Bear Woman by Karolina Ramqvist

Author:Karolina Ramqvist [Ramqvist, Karolina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manilla Press

A

ccording to Jean Alfonse’s calculations, the journey across the ocean would take sixty days. She keeps out of the way at first; sitting in the pilothouse as he and Roberval set their course and predict the weather and wind and how to change course if necessary, their options for escape if they end up in a storm the ships can’t handle. Roberval walks in and out of the cabin. He takes in the crew and the ocean. When all is calm, he searches for signs of change; the weather is unpredictable but so are the men. Everything he does on board, every movement, is a display of mastery over them, but he can do nothing about the sea. It simply is, impossible to tame. In contrast to what he and Jean Alfonse seem to believe when their instruments and navigational charts are between them, it can’t be controlled. It is unamenable to reason, but they seem to believe that God will protect them.

For a long time I took this to be the reason – Roberval having to placate God since she had awakened his rage – but that was probably naive of me. A well-meaning, atheistic interpretation. Now I’m more inclined to think it was as my friend had once suggested: he’d already made his plans for her, and bringing her along on this journey was a sort of ultimate solution to all of his problems. Her crime presented him with an opportunity to do as he pleased with her. Did he think the Divine had unexpectedly come to his aid, or was this the motive for him wanting the man without a name to teach her the cithern, because he had sensed that something might happen between them that would give him reason to jettison her from the expedition?

I didn’t want to believe it at first. Perhaps I didn’t want to believe he could be so calculating and cruel, but more so because, in this case, she wouldn’t be alone in driving this story: it would become unromantic, or somewhere along the way I’d presupposed that Roberval wouldn’t willingly cede her to another man.

I so very much wanted to know who was driving the events forwards and couldn’t shake the idea that identifying the person whose thoughts and actions were behind them was possible. But there was also the matter of me wanting to try and understand what her relationship to sex and love was and what she knew about them, whether or not she had been a virgin and what concepts such as ‘virgin’ and ‘chastity’ meant to her. I, too, was mired in the question of whether to see her as a subject or object, as if she could only be one or the other, or one at a time.

Her constant presence must have made Roberval a bit uncomfortable. Jean Alfonse shows her his navigational instruments and allows her to examine them: quadrants and tables, astrolabes and alidades, of which he has written in L’Hydrographie d’un Découvreur

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.