Elle (14 page)

And then the red chateau is replaced by an image of the ruined stockade at France-Roy, the low log structures of the settlement within and the great caravels almost free of ice in the river below. Mist rises from the river and shrouds the ships. The forest seems endless, implacable and empty, like a desert made of trees. Inside the fort, old snow is yellow with piss and shit. Everything smells of failure. In my dream, the General pores sleeplessly over maps, notes and diaries, as if he could improve reality with his quill pen.

On a map he writes: China. Then he tears up the map, draws another. With the deliberation (stupor) of an insomniac he tries the word on all the empty spaces. There are a lot of empty
spaces, imaginary worlds. His palsied hand creeps up a river to a point where the river disappears, and he writes: China. And again, China. China. China? The word has become a question. The word seems to embody all desire, the desire of all Europe, the thing that is other and alien and infinitely desirable. (All at once, our faces merge, my own hand traces the word upon the chart. Revulsion and horror enter my heart.)

When I wake, the crone is hovering over me. In my con-fused state, I identify her with the animal I saw in my dreams, as if my dreams and the world have somehow fused. She scolds me (or so I take it), speaking softly but insistently in her own tongue. Her speech is full of low sh-sh sounds like the sound of leaves falling among leaves. Try as I might, I fail to recognize any words from M. Cartier's lexicon. (I think of imaginary languages, and languages that no longer exist because their speakers have died out or have forgotten them, and the language of dreams. What worlds do they describe?)

Her harangue takes on a confidential note. She is full of sage advice and good counsel, none of which I can understand. She points to the door. I notice for the first time that the hut is empty except for my bed. The fire has guttered out. No doubt she is one of Itslk's tribal enemies, but I am not afraid, even when she scoops me up as if I were a doll and, with rough gentleness and amazing strength, carries me to the canoe, which lies half out of the water. She has fashioned a sort of cushion in the bow, where I can sleep among her belongings. The dogs mill about on the bank, their tongues lolling in ecstasy and expectation. She speaks sharply, and they slink away, embarrassed, suddenly shy.

Only Léon remains, sitting on his haunches, watching our preparations for departure. His stupid eyes suddenly look deep
with intelligence. He is an old warrior, afraid of nothing, grown gentle and forgiving. I rummage around till I find my rolled-up sealskin pack and retrieve the tennis ball. As my companion pushes the canoe into the icy creek and points us downstream toward the gulf of the Great River, I toss the ball into the nearby trees. Léon, get the ball, I cry. Bring me the ball. His head turns to follow the ball's trajectory, but he makes no move to fetch it. This has happened one too many times, he thinks. Then he shakes himself and lopes grandly along the bank, following the canoe.

The canoe is built of wood slats and bark. To me, it looks frail and unsteerable, though the old woman is remarkably adept at keeping us afloat in the current, sliding this way and that to avoid rocks and slabs of ice. In no time, the creek spits itself into the gulf, a vast, steaming flood (it looks like an ocean, I have always taken the existence of a farther shore on faith, maybe there isn't one). With a grunt, the old woman points to an island, nudged like a ship against the near shoreline. Flocks of birds plummet and whirl above its icy rocks. I can just make out my hut and Richard's mound — the Isle of Demons, looking less demonic in the morning light, looking almost homelike. My soul is hidden there, I think, though that doesn't make sense. It was Itslk who mistook the scarecrow woman in a crimson court dress for my soul.

Léon dwindles to a speck, though I can still see the jerky movements of his head as he barks. We travel west, and the west wind carries the sound away. For a moment, there is nothing but the soughing of the wind and the sound of my own thoughts. Then the old woman begins to chant, some deep-voiced song, rhythmic, repetitive, nonsensical but oddly soothing. Looking back, I see the ancient tattooed savage bending to her paddle, the
Isle of Demons receding in the distance, the tiny black dog. I have the strangest feeling, a conviction really, based on no evidence but my intuition, that the song she is singing is about me.

The next morning I find myself abed in the self-same hut beside the aforementioned fast-flowing creek. And the next, and the next. We haven't embarked upon a journey at all, although the journey itself seems more real than my sickly, indolent life with the old woman and her dogs. We never leave except in my nightmares, and Léon sleeps next to me, and only his frantic yips and whimpers and his violent running motions betray the fact that he is having the same dream.

Day after day, she sings to me. At first I am lost in my own profound melancholy and do not notice the insidious effect of the song. (I am sick, starved, sad and confused — about what you would expect, given my history.) But the song insinuates itself into my heart, where it alters me, infects me with restlessness. The tempo quickens, seems freighted with urgency, with some purpose I cannot guess. The song's rhythm imitates the rhythm of the old woman's paddle strokes in my dream. It echoes against the forest wall and the colossal cliffs where mountains shoulder into the river. It resonates inside my breast. It seems to propel me forward on some mysterious trajectory as the canoe rushes westward.

At night or when I doze during the day, the song infects my
dreams. We camp on lonely beaches, sleeping beneath the upturned canoe draped with animal hides. The old woman disappears, and the bear walks at the edge of the firelight. Sometimes I sense the presence of other mysterious shapes, thin, winter-starved bears come down to the shore to commune with the old one. Often in the morning fresh piles of bear dung dot the campsite. My dreams are incontinent. She seems to sing to them as she sings to me, and always there is an undertone of anxiety and embarrassment. In my dreams I grow a snout, huge curved claws and extra teats, coarse hair covers my body, and I shamble alone through trackless forests, along ancient rivers, ravenous, immensely strong, dim-eyed. (It could be worse, I think. I might have turned into a slug or a mosquito.)

The worst is when I dream that the General is hunting me, although often it seems that I am hunting him, that we are bound together, even created, in some dramatic relation of hunter and hunted, though the roles are interchangeable. His colonists, wraiths by now, form a line in the forest, raising a din with shouts and drums and battered cookware, driving me toward the place where he waits with an arquebus, mounted and primed. Does he remember me? Does he regret his hasty judgment at the Isle of Demons? Will he recognize me in my new form? I am a head-strong girl, shallow and frivolous.
Aguyase.
I am a friend.
Quatgathoma.
Look at me. Attend to me. Love me. But the words sound foreign to him, like the snarling of a she-bear. The matchlock fizzes, detonates. I wake with a horrible pain in my breast.

Along my riverine dream shore, snow disappears, the boggy places give way to dense forest, cataracts plunge into the Great River, threatening to overturn our slender canoe as we slip past their mouths. We meet a party of savages setting up their summer fishing camps, as I am made to understand by their
chief men or interpreters, who speak a river patois of foreign words and hand signs. They treat us with suspicion and distaste, as though our presence were somehow inappropriate, which I take to mean that we are as much like dream figures, wraiths or revenants to them as they are to me. By the odd bits of tattered European clothing, tufted Breton caps, torn hose, pewter rings, rosary beads, sword belts, iron knives and cooking pots, I conclude that I am far from the first white person to pass this way. (A grizzled warrior walks about in a gown worn back to front — not one of mine.)

I do not know where the dream begins or ends. Am I the wasted, half-dead girl in the hut, dreaming of myself on a journey to the heart of a continent, or I am an adventurous paddler dreaming the girl who seems to sleep all day, rousing herself at mealtimes, only to fall back into an exhausted and troubled delirium at night? Dream and reality weave together patterns that appear and disappear and appear again. This is like poetry, but it is also like madness, which is governed by the same rules of repetition and similitude.

Stranger still, at the dream's climax or when some wild animal's howl disturbs me, I awake to see the she-bears whirling above my head, my dream repeating itself in the sky I have watched since I was a girl. I am Kochab and Polaris at the hub of the mill of the gods. And all the while, in dream or out, there is the song which the old one sings, though her lips never move. At times it seems as if the words of the song come from inside my own head. The words seem familiar, though they have the air and peculiarity of a foreign tongue. What do they mean? Over and over I hear the hissing match of the fusil and the thunderous report and feel the pain in my breast. Someone, some thing, falls like a sack of meat. The dog snarls.

Always when I awake I find myself in the hut by the creek. The old woman treats me like an invalid or an infant, lifting me out of and into the hut — or the canoe in my dream — with her huge hands, cosseting me, tucking me in at night. Sometimes she reminds me of Bastienne, with her strange face, half bear, half turnip. And the savages I meet in my dreams turn out to be only memories of a small band that inhabits a summer fishing camp at the mouth of the creek, a short walk from where I lie. The first time I manage to limp as far as their dwellings I am shocked at the sight of two yellow dogs hanging by their necks from poles, much as in Old Europe one might expect to see the bodies of executed criminals.

They bring us food, baskets of berries and occasionally a salmon or a hare or a bark tray of seal meat, in return for nostrums, philtres, charms and snatches of song from the old woman. She reads the bones for hunters — I used to watch Bastienne tell fortunes the same way — burning the scapula of some large beast in the fire and scrying over the cracks and smudges that appear. As likely as not, when the hunter returns, he will drop a bloody haunch of meat before the doorway. They negotiate in loud harangues, full of bluff oratory — one old man, with the Great Bear tattooed on his face, speaks for the rest. And, yes, I ask about the beaver anus story — these are the mountain people Itslk told me of; the old man, in signs and bastard words of half a dozen tongues, regales me with an encyclopedia of anus stories: their god Messou shooting ducks with his anus, the ducks shitting in his food pail. They are a jolly people with a sense of comedy founded on their backsides.

(Once the tattooed man leads me by a circuitous route to a secluded rocky cove. Just at the tide line lie the ribs and cross-beams of a sailing ship, blackened with age and damp, like the
half-buried skeleton of a whale or a man. We spend an hour poking about. He finds a rusty nail. I discover a sailor's jawbone and the remains of a book, the unreadable pages glued together by sea water. It is a dreary spot.)

All the while the crone treats me with the same rough tenderness she displayed when we first met. Hardly a day goes by without some unpleasant medical attention. I will wake to find her milky gaze fixed upon me, her face so close I can smell her fetid breath. She throws off my rug and runs her knobby hands over my body, exploring my most secret places, sniffing here and there with that tattooed snout, sometimes holding her fingers up to her nose, snorting like a she-bear with her young. Then the blowing and kneading begin, soothing at first, but soon more urgent and painful as she teases the object from deep inside my body (or so it seems).

She has removed a musket ball from my breast, a wadded up page of illuminated text, much scraped and scratched but clearly depicting an Eve expelled from Eden, her hands pressed over her privy parts, a fragment of quill pen, a square-head nail, a claw, three more teeth, one human (a remnant of cord tied to the root), a sailor's canvas needle, a piece of a knife blade, some silver thread, a prayer bead, a stone arrowhead and a half-dozen bone fragments.

I have heard how the balls and scraps of metal in the wounds of old soldiers fester and creep, year by year, to the surface, where they erupt and are expelled. My body encases the detritus of two worlds, or my shabby memories have frozen into shapes which gall me but can now be safely, if painfully, removed. Perhaps even Emmanuel was one such, a wound, a frozen memory. Of what? I wonder. And what if memory itself is a foreign object which the body longs to be rid of? At the threshold of another world,
where strangeness and confusion rule, where all words are un-translatable, such questions become paramount. What if I forget everything? Then I will be made anew.

At this juncture: I am not myself, but who am I? Even after the passage of years, I cannot write about this experience with my usual acerbic wit, the rhetorical device by which I keep my distance from myself Like Itslk, I find I am the subject of a story I can hardly follow. In the labyrinth of dream, I lose the power of thought. Is this what happens when one truly encounters another being (love)? I do not say I am better than anyone else. But I was weakened and susceptible.

This is the unofficial account of an anti-quest. This is the story of a girl who went to Canada, gave birth to a fish, turned into a bear, and fell in love with a famous author (F.). Or did she just go mad? In either case, from my point of view (the inside), they look the same.

On his first voyage past Newfoundland, M. Cartier met a fishing ship from La Rochelle sailing in the opposite direction. He reported, not that these sailors had discovered the New World before him, but that they were lost. Thus he became the official discoverer of Canada, behind the crowds of secretive, greedy, unofficial Breton cod fisherman, unofficial, oil-covered Basque whalers, unofficial Hibernian monks, and who knows who else. (Not to mention the inhabitants.)