We lived an isolated life; my father, when we walked far from our hut, pointed out the ancient Roman roads and told me that those routes now overgrown with grass and torn apart by invasions were once the pride of the ancient empire: straight, clean, cobbled. We sold our honey and torches, our candles and dyes; I began to sew and to dye clothing that found buyers among the voyagers traveling the new roads — worn smooth, my father said, by all those trampling feet — between the fairs and holy places, ports and universities; in this way I learned the happy and distant-sounding names of Compostela, Bologna, Venice, Chartres, Antwerp, the Baltic Sea … And thus I came to know that the world extended far beyond our forest. Men on foot and men on horseback, beasts of burden as well as the carts of the merchants, all abandoned the ancient roadways that only linked one castle to another. The travelers told me: We are afraid to pass close by the fortresses, for the Lords invariably rob us, rape our women, and impose all kinds of taxes upon us. I asked my father: What is a Lord? and he answered: A father who does not love his children as I love you. I did not understand. I sold our honey and candles in exchange for clothing I then washed with the ashes and dyed with the bark, then exchanged again for onions and for ducks. And so I helped my father; together we tended our flock and later, after the time for shearing the lambs had passed, he would travel to the castle to deliver to our Liege bales of wool in exchange for his permission to continue living in the isolated forest. But, little by little, our forest became fraught with dangers.
I remember the first time I saw El Señor. He had never visited us, but one day he came to advise us that every Saturday from that time forward, except on Twelfth Night and Pentecost Eves, accompanied by priests and horsemen, by farmers and shepherds, he would devote to hunting and destroying marauding wolves and to setting traps for them throughout the district. I, who always had frightened away the wolves with bonfires and burning brands, could not understand the need for killing or trapping them. But my father said: “They want to come into the forest; someday even here we will not be able to live in peace and we will have to flee again, searching, for the harsh desert.” But I recognized in the hard and fearful gaze of El Señor only the desire to assert his presence and the fear that someone, someday, somewhere, would fail to recognize him. This twelve-year-old girls understand, for we, too, fear that, when we cease to be girls and become women, people who have always loved us will not know us.
Then came the strangest event of my childhood. One clear spring night I was tending my sheep and in spite of the full moon and balmy air had built the usual fire to protect myself and protect my flock, when close by I heard the sound of an animal in pain. I picked up one of the brands, sure that a wolf was approaching; and so it was, except that the moan should have warned me: it wasn’t a howl in the distance, or the approaching stealth I recognized in wild beasts; it was a very tender and painful moan, and it was very close by. I lowered the flame: the light fell on a large gray she-wolf, her ears pricked up and her eyes feverish. Ever since I had learned to speak I had learned, before anything else, the sayings about wolves, for they were our greatest danger; and in spite of the tameness of this wolf, I said to myself: even if a wolf grow old and lose its teeth, it’s still a wolf. But the she-wolf showed me a wounded paw she’d hurt in one of the traps set by El Señor during the Saturday hunts and I, in a childish and spontaneous way, knelt beside her and took the paw she offered me.
The she-wolf licked my hand and lay down beside my fire. I saw then that her belly was great and that the beast was not moaning only from the pain of the wound but for a graver reason: I had watched my sheep give birth and I understood what was happening. I stroked the she-wolf’s angular head and waited. Soon she was giving birth; imagine my surprise, young sailor, when I saw emerge from between the she-wolf’s legs two tiny blue feet exactly like those of a human baby; I was doubly confounded by the fact that even when baby rams — the animals most inclined to the monstrous — are born, even with two heads, those two heads appear first, but the she-wolf was delivering a child, and that child was emerging feet first.
It was a boy; he was born quickly, hunched and bluish; I tried to take him, afraid for him, born as he was on the ground of the forest, amid brambles and dust and bleating sheep and tinkling bells that seemed to celebrate the event; only then did the she-wolf snarl, and she herself licked the baby and cut the cord with her sharp teeth. I touched my breasts and realized that although I knew a lot I was still a little girl; the she-wolf pawed the newborn infant to her teats, and suckled him. I saw then, upon the infant’s back, the sign of the cross; not a painted cross, but part of his flesh; flesh incarnate, young sailor.
I didn’t know what to do; I would have liked to take the she-wolf and her offspring to my father’s house, but the moment I tried to separate them or pull them both from the brambles, the she-wolf again snarled and snapped at my hand. Filled with fear, astonishment, and uneasiness, I returned to our cottage. I told my father what had happened and at first he laughed at me and then he told me to take care; he repeated one of the sayings I tell you now: “When the wolf gets his fill of savage ways, he joins the priesthood.”
Very early the following morning, I returned to the bramble thicket, but neither the she-wolf nor the child was there. I was afraid for them, and I cried. I prayed that the she-wolf would find a deep hidden den where she could protect the child; otherwise, both would die during the hunt the following Saturday. My father came to the place where it had happened, and when he, as I, found nothing, he said I shouldn’t fall asleep again while I was tending the flock, for I had already seen that wolves can appear in dreams, and one day while I was asleep they might really appear.
In spite of all the distractions our forests offered — even though its limits were shrinking — I never forgot that strange event. I recall that more people passed by every year of my adolescence. I met students traveling to their universities; horsemen and clerics; jugglers, minstrels, drug sellers, sorcerers, itinerant workers, freed serfs, soldiers without employ, beggars, and barefoot pilgrims carrying long staffs with hooks holding bottles; all the travelers of the routes of our Christian empire. And farmers also passed by, complaining that they had lost their lands, or that they couldn’t pay both the tribute demanded by their Liege and the taxes demanded by the cities that spread outside their walls, absorbing fields and forests for themselves. And I never stopped wondering if, in some manner as mysterious as his birth, the destiny of the child born and suckled of the she-wolf was not somehow tied to the destiny of all these people who now marched through the same brambles which had witnessed his birth.