Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [62]
From San Francisco they drove north over the Golden Gate Bridge, then left the highway and took a country road until they came into Nicasio. She said she was tired and asked Coop to drive. They went on, and saw the bent tree growing out of the great rock by the reservoir. The car wound along the Petaluma road into the hills, bordered on one side by giant poplars. She bit her tongue, looked out of her window seemingly unconcerned. As the car reached the peak he swerved the steering wheel with one hand casually to the right and they drove down the narrow farm road. He turned the key off, and they were gliding between fences towards the farmhouse. They went over the old speed bump of tires, and she saw her horse approaching the fence, and she saw Coop looking over the steering wheel into the old world.
Rafael and I follow the river that disappears under a chaos of boulders and emerges once more a few hundred yards further in the forest. We walk in silence beside it. Eventually we come to a ford where our river meets a road and covers it, or from another perspective, where the road has come upon the river and sunk below its surface, as if from a life lived to a life imagined. We have been following the river, so that now we must look on the road as a stranger. The depth of water is about twelve inches, more when the spring storms come racing at low level over the fields and leap into the trees so nests capsize and there is the crack of old branches and then silence before each plummets in their fall. The forest, Rafael says, always so full of revival and farewell.
They merge, the river and the road, like two lives, a tale told backwards and a tale told first. We see a vista of fields and walk through the clear water that floods the gravel path, leaving the background of forest with each step.
TWO
The Family in the Cart
The House
The writer Lucien Segura moved through an overgrown meadow abundant with insects that sprang into the air as he approached. He had been following a path. The grass was chest-high, even higher, so he was using his arms in a swimming motion to move forward. How long was it since this grass was last cut down or burned? A generation, or more? About the time when he was a boy?
After ten minutes he stood motionless in the claustrophobia and heat. He had no idea how far and for how long he would have to keep moving to be free of it. There seemed to be a clearing about thirty metres away, for some charm trees stood there, barely moving. As he looked at them he saw, unbelievably, a peacock flying over the sealike surface of the rough pasture. The bird reached and settled within the darkness of one of the trees, its blue shape disguised now as a horizontal branch.
A poem from his youth about a strange bird from the foothills had been one of his most famous verses, memorized, explicated, exfoliated in schools until there was nothing left but a throat bone and a claw. The lines had become a mockery for him. There had been, in fact, no such rare bird in his youth. None had ever flown across his stepfather’s fields. And now, suddenly, one existed as a reality.
He wished he had worn a hat. And the shirt he was wearing was wrong for this labour. He’d simply begun walking into the field as part of a brief reconnaissance of a property he might purchase. The house had come with a formal driveway of plane trees and several hectares of abandoned land. He began moving forward again and, unable to see what was below him, stumbled across a wooden object. A bench or a pump. He got to his knees, cleared the grass away, and discovered it was a wooden boat. The sound of insects thickened around him, and he felt even more alone.
Three weeks earlier he had left his home near Marseillan,