The proposal was this: If
Liébard would help him clear the overgrown
fi
elds beside the house and clarify the
lawns under the full-branched chestnut trees, then he and his family were
welcome to stay on that land for as long as they desired. Lucien would sign any
formal document if Liébard wished, but Liébard waived that possibility. He
disapproved of putting pen to paper—that and excessive dialogue had always got
him into trouble in the past. And while they were talking, in a footnote to the
conversation, Liébard announced that he was relinquishing the name he’d been
using, and was now taking the name Astolphe.
Within an hour the boy,
who was used to these changes, began calling his father Astolphe. Lucien
realized the man used names like passwords, all of them with a brief life span.
But this time the thief wished that he had owned the name earlier in his life.
He spent the
fi
rst day imagining moments from his past when he could have been
‘
Astolphe,
’
when he might have behaved and
participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such
a name. It led to the kind of biographical reconsideration a man might make
when looking at photographs of a wife or lover in an earlier time, in her teens
or twenties, which always brought the wish to have known her
then—
even
that dress from another decade, whose tender buttons he might carefully
unfasten; even to taste the fruit in the flowering tree behind her.... The
thief liked the sound of the name, its aftereffect, its airiness, with a hint
of an echo. With such a name it would almost be possible for this thickset man
to turn into a three-ounce bird or a subtle grammatical form.
The writer watched him
with the absinthe-smelling book on his lap. The name Astolphe appeared in the
sixteenth-century
Orlando Furioso.
How had this man come across it?
Would he have stolen such a book in the past—did thieves even steal books? How
did he gather such things into his pockets?
While the two men worked
in the
fi
elds,
Aria and the boy returned south, to where they had previously lived, to collect
their caravan. Their journey on horseback took several days, and they crossed
the fan of rivers—the Ardour, the Baïse, the Gimone. They went south and east,
riding into the fertile lands. On the fourth evening they arrived in darkness
at the outskirts of Saint-Martory, where they had left their horses and
caravan. There was a bon
fi
re and music, and they sat talking to others for a few hours and
later slept in their narrow familiar beds. The next day they dug up herbs and
plants from their small plot that would survive the journey back to Dému, and
decided what goods and property to leave behind.
Soon they were heading
north, returning by a different route because with the swaying caravan they
needed wider roads. There could be no more shortcuts by simply opening gates
and crossing
fi
elds, or even fording a stream where the water was deep;
there
was too much weight for the horses to pull from the
sandy soil. They were going towards Plaisance, and from there they would leave
the company of the Arros River and turn west.
They took their time and
stopped wherever they wished. Rafael built a
fi
re while Aria coursed over the
fi
elds, looking for things to eat.
An onion or two, rosemary, leeks.
Lunch was a collection of
minor plants and shoots as if gathered by a pair of birds rushing and diving
over the
fi
elds. It
was barely there on their tongues. When the meal was over, if the stream or
river was private enough, they would strip off their clothes and swim. Aria was
determined that Rafael never have a fear of water like his father, so she would
laugh as she ran down the bank and then grin at him when she surfaced out of
the river. She did not want a fearful child. The boy swam into her arms and
embraced her, kissed her shoulders. There was
a sensuality
between them, as there was between the boy and his father in their cuddling
affection. Back on dry land she bowed her head and he dried her long, dark hair
with his shirt.
Sometimes during their
journey great storms came at night, out of the west, from the ocean, near
Ségalas, at Buzon; and when they were west of Saint-Justin, lightning lit up
the river like a path through history and she grabbed the boy to stop him from
leaping into its brief beauty. It was a season of storms. She imagined the old
writer up at Dému, trying unsuccessfully to persuade her husband to sleep in
the mostly empty house.
She and Rafael kept the
caravan in the middle of open
fi
elds and let the horses loose. Released, they hardly moved, as if pretending
that there was nothing dangerous, that it was safer than galloping into
darkness. There were evenings when Aria and Rafael stood on the dry night-grass
with a hundred layers of stars above them.
Uncountable.
A million orchestras.
The boy could scarcely store the
delirious information. That journey south with his mother and the return north
broke his heart again and again with happiness. It was when he felt most
clearly that there was no distinction between
himself
and what was beyond him—a tree’s sigh or his mother’s song, could, it seemed,
have been generated by his body. Just as whatever gesture he made was an act
performed by the world around him.
They were a few miles
north of Plaisance when the eclipse paused over the Gers. The darkness came
fast into the afternoon. Rafael was lifting a pail for a nervous horse to drink
from and
185
became
conscious of the darkness only because it was growing cold. He spun
around and saw his mother looking at him with concern. Grey rain started
falling in the half-light, though it was the wind that bewildered everything,
arcing
the trees down so they hovered almost parallel to the
ground. He saw the horse’s eye lolling, distracted, in front of him as if it
too were part of this peculiar nature. He didn’t know what an eclipse was. He
thought it might be some vengeance that came with the end of the world. He was
holding the horse’s neck, looking for rope to secure the animal, but there was
none, so he held on to the mane with his hands. If the horse got loose they
would never
fi
nd it. When the animal began to pivot, he swung himself onto its
back, just as his mother yelled out
No!
and
the
horse burst through the trees into further darkness with the boy upon it.
Rafael put his head down
against the horse’s neck, and he became the animal’s eyes, witnessing the quick
choices of direction. He was saddle-less, clinging to the wet-coated creature
in its stumbles and swerves until it emerged into a vast
fi
eld where the sky was a shade lighter
than under the trees. The horse now doubled its speed and
fl
ung itself into the open. The boy could
hear his own breath alongside the breath of the
horse,
he could hear the hooves in the long grass, their sudden clatter over a wooden
bridge after the muted sound of the earth. He was holding on to the warm blood
of the animal. For perhaps a minute— time was measureless now—they had gone
through a village where only the two of them moved in the blackness, the boy
’
s leg brushing a cart, then a child, and then they had come
through it, into
fi
elds again beside a river. Then there was a slow return of light,
and there was heat once more around them and in the wet grass. Time was in a
broken state. The sky appeared
fi
lled with a bright moonlight, though it was day. The horse calmed,
aware now of the
fl
ylike rider whose knees clutched it, the boy
’
s feet bare from another time, when they
were serene under the trees, and he had approached this animal with a pail of
water.
Rafael rode back slowly,
fi
eld after
fi
eld. They were all new to him. He looked
for the village, but whatever community they’d rushed through he never
encountered again. They crossed over the wooden bridge, then saw the black
horizon of forest and soon he could make out his mother pacing on the edge of
it. He never hurried the horse. He
fi
nally dismounted lying back and sliding off the slippery wall of the
animal. He could hardly stand in front of Aria, though he did, shaken by her
and then embraced.
There are two photographs
pinned up on the wall of the kitchen in Dému. One is a picture taken of Lucien
Segura in this last phase of his life, sitting on a garden bench with a dark
branch fanning out above him. There is a sense of formality as well as disorder
in the picture. And the disorder comes from the appearance of the writer—his
unironed shirt, his moustache, which looks like something borrowed from an
animal—though what is most informal
is the openness of his
face, as if it has just been blessed. His laugh, for instance—there is no
attempt to hide the shaggy randomness, or even the unsightly gap of a missing
tooth. This was a discreet man who used to laugh internally, in a hidden way.
On the righthand side of
the picture is a dark blur, something unknown, like raw paint imposed on an
otherwise immaculate canvas, or perhaps it is a bat in the daylight, caught
fl
ying between camera and writer. This is
the only photographic capturing of Lucien
’
s friend Li
é
bard, or Astolphe, who turned on
the photographer with a surprising belligerence when he heard the shutter begin
to slip into place, turning so quickly that he was able to dissolve his
appearance.
The other picture, taken
on the same grounds, was snapped all these years later by the belligerent and
blurred subject’s son, Rafael. It is of the woman he met in the writer’s house.
He used her camera, and the image has been blown up to be the same size as the
other, so it is, in a way, a partner to it.
We are much closer to the
subject in this picture. Photography has moved in from the middle distance as
the century progressed, eliminating vistas, the great forests, the ranging
hills.
The woman
’
s
fi
gure is naked from the waist up, moving forward, just about to break
free of focus. The tanned body willful, laughing, because she has woven the
roots of two small muddy plants into her blond hair, so it appears as if
mullein and rosemary are growing out of the plastered earth on her head.
There’s a wet muck across her smiling mouth, and on her lean shoulders and
arms. It is as if her energy and sensuality have been drawn from the air
surrounding her. We look at this picture and imagine also the person with the
camera, walking backwards at the same pace as the subject so that she remains
in focus. We can guess the relationship between the unseen photographer and
this laughing muddy woman, weeds around the
fi
ngers of her hand gesturing to him in
intimate argumentative pleasure.
This person who is barely
Anna.
Lucien Segura Archives, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.
Tape 3
The large clock above the
mirrors at Le Daroles bar has remained at twenty minutes past eleven for the
last two weeks. The clockmaker has still not arrived, being somewhere in the
south, correcting time along the small villages of the Pyrenees. He will come
when he does with rags and oil and needle-
fi
ne tools. He will lift the heavy machine into his arms, be guided
down the ladder by others, and place it on the marble counter of the bar,
intentionally taking up the prime space of trade in the caf
é
. What will occur then is ceremonial. He will insist on his taut
espresso, and behave with a ponderous authority as if he has been summoned into
this town to correct the weakening eyes of the mayor’s daughter. He soaks
petite
fl
ags of
cloth in a sauce of oil and with tweezers inserts them into the unseen depths
of the giant clock....
They are a strange breed,
clockmakers, some surly and insensitive to all save the machine about to whir
into life, some uncertain as poets about their gift. Because my stepfather—my
mother’s second husband—was one, I have studied their natures. He, my
fi
rst clockmaker, never felt his talent as
anything special. There were just a few procedures to learn; now and then the
Italians or Belgians would produce something that reversed the cause and
effect, but he did not feel himself to be in any way different from the market
gardener in the way he spoke about his work. And I learned the cautious and
also incautious habit of my own work from him. You are given a trade, not a
gift. There need not be intensity or darkness in the service of it. Still, I
met no other clockmaker like him. By watching him, I learned enough to correct
the pace on my own watch, but I would still take any failing timepiece to
clockmakers in Toulouse so I could study the ‘grandeur’ they brought to their
skill.