Kamouraska (9 page)

We should have taken the steamboat to Quebec. But my husband insists that he'll drive his young wife by himself, over his favorite route, all the way to his home down the river.

The smell of cut hay. The fragrance of clover. The chirping of crickets. Great armfuls heaped over me, now burning hot, now fresh and cool. Out of the sunlight, into the deep, dark shade of the forest. So sensitive again to the slightest touch. This one desire, the very center of my being . . . No, no! I won't admit how willingly I let myself be bound to this fair-haired man beside me. The carriage, madly flying over these treacherous roads, in the blazing summer heat.

In front of the inn the sign is swaying in the wind.
Auberge des Trembles
. The Gothic letters blend with the white wooden frills that trim the narrow columns and the balcony.

The innkeeper seems to know the groom. The groom's clothes have thrown off their nice little fashion-book air. The tall silk hat, pushed back on his head. A childish lock of fine blond hair falling over his forehead. The vest — unbuttoned, rebuttoned askew — all full of wrinkles.

The groom gives the innkeeper a couple of healthy slaps on the shoulder. His booming voice fills the low-ceilinged room.

“Hello, old man! I'm here to eat. And to spend the night. The lady here is my wife. So give her your nicest, deepest bow and call her ‘Madame.' Then go round up some fiddlers and dancers. Fast as you can. This is my wedding night. And we're going to have ourselves a time!”

I like the polka better. Good God, the governor's ball! Help me! Save me! The young men are wearing white gloves and such pious expressions. And the governor . . . With his whiskers, reddish gold, like cat's fur. And his oh-so British air . . . I speak such elegant English. The governor told me so . . . Then why am I here?
Tell me, what am I doing here? My husband gets such strange ideas . . . All these ignorant, backwoods boors! Reeking of sweat and dirt. Doing their noisy dances, shrieking like so many beasts off to be slaughtered . . . My husband likes his women unwashed, heavy with the smell of musk. He told me so. He mixes whiskey in his wine. He eats his shortbread hot off the fire . . .

“What a wonderful life!”

The groom, shouting as he twirls the bride about.

I'm sick. Sick to my stomach. That swallow of shortbread that won't go down . . . It's stifling in here . . . The Irish jig . . . The devil's own dance! And that jarring sound of the fiddles, scraping, piercing my skull . . . I must have had too much to drink. Tin cups full of liquid fire. Good God, I'm dying! . . . At the governor's ball little round slices of lime float in a pink punch, nice and sweet . . . Mustn't forget my position . . . I feel so weak, the way I do before my period . . . This country inn is so far beneath me . . . Now he's playing with the lace on my petticoat. Under the table. Slipping his fingers between my stocking and my shoe. Ever so gently. Behind the long linen cloth, hanging down.

“I'm a happy man!”

The groom, proclaiming his joy. Everyone watching, a little embarrassed, cooing with delight. Then they all laugh and laugh. Cast sly little looks at the bride. Knowing glances . . .

In the wee, small hours, the bride is still awake, nestling head to toe against the groom, who lies submerged in an exhausted, alcoholic sleep. With that fresh-cut gash between her thighs, the bride looks round the room. Dismayed to see her clothing strewn about in a tangled clutter of velvet, linen, and lace.

A two-week journey. Long, deserted roads. Through forests. Little village inns. The fatback and molasses make me sick. Sometimes there are bugs crawling out of the bedsteads. And the sheets are always so rough. The heat is unbearable. The rain comes through the hood into the carriage.

Louiseville, Saint-Hyacinthe, Saint-Nicolas, Pointe-Lévis, Saint-Michel, Montmagny, Berthier, L'Islet, Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli . . .

The air of the river, downstream, filling my lungs. The evenings, growing cooler. Stronger and stronger, the smell of the sandy banks.

Riding along, Antoine Tassy points to an invisible line where the river becomes as salty as the ocean. Elisabeth d'Aulnières lets her thoughts run back home to the sweet, fresh waters of the Richelieu.

Sainte-Anne, Rivière-Ouelle, Kamouraska!

The hills loom up, rise out of the underbrush. Sudden whiteness, speckled with black. Layers of marbled rock, larded here and there with stunted trees. And close by, the forest . . . The flat banks, stretching along the river. Reeds and rushes. And sea
grasses, long-stemmed eelgrass, swaying in the wind. Like ripples along the water's edge.

The groom waves his whip against the July sky. Points out the islands. Names each one, slowly, as if they were human beings. Introduces his domain to his young bride.

“Ile aux Corneilles, Ile Providence, Ile aux Patins, Grosse Ile . . .”

Summer landscape, warm and misty blue. The long expanse of muddy banks. The smell of low tide fills the air. The water blends with the sky. You can't see over to the other shore.

I have plenty of time to live here with my young husband . . . A few years of violence and despair . . . See how I cling to him, like a pussycat! Nestling against him as he introduces me to his mother, standing at the manor door to greet the newlyweds.

The manor . . . Someone is asking where the manor is. A man's voice, with a hint of an American accent. It's winter. Freezing cold. A slow, deliberate gesture, peasant-fashion, points toward the other end of the village. A cape jutting out, alone, into the river.

At the Dionnes' inn, a girl with kinky hair, a stranger in the village. Asking for the manor. She puts her hand against the frozen windowpane and scratches with her nails to melt the frost. She stands for a long time looking out into the darkness, toward where the manor must be.

The manor . . . You don't risk much going back there, Madame Rolland. You know there's nothing left of it. All burned down in 18—. Burned to the ground, not a trace left standing. Who else can boast of wiping out a past like that, all at once? A few flames, a lot of smoke. Then nothing . . . Memory has to be tilled like a plot of land. You have to fire it from time to time. Burn the weeds down to the roots. Plant a field of imaginary roses in their place.

It's no great feat to have a double life, Madame Rolland. But to have four secret lives, or five, with no one any the wiser. Yes, that would be harder. Like all those pious ladies, mumbling their
endless rosaries, with viper's venom flowing through their veins. Good day, Madame Rolland. Good evening, Madame Rolland. And how is Monsieur Rolland? And the children? Quite a brood you have! But all strong and healthy, thank heaven! . . . Really, Madame Rolland, what can you be thinking, to give you such a sullen look? To give you such a wrinkled brow? . . . Above reproach. You're above reproach. Oh, but you're a daydreamer. That's what you are, Madame Rolland. No use denying it. Your husband is dying on the second floor, and here you are, on the governess's bed, pretending to be asleep. Hearing voices, Madame Rolland. You make believe you're hearing voices. Having hallucinations. Come now. Are you so desperate for amusement that you have to go digging, deep in the shadows, to find the phantoms of your youth?

In the autumn the birds take over all of Kamouraska. Canada geese and ducks, brant and teal, wild geese of every kind. Thousands of birds from miles and miles away. All along the shore. Aren't you simply delighted? You who love to hunt so much . . . The wind. There's too much wind. I'll never get used to it. At night it whistles around the house. Rattles the shutters. The wind will be the death of me . . .

On stormy nights they say the dead are moaning in the wind. But nobody here is dead. I'm alive, and so is my husband. In Kamouraska, here in the manor. Living out our bitter youth, day after day. Alive! Both of us, alive! Married to each other . . . Two people, confronting each other. Hurting each other. Insulting each other as much as they please. And under the prying eye of the dowager Madame Tassy! . . . It can't go on this way. It has to come to a head. One of them will have to pick a spot, the right spot in the heart, and plant it with death. Quietly, calmly . . . And the one who does it first will be saved.

Again, nothing moving. It's evening. Everything, stiff and still. Lifeless. I'm all alone. And yet, there's something watching me, here in the petrified landscape of Kamouraska. Something motionless, agape . . . I never should have come back. The charred ruins of the manor, all black against a sky of stone. The front still seems to be intact. The door, wide open. Through the doorway you can see the wild weeds growing madly in massive dumps behind the house. The drawing room window has a few little panes in place, smoked black . . . Upstairs, a lamp is burning in the couple's bedroom, glowing orange, dead. Somewhere in the wall, one motionless speck of life, stony but alive, aims itself in my direction. Holding its fire. Stuck in the stone . . . All at once, it moves. A lizard, I suppose, hidden among the stones, now suddenly scurrying down the wall. In nimble zigzags. Falling at my feet. Good Lord! Now all the ruins seem to be coming to life. This living speck decides to budge, and bit by bit it wakes up all the walls left standing. The stones licked black by the fire. Just as if all the ruins . . .

That little black eye, riveted on me. Those fleshy, puckered lids, never blinking . . . My mother-in-law is alive. She looms up out of
the fire-charred stone. Standing there, the color of dust, her scraggy, scrawny, fidgety little form.

“Hello, Elisabeth dear. Welcome to the manor.”

She steps aside on her short, crooked legs. She's leaning on a cane, gazing with rapt attention at her two club feet in their new high-button shoes.

Frugal in every other way, living like a peasant, Madame Tassy allows herself the luxury of having her shoes made in New York. Sometimes it takes them a year to get to Kamouraska. And all that time she delights in the knowledge that a bootmaker in the big American city is carefully preserving the mold of her misshapen feet.

Her long mourning veils reach to the ground. I turn aside. If only I can keep from crying and trembling in front of her. Tears are foreign to her way of life. For her, tears and hysterics are part of that unseemly world of bad taste and excesses. A world which, for want of a better term, she calls the theatre.

And that's my world. The theatre. Emotions, passions, great shouts and gnashing of teeth. I'm not afraid of anything. Only of being bored. I'll play out my madness to the very end. It's something I have to do. I'm on my way. Afterwards I'll settle down. Become Madame Rolland again . . . There, I've settled down already. I am Madame Rolland. As for your son, Antoine Tassy, he's part of the theatre world too, with his flailing arms and passionate outbursts. And so much the worse for him, because . . .

Madame Tassy looks at me so sternly I'm sure she can read my thoughts. Another flash of her little eye, and for a moment I'm afraid she's going to bring down her heavy cane across my back. Now she's speaking. Calmly. In a flat, dull voice. Slyly repeating the little speech she made on my first day at the manor, when, clinging to Antoine, I . . .

“My dear, there's something I should tell you. My son is a good boy. But he will go off on his little flings once in a while. Now
then, I'm not going to say you should try to get used to it . . . I've never been able to. Or his father either. My poor husband, God rest his soul! . . . You'll just have to turn your back, my dear, if you ever find him coarse or shocking. Simply ignore it. Like all those folks who tell us how beautiful life can be! Don't forget that, and you're sure to be happy. No matter how my son mistreats you . . .”

My mother-in-law knits for the poor people in the village. All night long. With that homespun wool, rough and prickly, the color of porridge. Early one morning she sends for me. My hair disheveled, my eyes puffed up from crying and lack of sleep, my huge belly bulging. I feel like a toy tumbler, rolling from side to side, up and down. I can't see my feet. I'm a tower. Keeping watch, like the tower in the song. My husband has run off to Quebec with a silly little village girl. On my mother-in-law's face, that tough look of wise good sense. A face whose tears are dry as dust. A letter from Antoine lies open on her lap.

“The child is dead. She died on the way. Her heart . . .”

“Good enough. Let that be a lesson . . .”

“But you don't understand. She's only fifteen. My son is responsible to her parents. Who would ever dream . . . A child like that, to up and die in the middle of a trip . . . You'd think at her age she would be strong and healthy, wouldn't you? Well, at any rate . . . Of course, what he really needs is a good fright, once and for all. Don't you think?”

Her reply is already written. A few words scratched out in pencil:

You've damned her soul. Manage as best you can with her body. Caroline des Rivières Tassy.

Just as she never cries, so too she never laughs. The slightest quiver at the corner of the mouth, nothing more. An almost invisible pucker of her shriveled cheek.

With the message sent and received by her son, Madame Tassy sets about at once to hush up the whole affair.

Once again, Léontine Mélançon's little room. I don't have the strength now to move my head on the pillow. Flat on my back, my eyes fixed on the ceiling. The elaborate plaster moldings. That blinding whiteness. That sun, still there, still . . . The moldings. Staring at them, scrutinizing them, putting them together, taking them apart. To my heart's content. Impossible to move. Not even my little finger. My body is weighted down with hundreds of leaden pellets, like the ones they sew into the hems of cloaks and skirts to keep them hanging straight. Wrapped up like a corpse being buried at sea. Dropped overboard into a briny dream. My memory still in perfect order. Like a clock. Tick-tock, tick-tock . . . Who's going to lift me up? Gently . . . Take me out of this room, with its silly flowers? Who's going to lead me to the stairs? Help me down. One by one, like a child. And leave me, safe and sound, by Jérôme Rolland's bedside . . .