Copyright © 2012 Susan Glickman
First ePub edition © Cormorant Books Inc. September, 2012
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cataloguing information available upon request.
Glickman, Susan
The Tale-Teller/Susan Glickman.
EPUB ISBN 978-1-77086-258-6 | MOBI ISBN 978-1-77086-259-3
Cover design: Angel Guerra/Archetype
based on a text design by Tannice Goddard, Soul Oasis Networking
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for my daughter Rachel
and in memory of Sheldon Zitner,
who always played Prospero to my Miranda
Y anoche, mi madre
cuando me eché a acordar
soñabo un sueño
tan dulce era de contar:
que me adormía
y a orias del mar.
(Last night, mother dear,
when I lay down to sleep,
I dreamed a dream
so sweet to tell:
that I had fallen asleep
on the seashore.)
ONE
“La fortuna no viene sólo, kali buxcarla.”
(Good luck doesn’t arrive on its own; one must seek it.)
THE BOY THEY CALLED Jacques leaned over the ship’s rail, squinting into the setting sun. There, shimmering in the distance, impossibly green against the pink evening sky, was New France. He inhaled in anticipation, and the welcome smell of earth and trees and grass and animals infused the salt spray he had been breathing for seventy-two days. He felt as though that relentless salt had scoured him inside and out, leaving him as raw as a peeled onion, and as full of secret tears.
It had not been a comfortable voyage. Like many of the other passengers, he’d developed a high fever within two weeks of boarding the Saint Michel. Unlike the ship’s second mate and a prosperous silk-trader from Rouen, both of whom had
been buried hastily at sea, the boy had recovered, but he had not regained the weight he’d lost during his illness. After a couple of attempts that left him choking, he found himself unable to palate the shipboard diet of salt pork, salt fish, and hard biscuits. Once they’d finally reached the Grand Banks and were able to purchase fresh fish his appetite returned, but until then — except for one welcome meal of chicken stew contrived after all the captain’s laying hens had drowned — the boy had subsisted on peas, beans, rice, and watered-down wine.
Small and wiry, with dark eyes and olive skin, he appeared to be sixteen at most, having as yet no sign of a beard. He was quiet and kept to himself, politely deflecting all inquiries into his genealogy or his place of birth in France, the topics of most interest to the others on board. All he would reveal was that he was an orphan from a good family and knew how to read and write; however, because his older brothers had inherited all his family’s land and money and he had no affinity for either the priesthood or the military, he had decided to make his fortune overseas. His memories of home were so painful he preferred not to dwell on them, allowing only that he had nearly died during the same typhus epidemic that had carried off his beloved mother. Was it any wonder he wished to start a new life in the New World, inscribing himself on a blank page of history?
He was not alone in this resolve. Though most of the Saint Michel’s passengers were indentured servants or soldiers going abroad for a fixed term of employment, there were about a dozen other immigrants paying for their own passage at a cost of thirty livres — at least two months’ wages — apiece. This group consisted entirely of young men, though no one else was quite as young as Jacques. What was his trade, they wanted to know. He had apprenticed once to a baker and at another time to a tailor, so was handy at both occupations. He claimed to be very adaptable, and indeed whenever the sailors required an extra body on board he was the first to offer his help. The general consensus was that a nice lad like him should find employment easily; more easily than some of the rougher artisans such as the burly tanner from Bordeaux who persisted in giving Jacques loud and graphic instructions about how to seduce women.
Besides the tradesmen, soldiers, and servants, there were also several merchants and government officials travelling for business, an elite group who had paid one hundred and fifty livres each to eat at the captain’s table and sleep in better quarters. There were only a handful of women aboard: the wives of a couple of the officials, who were rarely glimpsed by the general population of the ship, and a trio of nuns who had undertaken a holy mission to convert the heathens. The nuns resorted to prayer at the slightest hint of danger and kept resolutely away from the ribaldry and drinking of passengers like the irrepressible tanner, who seemed to enjoy embarrassing them. When not telling their rosaries or reading sacred texts, they were preoccupied with maintaining a semblance of modesty despite the absence of bathing facilities and the cramped conditions below deck. There was barely enough water to drink and cook with, and hygiene consisted mostly of rubbing a damp and stinking cloth across one’s face. Not even the men stripped down entirely; no one ever got clean.
The quarters assigned to the lower-class passengers — a corner of the gunroom — were crowded and dismal. A sudden movement of the ship would fling the sleepers rudely on top of each other and, as most slept in clothes that were filthy and crawling with lice, this was an unpleasant way to be wakened. During one violent storm the occupant of an upper bunk, failing to scramble down in time, had vomited over Jacques’s already fetid blankets. There was no possibility of acquiring fresh linens and the persistent smell made him gag, so he begged for permission to sleep elsewhere — anywhere else at all. He went so far as to ask permission to sleep in the nuns’ corner, which was separated from the public barracks by a sheet of canvas, but the holy sisters would not agree to have any man, even a beardless boy, in their virgin territory.
Finally a vacant hammock was found in between decks with the crew, and thereafter Jacques had even less reason to socialize with the other passengers. Though he drank little and cursed less, he seemed to enjoy the company of the rough and rowdy sailors and said that he had dreamed all his life of undertaking such a voyage. When one of the other young tradesmen, a carpenter from Saint-Jean-de-Luz who cried himself to sleep each night, asked Jacques what he liked so much about being tossed up and down relentlessly and being cold and wet all the time, he replied that this was the greatest freedom he could imagine. Suspended between sea and sky in the cupped hands of God, he was free from the expectations of others. For the first time in his life he was only and truly the person he knew himself to be.
The carpenter was moved, despite his own misery, by this uncharacteristically passionate speech, and wished Jacques would share his thoughts more often. The boy, however, preferred to ask questions of others rather than answer them himself. Nights when the weather was fair he could be found on deck listening to the sailors’ conversatio
n, eyes half closed against the fug of tobacco or fixed overhead, tracing the summer constellations. The Great and Little Bears shone brightest, welcoming him to the boreal forest, but just above the horizon lurked Camelopardalis, the Giraffe, as if taunting those who persisted in seeking a passage to the Orient by the Atlantic route.
The existence of this northwest passage was the cause of much animated discussion among the crew, some believing that it had yet to be found, some that it never would. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the New World continued to bear the name of “Indians” given to them mistakenly by Columbus, though they were a different sort of people altogether. Jacques would often ask the crew penetrating questions, revealing that he had been paying careful attention to everything they said; moreover, he seemed remarkably well-informed for someone so young, particularly someone with no previous maritime experience. The boy was aware, for example, that an Englishman named John Hadley had recently invented an instrument for determining latitude which he called the “octant,” even though the captain of the Saint Michel, the Sieur de Salaberry, did not own one, relying instead on the traditional backstaff. He also understood the principles of celestial navigation despite having never held an astrolabe, and often offered to stand at the stern of the ship counting the knots on the log-line to help calculate the speed of travel.
He was particularly interested in the mariners’ tales of adventures in distant lands. No fact was too obscure, no story too outlandish to merit his attention. Everything fascinated him: the inadequacy of armaments on trading vessels as compared to those found on pirate ships, the prevalence of marriage between African women and French soldiers on the Guinea coast, the sordid particulars of the slave trade. Indeed, the main reason the sailors indulged his curiosity was that his questions made them understand their own experiences in strange new ways. They were so taken with the lad that they urged him to join the crew on the return voyage to France. He would make a good sailor, they said, given his affinity for all things maritime. But although he was flattered, he declined; at latitude forty-six degrees forty-nine minutes north and longitude seventy-one degrees thirteen minutes west this voyage would end. Soon he would step ashore in Quebec, a place whose very name, meaning “the narrowing of the waters,” resonated in an alien tongue. And who knew what prospects awaited him there?
***
WHEN THE SAINT MICHEL pulled into Quebec Harbour, a festive scene greeted its weary occupants. Ships of many builds and sizes filled the port, belying the French prejudice that the colonial enterprise was doomed to failure after a year plagued by cholera and crop failures. Some of these busy vessels were familiar — single-masted sloops, two-masted brigs, and even a four-masted barque — and some were not. The latter consisted of shallow wooden crafts being paddled along the shore, well away from the dangerous current, by Natives sitting so low within them that only their naked upper torsos showed. Gaping at the aboriginals, who manoeuvred with such nonchalant grace it seemed their canoes were fused to their bodies, the boy was reminded of the mythical Skiapodes of Pliny’s Natural History, creatures with a single boat-like foot who were rumoured to inhabit India, Africa, and the “Terrae Incognitae”: blank spaces on the map which had once included this very region. As more and more of the earth had become known, legendary monsters like these had proved elusive, casting doubt on ancient testimonials like that of Pliny, one of Jacques’s favourite authors. Nonetheless he felt a thrill of excitement to be entering the heart of an unknown continent, where there was so much to explore. Where someone like him could become lost and, in the losing, find himself.
The rugged town was crowned with ramparts, its steep facade raked by stairs bustling with humanity. Green hills rolled away in the distance and the sun sparkled on the water. The panorama before him would have been impressive anywhere, at any time, but after so many weeks at sea it was brilliant beyond anything the boy could have expected. He pushed forward, eager to go ashore, but was stopped by one of the sailors who told him that before disembarking, all the passengers needed to get permission from a handsome man deep in conversation with Captain Salaberry. Though Salaberry had donned a blue overcoat and a clean linen shirt to celebrate his safe arrival, he was no match for the colonial official, resplendent in fur-trimmed brocade and lace as though he were welcoming the voyagers to court rather than to a busy port full of labouring stevedores and loitering boys.
The nuns, each with a cloth bag of missals slung around her neck, were the first to pass inspection, and nervously descended a swaying rope ladder into the waiting longboat. After them went a crate of tea and honey and chocolate and preserved fruit: gifts for their Canadian sisters, who they assumed would be pining for such luxuries after surviving on a meagre diet of roots and berries. The government officials were next, clutching their satchels of diplomatic papers and royal decrees, their pumps catching awkwardly at the fraying rungs. One stout functionary wearing a long red coat trimmed with gold braid momentarily lost his balance and, with it, his tricorne hat. The splash this object made hitting the water below was drowned out by his cry of dismay. A member of the crew below quickly fished the dripping thing out with his oar and offered it to its owner, who held it over the side of the boat as they paddled off. This being the land of inexhaustible beaver pelts, he was assured by those on board not to worry; he would soon be able to replace it.
The merchants, who had watched the discomfiture of the official with great amusement, were meant to follow in a second longboat, but they refused to leave until they saw their own precious cargo of guns and gunpowder, liquor, tobacco, blankets, cloth, cooking vessels, and assorted tools safely stowed on another conveyance. Then they too climbed down the ladder and the second longboat pulled away. Another rowed up and yet another, and the scene was repeated many times with the colonists and their dogs, their clothes, guns, household items and musical instruments, their portraits of loved ones and maps of the new land, until the only passenger left on the Saint Michel was Jacques.
He lifted his small bag of belongings expectantly, as though to throw it down to the waiting shuttle. Salaberry looked at the colonial official, who shook his head and beckoned Jacques to come over to them instead. The boy traversed the deck reluctantly, the Promised Land now shimmering in the distance like a mirage. He stood before the older men with eyes downcast, shoulders slumped, until the official grabbed him by the chin and pushed his face up into the light. The man ran his index finger along the boy’s jaw as if testing the sharpness of a blade, then clucked his tongue.
“I shall be sending you to the medical examiner, I’m afraid,” he said.
“Who are you?” asked the boy.
“I am Jean-Victor Varin de La Marre, Commissary of the Marine. But the more interesting question is: Who are you?”
“I am Jacques Lafargue.”
“We shall see about that.”
***
Today, the fifteenth of September, one thousand seven hundred thirty-eight, Esther Brandeau, aged about twenty years, appeared before us, the Commissary of the Marine, charged with policing the maritime population of Quebec; the aforementioned girl embarked at La Rochelle disguised as a boy passenger under the name of Jacques Lafargue, on the ship Saint Michel commanded by Le Sieur de Salaberry ...
— From Jean-Victor Varin de La Marre to the
Minister of the Marine in France.
***
THE GIRL — TREMBLING WITH fear, her face ashen under its tan — was ushered by her captor into a room hung with rich tapestries. It smelled of candlewax and some kind of aromatic wood, and was stuffed with ornate furniture at least twenty-five years out of fashion. Before her stood two men, announced by Varin in a stage whisper as the Marquis Charles Beauharnois de La Boische, the Governor General of New France, and Gilles Hocquart, the Intendant. Recognizing the names of the ruling authorities of the colony, she bent forward at both knees and waist, executing an awkward compromise between a curtsy and a bow. Hocquart, a stout, balding man in sombre attire, began to smil
e before covering his mouth with one hand in an attempt to maintain a serious demeanour. Beauharnois, tall and thin and resplendent in satin and lace, saw nothing humorous in the situation; nor was he moved by the vulnerability of the slender neck revealed as the girl in boy’s clothes swept her cap from her head.
“Why are you travelling in disguise?” Beauharnois asked brusquely.
“The only way I can explain is by telling you a story.”
“Very well, then. We are listening,” Hocquart said, sitting down at once on a comfortable sofa and motioning to his colleagues to do the same. Varin crossed to a blue guéridon side-table in one corner of the room, upon which pen and ink stood ready; Beauharnois chose a heavily gilded chair decorated with carved lion heads and lowered himself onto it with a great show of reluctance, crossing one silk-clad knee over the other, then fidgeting with his embroidered waistcoat, until he was forced to acknowledge that the others were waiting for him.
“Begin,” he said. “Unlike the Intendant here, I don’t have all day to waste.”
The girl took a step forward, clasping her hands together in front of her and closing her eyes as though retrieving a distant memory, and in a surprisingly musical voice, pausing only occasionally while searching for the right words to describe a scene more accurately, told her audience the following tale.
TWO
“No me llores por ser prove, sino por ser solo.”
(Weep not for my poverty, but for my loneliness.)
ONCE THERE WAS A green island in a blue sea: the greenest island, the bluest sea. At dawn the sun rose, a blaze of gold, over the horizon; at dusk white egrets stained themselves red as they flew through the sunset, dipping their beaks for the day’s last catch. Quick fish darted through the water, playing hide and seek; crabs wrote mysterious names in the sand; apes frolicked in the trees. Each stone hunched around its secrets, each palm tree translated the wind, each flower held one creature or another. The entire island was alive with voices singing praise to the power that sustained them.
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