Elle (20 page)

F. watches, can scarcely believe such gentleness in so wild a creature.

I try some words from the lexicon on the savage girl and see her eyes grow large with surprise. Then she quickly corrects my pronunciation. I say, Moon, girl, canoe, friend. But her tongue races away with her, and I cannot follow the new words. Coughing stops the flow. She coughs till it seems something will snap inside her slender frame. She gags, spits blood, heaves, clutching
her ribs with bone-thin fingers, her eyes inward and terror-struck. Will I drown now? they ask. Will it be now? So far from home? I bite my lip, for I have seen the look and sensed the questions before, when Richard died and Bastienne. When the New and the Old Worlds meet, first we exchange corpses.

This is too sad for me, I think — to be exiled and watch my loved ones die, then to return home and find the process repeated in reverse. It is as if the whole journey was meant to teach me to see this girl, to guess her torment and dream her dreams of rescue.

I ask her name.

Catherine, she says, the word seemingly wet with blood. No, I say. Not your Christian name. The other.

Comes Winter, she says.

F. wishes to know if I slept with a bear. For the book he is writing, he says.

He has a new name. Arnolais i Frabec.

I say, Are you trying to get caught?

How about Arnolaf Rasibeci?

Flirty, flirty. I could eat him for breakfast, the little dumpling — spectacles, truss, walking stick and all. Once F. had dreams like mine, but sleep is something that comes to him rarely now. He has farmer's hands, with big digits like sausages, always moving. He blinks when he talks to me — an old nervous habit.

We have much in common besides dead sons. Being an extra child and younger son, F. was handed over to the Dominicans in a distant town at the age of seven. He blames his mother for this and, after her, all women. The monks beat him, starved him, kept him awake with nightly prayers and vigils, made him sleep on dirty straw in a room otherwise used as a urinal and advised him to imagine women performing the filthiest bodily functions in order to suppress desire — all those things that, in the common view, bring a child closer to God.

F. learned Latin, Greek and forty-nine ways to masturbate. He learned more about desire than about God. He says desire is like a soft cheese. If you squeeze it, it will simply squirt out through the cracks between your fingers. Or it is like metaphor or comedy, affording the greatest pleasure by surprising juxtaposition (he is not sure this is the lesson the Dominicans intended). Later he liked to use me the Italian way (the Italians call it the French way) and took delight in watching me defecate — he was a rhetorician of ironic reversal.

Everything he knows he knows from books. His mind is an encyclopedia of ancient wisdom (these days, to become a doctor, it is only necessary to memorize Hippocrates, Galen and Vesalius). But to F. this wisdom, too, has become a game, an opportunity for rearrangement and altered meaning. (So, then, I ask, you believe nothing? No wonder they want to burn you.) He delights in my tales of life amongst the savages, their habit of renaming one another to record significant life events, their cunning mistranslations, their trust in dreams, their tales of transformation — something there, he says, we have ourselves forgot.

He takes me to see the bas-reliefs in the little Malouin church of Ste. Agathe, which are meant to be the likenesses of five
savages a certain Captain d'Aubert brought back from Newfoundland in 1509 (unofficially). When these men saw SaintMalo, they daubed themselves with red ochre and sang their death songs — somewhat prematurely, as it turned out, for death comes with excruciating slowness to these savage exiles. The carvings have the air of souls captured in stone, of spirits put unwillingly into the earth, striving to go home.

He takes me to see Donnacona's grave, with its diminutive stone cross, in a secluded churchyard. And I am reminded of the little graveyard on the Isle of Demons where Richard, Bastienne and Emmanuel rest forever (though their graves have no marker). I think also of the graves at Trois Pistoles, which Dado Duminil told me of, and the colonial cemeteries left behind by M. Cartier and the General. The idea of all these unvisited graves on the peripheries of other worlds haunts me.

F. watches curiously, gauging my responses, which I try to keep to myself I no longer let him examine me, wear gloves to conceal my nails. He says his interest in me is purely medical and linguistic — am I a pun or a simile?

He says, These savages are all forgotten. Easier to forget than to think about, be moved and then, perhaps, to change oneself Easier to squabble over the nature of a communion wafer and fight a war and burn a heretic or two.

But we writers have an odd prejudice against silence, for-gotten lives, words unsaid between lovers, unwritten books.

How about Franco Belaraissi?

Better, I say.

My favourite words are dolour and enigma. I recall a priest telling me when I was six that on the call of the last trump the earth will bubble and burst like a stew, and out will pop the legions of the dead. I covered my eyes with horror. The priest
seemed ancient but was probably only twenty, with a goitre the size of a rabbit draped at his throat and one eye scarred over from small pox. He said not to be afraid because we would all be born again hale and hearty, even those who died dismembered in war or eaten by foxes or rotten with leprosy or — his gift for dolorous extrapolations was positively, well, Rabelaisian. Also we would all be born the same age — thirty-one. Even those who died as babies? How strange to think you could die a sucking infant and wake up a thousand years later aged thirty-one.

I am a little in love with the doctor, not the least because his cures are less painful than any I have yet encountered, but also because of my girlish attraction to men of genius. F. says he once saw my dear Richard, the so-called etc., play a youth match on the university court in Orléans one hot June day while in the company of a fellow student, the waspish and disputatious John Calvin, who later went off to found a religion and a state. He makes much of this coincidental crossing of paths with my lover — three great men of the age, he says, laughing, and their connection with the girl who colonized the New World, killed three bears, and dwelt a year on an island inhabited by shrieking demons, where her words froze in the air as soon as they were spoken.

Two, I say. Two bears died. I didn't kill either of them. And the demons turned out to be seabirds.

Alas, my legend already grows at the expense of my true story. Even a celebrated writer like E, with his insatiable curiosity, cannot resist the impulse to embellish, expand and invent.

On a scrap of paper torn from the margin of a book, he writes: And what of the young bear-woman? Does she stay inside, does she roam, does she forget, does she learn to shave?

I embark upon a mysterious project, something between a game and a prayer. Dreams drive me. And pity. In a corner of forest attached to M. Cartier's estate at Limoilou, the savage girl Comes Winter and I begin to build a facsimile of a Canadian encampment. We choose a spot where a pleasant brook pools before splashing into the fields beyond, and there, with twigs, hemp twine and the hide roll taken from the bear-woman's hut, we construct a home, laying down evergreen boughs for a floor and my bearskins for a bed. We have neither time nor patience to use stone axes but resort to iron tools from M. Cartier's farm stores, even nails. (In any case, there is little time to spare, for she is dying.)

Nothing is exactly as it should be: Comes Winter belongs to Donnacona's tribe, which speaks the language of the lexicon and lives far from the lands inhabited by Itslk's family and the Bear-Hunting People. Her customs and usages are far different from what I myself learned. Nor is the French winter as cruel and antiseptic as the one I passed in Canada — there is little need for the tennis racquets I brought back with me. And though we set snares and I even hammer a half-dozen nails into points and fashion arrows for the hunt, we settle for killing a pig, draping the meat to cure over a frame above the fire. When we sleep, she holds my hand. But in the morning when I wake she is kneeling over her prayers, kissing a wooden cross, coughing so hard she seems to be trying to turn herself inside out. We keep the bear chained to prevent him from wandering off (when he should be wandering off).

I hang the pig's skull in a tree, along with a few chicken heads and a deer's jaw I find in the woods. But to Comes
Winter this is alien symbolism. It makes her uncomfortable. Likewise she tells me her dreams in detail, while I recall that the Bear-Hunting People kept theirs secret. My own dreams are various. Though I am living safe and sound in France, I dream of ships sailing away, abandonment and exile. Comes Winter and I are like twins but opposite; she is infected with Christianity while I am infected with savagery. Sometimes I dream of bears. Once again I see the dark shape outside the hut, pacing among the trees with sparks flying out of its mouth, no sound for such a monstrous, moving thing. From time to time it raises its snout to the wind, and I perceive it is calling, crying something in the lost language of bears. But no one answers.

My own bear is gentle and affectionate, doglike in fact. I can walk with him on a leash, which delights children in the neighbourhood, offends the dogs and village dignitaries, terrifies mothers. Once the village cure comes to spy on us, though he is an old Malouin, a Breton who grew up more pagan than Christian himself, and after a meal of smoked pig and fish stew cooked over a fire in the woods, he goes away again. After that, strange to say, the villagers begin to visit in ones and twos with small offerings of food, as if they take us for holy hermits.

Signs: (I) A whale chasing a school of fish beaches itself in the shallows south of the port one day — an orca or hunter whale, black and white with a fin on top like a rudder, not as large as the right and bowhead whales harpooned for their oil but ruthless and brave. It lives a long day, breathing quietly, staring at the gathering sightseers through its sad brown eyes. Astonishingly, it remains alive even after fishermen begin to chop it up for the meat. A beggar boy pokes a stick through its
eyes to keep it from watching, sending a tremor through its frame. Later someone says the whale wept through its own slaughter. When they slice open its belly, two ivory pegs and a flood of pinkish sea water rush out. The pegs are iron-shod, with leather straps at the top. They are given to a legless man in the parish.

(2) A Welsh cog carrying coal puts into port with the story of how the crew had spied a man riding an iceberg, bobbing amid the coasters and cross-channel traffic. The slab of ice was the remains of what must have once been a huge floe, but it was now so diminished it was translucent, and the rider had to lie flat, with his arms and legs stretched out, to keep it from tipping over. He smiled and waved when he saw the sailors peering down at him from the deck of the ship. His clothing, they said, was of fur, his cheeks were tattooed in strange patterns, and on the ice beside him lay a fresh sea bass and an assortment of primitive implements: a stone-point spear, a bow and arrows, a stone hatchet, bone hooks and leather fishing line. Before the sailors could throw him a rope, their ship had carried them away. The last they saw of the waving man was his tiny ice-boat drifting toward the coast of France. In the dives and taverns that line the port, it is said the crew was stunned by coal gas captured in the ship's hold. In any case, sailors are always sighting strange objects: burning crosses, cavorting mermaids, burning islands where no land was ever seen, monsters and serpents.

F. says old de Saintonge, M. Cartier's pilot, the one who sailed with the General, has stolen a march on us all and rushed a small book into print, a narrative of his voyages to Canada, pulled out of a hat, as it were, for the November book fair in Lyons, where F.'s own books are published. The world is an immensely speedy place these days. Books on any subject come out willy-nilly: almanacs, prognostications, illustrated medical manuals, topical histories, travel memoirs — religious tracts and collections of obscene drawings sell the best. Flocks of books, their pages like birds' wings (on some distant island).

M. Cartier himself is an indifferent, poky writer (or all writers suffer the Canadian lethargy described above). He spends hours at a table before the window, watching the fat-assed milkmaid flirt with the stableboy, smoking a pipe, smashing walnuts with a hammer, mixing his ink, sharpening his quills with a pocket knife, going for snacks, sniffing cloves, rubbing his eyes, rubbing his cock, scratching his balls, smelling his farts, pulling hairs out of his ears and nose, and has nothing to show for it at the end of the day.

F. says the chief evil of printed books is that, as soon as everyone can read whatever they want, they'll all decide to be writers as well. He is already tired of amateurs — retired explorers, soldiers, prelates, ambassadors, midwives, courtesans, tennis players, lovers, swordsmen, cooks, kings (not to mention the King's relatives) — who all their lives read nothing but a breviary, account books, a dozen letters and an almanac and
then sit down to write a book as if their opinions were worth more than an eel's whisker to anyone but themselves.