Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [71]
Marseillan
His mother, Odile Segura, had been born in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, where the Spanish influence whipped down from the Pyrenees fifty kilometres away. Miguel Invierno had crossed the Spanish border to work as a roofer in the town. She had been courted by him before he departed without warning a few months later with a trio of fellow Spaniards. In the village of Vic-Fezensac, to the north, there was a corrida every June, and each year she took her small child with her, hoping to find her lover among the crowd, but she never encountered Lucien’s father again. Instead she married the clockmaker, and she and the boy came to live with him in his home outside the village of Marseillan.
The boy was four when he entered his stepfather’s house for the first time. There, in its gardens, with the river’s spark through the trees and a gardener’s dog sleeping in sunlight, he learned to distinguish the voices of each field. Soon he had been taught which section of the sky to search for stars during different seasons and which tree it was that held a mockingbird. Each year, for their birthdays, his mother made salade de gésiers—a plate composed of a small egg upon salad leaves, with goose gizzard, potato, chives, and a grainy mustard that Lucien would find nowhere else. Each year, in the last week of May, she would give the house a spring cleaning, weed the garden, wash and iron her husband’s shirts, and then gather the boy into a cart and travel to the corrida at Vic-Fézensac, searching the streets day and night, until she returned home empty-handed and with a mixture of disappointment and relief. The clockmaker never felt he reached the intimacy with his wife that existed between the boy and his mother. Perhaps he never was sure that, if his new wife did stumble across the Spaniard during the celebrations, she would return to their home.
With the stepfather’s unexpected death, in spite of some inherited wealth, Odile Segura and the boy reduced their way of life. There had been little protecting the boy’s world save for that careful man. Now Lucien became more cautious and secretive. In classrooms, the others heard his closeted speech patterns. He had spent too long conversing with just himself. As he grew older he had private words, as if collected twig by twig from an open field. He spoke a few sentences to himself about a rusted gate, or an animal’s nervousness on entering a boat, and that spoken scene would become indelible to him. Already he protected himself with words, with the small and partial clarity they brought.
The Arrival
One evening at suppertime their silence was broken by the sound of a cart. Their house was only a short distance from the journeying road, so it meant they had a visitor. But as the boy and his mother rose from their meal, opened the door, and looked out, an overburdened two-horse cart went past them and up the rise of the hill. It struggled another hundred metres and stopped at the one-room farmhouse that had been a vacant neighbour to them for years. Lucien and his mother stood by the doorway, halted in their expected greeting. They watched the couple in the distance descend and stretch themselves, looking like mere outlines on the crest of the hill, a man and a woman. The farmhouse had stood for years as the one inert obstacle on their horizon. The idea that it was now to contain people was exciting to the sixteen-year-old boy. It meant that he would have to be more curious, and yet cautious with his own secrecies.
They gave the couple half an hour, and then, just before darkness, he and his mother walked over, carrying bread and milk and candles, along with a few cuttings of meat. The man and the woman were still unloading the cart. Beside the road were a modest bed in two sections, two chairs, a painted table, an iron stove and its L-shaped pipe. Amidst this minimal furniture