Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [82]
Sometimes he lost that crucial part of himself that allowed him to feel secure. Segura. The irony of his name was not lost on him. The safe world disappeared. One of his daughters, it was probably Lucette, would enter the darkened parlour and witness him with a thin plaid blanket over his shoulders. She had been sent in to make him talk and bring him away from himself. Papa! Her mother had insisted she carry in a plate of food, but the girl did not place it on his lap. She was sixteen. She wished to be an accompanist, not a messenger, desired only to spell him through the darkness. He knew darkness well, all the footfalls within it. She sat on the floor, her back against his legs like a spaniel, as if she were owned by his silent body. Lucette remembers the heat in the room, the boredom of the hours there, until she recognized each minimal gesture of his as a kind of talking. She began to speak about what she feared, what drove her to jealousy, what she imagined of the future, and eventually Lucien muttered how he himself had behaved when he’d been caught as a boy in a similar place or with a similar fear. He would never recall for certain which daughter had been with him that long day in the dimly lit room with its small window, when he had felt the thin blanket was his only skin, when only a careful breathing could release the rubble of what he contained.
He recalled a metal pencil box he had owned as a child, he remembered the young grisette he once shared a train carriage with, whom he would name Claudile in three of his books. Her companion was dangerous, she told him. The man had kept her captive, jealous of her friendships, and had overthrown her sense of perspective. There was no one to give an alternative opinion that countered his. Lucien sat across from her in that train carriage, and they spoke as if the oldest of friends in a night brasserie. She seemed wise in all things but her acceptance of this man. How easy it was to be caught within another’s personality.
He wondered whether he was like that to his own wife, knowing how dark their union was. When he returned home he considered his role within the family, recognizing the controlling element in himself. It was true he had found himself more compassionate and empathetic to the woman he had spoken with on the train for those three hours. He already missed her, even in his busy life. He began to invent the days and nights of this woman without having taken a single step into her life. For more than a year he wrote of Claudile and her belligerent companion, the rooms they lived in, her visits to meet a writer in Auch for desire, and for a few thin luxuries. He watched and described her exhausted face during sleep, the pace of her breath during sexual excitement, the obsessive reading of the books the avuncular writer smuggled to her. He lived almost fully in her world for a year. When he completed the trilogy of tales about Claudile, he opened his study door and it felt to him that an era had passed. He found a chaos of in-laws around him on the estate at Mar-seillan. He was responsible for a many-headed family, and this left him unable to act for himself anymore.
It is difficult to recognize your own vices in a son-in-law. He ought to have watched over the youth from a more neutral zone. If Lucien was objective about what he was witnessing in the young man, he could have blown whistles and surrounded the monster. His daughter would have hated him for a season, but all would have ultimately been perceived and resolved. Yet he felt mocked and finessed by the man, an up-and-coming poet, whom Lucien once caught winking at his patriarchal role, which the young suitor did not believe for a second, any more than Lucien believed in the man’s flattery and attempts at family courtesy.
Whereas the truth of what was occurring was more anarchic. His daughter Lucette, now twenty-two, was engaged to Henri Courtade. His nineteen-year-old daughter, Thér