Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [67]
Within an hour the boy, who was used to these changes, began calling his father Astolphe. Lucien realized the man used names like passwords, all of them with a brief life span. But this time the thief wished that he had owned the name earlier in his life. He spent the first day imagining moments from his past when he could have been ‘Astolphe,’ when he might have behaved and participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such a name. It led to the kind of biographical reconsideration a man might make when looking at photographs of a wife or lover in an earlier time, in her teens or twenties, which always brought the wish to have known her then—even that dress from another decade, whose tender buttons he might carefully unfasten; even to taste the fruit in the flowering tree behind her.... The thief liked the sound of the name, its aftereffect, its airiness, with a hint of an echo. With such a name it would almost be possible for this thickset man to turn into a three-ounce bird or a subtle grammatical form.
The writer watched him with the absinthe-smelling book on his lap. The name Astolphe appeared in the sixteenth-century Orlando Furioso. How had this man come across it? Would he have stolen such a book in the past—did thieves even steal books? How did he gather such things into his pockets?
Journey
While the two men worked in the fields, Aria and the boy returned south, to where they had previously lived, to collect their caravan. Their journey on horseback took several days, and they crossed the fan of rivers—the Ardour, the Baïse, the Gimone. They went south and east, riding into the fertile lands. On the fourth evening they arrived in darkness at the outskirts of Saint-Martory, where they had left their horses and caravan. There was a bonfire and music, and they sat talking to others for a few hours and later slept in their narrow familiar beds. The next day they dug up herbs and plants from their small plot that would survive the journey back to Dému, and decided what goods and property to leave behind.
Soon they were heading north, returning by a different route because with the swaying caravan they needed wider roads. There could be no more shortcuts by simply opening gates and crossing fields, or even fording a stream where the water was deep; there was too much weight for the horses to pull from the sandy soil. They were going towards Plaisance, and from there they would leave the company of the Arros River and turn west.
They took their time and stopped wherever they wished. Rafael built a fire while Aria coursed over the fields, looking for things to eat. An onion or two, rosemary, leeks. Lunch was a collection of minor plants and shoots as if gathered by a pair of birds rushing and diving over the fields. It was barely there on their tongues. When the meal was over, if the stream or river was private enough, they would strip off their clothes and swim. Aria was determined that Rafael never have a fear of water like his father, so she would laugh as she ran down the bank and then grin at him when she surfaced out of the river. She did not want a fearful child. The boy swam into her arms and embraced her, kissed her shoulders. There was a sensuality between them, as there was between the boy and his father in their cuddling affection. Back on dry land she bowed her head and he dried her long, dark hair with his shirt.
Sometimes during their journey great storms came at night, out of the west, from the ocean, near Ségalas, at Buzon; and