(2) A Welsh cog carrying coal puts into port with the story of how the crew had spied a man riding an iceberg, bobbing amid the coasters and cross-channel traffic. The slab of ice was the remains of what must have once been a huge floe, but it was now so diminished it was translucent, and the rider had to lie flat, with his arms and legs stretched out, to keep it from tipping over. He smiled and waved when he saw the sailors peering down at him from the deck of the ship. His clothing, they said, was of fur, his cheeks were tattooed in strange patterns, and on the ice beside him lay a fresh sea bass and an assortment of primitive implements: a stone-point spear, a bow and arrows, a stone hatchet, bone hooks and leather fishing line. Before the sailors could throw him a rope, their ship had carried them away. The last they saw of the waving man was his tiny ice-boat drifting toward the coast of France. In the dives and taverns that line the port, it is said the crew was stunned by coal gas captured in the ship’s hold. In any case, sailors are always sighting strange objects: burning crosses, cavorting mermaids, burning islands where no land was ever seen, monsters and serpents.
The Writing Life
F. says old de Saintonge, M. Cartier’s pilot, the one who sailed with the General, has stolen a march on us all and rushed a small book into print, a narrative of his voyages to Canada, pulled out of a hat, as it were, for the November book fair in Lyons, where F.’s own books are published. The world is an immensely speedy place these days. Books on any subject come out willy-nilly: almanacs, prognostications, illustrated medical manuals, topical histories, travel memoirs — religious tracts and collections of obscene drawings sell the best. Flocks of books, their pages like birds’ wings (on some distant island).
M. Cartier himself is an indifferent, poky writer (or all writers suffer the Canadian lethargy described above). He spends hours at a table before the window, watching the fat-assed milkmaid flirt with the stableboy, smoking a pipe, smashing walnuts with a hammer, mixing his ink, sharpening his quills with a pocket knife, going for snacks, sniffing cloves, rubbing his eyes, rubbing his cock, scratching his balls, smelling his farts, pulling hairs out of his ears and nose, and has nothing to show for it at the end of the day.
F. says the chief evil of printed books is that, as soon as everyone can read whatever they want, they’ll all decide to be writers as well. He is already tired of amateurs — retired explorers, soldiers, prelates, ambassadors, midwives, courtesans, tennis players, lovers, swordsmen, cooks, kings (not to mention the King’s relatives) — who all their lives read nothing but a breviary, account books, a dozen letters and an almanac and then sit down to write a book as if their opinions were worth more than an eel’s whisker to anyone but themselves.
I study F’s books, following the words with my finger, teaching myself to read again. What I love about his stories: He writes as if he is never afraid of what he might say next.
Foolhardy and fearless with a pen; he says. That’s me.
F. says he may have a try at writing my story, that or a travel guide to Rome, which he is certain he can sell to his Lyons printer. He has just finished a third book about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel but despairs of publishing it in the present atmosphere of suspicion, excessive religious zeal (irrespective of what religion), ill-humour, illiberality and lack of irony. He keeps the manuscript in a box under the mattress (uncomfortable for sleeping), drags it out from time to time, changes a word and puts it back, is haunted by fantasies of house fires. His former protector, the cardinal, died a year before in the yard of an inn while crossing the Alps from Italy. For the last hour of his life he uttered oracles and predicted the future.
What did he foretell? I ask.
Death, famine, pestilence, war, an end to the ban on usury, the invention of a flying machine, a total eclipse of the sun sometime, earthquakes, forest fires, floods —
Has he gotten anything right so far?
F. doesn’t dare publish another word till he finds a new sponsor or receives a blessing from the King, some protection at least from the book and author burners. He is an old man, looks older than he is, bespectacled, burning his brain up thinking of money-making schemes, scribbling his notes, sipping a decoction of thornapple and hellebore for the mild hallucinations it induces (imaginary worlds that are, he says, an improvement on the real one). In bed he likes to be held against my breast in the dark, likes to become a child again. I stroke his scalp, murmur endearments, pull the cover tight about us. Like all writers, he is a man fighting with himself for purchase, for confidence, for the moment when his spirit overflows onto the page and he is himself and free.
Meanwhile there is some trouble about an incompetent printer who switched an m for an n and changed the word “soul” to “ass,” which seems to have pushed ironic disrespect right over into sacrilege. And an old friend, Etienne Dolet, a noble hack with a death wish, whose excitable temperament drives him to seek martyrdom, has just dangerously blackened F.’s reputation by printing an unexpurgated edition of his first two giant books (which Dado Duminil showed me on the Nellie). M. Dolet is lining up a free seat at a public burning but seems intent on bringing F. along as well.
Sometimes he reminisces about the child. Theodule’s mother was an Italian book smuggler named Renata Belmissieri, who, like my old nurse Bastienne, went back and forth over the mountains carrying books in a belly sack. The author gave her a real belly, but she left after his baby was born, bent on adventure and bad men. In the end, F. says, M. Calvin’s spies snatched her passing Unitarian tracts to a Geneva bookseller in a tavern stable. She and the bookseller died under torture.
He gives me a list of books to read: Hippocrates, On Dreams, Plotinus, Inexpressible Things, Artemidorus, On the Interpretation of Dreams, Dinarius, Unknowable Things, and Hipponax, Things Better Left Unsaid (Peri anecphoneton).
What the Curé Knew
Comes Winter is dying by the minute, dying by inches, by each breath she takes. There are three kinds of consumption — atrophic, tabetic and emaciative — of which she has all three. Her ribs are gaunt, thin as blades. Her breath comes in whispers, like the sound of a quill pen on parchment. For pillow talk, F. describes the state of her insides (another new world, not one I wish to visit). He is most interested in the sucking medicine the old bear-woman practised on me. He encourages me to try it on the savage girl so that he can observe the operation. Her skin is as dry as a snake’s, papery to the touch. I am afraid I will tear it with my tugging and pulling, which she suffers in gloomy silence (her reaction to most things in life). I fail to discover any alien objects whatsoever inside her body.
F., the doctor, the scrupulous scientist, the new thinker, says as likely as not the old bear-woman used sleight of hand to introduce objects which she appeared to wrench from my flesh. He offers to demonstrate, rubbing Comes Winter’s back briskly with his sinewy hands till she sighs with the heat of it. Then he grasps a knob between his thumb and forefinger, kneads it violently, pulls and pulls, and suddenly out pops a tiny carved bear, the twin of my own which I had from Itslk and which the old woman found beneath my shoulder blade. (F. says it is my bear.)
Comes Winter disappears daily on some obscure errand, limping down the snowy path past M. Cartier’s cow barn and pigsty — from this angle I think how his little estate looks just like a ship rising upon the hill of an enormous wave (a ship called the Passing Fancy). One day I follow her to a chapel on the high road to Saint-Malo, by the third milestone before the gate, a sailors’ chapel overlooking the sea, with a mermaid carved in stone over the door, fish and spouting whales in relief around the altar. She falls to her knees and drags herself inside over the dirty flags to pray and weep. The cure sometimes comes upon her there. He says she would be a saint if she weren’t brown-skinned. He rarely sees such piety. Her weakness shows in the lengthening of her absences. Once she returns on her hands and knees, coughing blood along the path.
But she is as torn, as I am, in her heart. She shows me a small spirit drum she made from a cask and a pie
ce of pig hide she cured herself. She has decorated the drum with the painted symbols of her old religion mixed with fish and crucifixes from the new. I tell her that at least all her changes are on the inside. She can’t imagine the horror, not to mention the inconvenience, of now and then descending into bearishness.
Comes Winter also has a rattle she made from a turtle she discovered in the barnyard, lacquered and polished, with its neck stretched out for a handle and its beaky mouth gaping open. She tells me that according to her grandfather the world was created on a turtle’s back with mud a muskrat retrieved from the bottom of a primeval sea. I ask her if by chance anyone had to blow through the muskrat’s anus to get the dirt out. She finds this a distasteful suggestion, but I notice F.’s ears perk up.
Day by day, Comes Winter weakens. The flow of blood from her mouth and nostrils is constant. She bleeds more than one could imagine, given her size and state of emaciation. F. says her lungs are in tatters, ragged flags instead of bags. Still she tries to dance a little by the fire, softly sings old songs from before M. Cartier sailed away with her. It is sad to watch, and I think, This is how we will all go in the end, dancing to some half-forgotten rhythm as the clockwork inside runs down.
My dreams are fierce with memories of the familiar dead. I am tense and anxious, spill a pot of stew in the fire and cut myself to the bone with a knife. Things are not right, not right, and this lonely encampment seems like a poor translation of some other more meaningful place.
M. Cartier limps down to our hut from time to time, dimeyed, hesitant. He has stopped writing his memoir. F. despairs. He shows me a page. Scribbled star maps, squiggles, female genitals grossly enlarged, lists of household bills. M. Cartier peeks in at Comes Winter, mutters, Stupid, stupid. Perhaps he understands by how much he failed to grasp the moment of contact, how ill-advised he was to steal human beings and ship them to France, how, when love was offered, he failed to reach out a lover’s hand.
I try to talk to Comes Winter about dying. She says only that she is tired, that she wants to rest, that she is afraid of nothing and cannot imagine why she continues to persist. What she thinks is a mystery, cloudy and mixed, with beliefs piled on top of beliefs. She is grateful for my presence. She asks me to tell her my stories again and again. She believes every word about my old bear-woman, as if I am telling her about my trip to market the day before. Such transformations are not surprising to her.
She says the spirit goes west when it dies, but first it encounters a dreadful warrior called Head-Piercer, who extracts the brain before the spirit continues to the Land of the Dead. When I ask her what effect this has on the dead person, she seems surprised by the question. Apparently it has no effect whatsoever. She calls out one moment, God, forgive me. The next she whispers a savage death dirge, repeating the same word over and over again.
I invented my own picture of death when I was three and my kitten Manu suffocated under the bedcovers. When I die, when Comes Winter dies, we will awake on a sun-drenched meadow, sheep-cropped by the look of it, with a hill rising before us with one great shade tree at the top, and all those who have loved us will come strolling down the slope, like a party on a summer picnic, to welcome us to a place that seems much like this only better, sharper and realer.
This is a sentimental image (curiously Platonic, says F.), but I cannot shake it. It persists alongside the doleful notion that nothing exists beyond the light, no God, no angels, no one paying respectful attention to my every act, no caring Father (so unlike my father). But I cannot imagine nothing, or only for an instant now and then, a flicker of darkness and cold.
Comes Winter stops eating, sucks brandy mixed with water from a rag. With sudden passion, she whispers to me that she is a great sinner. I say, No, that cannot be true. I remember how virtuous and reserved she has always seemed. But then she says that she has slept with more than fifty men since coming to France. I even let the curé fuck me in the chapel, she says. She has the pox. She lifts her shift to show me her privy parts, which are a mass of sores, scars and welts. But, she adds, Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. She quotes me the verses about the woman at the well who had six men, and still God did not turn from her. (But only six, I say.) Like Richard, on her deathbed she sweeps away my pleasant illusions, my self-possession.
She wants to see a public burning before she dies, she has heard so much about them. She wants to see a two-headed calf born in the next village. She wants me to read her the poems of Francois Villon and tell her all my Canadian adventures again and again. She coughs up her own flesh. She stinks of rot before she is dead and cannot stand herself. Will I go home when I die? she wonders. Her hair comes out when I comb it with my fingers. In my dreams, her bones poke through her flesh. She dances till they fall in a heap, still jerking to the rhythm of the drum.
One day, as a cold spring rain descends, flooding our hut, she expires in a deluge of blood.
Such a relief, she whispers at the end, for both of us.
I think, What of the Lord Cudragny? When the language that names a god dies, does the god die, too?
Stupid, stupid, I think.
After
This is what it will be like, I think. I will wander with F. a while. We will go to Metz to the street of the Jews, and he will write importunate and whining letters to rich friends who are not so friendly as they once were. (Tell me, why do I end up with men who cannot take care of themselves?) ètienne Dolet goes to the stake after having his tongue severed, his hands broken, his feet pierced. F.’s new book will come out under the King’s seal, but then the King will die.
In Metz, F. begins a fourth book about the giants, the tale of how Pantagruel and his friends set sail from Thalassa (somewhere near Saint-Malo), in imitation of M. Cartier and the General, in search of the Oracle of the Holy Bottle, who will help the cowardly Panurge decide whether to marry or not.
That chestnut, I say.
It’s not about marriage, says F. It’s an allegory.
What’s an allegory? I ask.
Never mind.
It’s a new kind of book; he makes fun of everything. But then he doesn’t. I know what he means. Panurge is the most human of F.’s characters, the most like the author himself, and what he fears is love. In F.’s book, Panurge is afraid of being cuckolded by his wife. You know the story: A man falls in love, marries a girl, and all at once the girl changes into someone he no longer recognizes and turns him into a foolish bird with horns. But being cuckolded is a joke that hides a deeper fear — that the soul of another person is a wilderness, a New World, where the lover must learn to speak a foreign language, where he loses all certainty and finds himself transformed. We are not so different, the shallow and headstrong girl from the provinces and the new writer. When I tell him about my attempts to use M. Cartier’s lexicon, F. hides his bad teeth behind his hand and laughs. Then he begins to study the lexicon and speaks the words with me when we are alone.
But F. can’t finish the book, sells it to a printer incomplete. He will find a new protector, take a trip to Rome, then waste his visit researching his guidebook, only to discover that some Italian has already written one better. He is running out of energy. Sweet man, dumpling. I collect and organize his notes, his half-completed chapters. Nothing is as I imagined it would be. The world is lit by human candles to the glory of God. My opinion of this practice has altered. Bears do not see the point of burning people; bears understand that they might be hunted down and burnt themselves.
He finally finishes the fourth book. In 1551, we have one good year, when the cardinal arranges two livings for F., there is sufficient money, and we only squabble about the book because it is nothing like my journey and stops before the giant and his friends reach the Indies and the oracle. When the book comes out, it is immediately banned. F. is cast down, broken. He drags about, feeling like a failure. He has an ailment that causes his limbs to shake, his head and eyes to move constantly. But he tries to write. There is something he needs to get down on paper
. The last book will conclude them all.
He scribbles notes, dialogues, scenes — he sketches the end of the book, the ambiguous advice of the oracle, which, variously interpreted, causes Panurge to decide to risk marriage after all. I don’t know why I expect the author will write my story the way it happened (since no one else does), or why I should expect a straight answer to the foremost questions of existence. It occurs to me that if I have learned anything it is that the universe gives no clear word as to its state, that our lives are bracketed in fog. And yet there is no holding back. We change ourselves by plunging into the thick of things (a wife, a lover, a New World). We change ourselves or die.
Aguyase, F. Quatgathoma.
Oh, F., you’re dead now. But don’t worry. I’ll write the rest of your book.
Adgnyeusce.
At the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, 1560
For a time I live in the rue de la Ferronnerie in Paris, hard by the Church of the Innocents (named for the babies King Herod slaughtered in an ineptly planned attempt to kill Jesus, our Lord and Saviour). I also was once innocent and unjustly condemned by my uncle, the General, but perhaps I have said enough about that. I am here because F. brought me in the days of his decline (when he put it about that he was in jail for debt in Lyons, then ran away from his debts). It has been years and years since we came to this city of the dead. Now his bones are mixed with a million other bones in the arcaded charnel houses along the walls of the cemetery square. But for the bear, who provides a steady income, I would have been dead and lost among those bones myself long ago.
I am far gone in self-pity, melancholy, misanthropy and other words ending in -y. I drink wine spirits for nourishment, take laudanum to sleep and insert clysters of galbanum, asafetida and castoreum to counteract the constipating effect of the laudanum. Mostly I sit in a corner, holding the bear’s paw in one hand and an old tablecloth in the other with which to wipe my tears. I have told my story over and over to anyone who will listen, have alienated erstwhile friends, lovers and well-wishers. In Canada I was, briefly, next thing to a god (an ambiguous and confusing state), but now I am perceived as a liar, a madwoman and, worst of all, a bore. (Weep, weep.) No one believes a word I say, either that I once went to the New World or knew the celebrated F.
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