Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [27]
In the days before Anna slept with him, he had expected no gesture of interest from her. Their lunches had seemed innocent of courtship. And their first afternoon in the upstairs room of the house had been similarly genial, neither of them loved the other yet, so there was nothing fatal or fateful about it when they woke in each other’s arms, facing each other, a breath away. In that small space between them was the smell of cilantro. He had a passion for it, and had crushed it into their salad a few hours earlier. His pockets always held a few herbs, basil or mint, so he could rip off a heel of bread and create a meal wherever he was.
When Anna had gone upstairs to wash that first day, he had stayed outside for a while, half dreaming among the green rows of the garden, then walked into a deep hollow in the earth, a mare that had a century earlier held water for cattle. He stood there blackened by the shadow of the great oak that rose above him, and soon he was stretched out on the grass, so that when Anna looked from the window he seemed to have disappeared.
Her early impression of Rafael was that he saw nothing around him as fully owned—his fingers removed leaves from a plant with the same ease as when, three days later, he wrapped his dark fingers around her wrist, barely grazing the skin so her pulse continued to pause and lift in his loose grip. She looked down at a scar across his knuckles, kept looking down, giving no gesture in response to this act of his, the captive pulse no doubt beating faster. She was thinking of the chords of music that had emerged from hands as scarred as these. She did not rest her face into his chest, into the cache of basil within the shirt pocket, until he let go of her. Come with me, she said then. Watch your step. They went up the stone stairs wide enough for three horses, along the corridor, into her small room, where she bent down to turn on the electric heater and waited for the appearance of its three red bars.
She laughed when he rather formally closed the door behind them. He shrugged.
Is that what you call a ‘Gallic gesture’?
Garlic? He was perplexed.
Gallic! You know that turn of phrase?
‘A turn of phrase’? Another shrug. We are in the smallest little room in a very big house, he said. Is there a reason?
You don’t like it?
No, he said, we should take up the smallest possible space. But not too little space.
I’m embarrassed by the size of the other rooms.
Rafael sat on the bed, watching the strip of her energy, tall, erect. Dark jeans, blue shirt, a rolled-up sleeve on her brown arm. He noticed a mirror positioned low on the wall, a low sink.
This room belongs to a child.
This ‘smallest possible space’ is where Anna wishes to be now. The truth of her life comes out only in places like this. There are times when she needs to hide in a stranger’s landscape, so that she can look back at the tumult of her youth, to the still-undiminished violence of her bloodied naked self between her father and Coop, the moment of violence that deformed her, all of them. Anna, who keeps herself at a distance from those who show anger or violence, just as she is still fearful of true intimacy. Her past is hidden from everyone. She has never turned to a lover or friends when they speak about families (and she always inquires of their families) and spoken of her childhood. The terrible beating of Coop, the weapon of glass entering her father’s shoulder as she tried to kill him. Even now she cannot enter that afternoon’s episode with safety.