Elle (6 page)

My heart is as unknown to me as this vast and desolate province. I miss Richard horribly. At first I think I am sick because of the fierce pain in my belly. I cannot bear to kill the little birds, even for food. I cannot stand to have Bastienne out of my sight. I am terrified I will lose the baby. I carry a rag to blow my nose and wipe my eyes. I find solace in the native words and my English Bible.
Aguyase,
I cry. Friend, friend.

It is autumn. Already ice forms over the little stream at night. Immense flocks of birds swirl above the island, then strike off south and are replaced by other flocks. At night, the geese honk without a break, reminding me of the mumbled colloquies of
monks. I wear a bag of feathers over my head to keep my ears warm. My nose is raw, my hands chapped — the early signs of scurvy, I suspect. Parts of me will start to drop off soon. I am in a panic about the future; there is no future, so far as I can see. I am without hope. It is obvious that once the birds stop flying through, once the snow begins to fall, there will be no food here. All Bastienne and I can look forward to are months of cruel cold and starvation. Better to die quickly, I think, though in a half-hearted way. It is a sin to think this.

We buried my lover above the tide line by his tennis court. It was a devil of a job to dig a hole through the tangle of ancient tree roots, broken sea shells and beach cobbles, and the soil above the bedrock was barely deep enough to take his body. We raised a mound over him, a layer of dirt and leaves covered with all the stones we could carry. Even then the grave wasn't sealed, and ravens would perch atop the pile, attracted by the smell, coating the stones with droppings, which seemed a desecration. I fashioned a scarecrow from one of my gowns stuffed with kelp, which somehow did little to improve the dignity of Richard's resting place. We kept his clothes. They are more convenient than my skirts, which in any case are turning to rags.

My pregnancy advances inexorably. Since I can force myself to eat little or nothing, my belly is growing bigger and smaller at the same time. My tits have shrunk to an androgyne semblance of tits, though my nipples itch, and I keep opening my (Richard's) shirt to look at them and wonder. I have passed the first three months of sickness and fatigue when Bastienne says I ought to be feeling better. But I feel nothing. From all the signs, the child will be born in April, which means it will not be born at all. It mocks me, reminding me of love, hope and desire, which are as much a trinity as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost
and just as distant and ineffectual (forgive me, Lord, my bitter heart). But it grows, feeding off me like trees living off the landscape. I am a landscape of desire. Everything is a complete surprise to me — baby, body, heart, the country roundabout, my peculiar history.

I have said little of Bastienne, who I believe hired herself out as a baby's nurse when she was thirteen, was seduced by the child's father, a paper factor of middle years, then abandoned in Paris in a delicate condition. She was pretty and dirty minded and so made her living easily at first, gave up the child to the nuns and found herself a protector, some provincial viscomte with a large belly and an interminable lawsuit in regard to dams and water rights that he was determined to bring before the King while his wife and eighteen children cooled their heels in Provence.

He kept her in a little gate lodge on rue Montsouris, along with many objects of religious art and a draughts table on which they played every evening before retiring. He could not read but revered books and liked her to tell him rude stories before he went to sleep. He liked the stories so much that he hired a secretary and had them written down and found a printer who made them into a little book which sold out in a fortnight. (Thus two people who could neither read nor write contrived to author a bestseller, a pattern that I suspect will prove the rule rather than the exception as the history of literature unfolds.)

Bastienne fell in love with the printer, who preferred the real thing to the stories. For him, she embarked on a career smuggling forbidden books and manuscripts between Paris and the great cities of Europe. She pretended to be pregnant, concealing books in a bag beneath her skirts. But one day, crossing the Alps, she was accosted and summarily aborted by a squad of
Swiss pikemen, who raped her and handed her over to the Dominicans. The Dominicans, in turn, tortured her nearly to death in a manner that left her ugly as an old boot and incapable of performing the act of love except the Italian way. She was twenty-three and toothless, with a draggy walk that made men pity her.

Pity kept her alive, but she always learned from the men who used her, found something they could give. An old Prussian herbalist named Nicholas Merck gave her the secret formula for an abortifacient, handed down by his family, and a book of astrology — easy spells and recipes in clotted Gothic print. She hired an impoverished student at the Sorbonne (later a famous cleric and dialectician, much loved for folksy medical imagery and his persecution of wayward women) to read the book to her and set herself up in business, always in secret and always ready to move on when things grew hot.

Over the years, she made her way toward me, as though spurred by a feckless and dilatory Fate (she actually passed through our village twice before coming to rest). When we met, Bastienne was much skilled but tired and ready to go back to telling stories. I was an impressionable and curious eight-year-old when she told me, in detail, the story of her rape and torture. It had an effect.

Now her old wounds are reopening, scar turning to jelly and beginning to seep. She bleeds when she shits, which could be just piles brought on by a diet of bird bones, books and tennis balls but probably has its origin in some more malign interior difficulty. Her turnip face, with its sunken lips and chin almost reaching her nose, gazes up at me with an expression of mild surprise and interrogation, more like a dumb animal than a human. Why me? What does it all mean? Can you give me a
bone and a place to sleep and make me feel safe and warm again? (On the other hand, maybe this is all a human wants, too.) She drags about, mumbling old stories like prayers — which reminds me of Richard and his tennis court. We cannot be saved, I think, unless we are willing to be changed. But I myself cannot change, or even imagine the change that might redeem me.

She who ministered to me of old, told me scandalous tales and taught me to touch myself to help me sleep (I did not sleep much and once gave myself a blister down there), she who carried messages to my lovers and stood sentry and held me through the night when love turned sour, she who comforted me when baby Charles came and fed me powders that gave the sweetest dreams, she now seems impotent and diminished. She has no imagination except of the fantastical erotic variety and so cannot even find solace in seeing herself, as I do, as part of some tragic drama.

(The Three Ages of Man, according to
moi:
In ancient times, we saw ourselves engaged in a timeless struggle — or dance — with the gods, in which men and gods met and contended, and men died heroes, and women slept with immortals in the shape of farm animals. Currently, at the beginning of the age of literature, we see ourselves as actors strutting upon the stage or as characters in a book. We are still heroic, but there is a beginning and an end, which makes us wistful. The gods have retreated — I don't know where — and it is no longer appropriate to have sex with animals. In the future, and this I must have dreamed, the stage will shrink to a prison, we will see ourselves as inmates separated from everyone else by bars, and heroism and love will be impossible.)

I survive this period of grief by caring for Bastienne, though her helplessness often enrages me (because it reminds me of my
own), and I cannot conceal my irritation. She is, and always was, a battered, shrunken shadow self, a version of me much punished for her sins but with a cunning I have always lacked. I hunt what birds remain to feed her. I gather firewood to warm her. I stuff more of my old clothes with feathers to comfort her.

A lone old seal lingers at the bottom of the rookery. In spite of his almost human eyes (like Richard's), I hack him to death with the bent sword — for Bastienne's sake. I try to cure the skin so as to fashion her a robe (as I have heard the natives do). But I have not the skill of curing hides. What I end up with resembles a table-sized, fur-covered plank — my sweet Bastienne pretends to be pleased. We eat everything, including the flippers (quite nice, really) and brains, and I set out the skull, boiled free of flesh, on Richard's grave.

I do not know why I do this. The symbolism escapes me. My actions are beginning to take on the semblance of dreams, while my dreams seem more and more to be but memories of a distant past, the world from which I came.

Six months now. We are going for the record. M. Cartier's first settlement lasted one winter, his second, ditto. His people suffered atrociously, many succumbed, even though the savages took pity and helped them. So far I have seen no land animal larger than a rat. Sometimes I scrutinize the mainland and imagine it seething with life, natives coming and going, large
antlered herbivores chewing the shrubs, fields of corn, cities of gold and cathedrals built with timber shaped with stone axes. But nothing so much as a wisp of smoke appears. And anyway, the last news we had from M. Cartier, before I was stranded on this Isle of Demons, was that the savages had turned violent (on account of his obnoxious habit of kidnapping their chiefs and shipping them off to France to die — as my Richard died — of strangeness and a broken heart).

The good news is that it doesn't look as if it will rain again. Ever. Snow swirls along the empty rookery in stinging blasts. The birds have abandoned us, save one or two unintelligent and laggard gulls, which spend their time standing to the wind, plunging up and down with the waves, looking alarmed. Bastienne is confined to our hut, where she natters away about lovers and outré sex acts, lingering over details that sometimes make even my face burn with embarrassment. She stays cozy on account of the bags of feathers we have stuffed inside our living quarters. I contrive to make a winter coat by cutting arm and neck holes in a bag of feathers, slipping the whole thing over my head and securing the openings with string. Then I shove my hands into other bags and walk around outside, quite comfortable except for my feet, which are bare. Of course, as Bastienne points out in a moment of clarity, the coat is hell to put on and take off, and the feathers itch, and I leave a trail of down wherever I've been. If I live, I shall perfect the design.

We have eaten the tennis balls and boiled and reboiled every bird bone about the place. I made the sealskin into a door, but then we boiled and ate the door. The baby grows apace. I look like a skeleton that has swallowed a melon. My nipples look like raisins. I have to smash the ice to get water, water is all we eat. Here, Bastienne, I say, have some water soup. Here is a nice
bowl of stewed water. Don't eat too much. You'll get fat. Really, I quite like your new figure. Would you like some water for dessert? Would you care to hear the story of Sir John Mandeville and the naked, child-eating sybarites of Lamory? Tell me again about M. Radagast, the apothecary, and what he did to you in the privy.

I am without a doubt a shallow and frivolous girl. And I know we shall die soon. It is clear to me that all my haphazard and naive attempts to survive are pathetically inadequate, that I am truly and amazingly unprepared to be anything but my father's daughter back in France. But the realization no longer disheartens me. I was once pretty and vain and liked to flounce about in expensive gowns that showed my cleavage. Now I rather enjoy the new look: my grotesquely thin and elongated body, my tangled, matted hair (like the nest of an incontinent sea eagle), my filthy, hardened hands, my gnarled feet, not to mention the clothes Richard bequeathed me, which are now seven colours different from when he wore them, and my feather bags (which, yes, are really more like pillows — I trudge about my island duchy like a person with an abnormal fear of collisions).

My world is turning itself upside down: Two Gods are as bad as two suns or two moons for a person's peace of mind. One God guarantees the words I speak are true; two makes them a joke; three gods (or more!) — it doesn't bear thinking about. And no one mentioned this on the ship over, but the mere existence of Canada constitutes a refutation of the first principle of Christian cosmology, expressed by St. Isidore in the seventh century, that “beyond the Ocean there is not land.” Is it because I am already dead that things have changed so radically? Our hut resembles a grave mound, and Richard's grave looks
like a house (that scarecrow woman looks more like me than I do). Are the legends true, that the journey west, which M. Cartier pioneered under a charter from the King, follows a forgotten route to the Underworld, the enervated utopia of the dead? (Have I mentioned the ship-coffin analogy?)

I have Richard's tennis racquet, warped and battered, with many of the leather strings broken, and my little English Bible (they burned M. Tyndale at the stake in Belgium — I wish I had been there, I have such affection for the man). Once I tried to make away with myself, lying naked with my head resting on the rocks of Richard's grave. I thought I would go to sleep in the cold and never wake. But I could not get past the cold part, jumped up chilled to the bone, ran home and crawled into Bastienne's feather bag to get warm.

I stomp about the island, trying to keep my feet warm. Or I find a sheltered spot where I can read in the sun, dandling the tennis racquet on my knee. Then suddenly I am overcome with fear that Bastienne has died, that I am abandoned and alone. I think of her as my mother now, my dark mother, the image of my desires — all books, pain and dirty sex mixed together. I am horribly mixed up, as I think most humans are. I race back to the hut (no door, just a hole with a windbreak in front), and she is still breathing, languid in repose, almost peaceful. She talks of an old friend come to visit. Strangely, for Bastienne, this isn't about sex. They speak of childhood games, a pet squirrel she kept in a box beside her bed and a dolly made of a rag stuffed with wheat chaff she called Susanne.