The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  Then a chest—a medicine chest—appears upon waves that move like lips in speech.

  It rolls toward me. As the deep red box dips, I notice the crest of the Mondini family painted upon the lid, a double griffin with a snake in each claw.

  The chest opens and spills loose vials upon the water. Hundreds of little bottles roll and gleam and drift apart like droplets of mercury. I try to gather them up in my skirts, but the current disperses them, clinking against each other, into the rushes. I can barely move from the weight of soaked skirts and the pull of mud on my slippered feet. The rushes sigh, shhh, shhh, shhh. The bottles ring out all over the marsh. Other things escape as the chest capsizes—lead boxes, glass bowls sealed with parchment lids, blue quetzal feathers from the New World, snake castings, light bones like wands spinning haplessly in the water. Then scissors, surgical knives and saws, lancets, clamps, forceps, and bleeding tools, mortars and pestles, which unaccountably float. Leeching cups, urine flasks, ear scoops, artificial noses and ears of wood that suggest submerged bodies.

  All scatter inward toward the stagnant meanders of the marsh. I want to gather them up.

  But I’m gripped by the mud.

  I can reach the handle of the chest, however, and right it. But now it is larger and becomes the long skiff of a casket. Shhh, shhh, shhh—

  I awoke with a jolt, sweating and adrift. Giannetta still sat next to me sewing (it seemed she must have been stitching an eternity). She took one more loop and left the needle in the cloth. She put her arm lightly around me and wiped my forehead with her handkerchief.

  We sat a little longer, saying nothing, before we returned to the house.

  That night in Dr. Cardano’s study—he was kind enough to leave me alone at his tilted desk during the evenings—I began work upon my own notes for The Book of Diseases. I took a light supper, goat cheese with bread grilled upon the hearth, dried black olives, and wine. I liked to eat slowly, intermittently, while I formed my thoughts. A chewy crust of bread always anchored my words, while wine brought on certain deft phrases (which didn’t always hold up to daylight).

  These hours of candlelight, encircled by a studious darkness, drew me closer to my intent. The muted cries of owls and the sorrowful quavers of nightjars kept me company. Even when I wasn’t putting words to page with the quill and indigo ink I preferred, I was more at peace than in the day.

  I realized this was the solitude my father tasted and loved, which I also loved. Often, at home in Venetia, we would read or write in our separate chambers, though I might visit his study from time to time to ask a question about the healing properties of something such as aurum potabile, the gold suspended in spirits that purportedly could be sipped as a cure-all. He would pause, whatever he was doing, and answer me thoughtfully yet simply, as if sharing a piece of bread. “What is meant by gold? The thing in its purity or surrounded by other minerals? The gold of dreams? And then each temperament may react differently, just as elements respond to light, some trapping it, others magnifying it.”

  And I would leave his study content, even if the questions were unanswered and more questions lingered. I was comforted merely by the rise and fall of his room’s reflected light upon the canal waters, which I could perceive from my window. Then the light would be extinguished, and this too was reassuring, in the way that the rhythms of work mend the days. I was pleased to be the last one awake in the house, keeping my small vigil.

  The light from his room still rose and fell for me, from the various cities of his visitations. I’d been rereading his letters, trying to surmise his route by his mind’s tenor. In one letter from an unnamed place, yet with the date February 5, 1588, he wrote:

  How I treasure the dark nights when my candle is the only one lit, perhaps, in the entire city. It may be that when no one else is about, I find greater entrance to my soul. It is not a simple matter of uninterrupted time. No, it is the darkened theater just after the play, the street after the festival, the emptiness that holds the semblances. There is something hallowed about the late hours that suspend one’s life. To be apart, to be silent, to pace or lay down the heart’s agitation. To find in words the plangent bell that calls one home. And if by chance I should move to the window and see another window, far down the street, lit for a scholar or a corpse vigil or even a midnight birth, we are instantly bound by the intimacy of our solitude.

  And, I now wanted to add, the intimacy of things! For here in Dr. Cardano’s study I was surrounded by the amiable calm of books, a few small boxes and majolica apothecary jars, which I resisted opening (not wishing to pry into the doctor’s cures without permission), a celestial globe, a bronze armillary sphere, a pair of scissors, a slim knife for trimming quills, and a lonely silver key that hung upon a nail without its companion lock or chest anywhere in sight.

  How agreeable to have such a quiet room at one’s disposal. I was free of the interruptions that came at home from my mother, the servants, and the raucous din of ships in the Canale della Giudecca, unloading and loading, thudding, jarring, creaking, along with the loud gabble and shouts of sailors.

  But sometimes in stillness, there is left still one’s inner clamor. Perhaps this was the very thing my mother feared most, for she always surrounded herself with chattering friends and never sought a moment to herself. She couldn’t bear that I spent hours alone, as if that solitude were a slight against her. Or perhaps she worried that the daughter bore signs of the father’s obsessions.

  Once, as a young girl of ten, I was sitting at the window, a book of hours open in my lap, though I wasn’t reading it. I loved to watch the light unspooling on the water and the shadows climbing or descending the walls of the villas. If I could discern the patterns in this movement, then, I reasoned in my child’s mind, other worlds would open to me. I’d see things that most people missed, not that I felt unusual in this. My young friends and I believed that most men and women missed half the world (except for my father, who’d mastered an uncanny field of vision and possessed the ability to detect whenever I crept into his study, even though his back was turned to me and he was deep in study).

  That afternoon, guests of my mother had arrived and I’d chosen to remain upstairs, though she’d repeatedly called me down, ignoring my wishes. Finally she bustled into my room without knocking, and in a low, pinched voice so the guests below would not hear, she said, “I don’t know what to do with you. Do you want us to donate you as others have given their daughters to the nunnery as tithe?”

  “Yes, donate me,” I said defiantly. Her face colored. “I’d be glad to leave!” I knew full well my father would never allow it, so it was an empty rebellion.

  At last I relented and went downstairs, where two young women and an old dowager questioned me about my book of hours, my tutors, and my poetry. I’d shown the latter to no one. (My mother had discovered it while poking around my desk. Thief!)

  I barely spoke, and later, when her friends left, my mother startled me by crying out, “I really don’t know you at all, Gabriella!” And you never will, Mamma. My mother wanted a daughter to reflect her. Someone to share gossip, clothes, and the latest shape in beauty marks (black felt crescents were all the rage then, glued to a cheek or a shoulder). Someone to be her confidante. But I was a shadow she could never grasp, though she might call that grasping love. Yet I couldn’t truly know her either. When she chastised me, there was always something behind it I couldn’t name, as if she were slipping into a chasm and clutching at me at the same time. I didn’t want to go down with her.

  Sitting alone in Dr. Cardano’s office, I shook my head. Here she was, in my thoughts again. I’d left her behind, and she’d still found a way to haunt me. Tonight I wrote with her living ghost there in the room, treading back and forth. How would I ever make peace with her? I set down my incomplete notes for a disease familiar to me on an unbound sheaf of paper.

  MELANCHOLIA:

  When One Is Weighed by a Leaden Sadness

  Melancholia seeps into one�
��s life like the metallic sand of an hourglass. Despondency accrues. One suffers from inertia and wan complexion. My friend Messalina grew so disconsolate that no one could find a cure, not even my father. The use of plants with a moist nature, such as watercress, lovage, and water parsley, could not counter her dry, cold humor. It is said that the black bile of melancholia devours even stone with its terrible acid.

  On a bone-aching afternoon of rain, I found Messalina seated by the casement of her room near Campo San Polo, a square of lace abandoned on her lap. She stared at a tiny insect, which crept along the sill. When I addressed her and took her limp hand, she didn’t answer but continued to watch the insect until it wriggled into the miter of the window frame. Years passed like this in a cruel paralysis for Messalina. The women in her family insisted that she rise from bed to resist the dotage of her malady. They dressed her and led her to the casement, moving her like an enormous puppet, so empty of will were her limbs. Before my father left, he counseled her to keep her windows open so she could breathe the salubrious air of the sea and exhale her gloom.

  Sometimes she recovered briefly and began to pace through every room, making lists of the most minute repairs that needed attention, much to her mother’s chagrin. “A new hinge pin for the dowry chest, for this one is bent; new plaster for the corner of the attic kitchen, for this corner is crooked; a new pot of cochineal for the dressing table—look, the powder on top is darker than the powder underneath . . .”

  And so on. But one dank January, she would not return to us. Every afternoon for a month I visited Messalina, spoke to her, touched her arm or hand, but she didn’t respond. Once, in a moment of weakness, I confided to my friend an unforeseen yearning for other parts of the world. I confess that her silence encouraged me, and I began to work out my plans in the presence of her fixed demeanor. Other times I hoped that my schemes would draw her into her own imaginings or that my discontent would distract her from her own. But it became clear that I wasn’t helping her to recover. She was always seated at the window, her chin resting upon one solemn fist, her eyes blankly measuring nothing.

  At last I resolved to try the cure of the Terme of Montecatini, though I couldn’t transport her there. I employed two men to travel to the springs and return with five barrels of sulfurous water. Messalina’s aunt and mother and I set about collecting huge copper kettles and pots that the servants filled with the malodorous waters and hung upon iron hasps in the fireplace. One by one, as the covered vessels boiled, the servants carried them upstairs to her room, where the windows were now shut. When all the pots were set about her, I signaled the servants to remove the lids. Her room filled with moiling vapors until she was nearly obscured at her window seat. As I waded through the steam, which reeked of damp plaster and volcanic minerals, her clammy face appeared above her loose smock and turned toward me like the slow revolution of a globe at the urging of one’s hand. She was an unrecognizable continent, a Sargasso Sea. Glassy beads of sweat stippled her temples and upper lip. When her eyes found mine, her pupils widened as if she had flushed them with tincture of belladonna. Her gall-brown eyes dilated with a ferment that spilled from little wounds everywhere, invisibly issuing from the veins of our lives, from the wall joists and the dark timbers of the ceiling, from the spaces in the perfect square of white lace that her mother desperately continued to lay upon her lap, from the cracks in the gondolas drawn up to the steps in the canals, from the sea itself.

  Without uttering a word, Messalina spoke with her eyes: Go away from here, Gabriella, and save yourself! Find your father! It was then I noticed the straight razor hidden in her sleeve and a small open notebook beneath the lace, filled with strange geometries like rhumb lines. I warily removed the razor and she didn’t resist.

  Her mother continued the sudorific cure at my suggestion, for it offered Messalina some relief for a few days. But later that February, even as she seemed to be improving, she leapt into the freezing sea and drowned. Now all the shutters on their house were always closed, summer and winter, whether to keep the ghost of Messalina from entering or to prevent her leaving, I could never be sure.

  In the refuge of Dr. Cardano’s study, I set down my quill, then closed and tied together the cover boards that protected the manuscript, just as the beeswax candle began to sputter, its warm, unguent scent urging me to sleep. My mother had gone.

  CHAPTER 5

  One Must Be Kind to Beasts

  When I bade farewell to Dr. Cardano, he startled me by weeping upon my collar as he held me. “So brief a stay after so long, my dear girl. I’ll be here, even if you never find your father.”

  “You’re very kind,” I mumbled in embarrassment. For a moment a part of me balked, a bird hopping in its unbolted cage, terrified of space.

  I restrained an odd impulse to stroke his polished skull as it met my cheek, for simple fondness might be read as invitation to pleasure. A woman must always be so prudent—though I hadn’t longed for a man since the death of my beloved Maurizio. I was wedded to the work of physick, which now stood as my husband and keeper. One who wouldn’t die and leave me bereft.

  “Good-bye, then, Gabriella, and keep well upon the road.” Dr. Cardano composed himself and leaned upon Giannetta’s slender but strong arm. “Remember the salutary qualities of lemon balm for your spirits.”

  “I thank you for your kindness, dear sir.” Without warning, my eyes welled with tears, for I suspected we might never meet again. The hardship of old age was not far from him, and an uncertain journey lay ahead for me.

  After three days of climbing, our little company traversed Passo Rolle and descended between the mountain ranges toward Val di Fassa, our animals glutted on abundant grasses and wildflowers. I grew dizzy from the high mountain air and profusion of green, as if the succulent saxifrage, campanula, and yarrow were intoxicant. Lorenzo and Olmina rode before me and sang all the way up and then down the switchback path.

  Sometimes I joined them in my dusky voice, in songs for mending nets, caulking boats, or stanching high tides (which I’d overheard on the Zattere), siren songs of boredom, songs for lulling babes, drawing lovers, or scorning those in high places. All this salty music high in the Dolomiti, as if we were rocking upon the sea instead of mule and horse haunches! What a pack of fools we must have looked, a commedia dell’arte. Olmina an earthy maidservant, Lorenzo a manservant of supreme alacrity —and how would I cast myself? Headstrong Isabella or shy Pedrolino, energetic observer of human follies? Or as la Dottoressa, pompous pedant, extemporizing at every moment, spouting great gobs of Latin? There was something of my father there, and something of me (though I winced to admit it).

  At last we glimpsed a village below, really just a huddle of single-and two-story wooden houses with steep mossy roofs and crooked walls, balconies hung with ragged, faded old rugs, for fine weather meant a good day for rug beating. A young woman with heavy arms stood on a balcony with a flat wooden bat, her hips swinging to the right as her arm swatted left, and Lorenzo let out a shout: “Oh, wonderful town! I feel I’ve come home!”

  “Looks like a bunch of rickety henhouses,” Olmina teased good-naturedly.

  “But what a farmyard, eh?” He waved his arm to include the lush green valley rimmed with jag-toothed mountains, the river ribboned with light, the forest that gave off a sweet resin scent in the waning heat of the day. “Just smell those woods, that meadow.” He took a deep, noisy breath that made us laugh.

  Olmina rode up next to him, and their mules jostled one another.

  For a moment as I ambled up from behind, I could have taken them for young lovers, their knees barely touching. Lorenzo reached across to touch her hand upon the saddle. If I weren’t there, perhaps they might have kissed, and this both astonished and delighted me. But he quickly withdrew his hand and the mules parted.

  The sun slid like a coin behind the sleight-of-hand peaks before us, and we all joined in on a lullaby Olmina had murmured to me since I was young.

  Fai la ninna bebé />
  che ora viene Papà

  e ti porta din-don

  fai la ninna bebé.

  My father wandered somewhere ahead of me, a thousand miles or ten. Perhaps at this very moment he was returning. He could be rolling slowly upon his own barge of a horse, that black monster Stelvio. Though now that Stelvio was older, his manner might be softened, the edginess in his eyes gone docile, if indeed, poor creature, he was even alive. My father always warned, Let him see you. Don’t sneak up on him. But I was afraid of that horse’s stare, just as I feared the abrupt rebuke of my father’s rage.

  He could be approaching me now with his two attendants, if they still accompanied him. Though really I had no reason to question their loyalty. We’d always assumed they’d send word if something happened. But since they couldn’t write (unless they enlisted the help of a scribe), they might’ve been unable to dispatch any news. And besides, messages are easily lost . . .

  There were so many ways to disappear in this world, I mused: by land, in the sea, kidnapped by thieves, set upon by vagabonds, forced into battles or chained to galleys, vanquished by gambling. And of course, the one possibility I pushed furthest from my mind: disease of all sorts. For what good was a doctor who couldn’t cure himself?

  As we continued on our way to Bregnicz, a week’s ride or so from Val di Fassa, Venetian spice merchants headed to Piamonte warned us, “You can’t go by the Costentz, its waters have swallowed the road!” In my determination (what Olmina calls my obstinacy), I refused to listen to them. Venetians are accustomed to the acqua alta. Indeed, my father, Dr. Cardano, and I had passed this way easily over a decade ago to visit an old friend. We were forewarned of submerged roads then too, but we waded through without mishap (other than muddied clothes) as the shallow waters receded.

  Also, I was fighting a desire to return to my former patients, the women I’d only been able to notify of my absence by message. Who knew what course a new doctor would follow. Would he be undoing my cures?