Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [97]
Lucien Segura completed the report on his time in the military camps and field hospitals, exposing what he had witnessed there. The first chapter was read, then the report was shelved. Almost no one read the work. His experience was questioned. How had this writer moved from a complex, finely tuned poetry to a blunt, coldly prepared vendetta? It irritated the literary populace of Paris, and they hoped once again for the slim volumes of verse. But he knew poetry would demand everything from him.
Roman did not return. And Lucien moved his workplace from his stepfather’s room into Roman’s farmhouse. He began to write again, and as he wrote he waited for her arrival, usually halfway through a book, long after a location and a plot had been established. She entered the story sometimes as a lover, sometimes as a sister. And in this way he spent most of his days with Marie-Neige as an ally in the court, or as a village girl who saves the hero without his being aware of it. Marie-Neige as a lost twin, Marie-Neige as a jongleuse the central character falls in love with, who, disguised within her craft as singer-acrobat, robs the great châteaux of the Bordelais, Marie-Neige who in one book guides a blind father out of a foreign city.
Often there was in these fictions a finite love or an unrecognized affection. But for the most part Lucien gave his readers the happiness of a resolution. As the stories were completed, he mailed them to a small press in Toulouse, where the success of the books brought stability to the publisher. With the printing of these tales, the central characters became popular public figures, especially as no one knew who the author, ‘La Garonne,’ was. Lucien had composed them in secrecy, in much the same way he had walked and dreamt as a boy surrounded by copses and thickets and rivers that had been his true intimates. The books hardly seemed the work of a well-regarded poet, or the author of the bitter jeremiad on the recent and already forgotten war.
The adventures had a hero who was at times awkward and at times gregarious, at times cautious, at times foolhardy. Before he plunged his rapier into a villain’s heart he would fling out the line ‘Say your good-byes.’ Whenever readers saw the line ‘Say your good-byes,’ they would know the very necessary death would occur in the next paragraph. It was a signal for final music as ‘Roman,’ after slaying the Count de Guispelle at the Académie Française and nailing a proclamation of motive to the imperious oak doors, leapt from the second floor into the waiting hay wagon driven by a Mathilde or a Melicante or a Marie-Neige.
Roman was an inconstant hero, witty with his lover and sullen with his enemies, but sometimes quick-witted with his enemy and sullen with his lover. He never seemed to be fully understood by his author, and so no one could ever be sure of him, not even his accomplices. In a later century, he might have been considered manic-depressive or bipolar, but in his time in France he got away with it. Often he went into depressions or was violent. He rarely proclaimed his anger out loud, instead hiding it (rather unfairly, some thought) from his victim, who was therefore unaware of the stalking and hunt. During the last third of a book a villain’s financial empire would crumble, his allies would turn against him, and le Conte de Porcelain would remain in the dark about which of his vices