The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  When Olmina ushered the gentleman from the Physicians’ Guild into our courtyard later that day, I’d just awoken to the bells of evening rebounding back and forth across Venetia. One belfry set up a clanging, then another started up slightly off pitch, and others followed until a resonant din shook the air and rang the grogginess from my head. My book of poetry by Veronica Franco lay open on the bench to the passage

  Nor does virtue reside in bodily strength,

  but in the vigor of the soul and in the mind,

  through which all things are known.

  I sat up on the bench in the courtyard where I’d been napping, and parted the low branches of pomegranate. There he stood, Dottor Orazio di Zirondi. His ample paunch advertised his wealth. I noted the black robe, the chains of gold and silver, and his doughy hand laden with rings. I quickly gathered my thick hair back into the net from which it had fallen, though I still must have appeared untidy. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my mother sitting in the shade of the wall, fanning herself above the lacy leaves of rue.

  “Ah, there you are, Signorina Mondini.” He bowed slightly in my direction, his round face like a poorly kneaded loaf.

  “Come and sit over here, dear Dottor. Olmina will bring us some lemon water,” my mother said. “You can join us, Gabriella.”

  “Thank you, signora. Very kind, but I have business with your daughter, a communiqué from the Guild of Physicians. Then I regret to say that I must be on my way.”

  My mother snapped her fan shut.

  I stood up and faced the doctor. “What is it the good doctors wish to tell me?”

  “Dear signorina—”

  “You may call me Dottoressa Mondini.”

  “You cannot expect me to do that, my dear. The title belongs to your father.”

  “Ah.” I was starting to suspect why they had sent Dottor Zirondi instead of my friend Dottor Camazarin. “I detect the reek of some scheme—”

  “Gabriella! I never taught you this lack of civility,” my mother said, stepping forward to touch his sleeve. “Please excuse her, Dottor Zirondi.”

  The man sighed and narrowed his eyes. His gaze flitted uncertainly between the two of us, trying to discern what ancient rivalry he’d interrupted. Then he went on. “Given that it’s been a decade since the departure of your father from this serene city, and especially now that no one has heard a word from him for the past two years . . . the guild . . . the Council of the Guild of Physicians can no longer support your membership without the mentorship of your father. We have allowed this to go on too long. Women physicians, as you well know, are not permitted. I am sorry. The guild is sorry. But this is by order of the council.” He gave a peremptory little bow, nodded meekly at my mother, and excused himself.

  “Wait!” I cried. “What about the women, my patients?”

  He gave me a cool glance. “The women will be looked after, signorina. Have you forgotten the many excellent doctors we have here in Venetia?”

  Though the guild had restricted my practice to women after my father departed, then forbidden me to attend their meetings, I didn’t believe that they would expel me altogether. I thought about the young courtesan five months gone and spotting blood (who would tend her during her pregnancy without scorning her for her profession—as some male doctors were known to do?) or the old wife who suffered from chronic catarrh and a drunkard husband who refused to pay for her herbs. I tried to keep my voice level, to maintain my composure. “But they are men. And most women much prefer a woman. Surely, sir, you would want your wife to be looked after by a woman, rather than some prying man, professional though he may be?”

  Zirondi sighed. “My wife is in excellent health and I would look after her myself.”

  “What about those women who have no doctor as husband, who are sometimes”—I paused—“examined overmuch, if you take my meaning?”

  He shot me a look of disdain. “Signorina, you are insulting my colleagues. I’ll listen to no more of this. Good day to you both.” And he swiftly left the courtyard.

  After a moment, my mother turned back to glare at me. “See?” she said quietly, snapping open her fan. “This is all the result of your insolence.”

  I couldn’t bear to look at her or surely I’d say something I’d regret that would fuel our long-standing dispute over my decision to work as a doctor. How my mother loved the spice of quarrel! I had no wish to feed her anger. Instead I stalked into the kitchen and found Olmina at the table cutting an onion. She dropped her knife when she saw my face. “Walk with me,” I said.

  She quickly drew a shawl about her shoulders and took my arm. We walked past my mother, still fanning herself in the courtyard, and left the house to pace the slippery, water-stained stones at the edge of the sea until night forced us indoors. When at last I returned to my room, I reread my father’s letter repeatedly. No, I wanted to tell him, it will not be the better for me if you don’t return. I’ll lose my vocation. And it will not be the better for you. For I could detect in his words that something was off. The days perplex my will and yet I have become a perpetual traveler . . . Above all do not send after me. It barely seemed that my own father was speaking.

  I will not send after you, my father, I decided that evening. I will come myself.

  CHAPTER 2

  Salt and Sweet, Tears and Milk

  When I last saw my father, in my twentieth year, he was pacing uneasily near the tall open windows in his study. “I’m planning a journey north,” he’d announced abruptly, his broad back to me as he pulled a book bound in red maroquin from the shelf of his voluminous library. “I’ll be gone for some time.” His black hair, speckled with gray, hung damply about his neck in the noonday heat. “I won’t be able to take you with me.”

  He turned and peered at me with hard, indiscernible eyes through round black-rimmed spectacles, holding The Book of Diseases like a small shield and then setting it down upon his slanted desk. As I hesitated to respond, clutching my hands within the pale blue folds of my skirts, he moved closer to the window, his pointed slippers hissing on the smooth terrazzo floor. He removed his jerkin and tossed it on the windowsill, then leaned forward in his linen shirt and claret breeches as if to catch a cooling breeze from the lagoon. None was forthcoming.

  I couldn’t find my voice, though I nodded and stared at the reading wheel, which stood at least two meters high, opposite him on the other side of the window. The upright circular device resembled one of those pleasure wheels seen at fairs, hung with little seats (in this case, lecterns) that revolve with much shrieking from the children. It awaited completion by Agostino Ramelli, my father’s friend and an architect of rare literary machines.

  “Gabriella. Is that silence of yours . . . impudence or assent?” my father asked, clasping his hands resolutely behind his back. He would often carry his hands this way, in the manner of men who walk through the city, pondering the silent stones or the rumor of water that lies beneath them.

  I shrugged. The air grew closer around us, and though I suffered the heat, I withdrew into a dry, cold temper. I moved toward the reading wheel, edgily tapping one of the larch spokes and setting it in lopsided motion. The oak axle creaked and three small lecterns swung to and fro. There would be eight when it was done.

  My father glared at me briefly. Then he sighed, not unkindly, looking back to the sluggish sea. The wheel, motionless now, resembled a large clockwork arrested by neglect. As if the great hub of the sun, to which all other cycles were bound, had lapsed in the sky. The wheel anticipated my father’s volumes on diseases. But his work had come to an unforeseen halt in the universal malaise of August.

  “What about Ramelli’s wheel, Papà?” I asked in a pinched voice. “Don’t you want to see it finished? Won’t you complete The Book of Diseases?”

  He groaned. He’d been unwell lately and endured a bitter humor. For months I’d devoted time every day to copying his nearly illegible, rapidly scrawled notes on diseases and cures, occasionally taking libe
rties with those phrases I couldn’t understand and inserting my own. He gently berated me on that account, though he was reluctant to take the time to clarify his intent. So I continued with my own interpretations and simply didn’t show them to him, compiling my own parallel encyclopedia—a mute companion to my father’s volume—which I kept in my chest.

  Across the broad canal the gray-green island of the Giudecca shimmered dully in the heat. Thunderclouds lurched upward and sideways, lending their leaden color to the sea and their implausible dead weight to the air.

  I spoke again. “You know that I’m your best nurse and scribe. Let me accompany you, Papà. I don’t flinch from a wound; why would I fear a journey?” I placed my hand gently on his thick shoulder. It still conveyed some of the strength of his youth. At that moment one of the great trading vessels slid into view, its sails slack in the windless afternoon.

  “I’ve no need for an assistant now. I’ll simply be gathering more notes.”

  I removed my hand, leaving a faint, clammy print on his shirt. “But surely you’ll be called upon as a doctor? Who will suture the wounds for you? You know I employ the finest stitch.” It was true, though my hands were rather large and coarse for a woman of my class. What I left unsaid was the fact that his hands were no longer as steady as they had once been. “And the strands of my hair provide the best thread.”

  My father once told me affectionately that my wiry red hairs were stronger than threads of linen.

  But he shook his head now and placed both arms upon the marble sill, as if struggling to steady his resolve. We watched the mullet fishermen standing in black gondolas upon the water, heard the fletched sound of their arrows stinging the air. How I loved to stand by him in quiet observation of the world. He was my spyglass and magnifying lens, my kind instructor and stern doctor. We witnessed the mingling of cruelty and cure in disease, the loss that redeemed itself in healing and also the loss that never ended. My father possessed no other children and so he had always shared the gifts that were destined for a son with his daughter.

  From this distance, the fishermen were almost stationary, planted on a solid gray surface, the tilting of their boats imperceptible. The black cormorants that surrounded them stood out with the certainty of inked type rising from the flat bed of the sea as if they were spelling out the letters of a word. The illusion of I (swallowing fish), S (at rest), T (wings outstretched to catch the sunlight). Was it istante, istanza, istmo? The illusion slipped away when the birds plunged into the water after a stricken fish. From time to time the fishermen struck at the cormorants with poles, oars, nets, or whatever was at hand. The rattle of oars against rowlocks and the cries of the birds disturbed me. My throat tightened suddenly, as if I would cry like a little girl.

  “Daughter,” my father finally said, “there will be no discussion on this matter.” He didn’t turn from the window and improbably addressed the air. “You must look after your mother. Your earnings will be hers as well, though I’m leaving ample gold behind to keep the two of you for years. My bags are packed. I need your assistance now in replenishing my medicine chest.”

  “I’m occupied this afternoon,” I answered sharply, considering the irascible charge—my mother—being hefted on me. Would she appreciate me finally if I were her support? I doubted it. I clasped my hands upon my stomach. “I have to clean the lancets. We agreed to assist Dr. Torrigiano with a bloodletting while the moon is still in the second quarter, or have you forgotten?”

  “You’ll have to go in my place,” muttered my father. “I must attend to the final details of my departure.”

  What caused this hasty decision? Or had change formed slowly in the alembic of his discontent?

  We were still beside the edge of the sea

  like people who are thinking about their journey

  who in their hearts go and their bodies stay

  I murmured these lines from Purgatorio more to myself than to my father. Still I wanted him to answer me in the old comradely way, but when he just stood at the window in silence, I did not repeat myself.

  The next morning my father slipped away while I slept, without any leave-taking. Though he rose early, he must have been exhausted from the quarrel with my mother the night before.

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” I’d heard his voice late at night, roaring through the house.

  “Why would I try? You’ve never listened to me,” she said glumly. “All that matters to you is that dusty volume of ailments. Yet you fail to cure your own foul temper!”

  “You understand nothing, woman!” The floor shook above me as my father strode back and forth in their chamber.

  “You understand less! I’ve tried to hold this household together for the sake of your profession and our little family. But you’re a specter to me, always locked up in your study or out on your rounds. And now you’re going to leave altogether?”

  “If it weren’t for my daughter and my peers, I’d have left long ago.”

  “She’s my daughter too.”

  “She may be your flesh, but she isn’t your daughter.”

  I couldn’t hear my mother gasp, but I felt it from the vast intake of silence that sucked all the air from our house for an immeasurable length of time.

  Now I began my preparations for my own journey. But my mother suspected that something was afoot. Though it was time to retire, she paced the corridor and after a few turns pushed open the door to my room without knocking. She swiftly took in the scene of my satchel and clothing spread out upon the bed, my medicine chest open, and papers scattered across my desk, and she understood.

  “Oh,” she said, her face reddening in the warm light of the candles. “You’re going to abandon me. Just as your father did.”

  When I ignored her, she added, “Go ahead, waste your fortune, Gabriella. But don’t expect a dowry when you return.”

  I stopped my packing, stung by her insinuation (my lack of marriage prospects). “Mamma,” I finally said. “My dowry is here”—I held out my hands—“and here”—I tapped my forehead.

  She walked over to my window and peered out past the shutter at the city’s faint lights smoldering in windows, faltering on the water. “Oh, I see, yes—that will serve you well when you encounter a suitor. I can’t wait to hear what he’ll say.” She turned back to face me in frustration. “Or rather what he won’t say, when he disappears quick as a quenched flame.” She pressed both hands to her heart. “I want you to be content, Gabriella. Bear children. Why not marry a good doctor? Why must you be one?” Tears started to her eyes, for we’d had this conversation many times before and I’d left the room. But this time I simply stared at her, fierce and speechless with hurt. We were on opposite sides of a deep channel, no bridge between us. The sea ran on in the dark. She dropped her eyes and began to pace again back and forth the full length of my floor, heels clicking marble and then going mute across the wide Ciprian carpet.

  We heard a sputtering and both of us swung to the open doorway. My mother’s gaunt young maidservant hovered nervously with a guttered candle, hooded by a large shadow in the corridor behind her. “Your bed is turned, my lady,” ventured Milena. She fidgeted, rubbing her skeletal neck with her free hand, her long fingers strangely delicate.

  I sighed and said, “I’m not abandoning you, Mamma. I will find your husband and make our family whole again.” I spoke with willful sincerity, as if I could claim the distant harmony from childhood, if I hadn’t imagined it in the way a child will construct peace out of necessity. I pushed my extra skirts and blouses down into the leather satchel with my fists to make room for more clothing, to counter my mother’s rancor.

  She touched my shoulder. “Gabriella. Don’t leave. I . . . I need you here.”

  I’d never heard my mother say those words. Without looking at her, I answered, “Mamma. My mind and heart are set on this.”

  My mother, for once, fell silent. Then she left me.

  My mother also left me the day I became a woman. I wa
s thirteen and undressing for bed with Olmina’s help, under my mother’s watchful gaze—a rare occasion. She’d been instructing me as to what gown I should wear for an upcoming wedding when Olmina cried out happily as she tugged my chemise over my head. The dark red streak on my garment announced the change. I hadn’t even sensed it, though now I felt a vague thrill and confusion. She laid the chemise tenderly on the bed. I hugged my sleeping smock to my body, shivering. Tears sprang to Olmina’s eyes—but my mother froze.

  “You’re no longer a girl!” she moaned, as if it were an unforeseen calamity. She must have observed my distress at her words, for then she said, “It’s only the beginning of desires you’ll never quell, my daughter. The end of simple pastimes.” She must have been speaking of her own change, for had she forgotten that I assisted my father in his work and engaged in few simple pastimes? That I’d observed disease and death? But she didn’t wish to hear of those things. She bit her lip and fled the room. My body had betrayed her dream of me and it could not be taken back. Salt water had seeped into the well. I no longer belonged to her, if ever I had.

  Olmina, not my mother, taught me how to use the sea sponge, how to tie it up under my smock with a silk ribbon (once round my waist, between the legs, then fastened to the waistband) to catch the flow. My mother never spoke of it again.

  Late the next afternoon, I continued packing, taking my father’s letters and a small bottle full of ashes from the chest to pack in my satchel.

  The previous November, I’d returned from tending an ailing friend to find the letters from my beloved Maurizio (twelve years dead of tertian fever) cast upon the grate, glowing packets of ash, with the string that bound them a hot and shrinking vein. I thought of the fine blue veins beneath his temples, which I’d liked to kiss. His cheek. The perfect cowrie of his ear.