Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [77]
She saw him change as a result of his labour in the fields. She noticed his brown arms, his broken voice, its shrill husk falling away. He was no longer the boy she had first met. He had begun to move with confidence now, with the sureness she would never have. Again she hesitated within her world before stepping into the light and into the pleasure she got from him.
Charivari and Veillée
She had met Roman at a fair in the village of Saint-Didier-sur-Rochefort, and their marriage took place after an hour of bartering by an uncle who had raised her since the death of her parents. During the spring, all over the neighbouring valleys—in Perize, in Challons—there were marriage fairs. Marie-Neige was sixteen and Roman was in his thirties, and they sat at a small table while the scribe wrote out the marriage contract.
That evening whatever frail bond existed between them was met with derision by a gang of twenty or more who made up a charivari. It was a time when any union outside what was familiar was considered insulting to a community. A wedding too soon after the death of a spouse, a marriage between known adulterers, a marriage where there was a great age difference, would result in the humiliation of a bride and groom. If a woman was wealthy and a man poor, banners would proclaim the adage ‘If the purse is big, a man will marry a bear.’ When adulterers married, tumescent manikins were carried jostling beside them on the street. Some charivaris lasted two months; some, if the gangs were paid off, a few hours. Being poor and having no social power, Roman and Marie-Neige became easy victims. Although Roman was a powerful man, the manikin representing him depicted him as ancient and weak, and his young wife as a baby on his knee. There had been stories in the recent past of couples driven mad by a charivari; in one case a husband insulted beyond care stabbed to death the first jeering man he could reach with an awl. So that there was a wedding and then an execution.
All night her uncle’s home was surrounded by torches and drumming and the bray of obscene songs. Roman stood for hours at the window, then slipped from the house before dawn and attacked two men who had been left to watch the house while the others slept, strangling one until he fainted and breaking the wrists of the other. He stood there alone with the bodies in the pasture. It was about five in the morning and there would be darkness only for a brief while more. His new bride came out carrying a lamp and he extinguished it. He put his hands on her shoulders and for a moment leaned his head against hers. Marie-Neige was dressed in the clothes of a boy and had cut her hair short. They did not go back into the house. They haltered her uncle’s horse and walked with it silently through the village in the last of the darkness. When they were in the open fields he climbed on, reached his hand down, and pulled his wife up into the air and swung her behind him onto the animal. They rode south with the morning, the fields brightening around them.
They barely paused through the Ardéche, eating only what could be found on bushes, trees, and in vegetable gardens. Approaching Nîmes, they turned west and travelled through the departments of the Tarn and the Haute-Garonne, and by the time they reached the Gers, she had removed her boy’s disguise and wore a yellow cotton dress. They found work at a fruit farm and slept with the other labourers in a crowded barn. The two had still not slept together as lovers, as husband and wife, and on the third night he woke her and they went into the warmth of an adjacent horse barn. The animals woke quickly, conscious of their presence, so there was a tense silence. He went up to each of the animals and calmed them, stroking their foreheads. Seven horses. Then he came back to the sixteen-year-old girl sitting on a bench, watching him. The light from the moon outside filled the rolled-open