Elle Read online

  I have practised in my head words of greeting and general conversation, gleaned from hastily scribbled word lists M. Cartier once gave me to copy, to prepare myself should we encounter an inhabitant. The native word for girl is agnyaquesta. For friend, aguyase. Pubic hair, aggonson. Look at me, quatgathoma. The moon, assomaha. Give me supper, quazahoa quatfream. Testicles, xista. My mother, adhanahoe. Let us go to bed, casigno agnydahoa. Many thanks, adgnyeusce. With no one about to correct me, I congratulate myself on my pronunciation and imagine becoming a considerable social success when contact is finally made with the indigenous peoples. I try to teach the others. I tell Richard he must speak to me in the savage tongue or not at all. All is not lost, he says. I will never abandon you.

  By the fifth evening, we keep a fire burning day and night. I discover that plastering my skin with mud discourages the insects (some of them). In firelight, we look like ghosts, our skin pale ochre from the dust. I make my bed on a mattress of pine needles and moss, which are lumpy for sleeping on though an improvement over bare rocks and fragrant to the senses. The three of us sleep in a huddle like a litter of pigs, Richard and Bastienne on either side of me. Over our heads, I have arranged some branches and a piece of sail. I make Richard take an after-noon from court construction to teach me the use of the arquebus. I mount the three weapons on rocks, ready to shoot in the general direction of the forest, from which I assume any attack will develop (and in case my command of the native speech fails to produce instant amity). I wear the bent sword on a belt slung over my shoulder. My hands are scraped and burned. My hair is a mane.

  I am no longer beautiful, or French, or related to anyone, or learned. I think of my children, the one I gave to the servants long ago and the one cooking inside me now. I swagger with my belly thrust out, though in truth it is shrinking, sway like cow and vomit noisily in the morning. Once Richard espies me peeing in the light of assomaha. I say, Casigno agnydahoa. For once he seems to understand, and we make love beside the sleeping Bastienne, with the cries of the birds rising in the background.

  I have not told him about the baby. It would only send him into a panic. Richard thinks I have gone mad from being stranded on this island. He rescues me with his tennis court, while I gibber incomprehensible words. I cherish him for his faith in his own heroics, for the way he gallantly assumes the roles of father, lover, saviour and pioneering sports enthusiast. He will act the way he has learned to act, even though it is impractical in the New World and will lead only to starvation or other forms of premature extinction.

  The savages call their god Cudragny, according to M. Cartier. I wonder how different a god he is from ours. Of course, we have two now, which will be very difficult to explain. On the eighth day, it occurs to me there may be no God at all. Richard has come down with a fever. At midday, we sight a sail in the distance. I nearly set my skirts alight throwing wood on the fire, trying to draw its attention. Richard fires an arquebus. Bastienne kneels on the beach, throwing clods of earth over her head. I call on the saints and martyrs, the Mother of God. I promise my unborn child to the priests. I whisper a prayer to Mahomet and one to the Lord Cudragny. In this, I follow the ancient Roman custom of adopting the gods of conquered tribes into their own capacious pantheon (I read about this in a book).

  But the sail disappears.

  Laura’s Bones

  In 1533, King Francis had the bones of Petrarch’s beloved Laura retrieved from her tomb so that he could gaze upon her timeless beauty. It was a modern moment. No one knows what happened to the bones.

  Francis named the General King of Canada, but everywhere his wife goes, the backbiters call her Queen of Nadaz, Queen of Nowhere.

  The most up-to-date geographers, cosmographers, map-makers, astrologers, admirals, kings, court jesters and merchant adventurers of Europe contend that Canada is: (a) a thin strip of land running north-south and dividing the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific Ocean; (b) an archipelago of large and small islands encompassing a labyrinth of channels leading more or less directly from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and (c) a continent enclosing a vast inland sea — some call it the Sea of Verrazano — with river outlets flowing east, north and possibly west to the Pacific Ocean (only one or two sharpish fellows note that this is physically impossible).

  In his delirium, my lover, Richard, Comte d’Epirgny, one-time boy wonder of the tennis courts of Orleans, takes me for a Spanish priest named Pedrosa Mimosa, who, by internal evidence, is corpulent, avaricious, bald, lewd, holy and wise — a true saint of the cross, much annoyed by the Lutherans’ allowing their clergy to marry. Evidently the good Catalan friar has been a confidante and familiar of my Richard’s dreams since childhood, a boyish fancy who took the road to holiness whilst Richard turned to sport.

  All this is startling to me, who had no intimation of my lover’s depths and complexities. In truth I am shocked when, with utmost gravity, he begs me to hear his confession and begins to list his infidelities, passions, passing fancies, regrets, petty thefts, embezzlements, forgeries and sundry small debts he left unpaid in France. But then, I think, he did jump over-board of his own free will and maroon himself on this lonely coast for my sake. Why? Love is a mystery. The fact that it goes hand in hand with betrayal suggests to me that we never ask the right questions of our lovers.

  In spite of my cynical heart, I cannot hold back a tear of purely feminine sadness at the news that he slept with my father’s dog boy, my chambermaid and even Pip, the ship’s boy on our recent voyage.

  All that time I thought you were tired, I say, from playing tennis. And then I thought you were depressed because the tennis wasn’t going well.

  There are more, he says.

  You’d better shut up, I say, in case you survive.

  Struggling, he gathers his wits, looks into my eyes and says, I couldn’t live without you. But then he spoils this declaration by whispering the name of a slow girl who worked in my father’s cow barn.

  My poor confused Richard, I think. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to forgive you.

  Do you forgive me? he asks coincidentally, mentioning another name I do not recognize.

  His skin turns yellow. Dark blotches, like purple shadows, erupt over his chest and throat. He claims he can’t catch his breath, yet breathes in halting gasps and belches that seem likely to burst his ribs. He shivers while he sweats with fever and claims little brown people have buried him in ice without his clothes. Most of the time he has an erection, which is an improvement.

  A month has passed since the General stranded me on this lonesome shore. We are living in a hut Bastienne and I built of branches, barrel staves, sailcloth and rocks, the crevices stuffed with mud and moss. The inside is large enough to enclose my. bedding, with no room to stand up, and a small annex in the back for the powder and tools. I have unpacked my court gowns, and we pile them on top of us at bedtime for warmth. Twice Richard has contrived to get into one of the gowns. I think how unfair it is that catastrophe has allowed him to become more himself while I have turned into a construction worker.

  We have eaten the books, using the bits we found inedible to kindle the fire in desperate circumstances — the mornings have turned chilly. I keep only the English Bible, much chewed by rodents, for its strangeness and the vulgar force of its language. Its very foreignness in this foreign land somehow soothes my heart. We have also eaten most of the salt fish — dry, stewed, rendered into soup, baked in hot coals, sautéed with fat, wrapped in kelp, soaked in brine and chewed like candy.

  I have become adept at supplementing our stores by walking around the island whacking seabirds’ heads with Richard’s tennis racquet. They are, as I have noted, fearless and respond to my approach by standing deferentially, shuffling their little webbed feet like earnest peasants until I whack them. Some-times I go out there and whack a few even when we have no need. It is cruel, I shall be punished for it, but, on the whole, things have not been going well, and someone needs to suffer.

  Bastienne
collects the feathers in a bag she has made out of two of my gowns. When she fills the bag, we will be able to crawl inside at night for warmth. This is a shrewd and inventive scheme, and surprising, for I myself do not look ahead, cannot bear to speculate upon the winter climate, which, I am told, is inimical to Europeans, who suffer horribly from frostbite, scurvy, lethargy and melancholy during the snowy months (while the natives walk about in loose blankets made of animal pelts). Of larger animals, aside from the occasional seal or sea cat in the distance, we have seen none, and I despair of making anything furry and useful out of mouse and squirrel skins.

  We do not wash. Our home looks like a pile of sticks and stones, smells like a midden. There are bird bones, broken feathers, rotting animal guts and piles of shit everywhere you look. I have a small hand mirror that was hidden away in my trunk, but I cannot bear to look at myself, covered as I am with red mud, insect bites, scrapes, calluses and bruises. In my own country, I would be laughed at and taken for a savage.

  One evening, late in August, there is a whiff of frost in the air. The sky is clear. Above our heads, the Great Bear and the Little Bear whirl around the sky’s centre peg. A whale breeches and lies puffing just off shore. The seabirds coo. Richard raves in the hut, replaying his match against the King on the Feast of St. Chrysostom, the seats above the court crowded with lovely, shallow, insipid women and foolish, vain, romantic men wearing slashed pantaloons, enormous codpieces and gold-trimmed berets that flop over their ears. Richard is sometimes himself, sometimes the King and sometimes a spectator explaining shots to a woman he is trying to impress.

  Bastienne bleeds him, offers him a decoction of herbs and moss, though she has already tried other recipes without success. In the Old World, she was wonderfully adept with abortifacients, fumigations, purgatives, soporifics and medicinals. But she recognizes hardly any of the native plants, so every trial is an experiment. The disgusting brown fluid she thought would allay the fever turned out to be a powerful purgative, and the poultice blistered his skin, and the soporific made him unmentionably randy one night. Once she asked me if I wished to do away with the child. My answer: No.

  The sky that night is wondrous to behold: bars of light, glowing clouds, explosions, rivers of fire that seem to dance to an unheard music. I do not believe the phenomenon has been reported in my part of the world. I sit by the fire with my feet in a bag of duck feathers and watch the display with a tumult in my heart. Richard cries out, You should have seen me then, my love. You should have seen me in my prime. In the sky a bearded face appears, stretching from horizon to horizon, and just as quickly fades to nothing. Then Richard shouts: You can’t come for me yet. I am winning.

  There is a sudden urgency in his voice. We drag him into the fresh air. The hut stinks of shit and vomit. I give him my breast for a pillow, he fondles my nipple. My love, my love, he whispers. The sky blazes up anew. Bastienne rubs his icy feet. He shouts, A point! I passed him along the wall and nearly tied his legs in a knot. His face is red as a ham. You have to let him win, I say. It’s the King. Richard cries, One more point. Oh, my love, you should have seen the day.

  He watches the lights dancing in the sky, his cold fingers slip away from my breast. I whisper about the baby, but he seems not to notice. Quatgathoma, I say. Quatgathoma. He looks into my eyes. Adgnyeusce, I say. He suddenly gives a pathetic little kick, his body arches, the breath whistles out of him like a cry, and he expires.

  Something disturbs the birds. A rustling sound whispers through the rookery, then a thunder of wings and piercing calls. The birds rise as one, circle the island, almost blotting out the dancing lights.

  Burial and Bastienne

  My heart is as unknown to me as this vast and desolate province. I miss Richard horribly. At first I think I am sick because of the fierce pain in my belly. I cannot bear to kill the little birds, even for food. I cannot stand to have Bastienne out of my sight. I am terrified I will lose the baby. I carry a rag to blow my nose and wipe my eyes. I find solace in the native words and my English Bible. Aguyase, I cry. Friend, friend.

  It is autumn. Already ice forms over the little stream at night. Immense flocks of birds swirl above the island, then strike off south and are replaced by other flocks. At night, the geese honk without a break, reminding me of the mumbled colloquies of monks. I wear a bag of feathers over my head to keep my ears warm. My nose is raw, my hands chapped — the early signs of scurvy, I suspect. Parts of me will start to drop off soon. I am in a panic about the future; there is no future, so far as I can see. I am without hope. It is obvious that once the birds stop flying through, once the snow begins to fall, there will be no food here. All Bastienne and I can look forward to are months of cruel cold and starvation. Better to die quickly, I think, though in a half-hearted way. It is a sin to think this.

  We buried my lover above the tide line by his tennis court. It was a devil of a job to dig a hole through the tangle of ancient tree roots, broken sea shells and beach cobbles, and the soil above the bedrock was barely deep enough to take his body. We raised a mound over him, a layer of dirt and leaves covered with all the stones we could carry. Even then the grave wasn’t sealed, and ravens would perch atop the pile, attracted by the smell, coating the stones with droppings, which seemed a desecration. I fashioned a scarecrow from one of my gowns stuffed with kelp, which somehow did little to improve the dignity of Richard’s resting place. We kept his clothes. They are more convenient than my skirts, which in any case are turning to rags.

  My pregnancy advances inexorably. Since I can force myself to eat little or nothing, my belly is growing bigger and smaller at the same time. My tits have shrunk to an androgyne semblance of tits, though my nipples itch, and I keep opening my (Richard’s) shirt to look at them and wonder. I have passed the first three months of sickness and fatigue when Bastienne says I ought to be feeling better. But I feel nothing. From all the signs, the child will be born in April, which means it will not be born at all. It mocks me, reminding me of love, hope and desire, which are as much a trinity as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and just as distant and ineffectual (forgive me, Lord, my bitter heart). But it grows, feeding off me like trees living off the landscape. I am a landscape of desire. Everything is a complete surprise to me — baby, body, heart, the country roundabout, my peculiar history.

  I have said little of Bastienne, who I believe hired herself out as a baby’s nurse when she was thirteen, was seduced by the child’s father, a paper factor of middle years, then abandoned in Paris in a delicate condition. She was pretty and dirty minded and so made her living easily at first, gave up the child to the nuns and found herself a protector, some provincial viscomte with a large belly and an interminable lawsuit in regard to dams and water rights that he was determined to bring before the King while his wife and eighteen children cooled their heels in Provence.

  He kept her in a little gate lodge on rue Montsouris, along with many objects of religious art and a draughts table on which they played every evening before retiring. He could not read but revered books and liked her to tell him rude stories before he went to sleep. He liked the stories so much that he hired a secretary and had them written down and found a printer who made them into a little book which sold out in a fortnight. (Thus two people who could neither read nor write contrived to author a bestseller, a pattern that I suspect will prove the rule rather than the exception as the history of literature unfolds.)

  Bastienne fell in love with the printer, who preferred the real thing to the stories. For him, she embarked on a career smuggling forbidden books and manuscripts between Paris and the great cities of Europe. She pretended to be pregnant, concealing books in a bag beneath her skirts. But one day, crossing the Alps, she was accosted and summarily aborted by a squad of Swiss pikemen, who raped her and handed her over to the Dominicans. The Dominicans, in turn, tortured her nearly to death in a manner that left her ugly as an old boot and incapable of performing the act of love except the Italian way. She was twenty-thre
e and toothless, with a draggy walk that made men pity her.

  Pity kept her alive, but she always learned from the men who used her, found something they could give. An old Prussian herbalist named Nicholas Merck gave her the secret formula for an abortifacient, handed down by his family, and a book of astrology — easy spells and recipes in clotted Gothic print. She hired an impoverished student at the Sorbonne (later a famous cleric and dialectician, much loved for folksy medical imagery and his persecution of wayward women) to read the book to her and set herself up in business, always in secret and always ready to move on when things grew hot.

  Over the years, she made her way toward me, as though spurred by a feckless and dilatory Fate (she actually passed through our village twice before coming to rest). When we met, Bastienne was much skilled but tired and ready to go back to telling stories. I was an impressionable and curious eight-year-old when she told me, in detail, the story of her rape and torture. It had an effect.

  Now her old wounds are reopening, scar turning to jelly and beginning to seep. She bleeds when she shits, which could be just piles brought on by a diet of bird bones, books and tennis balls but probably has its origin in some more malign interior difficulty. Her turnip face, with its sunken lips and chin almost reaching her nose, gazes up at me with an expression of mild surprise and interrogation, more like a dumb animal than a human. Why me? What does it all mean? Can you give me a bone and a place to sleep and make me feel safe and warm again? (On the other hand, maybe this is all a human wants, too.) She drags about, mumbling old stories like prayers — which reminds me of Richard and his tennis court. We cannot be saved, I think, unless we are willing to be changed. But I myself cannot change, or even imagine the change that might redeem me.