Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [78]
All the landscape was blue around them. Years later, when Roman was in prison for assault, he would return to this moment, Marie-Neige bending to wash her legs and her feet with rainwater, her flesh a tint of blue, and the green fields blue, so the only thing another colour was the moon. He made her lean over the barrel and raised her yellow cotton dress but she turned around and looked at him and kissed the hands that had calmed horse after horse as if there would be all the time in the world, as if those seven animals were the only civilized creatures they had met since their wedding, in that place that now felt like another country altogether. He touched the soft and small delight of her face, then her neck and the dampness in her hair where she’d raked her fingers. She put her palms against his rough shirt and kissed the open triangle of his neck. After that she turned and put her arms out along the thick rim of the barrel where in the water was the moon and the ghost of her face. Roman moved against her, and in the next while, whatever surprise there was, whatever pain, there was also the frantic moon in front of her shifting and breaking into pieces in the water.
‘Who comes from afar, can lie more easily.’ But the next day someone they thought was a stranger recognized them and passed around the scandal of their marriage and Roman’s brutality. Within half an hour they left the farm and that memory of the blue countryside at night. He proposed they travel as brother and sister, and they rode further west on her uncle’s horse. For the next few weeks there was hardly any food to eat, and eventually she stopped having her period. The few times they did make love, when they could touch each other late in the night, there was little pleasure to be found anywhere within their weariness. They would be travelling most of the day, and the only thing alive in them was hunger. All they owned was a wineskin of water for thirst in the night. Neither could read, so if they wished to find work they needed to ask others. But they kept to themselves. The fairs they came upon were the only places they knew to look for work. At the village of Barran, west of Auch, they found themselves within the sounds of a great crowd. Around them were magicians, and craftsmen who could pull out your teeth, and soothsayers who would reveal your future as if it were a hidden serpent. She realized, seeing the stalls, she should have waited and sold her long hair so that it could have been made into a wig.
At the fair, the person who carried a live pig the greatest distance would win it, and Roman did so, collapsing beyond the others with the animal in his arms. He sold it to a farmer before he even got up off the grass, then changed his mind and promised it to the man for nothing in return for a job. The farmer agreed, and offered the pig-carrier and his gamine of a sister work in his fields and a place to sleep in his barn. A few days later Roman and Marie-Neige were invited by that man to the neighbourhood veillée. The communal gathering was held in a large chalk-walled structure. It felt like a night market or congregation, with the women sitting in rows, sewing and embroidering, peeling apples or blanching chestnuts close by the firelight. Further back the men repaired or sharpened tools, boasted and tossed pearls of rough wisdom. Roman sat with them, dressing hemp and burning the ends. A woman walked among them with a shovel of hot ash, from which they picked chestnuts and potatoes; another followed with a jug of mulled wine.
A veillée held the community together, it was where everyone volunteered work, even if exhausted. Outside was a defiant landscape where the crops hardly grew, where life was a constantly repeating wheel,