel cup he was holding in his hands.
My father was known by some as a thief, he said, as though he had read her mind about how he was looking around the room. But he never stole from houses he was invited into.
That’s civilized, she managed to retort soon enough to seem at ease with this information.
I think so too. Still, his craft taught him—and so he taught me—about the value of things I am unlikely to own. To me, for instance, what is most valuable in this room is this blue table. But I know it has no real value.
Does he live around here, your father?
He’s not from France. But after the war he didn’t go home, instead he met my mother. He was injured in the war. He later organized a small group who filched—is that the word?—from the houses they were not asked into. It had been difficult during the war, and I think he felt that everyone who had fought was owed more than they were given.
So he was a ‘filcher.’ A quaint term. And what did you