The Dog in the Gartempe
River
and
The Yellow Dress
swept through France.
Meanwhile no one, even within his family, was aware of the link between Lucien
Segura and the author of the Roman stories, that whore of popular success who
somehow seemed to understand the intrigues of the publishing world too well for
the comfort of many within it. And the swordsman Roman was not beyond quoting
the poetry of Verlaine or Pierre Le Cras out loud in the middle of a fracas,
sometimes mockingly, but usually with a sense of recognition of their worth. In
one novel, he strolled through a famous art gallery in Munich, humming Don
Ottavio
’
s ‘Dalla sua pace,’ his
fi
ngers stroking the textured paint. So
while people read him for swordplay and romance and moral vengeance, they
absorbed everything else. Roman
’
s obsession with art and poetry was strange, and may have had to do
with the fact that he was illiterate. The verses he sang or recited were taught
him by his seemingly unworthy companion ‘One-Eyed Jacques,’ a libertine and
socialist, who bandaged Roman
’
s wound when his arm was
slashed open—if Marie-Neige was nowhere to be found—and who was also a master
of disguises: he would in
fi
ltrate enemy courts sometimes as a foolish dauphin, sometimes as a
wealthy countess. There were many sequences in the novels when Jacques and
Roman wrestled around camp
fi
res over the subjects of poverty, foreign wars, the Black Goyas,
incest, the selling of children, Balzac
’
s Vautrin, and the banking system in Paris. Their adventures always
took place alongside the events of the day.
All this, until the very
last book, when Marie-Neige succumbs, dying in an epidemic while Roman is off
adventuring in Brittany, so only Jacques is with her in the
fi
nal hours. He has discovered her alone in
her farmhouse, overtaken by a fever.
Slowed into confusion,
barely able to breathe, she keeps asking for Roman in her last hours.
She whispers to the old ally Jacques to assist her in getting a message to
Roman, and there is nothing Jacques can do but lie. He nurses her, changes the
sheets wet from the fever, and feeds her. In the last hours, as she drifts off,
he undresses and takes from a chest the clothes of Roman and puts them on, and
cuts his long hair and darkens it. He enters her room noisily as her lover,
wakes her and speaks in his voice so that in the haze of her vision she sees
him.
She beckons him to lie beside her, and the old degenerate sidekick, who
knows and loves these two people more than any others, enters the bed beside
this village queen he has travelled and worked with and conspired alongside all
these years. At all those campsites in the Ardèche or the Loire, during their
adventures in earlier works such as
The Girl on a Horse
and
Baptiste
’
s Breath,
he has slept on one side of the camp
fi
re while Roman and Marie-Neige slept
together on the other.
She whispers to him now, touching
his hair, looking deep into his tired, caring face. It looks to her almost like
the Madonna’s in this semi-darkness. He whispers back, reminding her of their
times in the past, of the sunlit afternoon when the two of them travelled with
Jacques through a grove of oaks, and the clicking branches sounded like rain,
of a river swim, of his love for her.... So he accompanies her into her
fi
nal sleep. He kisses her mouth and lies
in the bed beside her all that dark night, until the first grains of light,
when he is able to see her again. She has hardened into the position of an ef
fi
gy, and the heat of fever that consumed
her has departed with her soul. But there is also a dry whiteness on her lips
he did not see before. And so he waits for more sunlight to
fi
ll the room and pries open her mouth and
sees the
fl
ecks of
white sores on her tongue. Diphtheria has been sweeping into villages and
killing children as well as those who nursed them. When Roman returns from his
adventures in Brittany to the farmhouse, he is surrounded by this truth. The
disease has destroyed the two who are dearest to him in his life. It is not war
or
fi
nance or
greed or power, all those easily corrupting things, but this small membrane of
death in the throat.
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
fi
nally, 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
fi
rst 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 re
fl
ection 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
fl
ag
fl
uttering noisily within its colour brings me into a sudden blizzard
in Petaluma. Just as a folded map places you beside
another
geography
. So I
fi
nd the lives of Coop and my sister and my father everywhere (I draw
portraits of them
everywhere
), as they perhaps still concern themselves
with my absence, wherever they are. I don’t know. It is the hunger, what we do
not have, that holds us together.
I see Lucien Segura for
the last time with the boy Rafael, who recalls the old man sitting out of doors
in the glare of the day. Rafael appears with bread. They tear up the loaf and
eat it with an onion or some herbs. If Lucien is thirsty he walks over to a
pond, immerses his hand, and lifts it cupped to his mouth and drinks. This is
how I remember him, Rafael tells me.
Lucien must have walked
into that depression of the earth that was once a
mare
and sat at his
blue table, the only furniture he had brought with him in that journey by cart.
A few years earlier at Marseillan, in the middle of describing a tense scuf
fl
e of a sword
fi
ght, he had suddenly become curious about
how long and how wide the table he wrote on was. He began measuring it with his
hands.
From elbow to fingertip twice, and then twice from
wrist to fingertip.
So the length was slightly over a metre.
About one metre in width.
It was made out of two pine
boards, with a narrow runnel down the middle, where they joined. The table
always a fraction below his notebooks, always out of focus as he wrote. The six
nails that held it together, the colour of the paint, that exact height for him
to bend over, as if over a mirror, to see what could be found.
His constant companion.
Astolphe’s boy would turn
up and sit on the stool across from him, with his grin, his desire for, it
seemed, every possibility in this world. Perhaps Lucien himself looked like
that when young. Like a slim combed hound, mouth open, breathing fast with
eagerness, hoping for everything. Even rain would not keep the boy away. Lucien
would look down from his bedroom window and see Rafael arrive, and see him
shelter himself for a while under the oak tree before leaving. He was curious
about what Rafael would remember of their afternoons. Would it be the card
games or
his own
fragmentary thoughts like half-told
secrets? Or his avuncular air, the holding of his hand above his good eye when
the sun fell onto him like a weight? Would he be even a fragment in the boy’s
future?
He would see Rafael coming
towards him, pause, and turn back to the herb garden.
No. Come here,
he’d
say out loud. And the boy would return and sit across from him. And what Lucien
had been remembering disappeared into his clenched
fi
st.
Then even
these friends left him.
Rafael’s father strolled
down the driveway of plane trees with two horses he had received in exchange
for something. (The object of trade was in fact one of Lucien Segura’s
peacocks, which a distant farmer coveted. The disappearance of the bird was not
noticed yet; it was whimsical in its wanderings and may simply have followed a
layer of warmth that came after a storm. And as far as the old thief was
concerned, to separate an owner from
fi
sh or fowl or undomesticated hound was not quite robbery;
there
was always the opportunity for it to return, even from
seven or eight farms away.) So Rafael’s father walked guiltlessly beside the
house where sumac bordered the walls, whistling, in contrast to his earlier
departure at four a.m. in silence, when he carried the struggling bird—it was
almost a mammal, he thought—within his long coat.
Lucien witnessed his
return, his head alongside two nodding horses, and not wishing to inquire too
directly, waited until the next afternoon, when the family crossed the small
lake in the boat, to ask what they were doing with the new animals. They were
going to live further north for a while, he was told. They gave no reason and
he did not ask for one. Perhaps there was easier commerce there, or the father
needed to evade a rumour of his existence in the area. And ‘for a while’ was as
precise as they wished to be about the period of time they would be away.
A few days later, shockingly soon to the old writer, the entourage
rumbled along the narrow path beside the house and then departed along the
straight lane between the trees.
It was almost dawn, and Lucien in his
narrow bed listened to the muf
fl
ed clang of pans at the end of each sway of the caravan, and Aria
’
s clear voice talking with the boy. When
he came outside and stood there ten minutes later, he detected a faint remnant
of cigarette smoke that had caught against the rough brick of his house.
After they left he must
have remained, alone, through the dark fortnights of the moon, the arrival and
departure of winter. The vegetable garden slept under snow, revealing only a
frail fence, and a tent, a pyramid of stick and cloth where the travellers used
to store their tools during other seasons. He walked one day across the hard
and brittle vegetable beds and entered the tent
’
s
light-
fi
lled
emptiness and simply stood within it. It had been Aria
’
s garden. He would often see her early in the morning. The mist
would slowly lift and she would be there on her knees plucking away snails or
dead leaves from the soft, damp earth after night rains. It was as if she had
been there all night in that posture of almost obsessive prayer, waiting for
the darkness to lift, and then for the white mist to disperse, until Lucien saw
her in her green shawl.