Elle

by Douglas Glover

  But I do not die. I travel somewhere past dignity, shame and hope, bucking on Itslk’s sleeping platform in my shit, shrieking obscene words, cursing the child, wishing it dead, then cursing myself in horror, whimpering, Sweet thing, sweet thing, don’t die. I am no longer attached to the poor worm of my body. Time passes to the rhythm of the spasms ripping through me. My body writhes as if impaled on a stake (I have seen such dancing horrors in the marketplace on execution days and laughed). At times my lonely soul seems to wander, holding indistinct and ill-remembered colloquies with the familiar dead — Richard, Bastienne. It hovers above France-Roy, the General’s motley town beside the Great River of Canada, where bodies swing from the gibbet and swollen corpses are stacked like loaves of bread in the snow next to mounds of glittering but worthless stones. For a while it follows a solitary white bear, loping across the ice toward a stretch of open water where seals cavort among the waves.

  I wake to the sensation of Léon lapping at my thighs, some tiny warm thing squirming under his tongue. I scream at the dog because I think he is trying to eat my baby, which I instantly name Emmanuel for our Lord and Saviour. Then I scoop it into my arms, the cord still dangling, and see that it has a face like my own, but that there is nothing else human about it. It is strangely deformed and sexless, and for arms and legs there are tiny appendages like fins. It breathes in gasps like a drowning fish and gazes at me with wise eyes as blue as the sea. Not Emmanuel, I think, but a changeling, a tadpole or the homunculus of Hermes Trismegistus, a half-boy in a jar.

  My impulse is to drop it and scramble away, but then some-thing warm washes through me like a tide of blood, bringing a sensation of peace. I think, I give up. Which is strange. I don’t know what I am giving up. And then I think, yes, I am giving up all my vanities, all my desires, designs and hopes, along with the claims of family, race and religion. Till now, when I felt despair, it meant merely feeling frustrated and regretful. This time hopelessness fills me with contentment. In my heart now, there is room for pity for the little fish-person, who clearly will not survive, who will shortly gasp its last upon my breast. Pity and love.

  I cradle him tenderly, wrapping him in a piece of an old gown, placing his head next to my heart so that he can sense the pulse. He struggles a little. It is so difficult to breathe. I wonder if this is what the soul looks like, if this fish thing with a human face is closer to our essence than the forms conceived by Aristotle? We are not beautiful, life is short and difficult. Often the deformity is internal, with kindness, generosity and love lopped off instead of hands and feet.

  Oh, my little love, I think. Oh, my sweet thing.

  His breath quickens, his lips turn blue, a milky froth appears at the corner of his mouth. I rub his head with my palm. I sing to him a little song about a frog and a toad. I hum a lullaby. For one hour, I am the best mother that ever existed. I tell him who I am and where I came from and of the long journey that brought us to Canada. I tell him about his father, the tennis player, who is buried outside. Little fish would have inherited a title. I try to teach things he needs to know, about books, little girls, fights in the schoolyard, stealing apples, the teachings of the hermetic philosophers and how to tell a ripe melon. I teach him his ABCs, touching the tip of my finger to his nose at each letter. Hurry, I think. There is no time. I tickle his belly. I kiss his ears. I inhale the smell of him — oh sweet, sweet — and admonish myself to remember it on my deathbed. I tell him about wine, about flirting, about sex, about the smell of flowers in May.

  I tell him how we will live together in a stone cottage with a garden, pigsty and dovecote, and play cat’s cradle and make up stories about the adventures of a boy named Emmanuel. Quick, quick, I think, make up a story. Once upon a time there was a little boy named Emmanuel, who lived with his mother by the sea. One day Pasqualigo, the dwarf, comes to beg the boy for help because a wicked witch is turning the dwarfs into wolves when they go to work in the mines. Emmanuel hurries off with Pasqualigo, who leads him to a mysterious black castle. The boy knocks at the castle gate and asks to see the witch, who promptly turns him into a wolf.

  Wandering in the woods nearby, he meets a pretty girl named Fleurice Trémouille, who tells him he must go to Fellberg Mountain and search for a flower that will remove the spell from her sister, the witch. Emmanuel travels an immense distance and endures many trials but finds the flower. The wicked witch is so touched that a tear drops from her eye, washing the black from the castle walls and transforming her into a good, happy witch. She turns Emmanuel back into a boy and then walks home with him for dinner. Emmanuel grows up, marries Fleurice Trémouille and lives happily ever after. But he never loses the power to change himself into a wolf with a magic word. What is the magic word? There I stop. There are no magic words.

  I tell him about sadness, melancholy, pain, loss, loneliness and the meaning of tears. I am fierce in insisting that he follow every motion of my thought. Quatgathoma, look at me, I say, in the haunting language of M. Cartier’s lexicon. But I have no need, for his eyes are fixed upon my face. Quatgathoma. Attend to me. Love me. I kiss his brow. I run my tongue along the contours of his face. Remember, I tell myself And then I explain as best I can about death, about where he is going. I don’t know how much he understands. It is a mystery what he is thinking. Philosophers say the soul does not enter the child till the age of three or five, when it begins to remember. But this cannot be true.

  At some point, the creature dies. He sighs, wets me belly and seems to fall asleep. I fall silent. Still clutching him to my breast, I drag myself off the sleeping platform and throw Léon a bit of meat from the stores. Good dog, I say.

  What I feel — words fail.

  Burn these pages.

  The Swimmers

  Delirium. Sleeplessness assaulted by phantoms. Nightmares in which I experience again exactly what I have experienced in life and from which I desperately guard myself with stratagems designed to prevent sleep. In my sleep I give birth to mermen and halflings; when I am awake, huge black carrion birds perch upon the hut’s roof, as they once did upon Richard’s grave, pecking insistently. I count the deaths of loved ones under my breath like beads on a string, like anti-prayers, like spells and incantations, remembering also the plague deaths in the village, beggars starving in the streets of Paris, babies who died of smallpox and the bodies of criminals suspended at the crossroads to rot, the lepers and consumptives, deaths by hanging, torture, drowning, fire and dismemberment, women dying in child-birth, the countless armless, legless cripples of war with their caps in their teeth and their whining voices.

  Truly I inhabit an island of demons. Whether it is an expression of my disordered thoughts or an outpost of Sedna’s realm or Hell I cannot say, nor does it matter, for the demons are real to me, and I am ringed by a dance of death, the capering grotesques gleefully inviting my concupiscence. At times Richard appears to me in the guise of a corpse alive with worms, a mocking grin where the flesh of his lips has been eaten away. Yet I am smitten with lust and embrace him in the old way. I have heard that the young rakes of King Francis’s court will steal the corpses of hanged men and conceal them in the beds of impertinent ladies for a joke, but now the joke is on me.

  In the Old World, death is all around, life is short, and beauty as brief as a day. Men and women pour their souls into play and war and religion and love in order to forget their terror, and the dying discover indignities that mock the living. Now we have imported this infection to the New World, which excites us the way a virgin excites an old man — make us new, make us rich, redeem our lost souls, we cry. Far to the south, in a place called Florida, the Spanish say there is a Fountain of Youth. St. Brendan was searching for the Fortunate Isles, where there is no sickness, old age or death, where happiness lasts forever, and a hundred years is as one day. In ancient stories, maidens from that fabulous land call to young warriors with their songs, heroes embark in glass boats and disappear into a magical mist (sometimes they return, but a dozen lifetimes
have passed, and all their friends are dead).

  According to Dicuil’s account, one of St. Brendan’s monks chose to stay behind when the wanderers turned for home. Why did he stay? Why, for that matter, did St. Brendan decide to go home if it was such a pleasant place? Perhaps they found my island, this very spot, and if I dug around I could discover the bones of that ancient monk. Or perhaps he fell in love, married a local girl, had many children — Itslk is a descendent. And perhaps the cries of the demons are the wails of disappointed monks frozen in the air, for what they found was not the blessed land but a reflection of their own ruined desires. What would it be like to be remade? To leave ourselves behind? These are fancies that dog my days.

  The fish baby lies next to me on Itslk’s sleeping platform. I feed the oil lamp, suck water from the snow at the door, throw Léon slabs of frozen meat. My joints are swollen, my gums bleed, my ribs seem to poke through my skin again — my Canadian look. Between the savage visions I have memories which are almost the same as the visions. An enormous white bear rises before me. I take aim with an arquebus, praying the powder has not blown away in the wind or gotten wet in the rain, that the fuse is not too short, that the whole will not explode in my face. I fire. The bear looks shocked, disappears. In his place, there is a handsome young man with a horrid wound in his breast. Is this a memory or a vision?

  Outside, the days lengthen and grow milder. With a violent grinding one night, the ice before and around the island breaks apart. When I peep out in the morning the gulf is filled as far as the horizon with a thousand fanciful blue-white ice ships, an armada of dreams. Then a wind kicks up in the west, and in one day they are gone, except for laggards that swim out to sea, trailing mist, in lazy ones and twos. They are like monuments to the glory of the wind. Dense banks of fog hover above the melting snow as if they are feeding. Léon moves up on the sleeping platform with me because of the water swirling through the hut. I make him uncomfortable with my constant weeping, sighs and lamentations. Days I sit in the doorway, chewing the ends of my hair. My mind casts about for an anchor, an order, a meaning. But the Lords of Misrule guide me, and every thought I entertain is heretical.

  The Old World is based on a dream of order, with God at the top and descending through the angels to men to the nobler animals to plants to inanimate objects. Once this vision was real to me, but now I am of the opinion that it is only a hopeful metaphor. And all the optimistic descriptions of the hereafter, with its hierarchies of angels and the risen dead, with God as king, are unwarranted applications of Aristotle’s argument by analogy. The throw of language is seductive. Sentences march like fanatical soldiers over cliffs. The moon is a tennis ball. My soul is hidden under the moss where Itslk buried it. I gave birth to a sea creature with a face like my own. His name is Emmanuel. Ora pro nobis. No anchor here.

  Founding a colony in the New World is like the act of love. You make camp in the heart of the other. Nothing is the way you expected it. You have to learn to talk another language. Translation fails. The languages get mixed up with each other. You’re both disappointed. You ask yourself why you came there in the first place. You both feel invaded. You try harder and harder to make the other person do as you want, all the while feeling that this defeats the purpose. You would rather be alone. The thing you love seems altered, even dead. You are not the same as you were before you fell in love. When it’s over, you leave part of yourself behind. If you survive, you are worse off than when you started.

  Fugitive thoughts: Bastienne used to say that riding mules makes a woman infertile. Richard had a recurring nightmare. He is playing tennis with the King’s son, the dauphin, at Tournon. After losing a point, the dauphin complains of the heat, swoons, falls into a terminal lethargy and dies three days later. Richard wakes screaming, just as the executioners begin to harness his hands and feet to teams of horses, the usual punishment for killing a member of the royal family. But this wasn’t just a dream. It actually happened to the dauphin’s Italian secretary, Comte Montecuccoli, who was torn to pieces at Lyons in the Place de Grenette in 1536. Afterward the mob played football with his head. (In his sleep, Richard holds his head in his hands and shouts, I would have let him win!)

  A conversation with Itslk: I point to the west and say, The General took his ship and sailed away. Do you know the place?

  Itslk shakes his head. I know the people along the river, for I have met the nearest, the Oumamioneks, bad people. These are the savages I mentioned. We are at war with them. After the Oumamioneks come the Papinachois and the Betsiamites — they are all mountain people, people of the bare mountains. Farther along there is a river that flows from the north where other people come to trade, but I do not know them. There are white whales there.

  I point south.

  Etchemins, he says, bad people. We are at war with them, and they are at war with the mountain people.

  I point north.

  Naskopi, he says, very bad people, dirty. We are at war with them, but sometimes they trade for iron.

  He scratches his head for lice, remembers something else. The mountain people say the world was created when a beaver dove deep under the sea and got a mouthful of dirt. When it came to the surface, their god picked up the beaver and blew through its anus, scattering dirt over the sea to make dry land. How can you take such a people seriously? (It occurs to me to explain this doctrinal schism along the lines of our own debate between Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics, their mutual incomprehension, antipathy and scorn).

  My happiest memory: Starlings invaded the dovecote one summer. My father ordered nets thrown over the building, and three hundred birds were snared. I remember the little bodies placed in rows in the courtyard, with pigs sniffing at them and geese strutting up and down, glancing sideways like nervous priests. The next day my father took me to visit the shrine of a local martyr. By the side of the road, a little girl watched curiously as a boy peed in a iron pot, his legs bare and his shirt gathered up in front of his chest. My father shook his whip at them and roared with laughter. The girl stuck out her tongue and hopped over a wall. The boy stood there with the pot. Why is this my happiest memory?

  I bury my Emmanuel. Not exactly bury. I use an arquebus to smash the snow crust and displace rocks at the foot of Richard’s mound and place the body there, wrapped in a sealskin. My bear-claw necklace swings and rattles. An enormous ice island swims by. There is a man on it, a savage with a tattooed face, a feathered horsetail dragging down his back, leggings and a fur robe. He stands at the edge nearest me and waves. He strides up and down, gesturing with his arms. He is talking to me, or singing, but the wind carries the words away. There is no telling if he is one of those who believe the earth was formed by God blowing through a beaver’s anus.

  The General and the Bear,

  the Untold Story

  MAY-AUGUST, 1543

  Water Birth (with Prolepsis)

  I tell you now that I am very old and writing this memoir in secret, knowing that it may be used to light fires when I am gone. I live in the city of N______ in Perigord, which is famous for its truffles, trained pigs, oak forests and religious dissent. My husband Isidore descends from an old Cathar family, much persecuted in bygone times, which makes him a natural heretic, bad tempered and secretive. He also was an adventurer in his youth and sailed twice on fishing boats to the cod banks off the coast of Canada.

  He slept with a savage girl on a skin bed spread on a drying stage on a Canadian beach, and he still dreams of her despite the fact that she was drunk and slept also with eight other members of the crew. Late at night I have spied him, in his cap and shirt, pissing in the garden, staring at the North Star, which is all I need to remind me of the continent hidden in his heart. Otherwise he is cranky and scornful and calls me an old bear and threatens to betray me to the Inquisition for my memoir and the little collection of books I hide behind the wall, though I suspect that in the event he would die on the doorsill to defend me.

  We operate an inn with a
stable for post horses, rent out hacks and drays to the locals, and keep our own cow, chickens and pigs, which are dear to me for their intelligence and affectionate nature. I raise tobacco in my garden from seeds left to me by M. Cartier’s captive Catherine, and have taught Isidore to smoke a pipe, though we do it in secret because of the aura of witchcraft that surrounds foreign customs, especially things like blowing smoke out of your mouth. To keep up appearances, I teach catechism and tell Bible stories to the illiterate sons and daughters of peasants at the church door two evenings a week and Sunday afternoons.

  For many years there was a bear chained to a post in the stable yard, mad, unhappy, bored and violent. But I could not kill him. When the wind was in the north on a fall day and the smell of snow was in the air, he would mew insistently (a strange, unbearish sound), his sad old nose raised to sniff the breeze. I would put my arms around his scarred neck and whisper to him about the forests of Canada and how I used to cuddle him in my bed when he was just a cub whimpering for his mother.

  The days of my celebrity have passed. Prior to this, I was much written about and abused in print, the truth being notably absent from these accounts, especially those that claimed to come directly from my mouth. I speak of books written by M. Thevet, M. de Belleforest and the King’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre, who heard her version from the General and contrived to twist the story completely. I jump off the boat to remain with my husband (sic) who has been caught plotting a mutiny against the General (nothing about the dog, tennis players, lust or my soul, which Itslk hid so long ago on the Isle of Demons). I became a parable of the pious wife who prays over the body of her rebellious husband and shoots bears with an arquebus when they come to eat him.