Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [79]
These were the most exciting days of her life. There was the adventure of disguise. And sleep was easy, without fear. In the barn, crowded with others, she felt a wall of security beside Roman, now forced to be platonic in his caring. When they wished or needed to make love, the lack of privacy and the seeming sin of brotherly love that surrounded the act made the tension and desire... magnificent. Every wish for sound between them was impossible and could be translated only into a half-lit glance. His hand on her back in the night, which had become gentle with this caution, was enough for her. So she would turn slowly from the blunt advances of others during the veillée and gaze towards the darkness of the workingmen, where she knew Roman would be watching her, and run her fingers through her hair and shrug.
And so wait for night. The hand on her shoulder. Touching the soft untouched back of her knee. They lay there, a brother and sister, silent and calm save for this brush of him against her. If someone lit a rush-light, its flood of ochre would reveal a nearness that might seem to have occurred accidentally during sleep. But hours of darkness cloaked them. She pushed back briefly against him and waited. He was already within her and held on to the stasis of this, did not wish it to end. A whisper. When he felt himself coming, his hand covered her mouth to silence it, though all noise came from the violence of his breath at her ear. And now, if a rush-light were held up in the middle of the great barn, the posture of the two would seem like a strangling, a brother in an old feud with a sister.
In the beginning this posing as siblings had made them anonymous to each other, but later, blindfolded this way, in a role, they knew each other’s truthful desires. And what they discovered was not only conjugal love, but the quick danger of life around them. They were caught in the attempt at survival among strangers, these two who were strangers to each other. And they saw that anything, everything, could be taken away, there was nothing that could be held on to except each other in this ironlike world that appeared to stretch out for the rest of their lives.
Billet-doux
When Lucien Segura’s mother died, a few weeks before his own wedding, Le Haricot entered the house, for the first time uninvited, drew a chair beside the coffin, and rested her head against the black pine. She would not move away. She had been befriended and had grown magically in the shadow cast by this woman. And then with the recent imprisonment of Roman, the result of his assaulting a carpenter in Barran, Marie-Neige had been close to losing their farmhouse, until Lucien’s mother had paid the rent. Thus, when Marie-Neige keened and wailed beside the coffin, Lucien believed she might in part be fearing the loss of her home, and he had taken her aside and told her it was still hers and he would cover the rent; she stared at him with a look of scorn and turned away. She sat down in the chair again and put her head against the black pine. Lucien realized he had insulted her, misinterpreted her sorrow. After that he did not see her for a long time, and when he did she would not speak to him. Nothing he could say would remove the damage.
In the years between their first meeting and his wedding, there were two indelible versions of Marie-Neige that Lucien had