Elle Read online

  I Make a Grievous Error in Judgment

  I am in a daze, overwrought, over-heated and beside myself — also wobbly in the legs — the usual thing after sex. I slip out onto the deck for a stroll, for a bit of fresh air, with a length of coarse string dangling from my hand, the other hand pressing one of Richard’s tennis balls to the loosened poultice on my cheek. Grey waves, each more substantial than this insubstantial shell of a boat, rise like slate hills on either side, then settle beneath us. An impenetrable fog, as thick and oily as fleece, hides the shoreline, which the General says cannot be far off.

  I am thinking about the current debate in France between Lutherans and Churchmen over the transubstantiation of the host, which the German says is only a symbol of the True God and not God Himself I am of two minds myself, much like all of France, Europe and the known world. Since I was little, I have watched the priest raise the bread above the congregation, mumbling Latin incantations, and tried to believe it was Jesus, though it often looked like a day-old loaf from the bakery. Was it magic or literature when the bread went up? And which message will we bring to the New World racing through the waves to meet us at the fringes of the mist? (M. Cartier says the savages call it Canada, to our ears a nonsense word something like banana, although I can quite easily imagine that to their ears the word France calls to mind wholly other and unworthy resonances. Indian boy: He says he comes from a country far distant called Ass Wipe.)

  A squall rattles against the sails. The deck gives a sudden lurch throwing me against a bulkhead. Something snarls, full of menace. A huge, black shape squats just ahead of me. It is the General’s dog Léon, straining to move his bowels, haunches quivering with the effort to hold his pose against the see-sawing of the ship. When he recognizes me, he whimpers, looks embarrassed. But then my shoe slides in a mess of dog shit, wrenching my ankle and throwing me onto the oak planks in an attitude of salacious indignity. Woof, woof, says Léon.

  Like my lover Richard, Léon suffers from seasickness, which in the dog manifests itself as a malign restlessness, incontinence and rage. Léon paces the decks day and night, his legs braced at awkward angles to keep himself upright. In France, he was a bull baiter. (The General read somewhere that Columbus brought a pack of mastiffs to the New World to terrorize the savages. In one battle, they were reputed to have disembowelled a hundred enemy warriors each.) But on the ship his enormous bulk, bulging jaws and spiked collar make him look out of place and comical. Once I found him leaning against a mast, fast asleep with his nose resting on the deck as though he were trying to stand on his head.

  I scramble to my feet, tossing the ball lightly in the air, one-handed, an idea forming in the post-coital recesses of my mind. The dog’s old eyes watch the ball, a glimmer of interest there. He snarls as I drag myself up by his collar, but allows me to scratch his warm chest as a token of friendship and reciprocity.

  Do you want to play, Léon? I say soothingly. Do you want to get the pretty ball?

  His head droops unenthusiastically as I slip one end of the string around his collar. The other end I loop around my aching tooth and pull snug so it bites into my inflamed gums.

  I bounce the ball in front of Léon’s immense dog face, his nose bobs up and down, and he makes a half-hearted lurch. But I snatch the ball away and taunt him with it. He snarls, ventures one hoarse, deep-throated bark.

  Get the ball, Léon, I shout. Come get the ball. Play with me, Léon.

  I bounce it once more, then heave it toward the near rail. Léon whimpers frantically as the ball leaves my fingers. His tremendous nails scratch the deck as he begins to run. Fetch, I shout. The ball bounces once on the deck, then flies silently over the ship’s rail and disappears. The silence, as I say, is what I remember most of the moment, and the delicate, cold drops of spray or fog that fell on my face.

  The string runs through my fingers as Léon lumbers toward the rail, still splayed against the tilting of the deck but wagging his stub tail with anticipation, suddenly happy. He reaches the rail, sniffs vainly for the ball, then rears, peering with a mixture of doggy eagerness and disappointment into the fog and murk. But his disappointment lasts only a moment, and then he is scrambling, dragging himself over the rail. For an instant, he balances there, an impossible acrobat, before his hind legs thrust him into the aqueous element.

  With him goes my tooth, ripped from my jaw with a pang like a red-hot nail driven into my cheek. Blood seeps out of the empty crater, filling my mouth. I gaze at the rail, half expecting the dog to come scrambling back, and it slowly begins to dawn on me that perhaps I have made an error in judgment.

  Léon, I cry. Léon! Come back, Léon.

  I rush to the rail and peer over. Night is beginning to fall. Wind rips through the sheets. Invisible, a new land slips by as we sail up the colossal gulf that forms the mouth of this river, called the Great River of Canada by M. Cartier and something else, no doubt, by the locals. At first, the dog is nowhere to be seen, but then I spy him astern, the ball in his mouth, his huge eyes rolling up white in his effort to paddle after the ship.

  Léon, I cry again, only very faintly. He is like something of myself I have carelessly tossed away, never to see again. I can barely make him out now, dark head straining to stay above the slate waves. Then he disappears behind an immense grey hill, and when the hill settles beneath us, Léon is no more.

  God, forgive me, I whisper, throwing my poultice into the sea. Already my jaw feels better.

  The Lord’s Great Horses, Sin and Retribution

  This is about the dog, right? I say. I want to apologize about Léon. I was sure he could swim. He was your dog. It was unforgivable. I feel very badly.

  Really, I don’t think this is about the dog because the little gathering of ship’s officers, petty nobility and prelates has the air of a tribunal, and Richard is here, along with my ancient nurse and co-conspirator Bastienne (with her face like an old turnip). And Richard informed me as we came along the deck that Pip, the African ship’s boy, the General’s minion, had spied upon us in my cabin, but that he, Richard, had taken care of this by paying Pip a gold piece, which he had from me for spending money, to guard his silence, which Pip apparently did for as long as it took him to walk to the General’s quarters.

  By the collective mood of piety, disapproval, hypocrisy and delight, I deduce that Pip has provided incontrovertible proof of our indiscretions, as he has done against so many others on this voyage. The on-deck stocks are always occupied, in rain, sleet, hail or blistering sunshine, and floggings are a daily attraction. Though there are worse things than sitting in the stocks. What with the fresh air and being out of doors all day and not having to work, some show a remarkable improvement of spirits. And when you sit and stare at the sea, you see things other people don’t: boatloads of singing monks, schools of mermaids, fish as big as houses, celestial lights hovering above the waves, images of the Holy Family, palaces of blue ice, birds flying backwards and other such supernatural and oneiric phenomena.

  The General, Sieur de Roberval, Jean-François de La Rocque, a nobleman of Picardy, styled by the King Viceroy and Lieutenant General in Canada, Hochelaga, Saguenay, Newfoundland, Belle Isle, Carpunt, Labrador, the Great Bay and Baccalaos, my father’s cousin (I call him uncle), one of the new people, has just informed me that, on account of my grievous sin, my chronic recidivism and impenitence, for which behaviour my father handed me over to him in the first place and which our journey has done nothing to mitigate, which furthermore he can no longer condone on account of his great love for me, which love bids him now devise some chastisement —

  It’s not about the dog then? I say, interrupting. Whenever the General opens his mouth, I am reminded of the excessive legalism and barbarous cruelty of the Protestant grammar.

  He sits at a rough-hewn oak ship’s table strewn with charts, logs, compass, inkhorn, sandglass, wine cups, an image of St. Christopher, not to mention Léon’s now useless iron food dish, leash and muzzle, much worn and stained
with slobber. The General’s attention seems elsewhere when I speak, seems rather to be taken up with his left hand, which suffers a palsy from a war wound he received fighting for King Francis in Italy. At moments of high emotion, my uncle’s hand takes on a life of its own, seems almost to creep away from him as if to prosecute its own malign and secret ends. It is trembling over one of M. Cartier’s charts, tracing the coastline of the river with the predatory air of a ferret after a mole.

  The General follows M. Calvin, who left France to found a religion and smuggles back his infection in the form of books, sermons, pamphlets and bad clothes sense. He dresses mainly in black: black doublet, black hose, black leather slippers, with a gold chain at his throat, dirty white cuffs trailing lace from his wrists, and a codpiece, outlined in gold thread and turned up at the end (like so many, full of promise and an old sock). His hair is cropped short like a sheep pasture, but his moustaches hang long and lank down the sides of his thin, dour mouth. A strip of black beard sprouts beneath his lower lip. He looks cruel, austere and pleased with himself, like a man who encounters in the world all the evil he expected to find and is sure of his throne in Heaven.

  — some chastisement, he says, ignoring my interruption, worthy of my rank and the severity of my sin, which is all the more sinful because of that rank, and so and therefore and with profound regret but under the watchful eyes of the ship’s company and a just and vengeful Lord, he has decided to endow me with a fief, a duchy, if you will, a colonial outpost in the new land of Canada, wherein I may purify my soul of its noxious vagrancy.

  Outside the porthole, the lugubrious shoreline of Canada, the General’s kingdom, slides by in an endless misty vista of flat, treeless swamp, a low wall of purple mountains in the distance, occasional forests of dark green trees like armies of pikemen with ragged flags, ghostly beaches, tremendous, thundering rivers, and rocky islands hewn into agonized shapes and plastered with an odd, papery plant curling up at the edges like yellow parchment. It is bigger than Europe, empty of people and strange as the moon. And I think how, yes, this is the way King Francis rewards his old friend and divests himself of a doctrinal embarrassment.

  At first I hear the General’s words as if he meant them, and I think how jolly a little house in the country will be. But then I notice the malicious twist of his mouth and hear Richard’s gasp and look again through the porthole and wonder, What house? What duchy? What settlement? And when has the General, who squabbles with everyone, ever rewarded error?

  The General’s forefinger taps the map before him. Maps never look like the territory. Their relation to geography, it seems to me, has always been abstract if not outright deceptive. I peer at the spot and puzzle out the words: Isle des Demons.

  I glance outside as the ship glides almost imperceptibly to a halt. The rise and fall of the waves has abated; we are in some sort of sheltered place. We’ve trimmed sail and angled toward the shore. Gnarled pillars of rock balancing flowerpots on their heads loom in the dusk. Delicate flowers and dwarf trees struggle for life amid the rocks. Chiefly, I am aware of the large number of birds, gazing at us unruffled as we glide toward them. Bird shit cakes the rocks along the foreshore and dribbles down their flanks.

  My house, my duchy. For a moment, I actually imagine I see a house, lead-roofed and green, in the twilight. The shrieks of the birds are like the noises devils make in Hell, I think. The birds rise suddenly from shoreline and surf, filling the sky with a thousand fluttering, whistling wings.

  What Do You Do with a Headstrong Girl?

  What do you do with a headstrong girl? Always a difficult question.

  Kill her, maim her, amputate limbs, pour acid over her face, put out her eyes, shave her head, put her in a brothel or a nunnery, or simply get her pregnant and marry her. Better yet, maroon her on a deserted island lest she spread the contagion of discontent to other girls or even men, though men are generally impervious. Keep her away from shops and books and looking glasses and friends and lovers. Forget her.

  This was the General’s solution.

  And after, when the General met the bear in the darkened cemetery by the Church of the Holy Innocents, he thought of me. When he was found the next morning, clawed to death, the evidence of his mutilated body could not be believed. A young physician, new from Montpelier, pronounced him dead of multiple stab wounds. But the rumour spread that he had met a bear escaped from a circus, a dancing bear from Poland. Knife wounds from an unknown assailant, said the magistrate’s report, but it was a Canadian bear with a woman’s heart, and the General remembered me when he saw it, though he had barely given me a thought in fifteen years.

  And I think, yes, there was a plan about a nunnery. I heard my father discussing it with Maignant, his secretary. He said something about my disobedient temperament, my libidinous and bookish nature, my many indiscretions (including a certain louche tennis player down on his luck who kept coming around, sponging money), and the child, not to mention the fact that in a nunnery I would be legally dead and thus have no further claim on the family purse, no question of dowry or inheritance. The child was already three, a big boy brought up in the household by the servants, of whom one was said to be his mother, though everyone knew he was mine. He was wild as me, with his black curls and a tendency to pull up his little skirts and show his impudent cock to the ladies of the house, which I adored.

  But there came a letter one day from the General asking Papa for money for his voyage to Canada, which, despite the King’s munificence, was under-financed and would be delayed. The General was notoriously improvident, impecunious and impractical (his estate in Roberval had been seized once for debt) but also a gallant, pious relative and a crony of the King, a circumstance which caused my father no end of envy and bitterness. Maignant showed me the letter — have I said Maignant was one of my lovers? Obese and hairless, with an organ the size of a sparrow’s and an insistent lubricity surprising in a priest and bookkeeper, he loved me well, taught me to cipher and kept as many of my secrets as he could.

  I was nineteen, with all my teeth except three, arid possessed of a backside that made my life both difficult and sublime. I had learned to read from Maignant and a Jesuit tutor named Tobini (who I believe was born Jewish and converted in order to join that most modern and decadent of the new orders — later he was burned by the Dominicans in Paris, a direct result of his adherence to certain proscribed or irreverent ideas). I knew Latin, Italian and some English and owned a copy of Tyndale’s little pocket New Testament, which I read daily in order to combine religious meditation with language practice. I loved God and myself and despised Protestants and heretics, though I thought the world a more exciting place for all the conflict and never missed a public burning or decapitation.

  I owned forty-three books, including two by Erasmus, Clement Marot’s Adolescence Clementine, Marguerite de Navarre’s anonymously published volume of devotional verse, Mirror of a Sinful Soul, which the Dominicans banned as blasphemous until the King informed them his sister was the author, three other works still on the List, and a medical textbook with drawings made from the bodies of dead people. I had read The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, mostly for his description of the land of Lamory, where everyone goes naked, women give themselves freely to any man, and adults eat children, a novel form of population control. I knew Dicuil’s account (in De mensera orbis terrae) of St. Brendan’s voyage to the Fortunate Isles, with his Irish monks in their peculiar round boats, carrying their books, bells and croziers. I had dreamed of the Northmen’s Thule, the Isles of the Blest written of by the ancients, Anthilia, Saluaga and the Isle of the Seven Cities, Satanaxes. I had seen five savages from Brazil in Paris, looking like Tartars with their fierce tattoos and empty faces.

  When the letter came, I saw my chance and begged my father to send me to the New World, whatever it cost him. What do you do with a headstrong girl? he asked himself. I think he was relieved. He looked to the family’s coat of arms, two bears rampant over a field of waves
quartered with three lions couchant, an exceedingly ancient insignia the meaning of which had been lost by our etiolate and retiring ancestors (the high-born courtiers call us petite maison). He was sure he would never see me again. Wild beasts would eat me, or I would be trampled to death by the famous one-footed savages of the antipodes, or we would simply sink along the way.

  I took Bastienne, my nurse, a retired whore, pander, pornographer and abortionist who came into the family on the strongest possible recommendation from the village priest, who was somewhat in her debt. And Richard, the so-called Comte d’Epirgny (who claimed to have played the King himself once on a clay court in Paris on the feast day of St. Chrysostom), begged his way aboard at the last minute, offering his tennis arm for the defence of the Cross and the domestication of the native inhabitants.

  Iphigenia in Canada

  I have sufficient education to be aware of certain fore-shadowings, signs, omens, parallels, prognostications and analogies. Classical literature teems with stories of extreme child-rearing practices: young single girls left on rocks or deserted islands or thrust into dark tunnels as punishments or sacrifices or tribute or simply for their nutrient value vis-à-vis whatever slavering monster happens by.

  I am particularly reminded of the Greek princess Iphigenia, whose father Agamemnon put her to death on a lonely beach on the shaky theory that this act would ensure decent sailing over to Troy, where he hoped to win back his brother’s runaway wife Helen (another woman led astray by her heart in a world of men). It’s a male thing, I suppose, not to be persuaded from murder by the threat of revenge, pangs of conscience, pity, justice, the tug of family affection, not to mention the purely unscientific basis of the premise that killing a virgin will cause sunshine and warm, westerly breezes. Surely Agamemnon must have known this would come back to haunt him.