Elle (16 page)

This sailor, far gone in drink and suffering the pox, further testifies that a savage dressed in a bearskin made threatening gestures from the shore and was fired upon by the boat's company, that a bear danced upon the bow of a skiff in broad daylight (forcing the General to turn around), that the General was so terrified of bears or demons or both that he surrounded himself with arquebusiers till he reached France-Roy and then begged an exorcism of the priest. The sailor also confides that a small bear befriended him one night when they were camped along the shore and allowed him to enter her. His current wife, who really isn't his wife but a bottle whore much impressed by sailors, has a backside much like a bear's. He asks if I am interested in hearing stories about any other animals. F. is laughing at me.

I wake before dawn the next morning by a cold fire in a savage encampment beside a bay, the mouth of an immense river, with no far shore in sight, a river greater than any we can boast in Europe. Two rotten dogs hanging from poles watch over me. A circle of sun-bleached skulls watches over me. I shiver inside my bear robe. The ground about is dotted with other sleeping forms. Léon sleeps against my thigh, snoring fretfully, thrashing in his dreams.

I stagger to my feet, alarmed by the unusual silence, the bear-woman's absence. The stars whirl above in the blue-black of the morning sky. Racing back to our hut, I call and call for her, scouring the camp and woods nearby — the place where she liked to relieve herself in a bed of club moss, the marsh where she gathered herbs, especially the one with roots like golden threads, the traps she set for hares, the hemlock worn smooth where she rubbed her back when it itched, her favourite berry patch, her fishing rock beside the creek and the hollow tree where honey bees live.

Then I notice Léon sniffing with the curious enthusiasm of dogs at something in the underbrush and discover the corpse of an old she-bear, already wormy and beginning to stink. There is no mark on her. She looks uncommonly peaceful, as the dead often do, and my mind gratefully retreats from the conclusion that I feared most, that she was killed by the ball from a dream arquebus in some distant place.

Something in me wants to be tender with her. I cradle her enormous old head in my lap, fanning the flies away, cleaning her rheumy eyes with a bit of rag saved from a dress, stroking the fur down the back of her neck, fondling her scarred ears. It is a relief to see her at rest. Despite the flies and maggots, her ancient, ursine face is stern and noble in death, almost human in its attitude of repose. Her bearishness makes me think of Richard's tennis-playing; both roles seem out of place, romantic in their insistence upon a way of operating that no longer fits the circumstances.

And I remember the long, anxious nights when she paced in the darkness (there is a path worn in the forest floor). What disturbed her? My own presence, for one thing. Of this I am certain. I am the herald of the new, a new world for the inhabitants
of this New World, as disturbing for them as they are for us. I believe she peered into the future and foresaw the end of everything that had meaning for her. She would no longer fit into the world without an explanation, everything would have to be translated, just as in my Old World the disruptions which are only beginning will end by sweeping all the ancient hierarchies, courtesies and protocols away. For it seems to me that their world is as much a disproof of ours as ours is of theirs. One of our advantages will be our ability to live and fight and destroy while remaining in doubt. But the doubt will gradually eat away at us. That is what I think.

That afternoon savages arrive from the fishing camp. They have heard about the old bear-woman's death — I don't know how. At first they are frightened. Léon snarls, crouching protectively astride the bear's body. The savages confer, then gently lead me away, offering me a salmon of such prodigious size I cannot carry it. (It seems a strange offering. Why give me a salmon?) Léon licks its tail and dances, trying to get the fish to play. The savages squat around the bear, buzzing with consternation. They draw diagrams in the sand, sing one of their songs (monotonous, rising and falling like the wind — this one is not about me). Then they skin the bear, slicing her from chin to anus with a stone knife as sharp as a
razor,
the hide curling back like the bow wave of a ship.

It is my turn to pace nervously upon the old bear's path. Léon keeps me company, grumbling deep in his throat at the savage intruders. I am not myself, I can tell. Some unexpected diffidence separates me from our visitors.
Aguyase
, I want to say, but what is the use? They pretend to ignore me but cast wary glances in my direction from time to time. I ramble up and down the old woman's well-worn path, whirling abruptly at the
forest's edge and turning back on my tracks. After a while, I notice that I have dropped to all fours, as I have often done in my dreams. My agitation increases. I rage against the men working over the she-bear's corpse. I am shocked at how human her body seems once they have stripped away the hide. Someone has cut out her tongue and placed it on a rock nearby. Yellow dogs race in and out, snapping at scraps of flesh.

The bearskin cape is suddenly too tight, constricting me at the neck and shoulders where I keep it pinned. I catch sight of my hands, which now have huge curved nails and a coating of black fur. My head sinks comfortably into my chest. But horror and revulsion flood my heart. God's wounds, I can see the end of my own nose, black as charcoal, and I am not dreaming, not even asleep. And my hands, which once were delicate (though lately scuffed and hardened with ill-use), have turned into paws. Without even thinking, and to my mortification, I squat and release a stream of urine. I feel the extra teats pop out along my belly. Léon edges away from me. My cape falls off, leaving me naked.

The savages leap to their feet, brandishing spears and bows, shouting and gesticulating. One man, with a constellation of blue dots like stars tattooed on his face, more resolute than the others — indeed, he seems to know me (and I him, though when and where we have met I cannot recall) — steps forward and delivers a harangue in his own tongue. I fail to understand a single word, but then he drops his voice and speaks to me in their river-speech, and with hand signs makes me understand that I have committed a faux pas. Perhaps it is only that, by turning into a bear before their eyes, I have made literal what should remain mysterious. Yes, yes, I think, I have always had a difficult time keeping in step with convention. What do you do
with a headstrong girl? The star-man looks like my father, looks like the General, looks like every disapproving male I have ever known. He shakes his bow at me, notches an arrow with exaggerated care. By his manner, I can tell he is as afraid and as disgusted by me as I feel myself. It's true — part of me wants to be normal.

But then, I think, this is what it is like to be a god — and I realize suddenly the naivete of my own prior conceptions, Jesus, the Trinity (an idea, if anything, more bizarre than a woman turning into a bear), Christ's torment in Gethsemane when it is clear he would prefer to remain a disputatious carpenter instead of becoming the son of God. I wonder if I will ever change back and, in passing, what bear sex is like and how you meet boy bears (inward shudder). Lately I have been thinking of France, and mostly what I think about is the talk, the brilliant, witty, shallow, trivial, never-ending chatter of commerce, flirtation, politics, gossip and scholarship. I would like to read a book instead of eating one. But in a universe governed by swirling contraries, I seem to be drifting farther and farther from the world I used to know, farther from the world of the recognizably human, closer to difference, divinity and madness.

I emit a bearish cough of frustration, which, even to my new ears, sounds fearsome. I shake my head till my lips slap (humans can't do this). I rush at the nearest hemlock, dig into it with my claws and give it a shake. The savages flee. One moment they are threatening me, the next they scatter in all directions like startled pheasants, vanishing among the trees. A single arrow clatters harmlessly at my feet. My first impulse is to sniff it. Then I smell Léon, a familiar scent but much stronger and more musical, composed of a medley of subtler scents I have not noticed before. He slinks into the underbrush. I try to call
him, but my voice is gone. I walk toward the dead she-bear, a strange gait — like walking downhill with my ass in the air, exposing my nether parts for all to see. I nudge her corpse with my snout, moan a bearish moan, not because I miss her or mourn but because now I understand the awful force of her loneliness.

The flickering sensation I felt in my dreams returns. The world seems to flame and glow, though, in truth, I can't see it very well through my bear eyes. The shadows change direction and lengthen into evening. I notice I have changed back into a woman. This is a relief. I begin to hope this bear thing is only a phase. Léon slinks back, licks my hand. But then I notice the hand beginning to sprout fur again, the claws begin to lengthen. Léon returns to the undergrowth. I wash the paw in the creek, wondering if scrubbing might rid me of this infection. The fur runs up my arm like flames licking through dead grass. Then it recedes, my hand returns to normal. The smell of blood makes me hungry, but I cry the dog away when he tries to lick the bear's flesh. Eating the bear strikes me as revolting. Later I seem to come out of my trance in a berry patch, gorging on fruit, my mouth dripping with juice (but I still look like a woman). Then I remember that salmon.

Next morning I am exhausted, spent, empty, lucid — and a woman. I hear no song but the birds. I feel like a fever patient who has passed a crisis. I wrap the old woman's carcass in bark (as I say, she looks so human without her bear skin), hoisting her into a tree to keep the dogs away. I hang her tongue on a meat-drying rack beneath the ceiling of my hut, where the smoke will cure it. Then I treat the hide with fat and ashes and stretch it to dry in the sun. For days I live like this, like a hermit, sheltered by strangeness, growing strong in the sunlight.

One night I pierce my ear lobes with bone skewers in the savage fashion. I experiment with a needle and soot and give myself a tattoo, imitating the star pattern, the Great Bear, because it is easy to apply (another time I will elaborate my efforts). In the dark, I finger my new wounds and point them out to Léon in the sky and say the names. By what names they are called in Canada, I cannot say.

When I am bored, I drape the bearskin over my head and shoulders, waddle along the creek to its mouth and frighten the savages in their encampment, doing no real damage beyond stealing a few fish and overturning their cooking frames. I believe they see the humour in this, for they do not shoot at me, only shout and wave their capes. A little boy, impudently naked, chases me with a toy bow and blunt arrows.

Once I go there and find them all gathered by the shore. Two caravels march slowly past in the swell, pushed along by the current, with hardly a man up in the sails and those on deck as like skeletons and scarecrows as real men. The ships look familiar, even to my dim, bearish eyes. Seeing us, a black-clad man with a crippled hand directs sailors to discharge the ship's cannon in our direction. Balls wheel lazily through the serene air and splash magnificently into the water far short of their target. The savages wave and call out and show their bare bums — by their actions I judge they are trying to get the ships to shoot at them again or perhaps to come and trade for furs. But the ships drift on to the horizon, tip over it and disappear, east toward the ocean and France.

What is France? Did I not once dream of rescue? As I recall, in the Old World they burn people less strange than I have become for consorting with the Devil. Did I once speak fluent French, read books? Now I am mute, or my words stumble as
they come out of my mouth. Did I really turn into a bear, or was I but a captive of a system of belief into which I had wandered all unknowing? There is something I cannot explain here, some character of reality not contained between the
via antiqua
and the
via moderna
of the scholars who debate at the universities. Is it possible that with the help of God's light we can know the true substance of things, or is everything just a sign of something else? Or is neither proposition true? What does the world look like to a savage? Or to a dog? Or to a Frenchman of the petty nobility? Or an ordinary girl with marriage hopes and a dowry? What I have become is more like a garbled translation than a self.

Night falls, night falls, night falls. The bears whirl above my head. The phantasmagoria of flickering lights I saw a year ago has returned. Faces, continents, great cities appear and swirl and vanish, then reappear and swirl again. It is like history itself, like some mad music made visible. But I remember someone telling me the savages believe this spectacle is the souls of the dead dancing in their heavenly home.

Cristoforo Columbus (like M. Cartier and my uncle) was a leaden literalist when he could have been a poet. He went hunting for a real New World, which he could apprehend in the image of the Old World, instead of some new world of the heart.

I am a headstrong girl, shallow and frivolous, born to a little land in the provinces but never meant to take part in the so-called great events of my time even if I had wanted to. Instead I wanted to read books and make love, which only made me an object of lust or ridicule and bound me to the periphery, the social outlands, to Canada.
Aguyase.
I am a friend.
Quatgathoma.
Look at me.

I have founded an unofficial colony in an unofficial Canada. Or I have saved Canada from officialdom; unfortunately, no one knows this, which is the nature of unofficial non-histories (and anti-quests).

After certain sorts of experience, people should change their names as the savages do or as we Europeans do when we accept a vocation, enter the monastery or the nunnery. (In this do I detect the remnant of some ancient practice forgotten by our newly literate forefathers?)