Elle (7 page)

Nights, I dream of cannibals. I dream I am a cannibal, cooking Bastienne in a pot. My baby is a cannibal, eating me. Then I wake myself up because there is nothing worse than dreaming about food when you have none. I go outside and
gaze at the stars. I walk around the island to keep warm. The rocks are windswept, clean of snow, which seems to collect in clefts and among the trees inland. But there is a fine dusting of powder over everything on this quiet night. I recall it is near the feast day of Jesus' birth. In the village where I grew up, the peasants would decorate a tree in the forest — a pagan rite, full of magic, much disapproved in official circles. Above me, the bears circle, never setting beneath the line of the horizon, never dying, with their tails elongated where Zeus grasped them when he flung them into the heavens.

At the northern headland, where the island comes to a point like an arrow aimed downstream toward the Atlantic, the snow is scuffed and creased. Perhaps another vagrant seal has landed, I think. I kneel to make a closer investigation. Such is the power of the mind that initial assumptions can colour the evidence of our eyes. I think again, yes, a seal. But there, clear in the moon-light, is a left footprint and a right footprint, and they seem to walk about bipedally, which is fairly unusual for a seal (admittedly, my knowledge of seal lore is limited). They emerge from the water, though, like a seal. But here I detect a long keel line in the snow. So, I say to myself, this seal arrived in a boat and walks around on his hind legs. I'll wait. I'll make an ambush. He'll come back. We'll eat like kings and queens.

I hide behind a rock and rub my feet with my hands to keep them from freezing. Soon I am dreaming of intercourse with a strange seal-man with a furry, bewhiskered face on top of his human face. Then I dream of giving birth. I grasp the squirming, slippery thing to my breast and peep down to see its face, which resembles a turnip. For some reason, I find giving birth to a turnip reassuring.

When I awake, my feet are blue and so cold I cannot walk.

I crawl painfully down to the shore in an agony of fear and expectation. Like many women, I know what I don't know — a duplicity of mental operation caused by living in a world run by men and Dominican priests. The tracks are indubitably human. They are clearer and much less dreamlike in the dawn light. After coming ashore, they stand and shuffle a moment, perhaps in the process of dragging the boat onto the rocks. Then they strike off on a tour of the island perimeter.

I scramble after them, trying to be stealthy (not easy for a girl of my class and experience), slipping from rock to ice slab to driftwood log, biting my lips, weeping silently. Why does everything new seem like a threat? Perhaps he will be the seal-man of my dreams. Perhaps he will feed us and bring us to his city. He walks all the way around the island to the hut. There he stops, seems to meditate while keeping himself hidden in the lee of a boulder. I can see what he sees, two mounds, a straw woman dressed for court, a skull, a pile of bones, three arquebuses aimed at nothing. Perhaps the scene is as mysterious to him as he to me, as difficult a book to read. What general assumptions did he bring with him to this island? Am I the bird-woman of his fancy? The legendary cormorant girl bent on dragging him to his doom beneath the waves?

After pausing, he gives the hut a wide berth, tiptoeing (bent double, I imagine, with an arrow notched in his bow) from rock to rock, mystified, frightened. Then he races back to his boat and disappears. I have made the circuit of the island on my knees without even noticing the torn condition of my stockings, my scraped shins, my toes beginning to blister. Now I rush home, still heedless of my wounds. A man was here. Now he's gone. I have crawled in his footsteps, read his mind. I am suddenly not dead. It's almost as good as having a social life.

I break into the hut, breathless and babbling. I tell Bastienne eighty-nine times that I have seen tracks. A man, I say. We are redeemed. Of course he might kill us, we could look on the dark side, but you know the natives were friendly to M. Cartier before he gave them reason to hate him. Maybe this one doesn't know about M. Cartier. I own all this now — he's one of my people. I shall claim my rights. We'll get him to build a better house. Peasants are always better at that than the nobility. Perhaps he's not a peasant, but he'll find me some.

Bastienne refuses to wake up and listen. It is so contrary of her. Bastienne, I cry. Bastienne, we are watched. We are watched. I shake her shoulders, trying to rouse her, but she is stiff with death, and I back out of the hut in horror.

God's wounds, I am a fool. Vanity and rebelliousness brought me here. Arrogance and vanity. My little mother is dead. I thought I had built us a home, but it is a tomb. I only wanted love, but everything I loved I have caused to die.

JANUARY-APRIL, 1543

The wind begins to displace what is left of my thoughts, whistling among the stone outcrops, shrieking over the empty rookery, blasting the trees, which have a sinister, malformed look, as if the wind had tortured them before freezing them in place. The wind screams like a hundred hundred demons, far worse than the screaming of the birds, which in retrospect seems like the muffled cooing of doves on my father's estate. Night succeeds day in such a frantic rhythm that dawn barely pales the horizon before darkness crashes upon me.

I crouch in the lee of the hut, now a grave, with my bags of feathers bundled about me. My lover rests in his burial mound, and next to me lies the corpse of my spirit mother, who, now that I think of it, may have done more harm than good in encouraging my wayward heart. Rebelliousness has led me, precisely, here, where I wish I could die sooner rather than later, though for some reason — an unexpectedly robust constitution — I cannot even accomplish that.

I have made many mistakes. I blame printed books for this, a recent invention which has led us to solitary pleasures: reason, private opinions, moral relativism, Lutheranism and masturbation. I cannot bear to go inside, where my Bastienne lies frozen in state, because she reminds me of my loneliness. All I want is to sit here and weep, but my tears turn into icicles, just
as ice congeals along the shore. The whole world is freezing. (Prior to this I thought Hell would be hot.)

I only want to be unconscious, to fall asleep beneath the counterpane of snow. But sleep evades me. The wind howls, icy fingers probe my limbs to the bone. Night follows night, the elements in fantastic disarray. The demons of fear, guilt and self-doubt assault my dreams. I am in no fit state to die, though when I try to pray, the words come out as curses. (Better to curse God, I suppose, than to go off and invent another one — I am still closer to divine grace than the Protestants.) I have my English Bible — its translator was burned at the stake, a fate which just now seems preferable to my current torment — and Richard's tennis racquet and a baby (a still-warm lump inside me), but these are little consolation.

In idle moments, I recall a savage girl living on M. Cartier's farm at Limoilou. Her parents had offered her to the captain as a gift for the return voyage his last time in Canada. (Evidently native child-rearing practices are as thoughtless and irresponsible as those of the French. Dare we ask if her name means Iphigenia in the tongue of the Hochelagans?) M. Cartier's wife, being childless, stood godmother to her when she was baptized and brought her into their home as a serving girl. She did queer work with beads and thread that delighted the ladies. I saw her only once, in shadow, at the back of a large room lit by a fire, bent so close to her needlework that she must have been almost blind. She peered up when someone raised his voice in the company. Dull, pocked skin, lank, thin hair, eyes blank from terror and loneliness — no less marooned in France than I in Canada.

One day (it is day, and suddenly clear and still) I poke Richard's tennis racquet through the snow and perceive a sky so
blue and a world so white that it assaults me with its clarity. Nothing has ever seemed this clear — and I am French, so clarity is beauty. A lone gull shrieks above my head, then sheers off and dives for the open water. Far off, I hear the chuff-chuff of the slushy shore ice grinding in the swell. The air is so cold it seems solid; it would freeze these words were I to speak them, just as it freezes my breath. I am languid from starvation and cold. I cannot imagine why I am still alive. My persistence is an occasion for astonishment and frustration. (It makes a person believe in God — nothing this stupid could be random.)

I unbend my stick limbs and attempt to stand but find myself sitting willy-nilly. I really am a bundle of sticks. I resemble one of those Christs behind the rood screen in the village churches, with the ribs carved outside the skin. My baby has grown smaller instead of larger, as if he entertained second thoughts about being born. I can't feel a thing. Or perhaps I am so inured to pain that I no longer register how much everything hurts. Perhaps not starving and not freezing to death would be agony now. Perhaps I am already dead and just haven't noticed yet. But sitting here in my feather bags, amid that clarity of ice and sky, I suddenly feel giddy. Let us not say happy or filled with grace. But my stone cold heart warms a little with the beauty of the landscape, which, as I now recall, I own, by the grace of his majesty Francis I and the intemperate actions of my unforgiving and ungenerous uncle.

This is a good moment which, as I might have guessed, is really only a prelude to something worse. In Canada, I have learned that feeling good about oneself, entertaining hopes and plans, is a recipe for disaster. I am in the realm of the Lords of Misrule, who, in my former world, caper about only on feast days, disrupting convention, ridiculing the good, tweaking the powerful, exalting the humble, the criminal and the ugly.

What I notice is that the chuff-chuff of the shore ice is exceedingly close and persistent. It has not the leisurely rhythm of the waves on a calm day but is quicker and more erratic and given to the occasional emphatic snort. This takes more time to tell than to think, and as soon as I think it, I twist round and spy a white bear nosing amid the snowy rocks of my lover's grave. This should frighten me, but I am not up to much excitement and so simply note the fact that there is a bear sniffing (chuffchuff) at Richard's grave.

My experience with bears is limited to watching dancing bears and bear-baiting exhibitions at harvest fairs. I once saw the skin of a white bear sent to King Francis when he was still Prince of Angoulême by the King of Russia. The bear died en route, only the skin arrived. This bear is not exactly white, not as white as the snow, more a yellowish-white, and its fur is worn to the skin in places. It is huge — what you would expect — but the hugeness is oddly deflated. The bear is skin and bones, mostly bones, much as I am myself. And it limps on three legs, the fourth held gingerly above the snow, dripping blood. It is clearly old and weak and dejected and pathetic. And it has come here, drawn by the scent of Richard's corpse, in hopes of finding a meal it will not have to hunt or fight for.

It turns its ungainly backside to me, shoves its black nose into a crevice and snuffles wetly, with anticipation. By the look of things, she is female, an old mother bear, a fact which increases my sense of kinship and identification. She begins to dig, using her nose and forepaws to push boulders aside, pausing now and then to lower her nose and sniff. She quivers with a wan excitement that only exaggerates her decrepitude. She is a sad bear, a dying bear, who, like me, is out of place and soon to be extinguished from this land of sudden sunlight and clarity.

It is like a dream: The white bear scrabbles at the feet of the scarecrow woman in court dress. I am not afraid. The bear resembles me in so many particulars (skin, bones, loss of hope). In the distance, I hear a dog barking, though there can be no dog. I manage to rise to my feet and shuffle toward her, looking bear-like in my bags of bird feathers. I brush against an arquebus, still aimed at the contorted pines, though rusty and useless, the priming powder blown away by the wind. I stumble to the grave mound and subside upon a rock, from which I can smell the bear (pungent yet full of warmth) and observe the rheumy gentleness deep in her eyes. Her eyes remind me of Bastienne, that interrogative look: Why me, Lord Cudragny? What did I do that I should deserve to grow old and find myself starving at winter's doorstep, digging in a French tennis player's grave? I probably wear the same look.

Bear, I say — it is a pleasure to speak to someone, even a bear, though my voice is weak, and I imagine my words freezing before they reach her ears. Bear, I say, you had better leave off digging. I don't want you to eat Richard. Let his poor body lie in peace. You can eat me. I don't mind. Don't hurt your mouth on the bones.

The bear snorts. Whether from surprise or disgust, I can't tell. She turns her back on me, resumes digging. She mews like a cat. I think, this is the trouble when two worlds collide: It is difficult to discern the identity of the other. I have the advantage of the bear for having seen other bears. But the bear has never seen a French woman dressed up in pillows before. In a situation like this, the smell of Richard's flesh is tantalizingly familiar.

Bear, I say, raising one finger for emphasis, as priests do when they sermonize. Pay attention, bear. I grab a tuft of fur, give it jerk. It comes away in my hand. Oh, bear —, I say. But the bear, apparently taking my point, whirls round to face me.

Her mewing modulates into a rumble. Black lips curling back, she snarls, then opens her cavernous mouth and roars. I have time to notice her worn-out teeth, bleeding gums and truly rancid breath before she lurches onto her hind legs, her torn foot pawing the air above her head in imitation of my raised finger. Her great roar vibrates over the island, sets my head ringing. The sound is black and terrible. It goes on and on. Then suddenly she falls upon me, those enormous jaws ready to tear me asunder.