Divisadero (9 page)

was
scared, to tell the truth.

As she spoke, he pulled a
piece of green cloth from one of his inside jacket pockets. Tie this around
your arm when you go walking, you’ll be safe.

She took the cloth into
her hands.
Your father, was he English? You speak very—
My
father could speak it well.
Does he come here?
Not for some time.
Well, if he ever does, I’ll be sure to invite him in.
Rafael crouched and began to snap off beans, passing them

back
to her, dropping them into the green cloth she held open. Do you
have a little beef?
I’ll take these in, she said, and cut a few strips of meat for us. He strolled
into the house a few minutes later and unpacked

rosemary
and four
fi
gs from
his pocket. He began working on a salad, slicing slivers of garlic into it.

So, how did you escape the
life of crime—and your charming father?
Anna was talking with him as if he were an old friend from childhood who had
changed shape into this thickset man. His musical
fi
ngers were now dicing tomatoes. The eyes
that had darted around the room were now gazing easily at her. He seemed not at
all awkward or tense about being in the house. His behaviour around her seemed
effortless. So that when she went to bed with him for the
fi
rst time, some days after this lunch, his
hesitancy was a surprise. He did not pull away, but scarcely leaned forward.
What had been familiar across the kitchen table was now shyness and perhaps
incapacity, as though in the past he had been burned by something. They did
nothing but hold each other. He would for now be content with her breath
against his shoulder, the mole on her upper arm. He would fall asleep thinking
of this small dark dot.
He was certainly not vain, freely admitting his thick girth, his imperfect
health. After they had eventually made love satisfactorily (as far as she could
assume for both of them), he stood and tested his calves in a naked leap, then
strolled to the window, opened it and smoked a cigarette there, gazing out, not
caring how he looked in that sunlit posture. He would mention later that he was
unconcerned with his ‘silhouette.’ Anna had met no one like him. There appeared
to be no darkness in him. Though he would tell her of an earlier relationship
that had silenced him completely, and how he had almost not emerged from that.
He was in fact coming out of that privacy for the
fi
rst time with her. All over the world
there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by
falling in love
—
seemingly the most natural of acts.
He told her there was a song he no longer performed that had to do with all of
that. It was about a woman who had risen from their bed in the middle of the
night and left him. He would hear evidence of her in villages in the north, but
she would be gone by the time the rumour of her presence reached him.
A song of endless searching, sung by this man who until then had
seldom revealed himself.
His tough
fi
ngers would tug the heart out of his guitar. He
’
d sing this song to those who had grown up
with his music over the years, who were familiar with his skill at avoiding the
limelight. He knew his reputation for shyness and guile, but now he conceded
his scarred self to his friends. ‘
If any of you on your journeys see
her—shout to me, whistle...
’ he sang, and it became a habit for audiences
to shout and whistle in response to those lines. There was nowhere for him to
hide in such a song that had all of its doors and windows open, so that he
could walk out of it artlessly, the antiphonal responses blending with him as
though he were no longer on the stage.
In the days before Anna slept with him, he had expected no gesture of interest
from her. Their lunches had seemed innocent of courtship. And their
fi
rst afternoon in the upstairs room of the
house had been similarly genial, neither of them loved the other yet, so there
was nothing fatal or fateful about it when they woke in each other
’
s arms, facing each other, a breath away. In that small
space between them was the smell of cilantro. He had a passion for it, and had
crushed it into their salad a few hours earlier. His pockets always held a few
herbs, basil or mint, so he could rip off a heel of bread and create a meal
wherever he was.
When Anna had gone upstairs to wash that
fi
rst day, he had stayed outside for a while, half dreaming among the
green rows of the garden, then walked into a deep hollow in the earth, a
mare
that had a century earlier held water for cattle. He stood there blackened
by the shadow of the great oak that rose above him, and soon he was stretched
out on the grass, so that when Anna looked from the window he seemed to have
disappeared.
Her early impression of Rafael was that he saw nothing around him as fully
owned—his fingers removed leaves from a plant with the same ease as when, three
days later, he wrapped his dark fingers around her wrist, barely grazing the
skin so her pulse continued to pause and lift in his loose grip. She looked
down at a scar across his knuckles, kept looking down, giving no gesture in response
to this act of his, the captive pulse no doubt beating faster. She was thinking
of the chords of music that had emerged from hands as scarred as these. She did
not rest her face into his chest, into the cache of basil within the shirt
pocket, until he let go of her. Come with me, she said then. Watch your step.
They went up the stone stairs wide enough for three horses, along the corridor,
into her small room, where she bent down to turn on the electric heater and
waited for the appearance of its three red bars.
She laughed when he rather formally closed the door behind them. He shrugged.
Is that what you call a ‘Gallic gesture’?
Garlic?
He was perplexed.
Gallic! You know that turn of phrase?
‘A turn of phrase’?
Another shrug.
We are in the smallest little room in a very big house, he said. Is there a
reason?
You don’t like it?
No, he said, we should take up the smallest possible space. But not
too
little
space.
I’m embarrassed by the size of the other rooms.
Rafael sat on the bed, watching the strip of her energy, tall, erect.
Dark jeans, blue shirt, a rolled-up sleeve on her brown arm.
He noticed a mirror positioned low on the wall, a low sink.
This room belongs to a child.

This ‘smallest possible
space’ is where Anna wishes to be now. The truth of her life comes out only in
places like this. There are times when she needs to hide in a stranger’s
landscape, so that she can look back at the tumult of her youth, to the
stillundiminished violence of her bloodied naked self between her father and
Coop, the moment of violence that deformed her, all of them.
Anna,
who keeps herself at a distance from those who show anger or violence, just as
she is still fearful of true intimacy.
Her past is hidden from everyone.
She has never turned to a lover or friends when they speak about families (and
she always inquires of their families) and spoken of her childhood.
The terrible beating of Coop, the weapon of glass entering her
father’s shoulder as she tried to kill him.
Even now she cannot enter
that afternoon’s episode with safety. A wall of black light holds her away from
it. But she knows it damaged all of them, including Claire. She can imagine her
sister riding her horse in the Sierras, wearing small bells on her wrists to
warn wildlife of her approach, conscious of all the possibilities of danger.
Just as she herself works in archives and discovers every past but her own,
again and again, because it will always be there.

She and Rafael keep
between them a formality that makes them careful with each other. They have
stepped into this friendship the way solitaries in medieval times might have
bundled together for the night before journeying on towards a destination of
marriage or war. So that Anna is not aware that the casualness in Rafael she
witnesses is inconsistent with his nature (save for the territorial precision
with which he
fl
icked that bee off his guitar in her presence a few days earlier),
while he knows scarcely a thing about her. Who is she? This woman who has led
him into this medicine cabinet of a room where most of her possessions
exist—books, journals, passport, a carefully folded map, archival tapes, even
the soap she has brought with her from her other world. As if this orderly
collection of things is what she
is.
So we fall in
love with ghosts.

Early in her stay at Dému,
Anna watched three hawks
fl
ying low over the
fi
elds, half covered by mist, hunting for life. She noticed how the
poplars held thrushes and blackbirds, how sumac built itself beside the wall of
the house. One day while crossing a
fi
eld, she trod her way beside a neighbour
’
s linen drying on the grass and saw an empty wheelbarrow that must
have carried the wet clothes there. Later a green lizard ran across the palm of
her hand while she dozed in a kitchen chair. She has read in old manuscripts
that troubadours in this region were famous for their ability to imitate
birdcalls and, as a result, may have altered natural habits of migration. She
has been told by Madame Q that at the
fi
rst hint of winter her husband will wrap the water pump with straw
and burlap, and likewise wrap the trunks and low branches of the almond trees
on the terrace.

These are details that can
construct a partial background of a writer’s life. She knows that everything
here in Europe has touched history or a literature. Besançon became prominent
because Julien Sorel attended its seminary in
Le Rouge
et
le Noir.
The rough stone structure still exists, the dusk around it thick
with the smell of limes from a nearby arbor. And there are all the other towns
and villages etched by Balzac, page by page.
Angoulême.
Saint-Lange.
Sceaux.
‘I was
born in Balzac—he was my cradle, my forest, my travels . . . he invented
everything,’ Colette wrote, glancing back to her youth. Just as she
herself
later created her landscape at
Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. And here in Gascony, where the
fi
ctional D
’
Artagnan was born, the writer Lucien Segura lived, composed his
strange poems and novels, and disappeared.

Anna pulls her face back
from an orange lily, aware of its pollen and of the hovering bee. Its ancestors
must have done the same, shimmering down a stem of chicory some day in 1561,
here or beside the church in the distance. She has noticed the
gardien
cycle
past to unlock its doors. There must have always been a bee here to hear
Catholic music and witness a verger’s arrival. The past is always carried into
the present by small things. So a lily is bent with the weight of its
permanence. Richard the LionHeart may have stepped up to this same
fl
ower on his journey to a Crusade and inhaled
the same presence Anna does before he rode south into the Luberon.

Within a few days of
meeting him, she is conscious of Rafael
’
s secular
knowledge of every
fi
eld. The row of linden trees that leads to the graveyard
—
he knows their height from when he was a child, for he walked
between them then as though they were giants. Just as he has taken her back to
the middle of that pasture where they
fi
rst met, and said,
‘
This is where the old
writer drowned. In the old days there was a small lake here.
’

As a boy, Rafael crept
from his parents
’
caravan before daybreak and stood on
a wagon to watch the journeying light in the
fi
elds. The
fi
rst evening he slept with Anna, he rose
from her bed, left that smallest of rooms, and walked down the stairs in
darkness, then made his way through the night
fi
elds. In the noisy pasture where
everything was invisible he aligned himself with the rustle of a tree and moved
in a straight line towards the trailer.

Where do you go?
she
asked later.
Back to your home?
Yes.
I could come with you.
You wouldn’t sleep well in that narrow bunk.
Outside, then.
We could, someday.
What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As
if darkness had a hidden musical language. There were nights when he did not bother
to even light the oil lamp that hung in the doorway of his trailer. He reached
for the guitar and stepped down the three laddered steps into the field,
carrying a chair in his other hand. ‘
I don’t work, I appear
’
—he remembered the line of Django Reinhardt
’
s and imagined the great man slipping out from the shadows
grandly and disappearing ef
fi
ciently into his craft. The alternative was to arrive, as most
musicians did, like an eighteenth-century king entering a city, preceded by
great
fi
res on
the hills that signalled he had crossed the border, and then by the ringing of
bells. But Rafael was not even appearing. Dissolving perhaps, aware of night
bugs, the river on the edge of his hearing. His open palm brushed a chord that
was response, just response. He had not yet stepped forward. This was the late
summer of his life, the year he met Anna, and he had no idea whether he would
ever be able to return to the corralling work that art was, to have whatever he
needed to make even a simple song. Dissolving into darkness was enough, for
now. Or playing from memory an old song by a master, something his mother had
loved or his father had whistled, when he accompanied his father on a walk, for
there was one speci
fi
c song his father always muttered or whistled. In the past Rafael
had travelled from village to village, argued a salary, invented melodies,
stolen chords, slashed the legs off an old song to use just the torso—but he
had come to love now most of all the playing of music with no one there. Could
you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal?