Divisadero (28 page)

Years earlier, before the
death of Lucien Segura’s mother, the belfry of the church in Barran was
renovated. Roman, agile for such a thickset man, was one of those hired to work
on the
fi
fty-metre
height of it, where he would receive better money than could be earned anywhere
else. Hanging within a rope harness, Roman hammered loose and ripped away the
rotten sheeting, revealing gradually the skeleton of the twisted tower. Then he
and others, their bodies roped to pulleys, entered the old belfry and in the
darkness strengthened the structural braces, and laid new octagonal
fl
oors at each level.

They worked inside the
tower for two months, while the high gales and snow raced over the plain and
swirled among them. Then they came into sunlight and hauled up fresh sheets of
wood and rebuilt the outer structure. Roman at this time was as hazardous as
the work he was doing. He had rarely worked alongside others. When he returned
to the ground he’d swagger, as if drunk, free at last of the tension of
balance. All day he had hung in a bat harness or stood on a single spike on the
edge of the air, while around him was all the universe of the Gers. He could
see the many brown paths that wove towards the forest, and Auch twenty
kilometres away, and the route he took each night on his horse in the darkness
back to the farmhouse. Arriving around eight at night, he would eat a meal with
Marie-Neige, and be awake by
fi
ve the next morning to return to Barran. If not for those solitary
night rides, if not for Marie-Neige and their quiet talk as he slipped into
sleep, he felt he would have gone mad. By seven the next morning he was
attached once again to the structure, riding it, clinging to wood that had been
cut down in the thirteenth century. All that winter he worked against the
sloped roof. Still, the most dif
fi
cult hours were when he came down before darkness and there was the
need to test himself on the ground in a different way, as if to hold on to the
earth.

During the night, snow
came in the darkness, and Roman and Marie-Neige woke to a brief white land. In
the Gers it snowed and then melted with the
fi
rst sunlight, so the green landscape of
fields and forests soon returned. But when Roman rode towards Barran, it was
still early, and his horse left a path in the whiteness that arced up to the
forest. He always took the route through the Bois de Mazères. Travelling this
way, through the great acreage of trees, he could reach Barran in less than an
hour. He rode, the low branches with their new weight grazing his shoulders, so
snow fell onto his lap, his thighs, the rump of the horse. Eventually he let go
of the reins so the horse selected its own route, and would remember it when
they returned in the darkness.

Then Roman would lie back
and look up into the green crosshatched tapestry. For those minutes, lost under
the shifting world, he was a boy, doing what he had done as a boy. The reins
were loose at his knees and he thought of nothing. Because he was a man who
could not read and who rarely spoke except when there was a necessity, every
gesture that occurred around him magni
fi
ed in meaning, and was full of angles of introspection. A silent
hesitation by Marie-Neige, or the tone of a sentence from an authority at the
church in Barran, said almost more than was necessary. Thus the low, easy swoop
of a magpie, with some bright object in its mouth, turned slowly within him
like something grinding in a mill.

Bird life had hardly been
awake when he’d entered the trees. A
fi
rst chirp from above had fallen like a splash down towards him. But
now the oaks and beech trees repeated melodies and verbose plans, so it felt as
if he were moving through a marketplace. For Roman, a cow or a pig or a scared
hound revealed itself with sound and posture—they were no different from
humans. He could read the expression that told of a broken claw or a thirst.
But birdsong was the great mystery he had come to love. He aligned himself
within it, its vast architecture, which contained all forest life and the life
of a sky. Wherever Roman worked, he had found time in his day to enter a copse
or forest.

The light of the open
fi
eld hit him as he left the trees, and he
sat up on the horse and saw in the distance the twisted belfry of Barran. He
was a man who appeared to ignore everything around him. Whenever Lucien spoke
with him, asking him what he thought were essential questions, Roman seldom
gave an answer if he felt it could be discovered or pointed to instead. It was
only when Lucien had retreated from all of them, his face cut by those
splinters of glass, that Roman felt close to him. Since his marriage he had
never trusted strangers. In a narrow street, coming upon others, he would
stiffen so they could pass around him. He owned almost nothing, but would have
fought a legion to protect the one or two or three possessions he had— some
furniture, including a bed and a table, the two horses, the pigs he boarded—as
well as the things he felt he had a right to, the arms of his wife, the path he
took in the forest. Everything else was a stranger to him, possibly against
him.

At night, when he returned
to the farmhouse, the two lamps Marie-Neige had lit and hung above their door
frame allowed him to leave the roadway and ride across the
fi
elds, and as he came over the rise, up
out of the valley, and saw them, he gave a long howl like that of a wolf, and
she would know he was near—so that sometimes Lucien and his mother or sometimes
Lucien
’
s
fi
anc
é
e would believe there was a creature
skirting the two farms. No, there are no wolves, Marie-Neige would say if
asked, never revealing the source, and they never believed her certainty. It
was in a way the tenderest communication between her and her husband.

At Barran, Roman tied on
the leather apron, with its pouch for nails and hoop for a hammer, and ignoring
everyone climbed the ladder up the side of the belfry until he was back in
solitude once more, with nothing but a jarring wind and the echo of his
hammering and voices that shouted below him like the barking of foxes. It
reminded him of the charivari, those hoots in the darkness. Such wordless
events and small gestures converged on Roman in this way. Up there, high on the
belfry, he recalled the image of that swooping magpie with something stolen
glittering in its mouth, as if it had been a sign.

There was a suckling child
carved out of wood in a nearby church at Monteyzal that he took. The embroidery
on kneeling stools hidden among
pews, that
he cut and
pulled free.
Portraits of saints from walls.
A marble bowl.
A rug.
An ebony
cross.
A felt-covered ledger.
In Fontanilles and
Douelle and Brouelle and Malemort and Senilla—everywhere he rode, he fell upon
ancient churches empty at midnight, alone in their small grandeur, unheated and
in darkness. So there were nights when he did not travel the simple twenty
kilometres to the farmhouse, but rode into those villages on the periphery of
the great forest and entered churches, slept in their darkness, and took what
he needed or what he felt the churches did not need, the lace, the rims of
silver from a portrait, a graven image; he brought them to a clearing in the
Bois de Mazères, and waited until there was faint light. Frost covered
everything. The passereaux and the rapaces were awake already with tentative
songs in the dark. He dug up his previously buried tarpaulin and added to the
cache the new things he had taken. He would trade such objects for plants and
grain and clothing.

The
fi
nal stage of work on the belfry was the
slate covering. Slates had been brought from the Angers region and were to be
installed without overlap. The men hammered them on with ri
fl
ed copper nails. Ten metres below the
cross and the rooster, Roman balanced himself on a single spike. He could see
the forest of Maz
è
res in the northwest, shaped like a
green cloverleaf in all the whiteness, for snow fell deep and unseen into those
trees. Whatever he had taken from the churches was buried there, save for a
painted wooden
fl
ower he had pulled off a carved saint
’
s blouse for Marie-Neige, a stolen thing like a live alouette in his
pocket.

He paused in his
hammering, and looking into the distance saw Marie-Neige on horseback. Even
with all that space between them he could recognize her shape as she and the
animal nudged forward on the last half-hour of their journey to Barran. She
would never get to tell him, after the
fi
ght that occurred shortly afterwards, why she had come to Barran
that day, what news she wished to bring him. He saw her foreshortened
fi
gure tie up the horse and begin walking
towards a group of carpenters. He imagined the men gazing openly at her; she
was the only woman there, it must have been brazen. Then they had looked up,
pointed to the tower, and he heard laughter. For a long time he did not move,
high on this strange tower that people insisted had been created originally by
a sudden and perverse wind or by the madness of a roofer in love.

Whenever Marie-Neige
returned from visiting her husband in prison, she walked the periphery of their
two
fi
elds
—
one that surrounded the barn like a horseshoe, and a larger one that
sloped uphill. Roman had boarded horses and pigs for neighbouring farmers, and
this had brought in minimal subsistence. Now, with him in jail, she could
hardly keep up. But walking the property at dusk made its possibilities
clearer. She could live on what she grew within the horseshoe and turn the
larger
fi
eld into
a market garden. But she had to learn how to replenish the
fi
elds. The animals they boarded had ripped
open the earth. So she began to fork manure and vegetable remains and
fi
re ash into the earth, and took the wagon
to the slaughterhouse in Marseillan to bring back offal and the remnants of
carcasses, which were like gold. Needing a darker, loamier soil, she sprinkled
chimney soot over the rows where she had planted cabbage, dragged lime and
ammonia through the claylike soil, and used cow dung where it was sandy and
horse manure where it was chalk. Some of this she already knew. The rest she
discovered in a monograph she borrowed from Lucien’s library that showed how
earth was renewed in an old battle zone. All this reminded her of the book
where Cornelius tried to grow a perfect black tulip.

She bundled weeds at the
edge of the larger
fi
eld and let them dry, and a week later heaped them all into a
fi
re. The acrid smell drifted downhill to
Lucien
’
s house and slipped
into his workroom, so that he came to the window and watched her in the
distance, outlined by smoke and
fl
ame. She trod seeds into the earth instead of broadcasting them with
her hands. They called this
plombage
in Lucien’s military monograph. She
cut down brush and left just a few fruit trees along the fences. In the new
vegetable gardens, she discouraged sparrows by laying out white cotton along
the seedbeds, and dissected earthworms and dipped them in nux vomica, then
slipped them into mole holes. She was as gentle with seedlings as she was
brutal with pests. She loosened the moist earth and carried the bundle of
shoots in her cupped hands as if it were a fallen bird to be returned to its
nest. She saw her work now as a path through the seasons, seeding onions and
celery between February and April, leeks and winter cabbage from May to July.

She was older now. She had
wept when she married, and then had seen her new husband try to murder someone
during the darkness of her marriage night. He was a man who had grown up with
the harsh etiquette of self-protection he had witnessed on a farm. But the
world they were in was harsher. And Roman was now in a prison, having attacked
a man near the square base of the belfry, almost killing him in a rage of
jealousy. It had taken seven men to hold him down. As if he
were
a stag. When he had looked down at her among the carpenters from that great
height, he did not know she was pregnant.

Marie-Neige visited him
every week in his cell in Marseillan. A month after he was imprisoned, while
walking home, she had a miscarriage. She lay down in a stranger’s ditch and
lost all of what she and Roman had created. She got up after an hour. One rich
thistle had been growing next to Marie-Neige, and it became burned within her
memory. She tied two sticks together into a cross and planted it by the
roadside, gathered whatever was there into a fold of her yellow cotton dress,
and brought it home and buried it in the horseshoe-shaped
fi
eld near the house.