Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [56]
He kept talking to me in English, but I still returned mostly silence. If I spoke, I spoke my mother’s Spanish, or my tentative French. He knew I was raw with something, that I had some poison within me. He spoke to me anyway, telling me about Colonel Allensworth and the trains that since 1916 had refused to stop at the depot run by the black community. He must have known I could understand everything he said, for he spoke openly, and had stopped waiting for answers. At some point during that last morning with him, he went on about books and how they signalled the possibilities of our lives, and he recited to me what he said were the most beautiful lines. ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’ I know where those lines come from now, but I didn’t then, and when I did eventually stumble on them I froze and burst into tears for the first time in my adult life.
At Bakersfield he dropped me off, and slipped some money into my pocket. I started to walk through the sparse town, my life ahead of me. He had never touched me that whole time. I gave him a kiss at the truck stop. My last good kiss. I kissed no one for a long time after that. I have come to believe he was Mister Allensworth guiding me south.
This is the story I wished I could have someday told Coop— perhaps in a letter, perhaps in a phone call. But he, my first darling, was lost to me, and I was too far away by then, in another life.
Stumbling on a Name
It took Aldo Vea two days to locate Coop from the phone number that Claire had read out to him. ‘It’s a chalet, along the south shore of Tahoe,’ he said. ‘He must be renting the place.’
Claire parked at the foot of the hill. ‘Chalet’ was perhaps too grand a word. Halfway up the steep walk she called his name. When she reached the deck she saw the front door wide open and the body, face-down, a cane chair taped to his hand. Coop had always been strong, but it looked as though someone had beaten half the blood out of his face. He was conscious and he glared up at her. Turning him she saw dark bruises on his neck. This hadn’t just happened.
When the medics arrived, when they asked questions—Who had done it? Where did it hurt most? Was there still pain in his head?—he waved them away. She told the medics she would stay with him. Then he’s lucky, they said, he’s going to need help. They left and she remained beside him, waking him every few hours, as they’d told her to do, to check on him. Later he woke on his own and she fed him soft-boiled eggs. He could talk, but he was essentially reflecting the questions awkwardly. She remembered that embarrassed smile of his when she accused him of walking like a gangster. That had been only two days earlier.
What happened? Was this connected to your work?
Work, he said in a monotone. Then, What work?
The poker.
She watched him searching for an answer, as for a misplaced thing, a pencil, a lighter. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, she thought.
You play poker, Coop.
There was a grimace of a laugh then.
You are a gambler. That’s what you do. Do you know my name?
He said nothing to her.
Do you remember me? Do you remember Anna?
‘Anna,’ drawn out as if it were a new word he must learn to pronounce.
Thank you, Anna, he said when she took away the tray and the bowl that had held his eggs.
Gotraskhalana is a term in Sanskrit