Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [69]
On the righthand side of the picture is a dark blur, something unknown, like raw paint imposed on an otherwise immaculate canvas, or perhaps it is a bat in the daylight, caught flying between camera and writer. This is the only photographic capturing of Lucien’s friend Liébard, or Astolphe, who turned on the photographer with a surprising belligerence when he heard the shutter begin to slip into place, turning so quickly that he was able to dissolve his appearance.
The other picture, taken on the same grounds, was snapped all these years later by the belligerent and blurred subject’s son, Rafael. It is of the woman he met in the writer’s house. He used her camera, and the image has been blown up to be the same size as the other, so it is, in a way, a partner to it.
We are much closer to the subject in this picture. Photography has moved in from the middle distance as the century progressed, eliminating vistas, the great forests, the ranging hills.
The woman’s figure is naked from the waist up, moving forward, just about to break free of focus. The tanned body willful, laughing, because she has woven the roots of two small muddy plants into her blond hair, so it appears as if mullein and rosemary are growing out of the plastered earth on her head. There’s a wet muck across her smiling mouth, and on her lean shoulders and arms. It is as if her energy and sensuality have been drawn from the air surrounding her. We look at this picture and imagine also the person with the camera, walking backwards at the same pace as the subject so that she remains in focus. We can guess the relationship between the unseen photographer and this laughing muddy woman, weeds around the fingers of her hand gesturing to him in intimate argumentative pleasure. This person who is barely Anna.
THREE
The House in Dému
Lucien Segura Archives, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. Tape 3
The large clock above the mirrors at Le Daroles bar has remained at twenty minutes past eleven for the last two weeks. The clockmaker has still not arrived, being somewhere in the south, correcting time along the small villages of the Pyrenees. He will come when he does with rags and oil and needle-fine tools. He will lift the heavy machine into his arms, be guided down the ladder by others, and place it on the marble counter of the bar, intentionally taking up the prime space of trade in the cafe. What will occur then is ceremonial. He will insist on his taut espresso, and behave with a ponderous authority as if he has been summoned into this town to correct the weakening eyes of the mayor’s daughter. He soaks petite flags of cloth in a sauce of oil and with tweezers inserts them into the unseen depths of the giant clock… .
They are a strange breed, clockmakers, some surly and insensitive to all save the machine about to whir into life, some uncertain as poets about their gift. Because my stepfather—my mother’s second husband—was one, I have studied their natures. He, my first clockmaker, never felt his talent as anything special. There were just a few procedures to learn; now and then the Italians or Belgians would produce something that reversed the cause and effect, but he did not feel himself to be in any way different from the market gardener in the way he spoke about his work. And I learned the cautious and also incautious habit of my own work from him. You are given a trade, not a gift. There need not be intensity or darkness in the service of it. Still, I met no other clockmaker like