nowhere to be found, though my expectation and my knowledge of his reasons do nothing to soften the blow of his absence. At least he left me well provided, I think, as I sob over the carcasses of his seals. I can barely catch my breath. My breasts ache. My belly burns. I have cramps which at first are diarrhea (a common symptom, in women, ofa broken heart), but then are something else. What? It is March. Almost spring. Iâve never seen anything less springlike than the current landscape. What was supposed to happen in the spring?
I feel a little damp down there, touch myself with my fingers, which come away red with a drop of blood. Fresh panic. I am counting on the little fish to keep me company for, what, the next forty-five years, give or take. Every day I promise the fish Iâll be a better mother than I was to Charles, better than my mother was to me, a better mother than has ever been. (At least, Iâll try; I am very unclear, technically, on what is required, it being the custom of my class to send infants to the villages to be fostered by ignorant nurses with tarnished backgrounds. Peace, Bastienne.)
Itslk has given me a turn, I whimper to Léon, clutching his menacing collar and burying my face in the folds of his neck. I canât bear to think of the other. Léon thinks I want to play. The older he gets, the more puppyish he seems. Poor me, I squeak. Poor little me.
The night before I had said to Itslk, It was not magic. I donât know why the bear died. I didnât kill it. I never killed anything in my life except for my playmate Lucilleâs kitten when I was three and dropped it out a window to see if it would land on its feet. I crawled inside the bear because I was cold. It didnât eat me. I am not an aspirant. I have never aspired to anything except a little fun. I am pretty sure this is not a dream.
But he did not believe me, and I can see why, of the two accounts, he would prefer his own. In his version, he is the tragic hero and I am an ambiguous female, both good and evil, somewhat in the mythic mode (is every woman a sister of Sedna?). At least itâs a story. In my version, things happen by chance or bad luck. We wander in a fog, lacking a true explanationof events. Even the soul and its reasons are inscrutable. The wilderness is inside as much as it is outside. I like to imagine he bore me some affection, but the evidence, on the whole, is against it. Our lovemaking had a certain neutral quality, part ritual, part personal hygiene.
He could do worse than return to his wife, living out his days as he has always done, perhaps retreating into the hinter-land, following the old ways, forgetting his French, forgetting the colour of his children, forgetting that I have entered his dream world and established a colony there. Though, of course, he will not forget, and life will always have a poignant as-if quality, the wistful nostalgia that is the temper of the future. From this time forward, I predict, no one will ever be completely himself. (This is the point in history where we are transformed. Before, we had a word and an explanation for everything; henceforth, we shall only discover the necessity of larger and larger explanations, which will always fall short. What we know will become just another anxious symbol, a code for what we do not know.)
I touch myself again. Nothing. My heart jumps. A little scare. My body always overreacts to moody men. I think too much, talk too much and never know how attached I am until the object of my attachment has disappeared. I am always having to read myself like a book, like a lover, like a new country. Poor Itslk, I think, trying to walk home out of a bad dream. There is never any escape from a bad dream.
(One of mine: A caravel sails into view from the east â French by her design, by flags and ensigns I see she is out of La Rochelle. She lets down a shallop and a water party. They row straight to my lonely beach. I am saved.
I feel a little damp down there, touch myself with my fingers, which come away red with a drop of blood. Fresh panic. I am counting on the little fish to keep me company for, what, the next forty-five years, give or take. Every day I promise the fish Iâll be a better mother than I was to Charles, better than my mother was to me, a better mother than has ever been. (At least, Iâll try; I am very unclear, technically, on what is required, it being the custom of my class to send infants to the villages to be fostered by ignorant nurses with tarnished backgrounds. Peace, Bastienne.)
Itslk has given me a turn, I whimper to Léon, clutching his menacing collar and burying my face in the folds of his neck. I canât bear to think of the other. Léon thinks I want to play. The older he gets, the more puppyish he seems. Poor me, I squeak. Poor little me.
The night before I had said to Itslk, It was not magic. I donât know why the bear died. I didnât kill it. I never killed anything in my life except for my playmate Lucilleâs kitten when I was three and dropped it out a window to see if it would land on its feet. I crawled inside the bear because I was cold. It didnât eat me. I am not an aspirant. I have never aspired to anything except a little fun. I am pretty sure this is not a dream.
But he did not believe me, and I can see why, of the two accounts, he would prefer his own. In his version, he is the tragic hero and I am an ambiguous female, both good and evil, somewhat in the mythic mode (is every woman a sister of Sedna?). At least itâs a story. In my version, things happen by chance or bad luck. We wander in a fog, lacking a true explanationof events. Even the soul and its reasons are inscrutable. The wilderness is inside as much as it is outside. I like to imagine he bore me some affection, but the evidence, on the whole, is against it. Our lovemaking had a certain neutral quality, part ritual, part personal hygiene.
He could do worse than return to his wife, living out his days as he has always done, perhaps retreating into the hinter-land, following the old ways, forgetting his French, forgetting the colour of his children, forgetting that I have entered his dream world and established a colony there. Though, of course, he will not forget, and life will always have a poignant as-if quality, the wistful nostalgia that is the temper of the future. From this time forward, I predict, no one will ever be completely himself. (This is the point in history where we are transformed. Before, we had a word and an explanation for everything; henceforth, we shall only discover the necessity of larger and larger explanations, which will always fall short. What we know will become just another anxious symbol, a code for what we do not know.)
I touch myself again. Nothing. My heart jumps. A little scare. My body always overreacts to moody men. I think too much, talk too much and never know how attached I am until the object of my attachment has disappeared. I am always having to read myself like a book, like a lover, like a new country. Poor Itslk, I think, trying to walk home out of a bad dream. There is never any escape from a bad dream.
(One of mine: A caravel sails into view from the east â French by her design, by flags and ensigns I see she is out of La Rochelle. She lets down a shallop and a water party. They row straight to my lonely beach. I am saved.
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