Elle (3 page)

He sits at a rough-hewn oak ship's table strewn with charts, logs, compass, inkhorn, sandglass, wine cups, an image of St. Christopher, not to mention Léon's now useless iron food dish, leash and muzzle, much worn and stained with slobber. The General's attention seems elsewhere when I speak, seems rather
to be taken up with his left hand, which suffers a palsy from a war wound he received fighting for King Francis in Italy. At moments of high emotion, my uncle's hand takes on a life of its own, seems almost to creep away from him as if to prosecute its own malign and secret ends. It is trembling over one of M. Cartier's charts, tracing the coastline of the river with the predatory air of a ferret after a mole.

The General follows M. Calvin, who left France to found a religion and smuggles back his infection in the form of books, sermons, pamphlets and bad clothes sense. He dresses mainly in black: black doublet, black hose, black leather slippers, with a gold chain at his throat, dirty white cuffs trailing lace from his wrists, and a codpiece, outlined in gold thread and turned up at the end (like so many, full of promise and an old sock). His hair is cropped short like a sheep pasture, but his moustaches hang long and lank down the sides of his thin, dour mouth. A strip of black beard sprouts beneath his lower lip. He looks cruel, austere and pleased with himself, like a man who encounters in the world all the evil he expected to find and is sure of his throne in Heaven.

— some chastisement, he says, ignoring my interruption, worthy of my rank and the severity of my sin, which is all the more sinful because of that rank, and so and therefore and with profound regret but under the watchful eyes of the ship's company and a just and vengeful Lord, he has decided to endow me with a fief, a duchy, if you will, a colonial outpost in the new land of Canada, wherein I may purify my soul of its noxious vagrancy.

Outside the porthole, the lugubrious shoreline of Canada, the General's kingdom, slides by in an endless misty vista of flat, treeless swamp, a low wall of purple mountains in the distance, occasional forests of dark green trees like armies of
pikemen with ragged flags, ghostly beaches, tremendous, thundering rivers, and rocky islands hewn into agonized shapes and plastered with an odd, papery plant curling up at the edges like yellow parchment. It is bigger than Europe, empty of people and strange as the moon. And I think how, yes, this is the way King Francis rewards his old friend and divests himself of a doctrinal embarrassment.

At first I hear the General's words as if he meant them, and I think how jolly a little house in the country will be. But then I notice the malicious twist of his mouth and hear Richard's gasp and look again through the porthole and wonder, What house? What duchy? What settlement? And when has the General, who squabbles with everyone, ever rewarded error?

The General's forefinger taps the map before him. Maps never look like the territory. Their relation to geography, it seems to me, has always been abstract if not outright deceptive. I peer at the spot and puzzle out the words: Isle des Demons.

I glance outside as the ship glides almost imperceptibly to a halt. The rise and fall of the waves has abated; we are in some sort of sheltered place. We've trimmed sail and angled toward the shore. Gnarled pillars of rock balancing flowerpots on their heads loom in the dusk. Delicate flowers and dwarf trees struggle for life amid the rocks. Chiefly, I am aware of the large number of birds, gazing at us unruffled as we glide toward them. Bird shit cakes the rocks along the foreshore and dribbles down their flanks.

My house, my duchy. For a moment, I actually imagine I see a house, lead-roofed and green, in the twilight. The shrieks of the birds are like the noises devils make in Hell, I think. The birds rise suddenly from shoreline and surf, filling the sky with a thousand fluttering, whistling wings.

What do you do with a headstrong girl? Always a difficult question.

Kill her, maim her, amputate limbs, pour acid over her face, put out her eyes, shave her head, put her in a brothel or a nunnery, or simply get her pregnant and marry her. Better yet, maroon her on a deserted island lest she spread the contagion of discontent to other girls or even men, though men are generally impervious. Keep her away from shops and books and looking glasses and friends and lovers. Forget her.

This was the General's solution.

And after, when the General met the bear in the darkened cemetery by the Church of the Holy Innocents, he thought of me. When he was found the next morning, clawed to death, the evidence of his mutilated body could not be believed. A young physician, new from Montpelier, pronounced him dead of multiple stab wounds. But the rumour spread that he had met a bear escaped from a circus, a dancing bear from Poland. Knife wounds from an unknown assailant, said the magistrate's report, but it was a Canadian bear with a woman's heart, and the General remembered me when he saw it, though he had barely given me a thought in fifteen years.

And I think, yes, there was a plan about a nunnery. I heard my father discussing it with Maignant, his secretary. He said something about my disobedient temperament, my libidinous and bookish nature, my many indiscretions (including a certain louche tennis player down on his luck who kept coming around, sponging money), and the child, not to mention the fact that in a nunnery I would be legally dead and thus have no further claim on the family purse, no question of dowry or inheritance. The child was already three, a big boy brought up in the household by the servants, of whom one was said to be his mother, though everyone knew he was mine. He was wild as me, with his black curls and a tendency to pull up his little skirts and show his impudent cock to the ladies of the house, which I adored.

But there came a letter one day from the General asking Papa for money for his voyage to Canada, which, despite the King's munificence, was under-financed and would be delayed. The General was notoriously improvident, impecunious and impractical (his estate in Roberval had been seized once for debt) but also a gallant, pious relative and a crony of the King, a circumstance which caused my father no end of envy and bitterness. Maignant showed me the letter — have I said Maignant was one of my lovers? Obese and hairless, with an organ the size of a sparrow's and an insistent lubricity surprising in a priest and bookkeeper, he loved me well, taught me to cipher and kept as many of my secrets as he could.

I was nineteen, with all my teeth except three, arid possessed of a backside that made my life both difficult and sublime. I had learned to read from Maignant and a Jesuit tutor named Tobini
(who I believe was born Jewish and converted in order to join that most modern and decadent of the new orders — later he was burned by the Dominicans in Paris, a direct result of his adherence to certain proscribed or irreverent ideas). I knew Latin, Italian and some English and owned a copy of Tyndale's little pocket New Testament, which I read daily in order to combine religious meditation with language practice. I loved God and myself and despised Protestants and heretics, though I thought the world a more exciting place for all the conflict and never missed a public burning or decapitation.

I owned forty-three books, including two by Erasmus, Clement
Marot's Adolescence Clementine,
Marguerite de Navarre's anonymously published volume of devotional verse,
Mirror of a Sinful Soul,
which the Dominicans banned as blasphemous until the King informed them his sister was the author, three other works still on the List, and a medical textbook with drawings made from the bodies of dead people. I had read
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,
mostly for his description of the land of Lamory, where everyone goes naked, women give themselves freely to any man, and adults eat children, a novel form of population control. I knew Dicuil's account (in
De mensera orbis terrae
) of St. Brendan's voyage to the Fortunate Isles, with his Irish monks in their peculiar round boats, carrying their books, bells and croziers. I had dreamed of the Northmen's Thule, the Isles of the Blest written of by the ancients, Anthilia, Saluaga and the Isle of the Seven Cities, Satanaxes. I had seen five savages from Brazil in Paris, looking like Tartars with their fierce tattoos and empty faces.

When the letter came, I saw my chance and begged my father to send me to the New World, whatever it cost him. What do you do with a headstrong girl? he asked himself. I think he
was relieved. He looked to the family's coat of arms, two bears rampant over a field of waves quartered with three lions couchant, an exceedingly ancient insignia the meaning of which had been lost by our etiolate and retiring ancestors (the high-born courtiers call us
petite maison
). He was sure he would never see me again. Wild beasts would eat me, or I would be trampled to death by the famous one-footed savages of the antipodes, or we would simply sink along the way.

I took Bastienne, my nurse, a retired whore, pander, pornographer and abortionist who came into the family on the strongest possible recommendation from the village priest, who was somewhat in her debt. And Richard, the so-called Comte d'Epirgny (who claimed to have played the King himself once on a clay court in Paris on the feast day of St. Chrysostom), begged his way aboard at the last minute, offering his tennis arm for the defence of the Cross and the domestication of the native inhabitants.

I have sufficient education to be aware of certain fore-shadowings, signs, omens, parallels, prognostications and analogies. Classical literature teems with stories of extreme child-rearing practices: young single girls left on rocks or deserted islands or thrust into dark tunnels as punishments or sacrifices or tribute or simply for their nutrient value vis-à-vis whatever slavering monster happens by.

I am particularly reminded of the Greek princess Iphigenia, whose father Agamemnon put her to death on a lonely beach on the shaky theory that this act would ensure decent sailing over to Troy, where he hoped to win back his brother's runaway wife Helen (another woman led astray by her heart in a world of men). It's a male thing, I suppose, not to be persuaded from murder by the threat of revenge, pangs of conscience, pity, justice, the tug of family affection, not to mention the purely unscientific basis of the premise that killing a virgin will cause sunshine and warm, westerly breezes. Surely Agamemnon must have known this would come back to haunt him.

Surely the General must know this will come back to haunt him, I think, as I observe preparations for my disposal. I watch with a certain objectivity, having reached that natural human state of disbelief in the face of disasters soon to fall about one's ears. I have heard of false executions staged to punish mischievous nobility, and I imagine that my so-called uncle wishes to break my spirit with a show of cruelty and animus. I watch the crew struggle to lower a leaky clinker-built rowboat over the side. Someone has neglected to measure the ropes fore and aft, and the rope aft, being short, drags Jehan de Nantes overboard. He strikes his head on the stern of the boat and sinks but is rescued moments later by his lover, a large, buoyant woman everyone calls Petite Pitou. She has only one eye and a slash of pure white hair in the middle of her head from a sword blow during a peasant riot, and most of the ship's company is afraid of her temper.

The rowboat being righted and supplied with six oarsmen and a bailing bucket, it is loaded with things I will need on my new estate: a barrel of salt fish and my trunk of gowns, hose and underclothes (books concealed under the false bottom). It does
not seem like much. It does not seem as if anyone has taken thought for my future. In fact, it seems more and more like a joke or an execution. But I cannot read the General's face as he stands with his hands behind his back, Léon's stained and bitten leash dangling almost to the deck.

A quarrel breaks out, a brief, violent discussion as to whether or not the barrel of salt fish might be needed on the voyage into the interior, and wouldn't I surely be able to find food for myself on this hospitable island, birds' eggs, for example? The Comte d'Epirgny trembles at my side, from an access of pity, I think, though he also seems torn. He is an indecisive man, kindly and lustful but lacking in courage and largeness of character. I wonder what he is thinking.

Conscience prevails, and I am allowed the barrel of salt fish. Once that decision is made, the ship's company seems to relent, and all sorts of extra provisions are thrown into the rowboat: an iron hatchet with a broken handle, a rusty dagger, a sword someone sat on and bent, a pewter plate, a bag of onions, a half-dozen fat candles, the bedding from my cabin, sundry combs, trinkets, necklaces, earrings (none of my valuable jewels, which vanish in transit), a three-legged chair, a quantity of fishnet in need of mending, the stump of a mending needle, some old ship's sail for shelter. The diminutive boat rides low in the water, thumping against the hull planks with the motion of the waves. It looks like the repository for everything useless, old and broken, the things no one knew what to do with but weren't quite ready to throw overboard.