Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [81]
He wrote during the late mornings and afternoons in what had once been his stepfather’s workroom. The view from that window still held most of the natural world of his childhood, though the river was hidden now by overgrown trees. Then, after dinner, when his wife or any visitors had retired, he returned to its quiet and darkness, and before turning on the lamp, allowed himself to become conscious of the smell of the clockmaker’s oils that had once filled this space. He sat there weighing what was already written, half-dreamt during the day, until he fell on a scrap of sentence, something uncommitted, that would open a door for him. He worked for much of the night, aware of the darkness beyond his lamp. Only the pen and notebooks were alive, the rest of the world somewhere in the cliff-fall of dreams. Now and then he heard words spoken into a pillow in a far bedroom, a clue of another reality, like a juniper root shifting within the earth. He read out loud to himself, the way she had read to him, when his mother was alive, when Marie-Neige was seventeen, and Balzac was still too difficult for them. They’d entered the great world this way. Was he in such a place now?
He pushed the glass doors open and walked into the night so the coldness filled his shirt. He noticed the square of a lit window on the slope of the hill. There was a tightrope between the two farms, and below it an abyss.
In-laws
He was never fully certain as to what made him write. He had seen his mother dance at her wedding with the clockmaker, just a few embraced steps. And once with a cat—his mother dancing with a cat in a meadow, he remembered that. It had become for him this delicious, witnessed example. It was a way he could enter the world as himself.
The few women who knew him well (a mother, the neighbouring woman) saw how his early success altered him. He turned from uncertainty into a more determined and more private youth. He camouflaged his life. He seemed to them like a creature who had slipped into a mistaken garden of celebrity. He was now in a well-lit place, such as those zoos in distant countries where one is able in the hours of night to witness the behaviour of animals that assume they are cloaked in darkness.
When he had been about to marry, his fiancee’s family recommended a fortune-teller for them, someone who was known to predict accurate fates to those living in the village. The man read their stars and then whispered some safe sentences about the future. They were about to return to the sunlight of Blaziet when the seer grabbed Lucien Segura’s sleeve and asked, ‘You are a good gardener?’ No, he said, refusing to reveal his profession. The man looked at him with disbelief, then let go of his arm. Lucien and his future wife left the curtained parlour and walked arm in arm for an hour or two along a road banked with poppies, and into a marriage that created two daughters. There would be years of compatibility, and then bitterness, and who knew when that line was traversed, on what night, at what hour. Over what betrayal. They slipped over this as over a faint rise in the road, like a small vessel crossing the equator unaware, so that in fact their whole universe was now upside down.
Essays were being published in cities about his career, his craft, his psychosis, his landscape, the lack of close friends, his secretive and diverse nature, his soul. They reproduced maps of the town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and the Fan of Gascony, and Marseillan. Every local cleric, neighbouring butcher, and mailman came out from the quiet corners of Lucien Segura’s world with a story or an insight that would expose his silence. It turned out that his wife had kept a journal of fury towards him. He had assumed their relationship was affectionate. He read a few pages and realized how each of them was truly invisible to the other. He saw the disfigured man who was portrayed. He was the nocturnal