Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [91]
Lucien Segura was still alive. There were days of delirium, then stillness, when he would lie on his narrow cot exhausted, just looking at the back of his hand. Or at the cover of a romance, one of several appallingly written books regularly left by soldiers outside his tent, until one afternoon someone left him Balzac’s Les Chouans, a story of ‘love and adventure.’ In his feverish daze, Lucien could swallow a volume a day.
The solitude at Épernay gradually released him from the everyday world. He witnessed only what he saw through the open flaps of his tent. Once he overheard a strange rustling that confused him as to what was occurring outside until an officer was revealed attempting to fold up a large topographical chart. Sound, and thereby imagined plots of sound unwitnessed by the eye, became important… . He was lying on a daybed at Marseillan listening to the gradual approach of crows, and then their bickering in the poplars. He remembered the familiar hoofbeats of Marie-Neige’s cart horse, the rustle of the outdoor shower as it sprayed onto the earth, muted now and then by a body that stepped into it. He could make out the sound of scalpels in the medical tent being placed back onto rubber sheeting. There was a dying man’s cough three tents over, and in it the hidden fear that Lucien could recognize. He had these maps of sound, and they taught him to locate distances, to distinguish a footstep on mud as opposed to dust, or whether a voice was moving towards him or away.
He continued writing his reports, hunched over in the tent. And with what remaining energy he had, Lucien wandered back into his youth, his half-formed adulthood, reconsidering incidents that might have altered him as this person here, now, under such dark skies. It was as if he had been handed a mirror for the first time and could see what he held only faintly in his memory. Those nightly seductions of Madame de Rênal in Le Rouge et le Noir, had they taught him something? Or deceived him? His dance with a light-boned writer. The Dog. The past was gate-less. An overlooked life came rushing into his dun-coloured canvas tent, till then so full of the certainty of death. It was November now, and at night many were dying in the constant rains. He had saved a partially used flashlight but would not waste it on the darkness except in an emergency. He knew that, like him, it was a mortal thing.
He thought, strangely, not of his family but about Marie-Neige, with whom he had rarely spoken since his marriage. For a series of nights his mind leapt with excited freedom all around her. He would recall something and force himself to journey across the episode again, slowly. He had seen her rise from sewing and arch her back, slip her left hand up within the sleeve of the other arm and tug at the muscle there. If he had been more relaxed as a man, he would have crossed the room and kneaded the muscle free of its stiffness. There’d been some sibling-like desire in him towards her. He began sorting the evidence of that. Where he had turned right, he now turned left and entered a room with her, or helped her carry bundles of laundry when it started to rain—they rushed into