The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  “Ah, very ambitious, I’m sure!”

  “I hope to rejoin him when I discover his whereabouts. Have you received any word from him?”

  “No, not for a year or more.”

  My breath sank, as if weighted with stones.

  Then the professor of botany continued, slightly irritated: “That letter bore no indication of its origin, with his thoughts running scattershot. I’d asked him to collect unusual plants for me, to add to my collection, but he was not forthcoming with the eloquent descriptions of place as was previously his habit. For as single-minded as he could be, he could also be diffuse.”

  “I’d very much like to read the letter, if you’d permit me,” I requested. “Perhaps it will yield some bit of information for my search, for it seems that my father has disappeared.”

  “Oh! That is disturbing news.” Dr. Fuchs raised his eyebrows, then turned back to his desk, opened a small drawer, and pulled out a single folded sheet of paper from a bundle of many. “Peculiar, isn’t it, that your father, who customarily wrote several pages, sent me this single sheet and a pressed bulb, which he failed to identify?”

  A small sliced cross section of a bulb with spidery roots stuck to the paper. Surely Dr. Fuchs recognized the hyacinth, whose fresh bulb was poisonous, though it was styptic and diuretic when dry and powdered. What message was here? The hyacinth could also be made into a bookbinding glue. Was this a challenge or a good-natured jibe at Dr. Fuchs: among the two men, whose book would be published first? I sensed there was something he wasn’t telling me.

  I perused the letter quickly and then handed it back to him. A couple of sentences stood out from the others. I would like to study the world like a solitary in a tree and remain there for the rest of my days, but still I travel, aimlessly . . . I have based my life upon the ordering and naming of things, and now I wish to be nameless.

  I touched his spectacle case in my pocket with a sudden recognition. Without his eyeglasses, he could not see things clearly.

  I had only to close my left eye to grasp this, for my right eye was marred by the same poor vision that also troubled my father. The room lost definition and gained shadow. Then I opened both eyes. The room sprang forward into clarity again. For a moment I imagined my father squinting toward the shape of the world, though I was sure by now he would’ve had new eyeglasses ground. Yet as I gathered from this dispatch, there was another kind of vision eluding him.

  Dr. Fuchs leveled his gaze at me with keen curiosity. “You must have a well-stocked medicine chest. When you’ve rested I’d like very much to take a look at it.”

  I stared into the dying fire. “My medicine chest was lost in Lake Costentz, along with my horse. I must procure new stores of herbs and remedies.” I shivered involuntarily. “The loss was great—several theriacs came from my father’s own recipes.”

  The doctor sighed, disappointed. Then he called out, “Hans, Hans! Fetch the logs, stir the fire, the lady is cold!”

  “Please! Dr. Fuchs, don’t call me ‘lady’!” Suddenly I recalled the stinging glance the Widow Gudrun had given me when I blurted out her secret—now I fully understood it. “I want to remain a man for a while longer. I still don’t feel safe, for the bishop’s men may have followed us here. I beg you to protect my disguise.”

  “As you wish,” answered the professor, tipping his head back slightly to inspect me once more, pressing his lips together in a slit, and protruding his paunch. “Though the bishop’s reach does not extend here.” Then, in a low voice, he added, “Hans is nearly deaf. I doubt that he heard me.”

  He took my hand, staring at my strong fingers, and then led me from the room. “I’ll show you to your sleeping quarters. Please return when you are refreshed and we’ll take a light supper together. My sister has a son who is rather slight. I think his doublet and breeches will suit you. Let’s try to find some clothes more befitting a wo—” He smiled. “Forgive me, a man of your class!”

  The room I was given was well appointed but drafty.

  I rose and moved about to warm myself and added an oak log to the fire. I pulled a coarse sweater over my nightshirt and drawers. Then I began one of those pointless tasks that sometimes comforts one: making a list. I removed all my garments from the walnut trunk and drawers to consider what I might need for the next part of the journey. The oak log finally spit and flared among the embers, lighting up the narrow chamber. How odd to see all my things empty of me. I turned to my clothing as one would turn to scraps of a geography that must be pasted to a sphere. Even the regions that were missing, the lost things, should be noted.

  A pair of lady’s leather slippers tied with latchets from Padua

  A lace collar from Burano

  My hand mirror

  The medicine chest

  All lost in Lake Costentz.

  A skirt soiled by horse blood discarded in Überlingen

  Two brocade dresses abandoned in the Schwarzwald

  My vocation

  I missed the rounds of patient visitations, the practice of cures. For hadn’t I put on the profession of my father? Now vanished, he occupied the whole globe. Still. In his letters he’d brought me to the places he traveled. He’d tried to give reason for leaving me behind. There was the letter from Scotia:

  March 1585

  Dear Gabriella,

  May this letter find you in good health and able vocation. I trust all your wants are being met, and remember, you may always request help from Dottor Cardano if you are in need of a man’s advice with financial or professional matters. I know the guild members in Venetia resented your presence even when I was there and so may cause you some chagrin. Hold firm to the purpose of physick, to your work. Dear Daughter, I do miss your help with the copying and arrangement of my notes for The Book of Diseases, for sometimes I can’t even read my own writing (this is not from feeble vision, only the terrible recurrence of untamed thoughts). I’m reminded, however, that it is best that you remained there in Venetia, at least for now, as I met with an instance of the dangerous jail fever here in Scotia. I must confess shame at my own cowardice, because I could do no more than flee after being called to treat a gentleman recently released from prison (by all reports innocent). I recognized, from accounts I’ve read, the dreaded fever that just a few years ago devastated so many in Oxford, the Black Assize, when tainted prisoners fatally infected the court itself and then many hundreds beyond its purview. Of course I noted the symptoms at once, the fever and red wheals upon the chest, back, and arms, some stinking of gangrene. The words of Foscatero blazed in my mind, defining contagion that “passes from one thing to another, and is originally caused by infection of the imperceptible particles.” I could not touch him. My fear that the imperceptible could leap from the suffering man to my own person overcame my most honorable desires as a physician. As in the plague of 1575, when our city was besieged by invisible particles, I took flight without thinking, How can I alleviate this horror? I don’t feel absolved now by the apparent truth that nothing could be done. I only feel absolved in the case of that long-ago Venetian plague by the fact that in escaping to the cottage on my brother’s land in Padua, I saved your life and that of your mother. How does one do no harm? You and I, Daughter, have discussed this many times, housebound by pelting rainstorms when sky merged with sea and we couldn’t tend our patients. What is the least harm? This question is ever before me, a trembling needle that never quite rests on its compass face. Therefore, to answer the disquiet of your last letter, I do not abandon you. I protect you.

  Your father, even in distance,

  Dottor Ernesto Bartolomeo Mondini

  Despite the fire beside me, my chilled body felt as though it barely belonged to me. Would I find myself only when I found my father? I’d lived a good many years without him, but I now saw those years in some way adrift. Even when I wasn’t thinking of my father, I was always waiting for him to return.

  The following morning the shutters on my windows shook with bursts of brisk
wind, hung silent, then rattled again. Something dropped from the roof, knocking first against a ledge, then thudding to the street below, a loosened roof tile, a gable hinge, or one of those pulleys used to lift foodstuffs to the upper floors. The whole town, in fact, was losing bits of itself as the raw winter wind buffeted the houses, though it was still only October.

  I dressed and sat at the window seat overlooking the soiled banks of snow dully lit by a gray afternoon. The dangerous weather would prevent us from traveling any farther. How long would we be delayed?

  I heard a firm knock at the door.

  “Come in,” I murmured.

  Dr. Fuchs lumbered in, Olmina behind him with a tray of fragrant mint tea, which she placed on a small marquetry table inlaid with light wood vining through dark.

  “I have a letter for you, dear lady,” he announced, and he examined the room as if to discover something about me by the arrangement of my things. Or maybe he was hoping that I’d lied about the medicine chest out of proprietary intent and he’d find it here. He moved with a kind of ceremony, setting the letter carefully on the thick sill with two hands. I recognized my mother’s handwriting at once.

  “I beg your pardon, Dr. Fuchs. I’d like to read this alone,” I said, excusing myself, and then when I saw his expectant features fall, I added, “I’ll come down later, and if you’d be so kind, we can peruse your marvelous herbarium and discuss the medicinal qualities of the plants.”

  “Yes, of course, the herbarium.” His brow lightened somewhat. “I have a great many labels to pen. There are still so many plants in the presses from summer efflorescence that must be removed. The garden always grows far ahead of me, I’m afraid. My collections will certainly outlive me!” he exclaimed good-naturedly, shrugging his shoulders. I smiled to notice that, in fact, a crumpled alder leaf lay stuck to his woolen shirt.

  As soon as he clunked down the stairs, I opened the letter, at the top of which Dr. Cardano had written, “Signorina Gabriella, I’ve forwarded this letter at your mother’s request. May it find you in good humor. Your friend (under full moon and new), Dr. Cardano.” That was a troublesome reference at the end, meaning, I suppose, “In ill health and good, whether mad or sound of mind.”

  I turned to my mother’s tight cursive, vexed that Dr. Cardano had probably read her words. Her lengthy sentences ran all the way to the edges of the page and allowed no margins for one to breathe.

  Dear Gabriella,

  My most difficult daughter, yes, you are disobliging, as you sign your letter. But do you forget? Your father charged you to remain in Venetia. To care for me and, I might add, to care for yourself. But you were ever running away to explore—the garden, where a large black bee careened (you grasped it and were stung), the wharf (you might have been stolen), the marketplace (you were lost for half the day). But the more I held you, the more you squirmed to get away. I have never understood. And now, you believe you can be independent like a man and go wandering in search of your father, facing so many dangers. Come home, my girl. Your father has only bequeathed you a void—if he wanted to return, he would have. What’s the use of chasing after him? His servants would have sent word if something had happened to him. This mania of yours, which I also believe has been brought on by those books you are constantly reading, which are not fit for a young woman (the parts of the body!), has erased your good sense. I’ve seen this obsession before in your father, and it led him to reject all things that didn’t serve his studies. While this may be more seemly in a man, it is only unfortunate in a woman. I have always had to contend with your father’s indulgence of you, and now see the result—a daughter who doesn’t know her place in the world! I must speak my mind more openly: I’ve had a dream whose import I do not doubt. Your father was spellbound by a young linden in the form of a woman. Her skin shone green as moss and he strode into the woods with her. I cried out for him but he never turned. Your father is not lost or ill. He abandoned us under pretense of this book. Many years ago he was lulled by the women who were born with the caul, those cunning witches in the mountains who believe their healings to be true. Now his mania may have taken him farther afield, though he has always been leaving us. But Daughter, I have always had you. Please forget him and come home.

  9 September 1590

  Your ill-fated mother,

  Signora Alessandra Serena Mondini

  He was always leaving. I clenched the letter in my hand. My mother could twist the truth while still conserving some part of it. She knew him in a way I did not. Had their early affection been marred by some bluster (on his part, on hers)? Maybe neither of them could overcome the rash words that provoked old sorrow.

  “Il vento impetuoso accende il fuoco oppure lo spegne, signorina,” Olmina cautioned. The impetuous wind can ignite the fire or put it out. She was well acquainted with the grievances in the letter. Their repetition oddly sustained my mother, even as they wore down the people around her. She must have felt powerless. The recitation of grievances was strange balm. I too had felt it. But I never shared my grating sadness with her. Olmina rose from her chair to console me, but I waved her away.

  I’d heard that story of the Benandanti many times, how my mother believed my father was seduced by one of the green witches with their herbal decoctions and willow staffs. Only a few years after he’d left, she’d begun her life anew in the glittering drawing rooms of Venetia. She often lay abed till midday, and then after hours of preparation (the white powder on the face and bosom, eye kohl, shrewdly placed beauty spot, and lip and cheek color, the jewels forbidden by the sumptuary laws—nonetheless she had secret pockets sewn into her skirt so that she could remove a pearl necklace or faceted ruby earrings at will), with poor Milena, her maidservant, in tow, my mother clattered down the stairs in her cioppini. She’d engaged a gondola to a friend’s house for an afternoon and evening of gilded chatter and piquant rumor: who forked whom, who knifed whom, what the priest said in the confessional, what the Council of Ten confided to the little courtesan of Thessalonica, and how she parlayed that confidence.

  These were my mother’s concerns, interrupted only by lute playing and supper. Perhaps she no longer cared for my father, or perhaps she hid herself, a frightened girl, beneath all the frippery and sharp-tongued scorn. I didn’t know.

  Still, her letter burned in my mind. I considered, what if my father had truly disavowed us? He was always leaving us. Then this final disappearance was only a continuation of what had come before. No. I couldn’t believe it.

  We’d extended our stay in Tübingen with Dr. Fuchs because of the harsh weather. After a week, I rarely ventured out into the streets of the city, for even as a man without voluminous hems to worry about, I hated the stinging cold and foul mud that spattered everything. The wind swept the acrid stenches of tannery, slaughterhouse, and dung from the lower town up toward the university and the castle and drenched us all in its ill vapors. At times I took refuge in the parish church; its steep Protestant arches seemed a vaulted stone forest. The quiet appeased me and I liked the plain sounds of the Protestant bells, distinct from Catholic bells in their ringing.

  Once, I was accosted by a rough Swabian student who, not knowing I was a woman but having overheard my Venetian accent at the door, took me for some kind of intruder. “Halt there, foreigner! This is a sacred place for Protestants, not the trough at which Catholics feed!” (Why he’d assume that every stranger was a Catholic, I’ve no idea.) He shoved my shoulder and pushed me beneath an archway near the entrance.

  I said nothing. The smell of frozen stone pricked my breath keenly as a blade. Other students gathered behind him, leering.

  “Leave him be, he doesn’t understand you,” said another student.

  I couldn’t see this new voice well in the dim light but only detected a black hat that spilled yellow curls from beneath its rim.

  “He shouldn’t be here,” grumbled the Swabian, his nose flat as a spatula.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to offend,” I blurted in br
oken German. “This church—very beautiful. Not a Catholic, not a Catholic,” I lied, waving my hands before me in remonstration. Suddenly Olmo burst forth, fresh from the Marketplatz, bread basket in arm, loaves poking out, and pulled me out of the corner so quickly the others were too startled to respond.

  “That’s very fine!” shouted the Swabian after us. “You have to be rescued by your manservant, eh?” I shot a glance back over my shoulder. They all laughed—except for the one with yellow curls.

  I noticed him later, following us back to Dr. Fuchs’s house. He knocked on the door several minutes after we returned, and Hans opened it, grumbling.

  “I’d like to speak to the young man who just returned with his manservant,” said the tall man, his bright hair gathering the dry snow that began to fall heavily and steadily around him. I stood upstairs, watching him through the window. “You remember me—one of Dr. Fuchs’s students, Wilhelm Lochner.”

  The breath of his words hung visibly in puffs before the jutting face of Hans.

  “Can’t see them, they’re indisposed now,” Hans replied. “You know these foreign ladies—the doctor and her maidservant can’t take much of our cold weather, ha!” he spouted. I nearly gasped. Then, realizing his mistake, Hans thrust the door shut without a word.

  The young man, Wilhelm Lochner, looked confused. He stared upward toward the wavy panes of leaded glass and the thick velvet curtain that hid me from view. As I peered down at him, he appeared to be underwater, eyes blue-silver as coin, the snow churning around him like whitewater at the rudder of a ship. I studied his black cloak, black and yellow striped breeches, and yellow hose, which revealed supple calves. Wilhelm stood there for a while, staring at one window and another, and then at the brisk little stream, channeled from the Neckar, that ran at the edge of the street behind him. He waited for so long that when he left, a dark hollow of earth remained where he had stood in the dull broadloom of snow.