Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [72]
If his mother had not been there, perhaps no one would have spoken, but she learned that their names were Roman and Marie-Neige. They had rented the farmhouse sight-unseen from the owner, who lived in Marseillan. Roman accepted their gift of food but refused any help in moving the furniture, even though it was becoming dark. He would do that alone. He’d already carried, while they attempted conversation, the sections of bed indoors. And the girl remained silent. Her mouth had made some movement when they were introduced, that was all. To the boy she seemed too thin, her dark hair cut short so that it barely reached her neck. He felt the man could have folded her into some part of his clothing and made her disappear. Lucien walked back downhill with his mother, turning for a last time before going in. The man had placed a lamp on the cart, and he was moving back and forth and blotting out the light every minute or so. Lucien went indoors and sat at the table and thought of what had happened. It felt as if his whole life had changed.
They discovered that the couple had been recently married. The wife did not seem to be much older than Lucien. For the first two weeks the boy and his mother rarely saw her, for she was as cautious as wildlife. His mother made every effort to befriend the couple, especially the wife. Perhaps she had glimpsed something in that young, stunned face. So Marie-Neige was eventually coaxed under Odile Segura’s assured wing.
The girl would enter their home tentatively, as if she first had to learn the many rules that came with this scale of ownership. The house must have seemed palatial. The boy was aware suddenly of the extra metre that rose to the ceiling, the extra breadth and paces within each room. Roman seldom came, he would be in the fields most of the day, but Lucien’s mother would bustle uphill to the farmhouse and invite the girl, who appeared traumatized in her new role. He heard his mother say to someone that Marie-Neige had nothing to do but clean their little cabinet of a house and service her husband. Lucien would ponder that line later, when he thought more about their relationship. She was as thin as a bride could be. In fact, she represented no sense of that word. Physically and in age she was Lucien’s equal—and he was only a youth. But she was married, officially translated into an adult. She had the knowledge of such a world, as if she’d earned some abstract honour in a foreign place.
‘Lean as a haricot,’ he had described her to his mother’s friends when the girl was not there. And for a while, after that burst of laughter, ‘Le Haricot’ was how they all referred to her. He was showing off, and while it was the perfect naming, he felt he had committed a betrayal. ‘Well, she will soon grow some bumps on her,’ his mother said. And there was more laughter.
The Great World
The two families nestled gradually. His mother began teaching Marie-Neige to read. And on Saturdays, Lucien walked over to help Roman, digging turnips in the fields, or rebuilding a wall along the boundary line. To the sixteen-year-old boy, Marie-Neige’s husband was an unknown force, the dangerous possibility of a figure of a father he no longer had. They rarely spoke, and didn’t see each other during the week, for Roman worked in Marseillan or sometimes even further away. Meanwhile the youth was immersed in The Black Tulip, and one afternoon when Marie-Neige sat beside him in silence he decided to read the Dumas