Elle (17 page)

The new way of thinking (I): Luther said, Dreams are liars; if you shit in your bed, that's true. (The deluded rationality of the modern — yes.)

The new way of thinking (2): In the laws regulating Geneva inns, Calvin decreed that no one should sit up past nine o'clock at night except spies.

This is what I think: The ways of God are not our ways; what are not our ways are the ways of God.

The old man with the star map on his face limps into my camp one afternoon. Woof, woof, go the dogs. He flogs them with a fishing spear. He seems abashed when he spies my new tattoo. His fingers trace the pattern on his own face, the twin of my own. He examines the bear carcass in the tree, wafting away
the buzzing flies with his palm, hissing through his teeth. A little boy, impudently naked, with a cock the size of my little finger, trails behind. He has eyes the colour of blackberries, familiar eyes. He sidles over to Léon, who is depressed and won't get up from the rock where he basks in the sun. Perhaps he misses bull-baiting. At the end of the day he limps — it tears my heart to see. On the other hand, there are several pregnant bitches amongst the savage dogs. Possibly he is wearing himself out with love. We are inseparable.

The old man wears a string of pewter rings round his neck. With elaborate ceremony and oratorical flourish, he harangues me for more than an hour. I think he means to warn me that I am no longer welcome, that I must return to my home, wherever that might be, but presently he takes my hand and offers me a dusty fish from his bag, his usual gift this time a trifle gamy. He lapses into patois to announce that he and the rest of the Bear-Hunting People are leaving for their winter camp, which is far inland near a place they called the Land of Nothing, where the caribou are abundant. I can go along with them if I stop turning into a bear and leave their cooking fires alone. He says I should, otherwise I will die from starvation when the snow falls or be torn apart by wolves or carried off by the men in hide boats who sometimes come along the coast in the winter to hunt for seals. These men are reputed to have small penises and share their women with strangers.

I cannot say how the thought of eating caribou cooked a dozen different ways for six months thrills me. I pull my bear-skin over my head and rumble in my chest. The old man grimaces with irritation. The mystery has worn off. I shrug. He says he can cure me if I want.

It occurs to me that many of my recent problems have come
from people trying to repair some apparent aberration of my heart, and I shudder to think that he plans more of that sucking operation the bear woman practised on me. But the old man demurs, and presently he and the boy lead me back down the forest path to the fishing camp, where the savages have erected a modest domed shelter of boughs and hide, a miniature of their usual houses. A woman tends a fire nearby, heating rocks.

The old man bids me take off my bearskin and crawl inside, which I do, only somewhat humiliated at the sight my privy parts must offer as I squeeze through the narrow opening. The old man follows, equally naked — something familiar about his penis. Then the boy. Then the woman. Then half a dozen others, three men, a girl, two women. The girl is ill, snot bubbling out of her nose, flowing down her chin. We are wedged together round a pile of heated stones, everyone sweating, the only light coming through the doorway and tiny burn-holes in the hide dome that after a while begin to look like stars in the sky.

I offer to leave, make for the door. But the old man stays me with his hand. I understand nothing of what the savages say, though I suspect that I am the butt of several jocular remarks that pass between them. I am burning up, sweating rivers, veritable floods. Sweat drips off my nose, my chin, my fingertips, my elbows, runs between my thighs, trickles down my back. Many holy lice are carried away in the deluge. The little girl sticks her fingers in her nose and, wide-eyed, holds up the result for me to see. Someone goes out for more rocks. Someone else flagellates his back with a spruce branch. When I swoon, they throw cold water on my face. More laughter.

How tired I am of learning new customs, always being on the outside looking in, being spoken of in languages I will never
understand. My mind screams, I want to go home. But then I have a depressing thought — all my life, even in France, I have struggled to learn new customs, found myself on the outside looking in, always spoken of in words I could not fathom.

I doze off, have a little dream which takes the form of an imagined conversation in the future.

ROBERVAL: (overexcited, disbelieving) In France? She's in France, you say?

PLUTARD: (a servant, formerly Pip the cabin boy) Oui, monsieur.

ROBERVAL: My niece?

PLUTARD: Oui.

ROBERVAL: It's impossible. In France?

PLUTARD: Oui, monsieur. First she came to the coast by boat. Then she stepped onto the land and was in France. She has been here ever since.

ROBERVAL: Wine, Plutard. I have a sudden headache. How long ago was this?

PLUTARD: A week. The rumour began with the stable boys at the post houses, and now it's all over Paris. They say she's stopped with acquaintances in Saint-Malo to refresh herself and buy suitable clothes. Except for a bearskin, she was naked when they found her. They say she has all but forgotten how to speak French. They say she bore a child covered with scales, only half-human.

ROBERVAL: Oh yes, Captain Cartier was ever against me. Plutard?

PLUTARD: Oui.

ROBERVAL: I dreamed of bears again last night. They came into my chamber, overturned my bed and chair and defecated on the carpet.

PLUTARD: And in the morning?

ROBERVAL: Everything was as it should be. But the stench was appalling.

Splash, splash. The old man wakes me again, asks me if I feel any better. Answer: No. He says his wife is dead. The boy is his nephew. The boy's parents went to live with the Seven Islands People upriver but forgot to take him. The boy's name is Old Man, the old man's name is Gets Close to Caribou.

Gets Close to Caribou earned his name one winter when a panicky caribou spooked in the wrong direction and almost trampled him to death. Gets Close was unconscious for a week — he dreamed the caribou lifted him in its mouth and carried him to Caribou Mountain, north of the Land of Nothing. He stayed with the king of the caribou, a former hunter who had fallen in love with a caribou-woman. All present-day caribou are descended from this hunter and his caribou girlfriend. The whole family lives together in an unimaginably (one presumes) huge cave under the mountain, though the old hunter lets a few animals out from time to time so that the Bear-Hunting People can eat. Gets Close slept with several caribou girls and, as a con-sequence, could never hunt again on the off chance that he might kill one of his own children. He could still eat caribou, mind you, as long as someone else killed it. And instead of going hunting, he got to stay in camp with the women all winter.

The old man (Gets Close) laughs. I fail to see the significance of the story except perhaps to draw some obscure parallel between his experience and my own. Though I perceive that his discourse and the sweating rite are kindly meant as ways of educating me in the structure of their life. Since coming to Canada, all my conversations have been conducted anxiously in contending grammars, each describing a different world. What
if all grammars are correct? This hair-raising question would never occur to the General except in nightmares. Despite the heat, I shudder. Omen of winter, sign of death.

The little boy (Old Man) crawls into my lap and rests his cheek against my breast. He seems wise beyond his years. Gets Close to Caribou examines my limbs, face, teeth and nails for telltale signs of bearness and grunts with approval. The woman next to me speaks softly, reminding me of the unintelligible beauty of their speech. Gets Close says, yes, it is time to eat. Un-accountably, I begin to weep. He pats my hand.

Am I cured? I ask.

Every morning for days I pack my meagre belongings, put the bear's tongue in my bag of souvenirs, roll up the hide covering of my hut, attach a leash to Léon's collar and wait for the Bear-Hunting People to set out for the Land of Nothing. But nothing happens. What part of the old man's message did I misunderstand?

One afternoon I am relieving my bowels in a patch of fireweed, wondering what happened to a tennis ball I threw away in my dream, when a black ship looms in the distance, sails snapping as she falls off the wind rounding the sandbar at the creek's mouth. I hear a shout from the savage encampment.

Chill air, end of summer clarity. Dew cold as ice on my thighs
as I brush through the dying weeds. Bustards make arrowheads in the sky. Smell of winter on the wind. The ship is huge, a square-rigged, top-heavy, tar-stained tub, somewhat Spanish in her design but resembling an English carrack, not at all like the nimble lateen-rigged caravels M. Cartier prefers for crossing the ocean. I have seen one or two like her in the port at Saint-Malo. The Spanish call them
naos.

She rides low in the water, with her forecastle and poop deck rising fore and aft like the letter U. Awnings amidships to shelter the crew, piles of copper kettles like upturned acorns and huge oak casks lashed down on every spare bit of deck. Little bow-legged men race about, furling sail, dropping anchor, swinging out two longboats of a curious design with a bow at both ends and room for eight rowers on either side. One or two find time to wave to the savages, holding up articles of trade. Something odd about these men. Sallow, sunburned faces, red wool caps and trousers cut off at the knees, all stained to a dull sheen as if they were dipped in tallow.

Sailors row ashore so hastily that one boat tangles its oars and a fist fight-breaks out among the crew. The savage dogs bark, whine, snarl and turn on one another in the general excitement. Shouts of greeting volley back and forth, as if the savages and the sailors already know each other. Naked Bear-Hunting People splash gaily into the cold waves. A fussy, self-important-looking man rides in the stern of the foremost longboat — short in stature, pot-bellied, brilliant crimson jacket, black pantaloons slashed with orange and gold, round red face, looks like a sunset on legs. Except he is not standing on legs, rather on two pegs, with a crutch lashed to his arm.

The closer he comes the more ruinous he looks. He has a hook in place of his left hand, a patch over one eye, scars stitched
into his cheek and temple, one ear missing. Along with his crutch, he carries a crucifix on a staff, with a carving of Our Lord looking starved, wounded and doleful (it suddenly occurs to me that we have a depressing religion). Two jubilant warriors lift the partial man out of the boat as it grinds onto the shingle and carry him ashore in their arms — he protests the whole time, kicking his pegs, struggling weakly.

When they set him down, he takes a few wobbly strides to get his land legs, revealing the most amazing codpiece, turned up at the end and fastened to his belt with gold cord to keep it erect. He is followed ashore by a party of soot-coloured seamen, weighted down with trade packs, and a dwarf dressed in a monk's habit, carrying a ledger and a portable inkpot on a chain, a quill pen stuck in his hair. Gets Close to Caribou commences one of his interminable harangues. But commerce will not await the savage niceties, and bartering breaks out behind his back.

I sit on a rock overlooking the encampment, naked but for my bear cape, my hand resting on Léon's noble head, grizzled with years and the stress of his amorous adventures. No one takes notice of us till a savage boy of about six, the same one who hunts me with his bow, remembers me and shouts, exclaims and points as if I am some curiosity he knows will delight the sailors. Still no one glances up from the piles of fur draped on the shingle, the wool blankets weighted with rusty knives, cracked mirrors, palm-sized sloppily painted pictures of the saints, rosary beads, dented pots, worn shirts, odd stockings, buttons, rope ends, nails, old sails hacked to rags. So the boy races up the slope, his tiny penis bouncing on his thighs, grasps my hand and tugs and tugs, yammering away at me in the savage tongue.

The stranger, hampered only slightly by his lack of legs, bustles into the savage encampment, with his dwarfish secretary scurrying after, using his crucifix as a second crutch, inspecting the dwellings, hefting the savage tools, peering into bark vessels beside the cooking fires. He pauses for several minutes before the two dogs dangling from their poles, now all leathery dried skin, glistening bones and grinning teeth, and prods the tree of skulls so that they swing back and forth, making a clatter. He seems intrigued by sundry plants, nearly toppling over when he bends to examine the papery scrolls that flourish upon the rocks. His curiosity arouses some sentiment in me which I do not recognize — admiration, anticipation, anxiety?
Aguyase,
I think. I am a friend. Look at me.

Savage dogs sniff at the dwarf's habit, which is brown wool stained with the same grey patina as the crew and, now that I look at it, the ship itself, its sails and sheets. The yellow dogs growl. The clamour at the shoreline reaches a crescendo, the seamen broach a small cask of spirits, the savages set bark platters of fish and dried meat on the blankets next to the trade goods amid shouts and laughter. The boy (called Old Man by his people) continues to drag at my hand, shouting with glee. I drag back, for I am frightened.

I know how this is going to look — white woman with straggly hair caught up in two hanks tied with caribou-skin string, bones in my ears, walking around mostly naked in all weathers, sunburned brown to the teeth. My heart races at the spectacle I will make — shown at country fairs, exhibited on market days or, worse, set alight some Sunday afternoon in the town square. I have from time to time dreamed of rescue — out of habit. But if I were still in France, I would frighten myself I
am infected with otherness. What do you do with a headstrong girl? Pointless question.

Now the stranger peers up at me, attracted by the commotion, his single eye twinkling with mischief and misery, his remaining fingers clutching the stem of a pitcher plant he has discovered in a boggy crevice. He shouts an order in some incomprehensible dialect, points with the plant, and a half-dozen sailors dash up the rocks towards me. A feeling of doom washes over me. I feel Léon's hackles raise. Time to be off, I think, but where to go?