Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [35]
Rafael has added, in the many years since, a layer of casual irony to the trauma of the event. I try to imagine, he says, my donkey-odoured hand attempting to touch her naked waist or her sixteen-year-old shoulder during La Bête Humaine. I became used to the braying when I entered classrooms. And there was a sudden realistic neigh during the end-of-year exam a month later that made the students break into laughter, even cheering, and caused a knowing smile from the teacher.
I had no more ‘appointments’ with girls for the next four years—and then, knowing that the worst that could happen had already happened, I breezed into meetings with them unconcerned, the most relaxed suitor for my age. But during those four years I was in exile and I concentrated on the guitar. I owe my career to a bunch of marigolds and three donkeys.
So Rafael discovered the privacy of music, its hidden chords, all those disguised narratives. From then on, conflicts were to be within his art. And, being surrounded by the intimacy of his parents, he knew he had to somehow protect it. He was still the playful and loved son, but his mother noticed him removing himself easily from the conversations in their trailer. He had found his own enchantment, he had his own ‘emergency.’ He had an escape from the world. As if the chair he sat in was a horse to gallop into unknown distances.
Who taught him this secret? Once, as a young musician, he witnessed a pair of dancers who began rehearsing on their own, before anyone had taken out an instrument, to a recording of piano music that they pulled across like a screen between themselves and the others who were there. They were alone already, in their intimate preparation. And he remembers something else—for Anna has asked him if he knew the writer—how, while he was a boy living near this writer’s house, he spent long afternoons with him in the garden. The old man would sit at his table in the deep hollow that was once a mare, a notebook and a pen and ink in front of him, but would not write. So Rafael found another chair and walked down into the hollow and sat with him. He remembers how there was always birdsong falling out of the tree. The writer asked what was happening in the fields beyond, and Rafael said—a bonfire, a tilling, an execution of crows, and explained how his father had sculpted a large crow out of wood, placed it on a fence, and then with bloodcurdling screams attacked it violently with a knife. He claimed this kept crows away from their garden. I see, said the man at the table, looking beyond the lake towards that site of possible activity. Rafael visited him often at the blue table in the shade of the great oak.
When I wrote, the man said, that was the only time I would think. I would sit down with a notebook and a pen, and I would be lost in a story. The old writer, seemingly at peace, thus casually suggested to Rafael a path he might take during his own life, and taught him how he could be alone and content, guarded from all he knew, even those he loved, and in this strange way, be fully understanding of them. It was in a sense a terrible proposal of secrecy—what you might do with a life, with all those hours being separated from it—that could lead somehow to intimacy. The man had made himself an example of it. The solitary in his busy and crowded world of invention. It was one of the last things the writer talked to him about.
It was three a.m. Rafael took the lamp off the hook and went outside. In the meadow there were two chairs, and he placed the lamp on one of them and lit the wick, then moved his own chair away so he would not be in the spill of light. He sat there, hands curled on his lap.
Before coming outside he had been listening to Anna’s breathing in the dark trailer. She’d swept her arm back during the night and had relaxed into all of the bed. She was leaner than he was, but was used to American space. Asleep,