Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [53]
I would never see Coop again.
And then, somewhere south of San Jose, at a truck stop on Highway 101, I slipped away. I went in one door and immediately out another and caught a ride. I disappeared. I was probably ten minutes ahead of him by the time he realized what had happened. He must have careened down the highway looking into the windows of every car he passed along the coastal route, alerting the police about his lost daughter, searching for me in towns like Gilroy and Santa Clara and San Juan Bautista. He would not have gone back to the farm for several days. And by then the abnormal ice storm and blizzard that hit the region had left the Petaluma hills. I was now a runaway. And Coop would no doubt be gone.
Who recovers from such events? You meet people even in middle age and discover that at some point, in the delicate path of life, they have been turned into the Jack of Hearts or the Five of Clubs. This is what has happened, I suspect, to Coop and to me. We have become unintelligible in our secrets, governed by our previous selves. Just as Claire, in some way, will always be adjacent to our romance, the one who lost her family because of it.
‘One fetal twin may absorb the other without malice, and retain in its body a loose relic or two of one of the absorbed twin’s femurs. (The living twin grows and becomes an adult; the femur stays fetal.)’ That marvel, Annie Dillard, wrote that. And perhaps this is the story of twinship. I have smuggled myself away from who I was, and what I was. But am I the living twin in the story of our family? Or is it Claire?
Who is the stilled one?
Those who have an orphan’s sense of history love history. And my voice has become that of an orphan. Perhaps it was the unknown life of my mother, her barely drawn portrait, that made me an archivist, a historian. Because if you do not plunder the past, the absence feeds on you. My career exhumes mostly unknown corners of European culture. My best-known study is of Auguste Maquet, one of Alexandre Dumas’ collaborators and plot researchers. Another is a portrait of Georges Wague, the professional mime who gave Colette lessons in 1906 to prepare her for music-hall melodramas. I work where art meets life in secret. An archive is Utopia to me, a poet said, and my acquaintances no doubt feel contemporary life must seem a thin and less interesting pasture for me. That may be true. When Rafael asks, for instance, in which historical moment I desire to live, I say, without pause, Paris, the week Colette died, when at her state funeral Georges Wague made certain a thousand lilies were sent by the Association of Music Halls and Circuses. … I want to be there, I tell him, in my ‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’ t-shirt, looking up at her apartment on the premier étage of the Palais-Royal, where ‘no more amorously selected words would align themselves on the pale blue paper under the light of the blue lamp.’
Georges Wague, who taught Colette mime, taught her two important things. He had recognized a hidden art in her, that she could represent herself not just with words. This woman, he could see, contained other qualities. She could be as powerful when she was speechless. He took her hand and they walked away from others in Natalie Barney’s garden, and as she began to speak he put a finger across her lips and her eyes caught fire, full of life. They watched his face for a signal. He let his hand fall back in a surrender so she knew he was not manipulative, and they walked on. He told her then that mimes live long lives. The second thing he told her she already knew. That there was nothing more assuring than a mask. Under the mask she could rewrite herself into any place, in any form.
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