Elle

by Douglas Glover

  Instead I tell him about Emmanuel, and he tells me about a son he lost, his beloved little Theodule.

  But —, I say, indicating his monk’s habit. Blockhead.

  His name is F, medical man and scribbler, curious about my case, living rat-poor and under an assumed name because of irreverent books he wrote, one step ahead of the Dominicans at the Sorbonne and the torch, but cheerful nonetheless. For safety’s sake, he should have left the country (he talks wistfully of Metz, a free city where he has rich Jewish friends), but the prospect of meeting sailors back from the New World lured him to Saint-Malo. Now he treats M. Cartier for gout and stone, edits the captain’s memoirs and assists in the court case to recover his expenses from my uncle the General. He goes by the name Issa ben Raif al Roc, yet another Arabicized anagram of his own. (I say, How do you expect to go unnoticed with a name like that?)

  He says part of him would like to skewer the censors, fulminate against the priests and die on a pyre for his principles like Sir Thomas More or my idol William Tyndale. But he is not human candle material. His books are mostly full of jokes. He can’t see the point of dying for them. I tell him I tried to read one on the Nellie but could not follow the story (not worth dying for, I agree). The letters looked like bears, foxes and cranes, chasing each other across the pages.

  What year is it? I ask.

  I am living in M. Cartier’s townhouse in Saint-Malo, which is empty on account of his retirement from seafaring and an outbreak of pestilence. A caretaker watches over me as well as the house, and M. Cartier has visited twice to check on me. He walks crookedly on account of the rheumatics, and his eyes are squinty from sighting the sun too often on his cross-staff. His moustaches are yellow from smoking tobacco — F. has started to smoke it himself. The old seaman has a goodly supply, which he gives away for help with spelling, punctuation and the courtly turns of phrase that will please the King.

  What year is it?

  I ask this over and over because I forget. Is it one year, or two, or three, or a decade since I embarked for the New World ? The Holy Roman Emperor has invaded from the Low Countries and threatens Paris itself. King Francis, a man not known for long-term thinking and crisis management, has given Toulon to the Turks in return for their help fighting the Holy Roman Emperor. The Turks have stripped gold from the churches, raped French nuns and shipped off townspeople for slaves. (I dreamed all this in Canada.) The English have captured Boulogne. Clearly things have gone downhill since I left. I feel ancient, though F. says once I fill out I’ll look no older than thirty. (I am not twenty-one, old for a woman of my station to remain unmarried.)

  You nearly died of fever, he says, not to mention the barber surgeon who first attended you here. Had I not intervened they would have treated you to death. He laughs. Not only that, but there are strange symptoms I cannot account for, grunts you make in your sleep, the extra nipples, the abundant body hair, the over-development of toe- and fingernails.

  To take his mind off my symptoms, I tell him the story of my misfortunes on the voyage home: The ship was so hot I couldn’t bear to live inside and tried to camp on deck in a whaleboat with a sail drawn over in foul weather. And then I had such dreams (left on a desert island to die, giving birth to a fish, turning into a bear, hunted down and shot to death — the worst is when I try to speak, and no one understands me). I thought I heard barking and tried to jump overboard. Someone accused me of changing shape, and the captain put me in irons so he wouldn’t have to think about me. The cub would have died except that Dado, the dwarf, took charge of feeding us both. He said someone had seen me walking the deck at night with fire coming out of my mouth and black fur covering my body, but no doubt this was a fancy suggested by the oddness of my behaviour and my affection for the real bear.

  He drugged me with laudanum and put leeches between my thighs to draw blood. I watched the leeches wax fat and happy while I grew listless and feeble. The cub had sores around his legs where they chained him. The wind blew so badly in the wrong direction that the crew despaired of reaching home and began to call me a witch. Once we moored to an iceberg in the middle of the ocean to cut ice for fresh water, and I fancied I saw a savage man waving to us. They ate whale oil when the food ran out. They even suggested eating the bear, which struck terror in my heart. Dado read them F.’s book to take their minds off starvation and drowning.

  Dado told me about his lover, a young Basque harpoonist, fearless in the hunt and in bed, who died at Trois Pistoles on the Canadian shore and is buried in a lonely cemetery overlooking the Great River. He wants to be buried there, too, the dwarf said, and when he is away in Europe, he is always anxious to go back. Listening to his sad love story, I think that one day, like Brendan’s monk, Dado will refuse to return to his home across the ocean and stay in Canada.

  One day, I am moody, weeping and combing my hair straight out with my fingers.

  I say, That’s what it feels like. Life is punishment. It’s making small talk while the thumbscrews work, telling jokes in the Land of the Dead.

  F. hires a dogcart to take us to M. Cartier’s estate at Limoilou. You are a little club, a coterie, he says, the ones who have been to Canada and survived.

  Surviving wasn’t difficult. Dying was hard. I say this though I don’t know what I mean. My memories of the voyage are like dreams, and the bear-dreams like dreams of dreams, and all these dreams seem more true than waking life.

  My feelings are paradoxical. I have returned safely to France, Land of the Living, where they speak words I can understand. Yet I suffer a vast nostalgia — for what? Fur capes, dead friends, lovers and babies, starvation, large animals falling on me, conversations conducted in non-existent languages, insect life only prevented from driving me insane by copious applications of animal grease? Here in M. Cartier’s house, every word, smell, sound and half-forgotten convenience (bread, grapes, wine, combs — my hair!) brings me back to myself. Yet I live in terror of exposure and shame and miss the excitement of my old life.

  F. says he has noticed a malaise among the Canadian veterans, not exactly an illness, although some are sick with unspecified ailments and some are gone in drink and venery, but a lassitude, a dreaminess, an odd weightlessness. He says his informants at court report that the General speaks constantly of returning to his lost kingdom, tediously extolling its virtues. His words carry the implication that reality, everything of significance, is elsewhere, west and across the sea.

  M. Cartier’s farm is pungent with human, horse, ox, cow and pig dung, a small hill of which steams cozily between the barn and the kitchen door. Chickens, dogs and piglets squabble in the rotting turnips, yellow mire and snow melt of the dooryard. M. Cartier dozes guiltily over his memoirs in a sunny window, bundled in a beaver-hide cape and moccasins he brought back from Canada. The savage girl squats barefoot in a corner doing needlework, glancing now and then at a child’s illustrated book of devotional verse. There are dark stains down her breast, a bracket of dried blood inside one nostril. Her dark skin is ashen with pallor. She smells sourly of death.

  But she rouses herself when she sees me hobble through the door, takes my hand and leads me to the snowy field behind the barn, where the bear paces the length of a chain attached to an iron ring in the stone wall. Snowflakes glisten on his black back, his nose lifts to test the wind as we approach. Lean and starved looking, he is still larger than I remember, too big for my bed now. He bawls anxiously, rushes to meet me till the chain yanks him back. I have brought him apples tied in cloth and a honeycomb which he licks from my fingers.

  F. watches, can scarcely believe such gentleness in so wild a creature.

  I try some words from the lexicon on the savage girl and see her eyes grow large with surprise. Then she quickly corrects my pronunciation. I say, Moon, girl, canoe, friend. But her tongue races away with her, and I cannot follow the new words. Coughing stops the flow. She coughs till it seems something will snap inside her slender frame. She gags, spits blood, heaves, clutching her ri
bs with bone-thin fingers, her eyes inward and terror-struck. Will I drown now? they ask. Will it be now? So far from home? I bite my lip, for I have seen the look and sensed the questions before, when Richard died and Bastienne. When the New and the Old Worlds meet, first we exchange corpses.

  This is too sad for me, I think — to be exiled and watch my loved ones die, then to return home and find the process repeated in reverse. It is as if the whole journey was meant to teach me to see this girl, to guess her torment and dream her dreams of rescue.

  I ask her name.

  Catherine, she says, the word seemingly wet with blood. No, I say. Not your Christian name. The other.

  Comes Winter, she says.

  Never, Except in My Dreams

  F. wishes to know if I slept with a bear. For the book he is writing, he says.

  He has a new name. Arnolais i Frabec.

  I say, Are you trying to get caught?

  How about Arnolaf Rasibeci?

  Flirty, flirty. I could eat him for breakfast, the little dumpling — spectacles, truss, walking stick and all. Once F. had dreams like mine, but sleep is something that comes to him rarely now. He has farmer’s hands, with big digits like sausages, always moving. He blinks when he talks to me — an old nervous habit.

  We have much in common besides dead sons. Being an extra child and younger son, F. was handed over to the Dominicans in a distant town at the age of seven. He blames his mother for this and, after her, all women. The monks beat him, starved him, kept him awake with nightly prayers and vigils, made him sleep on dirty straw in a room otherwise used as a urinal and advised him to imagine women performing the filthiest bodily functions in order to suppress desire — all those things that, in the common view, bring a child closer to God.

  F. learned Latin, Greek and forty-nine ways to masturbate. He learned more about desire than about God. He says desire is like a soft cheese. If you squeeze it, it will simply squirt out through the cracks between your fingers. Or it is like metaphor or comedy, affording the greatest pleasure by surprising juxtaposition (he is not sure this is the lesson the Dominicans intended). Later he liked to use me the Italian way (the Italians call it the French way) and took delight in watching me defecate — he was a rhetorician of ironic reversal.

  Everything he knows he knows from books. His mind is an encyclopedia of ancient wisdom (these days, to become a doctor, it is only necessary to memorize Hippocrates, Galen and Vesalius). But to F. this wisdom, too, has become a game, an opportunity for rearrangement and altered meaning. (So, then, I ask, you believe nothing? No wonder they want to burn you.) He delights in my tales of life amongst the savages, their habit of renaming one another to record significant life events, their cunning mistranslations, their trust in dreams, their tales of transformation — something there, he says, we have ourselves forgot.

  He takes me to see the bas-reliefs in the little Malouin church of Ste. Agathe, which are meant to be the likenesses of five savages a certain Captain d’Aubert brought back from Newfoundland in 1509 (unofficially). When these men saw SaintMalo, they daubed themselves with red ochre and sang their death songs — somewhat prematurely, as it turned out, for death comes with excruciating slowness to these savage exiles. The carvings have the air of souls captured in stone, of spirits put unwillingly into the earth, striving to go home.

  He takes me to see Donnacona’s grave, with its diminutive stone cross, in a secluded churchyard. And I am reminded of the little graveyard on the Isle of Demons where Richard, Bastienne and Emmanuel rest forever (though their graves have no marker). I think also of the graves at Trois Pistoles, which Dado Duminil told me of, and the colonial cemeteries left behind by M. Cartier and the General. The idea of all these unvisited graves on the peripheries of other worlds haunts me.

  F. watches curiously, gauging my responses, which I try to keep to myself I no longer let him examine me, wear gloves to conceal my nails. He says his interest in me is purely medical and linguistic — am I a pun or a simile?

  He says, These savages are all forgotten. Easier to forget than to think about, be moved and then, perhaps, to change oneself Easier to squabble over the nature of a communion wafer and fight a war and burn a heretic or two.

  But we writers have an odd prejudice against silence, for-gotten lives, words unsaid between lovers, unwritten books.

  How about Franco Belaraissi?

  Better, I say.

  My favourite words are dolour and enigma. I recall a priest telling me when I was six that on the call of the last trump the earth will bubble and burst like a stew, and out will pop the legions of the dead. I covered my eyes with horror. The priest seemed ancient but was probably only twenty, with a goitre the size of a rabbit draped at his throat and one eye scarred over from small pox. He said not to be afraid because we would all be born again hale and hearty, even those who died dismembered in war or eaten by foxes or rotten with leprosy or — his gift for dolorous extrapolations was positively, well, Rabelaisian. Also we would all be born the same age — thirty-one. Even those who died as babies? How strange to think you could die a sucking infant and wake up a thousand years later aged thirty-one.

  I am a little in love with the doctor, not the least because his cures are less painful than any I have yet encountered, but also because of my girlish attraction to men of genius. F. says he once saw my dear Richard, the so-called etc., play a youth match on the university court in Orléans one hot June day while in the company of a fellow student, the waspish and disputatious John Calvin, who later went off to found a religion and a state. He makes much of this coincidental crossing of paths with my lover — three great men of the age, he says, laughing, and their connection with the girl who colonized the New World, killed three bears, and dwelt a year on an island inhabited by shrieking demons, where her words froze in the air as soon as they were spoken.

  Two, I say. Two bears died. I didn’t kill either of them. And the demons turned out to be seabirds.

  Alas, my legend already grows at the expense of my true story. Even a celebrated writer like E, with his insatiable curiosity, cannot resist the impulse to embellish, expand and invent.

  On a scrap of paper torn from the margin of a book, he writes: And what of the young bear-woman? Does she stay inside, does she roam, does she forget, does she learn to shave?

  I embark upon a mysterious project, something between a game and a prayer. Dreams drive me. And pity. In a corner of forest attached to M. Cartier’s estate at Limoilou, the savage girl Comes Winter and I begin to build a facsimile of a Canadian encampment. We choose a spot where a pleasant brook pools before splashing into the fields beyond, and there, with twigs, hemp twine and the hide roll taken from the bear-woman’s hut, we construct a home, laying down evergreen boughs for a floor and my bearskins for a bed. We have neither time nor patience to use stone axes but resort to iron tools from M. Cartier’s farm stores, even nails. (In any case, there is little time to spare, for she is dying.)

  Nothing is exactly as it should be: Comes Winter belongs to Donnacona’s tribe, which speaks the language of the lexicon and lives far from the lands inhabited by Itslk’s family and the Bear-Hunting People. Her customs and usages are far different from what I myself learned. Nor is the French winter as cruel and antiseptic as the one I passed in Canada — there is little need for the tennis racquets I brought back with me. And though we set snares and I even hammer a half-dozen nails into points and fashion arrows for the hunt, we settle for killing a pig, draping the meat to cure over a frame above the fire. When we sleep, she holds my hand. But in the morning when I wake she is kneeling over her prayers, kissing a wooden cross, coughing so hard she seems to be trying to turn herself inside out. We keep the bear chained to prevent him from wandering off (when he should be wandering off).

  I hang the pig’s skull in a tree, along with a few chicken heads and a deer’s jaw I find in the woods. But to Comes Winter this is alien symbolism. It makes her uncomfortable. Likewise she tells me her dreams i
n detail, while I recall that the Bear-Hunting People kept theirs secret. My own dreams are various. Though I am living safe and sound in France, I dream of ships sailing away, abandonment and exile. Comes Winter and I are like twins but opposite; she is infected with Christianity while I am infected with savagery. Sometimes I dream of bears. Once again I see the dark shape outside the hut, pacing among the trees with sparks flying out of its mouth, no sound for such a monstrous, moving thing. From time to time it raises its snout to the wind, and I perceive it is calling, crying something in the lost language of bears. But no one answers.

  My own bear is gentle and affectionate, doglike in fact. I can walk with him on a leash, which delights children in the neighbourhood, offends the dogs and village dignitaries, terrifies mothers. Once the village cure comes to spy on us, though he is an old Malouin, a Breton who grew up more pagan than Christian himself, and after a meal of smoked pig and fish stew cooked over a fire in the woods, he goes away again. After that, strange to say, the villagers begin to visit in ones and twos with small offerings of food, as if they take us for holy hermits.

  Signs: (I) A whale chasing a school of fish beaches itself in the shallows south of the port one day — an orca or hunter whale, black and white with a fin on top like a rudder, not as large as the right and bowhead whales harpooned for their oil but ruthless and brave. It lives a long day, breathing quietly, staring at the gathering sightseers through its sad brown eyes. Astonishingly, it remains alive even after fishermen begin to chop it up for the meat. A beggar boy pokes a stick through its eyes to keep it from watching, sending a tremor through its frame. Later someone says the whale wept through its own slaughter. When they slice open its belly, two ivory pegs and a flood of pinkish sea water rush out. The pegs are iron-shod, with leather straps at the top. They are given to a legless man in the parish.