Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [26]
Rafael.
And your father?
… never wished me to be a thief.
And your mother? Was she a thief too? He was grinning at her. Did they meet during a robbery?
Almost. It was in a jail. She had a part-time job at a police station. I believe he charmed her, even though he was older. May I have more water?
Yes, of course. She moved to the sink with the red cup. I met some strange hunters here, in the forest, the other day, she said.
There are terrible people, all over the place. Just like me.
She laughed then.
There’s a big garden here, isn’t there? I’d like to see it. I can cook you something.
It’s out through that door. Pick anything …
Anna stood in front of the flecked mirror, washing her face and arms, then rubbed her legs with a cold, wet washcloth. Later, when she walked into the garden, she saw him smoking a cigarette, looking over the rows of vegetables.
Who were those hunters? Are they from the village?
I cannot help you there. We keep to ourselves.
I suppose, then, you wouldn’t tell me even if you knew… . I was scared, to tell the truth.
As she spoke, he pulled a piece of green cloth from one of his inside jacket pockets. Tie this around your arm when you go walking, you’ll be safe.
She took the cloth into her hands.
Your father, was he English? You speak very—
My father could speak it well.
Does he come here?
Not for some time.
Well, if he ever does, I’ll be sure to invite him in.
Rafael crouched and began to snap off beans, passing them back to her, dropping them into the green cloth she held open.
Do you have a little beef?
I’ll take these in, she said, and cut a few strips of meat for us.
He strolled into the house a few minutes later and unpacked rosemary and four figs from his pocket. He began working on a salad, slicing slivers of garlic into it.
So, how did you escape the life of crime—and your charming father?
Anna was talking with him as if he were an old friend from childhood who had changed shape into this thickset man. His musical fingers were now dicing tomatoes. The eyes that had darted around the room were now gazing easily at her. He seemed not at all awkward or tense about being in the house. His behaviour around her seemed effortless. So that when she went to bed with him for the first time, some days after this lunch, his hesitancy was a surprise. He did not pull away, but scarcely leaned forward. What had been familiar across the kitchen table was now shyness and perhaps incapacity, as though in the past he had been burned by something. They did nothing but hold each other. He would for now be content with her breath against his shoulder, the mole on her upper arm. He would fall asleep thinking of this small dark dot.
He was certainly not vain, freely admitting his thick girth, his imperfect health. After they had eventually made love satisfactorily (as far as she could assume for both of them), he stood and tested his calves in a naked leap, then strolled to the window, opened it and smoked a cigarette there, gazing out, not caring how he looked in that sunlit posture. He would mention later that he was unconcerned with his ‘silhouette.’ Anna had met no one like him. There appeared to be no darkness in him. Though he would tell her of an earlier relationship that had silenced him completely, and how he had almost not emerged from that. He was in fact coming out of that privacy for the first time with her. All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love—seemingly the most natural of acts.
He told her there was a song he no longer performed that had to do with all of that. It was about a woman who had risen from their bed in the middle of the night and left him. He would hear evidence of her in villages in the north, but she would be gone by the time the rumour of her presence reached him. A song of endless searching, sung by this man who until then had seldom revealed himself. His tough fingers would tug the heart out of his guitar. He’d sing this song to those who had grown up with his music