Valentine Greatrakes goes looking in churches.
He knows that he should go straight to San Zaccaria, but he cannot bring himself to do so. It is easier to furnish himself with this simpler errand. Cecilia Cornaro has told him that San Zaccaria is the oldest and noblest convent in Venice: Smerghetto now informs him that its nuns are the most corrupt and venal, the worst whores and beanflickers. A fortress of hard, clever, hoity-toity women: An incontrovertible instinct tells him not to look for her there. If she indeed once upon a time escaped from the place, this will not reflect well on those charged with the operation of the convent. They will furnish him only with obfuscations and lies, humiliating him as much as possible in the process.
Meanwhile, he knows that the simple truth of family histories is usually written in stone, particularly in the case of nobles. He goes looking for tombs, hoping to find the “beloved father and mother of Catarina…” and a kind of priest who will be able to tell him the whole story of the family. He envisions the gentle man, remembering the mother’s or the father’s funeral, unable to forget the beauty of the daughter…
Valentine Greatrakes is no great God-botherer, and has not previously frequented the Venetian churches. He now finds his head swimming with the peculiar detritus of their faith and their swooning smell of warm mice and cold stone. These buildings in no way resemble the bony London churches. Each one is a knick-knackatorium of saints’ fingers and toes encrusted in wax, silver, or glass. His eyes hurt under the burnished fanfare of precious metals. Slanting fingers of light poke his eyes and he walks into gilded candlesticks taller than himself and low-slung censers that have the unmistakably unchristian light of the Orient about them. The merchant in Valentine sees all these things melted down and turned to uses more practical than their current ones.
The Irishman in him aches to interrupt the dismal caterwauling of the choir with a decent bit of melody.
Would you ever think of putting a tune to it? he thinks to himself while the Venetian fathers intone their rituals.
In church after church he forces himself to examine crypts and tombs, looking for the names of Catarina’s parents.
Eventually, after some hours of diligent research by Smerghetto, he learns that the Venier crypt is to be found in the convent church of S.S. Cosma e Damiano on Giudecca. Valentine claps his hands when he hears this news. For these two saints are, by coincidence, the most familiar to him of all in his largely unsainted world. The holy moneyless ones are the patron saints of apothecaries and medicine, a protection which Valentine has always felt extends even to those of the quack fraternity. He often adorns his handbills with their portraits and the rostrums of his quacks with their effigies in wood.
Arriving at S.S. Cosma e Damiano, he jumps out of the gondola, already scenting success—and not a little cat urine—in the salty air. The handsome brick and marble church is set in a frosty, verdant campo much prowled by cats, who rub ingratiatingly against his calves. Smerghetto addresses them with one or two firm but caressing words, and they respectfully desist.
Unobstructed, they enter the high depths of the church and stand blinking in the luminous dust of a single shaft of light streaming from the roundel above the door. The atmosphere is frigid; the silence absolute.
It is colder inside this church than outside. This is not a place to which people would hopefully come with their aching and paining of the spirit.
From a concealed door, a novice slides forth, his hands clasped together, and inquires about their business in tones that seem unwelcoming. Smerghetto confers for some minutes with the narrow-faced boy, who all the while clamps a haughty and cynical eye on Valentine Greatrakes.
With a great display of unwillingness the novice eventually ushers them into the office of the presiding cleric. They are not asked to sit down. The senior priest, pocked as a toad and endowed with a similar bass croak, answers Smerghetto’s questions in harsh monosyllables. Then he turns to Valentine and fixes on him an interrogative look that stirs something greasy in his belly.
Valentine refuses to be intimidated. When he asks, via Smerghetto, about the family of Catarina Venier, eyebrows and shoulders are raised and there is a disbelieving snort. However, eventually two nuns are summoned to show him not the family vault he expects, but a singular tombstone. Smerghetto is explaining this as they converge on a dark corner of the church. Valentine feels paralyzed internally, though his feet move mechanically in step with Smerghetto’s. The nuns glide ahead, their feet invisible, as if rolling on wheeled platforms.
Valentine gasps with a sudden shortness of breath. He reaches into his pocket for the Peruvian lozenges he has purchased that morning from a local quack. He winces at the cloying, rose-scented sweetness only slightly mitigated by the juice of the bark. But as he sucks the lozenge he begins to breathe again. Now the nuns have stopped in front of a small plaque, already blackened with the smoke of the church candles. They turn to face Valentine, who makes a brave attempt at manifesting a mere cerebral curiosity.
He knows nothing of how Smerghetto has explained their interest. But it does appear that Smerghetto has been unusually undiplomatic—or that the case is unexpectedly polemical. The nuns regard them both with hostility and even now their frigid expressions suggest that it would be much better if the men desisted immediately from this useless mission that can bring no possible good to anyone involved.
“I want to see it,” says Valentine, notwithstanding. He steps forward and the nuns part to permit his passage to the plaque. He does not need Smerghetto’s help to translate it. It is dated sixteen years before. There are no affectionate messages, no blessings. Just a name and the dates of birth and death, with so few years in between.
It is not the tomb of her parents. Gut into stone is the name of Catarina Venier herself. Valentine takes a step backwards. He does not understand. His head throbs in time with dense-packed heartbeats.
No, he tries to tell himself, this is another Catarina Venier entirely.
When he asks for more information, they close their faces.
“There is nothing more to be gained from talking of her,” they say.
“Her parents…?” he tries to ask.
In answer the nuns show another stone, bearing the names of Carlo and Ippolita Venier, who died within a year of one another, a decade ago. These are the names Cecilia Cornaro gave him. With hard faces and practiced gestures, the nuns now suggest that Valentine Greatrakes might like to make an offering to their church, which has so graciously furnished him with all the answers that any reasonable gentleman, even a foreign one, might require.
Valentine notes the offertory box under the rack of candles, and pushes coin after coin into the slot until the nuns unfold their hands and lean over to whisper to each other. He takes a candle, pinches open a candle-holder, and snaps it close around the wax stem. He lifts a small taper and lights his offering.
“For the memory of Catarina Venier,” he says aloud, as if saying her name will conjure her presence. A childlike part of him insists: She is not dead; when she hears this she will appear and tell me so!
The nuns fall silent—in the act of clucking their tongues—and even Smerghetto gasps. For Valentine has inadvertently chosen a candle with an overgrown wick. The flame now blazes up three inches, four inches, five, while the wick writhes around in its blue epicenter. The nuns cross themselves.
The flame dazzles Valentine’s overwrought eyes and his hands are tortured by long pins and needles.
He spins around to the nuns: “Did you see that? Is there not more to say? Smerghetto, ask them…”
But the nuns repeat, “There is nothing more to be gained…” Although Smerghetto translates the words as gently as possible, Valentine is at last defeated by the severity of their tone and he bows to thank them for their help, and indicate his acquiescence: He will not trouble them further.
He turns sharply on his heel so they will not see the liquid welling up again in his tight eyes. Too late, for he sprays them lightly with a swoll
en tear as he swings away.
With Smerghetto at his side, his sharp eyes carefully averted from his master’s wet face, Valentine steps out into the cold, clear air.
• 7 •
A Peruvian Epileptic Electuary
Take powder’d Bark 6 drams; Virginia Snake root 2 drams; Syrup of Piony as much as needs, mix it up into a soft Electuary.
I have Experimentally found it a most prevalent and most certain Remedy. (After due Evacuations) I dram may be given to adult Persons (and less a Dose to others) Morning and Evening, for three or four Months, and afterwards three or four days before change and full of the Moon, it absolutely eradicates Epileptic and Hysteric Diseases; and also those odd Epileptic Saltations called St Vitus’s Dance, in which the Affected are vexed with a thousand ridiculous Gesticulations and Leapings, after the manner of those in Apulia, that are bitten by a Tarantula.
Smerghetto is ineffably discreet. Even though Valentine has not shared with him the revelations gained at the studio of Cecilia Cornaro, the Venetian makes no inquiries as to why his master is weeping over the grave of a long-dead Venier. When he ascertains that he can be of no more help, Smerghetto subtly indicates that he could usefully busy himself elsewhere. Valentine nods gratefully and the man’s nebulous presence dematerializes entirely.
It has begun to snow.
Aimlessly, Valentine walks back through the light veil of snowflakes along the canal that runs beside the church. Away from the broad Giudecca canal, this inlet is still as cold broth, and smells as if it once bubbled up from somewhere ten miles below Hell. Or, he thinks, as if something crawled in and died, giving it a high flavor. He thinks of the noble corpses stowed in the crypt under the church. It is impossible to avoid the image of their effluvia trickling into the canal. Including that of Catarina Venier, whoever she is. He flinches at the thought.
The rich smell brings into his mind an image of Dizzom back in Bankside, keeping his vigils over his stinking pipettes in the depository and his chest lurches with homesickness.
The thought of Dizzom rouses Valentine from his morbid fantasies. He has a sudden appetite for work. He hurries the gondola under snow-grizzled skies to the Riva degli Schiavoni, home of the quacks and charlatans. It is his intention to browse among the local talent, something he should have been doing all these days he has wasted on—what? All the while they pole through the icy water his head is spinning with the thoughts of Catarina Venier, who should have been Mimosina Dolcezza, but lies dead. He feels a leaden panic in his belly: It is as if the actress has also died. He has invested too much in the felicity of his discovery. He cannot throw off the certainty that the two women are one and the same, despite the cruel truth etched in stone.
He tries to tell himself that it makes no difference that Catarina Venier is officially dead. Mimosina Dolcezza has demonstrably survived her. There is no reason why these tears should be springing from his eyes like lively tadpoles, so fast and so quick that he doesn’t bother to wipe them away. He doesn’t know where this knowledge will lead him, for it seems he must give up his theory that Mimosina Dolcezza was once a reluctant Golden Book nun, and accept a lesser one: that she merely resembles one.
His mind ranges over its previous construction, trying to reconcile the new-known facts with imperious instincts and wild hope. Certainly aristocratic girls are known to escape from convents in these lax times. And a Golden Book daughter who took on the shabby profession of an actress might well be disowned by her parents. But would they declare her dead? How hard-hearted might an Italian mother and father become, what cruel action might they take against a wilful daughter who brought disgrace on the family? Surely not so cruel as that? She might have been dead to them, but surely they could not inter her memory in a dishonest and empty grave? And anyway, there would be documents to sign and legal observances to be made in the event of deaths among the noble classes. So it is in London, so it must be here, where the nobility are not just the ornament but the spine of the state. Without some conspiracy at the highest levels, such things could not be forged and false-witnessed. And in what way would a powerless sixteen-year-old nun merit the attention of the Council of Ten or the Inquisitors?
No, decides Valentine, the thing is that the actress merely resembles the lovely young Catarina to an astonishing degree. Perhaps she is a natural daughter of the father, Carlo Venier?
Even the mother, Ippolita, could have strayed before wedlock. A girl of such mixed parentage might have been renounced by the family, could have ended up on the stage, helped a little by her connections. This scenario also explains why he is so drawn to Mimosina Dolcezza: He feels intensely that she is like him, someone who has needed to make her own way in the world, who has learned to support herself from an early age. It is their previous difficulties that marry their hearts: They met at a time when both had ovecome the obstacles that might have killed or depressed their ambitions: They had both made successes of their lives against the odds.
Indeed not, thinks Valentine, she is no Golden Book girl, spoiled and privileged. Not she! I would not love a woman like that. It’s frightened of her I’d be in that case, not heartbroken for the loss of her, as I am.
Honesty compels him to reflect that he has never met a woman of that class, but nevertheless he is sure that he would find her, if not repulsive, then certainly lacking in any communality or amiability of spirit. She would be shallow and dull, poor in worldly experience, determinedly ignorant.
He thinks of the stone plaque in the church of S.S. Cosma e Damiano, and he clenches his fist.
When I find her I’m going to ask her if she’d do me the honor of being buried with my family in Ireland.
He is drawn from his ruminations by the noises around him on the Riva degli Schiavoni. In the animal enclosures lions are roaring and the Westphalian hogs are cracking cocoa-nuts. All the sounds are depressed in volume by the rising mantle of snow that swags all surfaces.
And the quack doctors are everywhere, jumping benches like cats leaping at pigeons.
Valentine stops to admire a great craftsman at his bench. He has noticed the man’s gruesome handbills about the streets for some days and been hoping to see him at work. He’s a one-man act, and might be brought to London, if he does well. By the time Valentine arrives near his pitch, the man is already at his business, drawing all eyes. He howls, performing all the epileptic saltations of St. Vitus’ Dance, as if possessed by a thousand demons. When he has collected his appalled circle, he brandishes a knife and flourishes a naked arm from a voluminous sleeve. He cries out with pain as he gashes the arm again and again. A torrent of blood pours down his flesh, mapping it with thick red rivers, and still he strikes at himself, while the women cross themselves and the men cry out that he must desist, in the name of God.
“You want me to stop?” asks the man, finally, both in Venetian and in hand gestures. And he nods sadly, observing, with a faraway nostalgic look in his eyes, “Ah yes, in the city of Gilead, and in the court at Constantinople, they also begged me.”
At least this is what Valentine can guess he is saying. He recognizes the names of the towns, and he knows the formula, of course.
“Ahh,” sighs the Venetian crowd, transported, proud witnesses to these foreign conquests.
The charlatan appears to forget them and raises his arm to strike again.
“Please, please,” beg his victims, with eloquent hand movements, grimaces, and moans: “You’ll surely die of this.”
And indeed the mountebank swoons a little now, sinking down to a shelf where he has placed just one bottle, fastened with a red seal and a feather. Breathing heavily, he picks it up and pulls the cork. For a long moment he stands there, considering the bottle, and then he shakes his sleeve, scattering droplets of blood on the horrified crowd.
He says nothing but upends the bottle into a snowy rag, and rubs it over the meaty arm, slowly. A stripe of white flesh emerges, and another, and another.
Soon all his terrible slicings are excis
ed and the arm is flourished, clean and whole. For good measure, he takes a simulated swig of the contents of the bottle. And while he cures his mortal wounds, he is talking, talking, talking—with his hands and his eyes and his mouth—of the Arab steeds that have galloped across the desert to bring the precious balms contained in this nostrum, of how the dried powders have been fermented in liquors distilled from Peruvian bark scraped only in a propitious spring rain, and how the very bottle has been made on Murano, and blessed by a well-known nun who is even now expecting her beatification on her deathbed and who shall therefore never more be available to bestow her potent benediction. Supplies are infinitely finite, and almost exhausted.
If he’s not saying that very thing, then it’s something entirely similar.
The first customer comes forward, his arm outstretched.
But meanwhile, the quack shakes his head regretfully, apparently telling them that he did not dream of such a demand for his nostrum, and that in any case a minimum of nine weeks goes into the collection and boiling of the efficacious herbs, some of which are very rare. He cannot possibly supply everyone. Gould those among them with a serious need to help a loved one please step forward and the others fall back a little, until it can be seen whether there are enough bottles to go round. And soon they are crowding around the mountebank, beseeching his attention, some even drawing to his notice fresh wounds of their own that are in need of this remedy. These he avoids until the very last minute, just before he jumps over his bench and disappears. He will not be visible when the soapy water bites into their cuts.
Valentine has amused himself with the show, but it will not work in London. The tone is not right. The bladder of animal blood is too easily detected by just one sour member of the audience. The Oriental tales, even translated into English and pronounced with an Italian accent, will not impress John Bull. They are peculiarly charming to the Venetians, who have such an affinity with the East.
The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 35