Elle Page 5

  She who ministered to me of old, told me scandalous tales and taught me to touch myself to help me sleep (I did not sleep much and once gave myself a blister down there), she who carried messages to my lovers and stood sentry and held me through the night when love turned sour, she who comforted me when baby Charles came and fed me powders that gave the sweetest dreams, she now seems impotent and diminished. She has no imagination except of the fantastical erotic variety and so cannot even find solace in seeing herself, as I do, as part of some tragic drama.

  (The Three Ages of Man, according to moi: In ancient times, we saw ourselves engaged in a timeless struggle — or dance — with the gods, in which men and gods met and contended, and men died heroes, and women slept with immortals in the shape of farm animals. Currently, at the beginning of the age of literature, we see ourselves as actors strutting upon the stage or as characters in a book. We are still heroic, but there is a beginning and an end, which makes us wistful. The gods have retreated — I don’t know where — and it is no longer appropriate to have sex with animals. In the future, and this I must have dreamed, the stage will shrink to a prison, we will see ourselves as inmates separated from everyone else by bars, and heroism and love will be impossible.)

  I survive this period of grief by caring for Bastienne, though her helplessness often enrages me (because it reminds me of my own), and I cannot conceal my irritation. She is, and always was, a battered, shrunken shadow self, a version of me much punished for her sins but with a cunning I have always lacked. I hunt what birds remain to feed her. I gather firewood to warm her. I stuff more of my old clothes with feathers to comfort her.

  A lone old seal lingers at the bottom of the rookery. In spite of his almost human eyes (like Richard’s), I hack him to death with the bent sword — for Bastienne’s sake. I try to cure the skin so as to fashion her a robe (as I have heard the natives do). But I have not the skill of curing hides. What I end up with resembles a table-sized, fur-covered plank — my sweet Bastienne pretends to be pleased. We eat everything, including the flippers (quite nice, really) and brains, and I set out the skull, boiled free of flesh, on Richard’s grave.

  I do not know why I do this. The symbolism escapes me. My actions are beginning to take on the semblance of dreams, while my dreams seem more and more to be but memories of a distant past, the world from which I came.

  We Are Watched

  Six months now. We are going for the record. M. Cartier’s first settlement lasted one winter, his second, ditto. His people suffered atrociously, many succumbed, even though the savages took pity and helped them. So far I have seen no land animal larger than a rat. Sometimes I scrutinize the mainland and imagine it seething with life, natives coming and going, large antlered herbivores chewing the shrubs, fields of corn, cities of gold and cathedrals built with timber shaped with stone axes. But nothing so much as a wisp of smoke appears. And anyway, the last news we had from M. Cartier, before I was stranded on this Isle of Demons, was that the savages had turned violent (on account of his obnoxious habit of kidnapping their chiefs and shipping them off to France to die — as my Richard died — of strangeness and a broken heart).

  The good news is that it doesn’t look as if it will rain again. Ever. Snow swirls along the empty rookery in stinging blasts. The birds have abandoned us, save one or two unintelligent and laggard gulls, which spend their time standing to the wind, plunging up and down with the waves, looking alarmed. Bastienne is confined to our hut, where she natters away about lovers and outré sex acts, lingering over details that sometimes make even my face burn with embarrassment. She stays cozy on account of the bags of feathers we have stuffed inside our living quarters. I contrive to make a winter coat by cutting arm and neck holes in a bag of feathers, slipping the whole thing over my head and securing the openings with string. Then I shove my hands into other bags and walk around outside, quite comfortable except for my feet, which are bare. Of course, as Bastienne points out in a moment of clarity, the coat is hell to put on and take off, and the feathers itch, and I leave a trail of down wherever I’ve been. If I live, I shall perfect the design.

  We have eaten the tennis balls and boiled and reboiled every bird bone about the place. I made the sealskin into a door, but then we boiled and ate the door. The baby grows apace. I look like a skeleton that has swallowed a melon. My nipples look like raisins. I have to smash the ice to get water, water is all we eat. Here, Bastienne, I say, have some water soup. Here is a nice bowl of stewed water. Don’t eat too much. You’ll get fat. Really, I quite like your new figure. Would you like some water for dessert? Would you care to hear the story of Sir John Mandeville and the naked, child-eating sybarites of Lamory? Tell me again about M. Radagast, the apothecary, and what he did to you in the privy.

  I am without a doubt a shallow and frivolous girl. And I know we shall die soon. It is clear to me that all my haphazard and naive attempts to survive are pathetically inadequate, that I am truly and amazingly unprepared to be anything but my father’s daughter back in France. But the realization no longer disheartens me. I was once pretty and vain and liked to flounce about in expensive gowns that showed my cleavage. Now I rather enjoy the new look: my grotesquely thin and elongated body, my tangled, matted hair (like the nest of an incontinent sea eagle), my filthy, hardened hands, my gnarled feet, not to mention the clothes Richard bequeathed me, which are now seven colours different from when he wore them, and my feather bags (which, yes, are really more like pillows — I trudge about my island duchy like a person with an abnormal fear of collisions).

  My world is turning itself upside down: Two Gods are as bad as two suns or two moons for a person’s peace of mind. One God guarantees the words I speak are true; two makes them a joke; three gods (or more!) — it doesn’t bear thinking about. And no one mentioned this on the ship over, but the mere existence of Canada constitutes a refutation of the first principle of Christian cosmology, expressed by St. Isidore in the seventh century, that “beyond the Ocean there is not land.” Is it because I am already dead that things have changed so radically? Our hut resembles a grave mound, and Richard’s grave looks like a house (that scarecrow woman looks more like me than I do). Are the legends true, that the journey west, which M. Cartier pioneered under a charter from the King, follows a forgotten route to the Underworld, the enervated utopia of the dead? (Have I mentioned the ship-coffin analogy?)

  I have Richard’s tennis racquet, warped and battered, with many of the leather strings broken, and my little English Bible (they burned M. Tyndale at the stake in Belgium — I wish I had been there, I have such affection for the man). Once I tried to make away with myself, lying naked with my head resting on the rocks of Richard’s grave. I thought I would go to sleep in the cold and never wake. But I could not get past the cold part, jumped up chilled to the bone, ran home and crawled into Bastienne’s feather bag to get warm.

  I stomp about the island, trying to keep my feet warm. Or I find a sheltered spot where I can read in the sun, dandling the tennis racquet on my knee. Then suddenly I am overcome with fear that Bastienne has died, that I am abandoned and alone. I think of her as my mother now, my dark mother, the image of my desires — all books, pain and dirty sex mixed together. I am horribly mixed up, as I think most humans are. I race back to the hut (no door, just a hole with a windbreak in front), and she is still breathing, languid in repose, almost peaceful. She talks of an old friend come to visit. Strangely, for Bastienne, this isn’t about sex. They speak of childhood games, a pet squirrel she kept in a box beside her bed and a dolly made of a rag stuffed with wheat chaff she called Susanne.

  Nights, I dream of cannibals. I dream I am a cannibal, cooking Bastienne in a pot. My baby is a cannibal, eating me. Then I wake myself up because there is nothing worse than dreaming about food when you have none. I go outside and gaze at the stars. I walk around the island to keep warm. The rocks are windswept, clean of snow, which seems to collect in clefts and among the trees inland. But there is a fine d
usting of powder over everything on this quiet night. I recall it is near the feast day of Jesus’ birth. In the village where I grew up, the peasants would decorate a tree in the forest — a pagan rite, full of magic, much disapproved in official circles. Above me, the bears circle, never setting beneath the line of the horizon, never dying, with their tails elongated where Zeus grasped them when he flung them into the heavens.

  At the northern headland, where the island comes to a point like an arrow aimed downstream toward the Atlantic, the snow is scuffed and creased. Perhaps another vagrant seal has landed, I think. I kneel to make a closer investigation. Such is the power of the mind that initial assumptions can colour the evidence of our eyes. I think again, yes, a seal. But there, clear in the moon-light, is a left footprint and a right footprint, and they seem to walk about bipedally, which is fairly unusual for a seal (admittedly, my knowledge of seal lore is limited). They emerge from the water, though, like a seal. But here I detect a long keel line in the snow. So, I say to myself, this seal arrived in a boat and walks around on his hind legs. I’ll wait. I’ll make an ambush. He’ll come back. We’ll eat like kings and queens.

  I hide behind a rock and rub my feet with my hands to keep them from freezing. Soon I am dreaming of intercourse with a strange seal-man with a furry, bewhiskered face on top of his human face. Then I dream of giving birth. I grasp the squirming, slippery thing to my breast and peep down to see its face, which resembles a turnip. For some reason, I find giving birth to a turnip reassuring.

  When I awake, my feet are blue and so cold I cannot walk.

  I crawl painfully down to the shore in an agony of fear and expectation. Like many women, I know what I don’t know — a duplicity of mental operation caused by living in a world run by men and Dominican priests. The tracks are indubitably human. They are clearer and much less dreamlike in the dawn light. After coming ashore, they stand and shuffle a moment, perhaps in the process of dragging the boat onto the rocks. Then they strike off on a tour of the island perimeter.

  I scramble after them, trying to be stealthy (not easy for a girl of my class and experience), slipping from rock to ice slab to driftwood log, biting my lips, weeping silently. Why does everything new seem like a threat? Perhaps he will be the seal-man of my dreams. Perhaps he will feed us and bring us to his city. He walks all the way around the island to the hut. There he stops, seems to meditate while keeping himself hidden in the lee of a boulder. I can see what he sees, two mounds, a straw woman dressed for court, a skull, a pile of bones, three arquebuses aimed at nothing. Perhaps the scene is as mysterious to him as he to me, as difficult a book to read. What general assumptions did he bring with him to this island? Am I the bird-woman of his fancy? The legendary cormorant girl bent on dragging him to his doom beneath the waves?

  After pausing, he gives the hut a wide berth, tiptoeing (bent double, I imagine, with an arrow notched in his bow) from rock to rock, mystified, frightened. Then he races back to his boat and disappears. I have made the circuit of the island on my knees without even noticing the torn condition of my stockings, my scraped shins, my toes beginning to blister. Now I rush home, still heedless of my wounds. A man was here. Now he’s gone. I have crawled in his footsteps, read his mind. I am suddenly not dead. It’s almost as good as having a social life.

  I break into the hut, breathless and babbling. I tell Bastienne eighty-nine times that I have seen tracks. A man, I say. We are redeemed. Of course he might kill us, we could look on the dark side, but you know the natives were friendly to M. Cartier before he gave them reason to hate him. Maybe this one doesn’t know about M. Cartier. I own all this now — he’s one of my people. I shall claim my rights. We’ll get him to build a better house. Peasants are always better at that than the nobility. Perhaps he’s not a peasant, but he’ll find me some.

  Bastienne refuses to wake up and listen. It is so contrary of her. Bastienne, I cry. Bastienne, we are watched. We are watched. I shake her shoulders, trying to rouse her, but she is stiff with death, and I back out of the hut in horror.

  God’s wounds, I am a fool. Vanity and rebelliousness brought me here. Arrogance and vanity. My little mother is dead. I thought I had built us a home, but it is a tomb. I only wanted love, but everything I loved I have caused to die.

  How Tongársoak Appears as a White Bear

  (and Eats the Aspirant)

  JANUARY-APRIL, 1543

  Old Mother Bear

  The wind begins to displace what is left of my thoughts, whistling among the stone outcrops, shrieking over the empty rookery, blasting the trees, which have a sinister, malformed look, as if the wind had tortured them before freezing them in place. The wind screams like a hundred hundred demons, far worse than the screaming of the birds, which in retrospect seems like the muffled cooing of doves on my father’s estate. Night succeeds day in such a frantic rhythm that dawn barely pales the horizon before darkness crashes upon me.

  I crouch in the lee of the hut, now a grave, with my bags of feathers bundled about me. My lover rests in his burial mound, and next to me lies the corpse of my spirit mother, who, now that I think of it, may have done more harm than good in encouraging my wayward heart. Rebelliousness has led me, precisely, here, where I wish I could die sooner rather than later, though for some reason — an unexpectedly robust constitution — I cannot even accomplish that.

  I have made many mistakes. I blame printed books for this, a recent invention which has led us to solitary pleasures: reason, private opinions, moral relativism, Lutheranism and masturbation. I cannot bear to go inside, where my Bastienne lies frozen in state, because she reminds me of my loneliness. All I want is to sit here and weep, but my tears turn into icicles, just as ice congeals along the shore. The whole world is freezing. (Prior to this I thought Hell would be hot.)

  I only want to be unconscious, to fall asleep beneath the counterpane of snow. But sleep evades me. The wind howls, icy fingers probe my limbs to the bone. Night follows night, the elements in fantastic disarray. The demons of fear, guilt and self-doubt assault my dreams. I am in no fit state to die, though when I try to pray, the words come out as curses. (Better to curse God, I suppose, than to go off and invent another one — I am still closer to divine grace than the Protestants.) I have my English Bible — its translator was burned at the stake, a fate which just now seems preferable to my current torment — and Richard’s tennis racquet and a baby (a still-warm lump inside me), but these are little consolation.

  In idle moments, I recall a savage girl living on M. Cartier’s farm at Limoilou. Her parents had offered her to the captain as a gift for the return voyage his last time in Canada. (Evidently native child-rearing practices are as thoughtless and irresponsible as those of the French. Dare we ask if her name means Iphigenia in the tongue of the Hochelagans?) M. Cartier’s wife, being childless, stood godmother to her when she was baptized and brought her into their home as a serving girl. She did queer work with beads and thread that delighted the ladies. I saw her only once, in shadow, at the back of a large room lit by a fire, bent so close to her needlework that she must have been almost blind. She peered up when someone raised his voice in the company. Dull, pocked skin, lank, thin hair, eyes blank from terror and loneliness — no less marooned in France than I in Canada.

  One day (it is day, and suddenly clear and still) I poke Richard’s tennis racquet through the snow and perceive a sky so blue and a world so white that it assaults me with its clarity. Nothing has ever seemed this clear — and I am French, so clarity is beauty. A lone gull shrieks above my head, then sheers off and dives for the open water. Far off, I hear the chuff-chuff of the slushy shore ice grinding in the swell. The air is so cold it seems solid; it would freeze these words were I to speak them, just as it freezes my breath. I am languid from starvation and cold. I cannot imagine why I am still alive. My persistence is an occasion for astonishment and frustration. (It makes a person believe in God — nothing this stupid could be random.)

  I unbend my stic
k limbs and attempt to stand but find myself sitting willy-nilly. I really am a bundle of sticks. I resemble one of those Christs behind the rood screen in the village churches, with the ribs carved outside the skin. My baby has grown smaller instead of larger, as if he entertained second thoughts about being born. I can’t feel a thing. Or perhaps I am so inured to pain that I no longer register how much everything hurts. Perhaps not starving and not freezing to death would be agony now. Perhaps I am already dead and just haven’t noticed yet. But sitting here in my feather bags, amid that clarity of ice and sky, I suddenly feel giddy. Let us not say happy or filled with grace. But my stone cold heart warms a little with the beauty of the landscape, which, as I now recall, I own, by the grace of his majesty Francis I and the intemperate actions of my unforgiving and ungenerous uncle.

  This is a good moment which, as I might have guessed, is really only a prelude to something worse. In Canada, I have learned that feeling good about oneself, entertaining hopes and plans, is a recipe for disaster. I am in the realm of the Lords of Misrule, who, in my former world, caper about only on feast days, disrupting convention, ridiculing the good, tweaking the powerful, exalting the humble, the criminal and the ugly.

  What I notice is that the chuff-chuff of the shore ice is exceedingly close and persistent. It has not the leisurely rhythm of the waves on a calm day but is quicker and more erratic and given to the occasional emphatic snort. This takes more time to tell than to think, and as soon as I think it, I twist round and spy a white bear nosing amid the snowy rocks of my lover’s grave. This should frighten me, but I am not up to much excitement and so simply note the fact that there is a bear sniffing (chuffchuff) at Richard’s grave.

  My experience with bears is limited to watching dancing bears and bear-baiting exhibitions at harvest fairs. I once saw the skin of a white bear sent to King Francis when he was still Prince of Angoulême by the King of Russia. The bear died en route, only the skin arrived. This bear is not exactly white, not as white as the snow, more a yellowish-white, and its fur is worn to the skin in places. It is huge — what you would expect — but the hugeness is oddly deflated. The bear is skin and bones, mostly bones, much as I am myself. And it limps on three legs, the fourth held gingerly above the snow, dripping blood. It is clearly old and weak and dejected and pathetic. And it has come here, drawn by the scent of Richard’s corpse, in hopes of finding a meal it will not have to hunt or fight for.