Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [34]
She sits on his bunk, next to the sacred guitar.
So this is it.
Yes.
No books.
No.
No pictures.
He brings out a photograph of Aria. Anna looks for the person who has distilled in her mind as a result of his stories. There’s a whimsy in his mother’s face that Anna had not expected.
And your father? Do you have one of him?
He does not respond to this at first.
Somewhere I have a photograph that he is in, but you cannot see him clearly. He didn’t like being photographed. You get in their books, he’d say, and you can never get out. If he ever needed a passport, he would use someone else’s. Someone roughly the same age and hair colour. No one looks like their passport picture. Do you? Do you have a sister? You could probably use your sister’s passport if you needed to.
I don’t have a sister.
Don’t you? I thought you did.
She shook her head.
She was lying again to a lover. Had a sister. Had a past. She would not tell him. Later, if she were brave enough. About their father turning like an axe on Coop, and her praying for his breath beside him, even for a small rise of his chest, the rest of her life splintered at that moment, with her becoming a creature of a hundred natures and voices, and with a new name. She envied this man beside her, as close as Coop had been to her on that cabin floor. This man’s life seemed innocent. She envied the delightful adventures of his father and Aria. Perhaps she needed a man as content as this to tell her past to.
All your stories, Rafael—tell me, was there nothing terrible?
Oh, many things. Many things changed me. There was a love affair with a woman that silenced me, there was the writer who lived in the house you are staying in, there were the donkeys… .
See, that’s what I mean!
Rafael’s first encounter with a girl was when he was seventeen. On a Friday evening he was to walk the few miles into town, have a picnic with her beside the bridge, and then go to a cinema. He carefully picked some marigolds, and then, because he was late, decided to hitchhike. He felt the evening should go only one way, which was that he simply must not embarrass himself with a member of the opposite sex. If one minor thing went wrong, he was fated to die solitary. He could already list almost a hundred areas of danger, for at seventeen we are perfectionists.
He walked under the avenue of trees, his arm out every time he heard a motorcar, but no one stopped for him. Finally a Citroën ‘Tube’ stopped, with two men and a woman taking up the front. He walked to the back of the van, opened the rear door, and in his white shirt and ironed trousers, stepped into complete darkness. As the van took off, he began being nudged by three indistinct shapes that turned out to be donkeys. It was the longest ride of his life, and Anna insists that he relive every second of it for her, and the appointment that followed.
Le rendez-vous, he says, n’a pas eu lieu. The girl took one quick look at him when the van dropped him by the town fountain, staggering out with his shirt loose and his shoes wet and shat upon, and his hands holding—in an attempt at nobility— seven or so stumps of what had been flowers. His time in the Citroën had been spent mostly attempting to save the bouquet, holding it high, so that his frame was abandoned to the animals, which had been locked in the van since the start of their journey in Montricoux.
So what was the very worst thing about it? Anna asks.
The worst thing was that by the time I got home, after the girl left, saying, ‘My father is ill, I must go,’ after I had washed my arms and neck and cleaned the shit off my shoes at the fountain, after going to the cinema and seeing a Gabin all alone and then walking home along the dark road with the night sky so bright that I was beginning to feel good again—I’d bought some bread and herbs, as I was hungry, and I was walking with this food with a strange kind of joy, that was something to do with escape—the worst thing was that by the time I got home