Elle (19 page)

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.

DECEMBER, 1543-

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.

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.