Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [98]
The Dog in the Gartempe River and The Yellow Dress swept through France. Meanwhile no one, even within his family, was aware of the link between Lucien Segura and the author of the Roman stories, that whore of popular success who somehow seemed to understand the intrigues of the publishing world too well for the comfort of many within it. And the swordsman Roman was not beyond quoting the poetry of Verlaine or Pierre Le Cras out loud in the middle of a fracas, sometimes mockingly, but usually with a sense of recognition of their worth. In one novel, he strolled through a famous art gallery in Munich, humming Don Ottavio’s ‘Dalla sua pace,’ his fingers stroking the textured paint. So while people read him for swordplay and romance and moral vengeance, they absorbed everything else. Roman’s obsession with art and poetry was strange, and may have had to do with the fact that he was illiterate. The verses he sang or recited were taught him by his seemingly unworthy companion ‘One-Eyed Jacques,’ a libertine and socialist, who bandaged Roman’s wound when his arm was slashed open—if Marie-Neige was nowhere to be found—and who was also a master of disguises: he would infiltrate enemy courts sometimes as a foolish dauphin, sometimes as a wealthy countess. There were many sequences in the novels when Jacques and Roman wrestled around campfires over the subjects of poverty, foreign wars, the Black Goyas, incest, the selling of children, Balzac’s Vautrin, and the banking system in Paris. Their adventures always took place alongside the events of the day.
All this, until the very last book, when Marie-Neige succumbs, dying in an epidemic while Roman is off adventuring in Brittany, so only Jacques is with her in the final hours. He has discovered her alone in her farmhouse, overtaken by a fever. Slowed into confusion, barely able to breathe, she keeps asking for Roman in her last hours. She whispers to the old ally Jacques to assist her in getting a message to Roman, and there is nothing Jacques can do but lie. He nurses her, changes the sheets wet from the fever, and feeds her. In the last hours, as she drifts off, he undresses and takes from a chest the clothes of Roman and puts them on, and cuts his long hair and darkens it. He enters her room noisily as her lover, wakes her and speaks in his voice so that in the haze of her vision she sees him. She beckons him to lie beside her, and the old degenerate sidekick, who knows and loves these two people more than any others, enters the bed beside this village queen he has travelled and worked with and conspired alongside all these years. At all those campsites in the Ardèche or the Loire, during their adventures in earlier works such as The Girl on a Horse and Baptiste’s Breath, he has slept on one side of the campfire while Roman and Marie-Neige slept together on the other.
She whispers to him now, touching his hair, looking deep into his tired, caring face. It looks to her almost like the Madonna’s in this semi-darkness. He whispers back, reminding her of their times in the past, of the sunlit afternoon when the two of them travelled with Jacques through a grove of oaks, and the clicking branches sounded like rain, of a river swim, of his love for her.... So he accompanies her into her final sleep. He kisses her mouth and lies in the bed beside her all that dark night, until the first grains of light, when he is able to see her again. She has hardened into the position of an effigy, and the heat of fever that consumed her has departed with her soul. But there is