Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [31]
It’s a good excuse. The war.
Yes. In this case it was because my father was besotted with my mother. She was quite a bit younger. He had never been a jealous person—after all, he was a thief who believed property was ‘communal’—but he gave up everything he was and began living with her in the way she wanted to live. There was a strict moral code around her group.
So Aria …
Yes. Aria. And my father.
Turn around and face me… . Is that all true?
It’s probably been aged a bit. But that was how my father, the DDT inspector, met her.
I suppose there are a lot more stories about him.
Oh, yes. For one whole month, when the police were suspicious of that community of caravans, he dressed as a woman. He was a woman for all that time, until the police gave up. He had been in jail during his youth, and he was never going back.
Then you can’t blame him.
No. But the real reason he feared going to jail was that he became jealous of other men’s interest in my mother. Though she was consistently faithful, as far as I know, but then, who knows …
Aria, she said again. As if it was some taste on her tongue.
After the disinfecting, his father noticed that there was still about fifteen minutes before the jailer was scheduled to return, so he sat down opposite the young woman and wondered aloud whether they would, and could, meet again. She was looking down at some cards. He watched her hands scoop them this way and that. Her dark hair was tied back with a few inches of green ribbon. Without a word she arced the Tarot pack across the table in front of him. He cut it, pulled a card out, and let it lie there. He knew nothing about what the cards meant, and he watched as she moved the other cards around it. She made him select another. He glanced at the clock above her beautiful head. ‘I do not wish to be rude, but I must leave now.’ She said nothing, continuing to move the cards from side to side, as if evidence, acknowledging him with a slight nod as he opened the door and slipped out.
She knew she’d see him again, and what she had on the table in front of her was considerably more significant than the need to look up and see his face or his strange dark hands again. When he passed the window, he glanced inside and saw her profile bent even closer to the table, studying the cards.
The next night he visited her caravan. She looked him up and down, making certain this was what she wanted. She’d seen a possible jealousy in his nature; perhaps the war had made him desire too much security.
So in the moment he was abandoning his wife and betraying her with Aria, he began insisting on no betrayal on Aria’s part. As at the jailer’s desk, she remained silent and uncommitted to this insistence. She refused to deny chance and fate with a permanent agreement, there was no such thing, and he himself was on no moral pinnacle to be able to negotiate. Through all their years together, she refused to give the needed comfort about her faithfulness to this man who was suddenly conscious of the sacredness of property.
Rafael did not recount their entire story to Anna. Even as a seven-year-old, lying beside his mother, he had been aware of Aria as the central being, his arms enclosing her, the way a boy embraced a dog with all the right in the world. When he was twenty he’d still undress and swim in rivers with her. So that nakedness was natural to him, as when Anna watched him standing by the north window, focused only on the smoking of his cigarette, listening to the sound of doves that had found harbour in the damaged wall of the house. If she had asked him, he might or might not have explained how his mother protected this mystery of her faithfulness, which was like a moat that no one could cross with certainty—there was always the mixture of carefulness and open desire in her. She would whisper something into his ear and then kiss it, to seal it there, so he could never give it away to another.
You’re lucky you had a mother, such a mother.
I know.
It felt to Rafael that he had just turned from resting his face against Aria years