Elle (11 page)

Next morning Léon wakes me with his joyous barking. I am aroused (nothing unusual), half-dreaming of a bear lover, or a man in a bear suit, or perhaps it is something else entirely — a priest or a dolphin. My hand is tucked between my legs. But Léon's eager yips drag me abruptly from this access of sensuality
beneath my bearskin coverlet. The interruption feels like a punishment. It reminds me of my uncle, the General, with his vexed moustaches and wounded fingers. I think, this is the difference between men and women: My uncle has conquered Canada by brandishing a sword over the bodies of his companions; I have conquered Canada on my back. In either case, the long term effect on the inhabitants is the same.

I think of Sedna's maimed hands and her perpetual malevolence. One story tells of an enterprising
angakok
who swims to her underwater realm and earns her gratitude by combing the lice out of her hair, a homely task she can no longer perform for herself.

I think, oddly enough, of Guillemette Jansart and her evil consort. Perhaps he isn't evil, only misguided, the product of a difficult childhood; perhaps she sees correctly into his heart. Though what good does it do her? He is not guided by his heart.

These are waking thoughts, not to be trusted.

There are two dead seals, fat as pigs and still warm, lying on the bloody snow in front of the hut. They seem asleep but for the tears the harpoon made in their flesh and the blood. Where did they come from? I shade my eyes and peer at the surrounding ice. Nothing. Perhaps I have not yet learned to read the country aright. Or perhaps they are dream seals. Léon nuzzles them, then prances away, trying to get them to play. He looks suddenly bear-like.

Itslk, as I expected, is nowhere to be found, though my expectation and my knowledge of his reasons do nothing to soften the blow of his absence. At least he left me well provided, I think, as I sob over the carcasses of his seals. I can barely catch my breath. My breasts ache. My belly burns. I have cramps which at first are diarrhea (a common symptom, in women, of
a broken heart), but then are something else. What? It is March. Almost spring. I've never seen anything less springlike than the current landscape. What was supposed to happen in the spring?

I feel a little damp down there, touch myself with my fingers, which come away red with a drop of blood. Fresh panic. I am counting on the little fish to keep me company for, what, the next forty-five years, give or take. Every day I promise the fish I'll be a better mother than I was to Charles, better than my mother was to me, a better mother than has ever been. (At least, I'll try; I am very unclear, technically, on what is required, it being the custom of my class to send infants to the villages to be fostered by ignorant nurses with tarnished backgrounds. Peace, Bastienne.)

Itslk has given me a turn, I whimper to Léon, clutching his menacing collar and burying my face in the folds of his neck. I can't bear to think of the other. Léon thinks I want to play. The older he gets, the more puppyish he seems. Poor me, I squeak. Poor little me.

The night before I had said to Itslk, It was not magic. I don't know why the bear died. I didn't kill it. I never killed anything in my life except for my playmate Lucille's kitten when I was three and dropped it out a window to see if it would land on its feet. I crawled inside the bear because I was cold. It didn't eat me. I am not an aspirant. I have never aspired to anything except a little fun. I am pretty sure this is not a dream.

But he did not believe me, and I can see why, of the two accounts, he would prefer his own. In his version, he is the tragic hero and I am an ambiguous female, both good and evil, somewhat in the mythic mode (is every woman a sister of Sedna?). At least it's a story. In my version, things happen by chance or bad luck. We wander in a fog, lacking a true explanation
of events. Even the soul and its reasons are inscrutable. The wilderness is inside as much as it is outside. I like to imagine he bore me some affection, but the evidence, on the whole, is against it. Our lovemaking had a certain neutral quality, part ritual, part personal hygiene.

He could do worse than return to his wife, living out his days as he has always done, perhaps retreating into the hinter-land, following the old ways, forgetting his French, forgetting the colour of his children, forgetting that I have entered his dream world and established a colony there. Though, of course, he will not forget, and life will always have a poignant as-if quality, the wistful nostalgia that is the temper of the future. From this time forward, I predict, no one will ever be completely himself. (This is the point in history where we are transformed. Before, we had a word and an explanation for everything; henceforth, we shall only discover the necessity of larger and larger explanations, which will always fall short. What we know will become just another anxious symbol, a code for what we do not know.)

I touch myself again. Nothing. My heart jumps. A little scare. My body always overreacts to moody men. I think too much, talk too much and never know how attached I am until the object of my attachment has disappeared. I am always having to read myself like a book, like a lover, like a new country. Poor Itslk, I think, trying to walk home out of a bad dream. There is never any escape from a bad dream.

(One of mine: A caravel sails into view from the east — French by her design, by flags and ensigns I see she is out of La Rochelle. She lets down a shallop and a water party. They row straight to my lonely beach. I am saved. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I am redeemed. I begin to pack my belongings and a squirrel I keep in a cage — a symbol of the baby, I think. But the sailors
go about their business as if I were not there. They do not hear my joyous cries of welcome and gratitude. They fail to notice the slices of seal meat I put out for their refreshment. They walk right through me.)

I take stock. I have a little bear meat remaining, plus the two seals, enough to live on till the birds return to the rookery. Itslk has left me the lamp, his hand drum, a stone knife of cunning and graceful design, a necklace he made of the old sow-bear's claws and a tiny carved image of same. He placed the knife and the bear at the foot of the sleeping platform in a way that suggests to me they are propitiatory offerings and not gifts. I am being conjured away, asked to leave.

I use a mussel shell sharpened against a rock to butcher the seals. I treat the skins as Itslk taught me and store the fat for fuel. The bones I lay aside to return to the sea (when there is a sea again, water instead of this infinity of ice). I lick the blood from my hands as I work, gnawing the liver and offering tidbits to Léon. What was supposed to happen in the spring? When I pee, I leave little pink spots in the snow.

When I was little and afraid, Bastienne would sit up whole nights in a chair next to my bed with a candle burning. I was afraid of the dark, afraid of lightning, afraid of my dolly Jehanne, who had black hair like Mama. Once I ran screaming back into the house when Bastienne tried to take me for a walk. When I calmed down, I explained that the sight of the flowers along the path had frightened me. I was three. I always had a candle in my room, though my father forbade it. I wet the bed till I was twelve. I don't know why. Even now I go twice before I sleep, just to be sure. Bastienne sat with her feet under my covers for warmth, and we would talk in whispers, or I would read to her until she fell asleep.

That evening the spring storms begin. At first, the air is still, though heavy, oppressive and ominous, with a light snow falling. The snow increases through the night, drifting down in enormous feathery flakes. By morning snow chokes my doorway, and the place where Léon slept outside is like an anchorite's cave. Clouds form a vast spiral with its centre over the Isle of Demons. The wind picks up, then swings to the northeast, driving sleet in stinging gusts. It shrieks in the trees, throwing the new snow into sinuous drifts like stationary waves, turning the land into a white sea. I invite Léon inside, though at first he is suspicious and sniffs everything five times before settling on a corner of the bearskin. The stone lamp flickers. My belly feels like a stone. The wind sounds like the legions of Sedna's ghosts.

Something nags at my heart like a whisper from the grave. I hug my belly beneath the bearskin, snuggle closer to Léon. Nothing avails. When the pains come, my terror is unspeakable.

Memory comes now as if from the Land of the Dead, where the inhabitants speak in despairing whispers of their rage against the living, where the pale shades tilt their faces to the sunless sky and huddle close to fires that give no heat and cover their ears to shut out the muffled cries of the unborn. Their murmurs are like the constant iteration of the sea upon the shore or the sound of loose snow blowing across the ice crust. The baby comes a day or two later. I cannot be sure how long,
for the storm lashes around me like an angry god, turning day to night, and I lose all sense of time in the agony of my delivery. I only know that Léon cowers in the furthest corner with his hackles raised, that my screams and moans, prayers and entreaties drown out the storm, that once I try to crawl out the door to die in the snow and another time think of using Itslk's stone knife to cut the baby out, not caring if I live or die. From the first, something is wrong. I know because of Charles, who was born with the help of Bastienne and a midwife and came out in an hour, slippery as butter. This time the fish is stuck in my entrails, and I know I shall die of some internal insult, that we shall both die in a torrent of blood.

But I do not die. I travel somewhere past dignity, shame and hope, bucking on Itslk's sleeping platform in my shit, shrieking obscene words, cursing the child, wishing it dead, then cursing myself in horror, whimpering, Sweet thing, sweet thing, don't die. I am no longer attached to the poor worm of my body. Time passes to the rhythm of the spasms ripping through me. My body writhes as if impaled on a stake (I have seen such dancing horrors in the marketplace on execution days and laughed). At times my lonely soul seems to wander, holding indistinct and ill-remembered colloquies with the familiar dead — Richard, Bastienne. It hovers above France-Roy, the General's motley town beside the Great River of Canada, where bodies swing from the gibbet and swollen corpses are stacked like loaves of bread in the snow next to mounds of glittering but worthless stones. For a while it follows a solitary white bear, loping across the ice toward a stretch of open water where seals cavort among the waves.

I wake to the sensation of Léon lapping at my thighs, some tiny warm thing squirming under his tongue. I scream at the dog
because I think he is trying to eat my baby, which I instantly name Emmanuel for our Lord and Saviour. Then I scoop it into my arms, the cord still dangling, and see that it has a face like my own, but that there is nothing else human about it. It is strangely deformed and sexless, and for arms and legs there are tiny appendages like fins. It breathes in gasps like a drowning fish and gazes at me with wise eyes as blue as the sea. Not Emmanuel, I think, but a changeling, a tadpole or the homunculus of Hermes Trismegistus, a half-boy in a jar.

My impulse is to drop it and scramble away, but then some-thing warm washes through me like a tide of blood, bringing a sensation of peace. I think, I give up. Which is strange. I don't know what I am giving up. And then I think, yes, I am giving up all my vanities, all my desires, designs and hopes, along with the claims of family, race and religion. Till now, when I felt despair, it meant merely feeling frustrated and regretful. This time hopelessness fills me with contentment. In my heart now, there is room for pity for the little fish-person, who clearly will not survive, who will shortly gasp its last upon my breast. Pity and love.

I cradle him tenderly, wrapping him in a piece of an old gown, placing his head next to my heart so that he can sense the pulse. He struggles a little. It is so difficult to breathe. I wonder if this is what the soul looks like, if this fish thing with a human face is closer to our essence than the forms conceived by Aristotle? We are not beautiful, life is short and difficult. Often the deformity is internal, with kindness, generosity and love lopped off instead of hands and feet.

Oh, my little love, I think. Oh, my sweet thing.

His breath quickens, his lips turn blue, a milky froth appears at the corner of his mouth. I rub his head with my palm. I sing to
him a little song about a frog and a toad. I hum a lullaby. For one hour, I am the best mother that ever existed. I tell him who I am and where I came from and of the long journey that brought us to Canada. I tell him about his father, the tennis player, who is buried outside. Little fish would have inherited a title. I try to teach things he needs to know, about books, little girls, fights in the schoolyard, stealing apples, the teachings of the hermetic philosophers and how to tell a ripe melon. I teach him his ABCs, touching the tip of my finger to his nose at each letter. Hurry, I think. There is no time. I tickle his belly. I kiss his ears. I inhale the smell of him — oh sweet, sweet — and admonish myself to remember it on my deathbed. I tell him about wine, about flirting, about sex, about the smell of flowers in May.

I tell him how we will live together in a stone cottage with a garden, pigsty and dovecote, and play cat's cradle and make up stories about the adventures of a boy named Emmanuel. Quick, quick, I think, make up a story. Once upon a time there was a little boy named Emmanuel, who lived with his mother by the sea. One day Pasqualigo, the dwarf, comes to beg the boy for help because a wicked witch is turning the dwarfs into wolves when they go to work in the mines. Emmanuel hurries off with Pasqualigo, who leads him to a mysterious black castle. The boy knocks at the castle gate and asks to see the witch, who promptly turns him into a wolf.

Wandering in the woods nearby, he meets a pretty girl named Fleurice Trémouille, who tells him he must go to Fellberg Mountain and search for a flower that will remove the spell from her sister, the witch. Emmanuel travels an immense distance and endures many trials but finds the flower. The wicked witch is so touched that a tear drops from her eye, washing the black from the castle walls and transforming her into a good, happy witch.
She turns Emmanuel back into a boy and then walks home with him for dinner. Emmanuel grows up, marries Fleurice Trémouille and lives happily ever after. But he never loses the power to change himself into a wolf with a magic word. What is the magic word? There I stop. There are no magic words.