The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  “If you don’t rid yourself of the past, you’ll never possess a life in the present!” my mother had exclaimed as she stood near the charred letters. “I did it for you. Love wants a scorched field for the new seeds to take. Otherwise you’ll never find a husband.”

  I’d clasped the fire shovel with such force that she stepped backward in fear and fell against the kitchen table, crying out for her maidservant. I could have struck her. But I turned away to scoop the ashes from the hearth. Later, when I was alone, I poured them gently through a parchment cone into a bottle that I keep in my medicine chest. What a small heap of ashes for so many letters! My lover’s words weighed no more than a few breaths. My father’s letters wouldn’t follow such a fate. I planned to deliver all but a few into the hands of a dear friend, Dr. Cardano, for safekeeping on the first leg of my journey.

  Soon, I heard a flamboyant voice from downstairs. It was Cousin Lavinia, who wanted to bid me farewell, for I’d sent her a message by way of Lorenzo.

  “Come up to my chamber,” I called out. My mother, not one to miss a conversation, followed her on the stairs.

  Lavinia cut a messy figure in the streets of Venetia, for she loved drawing, and as a girl, she reveled with me in copying the various bones and skulls my father kept in his study. “What’s this one, Dottor Mondini?” she’d cry out to him as he wrote at his desk. And though he’d feign annoyance, he usually answered her questions with a smile—questions that I was often too reticent to ask, preferring instead to consult the Vesalius Epitome. Often he’d put down his quill and watch us for a while, as if it gave him great joy. Lavinia studied the bones’ forms for the art of beauty while I learned their names and contours for the art of physick. Thus we often kept each other company on long afternoons in our separate worship of bones.

  “Gabriella, you’re really leaving?” she asked. I recalled former visits, Lavinia with rolls of paper under her arm and charcoal stubs in her pockets, the dust smeared on her hands, arms, face, and clothing. Today she was merely out of breath, for—though I envied her ripe beauty —her ample body often slowed her down. My own body, neither full nor thin, seemed ordinary by comparison. She turned briefly to greet my mother, who chided, “My dear, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could resuscitate my daughter’s reason.”

  “Ah, you should know better, Signora Mondini,” Lavinia teased, “than to ask me to restore her senses, when you’ve often decried me as lacking my own!”

  But my mother was in no humor to smile in reply. Instead she looked down, brooding, as if there beneath the floor in the shifting island mud there might be a god to answer her prayer, to bind a mother and daughter. But finding no answer, she clutched her skirts and left my room.

  “So?” Lavinia kissed me on each cheek expectantly.

  “Yes, it’s true.” We sat together on my bed. “I’ve resolved to find my father, to bring him back, and to help him complete his encyclopedia, The Book of Diseases.”

  “But won’t it be dangerous?”

  “Staying here may be more dangerous,” I said, placing my pale hand over hers, with its habitually blackened nails, now also flecked with pigments. She’d been painting with egg tempera. “I’m slowly being smothered, by the guild, by Mamma . . .”

  She nodded. “I’d heard from my mother that guild members condemned your use of certain herbs when the men were in my father’s shop. These rumors stew when you have a gaggle of doctors waiting for their remedies to be measured by my father’s fumbling apprentice.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to protect you. And I thought it idle complaint. After all this time, why would they sever your membership?”

  “The reason given was that I lack a mentor.”

  “That’s nonsense. There must be a dearth of new patients, so they plucked a reason out of the ether that fills their poor brain-pans.”

  I laughed and said, “Well, now I can seek my way in the larger world. I’ll visit those cities renowned for their universities of medicine and garner letters of recommendation—how will the guild refuse me then?”

  “Yes, Gabriella. You’ll practice your art.” She set a brave face. “Just as I will practice mine. But what about other languages—how will you speak?”

  “It will be small worry. Many speak our melodious tongue. And my French and English are fair, since I’ve had occasion over the years to practice with foreign physicians at our table.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Come, I’ll show you.” I led her to my desk. “There, and there.” I moved my finger tentatively along one of many possible routes I planned on my Mercator map. The candle flame stood absolutely still in the evening torpor. She bent to watch me.

  “See? Beyond Padua the great centers of medicine in Europe beckon: Leiden, Edenburg, Montpellier. And Tübingen, where my father’s last letter was recently marked.”

  “But why not stay with Dr. Cardano and write to these other universities for news of your father? Otherwise aren’t you striking out at great risk, into the unknown?”

  I barely heard her and instead spoke the names of the cities again in a low voice. My breath quickened, my heart and mind leapt far ahead of me. I glanced toward the open door to the corridor and quickly stepped across my room to shut it. “Lavinia, I want the unknown.” I touched the map, its paper softening to a kind of flesh in the hot, damp air.

  She stared at me in astonishment and then flushed with the pleasure of understanding. “I almost wish that I could go with you.”

  “Come, then!”

  “No, I could never leave Venetia. I don’t hunger for the journey as you do.”

  She hugged me impulsively and rushed from the room, her black hair loosening from her snood as it fell on the stairs, her coarse linen work dress rustling stiffly.

  “Lavinia!” I cried, picking up the ecru snood. I ran to my window but barely glimpsed her form as she turned the corner near Campo Sant’Agnese. I held the snood for a moment with affection, then pressed it down among my things in the satchel.

  The following morning I listened to Olmina knock her wooden clogs about the stones of the Zattere as she paced in irritation. Her singsong voice called up to my window from the narrow wharf. “How long must we wait, signorina?”

  And then: “Dottoressa Gabriella, the gondolas are ready!”

  Her impatience was born of reluctance. When I asked her and Lorenzo to accompany me on the journey, she’d pleaded, “Let us stay, Gabriella. The journey does not bode well. I smell a corpse in the future.” But she was always casting tarocchi cards and predicting ruin, so I paid her no mind. She continued, “We should be patient and await your father’s return. For sooner or later the city will pull him back to her embrace, no?” She didn’t want to leave her city—the city that rose from the silt of salt marsh, the city that rocked upon the tides like a marvel run aground.

  Olmina had ordered my life since birth. A few months before my arrival, her own child had been stillborn, its head wrapped with the caul (a sign of second sight, a talent never to be realized), and so she took me to her breast as a babe; I suckled both salt and sweet, tears and milk. Over the years, she’d protected me from my mother, who’d refused to nurse me, for as a young maiden of only fifteen, she was frightened, I suppose, of what had happened to her body. She didn’t take to mothering easily. And her own mother, a lay healer falsely imprisoned on charges of witchcraft, wasn’t there to tend her. Even now Mamma would tell me, “Oh, Gabriella, I wept when you were born! Your head emerged so misshapen, I thought I’d brought forth a changeling!”

  There were a few early years when Mamma amused herself with me as one would with a doll. She dressed me up in uncomfortable frocks. She twisted my damp red hair into ringlets around her finger. She placed me on a cushion before one of the windows so that I could watch the ships on the canal, dusted my face with white powder, and told me not to move when her friends came over to talk and preen. But I remember a day shortly after my third bi
rthday when I didn’t listen. It had drizzled for weeks. Olmina gave me my own bowl of chestnut dough to form dumplings. I squatted on a rug on the kitchen floor (though mostly I just clenched the dough in my little fists with delight and squeezed out bits and pieces). My mother bent over me, firmly holding my arms as if she could fix me to the floor, and said, “Stay here, do you understand? Do not leave this rug, or monsters will come out of the cellar!” But if there were monsters in the cellar, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in our house.

  While Olmina rolled the dumplings on the thick table with her back to me, and my mother pulled up a chair and dozed before the cooking hearth, I slipped away, determined to explore the wharf before our house. I hastily put on my child’s cape and woolen cap, and pushing open the door Lorenzo had left ajar when he went out that morning, I tumbled out into the day. The rain had paused, the ships rocked like houses afloat, and I squealed with joy at my freedom, running along the stones to the edge of the water. Merchants stared at me, two nuns asked me where my mother was, sailors sang loudly and waved, and a lady with her servingwoman reprimanded me harshly when I bumped into them. I found a cat with three legs under a bench. I tasted a bit of bread that had fallen on the stones, then spit it out again. I clutched the beautiful damask skirts of a woman in purple who laughed at me and asked me my name. The wind hurt my ears. All at once the dark cloud of my mother descended. “Don’t you ever do this to me again!” she shouted as she yanked me along the stones, my feet flying off the Zattere at intervals. She locked me in her closet. “I’ll confine you to this place from now on, do you hear?”

  After sobbing quietly for a while, I fell asleep. Sometime later in the uncertain dusk of that place I awoke beneath a boned farthingale, as if within the rib cage of a great sea creature. In my dense imagining, my mother became a leviathan. I rocked back and forth beneath the ribs of the beast. She couldn’t harm me there, because I was hiding within her. Or so I imagined when Olmina came jangling her ring of skeleton keys to fetch me for supper.

  Olmina knew all the secrets of our household, which is why my mother refrained from throwing her out, lest she directly feed the ravenous ear of Venetia, which thrived upon the misfortunes of others. It was Olmina who later, when I attended university, urged me to hide my medical writings, which I promptly did, behind the lesser medical texts that my father rarely consulted. My mother seldom entered his study and had to ask for the key, as my father knew full well her jealous habit of stealing into his papers and shuffling the pages. “Materia medica is your mistress,” she’d say when she was upset. He took the keys with him when he left, citing fears that his rivals might try to steal his writings or his books, though perhaps he was truly wrestling with the rivals within.

  For months I suffered my father’s absence twice over: the lack of his presence and the dearth of his written words. I became so disturbed by the locked room that I considered ways to break and enter, with the clandestine help of a locksmith (though I knew it wouldn’t remain secret for long) or by breaking a window with a stone and enlisting the help of a glassmaker as an excuse to go inside using a ladder (though that would be very suspicious, and ridiculous too—bedecked woman doctor swaying upon ladder). Of course these schemes were only a distraction. Some essential part had been stricken from me. But in one of his early letters to me from Padua in the fall of 1580, he had a change of heart.

  And in the hub of the reading wheel that we removed to your room before I left, you’ll find a central round peg that, unlike its fellow on the other side, may easily be pulled out. In the small hollow there, you’ll find an extra key to the study. Keep this key, then, for it was yours originally anyway, dear Gabriella. Under no circumstances lend it to anyone. Lock yourself in when you visit the study, so that no one may guess the room has been opened, and enter only with caution, when no one is at home. I trust you’ll continue your studies and writings on diseases, which I may join to my own when I return. Who knows but one day you will outstrip my own research and inquiries into the vast nature of the maladies that beset us. This is the duty you have to your elders, to complete what they cannot . . . even perhaps to complete the healing that they cannot or choose not to pursue.

  I was glad to have access to the study, though after a while my joy carried a bitter aftertaste. As the years passed, my father’s study stood in our home like a strange mausoleum to his absence. I entered from time to time to read and to wipe the shelves and tables, which accumulated dust that fell from I know not where (since the windows and doors were always closed), unless it was the brief dust of the world I brought in with me. I also spoke with his ghost—a peculiar thing to say, I know, when a man is still alive. But that is how it was. Papà, where are you now? What cures are you working? I have a patient suffering languishment, and all the usual simples have failed to quicken her. What must I do?

  I never wrote there at his desk, though, because I didn’t want to disturb his things. If I left everything as it had been when he went away, perhaps that unchanging order would hasten his return. But of course nothing was changeless. The ink curled and dried in its pot. Minuscule insects consumed the quills. Webs shrouded the books.

  By contrast, I kept the windows of my own room open in nearly every weather. On this day of departure, I gazed across the small side canal at a winged lion of mottled stone with a lifted paw, dispassionate as a saint. He’d inhabited that outlook for my entire life. Sometimes cats slept beneath his mossy stone chest, multiplying his remote expression while the dim mirror of water below overturned him. In the Rialto Market they sold palm-size lions carved in jasper alleged to cure fever and dispel poison, and some carved in garnet, cure-alls and amulets against the dangers of travel. Though I barely believed in such things, I’d purchased one.

  The narrow corridor below my third-story room was still pooled in shadow despite the advance of morning. I could see a thin ribbon of sea, the San Vio surging into the swash of the Canale della Giudecca, which joined in turn the Canal Grande di San Marco, then the tides of the lagoon, and finally the open Adriatic. When I breathed in the smell of sea from below my window, I could also detect the metallic scent of ice, the source. Rivers and mountains.

  A muffled knock at my door.

  I opened it to see Lorenzo, Olmina’s short, wiry husband, who brought me back to matters at hand.

  “Dottoressa, please, Olmina is pulling my beard! We must reach Padua by evening. All the leather bags and provisions are loaded, everything except your medicine chest.”

  Lorenzo had also joined our household when I was born, his eyes and skin the color of dark shellac, as if he were a man made of wood. He was born in Pinoa, and his mountain dialect gave him a halting speech and manner, like one of those exotic creatures merchants bring back from their travels: Numidians and their dromedaries, or listless Barbary apes. Lorenzo often complained about the moods of the Adriatic. “Just give me terra firma, Tirolia, instead of this city ruled by moon and mud, where our lives are as sloppy as the sea!”

  Olmina always defended Venetia (this was the fray and habit of their marriage): “If it weren’t for this city, La Serenissima, we would be griming about in some frozen hut, our feet wrapped in last year’s straw, staring out at your beautiful mountains. That’s firm land for you. Have you forgotten your toes?”

  Three of Lorenzo’s toes had gone char black from frostbite and had to be severed when he was a child. He always stuffed the right foot of his brown stockings with wads of wool to compensate for the gap, after plucking burrs from the rough fleece. “La Serenissima!” Lorenzo would repeat sulkily and spit into the sea. He was phlegmy and possessed of a cold, overmoist nature.

  Now I closed and firmly latched the dark green shutters on my window for the last time. “Thank you, Lorenzo,” I told him. “I’m coming. I was just leaving my devotions.” Even as I excused myself in this way, I thought of the old proverb: Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists.

  Lorenzo grinned, as if he’d overheard my though
ts.

  I clasped the twin dolphin handles of my oak medicine chest, and refusing Lorenzo’s help (I always carry it myself, wary of the influence of others upon the medicaments), I descended the cramped stairs.

  “Mamma?” I called out.

  I was greeted with silence. Lorenzo stepped back as I called out her name again, this time adding a farewell.

  From the cool recesses of the house, her voice shot out through the corridors. “Now I will be free to enjoy my life!” Her bluster didn’t fool me.

  Again, I said, “Farewell!” I wanted to say, Be well, Mamma. Be content, but my throat closed and my mouth tasted brackish. The old salt of grief was in it.

  There was no reply. Silence dropped like a heavy plumb in my belly, which tightened against it. Against weeping. Despite having endured her swerves of mind and heart for years, I still wanted my mother’s blessing.

  Once I was outside, the sun’s glare, multiplied by the water, struck me full on.

  “Finalmente!” Olmina glowered in the bow of the pitching gondola.

  I stepped into the stern, followed by Lorenzo, and was thrown unceremoniously forward as I flung the chest down with a thud in the center. I chose the seat facing backward, to see the house I was leaving. The faded ocher walls stood discolored by the sea, gray and green at the foundations as if the building itself were a decaying body. Bricks the hue of dried blood were exposed near the water where the plaster had fallen away. The weathered doors, toothed from rot at the bottom, remained closed. Was it possible that I hadn’t noticed the decline of my family’s home until just now?

  Yet other houses were in decline too or crutched with scaffolding in restoration. As we slid through the calm water to the steady dip, pull, lift, drip of the oar, I watched the Zattere retreat, then San Marco appear beyond the other bell towers, steeples, canted roofs, the other quarters shabby, mossy, glorious, gleaming, prayerful, lively, sorrowful, muted, exuberant, fleshy, fabulous, then diminished—made one by distance, faint, flat, bluish white, thin as gauze I might use to wrap a wound.