Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [84]
Besides, she was already married to the sweet and lackadaisical Henri Courtade, was she not? And yet here was her sister’s suitor, languid and brilliant, quick-hearted, for he was humorous with all of her family, not just her (which Lucette loved in him), deceiving them all so that he could be close to her.
‘If you will not break off your engagement,’ Pierre Le Cras had warned her, ‘and marry me, then I will slip into the stockade of your family in any way I can.’ ‘I dare you,’ she had responded. ‘I shall propose to Thérèse,’ he had said, ‘and if she will not have me, I will become an architect and build a house for your father, or become the gardener for this estate.’ ‘Tante, our neighbour, keeps an eye on the garden.’ ‘Then I will become your father’s biographer.’ ‘He wishes for no biography, he’s famous enough.’ ‘Then I’ll make you pregnant and hell will break loose.’
There were scarcely any rules for the two of them. Or there was only one—whatever allowed them to be together. ‘If I have a child, then it must be yours,’ she said. That became the second rule.
She accepted everything about him, ached for him.
I want to ... Let me. This.
Here?
Yes.
She knelt on the turned earth, they were in someone’s field, he came into her mouth, and she stood up again. Around them suddenly was the rest of the world.
Lucien was halfway up the steps to the garden tower when he glanced down and saw his very pregnant daughter bathing under the shower, shielded partially by a birch. Few used the shower anymore, not since the children had grown up. When they were young the whole family bathed there during summer months. Lucien paused and watched the quick movement of Lucette’s hands as she soaped herself, and all at once, in that moment he became happy and was at ease. He accepted whatever the love was, and wherever it came from. He had at one time surely been as foolish as they were. What did it damage? There was in the end an order, even to this.
He was certain his daughter was pregnant by Pierre but things would be all right. A torch of desire sometimes sprang up in the strangest half-lit rooms, but a family could somehow envelop and contain that. He knew this from his own life. He continued up the steep iron stairs, looked down once more, and saw Lucette run her wet hands through her light brown hair, darkening it. Then she seemed to hear something and she turned her back and bent over, and the slim naked body of Pierre Le Cras stepped between Lucien and her.
What had been innocent—a celebration!—abruptly made him a voyeur. His daughter’s forearms and open palms were flat against the mildewed wall as Pierre tugged her white hips and shoulders towards him, his body digging into her again and again, and again as if she were the very centre of the universe. Lucien thought of her small hand brushing away the erasure rubbings from his pages.
He turned quickly to go down the flight of stairs to the level of the earth, to the normal perspective of a human. Ten metres up, you saw over walls, witnessed an unexpectedly revealed house. You were a writer in mid-air. It was what Japanese artists called the ‘lost-roof technique.’ Cursed with omnipotence, he had seen the blunt truth of their romance. The girl he had carried in his arms during a childhood nightmare now had the needs of an adult. It was something a father should not have shared, although as a young man he had bathed with this same person under that very same water spout.
She had been as tall as his knee.
There were nights when Lucien startled himself awake at his