Days, when I am sober, I conduct a letter-writing business on the doorstep, mostly orders, bills of sale, indents, invoices, receipts and contracts for illiterate merchants. Nights, I conceal my tattooed face under a cowl and descend with the bear into the cribs beneath the cemetery. I have learned to play two country dances on a shepherd’s flute (or sometimes I use the little drum Comes Winter made from a pigskin). At the sound of the music, the bear, now decrepit, mangy, flatulent and toothless (a twin of myself) rises majestically on his hind legs and begins to sway from side to side. His eyelids droop. He seems to fall into an ecstatic trance. Now and again he takes a step backward or forward or shakes his head till his lips slap. Coins clink in an iron pot between my knees. Torches and mortuary candles blaze smokily in iron sconces.
Around us the low business of this commercial empire of death proceeds unabated. A horde of pickpockets, whores, Protestant divines, animal trainers, knife sellers, gamblers, sharpers, fortune tellers, barber surgeons, body snatchers, pimps, murderers, gravediggers, madmen, mothers of lost children, lost children, cripples, displaced peasants, letter-writers, insomniacs, lepers, inappropriately mystical Catholics, printers, poxy old soldiers, pimply university students, hawkers, street musicians, booksellers, impoverished poets, the gilded youth — sons and daughters of the court — on a tear, drunks and laudanum takers flows ceaselessly to and fro, drawn it seems by the miasma that emanates from the cemetery itself.
Above us gravediggers excavate among the graves, raking bones together and wheeling them in barrows to the charnel houses, then returning to bury new arrivals, wrapped in white sheets and placed in rows inside the gate. The ancient church, the walls, the tenements that rise on either hand are coated with a black grease which reminds me of the sooty residue that covered the Nellie, her sails and her crew when she came to my rescue, oh, these long years ago in Canada.
Bones choke the arcades along the wall. Behind the bones, one can still see the ancient paintings of the danse macabre which F. would often visit when he could still walk about on my arm. Sometimes the walls buckle and fall outwards, strewing the street with bones. Here and there one still sees the tiny cubicles where holy women were once immured, piously spending their days in their own filth, dependent for their upkeep on the charity of the mourners who would pass food and drink through chinks in the brickwork. Sometimes I envy them their simple lives.
One night I am exercising my bear inside the cemetery, a clove-studded orange pressed to my nose to mask the smell. I am in a dreamy state, only somewhat drunk, having that day read a letter from a fisherman, recently returned from the cod banks of Canada and in search of the young wife he had left behind. It was the wife who brought me the letter. She was one of those fast girls from the provinces, with a dimple in her cheek, one slow eye that gave her a droll and sensual look, clothes that were much too good for a farmer’s daughter, and a monkey called Hippo on a leash. Ah, she said, I thought he was dead. She tossed the letter in the gutter and walked offhand-in-hand with the monkey. I kept the letter.
While the bear shits and savours the scent of carrion, I meditate upon the pictures of emaciated Death wrapped in passionate embrace with the living: knights and prelates, noblewomen and fat, comely maids. I am much reminded of the difference between who I am now and the voluptuous girl I once was, how once my body seemed all but bursting with sensuality and desire. I catch the sound of low voices in the street beyond. One strikes me as familiar, though I can’t place it, remember instead the sight of rocks and bird shit out a window. Lifting my skirts, I stumble to the gate and peer into the smoky gloom, where here and there candlelight from a window shines on a pale face or a puddle.
Haif a dozen black-clad gentlemen tumble from a dimly lit house into the street, their voices muffled, slipping away by ones and twos to conceal their numbers. The cemetery is a gathering place for heretics, and I take this for the break-up of a clandestine meeting of Calvinists, a secret mass, a conventicle of the Elect, holy plotters. A single man, perhaps the one whose voice I heard, brushes past me in the dark and takes a shortcut along the ambulatory that leads across the cemetery, brushing off the beggars and cripples who dash for him in the dark. Something familiar about his gait and manner, something I could never forget. And it is like an ancient dream come back to me, the voice on the ship, the great dog Léon, the panel of spies and judges in the General’s cabin, the withered hand upon the map, the dreams within the dream, bear-woman and arquebus.
Wait, I call. Do you not know me?
He doesn’t hear, or, hearing, ignores me for a pauper. Quatgathoma, I shout in the long forgotten language of M. Cartier’s lexicon. Quatgathoma. Look at me.
His cloak swirls out as he turns. His face gleams under the stars. The two bears whirl on the axis of the universe, faster and faster it seems. Alcor, Alioth, Dubhe, Megrez, Merak, Mizar, Kochab, Polaris. I whisper the names and slip back my cowl so he can see my face — whore, he thinks, with the Great Bear stamped on her brow like a savage. Alcor, Alioth — it brings back his nightmares and the awful journey toward the Kingdom of Saguenay, the bear that danced, the morbid wound (when he thought he would lose the other hand), the terror and the exorcism. Now he sees my bear, snuffling like a dog, with its face in a pile of bones.
Quatgathoma, I say. Did you think of me? I feel edgy, irritable, morose. My eyesight dims, my arms grow heavy. Suddenly I want to go off into the woods (what woods?) alone and pace about. Uh-oh, I think. I haven’t felt like this in years.
Around us the porous earth of the cemetery seems almost liquid with the centuries of rotting corpses. Gravediggers say the soil itself eats the meat off bones. A white substance oozes up from the corpse layer, provenance unknown. But the resurrection men gather it in cups and sell it by the back door to witches and apothecaries. Rake-thin dogs burrow in the bone heaps. Even I cannot watch. A poxy whore whispers, No, no, no, to her lover in the shadowy entrance to a charnel niche.
The General’s face betrays panic. The stink from the graves is suffocating. He pulls his cloak across his face, but he cannot take his eyes away from me. Grey beard, nose like a razor handle, desperate eyes darting between my face and the bear. He is a man perpetually out of his depth, feeling for the bottom with his toes. Who is this woman? He is afraid of spies. But probably she is a beggar or a whore. She pretends to know him. A trick. But what about the bear? He can’t think about the bear. It reminds him too much of his nightmares.
The wind of history is blowing against the Protestants in France. War is brewing, a hundred years of war. Part of me admires his courage for daring to meet his co-religionists at this hour and place. But he was always putting his money on the wrong side of a bet. I think of all those graves on the shores of the Great River of Canada, of little Guillemette Jansart and the rest, not to mention my fish baby, the tennis player, Bastienne, my nurse, and the soul of a French girl which Itslk hid among the trees (and so it was lost).
Muttering nearby, a crowd of beggars. What’s it all about? Don’t know. Is he going to kill her or fuck her? We’ll help you, sir, if there’s any trouble. You think there’s money in it for us? She’s here every night with that animal. Watch it! Something’s happening. Look out for the bear. There ought to be a ordinance against violent pets.
The bear, muzzy-brained with age and city living, notices a knot of onlookers and takes it into his head to dance, lurching onto his hind legs, swaying this way and that, hearing some imaginary music. Too much for the General, whose own brain is fat with theology — grace, faith, election, predestination, things he doesn’t quite understand except that they all fit neatly together and give him a leg up on everyone else, including the priest who put his fingers up the General’s arse when he was a boy (of course, I don’t know this; one conjectures). He has never felt guilt in his life. Calvinism is not a religion of guilt. Instead of guilt, he is haunted by images of bears that keep him awake at night and thoughts of his many failures, which contradict his sense of being among the Elect
.
The General’s sword whispers out of its sheath. He was never afraid of a fight, just not a very good fighter. Everything was tone with the General, military bearing, style of authority — no imagination. He launched himself on a quest to stamp the New World with his image of himself. Find the gold, smash the idols, set up a model colony. So the sword snicks out of its sheath, and, before I can react, it slides in and out of the bear’s thigh, and the bear goes down, bawling and biting at the place where blood spouts. I swat my uncle, the General, laying his cheek open to the teeth, sending him reeling to the earth.
Our audience (joined by sundry resurrectionists, student doctors, lepers) mutters: Look at that. See what she did? She’s coming for you, grout. Look at her face. She’s got a knife, I’ll warrant. Hairy one, ain’t she? Coming right out of her clothes. Always knew there was something uncanny about her. Think we’ll be able to get his purse?
Beside myself (or not myself) with rage, dim-eyed, scenting blood, I slash the General’s moaning form. The air is full of the sound of shredding cloth, someone’s shrieks, snarls — so different, yet they seem to come from the same source. Crimson spatters down my front. Clothes fallen into tatters. I lift my nose and grunt, shake my head till my lips slap together. The General lies slack in the grave dirt, a bag of blood, his face not even a face. But something in me doesn’t like the smell of human meat. I am wary of the whispering, murmuring crowd of onlookers. Struggling to rise, the old bear overturns a barrow of bones. I try to grasp his rope but can’t articulate my fingers. I butt and nip at him till he rolls up on all fours. We back away from the crowd, then turn and limp out of the cemetery. The last I see, knives flash over the General’s body, his legs kick once, twice and go still. What do the grave-haunters see? Two bears loping through a gate, disappearing into the night.
Elle, Sept-lies, 2003
Elle slips her underwear off beneath her short skirt and lets her lover come inside her in broad daylight on the empty beach, hidden from the row of cabins by banks of alder, sumac and blooming fireweed. Her lover is much older than she is and doesn’t speak French, an impossible love. He was once her professor at the university. Now it makes her both angry and sad to see the two of them, looking like father and daughter, reflected in shop windows. She loves him dearly, but it will never work between them. Without thinking too much about the situation, she knows that when he leaves to return to Montreal and his work, she will not go with him.
After they make love, she strolls barefoot along the shore dunes where the wind stirs the sand haphazardly. The insides of her thighs are slick. Her lover dozes on the blanket, a book open on his chest (a new translation of Rabelais). She splashes across a shallow stream that traverses the beach before disappearing into the waters of the St. Lawrence, which, at this point, looks like a sea and not like a river at all. A half-dozen Indian children play there, making sandcastles and sculpting animal effigies. Someone has carved a series of eerie-looking faces in the bank along the top of the beach. A man in a fringed jacket, with a backpack slung over his shoulder and a patch over one eye, sits on a bone-coloured driftwood trunk, smoking a cigarette, watching the children intently. The scene fascinates her. She has a fantasy of going off to live with the Indians.
She and her lover watched the aurora borealis from the beach in front of her parents’ summer cottage the night before. The girl had dreamed strange dreams. She was chased by a bear, then she was a bear. It was rather nice being a bear until someone began to chase her. Then she was sleeping in a cave; she was a bear dreaming a girl who calls herself Elle. Her dreams, her frustration with her lover (with his pedantic and childish sense of humour, much like that of M. Rabelais), and the story she is composing all rattle around in her head. She is trying to write something about a North Shore folk tale she heard growing up, something about a girl who was marooned on an island, left for dead with her fiance and her old nanny. This was when Canada still belonged to the Indians. The lover died, the nanny died, and the girl had a baby, which, according to the legend, was carried off by a huge black bird.
She wonders where this legend came from, how it migrated to the settlements along the North Shore. There is a parallel story, written over and over again in sixteenth-century France, about a girl who was abandoned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence during one of the earliest attempts to colonize the country. But that was eighty years before the French came to live here for good. Did they bring this strange tale back to Canada with them? Or did the Indians themselves remember enough to pass it back to the colonists? Or did the story simply inhabit the place like a ghost, letting itself nestle in the minds of receptive hosts as they came by?
She feels so bearish today. She and her lover have seen mysterious signs in the sky since they drove here from Montreal—coronas, sun dogs, mock moons. Her lover took her from behind like a bear. She was once a dancer, so she knows how to change herself merely by shifting rhythms, by changing the way she walks, her posture. She can almost feel her head sink into her chest. Her arms become impossibly heavy, dragging her down on all fours. It is suddenly dark. Black night. Blood moon with a halo of fire. Afire burns in a hollow beside a hide hut. A girl is watching the girl on the beach. A bear paces at the verge of the light. Fire seems to come from its mouth. It is immeasurably ancient, haggard and nearly blind, yet impatient, angry at some unwanted invasion. But she can wait.
Afterword
LAWRENCE MATHEWS
If exuberance is beauty, as one of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell has it, then this is a beautiful book. So began my review of Elle in The Fiddlehead. To some readers, the connection may have seemed odd; Rabelais and Robinson Crusoe provide the most obvious analogues. But I wasn’t alone in looking for more complex literary comparisons. One reviewer mentions Moll Flanders; another, H. Rider Haggard’s She. Ken Babstock, in The Globe and Mail, invokes James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Peter Carey, and Richard Ford. Lorna Jackson, in the Georgia Straight, opts for the weird-amalgam approach: “George Bowering meta-histo-slapstick… meets Cormac McCarthy meta-histoscatology.” In Canadian Literature, Herb Wyile calls Elle “a kind of cross between Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World and John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright” Philip Marchand in the Toronto Star refers to Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here, concluding that Elle is “equal to that novel in its contribution to Canadian mythography.”
The citation of so many parallels might suggest that Elle defies easy categorization, insisting on being read on its own terms.
***
Elle’s powerful verbal energy demonstrates Douglas Glover’s love of language, which manifests itself in many bizarre, hilarious, and imaginatively compelling ways. However the book may have been composed, it conjures up the image of the author as a man possessed by words, scrambling to get them down (or out) in a state of high glee. Here’s the first paragraph of the main section, set in July, 1542:
Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I am aroused beyond all reckoning, beyond memory, in a ship’s cabin on a spumy gulf somewhere west of Newfoundland, with the so-called Comte d’Epirgny, five years since bad-boy tennis champion of Orleans, tucked between my legs. Admittedly, Richard is turning green from the ship’s violent motions, and if he notices the rat hiding behind the shit bucket, he will surely puke. But I have looped a cord round the base of his cock to keep him hard.
Aficionados of Glover’s work will be prepared for the over-the-topness of the voice, the situation, and the details. This is historical fiction that will cheerfully disregard the current Canadian convention that Our Past must be presented with Due Solemnity and with an Eye to Political Correctness.
The voice belongs to a Frenchwoman known only as “Elle.” Her well-to-do father is faced with the dilemma of “what to do with a headstrong girl” who, at nineteen, has had an illegitimate child and is, she says, “possessed of a backside that made my life both difficult and sublime.” He considers sending her to a nunnery, but she successfully implor
es him to let her be part of the expedition to the New World that her uncle, the Sieur de Roberval, is about to undertake.
So begin Elle’s adventures. When her shipboard dalliance with Richard is discovered, she is marooned with him and her nurse, Bastienne, on an uninhabited island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Richard and Bastienne perish, but Elle, improbably, survives, lives with an aboriginal hunter, and gives birth to Richard’s child, who dies soon afterward.
At this point, about halfway through the novel, Elle encounters a “hunchbacked savage woman of extreme years,” under whose enigmatic auspices she develops the capacity to shape-shift by changing herself into a bear and in general to enter an aboriginal psychological reality that transforms her sense of identity:
Did I really turn into a bear, or was I but a captive of a system of belief into which I had wandered all un-knowing? There is something I cannot explain here, some character of reality not contained between the via antiqua and the via moderna of the scholars who debate at the universities…. What I have become is more like a garbled translation than a self.
Eventually she returns to France, enjoys a liaison with a writer she calls “F.” (clearly Francois Rabelais), marries an innkeeper in Perigord, and, as an old woman, writes the memoir that is the novel. She also retains her ability to morph into a bear, a fact which allows her to take belated, brutal revenge on Roberval.
Elle Page 17
