Three Women in a Mirror (12 page)

To be sure, her marriage with Philippe had been called off, but the young woman would return to her prior activities: spinning, embroidery, cooking, and sewing. She would forget about her misadventure, and leave the monk Braindor, and come to her senses. In the not-too-distant future she would make the acquaintance of another boy from Bruges and marry him. That was the plan.

“I promised your mother, Anne! As we wept I swore to her that if you survived infancy I would raise you as my own daughter. My task will only be over once you are settled in your own household.”

On hearing this evocation of her mother's final moments, Anne curled in upon herself, stifled by sorrow. Would her mother have died if she had not given birth to her? No, during the nine months she was with child she had not only nourished a fetus, she had nourished her own death. And who was it, during the difficult birth, who had preferred to save the child? Was it the barber who had been called in to help, or was it her mother, who had decided to cut open her womb to deliver the baby? Any woman who accepted the butchery of a Caesarean knew that she would die during the hours or days to come . . . Anne was afraid she owed her existence to a sacrifice. Or, worse than that, to a pointless abnegation. Was she really worthy of that renunciation? Miserable and incoherent, worthy of nothing, she was not making the most of the life her mother had deemed so precious. What a waste . . .

Wracked by guilt, Anne consented. Particularly as Braindor, when pleading her case, had not insisted, and indeed argued so little that Anne felt offended: why could he not persuade Aunt Godeliève to relent? The generous matron respected God and his ministers so much that the monk would surely have had some influence over her.

Braindor spent three days arguing for Anne to be sent to the nuns, but when he finally gave up, he showed no regret as he kissed her in the middle of her forehead.

“Godspeed, Anne.”

“Where are you going?”

“Wherever my steps take me.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Most certainly. Like your aunt, although in another way, I feel I am somehow responsible for your destiny.”

“Which means?”

“You will understand later on.”

“When will you be back?”

“When you are ready.”

Instead of getting angry, Anne was surprised. What was she not ready for?

“Anne, you gave me no support in arguing with your aunt; at no time did you tell us what you wanted.”

She had to admit he was right. Once again she saw how passive she was, under any circumstances, so passive that she was unaware of her own passivity.

“Braindor, why do I let people dominate me so easily?”

“Because you were made to obey—which is a wonderful thing—but you have not yet discovered whom you must obey.”

He pulled down his hood, adjusted his bundle on his shoulder and walked away down the street, not looking back.

 

Life went on.

Although they lived under the same roof, Ida spurned her cousin, miraculously managing to share her meals and join in the conversation without looking at her or saying a word. Invisible, inaudible, that is what Anne was for Ida, who could find no better way to tell her, “Filthy intruder, be gone, since you are no longer here.”

When Anne went out with her aunt to buy fish, she could sense from the reproachful glances she received that the neighbors had taken Philippe's side against her; the boys nodded their heads with a sigh, the girls sneered, the women pinched their lips, the old men leered at her as if she were a flea-ridden dog. Anne humbly bent her head and went on her way. She could not find fault with them, she knew that her flight had hurt her family, her fiancé, and those who were close to her: marriage, for all of them, coming as it did in an otherwise monotonous, laborious life, was seen as a joyful accomplishment; in fleeing, she had trampled their beliefs. She could understand her detractors better than she understood herself.

In her bedroom, when she was not chatting with Hadewijch and Bénédicte, the only ones who still behaved normally with her, she tried to keep the promise which Braindor had wrenched from her: to study the Bible. From her aunt's chest she took the only book in the house, bound in wood coated with linen; then, admiring in passing the semi-precious stone embedded in the cover, she thought it might be amusing to decipher it. Good Christian women in those days listened to the Bible but did not read it—Mass was enough.

Intimidated by the thickness of the volume, Anne tried to tame it by opening it at random—she swore that later she would go through it from the beginning. Words leapt off the page and lured her in, like streetwalkers grabbing for their clients. Nebuchadnezzar, Shalmaneser, Gomorrah, Habakukk, Baruch, Sodom, Leviathan, Holofernes . . . The East! These eccentric sounds, sometimes bronzed, sometimes gleaming, dazzled her, troubled her, and intrigued her. Often she would pick out a title—“And behold, Miriam became leprous,” “The Lost Axe,”—and imagine the rest; at other times she succumbed to temptation and immersed herself in an adventure. The further she went, the greater the profusion of horror—she was overwhelmed by murder, scheming, war, torture, executions, infanticide, and incest. Flushing red, scandalized, she closed the book and worried that she might be caught having such thoughts. How could the priests and nuns, with their placid faces, revel in such bloody episodes? What essential thing did they perceive that she had missed? She was leafing not through a sacred story, but an inventory of turpitudes. She must have misunderstood! Whatever was spiritual and sublime remained inaccessible to her, and she berated herself, felt almost guilty for all this Biblical violence.

Above all, the prophecies of Isaiah left her gasping for breath. All those dragons, satyrs, hyenas, wildcats, clothes ripped off, forests felled, cities razed, people rising from the dead when the vermin sprout! This tempestuous God terrified her, a frightening father who scolded, punished, sought revenge and demanded sacrifices, destroyed cities and sent floods, like a choleric brigand hidden in the forests of the heavens. It was a good thing, after all, that Braindor had not managed to send her to the convent: she feared God, and was not able to love him.

But the Old Testament terrified her ever more with each passing day. Far from inspiring her dreams, it gave her waking nightmares. Ever since she had obliged herself to read it, she squirmed on her chair instead of staring at the light, or the shape of clouds, or the patterns on a ladybug. Rather than feeling an emptiness—the inactive languor she had tamed since childhood and had rediscovered, much stronger, during her stay in the forest—Anne inflicted this onslaught of images upon herself; her mind filled with monsters, adventures, dramatic incidents and sudden tragedies.

She missed her erstwhile nonchalance, her torpor, those endless days where she did nothing, where she gave in to contemplation and the company of silence. In contrast with today, it seemed delightful to her, that boredom in which time slowed until you could seize its density, in which time let you see the infinity beneath it, lightening its weave by showing you eternity.

The Bible both disappointed and fascinated, and she concluded that she was not suited for either a spiritual life or a monastic existence. Like the others, Braindor had been mistaken about her.

So what would her destiny be?

Did she even have one? Or would she have to wait forever for the obvious answer that would not come?

 

“The wolves! The wolves are back!”

The town crier broke the news on his rounds, and within the hour all of Bruges had heard it.

A baby had been stolen outside a stable . . . While she was crouching at the edge of the field to relieve herself, a woman had been attacked . . . People were concerned about the sudden disappearance of two young children . . . In the evening cowherds had heard the sharp-toothed killers growling.

Before long, Bruges was abuzz with the news.

Anne was delighted that a new topic of conversation had come to replace her escapade: at last the good people of Bruges would put aside their interest in the foolish girl who had preferred the forest to the handsome lad from town, and everyone shivered as they spoke of the pack of murderous wolves.

Several other fears reemerged with the alarm, above all the fear of the cruelty of nature. What is the world? A competition between teeth and stomachs. One eats or one is eaten. The world knows no other law; it offers us two options, predator or prey, two conditions as unstable as they are interchangeable, alas.

The people trembled, but they enjoyed their trembling. For now that citizens were protected behind the city walls, having left peasanthood behind, they had nothing but scorn for the yokels still bent over the manure. Through their fear shone a delicious feeling of superiority; in truth, their apprehension was like the one that arises when one listens to a story—a fictitious fear, a fear without danger, a child's fear, fear for the fun of it.

To add spice to the debate, the burghers spoke knowingly of the wolves. In the past they did not attack humans: they fed on rabbits, rodents, foxes, partridges, and young wild boars; they stole piglets, hens, and ducks from the farmers; they caught salmon in the autumn when the fish swam upriver; in the event of extreme penury, they would grind carrion or overripe fruit; in short, for centuries wolves had not viewed human beings as a food source. Was the story of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, not proof of this, as they had been raised by a wild she-wolf? The situation had degenerated over the last few decades, said the burghers, and it was the fault of mankind! Since warfare left hundreds of corpses in the fields of battle, the morning after defeat the wolves ventured ever nearer, and they had acquired a taste for human flesh. Now they could no longer do without, and were particularly fond of the delicate meat of infants.

Anne gazed at these grave, portly men as they waxed ecstatic about the taste of newborn babies, sliding their tongues over their lips. Had they not just invented this detail? How did they know what the wolves liked? Had they asked them? She walked away, somewhat ashamed at having caught the notables red-handed indulging their perverse thoughts. They ascribed to the wild animal an inclination which only existed in man.

After two weeks of havoc in the countryside surrounding Bruges, the cause of the menace became clear: it was not a pack but a solitary wolf.

Yet this news did little to temper the burghers' enthusiasm. On the contrary. One wolf was almost better than ten or twenty! Because he went on killing, people imagined the wolf to be huge. The gigantic monster had the appetite of a pack, and was even more ferocious. There, what further proof did you need! The animal was proudly baptized “the Wolf of Bruges.”

Nevertheless, bored youths saw an opportunity for heroism. One Friday in the main square, Rubben, a draper's son, harangued his twenty-year old comrades: “Death to the wolf! The men of Bruges must eliminate the enemy of Bruges!” On hearing these exhortations, their courage was heightened, their imagination fired up. A group was formed and quickly grew in number.

All the citizens must defend the city. Anne's former fiancé, Philippe, along with his apprentice friends, joined Rubben and the burghers. They fraternized: solidarity in the face of danger abolished social barriers.

On Saturday they drew up their strategy: Rubben announced that the next day they would go out of town, organize a battue, and capture the wolf; then it would be brought back to this square, where it would be publicly tortured and burned at the stake. One doctor opposed cremation, pointing out that there were excellent remedies to be had from a wolf's organs: grilled ears for colic, its liver for warts, a dried eye worn around the neck to ward off epilepsy. Magnanimously, the excited citizens cried out that they would decide later, particularly as some recalled, without confessing as much, that a strap of a wolf's hide worn around the neck was excellent for lovemaking. Now that they had declared themselves invincible, they crowed about their gallantry, and applauded their success in advance, already basking in compliments and thanks from the women. That afternoon, to be on the safe side, they also asked the muscular lads they met on the river banks—Portuguese tradesmen, English sailors—to join their troop.

At the end of the day, an army of forty men had been raised. They swore to track down the predator on Sunday.

 

That evening Anne, who had been present during these debates, was knitting in her bedroom with the window open. The silvery moon was daydreaming in a pure, star-studded sky.

She thought about the way the boys were bragging, that mixture of shouting, bravado, drunkenness, and stupidity. One detail had surprised her: since they were planning a public execution, it meant the people of Bruges saw the wolf not as a harmful beast but as a criminal. Did that also mean they thought it had a soul? She was intrigued; she remembered the trials held during her childhood for thieving dogs and destructive donkeys, the cruel makeshift tribunals; she recalled the quartered sows and hanged ewes, and she felt sick to her stomach. Strange human beings. They showed no respect for animals other than to deliver a verdict, hand down a sentence, or inflict some form of torture. Only once in its life could an animal be the equal of men: when faced with its judge and executioner.

To take her mind off these thoughts, she picked up the Bible and started the book of Job.

She heard the cry.

From far far away, at the edge of the horizon, came the wolf's call, a lone, lugubrious, melodious, endless howling, permeating the darkness. It made the spring evening suddenly sinister with its desperate modulations.

Anne shuddered.

She felt a strange twinge in her heart, more piercing than an icy wind. The wolf was calling to her. Its lament was meant for her. No sooner had she heard its howling than she had been filled with sadness. She was distraught, lost, unhappy—like the wolf. Its haunting call spoke of exclusion and solitude in the face of man's hostility.