Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [28]
She and Rafael keep between them a formality that makes them careful with each other. They have stepped into this friendship the way solitaries in medieval times might have bundled together for the night before journeying on towards a destination of marriage or war. So that Anna is not aware that the casualness in Rafael she witnesses is inconsistent with his nature (save for the territorial precision with which he flicked that bee off his guitar in her presence a few days earlier), while he knows scarcely a thing about her. Who is she? This woman who has led him into this medicine cabinet of a room where most of her possessions exist—books, journals, passport, a carefully folded map, archival tapes, even the soap she has brought with her from her other world. As if this orderly collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.
Early in her stay at Dému, Anna watched three hawks flying low over the fields, half covered by mist, hunting for life. She noticed how the poplars held thrushes and blackbirds, how sumac built itself beside the wall of the house. One day while crossing a field, she trod her way beside a neighbour’s linen drying on the grass and saw an empty wheelbarrow that must have carried the wet clothes there. Later a green lizard ran across the palm of her hand while she dozed in a kitchen chair. She has read in old manuscripts that troubadours in this region were famous for their ability to imitate birdcalls and, as a result, may have altered natural habits of migration. She has been told by Madame Q that at the first hint of winter her husband will wrap the water pump with straw and burlap, and likewise wrap the trunks and low branches of the almond trees on the terrace.
These are details that can construct a partial background of a writer’s life. She knows that everything here in Europe has touched history or a literature. Besançon became prominent because Julien Sorel attended its seminary in Le Rouge et le Noir. The rough stone structure still exists, the dusk around it thick with the smell of limes from a nearby arbor. And there are all the other towns and villages etched by Balzac, page by page. Angoulême. Saint-Lange. Sceaux. ‘I was born in Balzac—he was my cradle, my forest, my travels … he invented everything,’ Colette wrote, glancing back to her youth. Just as she herself later created her landscape at Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. And here in Gascony, where the fictional D’Artagnan was born, the writer Lucien Segura lived, composed his strange poems and novels, and disappeared.
Anna pulls her face back from an orange lily, aware of its pollen and of the hovering bee. Its ancestors must have done the same, shimmering down a stem of chicory some day in 1561, here or beside the church in the distance. She has noticed the gardien cycle past to unlock its doors. There must have always been a bee here to hear Catholic music and witness a verger’s arrival. The past is always carried into the present by small things. So a lily is bent with the weight of its permanence. Richard the Lion-Heart may have stepped up to this same flower on his journey to a Crusade and inhaled the same presence Anna does before he rode south into the Luberon.
Within a few days of meeting him, she is conscious of Rafael’s secular knowledge of every field. The row of linden trees that leads to the graveyard—he knows their height from when he was a child, for he walked between them then as though they were giants. Just as he has taken her back to the middle of that pasture where they first met, and said, ‘This is where the old writer drowned. In the old days there was a small lake here.’
As a boy, Rafael crept from