Friend, he repeats, nodding enthusiastically, pointing at himself with a thumb. He pauses to think, searching for words. He tries out half a dozen phrases in different languages. Then he lapses into an awkward, heavily accented French.
Elephant tusk, he exclaims, banging his pegs with his cross. I think to myself, How extraordinary. It makes a person wonder what is inside his codpiece.
You are a legend up and down the coast, he says. Left for dead. But the savages saw you. No one believed them. They tell such stories.
This is too much news for a girl wrapped in a bearskin, unused to speaking in anything but signs and bastard river words. I wonder, somewhat irritably, why, if everyone was talking about me, no one came to help while the ones I loved were suffering and dying. I try to think of something suitably withering to say but find myself fixating on the words of M. Cartier’s lexicon.
Aguyase, I say. Canada undagneny? Where do you come from? Then in halting French: How do you know that word?
The fat, legless man beams, swells with pride, makes a courtly bow. It is a grand and dramatic moment, filled with meaning for both of us. He stuffs his thumb and hook inside his belt and drums his remaining fingers, sifting his memory for an appropriate sentiment.
He begins in French: Don’t worry. Everything will turn out all right. Then, as if to demonstrate his facility in the language of the lexicon, he says: I have a canoe on my penis.
Nails
And so I am rescued from the Land God Gave to Cain, delivered from savagery, redeemed, like the Israelites, from the wilderness. The captain’s name is Finch, an Englishman, once a man-at-arms in King Henry’s army, washed up on the shores of Navarre after some invasion or other, like me an exile of fortune. The dwarf’s name is Didier Duminil — purser, accountant, log-keeper, bone-setter, surgeon, apothecary, astrologer, alchemist, navigator, lay priest, sodomite and poet, also good with sleight of hand and card tricks. Their ship is called the Nellie. They are whalers out of San Juan de Luz and have made the voyage to Canada for eight years running but in nowise are the first of that country to come there — is M. Cartier aware of this? The official historians? Apparently the existence of a New World has been a mystery to no one except the French government.
I am forthwith provided with clothing — seamen’s wool stockings, knee-breeches, shirt and cap, all of which itch horribly and make me too warm, so that I take them off again and put on my bear robe. The sailors give me hardtack, oat gruel and very old boiled turnips to eat, spirits to drink. (Come, this will revive you, someone says. Revive me from what?) The spirits go straight to my head, and I become maudlin, weeping, sighing, blowing my nose in someone’s cap.
The sailors gather round to hear my story, examine my star tattoo and catch glimpses of my naked breasts. I request more spirits, flirt and wax garrulous, regaling them with stories they only half understand and don’t believe at all. Then I doze off, dreaming that King Francis has given half of France to the Turks — in my dream, the Turks look uncommonly like Canadian savages. Trading with the savages goes on long into the night. I hear savage drums and sailors’ flageolets, raucous male voices raised in song. Fires blaze on the beach. Sailors find savage wives for the night, savage husbands take the opportunity to hack apart one of the longboats and steal the nails. A party slips away in canoes, boards the ship and begins to pound nails out of the hull and superstructure. Everyone laughs. The dwarf prepares me a bed of blankets by a fire and tucks me in. But I get up, go hunting for Léon, fall into the creek by the she-bear’s lair and go back to sleep with my dog.
In the morning I am very confused. I have a headache. I have broken a tooth on the hardtack — this explains my trouble on the outward voyage. The whaling ship seems to ride a little lower in the water. The whole crew has found new homes in the savage huts and refuses to return to the ship. Captain Finch, immensely agile and undaunted by his amputations, orders the crew to return to the ship without delay on pain of flogging. Everyone ignores him. In the distance, naked savages raise and lower a sail experimentally, a half-dozen whale oil barrels slide over the side and float toward the sea.
Captain Finch has the relentless optimism of the new man of commerce, at once acquisitive, adventurous, guiltless, cunning and practical, with no tendency whatsoever to self-doubt or self-examination. He does not seek Cathay or a Northwest Passage or the Fountain of Youth or the Isles of the Blessed or a New World or even new lands for his king (I am not sure at this juncture who his king is, the borders of France being in flux). Nor does he bother with religion or dreams of converting savages. His head is full of numbers: so many barrels last year, so many the year before, so much a barrel, so many whales slaughtered (destroyed — I believe on occasion I have heard the whales singing their plaintive love songs to one another). All his voyages have been successful, though (tapping a peg leg with his hook) there have been accidents.
I ask for more spirits, am politely refused. I shift my bearskin over my head, growl and try to shake my cheeks till my lips flap. No effect. One of the sailors says my costume reminds him of the New Year festivals in the mountains near his home, when a man dressed up as a bear comes down from the mountainside and pretends to make love to the village women. He mimes fucking. Much laughter ensues. I think how little like a real bear this sounds, my own ursine yearnings tending toward solitude, berry patches, ripe salmon and, at this time of year, a cozy den where I might take a nap for a month or two.
These sailors are a dirty lot, covered with greasy soot (now I understand this — from a summer crouched over rendering fires and cauldrons of whale fat), but young, jolly and well-made, in contrast to the scrofulous ne’er-do-wells and effete petty nobility (who fancied themselves gentlemen adventurers) the General brought to Canada. They have hens on board their ship, they offer me an egg. I look at the hen’s egg and start to weep again. In that moment, I return to something of my essential self Do they have any bread? I wonder. But their bread is gone. In fact, they ate the last hen on the beach the night before. They are close to starving, anxious to sail for home.
We sail on the evening ebb tide.
The words catch me off guard. So soon? All my reactions are paradoxical. The strange food has made me ill. I can’t stand their civilized clothing. In the afternoon, I notice the steady seepage of the savage populace into the forest — bundles of gear, their hoards of trade bric-a-brac, hide roof coverings, paddles, tennis racquets, fishnets, strips of dried meat, children, dogs — bit by bit the vestiges of savage life disappear, their owners decamped for the Land of Nothing, rich in nails (the whaler’s superstructure looks, well, a bit slumped), leaving a smouldering fire here and there and a surprised, naked sleeper under a skeleton of poles. The tree of skulls rattles in the breeze. They did not say goodbye. But then was I ever anything but a nuisance, an intruder in their world? Nevertheless, in my mind, I say goodbye. Adieu. The land looks licked clean. Adieu.
The dwarf — Dado, for short — sits with me on the rocks. We watch the captain limp into the forest to hunt. He takes two dogs, a savage boy (left behind again by forgetful elders) and a crossbow rigged with a lanyard so he can pull the trigger with his teeth.
The dwarf says with a sigh, He’s a terrible sailor but lucky. That’s all you need. And the continents are large and difficult to miss. We did miss once on the journey home and landed in Africa. He didn’t know whether to turn right or left. That’s how I became a navigator.
He says, It takes these savages two days to cut a tree down with their stone axes. The first year we came here they swarmed the ship but were afraid to step on the deck. The captain hoisted a boy on his shoulders and careered about on his pegs, chanting plainsong, till the others lost their fear. They called out, Nails. It was the first word they learned. Now we budget for pilfering, but once we nearly lost a ship when the Seven Islands savages removed the nails from several runs of hull planking on the water side where we couldn’t see them working. But we can pay the sailors and coopers less if we let them
do business on their own.
The sailors pack their bales of furs, scrounge for meat left behind on the drying racks, hunt for berries, do their laundry, take baths, refill water casks. Léon barks furiously at the boats as they shuttle back and forth to the ship. To him, events have taken an ominously maritime turn. The day has a twilight quality long before it is really twilight. My recovery from the Land of the Dead (Canada) seems vaguely anticlimactic, if not ever so slightly tedious. The pole frames of the savage huts look like skeletons.
Dado says, This place teaches us yearning and grief!
An odd remark. What does he know of my experience, my thoughts? But it’s true, I think. He has a large head, thick brows, intelligent eyes, a lined face, tiny ink-stained hands, red knuckles. He hides his little legs beneath his habit. The weather is suitably dramatic — brilliant but with a storm approaching in the west over the restless gulf Grey clouds that will blow us out to sea in the night.
He asks me why I lived apart from the savages — like a hermit, he says — and about the carcass wrapped in bark suspended in a tree.
It doesn’t look quite human.
I am unused to speaking in French. And, in any case, there don’t seem to be words in any language to explain what has befallen me, the complexity and mystery of it, the song and the dream. I am wearing the old woman’s skin (the other, the white bear, is packed with my belongings). Goodbye, I think. Everything but the dwarf smells of the sea (the dwarf smells of burned whale fat — one gets used to this).
I look toward the Isle of Demons, not far off but out of sight round a bend in the coastline. Richard, Comte d’Epirgny, lies buried there, as does my son Emmanuel and my old nurse Bastienne. My soul is hidden among the trees. Adieu.
He gives me a book to read, something about a giant and his son, written by a man with an Arab name, Alcofribas Nasier. (Yes, till recently, for many hundreds of years, our dusky brother, the black man of our nightmares, our imaginary other, has been the Turk and the Moor.) A pirated and unexpurgated edition, Dado says, the sort of thing that will get the author burned at the stake. When I try to read, the letters and words seem meaningless, as helpful to me as the animal tracks Itslk tried once to explain. Everything that once had meaning is forgotten. I am a citizen of neither the New World nor the Old (and who would want to be a citizen of an Old World anyway — someone wasn’t thinking when he made up the names).
Captain Finch returns from the hunt dragging the head of a huge deer-like creature with a horse’s nose and thickened antlers. He thinks it’s a monster.
It’s very curious, he says. I collect curiosities.
His codpiece, which has come untied in the undergrowth, dangles between his thighs. He has left the meat behind and sends off a party with careful directions to find it. Then he sends out another party to find the first. Both return separately but without the meat. The captain shrugs and orders us to the ship. The savage boy has disappeared.
But then Léon refuses to climb into the boat. Sailors tie a line to his collar and try to drag him aboard. Finch roars out commands. It is growing dark, no moon, wind freshening. A whiff of snow on the air. The longboat nearly broaches in the rising surf. Léon snaps at anyone who comes near. He worries the line with his teeth, finally ducks his head and slips off his collar. He barks and barks at me, his eyes wild with incomprehension. I am wedged between thwarts near the stern of a whaleboat with my feet on the rolled-up caribou hide that once was my home, a moose’s head leaning into my lap. Léon sets up a mournful howl. Yellow bitches, his harem, some with pups, trot up and down, sipping the waves, their tails curving over their backs like ragged flags.
I hear Léon barking long after I can’t see him. Someone hands me the collar, which I clutch to my heart. I still hear the barking when the boat thumps against the hull of the ship and strong hands stretch over the rail to drag me up. Finch has his men marching around the windlass, raising the anchor, before we are all aboard. He keeps shouting for someone to check that his trophy is safe. One of his peg legs crashes through where the savages tore the deck planks loose. He roars, Nails! And sends his coopers and carpenters to mend the damage. The ship creaks, groans and seems to twist upon herself as the crew puts on sail, and the great masts begin to drag her against the waves.
The dwarf takes me by the hand and guides me to a closet under the poop.
You’ll have to share, he says, with another of Captain Finch’s trophies.
The tiny cabin suffocates me. The walls are unnaturally solid, the low ceiling presses upon me. I feel like a girl in a box. I start to panic as soon as he closes the door. The whole ship smells of death, whale oil, burning flukes and bones, not to mention shit and vomit from the ballast holds where the men relieve themselves in foul weather (every ship is the same, a chamber pot with sails; it smells like the General’s ship — I recognize the rats).
Something rustles in a dark corner. At first, suspicious of everything in that alien world (and when have I had much luck with ships?), I draw back. But then there is a pathetic whimpering, between a puppy’s cry and a cat’s meow. A black shape drags itself across the floor, claws clicking against the planks. A bear cub, it looks like.
The poor thing begins to lick my feet with its warm, wet tongue. I pick it up in my arms and incline it to an open port-hole where the last daylight trickles in. It is a cub like the ones I have seen in my dreams and occasionally in real life, though in real life they were often dead and about to be eaten. The cub’s eyes are dull and terrified. It whimpers plaintively, baas like a lamb, saying in the language of bears what I would most like to say myself.
I feel my way to a bunk that reminds me of a coffin and lie there with the little bear tucked against my breasts. The ship rocks with the motion of the waves. The bear yawns, licks my nipple and falls asleep. But I cannot sleep. My mind courses back and forth over my life in Canada. I offer a prayer to the Lord Cudragny (an ineffectual and unresponsive god much like the one I am returning to in France). I say farewell to Léon and fancy I can hear his barking still. I beg God for forgetfulness, to blot the past from my memory. I wet the wooden bed with my tears. I imagine the little bear is Emmanuel, my son, come back to me. I ask God to banish this thought, too.
What do you do with a girl who has journeyed to the Land of the Dead (Canada), has consorted with savages, left her soul on an island inhabited by demons, given birth to a fish, disappeared into a labyrinth of dreams and turned into a bear? At best, if I return to the place I once called home, I will be a spectacle. Now I have no home nor self nor soul.
This is the style of the anti-quest: You go on a journey, but instead of returning you find yourself frozen on the periphery, the place between places, in a state of being neither one nor the other. Instead of a conquering hero, you become a clown or fuel for the pyre or the subject of folk tales.
After: A Short History of the Next
Thirty-Eight Years, Begins with…
DECEMBER, 1543-
Comes Winter
Gabble of French and Breton voices in the wheat exchange opposite. Leaded windows chop the outside world into squares. Smell of rotting fish, salt seas, pig shit, meat broth, tallow candles. Mustard poultice on my belly. Three heated cups upturned on my chest. The lady of the house sends a maid to rub my arms with cider vinegar. Sounds, smells, angle of sunlight so familiar they enter me like a blade. They summon a doctor, a Montpelier man. Who is she? No one knows, sir. Does she speak? Not to my knowledge, sir. She’s brown as a Turk. Except on her privy parts, says the maid, lifting my sheets. The doctor raises one eyebrow, sucks in his breath.
Oak-wheeled wagons thunder by under hills of green hay topped with a salting of fresh snow. Clop-clop of horses, tap-tap-tap of hammers in the boatyards by the port. Cry of gulls. Streets chock-a-block with fat-bellied Breton peasants in saggy stockings, bandy-legged sailors, fresh farm girls and whores with baggy breasts, blackamoors, one-legged ex-soldiers, bare-bottomed children, beggars, merchants, matrons, friars, priests,
men-at-arms, esquires, scholars, virgins, lepers, footpads, comedians, preachers, troupes of actors reciting mystery plays, Twelfth Night mummers, itinerant Italian painters, poets and book smugglers. A religious procession every day, it seems, with a new saint borne aloft. Sonorous Te Deums. Din of church bells. Dogs bark. I remember Léon. Dead, I am certain, now dead.
As are all the others.
The cries of seagulls remind me of Canada. If I close my eyes
Later.
You shouldn’t have smashed the windowpane, he says. It opens like this.
I forgot, I say. It was stifling. I can’t get used to being inside. The ship was like a floating coffin. I slept under a sail on deck. What year is it?
I am a little disoriented.
The doctor leans into me, sniffing my breath, palpating my armpits, laying his ear against my breast (just a moment too long), examines my piss in a clear glass beaker as if it were wine.
Clear day. Blue sky through the casement. Cat asleep on a sunny patch on the counterpane. Salt wind off the ocean. They bring the savage girl from M. Cartier’s house to see me. She is keeping my bear cub, which is both a consolation and a delight to her. She stands at the foot of the bed, emaciated, pale, cracked lips, coughs and spits in a rag, rosary beads crushed in her palm. Exhausted. She only wants to see someone fresh from Canada. She drinks me in with her eyes. She kneels and says her prayers. Who is she praying for? Pray for us all, I think. What was her name?
Fevered dreams of hunting, of generals and of bears. Why is it that in dreams I seek the cause of all my woes, the giver of laws and punishments, the defender of faiths, expert at abandoning young females on the stony coasts of faraway lands? Or is it that somehow I know he is not finished with me yet? And I think, if I could tell him, I would have the doctor pluck these memories from my heart.
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