The monks were preparing themselves for the austere privations of Lent while the town was deeply engaged in the debauched week of Carnival. Outside and against one of the walls, a ragged shadow hastily propelled itself home on long legs and flat feet. Meg had just left her drunken husband and his cronies pretending to joust. Cluvmux had once again slid off his barrel to lay giggling in the dirt.
She was coming to remind him that the most recent batch of sausages needed to be blooded again before he attempted to sell them. But first, she decided to watch the stupidity from afar. Entering the tight square from the south side, Meg was instantly framed by the town’s tallest building, the dark, brooding high church. Engulfed by an overcrowded squabble, she pushed her way through the swells and splutters of shabby humanity, finally finding protection beside the vast wooden tuns of beer outside the inn.
Stopping to gain her breath, Meg gazed into the writhing throng of more than two hundred filthy, raging souls, each out-shouting, out-stinking, and out-jostling their oblivious neighbors. Momentarily she lost her place in the real world as she looked into this mass of everyday life and beheld a thing unknown, trying to focus through all that spun, crawled, and ran in the square. Dashes and thrusts of color flared in the rampant air; mouth-stained voices furred and belched, coagulating in the upturned jigsaw spaces between every human shape. She breathed in the colors of woodsmoke and the smells of bread, herring, straw, and piss and the roasted bristles of hogs and swine, all mixed with the sugar of a waffle iron. Wet feathers were being lash-boiled to laughter and gutted to swearing. She heard the squeaking wheel of the town’s well pulling up slopping pails of water and saw the dusty yellow ocher of the earth as it gulped down the spillage for cleansing, gasping a retreat from the littering rabble who would bruise it black over the next three days of the festival.
Bagpipes scrawled the air, smearing the stink of fish-gutters and griddle smoke into the cries and the lute of “The Dirty Bride,” a farce being performed between the jostling tavern and a shabby canvas tent housing stained lepers: A bedraggled Nysa is pulled from a travesty of the nuptial bed. Mopsus, the groom, prances before her, indicating the physical joys of betrothal and occasionally forcibly inviting a passerby to visit the squalor of their domain. This little gem, which had been performed forever, was a debased transcription of Virgil’s “Eighth Eclogue,” the Roman poet’s famous version of the Greek Bucolics. Meg grinned at the lewd caravansary and the warmth overflowing from it and from its audience bubbling in the tavern. Other plays could be glimpsed between the crowds, but only by the artificial difference of their movement.
But now, on her way to find her useless Cluvmux, she thought she had already seen the Devil and Death that day. The Devil was hooded and cheating at dice, while Death was present in the white and sea-swollen body of a man dragged before the public eye: a proven drowning. The naked corpse was positioned next to its poor widow, who held a begging bowl in her waving hands. Her swaddled child was propped against an upturned chair.
The dead did not worry Meg—their place in Carnival was valedictory and portended toward life. The Fool was another constant in this seasonal ritual. And he had the strangest behavior of all. Meg spotted him in the same place, over and over again: at the center of the square, purposely plodding on squat, bowed legs. The small, intent man, whose face she never saw, would lead couples out of the crowd by the light of a torch, which burned stupidly against the bright midday sun. They were always sauntering forward, but never made any progress. The Fool was always impossibly constant, in exactly the way the Devil, still shaking dice in his scarlet leather hands, was not.
Meg shivered and turned her head away from the corner where she knew the Fool was watching her, and, as if in his good jest, shifted into the tide of rotting beggars. She gathered her clothes tight about her and began to move away. That’s when she saw what was happening with her husband’s company.
In the time Meg had taken to enjoy the mummery, the rolling barrel had been brought down. She recognized a man dressed in yellow and wearing badges as Ingisfort Pleumps the wickmaker, and behind him was Mewdriss van Keulen, who earlier had been carrying on her head a table laden with bread and waffles. In one hand she held a tumbler, and in the other a candle—symbols representing deceit. It was an appropriate role for the slut Mewdriss, who, as Meg watched, suddenly slid and fell among the spilled and the broken, including a wrecked pie that Cluvmux had been balancing on his own head—a pie Meg had made the day before. The slut now had her hands on Cluvmux’s ample thigh, pretending to try and gain purchase on it and stand upright but instead falling back on top of him in more and more indecent postures. Both were laughing and falling, as were many around them.
Meg had had enough. She was not prudish, but she hated the time wasted and the amount of pleasure her husband was enjoying. He should have been carving pigs and blooding the sausages instead of feeling up the skirts of a better man’s wife. Then she saw her husband’s jousting lance: a long skewer, taken from her kitchen. It lay bent on the filthy earth. The pig’s head, roast chicken, and sausages it once carried had broken away and lay ruined in the mire, now fit only for stray dogs, children, and lepers.
This was the final straw. She stalked out of the frame of watchful buildings and into the alleyway, her eyes gathering the closed perspective of normal days back into the sensible scullery of her head, while her lips spewed venomous words under her breath.
By the time she reached home, she was more like the name she had been cursed with: Dull Gret. She sat in her low kitchen. Her head filled the space of the frame, a huge, white, sweaty close-up that squashed the edges of everything else, bigger than the room in which she sat and the world she occupied. Her head was propped on the hard spidery fists of her long bony hands where they screwed into the sinewy pistons of her arms, which fled down to crimson elbows chiseling into the scrubbed oak tabletop.
Like this, she was all detail, red-rimmed, long-nosed, becoming chinless. The last bloom of health and hope had burned her chapped pallor ruddy. Her tears were so dry, they had etched straight lines that could be mistaken for vertical contours. Once, when she was small, the distortions of her features had possessed a moment of cuteness. She had been all elbows and knees, nose, ears, and gawky eyes that asked so many questions with unblinking, birdlike pecks at the world. Goofy teeth, many lost now to rot and a thin diet, had made her food smile before she ate it. Citrus and ash had shrunk her face to almost a pucker, a mad hen growing whiskers and staring into what should have been despair. But something else was happening in her old hen brain, which smelled of ammonia and chalk. Something not unlike revenge that wanted payback for the squalor and foolishness she had been harnessed to for so long. Something that stirred the long-wasted child in her into insolent wakefulness. It was resolve.
She had never understood the words that Lady Grietje bellowed at her when she was being cooked, as the yellow hat in her garden had put it, but now she did. The blinkers and the safety catches had been taken off. She sat stationary for another twenty minutes and then rose to authenticate what was occurring with an act that would seal it in a signature of water and grease. With great, exaggerated purpose, she stooped over the overflowing sink, wiped her nose on the back of her hand, and began to wash up.
All fantasy was earthed. With her arms deep in the filthy water like lightning conductors, she experienced the separation of worlds. The one she knew simply slid apart from the one she was going to know. Deep in her body, salt flowed down from her mind and sulfur pumped up from her cunt and womb, mixing with the mercury of her solar plexus—and Meg was reborn.