Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [29]
Where do you go? she asked later. Back to your home?
Yes.
I could come with you.
You wouldn’t sleep well in that narrow bunk.
Outside, then.
We could, someday.
What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language. There were nights when he did not bother to even light the oil lamp that hung in the doorway of his trailer. He reached for the guitar and stepped down the three laddered steps into the field, carrying a chair in his other hand. ‘I don’t work, I appear’—he remembered the line of Django Reinhardt’s and imagined the great man slipping out from the shadows grandly and disappearing efficiently into his craft. The alternative was to arrive, as most musicians did, like an eighteenth-century king entering a city, preceded by great fires on the hills that signalled he had crossed the border, and then by the ringing of bells. But Rafael was not even appearing. Dissolving perhaps, aware of night bugs, the river on the edge of his hearing. His open palm brushed a chord that was response, just response. He had not yet stepped forward. This was the late summer of his life, the year he met Anna, and he had no idea whether he would ever be able to return to the corralling work that art was, to have whatever he needed to make even a simple song. Dissolving into darkness was enough, for now. Or playing from memory an old song by a master, something his mother had loved or his father had whistled, when he accompanied his father on a walk, for there was one specific song his father always muttered or whistled. In the past Rafael had travelled from village to village, argued a salary, invented melodies, stolen chords, slashed the legs off an old song to use just the torso—but he had come to love now most of all the playing of music with no one there. Could you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal?
Earlier that day Anna had come behind him and slid the earphones of a CD player gently over his ears. He was, he remembers, skinning kidneys, and the music was almost skeletal, a bare list, a sketch. He knew who it was by, but not what the piece of music was. ‘Bach,’ she said, ‘later Bach.’ He listened, watching the blade slow its movement, now slicing the innards, then the mushrooms, a sleepwalking knife, his hand pouring a splash of brandy and dry mustard into a pan, while he was in this spare thicket of music. As if the half-uttered gestures and emotion of the musician were the desultory conversations of a wood pigeon.
Now he brushed the strings of his guitar into life with the calluses of his palm, and listened to what it was. What was adjacent to music was music. The night air held everything and pressed into his coat and his face.
Tell me about your father, Anna said.
Oh …
Is he a big shadow in your life? Did you tell me he met your mother while he was robbing a police station?
He wasn’t quite robbing the police station, he was trying to take something off a man who was being held prisoner there. It was more difficult.
He wanted to rob a prisoner? So the prisoner was not a friend?
The prisoner had something that was important to a friend of my father’s. I don’t know why.
And where was this friend of his? Why couldn’t he do it?
It was a woman. And she was another prisoner. In the same jail. It usually held men.
Naturally.
Sometimes there were more women than men. Not this time.
And your mother worked in the police station.
Yes, she came in for an hour or so while the jailer went on his lunch break. She was not supposed to go anywhere near the prisoners, but she had been given the keys, in case