The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  Lorenzo stared at him and then away. He stroked the long forehead of his mule and then turned back to the first man. “Do you have any apples to sell?”

  “No, no, apples are finished. But I’ve got that perry wine. Sure you won’t come and drink with us?” The man was insistent, fixing his stare upon my smooth ungloved hands.

  “Sorry, we must be on our way,” Lorenzo answered flatly. He purchased three loaves of rough brown bread and a small smoked ham, stowing them in his saddlebags.

  “We’re not good enough then for you folk, are we, you foreigners and your high-flown manners!” The man curled his lip. Then in a throttled voice he said, “Do you think I wanted to give up my child?”

  For an astounding moment, I thought he would burst into sobs.

  But as we turned our mules, he cried out, regaining his harsh tone, “I’m onto you fine gentleman with your milksop hands, don’t think I don’t know what you are!”

  The tall, gaunt one yelled, “Whoremongers, despoilers!”

  I kicked Fedele’s stout sides to a quick trot. Without warning, a black-haired cleric scuttled from the building next to the church. Suddenly I felt the long rope of my auburn braid drop to the middle of my back. The cleric opened his mouth as if to shout, and I dug my heels hard into Fedele’s belly. With Lorenzo and Olmo and our threesome of mules following close behind, I bolted through the streets, Fedele’s hoofs clanging stones like hammers against iron. The frightful clamor spurred him on even more toward the edge of firs beyond the town.

  I thought I would never be warm again.

  I thought I would never sleep.

  Sometimes we dozed by daylight, lined up like dead pike on a clutch of leaves, unwilling to risk a fire. We covered ourselves with our blankets and fir needles and left the animals tied to our ankles. We traveled at night through the dismal wood and avoided other villages altogether.

  Durlingen—with its burnt square, shut church, priest, scarred peddler, and woodsman—haunted us.

  Olmo severed my braid with her cooking knife the first night after Durlingen and it fell heavily to the ground like a viper. I buried it in the prickly loam and Lorenzo helped me to set a heavy stone on top so that no animal would dig it up. For a moment I pictured a starving wolf dragging my red braid through the forest and those vile men filling his body with arrows. I imagined the bishop and his men ransacking the countryside for the mistress of the braid.

  When I did sleep, I saw mounds, hundreds of such braids, thin blond, glossy black, thick gray, wispy brown, coppery, curly, short, long, looped together, and tied at the ends. Ribboned. The braids of little girls, maids, mothers, nuns, and crones.

  I imagined the townsmen, stricken before the bishop and his inquisitors like those countrymen made to hobble their dogs while the nobility hunted deer through their fields, trampling their crops. I could see the dry branches loosely bound in stacks and set upon one another as firewood.

  When I woke at dusk, I could almost smell the bishop’s malevolence in the very air around us, like the smoke of burnt hair.

  That’s when I would write a little to keep spirit and senses honed.

  INVIDIA:

  An Invisible Worm That Consumes the Heart

  In the countryside they say this disease lies dormant for many years in the bowels of wild boar and has its origins in the uneasy corpses they grub in the winter woods when acorns are scarce and there is nothing else to eat. The bodies have not been properly laid to rest. They are the murdered or the lost, the starving or the mad who thrashed their way into the thickets of death and couldn’t be recovered. The unwanted children cast aside in the forest. The prostitutes grown withered. The lepers and their foul rags. The ambassadors from foreign countries and their entire entourages strangled in their sleep. The witches who preferred the wolf to the bishop. The earth gobblers who couldn’t withstand their hunger. The men who grew leaden. The failed miller poisoned by nightshade. The Gypsies who savored the wrong mushroom on their midday outing. The tired saltimbanques. The frantic mothers of blue-lipped soldiers. The lost fathers. The astronomer who swallowed his books in small bites every night to avoid the tribunals. The miller’s daughter. The noblewoman unable to discern day from night, city from wilderness. The suicides. The little girl who ran away. The veneer artist whose crippled hands froze shut in the gray curls of his dead wife. The bubonics. The victims of falling sickness who walked into the woods alone. Survivors of char and blaze who preferred death. The slow of mind and the infirm of body. The lost fathers. The boar snuffle and gobble this half-frozen and decayed flesh. But rancor doesn’t dissolve in the powerful swine stomachs. Instead it lies in the folds of sausages-to-be. The pork-bowel casings in the duke’s cupboard or the peasant’s larder are filled with an envy of the living, which cannot be sated.

  One treatment is preventive. As my father cautioned, do not eat pork, or you’ll be eating the undead. The other treatment upon the advice of the Benandanti, the green witches, has been said to work well among those mountain people. The infected person must walk in an unfriendly wood and converse with the abandoned dead. The visits should include certain gifts for the dead, who must be neither kin nor friend. The person must address someone she doesn’t know, ask him what he wants, and honor his request. It seems that sometimes one of the dead may stand for all that are troubling the bowels of the afflicted. Yet the irascible dead may ask for something impossible, like the ears of a former rival or the fingers of one who has wronged them. In the first case, a substitute may suffice, such as a sketch of the rival’s ears or perhaps an earring. But in the second case, there may be no amends, unless it be truth telling, like a rosary repeated over and over again.

  The cure is difficult to effect, however, for it may take many years, and often persons stricken with invidia are not willing to persist. Some prolong their conversations with the dead and thwart the cure by delaying their requests. Others prefer the ferocity of invidia to the difficulties of their own lives. Like the bishop of Wirtenberg, who surely envies the women their wisdom, the envious love their disease too fervently and would blight the joy they cannot own.

  CHAPTER 9

  Dr. Rainer Fuchs, Professor of Botany

  After four days, we emerged pale and drawn from the woods and came upon a region of brown hills covered with leafless pear, apple, and chestnut trees and withered vineyards. A young peasant, her face pocked and red, worked upon one of the vines with a rusty pruning hook.

  Lorenzo halted his mule and hailed her. “Good day, dear woman. Excellent old vines under your care, eh?”

  She barely glanced at us and didn’t miss a cut.

  “We’re traveling to Tübingen. Is this the right way?”

  She lifted her arm toward a large hill to the northeast. “There it is, Castle Hohentübingen, and if you smart gentlefolk walk blind down this road, it will smack you on the head!”

  She gave a short, dry laugh and turned back to the gnarled crown of her vine.

  The road followed the swift, flat Neckar River, its surface streaked by gusts of wind. It was the end of September. As we neared Tübingen, we could hear the punt boats tied up at the bank as they struck each other with dull knocking sounds. They reminded me of gondolas tapping out the tides. My mother’s fingers absently tapping the kitchen table when she was caught in some reverie. As a child I would place my hand atop hers, to stop the tapping and bring her back.

  I almost wished for my mother to be here with us, instead of remaining a kind of prisoner in Venetia, even if it was an island bejeweled with flashing prows, water-soaked stones, mosaic-flecked churches, glistening eyes of love and conspiracy. Underneath it all, we knew we were nostalgic for a place that didn’t exist. Perhaps that was the source of my mother’s tapping—restless illusion.

  Once, she’d waited for ships carrying rare cargo from other countries. Then my father arrived, their emissary. I wondered if she’d really wanted to go to those places, into the shifting haze, something other than the island. But ha
dn’t that been my desire all along, because I feared becoming trapped like my mother? Now I wanted to rescue her from afar (though she wasn’t asking to be rescued). I smiled. And bring her to this bitterly cold road? Meanwhile the hot winds from Barbaria could be blasting the cool passageways of Venetia even as we shivered in this northern place. Most likely my mother would be soaking in a cool cistern-water bath for relief from the heat. How I took pleasure in that clean, mossy smell! Now I longed to be home, seeking refuge from heat, rather than biting the wind.

  Peasants with cartloads of wood and merchants with wagons stacked with wine kegs passed us, drawing their cloaks about them, staring at our clothes and mules with mild suspicion; no one greeted us. How very different from Venetia, I thought, where we always greeted a stranger, not always out of friendliness perhaps, but at least out of curiosity.

  As we entered the city, pausing near the stone walls, a large wooden hoop bounded down the narrow dirt street directly toward us. My mule balked, backing into the other animals, and brayed with alarm. The hoop struck him lightly in the chest and sprang to the left, wobbling and finally settling on its side.

  A little girl of ten or eleven in a soiled blue woolen tunic ran down the hill, stick in hand, and curtsied awkwardly to us, mumbling a shy apology. A small group of her friends laughed and pointed from the top of the hill.

  After days of not glimpsing a child, we stared at her with relief. The flaxen braids that escaped her red cap were tied behind her with a blue string, and her dark eyes glinted with play. Her flushed cheeks were smudged with dirt.

  Embarrassed by our oddly silent attention, she tried again and again in vain to right the hoop. Finally I dismounted and came to her aid, lightly striking the stick with a forgotten kind of joy against the hoop. I walked with her up the hill to the half-timber house that she pointed out as her own, though she didn’t speak a word. Her friends hung back and gawked at us. Then I asked her in my broken German—reminding myself to lower my voice (and how strange it felt, this first time speaking aloud as a man!)—if she could direct us to the university buildings.

  “Yes, thank you, sir, this way, sir,” she said. She skipped ahead with her hoop whirring alongside.

  We led our animals into the numbingly cold alleys, which, it seemed, hadn’t received sunlight in months. We pushed through a group of beer-swigging men who sneered at us. One of them, a sallow burgher with a head like a bludgeon, growled harshly at the girl. “I’ll birch you proper when I get home, girl!” He struck the back of her neck as she passed. She half stumbled, then fled ahead of us, clutching her hoop and crying. Without thinking, I spun round to confront the man, perhaps her father or uncle, but Lorenzo’s coal-black eyes warned me to keep going. I lurched forward as the man spat insults that I couldn’t understand at my back.

  After we’d left them behind, Lorenzo admonished me, “We’re foreigners, never forget it! And peasants as well. The girl’s not allowed to speak to us, though the drunken father’s the one that should be flogged, if you ask me!”

  As we picked our way up the hill, the mules’ hooves clanged and crackled the crust of light ice that sheeted the muddy passageway. The girl, hugging the hoop to her body, disappeared down a side alley.

  “Wait!” I cried out, for I wanted to give her a coin for her trouble.

  But she didn’t turn.

  I could see the parish church now and the Alte Aula, the central university building, where a few gentlemen in fur-lined cloaks and tall hats gathered at the entrance. I approached one of them and inquired where I might find Dr. Rainer Fuchs, professor of botany. Again I spoke hoarsely to disguise the feminine timbre of my voice.

  At first the gentleman didn’t answer and scrutinized us carefully. I could smell the lavender perfume upon his cuffed gloves as he stroked his mustache. Maurizio had worn that scent sometimes to cover the smell of cadaver when he joined me after the anatomy lecture at the university. We often skirted the edge of that other world in the name of science, and it added an unexpected tang to our love, for we thought we knew more than others about brevity. A strange sort of arrogance to breed such deep affection. Yet there was more. In Mauro’s perfume his soul mingled yearning and fear, along with his own body’s warm scent of refuge. Lavender was less mask than entry.

  Once more, I addressed the gentleman. “Forgive me for neglecting to introduce myself—Gabriele Silvano Mondini, doctor of medicine from the University of Padua. We were forced to assume these plain traveling clothes when we came upon some trouble in the Schwarzwald.”

  The gentleman nodded and extended a dark, thickly sleeved arm toward a row of houses to indicate where the professors resided. The inner silk of his sleeve flashed red. He accompanied us and knocked upon a thick oak door with a heavy black ring in the center. A wizened man, sharp at every angle, answered. He tilted his head, assessing our presence, as he rolled his crooked hands in the soiled apron at his waist.

  “Is Master Fuchs at home?” our gentleman inquired.

  “Yes, yes,” croaked the man, “but he’s at work and doesn’t allow interruptions, mind you.”

  “Please inform him that Dr. Mondini has traveled a long way to pay him a visit and would like to know when it would be convenient to return,” I said.

  The spiky little man scowled and closed the door. Several minutes later I could hear Dr. Fuchs’s full-bodied bellow: “Let them in, then, Hans, show them in!”

  I thanked the gentleman who had led us here, and he bowed as he pulled his dusky cloak about him. The manservant opened the door, and a young boy leapt out to take care of the animals. He stared at us boldly, his scrubbed face a moon, his hair the color of damp barley. Lorenzo grinned at him and said, “Where to, young man? You lead the way!”

  The boy took his time, shifting his fresh look from one to the other of us, breaking into a smirk as he stared at my smooth skin and delicate features. I noticed the soft fuzz of a mustache on his upper lip and felt the lack on my own. Then he clasped the reins from Olmo and me and snicked to the two mules, leaving the others to Lorenzo.

  “This way, old man, if you”—his voice broke and shrilled—“can keep up!”

  Gangly Hans led us inside. I sighed with relief when we crossed the threshold and he shut out the world behind us. He directed Olmo to the kitchen as he walked ahead with knees that never straightened, guiding me into the dim study, where all the windows were shuttered against the chill but one, the window above the sloping desk of Dr. Fuchs. A feeble light surrounded the doctor, who stood facing away from me, his blue-white hair spread out upon his collar like a whisk. He stared at something in his hand and swung around to speak, thinking no doubt that I was my father. “Well, Mondini, I’m surprised you’ve returned—though I’ve something of yours here!”

  His hand extended a small boxwood case.

  Then he froze, spying my face.

  The case, however, sprang open with a smart click, for he’d inadvertently touched the tiny brass latch upon its back. The inner maroon velvet held two pairs of spectacles, one with baleen frames, the other with iron frames wrapped in green silk at the inner rim.

  “Yes, those would be my father’s,” I responded to the consternation in his slate-gray eyes.

  He abruptly snapped the spectacle case shut and dropped it into a half-open drawer. I turned to close the study door and was about to explain when Dr. Fuchs walked over to me, frowning.

  “You, sir, are an impostor! Dr. Mondini has no son, only a daughter in Venetia.”

  I removed my broad-brimmed hat, allowing him to see my face and my coppery hair, which fell to a crudely chopped length around my ears. “I am that daughter, sir, in disguise. The woods south of here aren’t kind to a woman.” My voice rose in tone again. I bowed my head. “Now you see Dr. Gabriella Silvana Mondini. If you need further proof—the spectacle case—I can describe it perfectly. The exterior is carved with two sirens, one on each side of the hinge. A wind curls from their mouths and ends with a flourish of fish. They are women i
n head and torso only; their arms are fins, and their lower bodies, dolphins. Inside the case are the words, ‘Do not be seduced by false visions. Death lives in every maiden.’ Though I would add that death lives equally in every man as well.”

  A long moment lapsed. Bells started up outside the room, severe and stony in their ringing. A spent fire hissed on the hearth to the left and I noticed the carved mantel, wondrously decorated with various leaf shapes.

  “Lift your head, then, dear lady, let me observe you,” Dr. Fuchs instructed me.

  I lifted my head and noticed that dried plants—rue, mint, vervain—hung from the ceiling, and mugwort was tied in a bundle above the niche where a bed lay, its down quilts mounded like winter drifts. All around the walls were shelves, cabinets, niches of books.

  “Hmm, yes. I do see the doctor in you.” Dr. Fuchs turned back to his desk and again withdrew the spectacle case from the drawer. “I owe you an apology. Please forgive my hasty judgment. Here, you must keep these for your father. I think he missed you a good deal, for he was troubled and wouldn’t speak but a few words about you, and those caused him pain, for he called you his helpmate and colleague. He was a man who could focus to a pinpoint of knowledge for days to the exclusion of all else. He greatly admired my herbals, you know. I remember once he spent days examining drawings and specimens of burdock, claiming some cure he’d learned from your mother’s mother for old women’s troubles. I only knew about its efficacy with tumors. I wasn’t clear about why he was so keen on it. But when I questioned him, he said there wasn’t enough attention given to women and those ailments of the moon.”

  I felt my heart quicken, and despite myself, my words rushed out: “My father and I were working on a complete book of diseases, to include those often overlooked by good doctors, namely the maladies of women. That is, until our work was interrupted by his departure.” Inwardly I was rather astounded that I’d said, “My father and I . . . our work . . .”