The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  After rising late the next day, I found myself of two minds. Wilhelm intrigued and delighted me, but already I doubted his intentions. Was he simply curious, or an agent of Dr. Fuchs, seeking information about my father?

  In any event, I wanted to recover my father’s papers.

  Dr. Fuchs would deny that he had them, so I didn’t bother to ask. Instead I persuaded him that I required the kind use of his library. Unfortunately he remained there in the room with me, writing at his own slanted desk for more than two hours while I pored over his voluminous herbals. All the while, I observed in detail the contents of his study, the dark wood bookshelves, the drawers—in particular the desk drawer where he kept his papers under ornate brass lock and key.

  A couple of days passed like this. Outside, winter yielded a little and the enlivening sun returned. I’d learned as much as I could here from Dr. Fuchs and decided, after studying my maps and recalling one of my father’s letters, in which he had fervently mentioned Leiden (“a city of intellectual fires even in deadest of winter”), that Leiden would be our next destination. I sent a letter ahead to Professor Otterspeer, a colleague and friend of my father (who’d stayed with him in Leiden), to ask him to procure us lodging. Then I informed Dr. Fuchs of my plans to leave. He didn’t attempt to dissuade me, and I grew anxious about obtaining my father’s papers. Finally, the evening before we were to depart, I requested a last opportunity with the books.

  “Of course, of course, my dear,” Dr. Fuchs consented. “And I should like to read some of your work this evening too, before you continue your journey.”

  “Perhaps we could share notes, if you would privilege me with a glance at your volume.”

  “That would be impossible.” The doctor looked at me askance. “I show no one my work until it is finished.”

  I nodded in assent, although privately I was annoyed at his refusal.

  That evening, Olmina joined us in the study. Dr. Fuchs unlocked his desk, pulling out his folio of papers. Then Olmina gently touched his elbow. “Would you like me to prepare some herbal decoction for you, sir? Signorina Gabriella here can vouch for my skill.”

  He pivoted heavily on his chair to face her, his moist eyes fixed gently on hers. “Yes, perhaps something to ease my stomach. I’m feeling dyspeptic tonight.”

  “Would you like to choose your own herbs, then?” Olmina cannily suggested.

  “Ah yes, that would be an excellent idea.”

  Olmina extended her arm and shoulder to him, for he was very arthritic and, like many gentlemen of advanced age, suffered from stiff joints. He stared at his feet and leaned into her as they moved toward the door. She glanced at me over her shoulder, indicating the open drawer with her eyes. “We’ll return shortly, signorina.”

  As soon as they left, I quickly examined the contents of the drawer, various loose pages of writings and some botanical drawings. There, beneath a folio containing watercolors of tubers, I glimpsed my father’s unsteady script, a writing that seemed scrawled on the surface of moving water.

  Quickly I clasped the papers in their plain folio and tucked them into my skirt band, then hurried upstairs to hide them. When I returned, Olmina and Dr. Fuchs still hadn’t come back. I assumed my place by the fire once more and read about the nature of kohlrabi (Brassica raposa) and its purifying benefits.

  When they returned, Dr. Fuchs didn’t sit at his desk but instead settled heavily in the chair opposite me, where he motioned for Olmina to draw up a seat too. He sipped his hot tea slowly, slurping loudly.

  “Gabriella, there is something I must tell you.” He paused. “I’ve hesitated to say this earlier, but . . . your father was no great friend of mine. He copied some of the notes from my materia medica and then refused to acknowledge it.” He watched my face to gauge my reaction. I remained calm, but his dyspepsia got the better of him, for he muttered crossly, “If you ask me, your father is the worst sort of scholar, a thief! When he left, furtively, one of the copies of my materia medica was missing. It was no coincidence, understand? If you find him, you must return it to me!”

  I looked down at the engraving of a monstrous cabbage.

  “Well, what do you say to that?” he asked, perturbed by my silence.

  “If my father committed any offense, I’ll make sure that your work is returned to you, though I can’t believe he would pilfer the work of others.” I spoke boldly, even as I felt a tense knot of doubt forming in my gut.

  Dr. Fuchs frowned, then yawned widely, showing his worn molars and three holes in the gums where teeth had been pulled. His eyelids drooped heavily and he rose clumsily with Olmina’s help. Then, to my horror, he shuffled back over to his desk. What if he notices that I’ve tampered with his papers? I thought.

  He shifted them about and paused as if inspecting something. “You may think he’d never steal,” he said, turning to me, “but we never really know the ones close to us.” Now the doctor spoke thickly. “Don’t resume to know your father—uh, er, presume, I mean.” He gathered his papers, stopped again, and tapped his fingers upon the desk. What if, in a strange reversal, he decides to return my father’s pages to me?

  But he put his own work in the folio, tucking it away in the drawer, then fumbled with the key in its tiny lock.

  “I’m very tired, must ask you to excuse me.” He struggled for speech, then staggered toward his bed in its niche and plopped facedown upon the mattress. Olmina smiled at me; she’d mixed a sleeping draft for him. Together we rolled him onto his side toward the wall beneath a hanging clump of mugwort, thought to bring pleasant dreams. Within a few minutes he was grating and gasping. Olmina pushed a pillow under his head, removed his slippers, and drew up the quilt, and then his snores subsided a little. She pulled the bed-curtains.

  After we left the doctor and began to climb the stairs to our room, she whispered, eyes gleaming with a certain mischief, “Do you have the pages?”

  “Yes, they’re in my satchel. Thank you, Olmina.”

  “Good! I’ll just go say goodnight to Lorenzo.”

  And there he was, in fact, watching us keenly from the door to the kitchen.

  Dr. Fuchs groggily sent us on our way early the next morning, our mules well laden with stores—hams, blood sausages, cheeses, and flatbreads—thanks to Lorenzo’s shrewd bargaining at the marketplace.

  My good man stood close by and helped me to mount Fedele. The botanist watched us for a moment, red faced in the prickling cold, and then lumbered back into his house. My mind kept wandering to Wilhelm—striding the nearby streets, or bent to a book at the university library, cheering the place with his vivid colors. The night I’d held his arm, the damp wool serge of his cape smelled like home. I wanted to say good-bye to that gentle man. My palm burned. I wanted to rest my hand on his face, his neck, feel the coarse bristles of unshaven beard. To laugh at his bright clumsiness.

  Lorenzo smacked the rump of my mule. “Are we ready to leave, then, Signorina Mondini? Want to hold the reins?” For I’d let them fall and now he handed them back to me.

  Hans alone remained to see us off. Briefly I considered leaving word for Wilhelm with the manservant but decided against it. He had already proved himself indiscreet.

  I was anxious now to be on our way. I didn’t want to be in the vicinity when Dr. Fuchs discovered that I’d reclaimed my father’s writings.

  Hans mumbled some words I couldn’t understand. I thought he might be offering some sort of apology, perhaps for his earlier lack of prudence, but then he chuckled. Later, Lorenzo told me that the rascal had said, “Good luck to you travelers, for you’ll never be seen round here again, I’ll wager, with this winter at your heels!”

  And so it seemed that we were trying to outrun the knifing cold for the whole next leg of our journey. We rode just ahead of a heavy storm front for two days to Bade and then boarded a sailing barge on the Rhin to finish the journey to Leiden.

  CHAPTER 12

  Lost Governance of the Whole

  Some travelers l
ike to read about the places they visit in the fine or fantastic accounts of their fellows on the road. Others like to read the work of great persons who’ve resided in those towns or cities they’ll attain. Still others revel in the local tales shared at taverns and inns. I read and reread my father’s letters to find out how the road or the town ahead might reveal him.

  Dear Gabriella,

  I have secluded myself in the Hollant winter. Dr. Otterspeer, meaning well, strives to draw me out to dinners and dissections, to small conversations and erudite ones, but I don’t have the heart for it. Especially after my stay with Dr. Fuchs, who vented his distasteful suspicions upon me. Something is slipping away . . . Colleagues are not the friends they once were. We are all grown bitter. Even my mild servants exasperate me with their ordinary questions: What fish would you like from the market, sir, what cheese, what ale? What, what, what. Make your own damnable choices, I thunder at them, and leave me alone! Ah, I don’t doubt you’ve known these moods, daughter. These are the days I work up a fury at myself, like a dog tearing at its fur . . . Best to end this letter now and stop my growling. Better yet, to not even send this letter!

  Your father,

  Dottor Ernesto Bartolomeo Mondini

  But he’d sent it anyway, this letter that followed his investigations of solar madness in Tübingen.

  Nightly I slept with my father’s pages beneath me to prevent Olmina from reading them. Sometimes she idly asked about the notes. “What do they say, your father’s pages? Do they bring you comfort, signorina?”

  “Oh, he’s simply expounding on certain ailments brought about by excessive sun.”

  “Ah,” she said with a sigh, nudging a place next to me on the deck, where we sat on a crate of half-frozen cheese. “It must be a consolation, then, with all this freezing weather. Though it would be beautiful land, wouldn’t it, if it weren’t for the fact that we’re in it.”

  “You’re right about that,” Lorenzo said as he groomed one of the mules to pass the time. “Does this river ever end?”

  “Now, where’s your sense of adventure?” I teased.

  “I lost that in the lake, I think.”

  “Ah, so did I.” I stared at the black water thickening to ice near the banks.

  “Oh, let’s think of something to banish the gloom,” Olmina cried. “Would you read to us a little to pass the time? Let’s hear about those that mislaid their brains on account of the sun.”

  “No, actually my father’s notes are rather dry and uninteresting in the end,” I answered in a surly tone. For the truth was, I was disturbed by the strange orbits of his thoughts.

  NOTES TOWARD MANIFESTATIONS OF SOLAR MADNESS, CORRELATIVE TO LUNACY

  Instances of sun fevers, unnatural indolence, and solar bedevilment. The sufferer believes himself to be kin to the fire in the sky and wanders naked, shedding his light! The deluded man then sees himself as a god who moves slowly, generates his own heat, emanates excessive sanguinity, believes others are circling him like the sun compassed by six planets in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Or is this the kindling of suicide? Why, he must wonder in cooler moments, does he suffer this grandeur? The man afflicted with sun stands in opposition to a man troubled by that other celestial body, the moon, which quickens and slows, disappears in paltry reflection of the larger orb or in shadow of the earth . . . I disappear. How might I find relief? For I’ve lost governance of the whole . . . If the sun could somehow be employed to counterbalance the effects of lunar increase, then the unease, the disease of the lesser body, might subside . . . I must look into this with others of like intolerance. The circular nature of the madness, a mockery of the sacred, condemns a man to wandering.

  What did it mean—lost governance of the whole? I worried about the rambling nature of these notes: I didn’t want anyone, not even Olmina, to know about this.

  Olmina frowned and looked away. How much did she really understand about my father’s possible illness? No, she couldn’t know. He’d hidden it so well. Unless my mother had confided in her. Or did we all really know and hide it from ourselves, calling it a quirk or volatility? When truly his mind may have loosened every month. Olmina hooked her elbow through mine as if she understood, and we leaned against one another, sharing our warmth.

  “I can tell you about a different kind of light that addles brains up in the mountains,” said Lorenzo, sitting on a bale next to Fedele. He waved his leather currycomb in the air, indicating the Dolomiti.

  “What sort of light is that?” I asked, curious.

  “The ghost trees.” Lorenzo paused, pulling hairs clotted with dirt out of the comb. “I was only a boy, and I had to bring the wood in for the fire. But the midsummer sun had gone down . . .”

  “Go on, now,” urged Olmina, to my surprise. Usually she’d huff at such tales.

  “The woodpile was finished, so my father told me to go into the woods, where sometimes a wolf flashed between the trees. I was frightened, but I knew a place where a great tree had fallen in the wind and broken many branches on the way down. I meant to gather them by the light of the half-moon. But when I got to the place, it was lit up and not by the moon. The tree gave off its own light.”

  “How could that be?” murmured Olmina, rapt as a child.

  “It was the ghost of it, wrapped round it like a veil or a shroud. It sort of rippled, and I felt it was friendly to me. As I gathered some branches, I touched it.”

  “Did it feel like anything?” I asked.

  “Like sticking your hand in a slow, cold stream. Then I thought it coveted me and would take me. I ran all the way back to our hut, dropping branches along the way. My father, who I thought was going to whip me, instead clutched me to him. ‘Figlio mio,’ he said, ‘don’t ever go out there again unless I’m with you. Tomorrow we’ll take the ax and cut it up.’ ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ said my mother fiercely. ‘You’ll be stricken with the shadows!’ ”

  “What’s that?” asked Olmina.

  “You can’t ever get them out of your vision—branches sawing at the edge of your sight. Look left and they stretch left. Look down and they fall. Look up and they lift their rough fingers. Men go mad after a while, axing the air to try to clear the thickets from their eyes.”

  We were silent then, each in our own thoughts, observing the smoke rising from hamlets along the shore, mute with cold. Seagulls on sandbars huddled in the snow of their bodies. Only the river spoke.

  Later that night after Olmina fell asleep, I began writing in response to my mother’s last letter, loath as I was to prod her vexation and receive another earful.

  My dear mamma,

  You may admonish me for thinking my father ill or lost, and you mention his mania for the book, for wandering. But I wonder now if there is something else that you couldn’t tell me all these years. I’m asking about madness in the family, my father’s Cipriot branch. I’d like to know what you’ve heard and whether my father ever crossed over, ever descended into that terrible place where the true world disappears. This may have bearing on whether I return, so you would do well to be forthcoming with me. I’m sorry I’m not the daughter you wished, nor are you the mother for whom I longed even though in the end that longing would be better directed to spirit or to Olmina. I wish you no ill. So there is a sad balance between our sorrows. Candor could give us a fulcrum toward change, if you wished it.

  1 November 1590

  Your daughter, Gabriella

  As we drifted past the snow-heaped walls and terraces of Worms, we lost one of the mules to a freeze. The poor creatures had stood roped together on deck under blankets at night, pressed into one another, facing into wind or snow. Lorenzo spoke to them, brushed them down, fed them, and took them ashore to relieve themselves on the longer stopovers. But one mule on the outside of the group refused to eat, and that morning we found him seemingly asleep but gone stiff, showing his teeth in the final grimace.

  “Well,” muttered Lorenzo, “he’s gone home to a far better c
lime.”

  “Oh, Lorenzo, how can we keep the others safe?” I cried as I knelt and stroked the dead mule’s neck (so rigid under my hand), aware of the futility of my gesture, stung with shame for my part in his death. I’d been wrong about the weather, though it had improved over the past few days. November had arrived gnashing with ice and blizzard. We should have stayed longer with Dr. Fuchs.

  “Give them our blankets,” he answered without pause.

  So we did. We also convinced the captain of the river barge to stack goods around our remaining five mules to create a makeshift stall. Now we all wore every bit of clothing we owned, and ate and slept in our many layers. Whenever I sat up on deck, watching the other sailing barges and ships, the shoreline and towns, pass by, I found a place near the mules and stroked them.

  Olmina sang to them.

  Lorenzo tended them.

  I thought of Wilhelm and then pushed him out of my mind. I couldn’t afford affection. I had to keep moving toward my father.

  After twelve days, the grisaille fields and icy canals of Hollant appeared at last. We had arrived at Leiden.

  We disembarked gratefully, barely knowing how to walk on land again, though the mules frisked and kicked up their hooves with joy after Lorenzo managed to half lead, half heave them down the gangplank. We asked directions to the Hortus Botanicus, where my father’s colleague Professor Otterspeer’s home was located—the helpful, bundled-up passersby viewed us with curious smiles, and I felt welcomed—and soon we found our way there.

  When we called upon Professor Otterspeer, we were informed he had unexpectedly departed to visit an ailing sister for a week. Before this news could disturb us, the caretaker, a stout middle-aged man, informed me the professor had kindly obtained a place for us to stay. He led us to a small two-story wood-and-brick cottage just outside the Hortus Botanicus walls.