Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [32]
Anna wakes early in the morning to begin translating the sparse texts by Lucien Segura that she has on her desk. For much of his life the man was unknown, save that he was a poet and later the author of a jeremiad about the Great War. And in the years since his death, knowledge of him has sunk into the fabric and soil of this region, so he is almost forgotten by his countrymen. Anna loves such strangers to history; for her they are essential as underground rivers. She wakes in this last house that Lucien Segura lived in, solitary in her bed, makes coffee, and is at work by eight. Rafael is absent from her thoughts until early afternoon, when he crosses the fields with a plan for lunch. He is her ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger,’ or perhaps she is his. In the afternoon, they nestle together in her small bedroom, and later, half dressed, still curious about the interior of the house, he will enter other rooms and glance at paintings, open what were once linen cupboards, and look down at the avenue of trees from an upstairs window.
During one of these reconnaissances he hears what sounds like a river’s whispering in the corridor. He realizes the noise comes from above, from a closed-off section above the ceiling. He wanders off, returns with a ladder, and ascends through a trapdoor into a room where the air is thick with bird heat. As he rolls in shirtless, feathers paste themselves onto his back. When Rafael was a boy, he knew there was a pigeonnier attached to the house. But over the years the wall separating the dovecote from the attic must have partially collapsed, and now birds swoop in, assemble, pause in the portal for a moment, and fly out. It is a room busy with entrances and escapes. He has never desired to be a pigeon, but many times has wished to be a bird in flight over the landscape, moving in a long slide towards a copse, where its high secret entrance, invisible to humans, reveals at the last moment a path into the forest. What you experience in the high air is the petite life on earth, a drifting of voices, the creak of a wagon, the retort and smoke from a gun among the almond trees, somewhat like the music Anna has played for him in the kitchen, with only the essential notes of life reaching you through that distance of air.
Rafael stands quietly in the middle of the room. He knows what he will be able to see from the portal, from this breadbox-sized opening. He could look towards the wooded valley east of Dému, the Bois de Mazères, where the silent burial of his mother took place many years ago … he and his father digging and four others watching, and then, at the end of his mother’s commitment to the earth, all of them stepped away from the grave and went their own ways like the spokes of a cart wheel, all of them carrying their own version of Aria, none of them wishing to share it, or dilute it within a group. No words were spoken. He was asked to play but did not; he would play later, when she inhabited him more, when she abided in him. Then he could represent her, just as he knew his father would take into himself the qualities of Aria he might unconsciously have fought against in the past. In this way she would remain with them. He can almost see the clearing in the forest where they took her that morning. They slipped her into the ground within three hours, so she lived the briefest death on the earth, as if earth were a boat that forced a quick embarkation. They had brought her back to the landscape she was most fond of. It was about five in the morning, and bird life was wild around them, as if it was his mother’s leaving.
Rafael turns and walks along the struts of the loft. He thinks he has heard Anna calling. She has moved the ladder away and is standing there undressed, laughing at him when his head appears through the rectangle. He drops his legs through the hole and hangs on with his hands. When she sees he isn’t going to ask her for the ladder, she scrambles to provide it, but he has already dropped the fifteen feet to the floor.