Kamouraska (11 page)

I think it's fear alone that keeps me here. I'm spellbound. Held fast to a madman's bed. His crazy wife, still bewitched by love. Once in a while. In great, sudden flashes. Fewer and fewer . . . Go on living. My new baby screams and screeches all night long. My milk is almost all dried up. My mother-in-law says I should get some sleep and find him a wet nurse instead. Yes, I'll look for one. An ugly one, not too young. Neat and clean, with plenty of milk.

My mother-in-law has no objections.

“My son is such a terrible spendthrift. It's up to you, my dear,
to see that my grandchildren never want for a thing.”

Madame Tassy leans on her cane. Screws up her little hook nose and goes digging in her numerous pockets. Rummages through her woollen skirts, here and there, inside and out. Finally produces a handful of coins and thrusts them into my hand. Scratching my palm with her little nails. As if she were clawing the earth to bury a treasure. Keeps telling me that she's the mistress of Kamouraska.

Antoine could puke at his mother's feet, all over the rug, and she'd never call him down. Never say a word. Instead, she delights in making our meals an act of strictest penance. Boiled potatoes, pickled eels, buckwheat cakes . . . Day after day.

My aunts come running to the baptism of my second child. Look at me, aghast. Decide to take me back to Sorel for a while, me and the children. I give myself over, body and soul, to these three little creatures, appearing all at once from the ends of the earth to save me. Antoine swears that he won't allow it. Then suddenly changes his mind and decides that we'll all go back to Sorel together.

My last mass in the church at Kamouraska. My aunts, gazing with pity at the hapless wife.

“How thin she is!”

“And so pale . . .”

The people of Kamouraska whisper as I go by.

“Wonderful woman . . . Wonderful wife . . . Such a pleasant disposition . . . Such Christian resignation . . .”

My head bowed low over my missal. I take a certain curious pleasure in my role as martyred wife and outraged princess. Over and over I repeat to myself the tender praises of the parishioners gathered in the little stone church. Mechanically I begin to spit out the words of the Our Father . . . A savage frenzy seems to seize me. Wakes me up, all at once, like someone walking in his sleep.
Makes me sink my teeth into four words of the prayer, wrenching them out of the text, explaining them, devouring them. As if to make them my very own, forever. Giving them one supreme and ultimate meaning. “Deliver us from evil.” While the evil I must be delivered from, at any cost, takes shape beside me in the family pew. Takes on the flushed face and the trembling hands of the man who is my husband.

What a pretty sight when the high mass is over. All the townsfolk leaving the church. Row after row, crowding behind his lordship and his lady. Arm in arm, just for the occasion. The young wife, smiling sweetly, still so pale from her confinement. Inside, her hidden heart. The underside of all that sweetness. Violent counterpart. Your delicate face, Elisabeth d'Aulnières. Film of angel skin laid over your loathing. Thin as can be.

You have just enough time to say good-bye to Kamouraska. Take a good look at the gigantic man coming toward you, covered with snow. Rising up out of some deep hole, dug in a snowbank out on the ice. To bury him forever. The long, flat, broad, bare, powdery stretch of snow. The lovely cove between Saint-Denis and Kamouraska. This man, lost. Standing out against the blurred horizon. His head is wrapped in white. He's growing, growing before your very eyes. Still coming toward you. Intent on making it perfectly clear that your love didn't fool him one bit.

I cry out. I'm sure I cry out. This vision of Antoine, murdered, is about to pounce. Knock me down. But all of a sudden . . . My shoulder, made of stone. And the giant smashes against it. Breaks into bits. Penetrates my very being. Thousands of splinters stuck in my flesh. I'm possessed, down to the roots of my hair, the tips of my nails. Antoine, multiplied beyond all measure. As if he were crushed in a mortar, pounded into a mass of tiny fragments. Each minuscule grain still bearing all the burden of crime and death. His blood, shed. His skull, smashed. His heart, stopped. About nine o'clock at night. January 31, 1839. In the cove at Kamouraska.

His blood, his head, his heart. It's all beginning again. Dancing
around in my bones. A swarm of Antoines, murdered, milling around in my bones. Black ants with huge eyes. Blue ones. Good God! I'm dying! I'm dying, I tell you . . .

I sit up on the bed with a start. All those morning glories on the paper, twining around me, holding me prisoner. The four walls grip me and weigh me down, like a fist clenched tight against my throat.

“Anne-Marie! . . . It's you, darling! . . .”

Madame Rolland is sitting there, her head, Medusa-like, poking out of her crumpled robe. Anne-Marie stares at her mother, a look of fright in her wistful eyes.

“Was that you that screamed, Mamma? . . . Are you sick? . . .”

“Me? Sick? . . . Don't be silly! . . . Now be a dear and get me a glass of water.”

Madame Rolland gulps it down. Passes the moist glass over her brow, her cheeks. Still under the dark and piercing gaze of Anne-Marie.

Madame Rolland begins to get up. The child runs to the bed, smooths out the covers. Speaks in a commanding tone. Repeats the doctor's orders in a solemn voice.

“No, no. You mustn't get up yet. The doctor said you have to rest . . . All the care you give Papa, all your worry . . . You're all worn out. You have to sleep a little longer.”

Madame Rolland savors her daughter's words. With gluttonous relish. “Care,” “worry” . . . She'll find her peace someday, hidden inside a compliment, hard as an almond.

Madame Rolland, grateful to her daughter, gives her a hug and a kiss. Then, dutiful, and in her dolefullest of voices, asks how Monsieur Rolland is doing.

“He's asleep. Florida is staying up with him. You don't have to worry.”

What a good little girl your daughter is. And Florida, what a
devoted maid. Nothing to worry about. But be sure not to fall asleep again. Stay up and keep watch.

Keep watch over my husband. Follow him every step of the way, as far as I can. Over this narrow plank that leads to death. Until I can't take one more step without dying myself. Just at the very moment prescribed by law, leaving him alone to take the last step over . . . Hanging from a thread thinner and thinner. Watching him disappear. Standing here, still living. At the edge of the cliff. And the thread, broken, hanging. Cut . . . Waving a handkerchief good-bye, over the void. A widow again . . . No, you can look all you want. This time my hands are clean. I'm innocent. My husband's name is Jérôme Rolland, and now I'm going to see him off. Walk with him. To the brink of death.

This dangerous urge to keep falling asleep will be your undoing, Madame Rolland. See, you're drunk with dreaming. You're babbling, Madame Rolland. Turning your heavy, sluggish body toward the wall, as if there were nothing else for you to do. And all this time, in his second-floor room, in your house on Rue du Parloir, Monsieur Rolland . . . Who knows, is he gasping his last? . . .

My legs are like cotton. My eyelids droop in spite of myself . . .

Sorel again. The house on Rue Augusta, open to the lovely October sun. They're expecting me. The russet leaves fill the tree-lined street with their splendor. A gentle breeze wafts its colors on the light.

No neighbor sweeping up the leaves outside his house. No children running, laughing. No woman's voice. No bird singing. They've emptied the town. Like a squash with its insides hollowed out. Only my house left standing. No life but the bare essentials. Just what's needed for my trial.

The dead leaves crinkle along the garden path. The threshold is bathed in light, dappled with the fluttering shadows of the leaves. The hall looks like an old abandoned station, just as it always did.
No time to pride myself on how I can avoid the drawing room — the black piano, the needlework left unfinished. Already I feel myself being pushed toward the stairs by an overpowering force. There's someone waiting for me at the top. Someone in petticoats, her tiny feet planted squarely on the floor.

Aurélie Caron is there to welcome me. I don't like that sly little grin of hers. She knows the way the story goes. Swears my intentions are anything but pure.

“Madame knows just what's going to happen. No need to act so innocent.”

“I'm sick . . . I've come back home to rest. There's nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly natural . . .”

“If Madame would kindly step into her old room, please?”

Aurélie laughs and dashes off. Her sprightly steps on the bare floor echo through the little corridor.

Why have they taken up the carpet? And my old room? No, nothing seems changed. And yet . . . It's all so neat. Everything almost frozen in place. Like a museum. Look, those drapes of pink percale hanging around the bed I slept in growing up. The flowered quilt. The doll, stuffed with bran, sprawled out on the pillow . . . I don't dare step over this wall. Rising, invisible, all about me.

“Go on, Madame! That's all you have to do. Come back to Rue Augusta and begin again. Just after your return from Kamouraska. As if the first time never even happened. That's one thing the judges are adamant about. Ab-so-lute-ly a-da-mant!”

She makes a display of hammering out each syllable. That gap-tooth grin. That impudent air. Her scrawny arms gesturing me on. Again and again.

I struggle to put one foot in front of the other. As if I were wading through some strangely thick, resistant water. I collapse on my bed. Flat on my face. My head in the pillow. Sobbing, sobbing
my heart out. A moment later, Aurélie tiptoes out of the room.

The patter of little feet around my bed. Plaintive whispers . . . My three little aunts! They're here! I let my tears flow free, more than I really need to do, to feel the flood of pity my aunts will lavish over me. I'm even afraid to open my eyes, afraid I might not find them still alive. Adélaïde, Angélique, Luce-Gertrude . . .

A stifling smell of withered roses. A stench of mice, poisoned, down behind the baseboard in the hall. My dear aunts, broken-hearted, dead from grief. One after another, a year apart.

“This child will be the death of us. Good God, what a calamity in Kamouraska!”

Their clothing, black and dull. Their amethyst and silver jewelry. Three dead birds, stuffed in all their faded feathers.

I clap my hands together. (Where do I get the strength, the burst of energy?) To chase away the ghosts. Dispel my fears. Arrange the dream. Maintain a kind of balance. The past, relived, but sensibly, and only on the surface. Everything just as it happened, in proper order. Without trying to live it over from start to finish, all at once. Like a mad bird, flying the length, the depth, the breadth of all that life's eternal desolation . . . To rear up at the slighted hint of death along the way, like a horse when it changes direction. To find my aunts alive again. Yes, I have that power. And I cling to it with all my might. To make the most of this sudden burst of strength.

Whatever else, to keep from standing trial! Not right away! Postponed, delayed. Then taking the offensive. Making accusations of your own. Raising your right hand and saying: “I swear.” Saying: “Antoine Tassy is the guilty one!” Under oath. Repeating: “He's the one who . . .”

“The child's not happy. You can see how thin she is. The air in Kamouraska must be bad for her.”

“And her hair! Did you see her hair? So dull, so woolly.”

“Yes, we'll have to wash her hair. And give it a rinse with camomile.”

My mother joins her sisters. Four virtuous ladies of excellent background, assembled to condemn Antoine Tassy to death. So much black, so much mourning. And the blinding white of collars, cuffs, and bonnets. Bare hands lying flat on their laps. Rosaries entwined about their feeble wrists.

I'm telling them about my life in Kamouraska. Crying. Sobbing. Dissolving in tears. Twisting my hair. Biting my fingers.

My mother is the first to speak. Breaks the heavy silence that follows my story. Pulls off her rosary. Rubs her wrist, like a prisoner whose handcuffs have just been removed. Says that all this praying is getting on her nerves. Tries to get back to the subject.

“It's no good for a woman to stagnate in the country with her husband.”

A cloud comes over her face. Again that faraway look in her eye. Seeking, off in her distant past, a curious dream in which every married woman first gives birth to a daughter, and then becomes a widow as soon as she can.

“Too bad the child didn't have a daughter . . .”

The three little Lanouette sisters echo a sigh. Sorry too that the dynasty of solitary women isn't going to continue forever, here in the house on Rue Augusta.

We'll keep the child with us. Her and the children, nice and safe. As for her husband . . .”

“He can go back to his mother's in Kamouraska?!”

“Eating and drinking the way he does, he won't last long!”

With the vision of a man not lasting long — an excellent solution — my dear aunts let their thoughts go running wild. Say to themselves “Dear God, please let him die!” Then panic at having dared bring God into their wicked fancy. Quickly correct themselves. Embark on another prayer, one they can allow. At night, kneeling beside their convent beds: “Dear God, please let him repent and be converted.”

Rosaries, novenas, stations of the cross, in endless succession. Day after day. A flurry of little aunts, to and fro. Frilly bonnets tied round with ribbon bows. And rosaries clutched tight. Going from the house on Rue Augusta to the church. Casting a kind of pious spell. Thousands of sly Hail Marys, all in vain. So many poisoned darts, bouncing off Antoine Tassy's impervious heart.

“Our little Elisabeth will take her old room back, the one she slept in as a child. You, Monsieur, can sleep in the guest room . . .”