Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [68]
She and Rafael kept the caravan in the middle of open fields and let the horses loose. Released, they hardly moved, as if pretending that there was nothing dangerous, that it was safer than galloping into darkness. There were evenings when Aria and Rafael stood on the dry night-grass with a hundred layers of stars above them. Uncountable. A million orchestras. The boy could scarcely store the delirious information. That journey south with his mother and the return north broke his heart again and again with happiness. It was when he felt most clearly that there was no distinction between himself and what was beyond him—a tree’s sigh or his mother’s song, could, it seemed, have been generated by his body. Just as whatever gesture he made was an act performed by the world around him.
They were a few miles north of Plaisance when the eclipse paused over the Gers. The darkness came fast into the afternoon. Rafael was lifting a pail for a nervous horse to drink from and became conscious of the darkness only because it was growing cold. He spun around and saw his mother looking at him with concern. Grey rain started falling in the half-light, though it was the wind that bewildered everything, arcing the trees down so they hovered almost parallel to the ground. He saw the horse’s eye lolling, distracted, in front of him as if it too were part of this peculiar nature. He didn’t know what an eclipse was. He thought it might be some vengeance that came with the end of the world. He was holding the horse’s neck, looking for rope to secure the animal, but there was none, so he held on to the mane with his hands. If the horse got loose they would never find it. When the animal began to pivot, he swung himself onto its back, just as his mother yelled out No! and the horse burst through the trees into further darkness with the boy upon it.
Rafael put his head down against the horse’s neck, and he became the animal’s eyes, witnessing the quick choices of direction. He was saddle-less, clinging to the wet-coated creature in its stumbles and swerves until it emerged into a vast field where the sky was a shade lighter than under the trees. The horse now doubled its speed and flung itself into the open. The boy could hear his own breath alongside the breath of the horse, he could hear the hooves in the long grass, their sudden clatter over a wooden bridge after the muted sound of the earth. He was holding on to the warm blood of the animal. For perhaps a minute— time was measureless now—they had gone through a village where only the two of them moved in the blackness, the boy’s leg brushing a cart, then a child, and then they had come through it, into fields again beside a river. Then there was a slow return of light, and there was heat once more around them and in the wet grass. Time was in a broken state. The sky appeared filled with a bright moonlight, though it was day. The horse calmed, aware now of the flylike rider whose knees clutched it, the boy’s feet bare from another time, when they were serene under the trees, and he had approached this animal with a pail of water.
Rafael rode back slowly, field after field. They were all new to him. He looked for the village, but whatever community they’d rushed through he never encountered again. They crossed over the wooden bridge, then saw the black horizon of forest and soon he could make out his mother pacing on the edge of it. He never hurried the horse. He finally dismounted lying back and sliding off the slippery wall of the animal. He could hardly stand in front of Aria, though he did, shaken by her and then embraced.
Two Photographs
There are two photographs pinned up on the wall of the kitchen in Dému. One is a picture taken of Lucien Segura in this last phase of