The Rose and the Swine - Anne Provoost

The Rose and the Swine
CHAPTER ONE How I was born, how I was taken care of by elves, how nobody believed I would live, of the miraculous mirror my mother received as a gift from my father, and how my mother died shortly afterwards.

They say I am the most beautiful woman in the world. I have ruby lips, a snow-white skin and hands like precious shells. In the Church of Our Lady stand images of saints created in my image. People say I resemble the Virgin Mary, but the truth is the Holy Virgin resembles me - the sculptors came to me with tears in their eyes and confessed as much.
I was not born beautiful. My beauty came gradually as I grew older. It is the work of the elves. They fed me and took me into their care. Because my beauty comes from them, I cannot escape it, it encases me like a suit of armour. Once I was ugly and incomplete - but undamaged. Now I am complete but damaged. And I cannot return to my original state.
The first woman to see me was my mother, not the midwife Lucretia, unlike at the birth of my two sisters. Lucretia had fled the room as soon as my head appeared. Guilt-ridden, she had paced up and down in the front garden, and every time she'd stuck her head around the bedroom door, my mother had sent her back. There was nobody else in the house. My sisters had been sent to the river and there were never many servants in my mother's household. Although she could not see me yet, my mother knew there was something wrong. Lucretia, whom she knew, was grateful to, and considered a good friend, had to stay away from her as much as possible - a misshapen child would have meant a flogging, a seriously misshapen child could mean imprisonment and the end of her career as a midwife.
The baby couldn't be fully formed. It still had weeks to go inside her body. My mother wasn't too worried, therefore, to let it slip out from between her legs onto the tile floor. It was the elves - sitting on the tiles as usual, heads hunched between their shoulders, smiling - who caught me.
For some reason or other I was born with a heart full of anxiety. As soon as the elves touched me, I knew why: some day my gifts would turn against me. Feeling their sticky little fingers on my skin, I immediately burst into inconsolable tears. Not because I had been frightened by my fall, but because of the pain that was yet to come.
With her last strength, my mother raised herself up to look at me. Lucretia's herb-drenched compresses fell from her nipples, but she didn't put them back because she was certain that this time she would have no need for milk. To her surprise, however, she saw that I had been born with everything necessary - like every child, I had arms, legs, a torso and a head. My head was round and complete. I had ears, eyes, a nose and a mouth. Her strength flooded back and, making little sucking noises, she wrenched me from the grasp of the tile elves with the resolve of a mother. The elves gazed at their empty hands, crouched and began to chuckle.
'A girl,' my mother said. She already had two and didn't need a third. I wasn't finished, of course. It was only when she'd wiped the blood from my face and body with the end of her undergarment, that she saw what was wrong. Still, she didn't drop me in horror - on the contrary, she bent over me to take a closer look. She found me interesting. The elves on the floor craned their necks to see too.
'Lucretia!' she called. The good woman came in, trembling like a leaf, carrying an earthenware bowl of water from the River Schelde to baptise me before it was too late. Her wrists were still smeared with the blood of Orlinde, the neighbour who had given birth that same morning to a healthy bastard girl. As if afraid of some infection, she kept her distance from me. However, as with my mother, her curiosity soon got the better of her and she approached to touch me and see whether I was real. Although not yet fully formed, tiny and light as a bird, I was moving and bawled the first air into my minuscule lungs. I was as real as could be - only I was transparent. When my mother held me up to the sunlight, it was as if its rays passed right through me, turning my body milky white. Where my bones were, you saw dark shadows. Lucretia had noticed this abnormality when my tiny head was just beginning to emerge - she could see my skull and had thought I would be born without skin.
I had red, swollen eyelids and little grey eyes that my mother immediately recognised as those of the First Woman, the Font of Life. I recognised her voice. In the depths of her belly, I had heard her talk and sing and scold my elder sisters. I was familiar with the lisp of her s's and her low, almost undefined vowels. When my sisters were called in a little later, they bent over me with pursed mouths and wide eyes. I recognised both the shrill voice of Idelies and the more lilting, somewhat older, voice of Richenel. Their faces, however, were as strange to me as that of any other city child. Later I would see they had my father's face. I heard them both shouting with excitement, and it took a while before I realised that this was not in excitement over my arrival but because they had seen the shadow of a goblin-owl in the crown of the oak beside the path. My mother picked me up, made the sign of the cross and looked out the window. High in the crown she could indeed just about see the almost invisible brown bird that had landed there. It sat perfectly still, as if intending to stay a while.
'Has it come to take her?' Richenel asked, jumping up and down.
'I don't know,' my mother said. 'Perhaps it won't find her.' She put me in the walnut casket in which she kept her jewellery, arranged some loose tufts of sheep's wool around me and placed the casket on the warm stones in front of the fire. I had no sucking reflex. I refused her breasts. She fed me by dipping the corner of a linen cloth in milk and wringing it over my gaping mouth. But it wasn't those few drops that kept me alive, it was the pig's milk the elves dribbled from their mouths into mine at night. A few days later news came that our neighbour Orlinde's baby had died. The goblin-owl in the oak had disappeared.

I was born near a river named The Schelde, which was the border between here and over there. Over there was the city of Antwerp in the dukedom of Brabant. Here was Flanders. For many years Flanders was nothing to me but the dense forest behind me, home only to ghosts, swamps and will-o'-the-wisps. It wasn't important to us, our eyes were turned eastwards, to the river where the Hanseatic cogs sailed. In the morning we saw the sun rise above a serrated skyline - the Church of Our Lady, the Fish Monger's Tower and the Baker's Tower. Further south were St Michael's Abbey and the Calous Hills, towards the north the mills on the Stuivenberg. The city wasn't just separated from us by water, but also by a wall with seven gates and various entrances for waterways. When I was a child, the sight of the chaotic, alien city made me repeat the quick prayers I'd heard my mother murmur when there were strong winds or thunder.
My father first saw me when I was several weeks old. He'd returned from a nerve-wrecking trade mission to England, where he'd haggled over the prices of lead, tin, wheat and wool. Shortly before his arrival, my mother rubbed me with a rough cloth and dipped me in a bucket of cold water to make the blood in my veins run faster, making me look red rather than transparent.
'A girl,' he said with the same resignation as my mother's. He'd never expected a son. My arrival reassured him because it confirmed his destiny. As he bent over the crib, I immediately noticed the brown birth mark in his face. He was marked. Later I would learn that the birthmark on his face was nothing compared to the one on his left shoulder. According to my mother, that one was as large as a child's hand. I never saw it because my forever solitary father did everything to hide his stigma from the outside world. Due to those two marks (the modest one in his face, the large and malignant one under his clothes), he behaved like one fated. He hadn't been able to discover whether it was a mark of God or the devil and because he could not be sure, he played safe and became the most righteous man walking our forests, fields and towns.
He'd been in the port recently, where he'd traded the newly bought bales of wool for reasonable prices and had them transported by carriers who took home a respectable sum at the end of the day. In his endeavour to be virtuous, he not only brought a present for my mother and two sisters, but also one for me, the child he could only have suspected born and alive. It was a small hand-mirror. Its handle was set with cut glass, the back painted with elegant birds. Holding the mirror in front of me, he made soft throaty sounds and repeated, 'Look, look at the baby.' I didn't have time to wonder whether I'd heard his voice before. It was the first time I'd seen myself and I was so shocked by the almost blue face whose skull showed in a smirking grimace that I burst into tears and regurgitated all the milk I had in my little stomach.
It was my father's large hands that lifted me from the wisps of sheep wool. I presented him with a large problem. He could easily see that I was to die soon. I had hardly any blood, my skin was greenish, and my frame was as frail as a bird's. He knew he could never give me what he gave his other children - for the simple reason that he would not get the time for it. He found this so unfair that it physically hurt him. He thought of the long row of porcelain dolls and gilt boxes he'd given my sisters over the years and promised me in a soothing voice that if I were to die, he would buy me an expensive, aspen coffin finished with gilt fittings and a bed of duck down and silk, to make up for everything I would never have during my life.
When my mother noticed he was whispering in my ear instead of wiping away the sour milk that trickled down my neck onto the swaddling clothes, she took me from his lap. He watched her change me in silence, studying my face and small swollen eyes, which opened wide from time to time, then closed resignedly. He touched my cheek with his broad finger and said hoarsely, 'She could have been so beautiful, this little glass girl.'
I grew up in times of poverty and hunger. I hardly noticed it, but it was said people in Antwerp ate rats. My father was a businessman who wasn't badly off. Every few weeks he took the ferry and sometimes stayed away for months. He bought goods unavailable here - spices and wines, but mostly expensive fabrics and sometimes jewellery. Then he looked for a ship to bring it here, negotiated with the ship's captain, sent it off and came home with a present for each of us in his horse's broad saddle bag.
Three years after my birth my mother got a mirror which was so large she could see her entire face in it. My mother was a beautiful woman but didn't know it. This present was an attempt by my father to show her. The mirror-maker put incredible effort into fashioning the frame. It was cut from hard wood with a deep glow. It shone so naturally it seemed as if not only the reflection, but the frame itself was alive and moving.
For Richenel he brought a expertly-ground looking-glass that made everything look much larger than it really was. She screamed with fear when she pointed it at passing insects. Idelies received a porcelain box within a box with such a fine flower decoration painted on it that it seemed the painter used a brush with a single hair. I myself received three silver bells of a different size. Although I was still very young, I immediately understood why there were three. If I died, my father wouldn't have any difficulty distributing what I left behind fairly. Each member of the family would inherit a bell, my mother the largest one.
My sisters didn't understand my father's reason. When we were on our own, they pulled my hair and said, 'You with the ugly, transparent face, you got more.' They hauled me to my mother's bedroom to show me what I looked like in her mirror. But I wasn't shocked by what I saw anymore. Thanks to the small hand-mirror I'd been given at birth, I was used to my strange, glassy face. To protect myself from their petty harassment, I'd learned to look through the mirror. They forced me to sit down on my mother's low dressing chair and held my face in their hands so I had no choice but to look. For several moments I saw myself, my sunken eyes and thin lips, and my grinning sisters on either side of me, but that image soon vanished. What I saw instead, inside the elegant frame, was a wood full of tall, leafy, waving trees with a muddy path running through it. For days, I didn't know what the image meant, until I sat in front of the mirror again one evening and saw a man on a horse appear at the end of the path. I sat motionless and waited until he came closer. It was dusk and misty, so the apparition seemed a shadow rather than a living creature. It was cold and the man was wearing a wide cloak that fell over the flanks of his horse. Only when he was close and filled the entire mirror did I see the birthmark on his cheek.
'Father,' I mumbled. My sisters pushed me off the chair, sneering. They chased me away, hurling the shells of nuts at my head. I withdrew to a corner of the kitchen where I stayed like a bird resting. The twinkling eyes of the tile elves told me they knew what I had seen in the mirror.
I told no-one what happened. After several unsuccessful attempts, I managed to open the door to my mother's bedroom unaided and climb onto the dressing chair. Sometimes my mother found me there at night, my head lolling and my arms limp on either side of my body. I had fallen asleep watching the slow images of my father's journey far away. I saw him cross ditches and fields, I saw the wisps-o'-the willow beckon in the reeds, I heard the conversations of tree spirits who inhabit the ash and chestnut trees. I saw dusk fall and fell asleep when I knew my father had found an inn with a straw bed and a tub of water on the washstand. My mother carried me to where I should have been - the short bed in the attic, between my two sisters to keep me warm and keep me from falling out of the bed.
'Father's coming home,' I told my mother one morning as she stirred my porridge to cool it. 'He couldn't find the captain he was looking for.' She stroked my hair with a callused finger and gave me a wooden spoon.
'Be quiet and eat,' she said, 'so that you'll grow nice and plump.' But I didn't eat, as usual. I coughed and my knees buckled when I had to go out to collect fire wood, something my mother couldn't understand, because judging by the holes in her teeth, I'd taken plenty of calcium from her. My father returned that same night, empty-handed, many days earlier than expected.
I followed him on his distant journeys thereafter. 'How vain she is!' my sisters cried when they found me in front of the mirror again.
'That's because she wants to see that she's still alive,' my mother said, her voice thick with emotion. She thought I'd be gone soon. Lucretia had said my liver didn't produce enough blood, which spared me the blood lettings my sisters screamed through whenever they had a children's ailment. 'It's not fair,' they said. They envied me because of the weekly washes intended to make me look fresher. When they only weakened me, Lucretia decided to leave her enema syringe at home and leave my body in the hands of nature. I was so skinny, so fragile, that my mother hardly dared to touch me. She would bend over Richenel in the middle of the night to check whether I was still alive. She wasn't kissing me anymore, she was already bidding me farewell.
My sisters said they had seen the goblin-owl again. Apparently, it perched on the trees around our house regularly. They were suddenly very worried, asked whether I wanted their liquorice and lay close to me at night to keep me warm. But I didn't die, it was my mother who died. It was she who got the aspen coffin with the gold, down and silk my father had promised me at my birth. Lucretia had come when she vomited blood. I was there when she undressed my delirious mother and applied cold compresses. She prepared extracts of herbs in the kitchen and left them to cool in the basement. Although younger than my mother, she walked like an old woman, feeling her way and shuffling up the stairs with difficulty, her eyes already affected by the abscess that would make her blind. The elves on the floor sat purposely in her way but, feeling guilty, jumped away at the last minute.
I stayed at my mother's bedside until the end. Behind her naked body hung the mirror reflecting her pain-stricken image. I looked at her breasts, and particularly her navel, the spot where she had been connected with her mother the way I had been connected to her. Her death-struggle lasted several days. In the end, she could no longer tolerate light, lost the ability to speak, and couldn't feel her limbs. She was unable to feel the sharp objects Lucretia pressed on her skin. Her hands and feet were already cold before she stopped breathing.
After her death, she was never far from me. From a very early age I learned that life and death are the two legs the world moves on. People around me still treated me as if I would not live much longer, and bad omens no longer threatened me. I moved in the grey area in which the living speak with the dead the way young children talk to madmen and dogs to horses. I was not surprised, therefore, when she was there the day after she was buried, dressed in grey, her voice inaudible. I walked through her and placed candles in her stomach. She was patient with me. Now that she was dead, the noise I made didn't seem to bother her anymore. She did what I had seen her do every day of my life - moved chairs, swept floors, sliced bread. The elves gave her a place to rest when she needed, but she didn't use it. Just as when she was still alive, she was always busy, even when everybody else in the house was already asleep.