Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [54]
It is what I do with my work, I suppose. I look into the distance for those I have lost, so that I see them everywhere. Even here, in Dému, where Lucien Segura existed, where I ‘transcribe a substitution / like the accidental folds of a scarf.’
I am uncertain, even now, what made me fall upon the life of Lucien Segura and wish to write about him. Or what made me explore in the Berkeley archives the almost worn-out paths of his life in the Gers. I had read the French writer while studying at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. But then, more important, in a carrel in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, I heard for the first time his voice, reciting his poems into a lacquered tin funnel as if into the large ear of a stranger. This documentation by the Académie Française in an early-twentieth-century recording had positioned him too far in the background, so that close by was what sounded like a seacoast or a crackling fire. Nonetheless I felt there was something in the articulated voice that suggested a wound, the way one can sometimes recognize a concealed ailment in the slow movement of a king in newsreels. And I remember that, after his poems, Lucien Segura read something on that cylinder about his father—his stepfather, really—who had been a clockmaker, and I looked up from the notes I had been taking in Dr. Weber’s semester on peasant life and began to listen more intently. There was a sweet shadow and hesitance in Segura. It was like a ruined love, and it was familiar to me. Till then all I knew of his life was his odd departure from his family; that late in life, comfortable, successful, he had climbed into a horse-drawn cart, and disappeared. His voice with the wound in it kept haunting me. I travelled to France, to the last house he had lived in, during the final stage of his life. I pieced together the landscapes he had written about. I took long walks. I swam in the nearby stream, I walked his avenue of trees. I met Rafael.
Seven minutes after I escaped from my father at the truck stop near San Jose, this person formerly known as Anna climbed into the passenger seat of a vehicle going south. We drove all night, a shy black man in his commercial refrigeration truck giving a lift to someone he thought was a French girl. (I did not wish to talk or explain anything.) We stopped now and then for food, though I barely ate, my stomach hurting from fear. We sat in roadside diners and I watched him eat guacamole and chiles rellenos, while the weather stations on every truck-stop television screen reported the freak ice storm invading northern California. It had been a sunny afternoon on Coop’s deck, before the windlessness and those moments of thunder, and here I was, a day later, across the table from a polite and generous stranger. I did not speak. English never escaped my lips, and the only words that existed between us as we travelled into the Great Central Plain came from the truck’s radio.
The Central Valley of California that we drove through had been, in an earlier time, a sea of flowers. John Muir describes how it used to be a ‘continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich … your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step.’ And at times the region had resembled a sea. ‘The whole Valley was turned into an ocean. Most of its people were