Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [76]
When she ended the chapter, she closed the book and without looking at him took it with her to her house. She didn’t appear the next day. The day after that, she was helping his mother with some curtains when he asked her if she would clarify something he had missed, not understood within that first chapter. She looked up. ‘I don’t think I remember, I was too nervous.’ There was a sort of response from him. ‘Shall I go back and read it again?’ ‘No, just go on. Not knowing something essential makes you more involved.’
Roman undressed her, having drawn open the curtain to their bedroom so the kitchen light was on her. She was taller and stronger now, her long hair more womanly. When they wrestled on the bed he saw her confidence, her less passive enjoyment. Her arms pushed at him and she stared back as an equal, without shyness at what he was doing. When he came into her, her mouth reached up and bit into his beard and tugged him down to her. It was a duel more than the passion that had happened before, and in the half-light when they finished he could see the sweat on her, unaware it was on him as well until she leaned up again and licked the taste of it off his forehead, a gesture he thought performed by some stranger within her.
When he was asleep, she couldn’t sleep. She lay there aware of the time rolling slowly and their bodies jammed against each other, her leaping mind awake. The light in the kitchen was still on, revealed by the open curtain. She looked for her shift and pulled it over her head and wiped herself between her legs. She bent over and watched Roman’s face, so calm and content in sleep, which always surprised her. She believed this was when he was happiest, unaware of the world. Then she knelt by the bed and reached under it for her old towel and unwrapped the book within. She drew the curtain so he was in darkness, and sat down at the kitchen table and began rereading the first chapter. She was not one to be content with gaps in a story; she would discover its secrets and would tell her friend whenever he wanted or needed to know them.
Lucien began helping Roman build troughs for his pigs. At dawn and at dinnertime he poured gruel into the hog feeder and rubbed their backs as they ate in the twilight. All his life he would remember the texture of their taut skin, the tough bristles, their delicate leaps in moments of nervousness. A good number of years later, when he was called upon to give injections to soldiers in a Belgian village, he remembered the first needle he’d given—to a large pig whose mouth had become infected. He had needed to sidle the creature into a corner of the barn, then come up behind it and lift it onto its hind feet, so that it fell back helpless into his arms while he himself leaned back with all this weight into the stone corner. He held it that way with one arm for those few seconds, and with the other hand reached for the syringe and stabbed the needle into the pig’s flank. Roman had told him what to do, and was watching all of this with a laughter that was rare but reassuring. And then Lucien had let the seemingly unconcerned creature loose.
The stories Lucien and Marie-Neige read together had become hers now. And he became accustomed to her voice, the way she read the fracas of a swordfight or described with unhidden amazement how the leaves in a book had been poisoned in order to kill a Protestant. The world out there was terrible with guile. The few times he corrected her pronunciation, it was done in no way to embarrass her but to protect her from embarrassment later in life among strangers. She read to him two or three times a week. They were equals again, sharing the alternative possibilities of a motive before