Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [73]
From then on she wished to share everything he consumed from a book. During the late mornings, after helping with household duties, she learned the letters of the alphabet from his mother, and during the afternoons listened to this drug of stories as she and Lucien sat together on the porch or within the shade of the dwarf apple tree by the river. They had both grown up far from the intrigue of cities, and now they fell upon Dumas as a guide into those cities that were always in peril and where the sight of an emerald on a neck could betray a family dynasty. They accompanied horsemen who carried crucial documents across flooded plains and kept assignations with foes and lovers at midnight. The books were stuffed with unbearable love. “She gave a plaintive moan and fled, trying in vain to stifle the beating of her heart. Cornelius, left alone, could do no more than breathe in this sweet scent of Rose’s hair, which lingered like a captive between the bars.” Lying on the slim ribbon of porch, they felt at times that they could scarcely breathe, that there could be no normal life ever again.
He read as if speaking in tongues, with such adult knowledge he was like someone wise who had been wounded in a distant battle or by a passion. And it was as if she were learning of the great world through him—it was he (and he felt it himself) who was introducing Marie-Neige at court, or riding beside her from city to city under the moon. They discovered how it was possible to send a messenger pigeon as far as The Hague, which might change everything, though more often it was necessary to ride the great distance oneself. If Lucien hesitated, shocked sometimes by a woman’s deceit or a violent beating in the fiction he was reading, Marie-Neige would interfere from within her silence, to examine what seemed to him a flaw in the carefully made fabric, and they would speak about it, discussing how, exactly, a man or a woman, a husband or a wife, might behave. For instance the line “What she wanted was beyond the power of this man, and she had to take him with his weakness.” If there were aspects he did not fully understand, or was simply bored by, she would wonder out loud why that was. He realized she had a sly wit within her—just as she had her preferences for a specific musketeer’s charm.
They came to know, in this way, about each other’s interests and hesitations. She noticed how he raced over sections about childhood, for he found characters under the age of twenty too familiar. He already knew what youth contained. He wished only for the intricacies of adults and travel, war and battles, marriages. When he blurted this out to her he paused, embarrassed at the wall between them concerning that. She put her thin brown hand up to his cheek and kept it there not even a second. Someday you will marry. And then we will talk about that as well. No, he had said, We will not. I’m certain we will not. He stepped back into formality, so that they were like two flammable matches side by side in a tinderbox.
All this was during their first year together. By late afternoon Roman would have returned, and she would return to her real life. And he—he would race into the fields, cartwheel, aim at thin trees with a slingshot, and throw himself like a spear into the river. He’d burn through the water, eyes open in its darkness, certain he could find silver or a lost sword or a branch that would attempt to entangle him underwater. Something made him return to being just a boy in those moments after their separation.
She would go to her narrow back window and see him leap up to a branch. If she was