Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [51]
We returned to the car and drove towards Dému.
All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.
There was now not a single lit streetlamp in the villages we passed, just our headlights veering and sweeping along the two-lane roads. We were alone in the world, in nameless and unseen country. I love such journeying at night. You have most of your life strapped to your back. Music on the radio comes faint and intermittent. You are wordless at last. Your friend’s hand on your knee to make sure you are not drifting away. The black hedges coax you on.
Whenever there is thunder I think of Claire. I imagine her, content by herself, though as far as I know she could be comfortably married. There is a poem of Henry Vaughan’s that describes the way ‘care moves in disguise.’ I don’t know if this is what I am doing, from this distance, imagining the life of my sister, and imagining the future of Coop. I am a person who discovers archival subtexts in history and art, where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story. In my story the person I always begin with is Claire.
Claire’s limp made her appear serious to those who did not know her well. It was the result of her having had polio as a child, and I remember our father during that period carrying her constantly from room to room. The limp always led to ardent gestures of courtesy towards her. Men on a trolley car or the Larkspur Ferry would rise and give her their seats. But Claire never felt this seriousness in herself. It is in fact I, Anna, who should be identified as the serious sister, who always insisted on some determined path to be taken. Claire was in many ways the adventurous one, with a wildness in her. Her journals about her travels—on horseback, of course—contained a range of friends unknown to the rest of us. …
January 7. We rode the cliffs looking for Keene’s dog. He was always yelling at him, goddammit this, goddammit that, but we knew he loved it. We split up going along the creeks, looking for something that was either dead or alive, we didn’t know. We all had done this before, looking for animals, then we would come across them dead, as if there had been a small massacre in the snow. In the late afternoon, we found the dog, shaking beside the creek at Richardson Bend. He had never been a friendly animal, except to his master, and now he had almost too much company. We crouched and ‘paid court,’ as Anna would say. Keene wrapped George in a blanket, and the rest of us led our horses into the water. I listened to the sound of their drinking, soosh soosh soosh, the sound a baby makes at a breast. A buck appeared, about twelve points—a deity. It came out of the trees and looked around. That must have been what it was like around