Elle

by Douglas Glover

  I write this memoir as a protest against all the uplifting, inspirational and exemplary texts claiming to be about my life. I am myself, not what they have written. M. Thevet, in his Cosmographie Universelle, was the only one to mention that after I was rescued I suddenly thought better of it and wished to remain.

  I said, This is strange — in the Land of the Dead, I felt alive, but here in France everything that was once familiar is like a coffin lid.

  F. said, No one told you what to expect. The way to Heaven may be through someone’s arsehole.

  But I digress.

  The birds have returned. Not the birds that nested here last summer, but the travellers, the ones headed further north. They make the island a way station on their pilgrimage. (We are all pilgrims.) One day I wake to their cries. I move my hand to my hair. I move my head, my foot. I am still alive, I realize, though probably not much to look at. I stagger into the open air, followed warily by Léon, and kill one of the big geese that shit so profligately. We make a huge meal of it over a fire, the feathers drifting across the rookery like tiny doleful ghosts. The sky is huge and blue.

  I notice a narrow ice bridge still connecting the Isle of Demons to the mainland (all winter I could have escaped but had other things on my mind). And it occurs to me that I cannot bear to remain amid these tombs, in this landscape of death. I pack meat in a rolled-up sealskin, along with Itslk’s stone knife, skin drum, lamp and bear statue, a tinder box and Léon’s tennis ball, throw on my feather bags, fasten the bearskin over my shoulders with a couple of bone pins, and strap two tennis racquets to my feet, for the snow is still deep among the trees. The last thing I do is retrieve Bastienne’s corpse from the snow-bank in front of the hut and lay it reverently on the sleeping platform.

  My plan is to find that part of Canada with cities, kings, markets, cathedrals, money, soft beds, apothecaries, books and public executions. Failing that, I shall take advantage of the recently discovered fact that the earth is round and walk home the long way. If I should happen to encounter the General along the way and discover some ingenious avenue of avenging myself, so much the better. But the likelihood of any positive outcome seems remote, and my spirits rise at the prospect of imminent death by wolf-bite, savage arrows, starvation or some-thing else I have not yet reckoned upon — the nature of life, in my experience, being a tendency to astonish the participant.

  Were this narrative an allegory, which it is not, one could say I had reached the state of worldly abandonment which the neoplatonists describe as leading to mystical union with God — unio mystico — though scholars, churchmen and philosophers generally agree that this sort of achievement is available only to males. Plato himself, after all, so little values the female receptacle for the soul that in the Timaeus he considers being born female a punishment for a previous failed life. I try to think: What did I do wrong last time to deserve this? (Lord Cudragny, or whoever, a brief word. Make my death quick. If at all possible, avoid the starvation option.)

  Léon bounds across the ice bridge without difficulty and then goes leaping about, wagging his stub tail, on the mainland. He thinks all this is for him. I am taking him for a walk. He hasn’t had so much excitement since Itslk and he went bear hunting. I shuffle forward cautiously, getting used to the tennis racquets, careful not to pitch sideways off the ice, when the whole thing collapses, and I find myself standing on the rocky bottom with a foot of water over my head and several large fish frozen in the spongy ice in front of my face.

  A hand plunges through the slush, twists itself in a hank of hair and jerks me up. God’s wounds, this hurts, I am freezing, and, as my face breaks the surface, I swallow water and choke. This is like being born again — as a literate person, I am not immune to the symbolism of events. Oh, throw me back, I think. Enough. But a face looms above me, ugly, old, brown, wrinkled, unreadable and androgynous, and I make shift, despite being hampered by the tennis racquets, to help drag myself out of the water.

  Léon frolics, acting about as stupidly as when I threw the ball off the General’s ship. My body feels as if I were being burned at the stake, though what I am undergoing is the opposite. My waterlogged clothing freezes as I lie on the ice. A hunchbacked savage woman of extreme years stands before me, her eyes large with amazement or her effort to peer through the milky discoloration which clouds them. Her head seems to sprout from her chest. Her arms hang down to her feet. Like me, she is wearing tennis racquets. Also a fur cape rubbed hairless, soft as a second skin, open at the front. Through the gap, I glimpse three pairs of withered teats descending her torso. Her tattooed face looks like an old turnip. Shells and bear claws rattle on a leather string at her throat, which in this regard is a twin of my own.

  Without a word, and one does not automatically assume such a creature could speak anyway, she scrambles up the bank and disappears into the line of stunted trees above the beach. Léon flounders after her, tongue lolling, stub tail erect. Léon, I cry, but he ignores me. The crone glances back as if she expects me to follow. Wait, I croak, beginning to lose my voice. This seems like a good time to try a word from M. Cartier’s lexicon. Aguyase, I cry. Aguyase. To which I get the usual response.

  I plunge after her, having some trouble with the tennis racquets, which, as I understood their function from Itslk, are supposed to keep me on top of the snow. My feather bags are frozen hard as stones. The bearskin knocks against my heels like an old door. Her trail is easy to follow, but I struggle in the thickets, stumble over fallen trees, step on the tail of my bear-skin, pitch face first into drifts till all I want is to rest, possibly take a little nap. I suspect parts of me will not survive. Once I was beautiful, but I shall bury fingers, toes, earlobes and possibly a nose in Canada. No man will look at me. I stop to shiver for a bit. My teeth chatter till they threaten to break. The sun is going down, though I have the impression it just came up. Trees cast black shadows. From time to time, I sense a presence in the woods on either side, something moving with me, ponderous and silent.

  I Experience Savage Medical Practice First Hand

  I hear dogs barking, not just Léon, many dogs. I smell wood-smoke. I drag myself through the last dozen snowdrifts, wriggle under a deadfall I haven’t the strength to lift myself over, and plunge through a last thicket of tangled branches into a camp not unlike the one I left on the Isle of Demons. There is a hut of logs and stones, moss stuffed in the cracks, with a canopy of animal skin and a fire before the door. I crawl to the fire, bask my cheeks in the heat. A black iron pot simmers, something cooking. I see two bearskins on stretchers, a skin bag decorated with beadwork, bark baskets half full of berries that look dried out but edible, the antlers of some huge deer, tools and weapons fashioned from wood, bone, stone and leather. Animal skulls dangle from tree branches. I count half a dozen bear heads, their jaws tied shut with leather straps, bands of red paint splashed across their craniums.

  A creek rushes by, brimming with snow melt, flooding its banks. A native boat of bark and wood lies upturned on the high ground, what M. Cartier says they call a casnouy. Everything smells of shit. Dogs abound, skinny, yellow savage dogs with wolf faces, bushy tails curled over their backs. Léon snaps and snarls, gambols and feints, fighting for his place. He is large and a bull-baiter. Finding a place amongst his own kind is simple for him. What of my kind? But I do not ponder this, the warmth of the fire being such a relief that I am close to ecstasy. (When was the last time I got such a thrill from lying in the mud next to an open fire?)

  The old woman emerges backwards from the door, crawling on all fours, her head swaying from side to side. Her hair is coiled in wheels on either side of her head, making her face bearlike in the shadows. My hand goes to my bear-claw necklace. The dogs swirl round her, snarling and nipping and licking her face. She takes a step, then, almost self-consciously, rises on her back legs, scattering dogs this way and that, and shuffles to the fire. She sniffs at me like an animal, then circles the way Itslk did. I am a strange creature, as strange to her a
s she is to me.

  I think how alike any two strangers or lovers or friends are when they meet, that the point at which they meet is a place of confused identity, translation and dream, that we see only the parts we recognize, that we ourselves are only apprehended in this incomplete fashion. Aguyase, I say. Quatgathoma. Look at me. And then, Do you speak French? I am hungry. What I mean to say is that I am not myself, that since coming to Canada I have found the world infinitely more mysterious and complicated than I had hitherto supposed, that if she could see me, speak to me, I might find myself again.

  She makes no reply, but, using her immense pawlike hands, pushes me over on my belly and begins dragging at my clothing. My first thought: Some outre form of rape. It makes me the slightest bit irritable. God did not send Job this many trials. The plagues of Egypt were nothing to the plagues of Canada. Does seeing me like this really give someone somewhere pleasure? Does it prove anything? My second thought: Blank.

  She bares my shoulder down to the blade, sniffs it, begins kneading it with strong fingers. She taps the shoulder blade with the tip of a finger, blows on the spot through a length of animal bone. I try to look but can’t get that far around. She goes back to kneading the skin. It feels like a lump, a painful knob beneath the skin. It grows under her ministering fingers, feels sharp, like a knife in my flesh. I haven’t the strength to struggle. Dogs lick my face. Leave me alone, I shout, flailing my arms in despair.

  The old woman seems to grasp the object through my skin and pulls. The pain is unbearable. She jerks me up from the ground by my skin handle. I dangle there. Something gives, tears. Agony. I start to weep. My face smacks the mud as I fall. I imagine my poor back ripped open to the bone, blood everywhere. But I feel an odd sort of relief, maybe just the relief a man on the rack feels when his torturer takes a break for a bite of sausage and cheese, but relief.

  I sigh, stretch my hand around to feel for myself. My skin is intact, there is no blood, though this seems hardly possible. The old woman examines something in her hand, holding it close, peering at it with one eye, then the other, as if she were short sighted or (the thought chills me) like an animal that has trouble seeing straight ahead. She sniffs it, tastes it with her pink tongue, spits.

  With a grunt, she kneels and holds her palm before my face. What I see: a piece of gnarled whiteness, a fragment of bone, a tooth, yes, a tooth, an outsize canine blunted and curved. She holds the tooth between her thumb and forefinger, holds it up to the firelight, then shuffles over to one of the huge stretched bearskins. In one hand she holds up the tooth; with the other she slaps the bearskin. A demonstration. Tooth, bearskin. Tooth, bearskin. Slap, slap.

  I have no idea what she is trying to tell me. She taps my shoulder again. Tooth, shoulder, bearskin. Tap, tap. Slap, slap. I feel wonderfully sleepy. The melancholy of the last weeks seems to lift. Canada is such a strange place. Sometimes a girl just needs a nap. Tooth, shoulder, bearskin.

  Bear Walking

  That night my dreams are fevered and confused. The old woman puts me to sleep on a bed of animal hides, while she herself seems not to sleep but prowls in and out of the hut, occasionally stopping to peer down at me, sniffing my hair and, more embarrassingly, my nether parts. She seems to be gathering oddments of equipment and packing them as if for a journey, and I suffer a half-waking fear that she will abandon me, just as Itslk did, just as my uncle the General did. Once I awake from a nightmare, a dream of giving birth to a fish or a seal, some sea creature. For a moment, I am relieved. Only a dream, I think. It was only a dream.

  I peep outside the hut’s doorway, my ancient mistress or captor having disappeared. She has kept the fire up, a goodly blaze in the night, with sparks flying up to the stars and the stars twinkling like candles, far brighter than any European star. At the edge of the clearing something moves, a large animal, hideous in the shadows, its fur dark brown but frosted with age, patched with mange. It seems to be pacing as if in a cage, whirling at the extremity of its range and pacing back the other way, as if it were uncomfortable, enraged and out of place. Its eyes glimmer red in the firelight. Flames and sparks issue from its mouth, but I discount this as an illusion caused by the fire’s reflection.

  The poor old thing’s head sways from side to side as it trudges along the well-worn path. Its skull seems to sprout directly from its chest. A bear, I think, tremendous, primordial. For such a large animal it treads lightly, so lightly it makes no sound. Once or twice it stops at a spot where I peed before coming to bed. It dips its snout, snorts and shakes its head till its jowls slap together. Then it walks on. Oddly enough, this vision does not rouse me from my bed. I feel less fear than wonder and pity. The dogs are silent, even Léon. One yellow pariah, asleep by the fire, raises his head and yawns but pays no attention to the walking bear. Little by little I fall back to sleep.

  I dream a dream from my childhood, my vision of Judgment Day, when the Beast walks, breathing fire, and the dead rise to mingle with the living as they march toward a gate the colour of fire, with a chateau of red stone towering behind, black pennons streaming above the battlements. The dead seem, well, dead — decomposing corpses and skeletons who seem embarrassed by their condition. The living shriek and wail, gibber their prayers and clutch their loved ones or their gold. Lost souls loot what is left behind as rivers of fire lap at their feet. Couples fornicate or caper obscenely along the grassy verges.

  At the gate, cowled and faceless monks mutter Te Deums and thrust into the pressing masses, which melt at their approach. They lay about them with knotted ropes, striking this one and that. Lightning illuminates the stricken faces. Sweet young girls with their newly printed Bibles turn ghoulish. Pious, black-clad dignitaries groan, grasp their codpieces and piss themselves. Scuffles break out at the very doorstep of Heaven as the condemned seek to perpetrate one last cruelty — a murder or rape — before the tortures of Hell begin. Only a few healthy souls pass through the gate and venture tremulously along the path toward the chateau. But even these redeemed creatures have an air of regret, as if they already miss the sun, their lovers’ caresses, the voice of a friend, as if, after all, there is nothing sweeter than to be alive.

  And then the red chateau is replaced by an image of the ruined stockade at France-Roy, the low log structures of the settlement within and the great caravels almost free of ice in the river below. Mist rises from the river and shrouds the ships. The forest seems endless, implacable and empty, like a desert made of trees. Inside the fort, old snow is yellow with piss and shit. Everything smells of failure. In my dream, the General pores sleeplessly over maps, notes and diaries, as if he could improve reality with his quill pen.

  On a map he writes: China. Then he tears up the map, draws another. With the deliberation (stupor) of an insomniac he tries the word on all the empty spaces. There are a lot of empty spaces, imaginary worlds. His palsied hand creeps up a river to a point where the river disappears, and he writes: China. And again, China. China. China? The word has become a question. The word seems to embody all desire, the desire of all Europe, the thing that is other and alien and infinitely desirable. (All at once, our faces merge, my own hand traces the word upon the chart. Revulsion and horror enter my heart.)

  When I wake, the crone is hovering over me. In my con-fused state, I identify her with the animal I saw in my dreams, as if my dreams and the world have somehow fused. She scolds me (or so I take it), speaking softly but insistently in her own tongue. Her speech is full of low sh-sh sounds like the sound of leaves falling among leaves. Try as I might, I fail to recognize any words from M. Cartier’s lexicon. (I think of imaginary languages, and languages that no longer exist because their speakers have died out or have forgotten them, and the language of dreams. What worlds do they describe?)

  Her harangue takes on a confidential note. She is full of sage advice and good counsel, none of which I can understand. She points to the door. I notice for the first time that the hut is empty except for my bed. The fire has guttered out. No do
ubt she is one of Itslk’s tribal enemies, but I am not afraid, even when she scoops me up as if I were a doll and, with rough gentleness and amazing strength, carries me to the canoe, which lies half out of the water. She has fashioned a sort of cushion in the bow, where I can sleep among her belongings. The dogs mill about on the bank, their tongues lolling in ecstasy and expectation. She speaks sharply, and they slink away, embarrassed, suddenly shy.

  Only Léon remains, sitting on his haunches, watching our preparations for departure. His stupid eyes suddenly look deep with intelligence. He is an old warrior, afraid of nothing, grown gentle and forgiving. I rummage around till I find my rolled-up sealskin pack and retrieve the tennis ball. As my companion pushes the canoe into the icy creek and points us downstream toward the gulf of the Great River, I toss the ball into the nearby trees. Léon, get the ball, I cry. Bring me the ball. His head turns to follow the ball’s trajectory, but he makes no move to fetch it. This has happened one too many times, he thinks. Then he shakes himself and lopes grandly along the bank, following the canoe.

  The canoe is built of wood slats and bark. To me, it looks frail and unsteerable, though the old woman is remarkably adept at keeping us afloat in the current, sliding this way and that to avoid rocks and slabs of ice. In no time, the creek spits itself into the gulf, a vast, steaming flood (it looks like an ocean, I have always taken the existence of a farther shore on faith, maybe there isn’t one). With a grunt, the old woman points to an island, nudged like a ship against the near shoreline. Flocks of birds plummet and whirl above its icy rocks. I can just make out my hut and Richard’s mound — the Isle of Demons, looking less demonic in the morning light, looking almost homelike. My soul is hidden there, I think, though that doesn’t make sense. It was Itslk who mistook the scarecrow woman in a crimson court dress for my soul.