Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [85]
Sometimes truth is too buried for adults, it can be found only in hours of rewritings during the night, the way metal is beaten into fineness. Whereas children are a generation with immediate clarity. He could not comprehend how the sequence of poems by Pierre had been so powerful and believable. He did not understand how his two daughters seemed so close and yet uncareful with each other. Once he had pockets full of wisdom to give his children. Had he not been the one who taught them where exactly to climb a fence, or how much to feed a dog?
Perhaps he’d ‘done enough’ in his life, as a novelist said to him in a salon before the war. She meant he had written enough to be significant, or at least he had as much chance of being significant as one could expect in a literary career. Even then it was not what he wanted to be comforted by. Fame was not what he wanted, fame was as foreign to him now as it had been when he was twenty. He’d protected himself from it by becoming a splintered creature. (When he made journeys, he would go with one friend, never two, then bid farewell and meet the second acquaintance in Lapalisse perhaps and walk with him into Burgundy.) Anyway, he had been dancing with that bird-slim novelist at a salon on the avenue Hoche, one of her hands on his shoulder, the other a light goose-wing at his neck. These were gestures towards possibility, and he had often imagined her as a lover. She was a graceful writer who had her own honours in her career. But for Lucien, writing was a place of emergency. He wanted what he had done those first few times, without awareness, when the page was a pigeonnier flown into from all the realms one had travelled through. There had been the gathering then, the thrill of diversity. There was no judgement. He had not sought judgement when he began to write, but it had somehow become crucial to his life. When all he had wanted was to dance with no purpose, with a cat.
Le Bois de Mazères
Years earlier, before the death of Lucien Segura’s mother, the belfry of the church in Barran was renovated. Roman, agile for such a thickset man, was one of those hired to work on the fifty-metre height of it, where he would receive better money than could be earned anywhere else. Hanging within a rope harness, Roman hammered loose and ripped away the rotten sheeting, revealing gradually the skeleton of the twisted tower. Then he and others, their bodies roped to pulleys, entered the old belfry and in the darkness strengthened the structural braces, and laid new octagonal floors at each level.
They worked inside the tower for two months, while the high gales and snow raced over the plain and swirled among them. Then they came into sunlight and hauled up fresh sheets of wood and rebuilt the outer structure. Roman at this time was as hazardous as the work he was doing. He had rarely worked alongside others. When he returned to the ground he’d swagger, as if drunk, free at last of the tension of balance. All day he had hung in a bat harness or stood on a single spike on the edge of the air, while around him was all the universe of the Gers. He could see the many brown paths that wove towards the forest, and Auch twenty kilometres away, and the route he took each night on his horse in the darkness back to the farmhouse. Arriving around eight at night, he would eat a meal with Marie-Neige,