Elle (2 page)

Here and there, children had flung themselves down, cranky, sunburned, exhausted from their orgy of construction and destruction. Everything we had built was sifting away before our eyes in tiny rivers, whirlwinds, eddies and avalanches of wind-drift sand. Soon nothing remained but the hollow-eyed monkey, though it no longer looked like a face at all but merely an uneven section of wall that somehow retained an aura of mystery and horror.

I looked round, but the stranger and the shoemaker's son had disappeared. We shouted for them. But no one answered. The wind
had scoured away their tracks. In the wind, I heard the words: Time eats her children.

When I reached home that evening, my father beat me again, but only half-heartedly, for already it was known that someone had stolen the club-foot boy. My father burned the stranger's shirt. The villagers searched for a week, then settled on a holy hermit who lived in the forest with his cats and drowned him in the mill race. The shoemaker hanged himself. The cure ordered the villagers to fill in the sandpit with rocks. Neither the boy nor the one-eyed stranger was ever seen again.

JULY-DECEMBER, 1542

Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I am aroused beyond all reckoning, beyond memory, in a ship's cabin on a spumy gulf somewhere west of Newfoundland, with the so-called Comte d'Epirgny, five years since bad-boy tennis champion of Orleans, tucked between my legs. Admittedly, Richard is turning green from the ship's violent motions, and if he notices the rat hiding behind the shit bucket, he will surely puke. But I have looped a cord round the base of his cock to keep him hard.

The ship is canting again, threatening to founder. Wind shrieks in the sheets. The hatch-door hinges squeal as if someone were there. But the whole ship creaks, every peg and nail is a pivot twisted by the waves, so perhaps it is only my imagination that we are being watched.

I am driven to this desperate expedient by the onset of a toothache, which, on top of the boredom, the fog and the ineffable see-sawing of the ship's deck, has lately made the voyage unendurable. My tooth feels bigger than my head, bigger than a house. My tooth has colonized the world. Everywhere I look there are images of decayed, cracked and rotten teeth. Over and over I say a prayer to St. Apollonia, the patron of toothache cures.
Beata Apollonia grave tormentum pro Domino sustinuit. Primo, tiranni exruerent dentes ejus cum multis afariis, etc.
Hanging over the side of the boat to cool my jaw in the salt spray was my best resort until, just this hour, the weather grew worse, and I went
hunting for Richard for relief, who otherwise I have been leaving alone on account of his own suffering.

I am so close, I call on Maman and Papa and the saints, especially those tortured to death in macabre ways, to help me over. My breasts spill out of my bodice, my skirts bunch at my waist. My head is tied up in a mustard plaster my old nurse made for the toothache. My breath is fetid with the cloves I chew for pain. I am aware that I have been more attractive and found more salubrious places in which to make love.

I want Richard (the Comte d'Epirgny) to touch me there, but he has both fists in his mouth, trying not to spoil the moment for me. He is a good man, if a little weak. Easy to seduce, but true as a pumpkin once he's in love. And he's been in love with me since I was thirteen and went up to him after a match, kissed him on the lips and said, May I play with your balls?

So I touch myself, licking my fingers to keep them slick, and moan above the moaning of the storm. Richard moans, too, stuffing the ends of his moustache in his mouth. I try to pretend that his contortions in the hammock beneath me are from passion and not from an urgent need to relieve himself due to acute seasickness. (I recall, not for the first time, that the learned Democritus described coitus as a form of epilepsy.) Richard is so good to me, I think, so good to me, a regular Christ of a lover (pardon, Lord, the use of blasphemy to heighten pleasure, but, oh, oh, the pleasure).

In Orleans, in 1542, there are forty-three tennis courts. Perhaps this is not the time to bring this up, but it makes you think. There are only thirty-seven churches. Yet we burn Protestant heretics (also horse thieves, book publishers, books themselves and the occasional impolitic author when we can get one) and not mala
droit tennis players. What one is to make of this odd circumstance, I cannot say.

But remembering a certain apostate nun I saw burned last summer drives me to my peak, and I come, shouting Hail Mary. My body heaves voluptuously. At the same moment, Richard, the so-called etc., vomits toward the shit bucket and the inquisitive rat, then lies there spent, feverish, the colour of parchment.

A violent shudder runs through me, whether because of the expression on his face or thoughts of the dark tide pressing like fate on the ship's flimsy hull, I cannot tell. Everything stinks of shit, vomit and cloves. The rat scurries to the vomit, rubbing his whiskers. The sound of laughter filters from the deck above. A dog barks. Woof, woof. I feel the fires of Hell licking at my toes, licking around the inflamed bone pits of my jaw. Oh, the pain and ecstasy. Oh, adorable act. Oh, love.

I jump down hastily, pulling my breasts into my dress, and fall to my knees at the wall opposite, against which Richard spends his hours whacking a ball with a racquet. I beg God to forgive me, I promise penance, I promise to confess, I promise to buy an indulgence when I get back to France. I feel so guilty I weep. In Richard's face, I saw death. Who can understand the provenance of desire, the quickness of lust? I wish I had not succumbed. I wish my tooth did not hurt. I wish Richard's codpiece had not looked so attractive six years ago.

Richard moans, raises a hand listlessly, makes the sign of the cross. He once considered a career in the priesthood before he discovered that his aptitude for ball-whacking exceeded his taste for Latin, books and pastoral exercises. Because of that string, his cock is still erect, a knob of ecclesiastical purple.

I am in a daze, overwrought, over-heated and beside myself — also wobbly in the legs — the usual thing after sex. I slip out onto the deck for a stroll, for a bit of fresh air, with a length of coarse string dangling from my hand, the other hand pressing one of Richard's tennis balls to the loosened poultice on my cheek. Grey waves, each more substantial than this insubstantial shell of a boat, rise like slate hills on either side, then settle beneath us. An impenetrable fog, as thick and oily as fleece, hides the shoreline, which the General says cannot be far off.

I am thinking about the current debate in France between Lutherans and Churchmen over the transubstantiation of the host, which the German says is only a symbol of the True God and not God Himself I am of two minds myself, much like all of France, Europe and the known world. Since I was little, I have watched the priest raise the bread above the congregation, mumbling Latin incantations, and tried to believe it was Jesus, though it often looked like a day-old loaf from the bakery. Was it magic or literature when the bread went up? And which message will we bring to the New World racing through the waves to meet us at the fringes of the mist? (M. Cartier says the savages call it Canada, to our ears a nonsense word something like banana, although I can quite easily imagine that to their ears the word France calls to mind wholly other and unworthy resonances. Indian boy: He says he comes from a country far distant called Ass Wipe.)

A squall rattles against the sails. The deck gives a sudden
lurch throwing me against a bulkhead. Something snarls, full of menace. A huge, black shape squats just ahead of me. It is the General's dog Léon, straining to move his bowels, haunches quivering with the effort to hold his pose against the see-sawing of the ship. When he recognizes me, he whimpers, looks embarrassed. But then my shoe slides in a mess of dog shit, wrenching my ankle and throwing me onto the oak planks in an attitude of salacious indignity. Woof, woof, says Léon.

Like my lover Richard, Léon suffers from seasickness, which in the dog manifests itself as a malign restlessness, incontinence and rage. Léon paces the decks day and night, his legs braced at awkward angles to keep himself upright. In France, he was a bull baiter. (The General read somewhere that Columbus brought a pack of mastiffs to the New World to terrorize the savages. In one battle, they were reputed to have disembowelled a hundred enemy warriors each.) But on the ship his enormous bulk, bulging jaws and spiked collar make him look out of place and comical. Once I found him leaning against a mast, fast asleep with his nose resting on the deck as though he were trying to stand on his head.

I scramble to my feet, tossing the ball lightly in the air, one-handed, an idea forming in the post-coital recesses of my mind. The dog's old eyes watch the ball, a glimmer of interest there. He snarls as I drag myself up by his collar, but allows me to scratch his warm chest as a token of friendship and reciprocity.

Do you want to play, Léon? I say soothingly. Do you want to get the pretty ball?

His head droops unenthusiastically as I slip one end of the string around his collar. The other end I loop around my aching tooth and pull snug so it bites into my inflamed gums.

I bounce the ball in front of Léon's immense dog face, his
nose bobs up and down, and he makes a half-hearted lurch. But I snatch the ball away and taunt him with it. He snarls, ventures one hoarse, deep-throated bark.

Get the ball, Léon, I shout. Come get the ball. Play with me, Léon.

I bounce it once more, then heave it toward the near rail. Léon whimpers frantically as the ball leaves my fingers. His tremendous nails scratch the deck as he begins to run. Fetch, I shout. The ball bounces once on the deck, then flies silently over the ship's rail and disappears. The silence, as I say, is what I remember most of the moment, and the delicate, cold drops of spray or fog that fell on my face.

The string runs through my fingers as Léon lumbers toward the rail, still splayed against the tilting of the deck but wagging his stub tail with anticipation, suddenly happy. He reaches the rail, sniffs vainly for the ball, then rears, peering with a mixture of doggy eagerness and disappointment into the fog and murk. But his disappointment lasts only a moment, and then he is scrambling, dragging himself over the rail. For an instant, he balances there, an impossible acrobat, before his hind legs thrust him into the aqueous element.

With him goes my tooth, ripped from my jaw with a pang like a red-hot nail driven into my cheek. Blood seeps out of the empty crater, filling my mouth. I gaze at the rail, half expecting the dog to come scrambling back, and it slowly begins to dawn on me that perhaps I have made an error in judgment.

Léon, I cry. Léon! Come back, Léon.

I rush to the rail and peer over. Night is beginning to fall. Wind rips through the sheets. Invisible, a new land slips by as we sail up the colossal gulf that forms the mouth of this river, called the Great River of Canada by M. Cartier and something
else, no doubt, by the locals. At first, the dog is nowhere to be seen, but then I spy him astern, the ball in his mouth, his huge eyes rolling up white in his effort to paddle after the ship.

Léon, I cry again, only very faintly. He is like something of myself I have carelessly tossed away, never to see again. I can barely make him out now, dark head straining to stay above the slate waves. Then he disappears behind an immense grey hill, and when the hill settles beneath us, Léon is no more.

God, forgive me, I whisper, throwing my poultice into the sea. Already my jaw feels better.

This is about the dog, right? I say. I want to apologize about Léon. I was sure he could swim. He was your dog. It was unforgivable. I feel very badly.

Really, I don't think this is about the dog because the little gathering of ship's officers, petty nobility and prelates has the air of a tribunal, and Richard is here, along with my ancient nurse and co-conspirator Bastienne (with her face like an old turnip). And Richard informed me as we came along the deck that Pip, the African ship's boy, the General's minion, had spied upon us in my cabin, but that he, Richard, had taken care of this by paying Pip a gold piece, which he had from me for spending money, to guard his silence, which Pip apparently did for as long as it took him to walk to the General's quarters.

By the collective mood of piety, disapproval, hypocrisy and
delight, I deduce that Pip has provided incontrovertible proof of our indiscretions, as he has done against so many others on this voyage. The on-deck stocks are always occupied, in rain, sleet, hail or blistering sunshine, and floggings are a daily attraction. Though there are worse things than sitting in the stocks. What with the fresh air and being out of doors all day and not having to work, some show a remarkable improvement of spirits. And when you sit and stare at the sea, you see things other people don't: boatloads of singing monks, schools of mermaids, fish as big as houses, celestial lights hovering above the waves, images of the Holy Family, palaces of blue ice, birds flying backwards and other such supernatural and oneiric phenomena.

The General, Sieur de Roberval, Jean-François de La Rocque, a nobleman of Picardy, styled by the King Viceroy and Lieutenant General in Canada, Hochelaga, Saguenay, Newfoundland, Belle Isle, Carpunt, Labrador, the Great Bay and Baccalaos, my father's cousin (I call him uncle), one of the new people, has just informed me that, on account of my grievous sin, my chronic recidivism and impenitence, for which behaviour my father handed me over to him in the first place and which our journey has done nothing to mitigate, which furthermore he can no longer condone on account of his great love for me, which love bids him now devise some chastisement —

It's not about the dog then? I say, interrupting. Whenever the General opens his mouth, I am reminded of the excessive legalism and barbarous cruelty of the Protestant grammar.