Elle (5 page)

And I wonder about a country founded by such disparate heroes as Richard and the Sieur de Roberval, who, if combined, still might not amount to a real man. Poor Canada, destined always to be on the edge of things, inimical to books and writing, plagued by insects in the summer and ice in the winter, populated by the sons and daughters of ambitious, narrow, pious, impecunious Protestants and inarticulate but lusty Catholic tennis players, not to mention the rest of the riff-raff on the expedition, drawn, by the King's order, from the prisons of Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Rouen and Dijon — thieves, abortionists, frauds, panders, whores, footpads, assassins, along with the destitute and the witless, every kind of rogue except heretics, traitors and counterfeiters who were deemed unsuitable to the dignity of our pious enterprise. (I watched the future citizens of Canada troop into Saint-Malo, manacled together and under guard. Among them walked a pale, terrified girl, about fifteen, innocent of any crime, who for love had herself chained to one of the felons, determined to share his fate. Her name was Guillemette Jansart. He used her abominably, but she would not abandon him. Her thin face haunts my dreams as if it were my own.)

On the third day, I make a circuit of the island, which takes upwards of three hours at low tide, when I can tie my skirts up to my waist and scramble around the ring of barren rocks that surround the pine-choked interior. Everywhere I step, there are bird droppings. Thousands take flight every time I come suddenly around a rock. Though, having little experience of human beings, the birds quickly settle back to their perches. At night, their gabbling and shrieking does sound like a parliament
of demons. But as far as I can tell, there are no actual demons, monsters or mythical beings hereabouts, nor savages, friendly or otherwise, nor game (aside from the squirrels and mice which eat my books).

I have practised in my head words of greeting and general conversation, gleaned from hastily scribbled word lists M. Cartier once gave me to copy, to prepare myself should we encounter an inhabitant. The native word for girl is
agnyaquesta.
For friend,
aguyase.
Pubic hair,
aggonson.
Look at me,
quatgathoma.
The moon,
assomaha.
Give me supper,
quazahoa quatfream.
Testicles,
xista.
My mother,
adhanahoe.
Let us go to bed,
casigno agnydahoa.
Many thanks,
adgnyeusce.
With no one about to correct me, I congratulate myself on my pronunciation and imagine becoming a considerable social success when contact is finally made with the indigenous peoples. I try to teach the others. I tell Richard he must speak to me in the savage tongue or not at all. All is not lost, he says. I will never abandon you.

By the fifth evening, we keep a fire burning day and night. I discover that plastering my skin with mud discourages the insects (some of them). In firelight, we look like ghosts, our skin pale ochre from the dust. I make my bed on a mattress of pine needles and moss, which are lumpy for sleeping on though an improvement over bare rocks and fragrant to the senses. The three of us sleep in a huddle like a litter of pigs, Richard and Bastienne on either side of me. Over our heads, I have arranged some branches and a piece of sail. I make Richard take an after-noon from court construction to teach me the use of the arquebus. I mount the three weapons on rocks, ready to shoot in the general direction of the forest, from which I assume any attack will develop (and in case my command of the native speech fails to produce
instant amity). I wear the bent sword on a belt slung over my shoulder. My hands are scraped and burned. My hair is a mane.

I am no longer beautiful, or French, or related to anyone, or learned. I think of my children, the one I gave to the servants long ago and the one cooking inside me now. I swagger with my belly thrust out, though in truth it is shrinking, sway like cow and vomit noisily in the morning. Once Richard espies me peeing in the light of
assomaha.
I say,
Casigno agnydahoa.
For once he seems to understand, and we make love beside the sleeping Bastienne, with the cries of the birds rising in the background.

I have not told him about the baby. It would only send him into a panic. Richard thinks I have gone mad from being stranded on this island. He rescues me with his tennis court, while I gibber incomprehensible words. I cherish him for his faith in his own heroics, for the way he gallantly assumes the roles of father, lover, saviour and pioneering sports enthusiast. He will act the way he has learned to act, even though it is impractical in the New World and will lead only to starvation or other forms of premature extinction.

The savages call their god
Cudragny,
according to M. Cartier. I wonder how different a god he is from ours. Of course, we have two now, which will be very difficult to explain. On the eighth day, it occurs to me there may be no God at all. Richard has come down with a fever. At midday, we sight a sail in the distance. I nearly set my skirts alight throwing wood on the fire, trying to draw its attention. Richard fires an arquebus. Bastienne kneels on the beach, throwing clods of earth over her head. I call on the saints and martyrs, the Mother of God. I promise my unborn child to the priests. I whisper a prayer to Mahomet and one to the Lord Cudragny. In this, I follow the
ancient Roman custom of adopting the gods of conquered tribes into their own capacious pantheon (I read about this in a book).

But the sail disappears.

In 1533, King Francis had the bones of Petrarch's beloved Laura retrieved from her tomb so that he could gaze upon her timeless beauty. It was a modern moment. No one knows what happened to the bones.

Francis named the General King of Canada, but everywhere his wife goes, the backbiters call her Queen of Nadaz, Queen of Nowhere.

The most up-to-date geographers, cosmographers, map-makers, astrologers, admirals, kings, court jesters and merchant adventurers of Europe contend that Canada is: (a) a thin strip of land running north-south and dividing the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific Ocean; (b) an archipelago of large and small islands encompassing a labyrinth of channels leading more or less directly from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and (c) a continent enclosing a vast inland sea — some call it the Sea of Verrazano — with river outlets flowing east, north and possibly west to the Pacific Ocean (only one or two sharpish fellows note that this is physically impossible).

In his delirium, my lover, Richard, Comte d'Epirgny, one-time boy wonder of the tennis courts of Orleans, takes me for a Spanish priest named Pedrosa Mimosa, who, by internal evidence,
is corpulent, avaricious, bald, lewd, holy and wise — a true saint of the cross, much annoyed by the Lutherans' allowing their clergy to marry. Evidently the good Catalan friar has been a confidante and familiar of my Richard's dreams since childhood, a boyish fancy who took the road to holiness whilst Richard turned to sport.

All this is startling to me, who had no intimation of my lover's depths and complexities. In truth I am shocked when, with utmost gravity, he begs me to hear his confession and begins to list his infidelities, passions, passing fancies, regrets, petty thefts, embezzlements, forgeries and sundry small debts he left unpaid in France. But then, I think, he did jump over-board of his own free will and maroon himself on this lonely coast for my sake. Why? Love is a mystery. The fact that it goes hand in hand with betrayal suggests to me that we never ask the right questions of our lovers.

In spite of my cynical heart, I cannot hold back a tear of purely feminine sadness at the news that he slept with my father's dog boy, my chambermaid and even Pip, the ship's boy on our recent voyage.

All that time I thought you were tired, I say, from playing tennis. And then I thought you were depressed because the tennis wasn't going well.

There are more, he says.

You'd better shut up, I say, in case you survive.

Struggling, he gathers his wits, looks into my eyes and says, I couldn't live without you. But then he spoils this declaration by whispering the name of a slow girl who worked in my father's cow barn.

My poor confused Richard, I think. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to forgive you.

Do you forgive me? he asks coincidentally, mentioning another name I do not recognize.

His skin turns yellow. Dark blotches, like purple shadows, erupt over his chest and throat. He claims he can't catch his breath, yet breathes in halting gasps and belches that seem likely to burst his ribs. He shivers while he sweats with fever and claims little brown people have buried him in ice without his clothes. Most of the time he has an erection, which is an improvement.

A month has passed since the General stranded me on this lonesome shore. We are living in a hut Bastienne and I built of branches, barrel staves, sailcloth and rocks, the crevices stuffed with mud and moss. The inside is large enough to enclose my. bedding, with no room to stand up, and a small annex in the back for the powder and tools. I have unpacked my court gowns, and we pile them on top of us at bedtime for warmth. Twice Richard has contrived to get into one of the gowns. I think how unfair it is that catastrophe has allowed him to become more himself while I have turned into a construction worker.

We have eaten the books, using the bits we found inedible to kindle the fire in desperate circumstances — the mornings have turned chilly. I keep only the English Bible, much chewed by rodents, for its strangeness and the vulgar force of its language. Its very foreignness in this foreign land somehow soothes my heart. We have also eaten most of the salt fish — dry, stewed, rendered into soup, baked in hot coals, sautéed with fat, wrapped in kelp, soaked in brine and chewed like candy.

I have become adept at supplementing our stores by walking around the island whacking seabirds' heads with Richard's
tennis racquet. They are, as I have noted, fearless and respond to my approach by standing deferentially, shuffling their little webbed feet like earnest peasants until I whack them. Some-times I go out there and whack a few even when we have no need. It is cruel, I shall be punished for it, but, on the whole, things have not been going well, and someone needs to suffer.

Bastienne collects the feathers in a bag she has made out of two of my gowns. When she fills the bag, we will be able to crawl inside at night for warmth. This is a shrewd and inventive scheme, and surprising, for I myself do not look ahead, cannot bear to speculate upon the winter climate, which, I am told, is inimical to Europeans, who suffer horribly from frostbite, scurvy, lethargy and melancholy during the snowy months (while the natives walk about in loose blankets made of animal pelts). Of larger animals, aside from the occasional seal or sea cat in the distance, we have seen none, and I despair of making anything furry and useful out of mouse and squirrel skins.

We do not wash. Our home looks like a pile of sticks and stones, smells like a midden. There are bird bones, broken feathers, rotting animal guts and piles of shit everywhere you look. I have a small hand mirror that was hidden away in my trunk, but I cannot bear to look at myself, covered as I am with red mud, insect bites, scrapes, calluses and bruises. In my own country, I would be laughed at and taken for a savage.

One evening, late in August, there is a whiff of frost in the air. The sky is clear. Above our heads, the Great Bear and the Little Bear whirl around the sky's centre peg. A whale breeches and lies puffing just off shore. The seabirds coo. Richard raves in the hut, replaying his match against the King on the Feast of
St. Chrysostom, the seats above the court crowded with lovely, shallow, insipid women and foolish, vain, romantic men wearing slashed pantaloons, enormous codpieces and gold-trimmed berets that flop over their ears. Richard is sometimes himself, sometimes the King and sometimes a spectator explaining shots to a woman he is trying to impress.

Bastienne bleeds him, offers him a decoction of herbs and moss, though she has already tried other recipes without success. In the Old World, she was wonderfully adept with abortifacients, fumigations, purgatives, soporifics and medicinals. But she recognizes hardly any of the native plants, so every trial is an experiment. The disgusting brown fluid she thought would allay the fever turned out to be a powerful purgative, and the poultice blistered his skin, and the soporific made him unmentionably randy one night. Once she asked me if I wished to do away with the child. My answer: No.

The sky that night is wondrous to behold: bars of light, glowing clouds, explosions, rivers of fire that seem to dance to an unheard music. I do not believe the phenomenon has been reported in my part of the world. I sit by the fire with my feet in a bag of duck feathers and watch the display with a tumult in my heart. Richard cries out, You should have seen me then, my love. You should have seen me in my prime. In the sky a bearded face appears, stretching from horizon to horizon, and just as quickly fades to nothing. Then Richard shouts: You can't come for me yet. I am winning.

There is a sudden urgency in his voice. We drag him into the fresh air. The hut stinks of shit and vomit. I give him my breast for a pillow, he fondles my nipple. My love, my love, he whispers. The sky blazes up anew. Bastienne rubs his icy feet. He shouts, A point! I passed him along the wall and nearly tied his legs in
a knot. His face is red as a ham. You have to let him win, I say. It's the King. Richard cries, One more point. Oh, my love, you should have seen the day.

He watches the lights dancing in the sky, his cold fingers slip away from my breast. I whisper about the baby, but he seems not to notice.
Quatgathoma
, I say.
Quatgathoma.
He looks into my eyes.
Adgnyeusce,
I say. He suddenly gives a pathetic little kick, his body arches, the breath whistles out of him like a cry, and he expires.

Something disturbs the birds. A rustling sound whispers through the rookery, then a thunder of wings and piercing calls. The birds rise as one, circle the island, almost blotting out the dancing lights.