Kamouraska (22 page)

Five in the morning. You let the sleigh bells on your horse's collar go jingling gaily along. As if they were around your neck, ringing out their joy. Nobody else could bear to be as strangely lighthearted as you are this morning.

If someone turns over in his sleep, as your sleigh goes by . . . Jumps up in bed . . . Pricks up his ears . . . Falls back on his pillow, and says: “It's Doctor Nelson off to take care of the sick . . .” Well, let him think so. I won't contradict him.

Rue Augusta. A woman at the window, chilled to the bone. Not a wink of sleep all night . . . Follow the plan. Look up at her, nod to her way up there. Standing in your sleigh. Your arms held over your head. The whip raised up against the blackened sky.

Farewell, my love. Au revoir, mon amour. We won't be seeing each other again until what must be done is done. Out there, in Kamouraska.

Farewell, my love . . . Your horse and sleigh are taking you off, taking you far, far away, over the hardened snow . . . I can't see you now. I can't hear you now. Your scent is beginning to vanish from my skin. Just a piece of your clothing . . . Your jacket, your scarf . . . And I'd curl up on it and bury my head. Like a faithful dog . . . Maybe then, secure and calm, steeped in the scent I love, maybe then I would fall asleep.

When I close my eyes I see you there, prey to the strange mutations of man and beast. One image haunts me more than the rest. You remember that cock in the stable? The one that would climb up on your horse and spend all night on his back? . . . One morning his spurs get tangled in the horse's mane. Your horse rears up.
Stands on his hind legs. The cock is stuck, spreads his wings out wide. Tries to get loose. Flutters and flaps in wild despair. To no avail. Cock and horse seem joined together in one incredible, monstrous whole. A single creature, thrashing about. A single flailing of wings and hooves. A single bedlam of snorts and cackles. Filling the stable with its awful din, beating against the walls of the stall. In one great shower of feathers and hair, one burst of shattered planks and twisted nails . . .

I scream. That frenzied fury, my love. It's you. That cock and that horse, fused into a single being. It's you. You, galloping blithely off. Off on your way to horror and murder. Over a perilous snow-covered road.

To begin with, Aurélie's predictions about the weather come true. It's clear and mild. No wind at all. Sainte-Anne-de-Sorel, Saint-François-du-Lac, Pierre-Ville, Nicolet . . .

Be calm and pleasant. Mustn't forget to nurse my son. It's Sunday and I have to go to mass. Say my prayers. Ask God to let George be successful. Smile . . . Someone is talking to me. Has to ask the same question twice, it seems.

“One or two sugars in your tea?”

“Two, please.”

Keep my voice firm. Make sure it's crisp and clear. Allow them to train me in the social graces and never bat an eye. Go through this most demanding pastime. In such proper company too. Under the noses of the dear old ladies of Sorel. Follow the path of a sleigh over the snow. Deep within myself, secure behind my sweet and gentle face . . . My ear to the ground, sharper than any trapper's, listening for the slightest noise. Hears the distant sound of hooves. The steady swish of a sleigh running over the frozen road along the river, from Sorel to Kamouraska. The road that follows the southern shore. Over its every twist and turn.

“A little milk in your tea?”

“Yes, please. A little milk.”

Someone is saying that Doctor Nelson has gone off to the United States, that his father is very sick.

Ever so softly I pick up the thread of George Nelson's actual journey. Names of villages clash in my head. Sainte-Anne-de-Laval, Bécancour, Gentilly, Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets . . . My love is on his way. Farther and farther. Beyond the region where Aurélie said the weather would be fine. Through wilderness. Out beyond the silence . . . The road, till now so flat, hardly higher than the river. And now, hill after hill. Up one side, down the other. Up again, down again. And all that snow piled high in the ravines! If only I were sure that the road was well marked! Are those scraggy little fir trees there, along the sides, stuck like fish bones into the snow?

“Aurélie! Aurélie! Do you think the weather up there is still all right? Do you think the road . . . Is it marked, Aurélie?”

Aurélie is smoking. Never stops. Seems anxious to hide in a cloud of smoke. An old blanket wrapped about her, from head to toe. She says she's awfully cold. Looks like certain nuns. Pulls the blanket round her face till only a bit of sallow, pale-lipped profile shows.

“The weather, the roads . . . I don't know anymore, Madame. It's all too far away. In a damnable country I wish I never knew.”

“Yes, Aurélie, that damnable country . . . But you do remember, don't you? A sleigh ride with my husband?”

“I told him I wanted to go to Saint-Pascal. He said he'd take me there in his sleigh. At first I said no. A girl like me, after all, with a gentleman like him. But he insisted.”

Antoine is drunk already. You know how Monsieur likes his liquor and his women! Oh, how I loathe him. I grit my teeth at the very thought. And you, Aurélie. I loathe you too. Carrying on like a slut with my husband. The long trip to Saint-Pascal, in his sleigh . . . None of it makes any sense, except as a prelude to death. But
look! All of a sudden Antoine has risen from the grave. With his insides on fire . . . You've failed us, Aurélie! Monsieur Tassy is still alive! His mother says so in her letter . . . There he is, leaving his manor. Riding along the highway. Enormous, massive, terrible. With his tremendous fists. Looking for my lover, to kill him. Looking for us both.

“Aurélie, I'm so afraid!”

“And what about me? If you don't think I'm good and afraid, Madame . . .”

Aurélie goes about the house picking up all the worn and washed-out clothing she can find. Begs to be allowed to keep it. Claims that nothing but faded colors suit her now. (The red shawl with the tassels and all her other nice new clothes are nowhere to be found.) She tells me she's sick. George has already said that he can't do anything for her. That she doesn't have any real disease, but that still she could die from it all the same.

Aurélie and I embrace each other. A strange and frightful tenderness binds us together. Sets us apart from the rest of the world.

We whisper senseless words. To take our minds off other things . . .

“Your Easter duty, Aurélie?”

“And yours, Madame?”

“Damn you, child!”

“And damn you too, Madame! You and your husband both! And as for that darling doctor of yours . . . Well, that one's the very devil himself!”

Lobinière, Sainte-Croix, Saint-Nicolas, Pointe-Lévis . . . For how many days and nights . . . And here I am, bearing the winter cold, the winter silence along with my love. Hurtling with him headlong over snowcovered roads, until the end of time. No other thought for you now, only this deadly cold that consumes you. Strikes me to the heart. Works its way under my nails. The endless, motionless nights by the window. An invisible someone, strong and unrelenting, holding me tight, flat against the glass. Crushing me with gigantic palms. Squeezed to a pulp. Gasping for air, pressed thin as a piece of seaweed . . . Soon I'll be nothing but a flowery swirl of frost traced out among the window's icy arabesques . . . No! I want to live! And you? Tell me you're still alive. Your strength. Your unshakable will. Let this scheme of ours weigh lightly on you, easy to bear. Let it change to a flame, burn bright and clear. Protect you, help you all along your way . . . One constant thought, rekindled over and over. Like a beacon in the storm. Our passion . . .

Don't play the doctor, whatever you do. Don't claim that the trouble is all in ourselves. A clot in our veins? A wart on our skin? The secret deep down in our bellies? Some tiny creature caught
inside? Some minuscule tick lodged just below the surface . . . Is it sin? Who can probe the depths of our bodies, our hearts? No trap is fine enough. And the English law of this captive land that says we're innocent until they prove us guilty . . .

My heart, leaping, rattling inside me. Smashing against my temple, my neck, my wrist . . . Does my newborn baby taste my madness? Does he taste its heady flavor in every gulp of milk that bubbles from my breast?

“How many places should we set?” “Justine forgot to iron the napkins.” “Baby Louis is kicking and screaming at the least little thing . . .”

The time has come now to split in two. Accept this total, sharp division of my being . . . Deep as I can, I probe the pleasure I feel. This rare delight, pretending I'm really here. Learning to leave my words and gestures far behind me. With no one any the wiser, no one to know how utterly empty they are.

I'm quieting the baby, calming his temper. And even as I do, I'm losing myself in a string of names, repeated one by one. Names of villages all along the river. Repeated over and over, to my heart's content. Like someone saying a rosary, bead by bead, and pondering all the while this world and its savage mysteries.

Lauzon, Beaumont, Saint-Michel, Berthier . . . Time! Time! Piling over me in heaps. Covering me with an icy armor. Silence, spreading itself in snowy sheets . . . Swept along in his sleigh, George has long since gone beyond the human pale. Now he's plunging deep into a boundless waste. Like a sailor, alone, setting his course for the open sea . . . It's pointless for me now to ask about the snow out there, the cold. We don't depend on the same rules anymore for snow and frost, the same conditions for fatigue and fear. Too far away. Why worry about a storm with its great gusts blowing over the roads and hiding the trails? Is my love battling gales of swirling snow, treacherous as the waters of torrential streams? Is my love breathing frost instead of air? Is my love spitting snow in puffs of icy smoke? Are his lungs on fire? Does his blood begin to freeze? . . . Once out beyond a certain point of horror, he changes into someone else. Escapes from me forever . . .

Clinging to the curtain in my room. Pressed against the window, like a leech. Sorel. Rue Augusta. This sanctuary, hardly safe. The refuge of my youth, exposed. Ripped open like the stuffed little belly of a doll. And all my memory's wiles and windings, twists and turnings lead me nowhere. Nowhere but emptiness. What is
Doctor Nelson doing down by the mouth of the river? Has he managed yet to . . . ? Nothing. I know nothing at all about him now. I live in an utter void. A desert of snow, chaste and sexless as hell itself. No use to scan the limitless white expanse, stripped of its villages and their people. The endless forests. The frozen river. No black horse now along the horizon.

Has George Nelson lost his way? Has he frozen to death in the snow?

Watch out for the snow. It can seem so soft and gentle. But the flakes close ranks and attack us, hem us in. Warn George. But how? Tell him not to be lulled by the dreamlike visions that rise up from the snow. By that serene delirium, that fatal fascination. (A twinge in the heart, no more. And little by little we begin to give way. Go musing, slipping from dream to dream, and off into a deep, deep sleep.) Not let him drop his guard. Keep all his love and hate alive and green . . . Far as the eye can reach, a motionless sea of snow, covering country, town and village, man and beast, as one. Erasing every joy and pain. Stifling every scheme the moment it comes to life. And all the while the cold connives its way in and offers the solace of its deathly calm. That man out there, on the road to Kamouraska. That one man among all others . . . If only he can cling to the reins. If only he doesn't let them go, even for a moment. It's not that his hand has gone numb. Not yet. Just so consumed by the uselessness of every move it makes. Such weariness too. Such a need to sleep. Such a strange, dull, comfortable feeling spreading all through that hand. A hand that won't (or can't) hold on anymore . . . Now two hands letting the horse run free. Two hands in the lap, lying helpless, blissful, heavy, so heavy, so wholly at peace. A vast, perfidious peace . . . Two hands, side by side. It seems they're a little more numb, a little more clumsy, perhaps, than they were. Less clearly shaped, less well defined inside the mittens. One after another, each finger, outlined
thicker and heavier than before. Each one so crucial, and yet so still, unable to move. Less and less feeling in them all the time. Dying. Just dying, one by one . . .

Pushed to the limits my mind can reach, I feel the numbing cold down by the river's mouth. And the burning flash of blood as it starts to flow again. (The man is rubbing his hands with snow.) Can it be that I'm really dreaming this pain that somebody else has to suffer? A dream too clear, too sharp to bear. Behind me I feel the resistless force that drives George Nelson on and on toward Kamouraska. That sends him in search of the next inn's shelter down the road.

If only the nice little ladies of Sorel could help me. Rather put up with their senseless chatter than have to go through . . .

Montmagny, Cap Saint-Ignace, Bonsecours, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Saint-Roch-des-Aulnaies . . . I think I must be moving my lips, like old women in church.

“The child is in simply a frightful state. She's feverish and just keeps mumbling her prayers. We'll have to find something to keep her busy, don't you think?”

“We haven't had a spell of cold like this in a long, long time . . .”

Some way to shut these women up. Like covering a parrot cage at night. To make it all quiet again . . . But not for long. There's something alive. Moving, spreading, filling the depths of the silence. Rising to the surface. Bursting like bubbles, muffled and dull, against my ear. A man's voice. Slow, expressionless, choosing his every word with care. Speaking to me. As if he hated to have to do it. Telling me, almost in a whisper, about a stranger who came to the inn at Saint-Vallier. (Oh, yes, I forgot all about Saint-Vallier, between Saint-Michel and Berthier.)

“Michel-Eustache Letellier. Tuesday, the 29th of January, at about nine at night, a young man came to the inn. Not from these parts. A nice-looking fellow, he was. Black hair. Whiskers, but not
too long. He stayed overnight at the inn and left the next morning, bright and early.”