Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [86]
During the night, snow came in the darkness, and Roman and Marie-Neige woke to a brief white land. In the Gers it snowed and then melted with the first sunlight, so the green landscape of fields and forests soon returned. But when Roman rode towards Barran, it was still early, and his horse left a path in the whiteness that arced up to the forest. He always took the route through the Bois de Mazères. Travelling this way, through the great acreage of trees, he could reach Barran in less than an hour. He rode, the low branches with their new weight grazing his shoulders, so snow fell onto his lap, his thighs, the rump of the horse. Eventually he let go of the reins so the horse selected its own route, and would remember it when they returned in the darkness.
Then Roman would lie back and look up into the green cross-hatched tapestry. For those minutes, lost under the shifting world, he was a boy, doing what he had done as a boy. The reins were loose at his knees and he thought of nothing. Because he was a man who could not read and who rarely spoke except when there was a necessity, every gesture that occurred around him magnified in meaning, and was full of angles of introspection. A silent hesitation by Marie-Neige, or the tone of a sentence from an authority at the church in Barran, said almost more than was necessary. Thus the low, easy swoop of a magpie, with some bright object in its mouth, turned slowly within him like something grinding in a mill.
Bird life had hardly been awake when he’d entered the trees. A first chirp from above had fallen like a splash down towards him. But now the oaks and beech trees repeated melodies and verbose plans, so it felt as if he were moving through a marketplace. For Roman, a cow or a pig or a scared hound revealed itself with sound and posture—they were no different from humans. He could read the expression that told of a broken claw or a thirst. But birdsong was the great mystery he had come to love. He aligned himself within it, its vast architecture, which contained all forest life and the life of a sky. Wherever Roman worked, he had found time in his day to enter a copse or forest.
The light of the open field hit him as he left the trees, and he sat up on the horse and saw in the distance the twisted belfry of Barran. He was a man who appeared to ignore everything around him. Whenever Lucien spoke with him, asking him what he thought were essential questions, Roman seldom gave an answer if he felt it could be discovered or pointed to instead. It was only when Lucien had retreated from all of them, his face cut by those splinters of glass, that Roman felt close to him. Since his marriage he had never trusted strangers. In a narrow street, coming upon others, he would stiffen so they could pass around him. He owned almost nothing, but would have fought a legion to protect the one or two or three possessions he had— some furniture, including a bed and a table, the two horses, the pigs he boarded—as well as the things he felt he had a right to, the arms of his wife, the path he took in the forest. Everything else was a stranger to him, possibly against him.
At night, when he returned to the farmhouse, the two lamps Marie-Neige had lit and hung above their door frame allowed him to leave the roadway and ride across the fields, and as he came over the rise, up out of the valley, and saw them, he gave a long howl like that of a wolf, and she would know he was near—so that sometimes Lucien and his mother or sometimes