Elle (18 page)

The dog snarls, barks a warning. The boy looks over his shoulder, agonizing over the orgy of avarice at the shoreline, the fun he is missing. The sun is setting. Smoky lanterns blaze aboard the ship, which looms like a dark cloud or a sorcerer's island. Just beyond her a whale breaches, rolling head to tail back into the sea. A cormorant, a black snake with wings, skims silently above the surface of the water. Eider ducks rise and fall on invisible waves. I am reminded of the mysterious beauty of Canada, peace just beyond the ambit of human squalor, silence split by the call of a bird or the cry of a wolf, the antiseptic and ghostly whiteness when winter comes. Already I miss the place.

Now and again I have thought about that monk who asked St. Brendan to leave him behind in Canada or, as they called it, the Fortunate Isles. What impulse led to this act of reckless self-abandonment? I imagine him, tonsure and cassock, kneeling on the glistening shingle, praying as the odd round ship vanishes eastward into the ocean fogs. When it is gone, he stands and turns with his arms outstretched to face inland, with the whole vast continent before him, everything new, his whole life to make for himself, snowflakes beginning to fall, God on the wind.

The sailors are short, stout-chested, dark-bearded young men.
They brandish an assortment of harpoons, knives and hatchets on the off chance, I suppose, that I might attack them. My rescue party, I think, not without a touch of irony. Europe come to take me back to her bosom. Léon snaps at their legs. I stay him with my hand.

When I am safely surrounded, the captain nods ever so slightly and swings himself up on his crutches to the rocks where I am sitting, the dwarf scrambling behind him. He stoops to examine me, much as he has been examining the rocks, plants and savage tools, his face so close I can feel his breath, which smells of garlic. The rest of him smells of something else altogether, soot, sweat and dead fish. I jerk my bearskin over my face and turn away, but the stranger lifts the hood, then my hair where it covers my ears, touches the stars on my face with the tips of his fingers, catches his breath.

He says something in a language I cannot understand. Then to my surprise, he mutters,
aguyase,
the word for friend in M. Cartier's lexicon.

Friend, friend, he says.

I cannot credit my ears. His face is as red as his coat. He puffs and blows with the effort of climbing my rocks. His codpiece bounces under his belly. It quite takes my breath away. Léon rumbles in his chest. Shh, shh, I say.
Aguyase.

Friend, he repeats, nodding enthusiastically, pointing at himself with a thumb. He pauses to think, searching for words. He tries out half a dozen phrases in different languages. Then he lapses into an awkward, heavily accented French.

Elephant tusk, he exclaims, banging his pegs with his cross. I think to myself, How extraordinary. It makes a person wonder what is inside his codpiece.

You are a legend up and down the coast, he says. Left for
dead. But the savages saw you. No one believed them. They tell such stories.

This is too much news for a girl wrapped in a bearskin, unused to speaking in anything but signs and bastard river words. I wonder, somewhat irritably, why, if everyone was talking about me, no one came to help while the ones I loved were suffering and dying. I try to think of something suitably withering to say but find myself fixating on the words of M. Cartier's lexicon.

Aguyase,
I say.
Canada undagneny?
Where do you come from? Then in halting French: How do you know that word?

The fat, legless man beams, swells with pride, makes a courtly bow. It is a grand and dramatic moment, filled with meaning for both of us. He stuffs his thumb and hook inside his belt and drums his remaining fingers, sifting his memory for an appropriate sentiment.

He begins in French: Don't worry. Everything will turn out all right. Then, as if to demonstrate his facility in the language of the lexicon, he says: I have a canoe on my penis.

And so I am rescued from the Land God Gave to Cain, delivered from savagery, redeemed, like the Israelites, from the wilderness. The captain's name is Finch, an Englishman, once a man-at-arms in King Henry's army, washed up on the shores of Navarre after some invasion or other, like me an exile of
fortune. The dwarf's name is Didier Duminil — purser, accountant, log-keeper, bone-setter, surgeon, apothecary, astrologer, alchemist, navigator, lay priest, sodomite and poet, also good with sleight of hand and card tricks. Their ship is called the
Nellie.
They are whalers out of San Juan de Luz and have made the voyage to Canada for eight years running but in nowise are the first of that country to come there — is M. Cartier aware of this? The official historians? Apparently the existence of a New World has been a mystery to no one except the French government.

I am forthwith provided with clothing — seamen's wool stockings, knee-breeches, shirt and cap, all of which itch horribly and make me too warm, so that I take them off again and put on my bear robe. The sailors give me hardtack, oat gruel and very old boiled turnips to eat, spirits to drink. (Come, this will revive you, someone says. Revive me from what?) The spirits go straight to my head, and I become maudlin, weeping, sighing, blowing my nose in someone's cap.

The sailors gather round to hear my story, examine my star tattoo and catch glimpses of my naked breasts. I request more spirits, flirt and wax garrulous, regaling them with stories they only half understand and don't believe at all. Then I doze off, dreaming that King Francis has given half of France to the Turks — in my dream, the Turks look uncommonly like Canadian savages. Trading with the savages goes on long into the night. I hear savage drums and sailors' flageolets, raucous male voices raised in song. Fires blaze on the beach. Sailors find savage wives for the night, savage husbands take the opportunity to hack apart one of the longboats and steal the nails. A party slips away in canoes, boards the ship and begins to pound nails out of the hull and superstructure. Everyone laughs. The dwarf
prepares me a bed of blankets by a fire and tucks me in. But I get up, go hunting for Léon, fall into the creek by the she-bear's lair and go back to sleep with my dog.

In the morning I am very confused. I have a headache. I have broken a tooth on the hardtack — this explains my trouble on the outward voyage. The whaling ship seems to ride a little lower in the water. The whole crew has found new homes in the savage huts and refuses to return to the ship. Captain Finch, immensely agile and undaunted by his amputations, orders the crew to return to the ship without delay on pain of flogging. Everyone ignores him. In the distance, naked savages raise and lower a sail experimentally, a half-dozen whale oil barrels slide over the side and float toward the sea.

Captain Finch has the relentless optimism of the new man of commerce, at once acquisitive, adventurous, guiltless, cunning and practical, with no tendency whatsoever to self-doubt or self-examination. He does not seek Cathay or a Northwest Passage or the Fountain of Youth or the Isles of the Blessed or a New World or even new lands for his king (I am not sure at this juncture who his king is, the borders of France being in flux). Nor does he bother with religion or dreams of converting savages. His head is full of numbers: so many barrels last year, so many the year before, so much a barrel, so many whales slaughtered (destroyed — I believe on occasion I have heard the whales singing their plaintive love songs to one another). All his voyages have been successful, though (tapping a peg leg with his hook) there have been accidents.

I ask for more spirits, am politely refused. I shift my bearskin over my head, growl and try to shake my cheeks till my lips flap. No effect. One of the sailors says my costume reminds him of the New Year festivals in the mountains near his home, when a
man dressed up as a bear comes down from the mountainside and pretends to make love to the village women. He mimes fucking. Much laughter ensues. I think how little like a real bear this sounds, my own ursine yearnings tending toward solitude, berry patches, ripe salmon and, at this time of year, a cozy den where I might take a nap for a month or two.

These sailors are a dirty lot, covered with greasy soot (now I understand this — from a summer crouched over rendering fires and cauldrons of whale fat), but young, jolly and well-made, in contrast to the scrofulous ne'er-do-wells and effete petty nobility (who fancied themselves gentlemen adventurers) the General brought to Canada. They have hens on board their ship, they offer me an egg. I look at the hen's egg and start to weep again. In that moment, I return to something of my essential self Do they have any bread? I wonder. But their bread is gone. In fact, they ate the last hen on the beach the night before. They are close to starving, anxious to sail for home.

We sail on the evening ebb tide.

The words catch me off guard. So soon? All my reactions are paradoxical. The strange food has made me ill. I can't stand their civilized clothing. In the afternoon, I notice the steady seepage of the savage populace into the forest — bundles of gear, their hoards of trade bric-a-brac, hide roof coverings, paddles, tennis racquets, fishnets, strips of dried meat, children, dogs — bit by bit the vestiges of savage life disappear, their owners decamped for the Land of Nothing, rich in nails (the whaler's superstructure looks, well, a bit slumped), leaving a smouldering fire here and there and a surprised, naked sleeper under a skeleton of poles. The tree of skulls rattles in the breeze. They did not say goodbye. But then was I ever anything but a nuisance, an intruder in their world? Nevertheless, in my
mind, I say goodbye. Adieu. The land looks licked clean. Adieu.

The dwarf — Dado, for short — sits with me on the rocks. We watch the captain limp into the forest to hunt. He takes two dogs, a savage boy (left behind again by forgetful elders) and a crossbow rigged with a lanyard so he can pull the trigger with his teeth.

The dwarf says with a sigh, He's a terrible sailor but lucky. That's all you need. And the continents are large and difficult to miss. We did miss once on the journey home and landed in Africa. He didn't know whether to turn right or left. That's how I became a navigator.

He says, It takes these savages two days to cut a tree down with their stone axes. The first year we came here they swarmed the ship but were afraid to step on the deck. The captain hoisted a boy on his shoulders and careered about on his pegs, chanting plainsong, till the others lost their fear. They called out, Nails. It was the first word they learned. Now we budget for pilfering, but once we nearly lost a ship when the Seven Islands savages removed the nails from several runs of hull planking on the water side where we couldn't see them working. But we can pay the sailors and coopers less if we let them do business on their own.

The sailors pack their bales of furs, scrounge for meat left behind on the drying racks, hunt for berries, do their laundry, take baths, refill water casks. Léon barks furiously at the boats as they shuttle back and forth to the ship. To him, events have taken an ominously maritime turn. The day has a twilight quality long before it is really twilight. My recovery from the Land of the Dead (Canada) seems vaguely anticlimactic, if not ever so slightly tedious. The pole frames of the savage huts look like skeletons.

Dado says, This place teaches us yearning and grief!

An odd remark. What does he know of my experience, my thoughts? But it's true, I think. He has a large head, thick brows, intelligent eyes, a lined face, tiny ink-stained hands, red knuckles. He hides his little legs beneath his habit. The weather is suitably dramatic — brilliant but with a storm approaching in the west over the restless gulf Grey clouds that will blow us out to sea in the night.

He asks me why I lived apart from the savages — like a hermit, he says — and about the carcass wrapped in bark suspended in a tree.

It doesn't look quite human.

I am unused to speaking in French. And, in any case, there don't seem to be words in any language to explain what has befallen me, the complexity and mystery of it, the song and the dream. I am wearing the old woman's skin (the other, the white bear, is packed with my belongings). Goodbye, I think. Everything but the dwarf smells of the sea (the dwarf smells of burned whale fat — one gets used to this).

I look toward the Isle of Demons, not far off but out of sight round a bend in the coastline. Richard, Comte d'Epirgny, lies buried there, as does my son Emmanuel and my old nurse Bastienne. My soul is hidden among the trees. Adieu.

He gives me a book to read, something about a giant and his son, written by a man with an Arab name, Alcofribas Nasier. (Yes, till recently, for many hundreds of years, our dusky brother, the black man of our nightmares, our imaginary other, has been the Turk and the Moor.) A pirated and unexpurgated edition, Dado says, the sort of thing that will get the author burned at the stake. When I try to read, the letters and words seem meaningless, as helpful to me as the animal tracks Itslk tried once to
explain. Everything that once had meaning is forgotten. I am a citizen of neither the New World nor the Old (and who would want to be a citizen of an Old World anyway — someone wasn't thinking when he made up the names).

Captain Finch returns from the hunt dragging the head of a huge deer-like creature with a horse's nose and thickened antlers. He thinks it's a monster.

It's very curious, he says. I collect curiosities.

His codpiece, which has come untied in the undergrowth, dangles between his thighs. He has left the meat behind and sends off a party with careful directions to find it. Then he sends out another party to find the first. Both return separately but without the meat. The captain shrugs and orders us to the ship. The savage boy has disappeared.

But then Léon refuses to climb into the boat. Sailors tie a line to his collar and try to drag him aboard. Finch roars out commands. It is growing dark, no moon, wind freshening. A whiff of snow on the air. The longboat nearly broaches in the rising surf. Léon snaps at anyone who comes near. He worries the line with his teeth, finally ducks his head and slips off his collar. He barks and barks at me, his eyes wild with incomprehension. I am wedged between thwarts near the stern of a whaleboat with my feet on the rolled-up caribou hide that once was my home, a moose's head leaning into my lap. Léon sets up a mournful howl. Yellow bitches, his harem, some with pups, trot up and down, sipping the waves, their tails curving over their backs like ragged flags.