Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [70]
I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin—as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place. One of my pleasures, when I was a boy, was to ride alongside the Garonne to where four steam engines were set up on the river-bank, pumping water out for the city of Toulouse. In all that be-stilled countryside, where you could hear a single croak of a duck, the engines suddenly roared into life, like grand apes spitting and shoving against the edge of the water. I was hypnotized. It was as if they were adults in their noisy complex labours. It was as if they could bring on darkness.
The clock at Le Daroles in Auch was overtaken by fatigue at least once a year, and Chamayou, the proprietor, would send me a message to let me know when the clockmaker was expected, and I would travel to town for the procedure and stay at the Hotel de France to witness the event. Up close, once the great object was on the marble counter of the bar, you could read the smaller letters on the clock face. A LAMARGUERE. The clock-maker wiped the appearance of mildew or foxing off the white portal of the dial and then lifted it off the mechanism. I, in order to remain close by, needed to appear humble—he insisted on a papal-like authority—and when told I was a writer, or at least was known to be a writer, he would speak to me rather than the other spectators, as if we were on another, professional level of existence. When it was clarified that I was a poet, my status slipped a rung or two and he muttered some line I didn’t quite hear that got a laugh somewhere to his left, a laugh guided by his own.
The skill of writing offers little to a viewer. There is only this five-centimetre relationship between your eyes and the pen. Any skill in the divining or dreaming is invisible, whereas the clock-maker visiting Auch removed his dark cotton jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, at which point I would part company from Claudile at the small round table by the window and come closer to the unrolled oilskin and its slim pockets that held tools and oil capsules, and his little flashlight for the machine’s dungeons. Soon I was almost within the pleasure of his serious demeanour. I could imagine his even greater status in those villages in the Hautes-Pyrénées, towns like Laruns, Gavarnie, Ogeu, where he must have travelled as if on the raised authority of a palanquin. I enjoyed all of this. But I believe only in the humbleness my stepfather had, who would stop in mid-operation—on hearing a song thrush—and walk to a window to search it out. Or he would pass me one of his essential knives to sharpen my blunt pencils. He constructed objects for us out of those wheels and dials that were no longer being used, so they’d move like half-formal animals across the dining room table. He was not my father, but he raised me. I learned, I suppose, a manner from him. Also that any trade or talent could be shaped discreetly without the sparks of exaggerated drama. And yet, with all his modesty, he loved the grandeur of Victor Hugo— and those slow, obedient descriptions that walked towards revolution.
And he loved my mother. I saw him on the last days of his life lift that oil-scented right hand and enter its fingers into her ordered hair and rustle it free of its pins as if he had been offered velvet or the fur of a rare animal. Forever I hold that gesture. For me it was perhaps the last remembered pleasure belonging to him. It is the unspoiled core of whatever I know of love and family (and I have not been successful at the craft of it). Our shyness at embracing each other—it rarely