Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [5]
Somewhere there is an album made up of photographs our father took of Claire and me that provides a time-lapse progression of our growing up, from our first, unconcerned poses to feral or vain glances, as the truer landscape of our faces began to be seen. Between Christmas and New Year’s—the picture was always taken at that time—we’d be herded into the pasture beside the outcrop of rock (where our mother was buried) and captured in a black-and-white photograph on a late December afternoon. He insisted on modest clothing, although as we grew older Claire would arrive in chapped jeans or I would reveal a bare shoulder, causing a twenty-minute argument. He found little humour in this. The yearly episode was something he needed, like a carefully laid table that would clarify the past.
We would study ourselves in this evolving portrait. It made us secretly competitive. One became more beautiful, or reclusive, one became more self-conscious, or anarchic. We were revealed and betrayed by our poses. There was the year, for instance, that Claire lowered her face to hide a scar. In spite of having been almost inseparable, we were diverging, pacing ourselves privately into our own version of ourselves. And then there was the last photograph, when we were both sixteen, where our faces gazed out nakedly. A picture that I would rip out of the album a short while later.
Claire recalls whistling as she entered the horse barn, and reaching for a bridle when she heard a bucket kicked over somewhere in the darkness. A bucket would not be left loose in a stall, so it meant someone was there, or it meant a horse was loose. She stepped forward with her uneven walk, the bridle still in one hand. She didn’t call out. She reached the corner of the passageway, peered around it, and saw my body lying inert on the ground in the dark silence of the barn. Then, as she approached me, the horse came loud out of the blackness and smashed against her, throwing her down.
There is a broken path in both our memories towards this incident, even now. We are aware only that something significant happened. Claire recalls herself whistling as she entered the barn, but in what follows, in what we have tried to piece together, she is still too close to the remembered evidence, as if she can see only grains of colour. For a moment Claire had been staring at me, who had already been knocked down by the attacking horse, and then the same horse had swerved out of the darkness and turned on her, and her senses closed down. Or maybe she remained like me, half awake on the concrete floor, unable to move, while everything around us was vivid and nightmarish, hooves smashing against the floor—I felt I could see sparks and flame to represent the loudness. The animal must have been crazed, claustrophobic, for it raced up and down the passageway, slipping on straw and concrete, banging into wood walls, charging the length of the barn, turning once more at the blocked exit, its eyes and heart frantic. Was she, was I, conscious during this, or unconscious? Or in a world of spirits, uncertain if we were dead or alive.
When Claire opened her eyes, I was apparently sitting up six feet away and not moving, just looking at her lazily. I didn’t have the strength to rise, uncertain as to what exactly had happened. There were planks knocked loose all around us. No one