Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [65]
What is his name? Lucien had asked the wife that first day as the family climbed into the cart.
You will need to ask him that, she said.
That had been the start of the evasiveness.
I cannot call you a thief all the time. I shall certainly acknowledge the title when it is apt, but I need a name.
Aùguste? Peloque? Liébard? Any of those …
All right, Liébard it is.
He kept the man’s joke to himself, he was fond of Un Coeur Simple. So the name Liébard was used for a while, the first of many aliases, though Lucien eventually forgot most of them. What he did remember was that in all their time together he rarely saw Liébard eat, even if he had just cooked their meal. Aria would shrug if Lucien brought it up, as if that was an explanation, as if she was saying, Men.
Each evening during the journey, they arrived at an inn where the writer would buy them a meal; he himself would then sleep there while the family camped in the fields. The country air and the journeying brought an appetite for sleep. But one night, Lucien Segura woke, not knowing where he was. He was suffocating and threw off his blankets. Then he unbuttoned his nightshirt and went to the window. There in the darkness he saw Liébard walking along a narrow wall that ran along one side of the inn’s garden. There was enough moonlight for Lucien to recognize his travelling companion and this strange act in the middle of the night. He clapped his hands, and Liébard paused and looked up and gave a slow wave. Lucien put a coat on and went outside. They began talking quietly. He told the thief he’d been unable to sleep. Then you should not sleep, he was told. Darkness has many potent hours. It is often a waste of time dreaming through it.
I need your help, my friend.
Liébard was instantly silent. Lucien paused also, waiting for a reply to his dramatic statement, but there was just the invitation of the man’s silence. After a moment Lucien continued. I need you to kill someone for me. A further silence. I feel my wife has become a nightmare. She will damage our children. I feel that for the rest of my life she will haunt me.
I have a wife too, in another life. (Liébard was talking cautiously, as if aware this might be remembered against him.) There are other ways to stop a haunting. I agree that men and women haunt each other, but your children will take care of themselves. The problem, the difficulty, is not the killing. It is harder to steal a healthy chicken and cook a good meal. There’s no skill in killing, it’s not equal combat. And as well, it will destroy you. You have lost or misplaced your wits. Perhaps your breathing, your sense of suffocation, is related to this, may have brought this on. I can tell you of an herb—la bourrache—the flower is like a little blue star and is good for your heart. It will calm you. We can locate some.…
Lucien had not thought about his difficult, abandoned wife for weeks. So it was peculiar that she had all at once risen to the surface of his thoughts on this night as an enemy. Now he was embarrassed he had said such a thing to a stranger he had known for mere days. He thought perhaps he might still be in a dream or in half-sleep.
Forgive me, he muttered.
No, I am honoured that you trusted me with the possibility, said the calm voice back to him. Lucien did not quite laugh, but smiled in the darkness.
It was the morning after the last of the fig jam, that is how the boy Rafael would remember it, shortly after they had passed through the village of Dému, that they found the home for the writer. They were resting in the back of the cart—the writer, the boy, and his mother—when they felt it halt, breaking the sleepy rhythm, as if they had stopped casually at the edge of a precipice. The boy’s father sat up front with the horse, looking silently to his left. What was tempting him was a lack of care along that pathway of trees.