Divisadero (23 page)

I love the performance of
a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when
discussions of it begin—as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel
he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested
only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not
understand fully what is taking place. One of my pleasures, when I was a boy,
was to ride alongside the Garonne to where four steam engines were set up on the
riverbank, pumping water out for the city of Toulouse. In all that be-stilled
countryside, where you could hear a single croak of a duck, the engines
suddenly roared into life, like grand apes spitting and shoving against the
edge of the water. I was hypnotized. It was as if they were adults in their
noisy complex labours. It was as if they could bring on darkness.

The clock at Le Daroles in
Auch was overtaken by fatigue at least once a year, and Chamayou, the
proprietor, would send me a message to let me know when the clockmaker was
expected, and I would travel to town for the procedure and stay at the Hôtel de
France to witness the event. Up close, once the great object was on the marble
counter of the bar, you could read the smaller letters on the clock face.
A LaMarguere.
The clockmaker wiped the appearance of mildew
or foxing off the white portal of the dial and then lifted it off the
mechanism. I, in order to remain close by, needed to appear humble—he insisted
on a papal-like authority—and when told I was a writer, or at least

193

was
known to be a writer, he would speak to me rather than the other
spectators, as if we were on another, professional level of existence. When it
was clari
fi
ed that
I was a poet, my status slipped a rung or two and he muttered some line I didn
’
t quite hear that got a laugh somewhere to his left, a
laugh guided by his own.

The skill of writing
offers little to a viewer. There is only this five-centimetre relationship
between your eyes and the pen. Any skill in the divining or dreaming is
invisible, whereas the clockmaker visiting Auch removed his dark cotton jacket
and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, at which point I would part
company from Claudile at the small round table by the window and come closer to
the unrolled oilskin and its slim pockets that held tools and oil capsules, and
his little
fl
ashlight for the machine
’
s dungeons. Soon I was almost within the pleasure of his serious
demeanour. I could imagine his even greater status in those villages in the
Hautes-Pyrénées, towns like Laruns, Gavarnie, Ogeu, where he must have
travelled as if on the raised authority of a palanquin. I enjoyed all of this.
But I believe only in the humbleness my stepfather had, who would stop in
midoperation—on hearing a song thrush—and walk to a window to search it out. Or
he would pass me one of his essential knives to sharpen my blunt pencils. He
constructed objects for us out of those wheels and dials that were no longer
being used, so they’d move like half-formal animals across the dining room
table. He was not my father, but he raised me. I learned, I suppose, a manner
from him.
Also that any trade or talent could be shaped
discreetly without the sparks of exaggerated drama.
And yet, with all
his modesty, he loved the grandeur of Victor Hugo— and those slow, obedient
descriptions that walked towards revolution.

And he loved my mother. I
saw him on the last days of his life lift that oil-scented right hand and enter
its
fi
ngers
into her ordered hair and rustle it free of its pins as if he had been offered
velvet or the fur of a rare animal. Forever I hold that gesture. For me it was
perhaps the last remembered pleasure belonging to him. It is the unspoiled core
of whatever I know of love and family (and I have not been successful at the
craft of it). Our shyness at embracing each other—it rarely happened—did not
matter. I felt safe and comforted in his house. There was
a
calm
, the two clocks in the house were silent but precise and we were
safe in time. For just
fi
ve years he gave us all that.

His mother, Odile Segura,
had been born in Bagnères-deBigorre, where the Spanish in
fl
uence whipped down from the Pyrenees
fi
fty kilometres away. Miguel Invierno had
crossed the Spanish border to work as a roofer in the town. She had been
courted by him before he departed without warning a few months later with a
trio of fellow Spaniards. In the village of Vic-Fézensac, to the north, there
was a
corrida
every June, and each year she took her small child with
her, hoping to
fi
nd her lover among the crowd, but she never encountered Lucien
’
s father again. Instead she married the clockmaker, and she
and the boy came to live with him in his home outside the village of
Marseillan.

The boy was four when he
entered his stepfather
’
s house for the
fi
rst time. There, in its gardens, with the
river
’
s spark through the trees and a gardener
’
s dog sleeping in sunlight, he learned to distinguish the
voices of each
fi
eld. Soon he had been taught which section of the sky to search for
stars during different seasons and which tree it was that held a mockingbird.
Each year, for their birthdays, his mother made
salade de gésiers—
a
plate composed of a small egg upon salad leaves, with goose gizzard, potato,
chives, and
a grainy
mustard that Lucien would find
nowhere else. Each year, in the last week of May, she would give the house a
spring cleaning, weed the garden, wash and iron her husband’s shirts, and then
gather the boy into a cart and travel to the
corrida
at Vic-Fézensac,
searching the streets day and night, until she returned home empty-handed and
with a mixture of disappointment and relief. The clockmaker never felt he
reached the intimacy with his wife that existed between the boy and his mother.
Perhaps he never was sure that, if his new wife did stumble across the Spaniard
during the celebrations, she would return to their home.

With the stepfather’s
unexpected death, in spite of some inherited wealth, Odile Segura and the boy
reduced their way of life. There had been little protecting the boy’s world save
for that careful man. Now Lucien became more cautious and secretive. In
classrooms, the others heard his closeted speech patterns. He had spent too
long conversing with just himself. As he grew older he had private words, as if
collected twig by twig from an open
fi
eld. He spoke a few sentences to himself about a rusted gate, or an
animal
’
s nervousness on
entering a boat, and that spoken scene would become indelible to him. Already
he protected himself with words, with the small and partial clarity they brought.

One evening at suppertime
their silence was broken by the sound of a cart. Their house was only a short
distance from the journeying road, so it meant they had a visitor. But as the
boy and his mother rose from their meal, opened the door, and looked out, an
overburdened two-horse cart went past them and up the rise of the hill. It
struggled another hundred metres and stopped at the one-room farmhouse that had
been a vacant neighbour to them for years. Lucien and his mother stood by the
doorway, halted in their expected greeting. They watched the couple in the
distance descend and stretch themselves, looking like mere outlines on the
crest of the hill, a man and a woman. The farmhouse had stood for years as the
one inert obstacle on their horizon. The idea that it was now to contain people
was exciting to the sixteen-year-old boy. It meant that he would have to be
more curious, and yet cautious with his own secrecies.

They gave the couple half
an hour, and then, just before darkness, he and his mother walked over,
carrying bread and milk and candles, along with a few cuttings of meat. The man
and the woman were still unloading the cart. Beside the road were a modest bed
in two sections, two chairs, a painted table, an iron stove and its L-shaped
pipe. Amidst this minimal furniture and one basket of clothing stood the man
and what now looked like a girl. As the couple turned towards the two who
appeared, the young woman reached for the man
’
s hand
brie
fl
y in
some gesture or other
—
the boy could not tell what
emotion was there, within that movement. She looked slight and the man was
heavy. Lucien had seen him pacing around the small building with grandeur, as
if it were a walled city he had inherited and had somehow to revive, or teach a
lesson to. The boy had been reading the Greek epics and in that moment these
strangers felt to him like part of a foreign army or delegation.

If his mother had not been
there, perhaps no one would have spoken, but she learned that their names were
Roman and Marie-Neige. They had rented the farmhouse sight-unseen from the
owner, who lived in Marseillan. Roman accepted their gift of food but refused
any help in moving the furniture, even though it was becoming dark. He would do
that alone. He’d already carried, while they attempted conversation, the
sections of bed indoors. And the girl remained silent. Her mouth had made some
movement when they were introduced, that was all. To the boy she seemed too
thin, her dark hair cut short so that it barely reached her neck. He felt the
man could have folded her into some part of his clothing and made her
disappear. Lucien walked back downhill with his mother, turning for a last time
before going in. The man had placed a lamp on the cart, and he was moving back
and forth and blotting out the light every minute or so. Lucien went indoors
and sat at the table and thought of what had happened. It felt as if his whole
life had changed.

They discovered that the
couple had been recently married. The wife did not seem to be much older than
Lucien. For the
fi
rst two weeks the boy and his mother rarely saw her, for she was as
cautious as wildlife. His mother made every effort to befriend the couple,
especially the wife. Perhaps she had glimpsed something in that young, stunned
face. So Marie-Neige was eventually coaxed under Odile Segura’s assured wing.

The girl would enter their
home tentatively, as if she
fi
rst had to learn the many rules that came with this scale of
ownership. The house must have seemed palatial. The boy was aware suddenly of
the extra metre that rose to the ceiling, the extra breadth and paces within
each room. Roman seldom came, he would be in the
fi
elds most of the day, but Lucien
’
s mother would bustle uphill to the
farmhouse and invite the girl, who appeared traumatized in her new role. He
heard his mother say to someone that Marie-Neige had nothing to do but clean
their little cabinet of a house and service her husband. Lucien would ponder
that line later, when he thought more about their relationship. She was as thin
as a bride could be. In fact, she represented no sense of that word. Physically
and in age she was Lucien’s equal—and he was only a youth. But she was married,
of
fi
cially translated
into an adult. She had the knowledge of such a world, as if she
’
d earned some abstract honour in a foreign
place.

‘Lean as a
haricot,
’
he had described her to his mother’s friends when the girl was not there. And
for a while, after that burst of laughter, ‘Le Haricot’ was how they all
referred to her. He was showing off, and while it was the perfect naming, he
felt he had committed a betrayal. ‘Well, she will soon grow some bumps on her,’
his mother said. And there was more laughter.

The two families nestled
gradually. His mother began teaching Marie-Neige to read. And on Saturdays,
Lucien walked over to help Roman, digging turnips in the
fi
elds, or rebuilding a wall along the
boundary line. To the sixteen-year-old boy, MarieNeige
’
s husband was an unknown force, the dangerous possibility of a
fi
gure of a father he no longer had. They
rarely spoke, and didn
’
t see
each other during the week, for Roman worked in Marseillan or sometimes even
further away. Meanwhile the youth was immersed in
The Black Tulip,
and
one afternoon when Marie-Neige sat beside him in silence he decided to read the
Dumas out loud to her. “On the way to his imprisonment in Buitenhof Prison, our
Cornelius heard nothing but the barking of the dog and saw nothing but the face
of a young woman....” Le Haricot looked at him with her mouth open. He could
not tell whether she believed he was inventing what he spoke or whether she was
already hypnotized by the fragment. He continued. Marie-Neige was in fact a
year or so older; yet as he read, she began to seem full of innocence to him.