The Scribe of Siena

by Melodie Winawer

  PART IX

  ROUND TRIP

  Afterward, I was known as “that neurosurgeon who came down with Plague on vacation.”

  “It wasn’t exactly vacation,” I usually said, though that didn’t get at the nature of the inaccuracy. I was well enough by Thanksgiving to celebrate with Nathaniel and Charles at their sleek Upper West Side apartment—always a banner event, especially when Charles was cooking. Linney would have been there but had the flu. Not Plague, she’d made sure of that. The three of us studiously avoided the topic of my illness until dessert. I’d been gone since June—five months, though for me it was more than five centuries.

  “So, about that trip you took,” Charles said, grimacing wryly as he brought in the final course of the meal, “just tell me where you stayed so I can avoid it. And next time consider a flea collar, okay, honey?” I had to laugh, and the dessert Charles plopped down in front of me kept me smiling—pumpkin crème brûlée, the top browned with a handheld torch. The scents of vanilla and nutmeg filled the room, and the espresso Nathaniel served had a perfect flourish on the crema: ferning dark brown on white that would make any barista proud. But even the delicious smells were dull compared with what I had become used to—the headiness of freshly ground spices, the jammy aroma of fruit picked from a contado orchard, a loaf baked in Martellino’s wood-fired oven. When my eyes teared up, the boys misunderstood why I was crying.

  “Sweetie, I’m sorry, it’s not right to tease. We almost lost you.” Charles was always more voluble with his affections than Nathaniel, but I knew from the look on Nathaniel’s face that he had feared for my survival. So had I.

  * * *

  The oldest memories, from before Messina, were crystal clear; I could replay them like a vivid film in my head. But my recollections fragmented as they drew closer to that moment when I jumped centuries for the second time. Maybe because the sickness had been brewing inside me already, distorting my consciousness. Or maybe clarity was impossible at the border of the two worlds I had bridged. Whatever the reason, those last few hours I spent in the fourteenth century assembled themselves like a collage of pictures pasted loosely together on a page.

  I remember sitting under a pear tree outside Messina’s walls. Feeling thirsty—terribly thirsty. Clara is bending over me, her eyes overly large and glistening with tears. But I send her away—to find water? Then the headache starts, a strange, dull, evil headache, like a warning. How long has she been gone? I am not sure.

  I remember the flies buzzing around a squashed fruit on the ground—an autumn pear. I look up to see fruit still on the tree, too high to grasp. I remember the ache in my legs, my run from the Ospedale, then backward, a bit clearer, the brilliant colors of the unfinished predella in the chapel. What transpired there—my mind shies away from the memory.

  Under the tree, I am lying on something lumpy and uncomfortable: my bag. I look for the water bottle, but it’s gone of course. I gave it to Clara. My hand goes to the very bottom of the bag and touches a corner of paper. It’s a letter, a modern handwritten letter. I can see the watermark on the page when I hold it up to the light filtering through the fruit tree. Did I already try to reach the fruit? Yes, I think so. I see it’s the note from Donata I’ve been carrying around since June, but a different June. The page is creased and grubby. My eyes are out of focus now; I have to strain to make the words clear. I have the beginnings of a fever, and every seam of the dress I’m wearing grates against my skin.

  The letter looks familiar to me; of course it does. There is my name at the top of the page, Beatrice. Even in my head I say it the Italian way now.

  Cara Beatrice,

  How silly to write to you when you live next door, but it seems we never have a moment to talk when I am surrounded by my sweet distractions.

  Sweet distractions. I once knew what that meant, but now I can’t recall.

  If you can spare a few hours from your research, perhaps we might attempt an adult outing together? There is a place near the Fonte Gaia—Caffè Rossi—that the tourists have not yet discovered. And Signora Rossi makes espresso like none other in the Western Hemisphere.

  Espresso. I used to drink espresso—the bitter rich taste blooms in my mouth like a hallucination. I think I am crying because now I taste salt, and I remember the feeling of standing next to Donata so acutely it’s almost real.

  Perhaps tomorrow afternoon?

  —Ciao,

  Donata

  The fever is rising, I know, because the chills are coming, and the shadow of the tree twists and bends on the ground. As I read, I can hear Donata’s voice, the intelligence and humor vivid in her words.

  And that was when it must have happened, because I don’t remember anything after that. I think I rode that letter home. All this time, I had it in my bag, and could have used it. Or could I? What released me from the time I’d become attached to? The Plague taking root in my body and scrambling my sense of place? Or was it the loosening of ties that held me there, with the knowledge of Gabriele bent in suffering in the workroom behind Messina’s chapel? I still don’t know. But when I awaken, I am staring into a worried, pale face. At first I think it is Clara, then Donata. But then slowly I become aware of the beeps and whines of machines around me. I am in a hospital bed, and the face is Linney’s, surrounded by her dark red hair.

  * * *

  I pieced together what happened from what I was told. A group of Russian tourists on a bus tour of Sicily found me lying on the ground, delirious and sweating a half-mile outside the Messina city perimeter. They’d called an ambulance that took me to the local hospital. It seems it wasn’t much of a hospital, because it took them nearly twenty-four hours to figure out I didn’t just have heatstroke. It had been a record hot day for Sicily in October. Fortunately, Dottoressa Elena Ricci, an infectious disease specialist from Venice, was visiting Messina’s main hospital to give a lecture on in-hospital staphylococcal infections. On rounds with the ICU team she heard about the mysteriously ill woman who’d been found passed out in an orchard outside the city gates, wearing medieval dress-up clothes. A few tests later I was in isolation on high-dose intravenous antibiotics.

  When the nursing staff went through my bag, they found my name written on a piece of parchment and were able to figure out where I worked. It didn’t take long for the massive clunking Machine of American Medicine, with some help from the U.S. Embassy, to have me flown back home on a medical plane, once I was stable and not contagious, and deposited safely in my former workplace—in New York City. With Yersinia pestis safely put in its place, I managed to recuperate fairly quickly, although I’d lost a lot of weight and my legs trembled when I stood up for too long. Still, for a few weeks after, the sight of one of those big buzzy indoor flies that show up in the late fall made me shudder. It would have been more accurate to fear fleas than flies, but my visceral reaction didn’t differentiate. I had a lot of unsettling dreams. Sometimes I wondered whether my time in the fourteenth century might actually have been a dream too. The only evidence that I’d traveled hundreds of years into the past was the Plague I’d brought home with me. But, since it had not been eradicated completely even in the twenty-first century, that was not proof enough.

  * * *

  Before I was discharged from the hospital, I’d asked Nathaniel to go through my mail. He brought the most pressing items, including a letter from Ben’s lawyers, but after just a few seconds of reading a stabbing headache started between my eyes.

  “Just tell whoever wants to know that I’m alive, I’ll deal with the rest later,” I croaked, “and Ben’s neighbor, I mean my neighbor . . . Donata . . . ah, what is her name . . . Donata Guerrini—write her too. Just tell her I’m OK.” I drifted off to sleep again, for the hundredth time. More often than not I dreamed about Gabriele, and awoke reaching for someone who wasn’t there.

  Once I was well enough to leave the hospital, I was well enough to think about Ben’s mystery again. At first my thoughts were vague, without any imp
etus to action, until the second letter from the lawyers came.

  Dottoressa Trovato:

  We hear from your colleague Signor Nathaniel Poole that you became ill while traveling in Sicily, and hope you are on the road back to health. Signor Signoretti, whom we are sure you will recall as the well-regarded Plague scholar, has approached us in your absence—most reasonably requesting your brother’s notes so he might complete the work you left behind. We imagine you will need time to recuperate, and that a return trip to Siena may not be forthcoming in the near future. We look forward to your approval, which will allow the most expedient publication of what appear to be important matters of great historical interest.

  My first response, which I did not commit to paper, was full of profanity. Instead I wrote:

  Dear Sirs:

  Thank you for your concern for my welfare. I do not authorize the transfer of any materials to Signor Signoretti. I intend to resume the project, and I appreciate your protection of my late brother’s documents. I trust you will continue to exercise the same caution should any future requests arise. Please inform me of any matters regarding the maintenance of my brother’s house in my absence.

  Best Regards,

  Beatrice Alessandra Trovato, MD

  I wasn’t going to hand over any of Ben’s papers to his unscrupulous competitor, even if he was descended from a fourteenth-century nobleman I’d met in person. But feeling proprietary about Ben’s book didn’t necessarily translate into actually resuming work on it—at least not immediately. My concentration wavered and I tired easily, napping at every opportunity on the faded pink couch in my apartment. Plus, I was still in New York City. Everything I’d done in Siena, even before my life was split between two times, seemed impossibly far away, and medieval Siena, even farther.

  Once I was strong enough, I went back to operating: part-time at first. It might have been easier to work all day than to rest. Resting meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering.

  Five weeks after I’d been discharged from the hospital, I decided to go to the Met for the visiting exhibit of medieval Italian art from the Uffizi in Florence. I found a room full of panel paintings from the 1300s and settled myself on a low bench in the middle of the gallery to bask in the images. It was late on a Wednesday afternoon and I was nearly alone in the exhibit; all the senior citizens were probably at half-price Broadway matinees. A blue-uniformed museum guard stood unobtrusively at the doorway, adept at watching for trouble while letting museumgoers commune with the art around them.

  I stared at the elongated face of a Madonna with almond-shaped eyes, at the curving plump hand of the Christ child reaching toward his mother’s cheek. I had a sharper eye for these images now—I could see emotion in faces I would once have found impassive. I looked at the date: 1320. Gabriele was nine years old when that was painted. I suppressed the thought and the sharp sudden pain it created in my chest.

  The clothing now looked familiar to me too, and when I closed my eyes I could feel the brush of a long skirt on the tops of my feet, and the smell of wool rose strong and almost sweet around me. But when I opened my eyes again I was still sitting on the upholstered bench in the middle of the gallery. I stayed for two hours, getting up periodically to stare at the paintings at close range. It was the small background details that felt most real to me—a nightingale in a cage hanging under a covered second-floor loggia, a glimpse of sheep dotting the rolling green hills through an open window, pages of a book, illumination in progress, on a scribe’s desk. The last one moved me most of all.

  * * *

  I was operating at full swing by the beginning of December. Linney and I worked side by side, and sometimes I’d catch her watching me from under her cap, as if convincing herself that I was really there. I didn’t know how to reassure either of us. My mind was occupied with what I’d left behind, a silent parallel narrative that intruded on whatever I was doing. And although I felt competent cutting, cauterizing, and suturing, the undercurrent I’d come to expect during surgery had gone quiet. In fact, since I’d returned nothing had elicited the rush of empathy that had come so frequently before. Sometimes I’d attempt to open my mind to someone else’s perspective, or I’d wait expectantly for a passage from a book to elicit a wave of pure emotion. I supposed it was safer to be free of it, if safety was my goal.

  The next letter from the lawyers finally jolted me out of my post-Plague inertia. Someone had tried to break into Ben’s house—my house. The attempt had failed, but the lock needed to be replaced. I authorized the expense and asked the Albertis to put everything related to Ben’s research into a safe-deposit box at the Bank of Siena.

  Would someone commit a crime to get at the information I’d collected? And if so, why—to publish it, or to suppress it? What had Ben been on the threshold of discovering that anyone would want to steal? Could the modern Signoretti have had something to do with the break-in? I couldn’t sit pondering in New York City anymore. My convalescence was officially over.

  The next day I finished a thorny spinal stenosis case early enough for a visit to Nathaniel’s bookstore. I hadn’t been there since the day I’d announced Ben’s death; it felt like seven hundred years ago. Nathaniel was standing at the front of the shop, sorting newly arrived books from a large wooden crate.

  “New shipment?”

  “An estate sale. There’s a complete set of Dickens first editions, and that’s just the beginning. Care to help?” Nathaniel beckoned me over and I happily joined him. We spent the next hour peacefully unpacking and cataloging. Finally, I put the book I was holding down on the table between us. Nathaniel put his down too and regarded me steadily.

  “Nathaniel, have I ever told you that you have nice eyes?”

  “Thank you for the lovely compliment.” He smiled so sweetly I wanted to kiss him. Chastely of course. I sighed loudly. “OK, Beatrice, tell me what’s eating you. It’s not every day you rhapsodize about my facial features.”

  I was quiet for a minute, trying to figure out how to explain.

  “I’m not quite right here.”

  “Here?” He caught the key word hidden in the sentence. I chewed my lower lip before answering, realizing as I did that it was a habit I’d gotten from Gabriele. I still could barely think about what might have happened to him, let alone discuss it. But what did I mean by here? Here and now? There would be no way of discussing now.

  “Back home. In New York, being a surgeon, all of that.”

  “Was it so wonderful in Italy, despite what happened?”

  He meant getting sick, of course, but that wasn’t what I was thinking. “When I’m operating now, part of me is somewhere else. That’s not ideal for a neurosurgeon.”

  “Maybe a full schedule is too much for you right now.”

  “No, that’s not it.” I closed my eyes and saw the scriptorium the way I remembered it on the last day before I’d left for Pisa. I’d finished the Dante, and it lay in front of me with the ink still drying. The sun came through the thick panes of the tall windows, dappling the stone floor with rippled light. But in my vision one window was still broken, and through it stepped Gabriele, haloed by sunshine. I knew he was dead now, more than six hundred years later. But had he died of Plague in his time?

  “You’re not sure you belong here anymore?” It was Nathaniel who said it first, my thoughts from months in the fourteenth century finally given voice.

  “There are things I have to deal with back in Siena. I left pretty suddenly.”

  Nathaniel reached out his hand and folded my smaller hand in his. I felt in danger of floating off, away from everything I once knew and wanted.

  “What will you do—finish Ben’s book?”

  I nodded, not saying the rest.

  “Well then, we’d better throw you a hell of a going-away party.”

  “Yes, you’d better,” I said, and, suddenly moved, I kissed his hand.

  “Should Charles worry?” Nathaniel said, smiling.

  “Why should
he worry? I’m leaving, right?” I smiled back. We finished sorting through the books from the estate sale, then sat down together to make the guest list.

  * * *

  Packing was harder this time. I didn’t know how long I’d be in Siena, and in how many seasons—or centuries. I didn’t know whether that thought produced dread or desire.

  I packed everything from my medicine cabinet. I hesitated when I got to my diaphragm—bringing birth control seemed presumptuous. But it might be as lifesaving as antibiotics, given the risks that accompanied pregnancy in the fourteenth century. I threw it in with everything else. I called in prescriptions to the neighborhood pharmacy for myself: two weeks of several antibiotics—ciprofloxacin included. I should be immune to Plague by now, but others might not be, and there were plenty of other infections to worry about. I justified it as being like packing mefloquine for a trip to a malaria-infested country.

  Next I packed my few pieces of jewelry. Folded into a velvet envelope was a heart-shaped pendant that had been my mother’s, inset with small rubies. I’d often taken it out to look at but hadn’t worn it since my high school prom. I put it on now, feeling the gold warm against my skin. I moved on to clothes, putting as much as I could fit into a vast yellow duffel bag I’d had since medical school. It smelled funny but worked fine.

  The bottom drawer of my dresser was full of surgical scrubs. Looking down at that pile of blue and green gave me a more explicit pang than saying good-bye to any live person. I closed the drawer quickly without touching the contents.

  * * *