Elle (4 page)

The last to go over is my nurse Bastienne, trussed like a capon in a butcher shop, with a rope under her armpits and her hairy legs swinging beneath her skirts. One of her wooden clogs falls off as she struggles and drops into the gulf with a splash.
She weeps, wails and crosses herself, holds out her hands to the General and prays to the Virgin in a pathetic and undignified display of cowardice. Her hysteria is infectious. My knees buckle, but I catch Richard's sleeve to steady myself before anyone notices.

I gaze at the foreshore of my little island kingdom. It is rank wilderness, all trees and rocks with birds swinging on the off-shore breezes. As for the Great River of Canada, I cannot see the other side of its huge mouth. It looks and acts like a sea or the ocean, grey waves slopping against the rocks, tides rushing in and out, horizon like the curve of a dirty eggshell. Words that come to mind: desolate, dreary, deserted, dreadful, drafty.

Civilization's vanguard consists of a dirty, smelly, rat-infested hulk, notable for its familiar (though stale and often rotten) food, and a ship's company of every social class save royalty but mostly one-eyed, impoverished, limping, lousy, raggedy, snaggletoothed dregs, led by a captious and judgmental social climber. For weeks I have wished myself off this ship, wished to feel dry land under my feet, to have the whole world to roam in instead of this cockleshell imitation of a world. What was I thinking?

Half a dozen deckhands wrench me from my thoughts, hoisting me up like a sack. Someone takes the opportunity to cup a breast, a moment of sly lust I do not find unappealing. The ship's block creaks as I dangle clear, swinging to and fro in front of the crew and colonists, a host of moony faces looking suddenly subdued. The seabirds are up all along the island shore, expectant, disturbed at my ungainly flight. Richard bites his hands. The General bites his moustache. I plop down awkwardly on the pyramid of my effects and am saved from toppling into the water only by a jerk of the rope, which almost drags me into the air again.

We start for shore, six pale, underfed seamen rowing with their eyes on the water slopping in the bottom of the boat. Bastienne grips my hands and wails. The birds cry out. Richard's face looms above us as we slip along the ship's hull, animated, attentive, the way he looks on the tennis court, when he is more himself than at any other time, closer to Aristotle's form than most of us can hope ever to be. His indecisiveness is gone. He bobs out of sight, then three heavy arquebuses come flying into the boat, laying one of the rowers out cold. The guns are followed by a barrel of powder, a box of fuses, a couple of lead pigs, an iron melting pot, a hinged bullet mould and a bag of tennis balls.

Brandishing his favourite tennis racquet like a broadsword, Richard, Comte d'Épirgny himself leaps to the rail, balancing there briefly, imitating the General's great dog Léon in his zeal. My love, he shouts, I shall never abandon you. He leaps but misses the boat, lands in the water, comes up spluttering near enough to be rescued, though he loses one of his great boots and the tennis racquet. He ends up shivering next to me, looking a great deal less heroic than I daresay he intended. I do not know what to make of this afflatus of romance and courage in a tennis player. It occurs to me that he will eat a lot of salt fish, and there won't be quite so much for me.

We are not far from shore. I give Richard my cloak. My bosom heaves with an emotion I cannot identify. Fear, mostly. Far away on the ship, someone raises a ragged cheer for the General. The shouts ring flat and tinny on the hot sea air. I almost miss the stink of civilization, though the seamen in the boat carry a redolence of that world of grace whence I am expelled. I say a prayer, then notice a brilliant white bird with a yellow beak and black tips on its wings gliding on the air just feet from where I sit, wings outspread like a statue of our Lord in the little church at
Saint-Malo where we heard Mass in the hour of our departure.

I know that I shall die upon this alien shore, this coastline of mystery, this place called Canada. I don't want to die. I like fucking and food and reading books and arguing with my tutor and waking up with the sun pouring in the window in the morning. The smell of the new land is fresh, almost no smell at all, a new world. I spell out a curse in my head — something about the winds being bad, the savages hateful, the General's troops rebellious and the stone prevalent. I cannot foresee the bear. The bear is far in the future.

But when the boat's keel grinds against the granite headland and the shorebirds rise again in a flickering cloud, I jump into the shallows, heedless of my skirts, and stride straight up onto the dry land. My thought: I must be the first ashore, ahead of the dirty oarsmen, my shivering lover, my quaking nurse. I must be the first French woman to set foot in this world, the first of the General's expedition to land, the first colonist in Canada. (For the record, I am wearing scarlet stockings with garters, red velvet shoes, white taffeta petticoats with a gown of the same cloth but tawny in colour, and an upper coat of red damask. I can see right away that the shoes will not last.)

I feel that I have entered the orders of the dreamed. By this I mean that I have entered a place where the old definitions, words themselves, no longer apply, a world strange beyond
anything I could have imagined save that which exists in the realm of Morpheus or in the Land of the Dead or on the surface of the moon, which, I have read, is a large orbicular planet that circles the earth and is covered with craters and scuff marks like a tennis ball. We have a name for such a place as this — wilderness. It is a name for the thing without a name, for everything that is not us, not me. It is a place without God or correction, with no knowledge of philosophy, science, cookery or the arts, including the art of love — and those who dwell therein are known as savages.

I turn and watch the oarsmen hastily offloading the rowboat's cargo. Guns, salt fish, old sails, nets, bag of balls and Bastienne are all dumped in the shallows. I notice my trunk of dresses and books bobbing gently in the swell, drifting back out to sea. The men delay a moment to bail before pushing off, casting guilty glances back in my direction, as if I might actually have the power to cause them harm. Richard huddles at the tide line in my cloak, searching the waves desperately for his racquet. I feel suddenly tiny on the edge of this vast, unknown and inscrutable continent. The words, definitions and customs I have known all my life row quickly back to the General's ship in the guise of six shabby oarsmen. Their shipmates circle the windlass, hauling anchor, and scramble in the rigging to set sufficient sail to catch the westerly breeze and tack offshore for sea room.

Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I think, as the ship diminishes against the huge expanse of the Great River's gulf and the even larger and more meaningless expanse of sky. I am terrified. I drop to my knees as if to pray, as if to beg my uncle the General for a reprieve (when really I am just feeling a trifle faint). No doubt he is watching with a glass for just such a show of submission.

The sun glows like an armourer's forge. It glints off the water into my eyes, so that everything seems doubly illuminated, flat and insubstantial under that awful light. Does God's sure hand extend this far beyond the stink of civilization and the throw of language? Does He visit Canada? The expedition's three chaplains, along with the symbols, sacraments, hymns, rites, holy wine and wafers of my religion, are sailing away from me. Now there will be no one to bless my corpse when I am gone.

Bastienne's turnip face appears before me, screwed up against the light, tear-stained, sooty from lack of washing, devious, self-pitying, loving, lewd, kindly, worried and stupid. She was a better mother to me than my mother, though she is a pimp at heart and has often taken delight in forwarding my lubricious stratagems. And, of course, my father hardly bears mentioning, having taken to heart Aquinas's teaching on marriage: that on the whole it is a good thing for a man to stay married because he is more rational than the mother and thus more capable of educating the children (also stronger and more capable of inflicting punishment).

But Bastienne says nothing. Apparently, there is nothing to say. The ship's departure has robbed us of the power of speech, though at other times she is a font of malicious gossip, salacious tales, erotic arcana (oh, my God, the goat turd pessary), irresponsible advice and herbal lore. Without a word, we set about retrieving the articles bobbing amongst the rocks, laying them out to dry. Richard, the count of nothing now, a new Adam, is dumb and useless, mourning his missing tennis racquet. I lay his bag of balls next to him, touch his arm lightly to encourage him. He doesn't seem to notice. From time to time, we glance toward the ship receding in the west. And just as often we glance inland where, beyond the forest verge and the rocky pillars that seem
sculpted by madmen, trees extend in an unbroken mass to a line of low purple mountains, which hang along the horizon like a curtain.

Having dragged ashore these pieces of bric-a-brac, the cast-offs of France, and assembled them on the rocks, Bastienne and I lapse into a stunned melancholy. The three of us wander about, peering upstream and downstream (although these words don't quite make sense given the vast and unriverlike nature of the gulf). Bastienne discovers a trickle of fresh water oozing from a rocky cleft, which refreshes us and assures me that we will not die right away from thirst.

As the afternoon wears on, this dreary moment seems to stretch to infinity, punctuated only by clouds of mosquitos and a kind of biting fly which does enormous damage to Richard, who barely notices the blood dripping from his stippled flesh. He looks beautiful, Christlike, I would say, were this not blasphemy; he reminds me of illuminations in books which show Jesus bleeding from his crown of thorns. This thought sends me into a little swoon of fantasy: Richard stretched on a bed, his arms wide, his eyes turned piously upward, a bloody bandage round his head, and myself astride, ass cheeks smacking against his thighs. But thoughts of love and sacrilege cannot .distract me for long in this new environment.

We are waiting for something to happen, something we might recognize as a happening. I have taken possession of an estate that is not an estate. I have a pain in my belly, possibly incipient starvation but perhaps something else entirely. If Richard is the new Adam, then I am the new Eve — expelled from the garden (the General's ship, miniature of my civilization) into the world beyond (read wilderness) for my sin (we all have much to be guilty for).

After a while, a line of black clouds issues from behind the range of purple mountains inland and surges toward us like a wave. Night falls. It begins to rain. These are recognizable events but otherwise disconcerting. The three of us huddle on a bed of damp evergreen needles and moss beneath a rock overhang. Lightning flashes now and again. In the shadows, we spy every kind of animal from bears to chimeras, not to mention the monopods, amazons, mermaids and giant crocodiles that inhabit this region (according to our leading cosmologists who have deduced these facts from Scripture and the works of Aristotle). The night grows chill. I am fairly certain that death would have been preferable to spending time in Canada.

After one spectacular lightning burst, when we have lost track of time and exist only in an agonized mode of fear, boredom and discomfort, Richard, the ex-Comte d'Epirgny, suddenly cries out and plunges headlong into the darkness. Bastienne and I call him back, but what comes back is only the sound of waves crashing against rocks and rain falling heavily around us. Then, almost at once, he returns. There is no light to see him by, but I can sense his triumph. He is soaked from head to foot but vibrates with excitement. Here, he says, grasping my hand, thrusting his racquet into my fingers. All is not lost.

I wrap him in my cloak again, but he demurs. A moment later (in another flash of light), I catch a glimpse of him, a gangly, sodden Frenchman with his wet hair plastered against his skull, his moustaches streaming down his cheeks, practising his strokes on a little rock pinnacle above the waves. I think how lucky he is to have found something safe and familiar. And then I think how foolish he seems, clinging with such glee to the familiar amid the strangeness of everything else.

And then I think, I am pregnant.

Several days pass unencumbered by the light of culture, the blessing of the church, French cookery, sex, shelter from the elements, witty conversation, sleep, laughter, shopping, sunshine. I place my books upon a rock to dry when it isn't raining, which instantly brings on the rain. In the night, some animal chews the pages of my Bible. Bastienne says we might strip the leather bindings and glue and boil them for food. At all events, the cause of literature has been set back in Canada.

Richard, thinner already yet full of febrile enthusiasm and relentless energy, has begun to construct the first tennis court in the country. He has discovered a flat stretch of beach sand, nearly square and nearly enclosed by rock walls, the only disadvantage being that it is submerged at high tide. Every day, as soon as the tide goes out, Richard shouts with dismay at the damage done to his court and sets to work scraping and levelling, using the lid of my trunk lashed to a tree branch.

When he is lucky, he finds time for a half-hour of ball-bashing before the tide begins to creep back. His racquet is warped. Balls carom off the rocks into the water or fail to bounce off the damp beach sand. But he is optimistic, even cheerful in the face of our difficulties, although his range of verbal expression is limited to bromides he picked up reading popular books of chivalry and romance. I shall never abandon you. All is not lost. The sun will come out tomorrow. Is that corner true, or do I need to scrape more sand off the centre
court? His conversation reminds me of what he is not and, tangentially, why I fell in love with him.