Kamouraska

by Anne Hébert

  “My wife is a bitch!”

  Antoine gets furious when I sleep with Aunt Luce-Gertrude. One night he knocks down the servant guarding the door. Tries to come over to my bed. I scream and scream. A kind of rattle, rasping deep in my throat. Some awful mechanism set in motion. Out of control. Nothing human about it now. Choking me. Filling me with horror . . . The flash of a razor blade, just for an instant, right at my throat. Aunt Luce-Gertrude insists that Antoine had it in his pocket. But I’m not sure. I can’t be sure of anything. The blade might have been in the room all the time. Hanging by a thread, over my bed, for all eternity.

  Disarmed, shown the door, thrown out. Antoine leaves the house on Rue Augusta. Goes running off to Horse Marine, to nestle his head in her stinking Irish lap and weep. Swears to stay with her for good, to forget his wife. That scrawny Horse Marine. So thin that when she lifts her arms you can count her ribs. Like the skeleton of a ship.

  One morning I wake up. There, between my thighs, the trickle of blood that will set me free. The sign. Unmistakable. Now never again will a child of Antoine’s come to life in my womb. Never take root. Never choose itself a sex, a face, deep in the darkness. I’m free now. Barren. As if no man had ever touched me. A few more days and I’ll be pure again. And free . . .

  I must go see the doctor. Nothing in this world can stop me. Nothing and no one. I’ve told Aurélie what I plan to do. She glows with a look of grim delight. Pretends to be obeying me against her will. Grumbles a little, then says yes, she’ll take me. Says she’ll drive the horses herself. Fixes my hair and helps me dress, without a word. Absorbed in a kind of strange, almost religious reverie. Brings me my fur coat, my shawls, those fur-lined mittens of Antoine’s. Then goes to dress the children.

  Wrapped in my furs, I’m shivering, shaking . . . All at once I rip the mittens off, fling them out into the snow. Feel a tremendous relief at what I’ve done. Thrust my hands into my muff. Cheerfully. Dream of throwing all of Antoine’s things away. Lost forever, strewn about the countryside. His pipes, his bottles, his guns, his jackets, his shirts, his belts, his suspenders . . . How heavy the children feel in my arms. Antoine’s blue eyes, twice over. A sudden spasm shakes my body, wakes little Louis, sleeping on my lap. Starts him crying . . .

  And right and left it’s “Good morning, Madame Tassy!” . . . And how are you, Madame Tassy! . . .”

  The folks in Sorel are out to see you, Madame Tassy. And the ones outside of town. To watch you go riding by, all pale and trembling, with that wild-eyed look of yours. You and your little blond babies, with their rosy-apple checks. A perfect alibi. No need to worry.

  The long blue shadows on the snow fade into the spreading darkness. We’ve reached the doctor’s house. Ever so gently the children pass from my arms to Aurélie’s. Go back to sleep. I step down from the carriage, alone.

  A voice, loud and clear, is asking me in . . . Here in the waiting room now. An old horsehair sofa. Plain wooden walls, unfinished, covered with knots. A small cast-iron stove, round and black. standing on giant twisted legs . . . I’m waiting for the doctor to finish with his patient.

  Behind the partition, the sounds of people moving here and there, huffing and puffing. A jumble of footsteps. Muffled gasps. As if two men were wrestling with each other . . . I try to fix all my attention on the stove in the middle of the room. Amuse myself trying to read the fancy letters entwined with garlands of flowers embossed on the metal. Make out the name “Warm Morning” . . .

  Suddenly, a scream from behind the wooden partition. Then a long groan. And a chilling, seemingly endless silence. A few moments later, barely audible, the rustle of cloth being rolled up carefully and put away . . . At last, the door opens. A young boy steps out, his arm in a sling. Moving so slowly, he seems ready to fall with every step he takes. He turns his pallid face in my direction, streaming with tears. Studies me long and hard. A kind of quizzical, melancholy look. Lost in wonder. He staggers a little. The doctor has to take him by the shoulders and help him to the door.

  George Nelson is in his shirt-sleeves. Cuffs rolled up. Hair disheveled, as if he were just getting out of bed. His movements, quick and precise. Energetic. He casts a suspicious glance my way, then strides off into the kitchen. Takes the lamp with him . . . I’m alone in the darkness. The doctor is washing his hands and face. Great loud splashes of water under the pump . . . He’s coming back now, rolling down his sleeves, face dripping. Mopping his brow with his handkerchief. Looks me in the eye. A strange, insistent stare, not very polite.

  “I had to break that youngsters arm so I could set it for him right. Some butcher went and set the bones all wrong. Really, this place is crawling with charlatans! Everywhere. Ignorance, no matter where you look. Quackery, superstition . . . It’s a scandal, that’s what it is! We should keep those medicine men from going around killing people. Give everyone proper care, whether they want it or not! Keep your girl Aurélie from doing her magic tricks on newborn babies! . . .”

  The white of his shirt, flashing. He holds up the lamp to his face, furrowed and gaunt. Never at rest. Seething with rage . . . I look at him, watch for each spark of life flickering across his swarthy face. I listen to his every word. As if I myself were the object of all his angry passion. Waiting for its secret meaning to be revealed. To turn on me, forever. To shower me with the holy wrath he feels . . . My, my, Doctor Nelson. How you’re looking at me! No peace in that look, Doctor Nelson. The blade of battle . . . That sudden pallor. That fever in your eyes. It must be the lamp. That dark shadow over your cheeks . . .

  “Is there something strange about me, Madame Tassy? Something that makes you look at me that way? Do you think I go around casting spells? Do you really think I can put the curse on a woman’s milk?”

  He laughs. A dry little laugh that sets me on edge.

  “To what do I owe the honor of your visit? I suppose you’re here about Antoine?”

  I tell him “no.” If the answer were yes, I would have said “yes.” No word seems short or sharp enough to do away with all the useless chatter between us.

  “You mean to tell me nobody sent you? You’ve come here on your own?”

  I tell him “yes.” But this time I’d like to go on, to say more. To explain myself. Defend myself . . . An odd, sardonic little something in George Nelson’s smile — or rather in the whiteness of his teeth — staggers me to the very depths of my being. Won’t let another word pass my lips.

  He raises the lamp over his head. Asks me to follow him. Shows me around the house.

  “Now that you’ve looked me over, take a good look at the house. Everything perfectly normal, you see? Just a nice little country cottage, like any other. Except for the books, that is. But I’m sure you’re not one to go thinking that just because I have some books . . .”

  Several square, half-furnished little rooms. Looking so painfully like wooden crates. White, rough, full of splinters. Books on shelves, books on the kitchen table, books piled high on the floor, books used to prop up a massive cupboard.

  “Did Antoine tell you about me? Did he tell you how we used to play chess at school? I think he used to like to lose. He never could beat me. Never. Not even once, you hear?”

  He’s raising his voice again. Almost defiantly. Then suddenly, silent. Becomes very sullen. Withdraws within himself. Drifts off without so much as a by-your-leave. Absorbed, I imagine, in a silent, skillful game of chess, with a young blond fellow, beaten before he starts. I have to bring him back. Quickly. Break up this ghostly game . . . I love you wildly, madly, Doctor Nelson. Please, let me go with you. Cross the stream, back to your childhood. Back to the source. Flowing there, to my chagrin, all intermingled with Antoine’s . . .

  My legs are shaking. A shudder rocks my body from head to toe. I’m clutching the back of the sofa to keep from falling.

  “I’ve come to see you, Doctor Nelson. Aren’t you going to ask me how I am?”

  With one bound he’s beside me. Makes me sit down on the sofa. Goe
s to the kitchen. Brings me a glass of water. Paces back and forth. Takes my pulse. Unnerved. Distraught.

  “Not ask you how you are? Good God, poor child! Seeing you bruised and tortured the way you were . . . Do you think I’ve thought of anything else since then? . . . Not ask you how you are, poor thing . . . For goodness’ sake, why did you marry Antoine Tassy? Why? Tell me why . . . You’re looking better despite the way he . . . I took good care of you, didn’t I? I’m a good doctor, don’t you think? . . .”

  “You know how miserable I am . . .”

  His whole face quivers. He speaks in a whisper. Won’t look me in the eye. Pushes me away. His words, one by one. Like stones.

  “There’s nothing I can do for you, Madame Elisabeth. I’m a total stranger . . .”

  Our giant shadows on the wall, so far from each other. A kind of emptiness, digging its way between us. Silence. Space . . . George is leaving me behind again. How can I catch him? I’m weighted down. Oppressed. Bound hand and foot. Prisoner of Rue Augusta and the town of Sorel . . . Oh, to break my bonds. Recapture my childhood, strong and free. That little girl within me, with the close-cropping hair, climbing out the window. Running off to join her nasty gang . . . What should I do, Doctor Nelson? Tell me. One word from you and I’ll obey. Cut off all my hair again? Is that what I should do? Run away? Leave my house, my children? . . . Out of this world, if that’s what you want. That’s how far I’ll go to meet you. Free, an entity unto myself. A stranger to everyone and everything but you . . .

  “And you don’t think I’m a total stranger too? . . .”

  He turns aside.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “More than you think . . .”

  Silence. Again, a wall between us, smooth and hard. His schooldays, that flimsy defense, hurriedly dredged up out of the past.

  “I never had any friends at all. Not as a student, not later either . . . But I used to like to play chess with Antoine Tassy . . .”

  “And I suppose that’s why you go riding past my windows every night?”

  This time he looks me right in the eye. Furious. Mortified. Like a child caught doing something naughty.

  “You shouldn’t have said that, Madame Elisabeth. You shouldn’t have. Really, there’s nothing I hate more than being found out . . .”

  “Madame Elisabeth” . . . He called me by my name. For the first time. I look down at my lap to hide my delight. Bend over my needlework. Careful not to look at my mother or my aunts. A quiet evening at home on Rue Augusta. “Petit point is done in two steps, diagonally across the canvas. First a vertical stitch, one row down, from left to right. Then a horizontal stitch, from right to left, up the next row. With a wool three strands thick, following the mesh . . .”

  The green felt covering on the study table, slashed with knife marks here and there. That ever-present odor of sour cabbage. Mass, evensong, vespers, Rogation Days, Lent, Holy Week. (My knees!) The chalk scraping over the blackboard, the teacher’s cane coming down on ink-stained hands. The barrack-room smell of the dormitory. The ice that has to be broken every morning in the pitchers. The tearful look on Antoine’s face, bending over a basin filled with floating chunks . . . My, my, Master Nelson, the way you’re staring at that big, fat, miserable lad! Why are you turning away? Is it out of pity? . . .

  “Protestants can’t get into Heaven, into Heaven . . .” Fifteen young fellows, chanting with ferocious glee. The gaunt, dark youth they’re teasing is wearing a muffler full of holes and an old sealskin cap. Rumor has it he’s a foreigner. No family. He’s learning French and studying to become a Catholic. But neither one with very much enthusiasm. Père Foucas is fed up with all his arrogance and disrespect. One day he gives him a thrashing with a hockey stick. Beats him within an inch of his life. But George doesn’t make a sound. Not even a whimper. There, Master Tassy. That rugged strength, that’s what you lack. That strength, so fascinating and yet so offensive. Two young fellows without a thing in common. Except in the deep recesses of their souls. A silent, premature experience with despair.

  Which one first challenges the other to a game of chess? And anyway, the games have already been acted out. The winner and loser chosen in advance. Who can presume to change the course of fate? Recess after recess. Year after year. The same stubborn silence. The same complicity. Through endless games of chess.

  “Checkmate!”

  Flushed with victory, this youngster with the rough and cracking voice . . . Doctor Nelson, is that you? One day that voice of yours will change, grow deep, and win me over, body and soul . . .

  With a sweep of his hand, Antoine clears the pieces off the board. They fall to the floor. Nasty loser. Nasty child. No one can match him when it comes to fiendish tricks. Like blowing up little green frogs, from the pond, with smoke from his pipe, and making them burst. And that great, shattering laugh of his.

  “Nelson, you’re cheating! . . .”

  I keep my jealous watch. Beyond all time. No thought here of any conventional reality. I have that power. I’m Madame Rolland and I know it all. From the very beginning, I play my part in the lives of these two ill-starred young men. Presiding over their friendship with great delight. A friendship destined never to exist between George Nelson and Antoine Tassy.

  I lie in wait, listening in vain for a horse’s hoofbeat, the sound of a sleigh. Can it be that he won’t come back, won’t come prowling anymore beneath my windows? One moment he calls me “Madame Elisabeth.” And the next, he rejects me. Runs away. I never should have told him about those nights, leaning out the window, when I . . . The look he gave me! That piercing glance. Like a cornered beast.

  Now he shuts himself up in his house. Locks and bars the doors, like a criminal. And I venture as close to his solitude as I can. Provoking him, bedeviling him. The way he provokes and bedevils me.

  “That man’s a foreigner. It’s better not to trust him, anymore than he trusts us.”

  “Quiet, Aurélie . . . Go away. I’m much too busy . . .”

  I’m concentrating. Closing my eyes. As if I were trying to conjure up the spirits. And yet, it’s life I’m after. Life . . . Over there, at the other end of Sorel. A man, all alone, leaning on a kitchen table. A book lying open in front of him, not a page moving . . . Standing over him, reading over his shoulder. Trying to work my way down into the innermost recesses of his daydreams . . .

  They won’t let you out of their sight, Master Nelson. They follow wherever you go. Protestants are all a pack of . . . And your weatherbeaten old sealskin cap.

  The man who makes foolish little mistakes in his French gives himself away. The man who speaks of “the Bible” instead of “the Holy Gospels” gives himself away. The man who says “Madame Elisabeth” instead of “Madame Tassy” is sure to compromise himself and her as well.

  How wonderfully selfless. To choose medicine as a calling. Compassion, spread open like a wound. You should find that very comforting. Fighting evil and illness and witches the way you do, all with the very same zeal. Why is it, then, when you do so much good, that nobody here really likes you? They’re afraid of you, Doctor Nelson. As if, under all that obvious selflessness of yours — too obvious, perhaps — some fearsome identity lies hidden . . . That original flaw, deeper than your Protestant religion, deeper than your English language . . . Look. Look hard. It’s not a sin, Doctor Nelson. Only some terrible grief.

  Turned out of your father’s house. His house with its white columns, its colonial façade. Like thieves. You, your brother, your sister. Three innocent little children. And your father sends you off, like thieves. And your mother, pressing her face against the window, crying. In Montpelier. In Vermont.

  This American independence is really too much for good loyalists to bear. Isn’t it better to pack the children off to Canada? Send them away before this new spirit pollutes and infects them? Let them even become Catholics. Even learn French if they have to. Anything, just so long as they keep their allegiance to the British cro
wn . . .

  “You don’t know my brother and sister, do you, Madame Elisabeth? You really should. You’ll see how very much alike we are, ever since we all turned Catholic . . .”

  One day, my love, you’ll call me just “Elisabeth.” No more formalities at all between us. You’ll tell me how your sister Cathy went with the Ursulines when she was fifteen. You’ll talk about her Roman nose, her cheeks, all covered with freckles. And you’ll tell me about your brother Henry, the Jesuit, and those impressive retreats he preaches . . .

  You’re groping for my body in the darkness. Your words are strange. Time ceases to exist. No one but me to hear them. We’re naked, lying together for all eternity. And you murmur something against my shoulder.

  “And I swore I’d be a saint, Elisabeth! I swore, do you hear? And never, never in my life did I yearn for anything else so much . . .”

  Once again, a studious young man bent over his books, in a wooden house. And the words going round and round in his head, mocking him: “Mustn’t get caught! No matter what, but mustn’t get caught!” . . . You jump to your feet, put away your books. Put on your coat, your cap, your mittens. Every movement so precise, and yet so quick. Like a doctor hurrying off to see his patients . . . He knows that, this time too, he’ll hitch up his horses and go prowling the streets of Sorel, even at the risk of being . . . Back and forth, maybe a good ten times, in front of Madame Tassy’s windows . . . In the hope and fear — both at once, so utterly intertwined — of seeing the wicked husband, thrown out of his wife’s house, suddenly appear on the corner of the street. Take careful aim at him. Shoot him down like a partridge. The born loser, Antoine Tassy. “Whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” I’ll take his rook. I’ll take his queen. I’ll take his wife. It has to be. How can I bear the thought of . . . A woman, so lovely, so pathetic. Being tortured, humiliated . . . Lying next to Antoine, beaten by Antoine, caressed by Antoine, opened and shut by Antoine, raped by Antoine, ravished by Antoine . . . I’ll bring back justice the way it used to be. The law of the victor and the vanquished . . . In a flash, a sudden glimpse of being in tune, at one with yourself. Something tried over and over again, since the mind can remember. Finding yourself, deep in the marrow of your bones, completely yourself. Admitting at last the sickness within you. The frenzied yearning to posses the world.