Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [99]
It was to be a horrifying conclusion for those readers of the Roman adventures, and what actually became of Roman remained a mystery. As readers left the final pages of Whiteness, he disappeared, and Lucien stopped writing, near the village of Marseillan, at his neighbours’ table. The seven adventures of Roman came to a close. Lucien had said all he knew and remembered about Marie-Neige in these stories, the sound of her wheelbarrow, how she lit a fire, the moment of a yawn, the way she had talked about a thistle in a ditch. She was within him now.
He diverted a modest sum of francs into a new account. He collected some notebooks, climbed into a horse-drawn cart, much like the one his mother had used to search for the lost father in the corridas of Vic-Fézensac, and disappeared, barely a mustard seed in his pocket. He would not write again.
A half-year later he used one of his notebooks to keep score during a card game in Dému with the boy named Rafael. There are three notebooks (one of them blank) in the archives in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. There are some childish maps indicating where he had planted certain vegetables in his new garden. ‘You are a gardener?’ the fortune-teller had asked him. There is a scale drawing of his house and property with its small lake and avenue of trees. There is an illustration, in another hand, of how to make a nest for insects by partially stripping a cob of corn.
One afternoon, in Lucien’s last garden in Dému, the boy mentioned that he was reading the series of adventures about Roman, but Lucien Segura said nothing. He simply took the book from him to see what Astolphe’s son was using as a bookmark, then responded that he had heard of this writer of escapes and revenge, of love and adventure, but he had not read him.
‘We have art,’ Nietzsche says, ‘so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.’ For the raw truth of an episode never ends, just as the terrain of my sister’s life and the story of my time with Coop are endless to me. They are the possibilities every time I pick up the telephone when it rings suddenly, some late hour after midnight, and I hear the beeps and whirs that suggest a transatlantic call, and I wait for that deep breath before Claire will announce herself. I will be for her an almost unrecognizable girl save for an image in a picture.
Every evening our father used to walk the property of our Petaluma farm before dinner, until finally, on the far hill, he would step from the dark shadows of the trees and come down in the last sunlight. We always saw him do this, although he never knew he was being watched by the three children. One evening a fox appeared behind him, running up and down along the edge of the copse, but my father, looking the other way, ambled down into the valley. Claire saw it first and nudged us. The creature moved lightly, as if on springs, barely glancing at the human near him. My father, sensing something was wrong, paused. He turned then and saw it, and began to walk backwards, cautiously, keeping it in view, the fox moving with its light step as if mocking him, back and forth, back and forth, on a different tangent.
With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can. The awareness of a flag fluttering noisily within its colour brings me into a sudden blizzard in Petaluma. Just as a folded map places you beside another geography.