I ignored the fact that he would not address me as Dottoressa. I asked, “So you haven’t brought your wife to attend an anatomy, then?”
“Oh no, my wife would never come, though she has no trouble chopping the head off a pullet and yanking out its entrails! I’ve actually tried to persuade her to visit, for I believe the demonstration to be most enlightening. But she sees no point in it, calls it an unsightly spectacle. But there are other wives here I could introduce you to.” Professor Otterspeer sniffed slightly and withdrew a petit-point handkerchief for his florid nose.
“That won’t be necessary,” I replied. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I didn’t ask how they came by permission to dissect the body. Even though unclaimed, such a corpse in Italy would be buried in a pauper’s grave. In Padua, where for the most part the bodies of criminals were used, dissection was considered the worst possible punishment, inflicted in addition to the death sentence. Some people believed that when the dead were resurrected on Judgment Day, the dissected corpse would wander about searching for its lost parts.
“Well, my dear, your father has certainly raised you with the independence of a good son. I’ll leave you, then, to view our fine collection of skeletons. If you’ll excuse me, I must speak to some of my students.” He bowed and retreated.
When he spoke the word “father”—in fact, every time he’d spoken the word—I felt a numbing cut at the center of me. Now, in this setting, I missed my father more than ever.
I looked once more upon the cadaver, foreshortened from a distance, the head closest, the legs pointing straight away from me. Professor Otterspeer hadn’t replaced the cloth all the way, and the face lay partly exposed. The dark yellow stubble of the dead man’s beard stood out on his chin like random bits of chaff, and his stringy blond hair fell away from his broad brow.
I felt the vague shock I always felt in the presence of the dead, the unsettling sense of defilement, which usually passed like a brief nausea. The man’s life, after all, was gone. He was no more than a carcass of days, but one that would yield up its secret structures, the marvels of the inner body, even in death apparent. I couldn’t allow myself, though, to imagine the color of his eyes, nor what they had sought out in life. The plump young woman, perhaps, who would caress his face, the impoverished family he’d left behind. Or the joy afforded by his mule’s hot breath upon his frostbitten fingers. Nor did I wish to know his name.
Still, the nausea didn’t pass.
I turned away and surveyed the room. I remembered my father’s caution from the very first occasion I viewed a dissection. “If you fear the corpse,” he’d said gently, “be sure not to look at the face or the hands, Gabriella, for they are the most human.” What if my father was such a corpse now, mistaken for a vagrant, his parts cut open and identified, then tossed away in some foreign land as victuals for dogs, rats, and vultures? But I pushed this thought violently from my mind and continued to look around the wooden amphitheater.
Skeletons were arranged in various postures, the human ones holding banners with Latin phrases such as PULVIS ET UMBRA SUMUS and HOMO BULLA. The skeletons didn’t sadden me but felt familiar and faintly ridiculous, one with a plumed helmet, seated upon a fleshless nag, crossbow in hand, and one in the corner casually leaning on a shovel.
All around me, men with slit pantaloons and doublets, and a small number of women, some with many short slashes in their sleeves and bodices, according to the current fashion, gathered and conversed, their vivid colors alone making the chamber warmer now. I glanced out the long windows on either side of the room but could see nothing of the frozen garden. The fog had orphaned us from the rest of the world.
I walked around the amphitheater and examined the animal skeletons. The wolf, singularly designed for the hunt, seemed almost friendly to me, in that it so resembled a dog. On impulse I stroked the chalky, smooth slope between the eyes. How benign was bone that once was threatening. The weasel presented a sleek form and egg-shaped skull, as if the meal it so relished corresponded to the form of its thoughts. The still deer relayed the quickness of its bones.
But I was most drawn to certain animal skeletons that I hadn’t observed before, such as the elegant swan, emblem of poets. The skeleton was no less pure than the creature. The swan, by virtue of its very size, exhibited mythical bones. Yet along with its beauty there was a kind of monstrosity, especially in the serpentine neck, which seemed inordinately long and curved, surmounted by the skull, which resembled a leper clapper, while the heavier skeletal body and great wings hung behind with a contrary force. The pinions, broad as they were, could mirror those of a seraph. If swans were as fierce as geese, though, then they would be demon and angel in a single creature.
“Signorina?”
The professor had returned. He led me to one of the privileged benches near the front, clasping my elbow through my sleeve most firmly, as if I might fall without his support.
Most of the amphitheater afforded standing room only, between narrow wooden aisles and railings. The demonstrating physician—“a doctor, not a barber-surgeon, like those at the Royal College of Physicians in London,” whispered Professor Otterspeer—made his entrance with his two assistants, along with three musicians, who would be accompanying the event on viol, lute, and viola da gamba.
Dr. Zuyderduin, a man of middle age, robust figure, and copper hair, began with a small introduction and courtesies in Dutch, very little of which I understood. He began incising the skin evenly in each region, drawing from a remarkable assortment of flaying knives, scissors, scalpels, forceps, needles, spatulas, and grossing tools. He was assisted by the two students, one with sponge and bowl to sop up blood and fluids, and one who held back portions of skin or tissue when necessary, tacking the muscles on a wooden block, tying up or arranging segments of flesh.
The musicians behind them, meanwhile, bowed and plucked away at their instruments as if we were seated in a pleasant chamber among friends. The viol player sawed rather dreadfully, the viola da gamba man performed well enough, but the lutenist lingered with the notes as if he found their melancholy resonance in the corpse, sheep-gut strings companioning the man’s ligaments. His plucked notes came with an almost imperceptible delay born of deep courtesy. He watched the dissection as he played, while the others, perhaps repulsed, gazed toward the audience and the skeletons at the top of the amphitheater.
As Dr. Zuyderduin worked, he swayed when the lutenist played alone.
I never ceased my amazement at the calm demeanor of such doctors who, while fishing about in the soupy viscera, could pull out the definitive organ and expound upon its position in the body. The soul seated within the liver, the heart, and the brain or (some have argued) within the ephemeral pineal gland. How the body yielded itself, both capacious and densely pressed, like the thick pages of a foreign text that we must translate.
The doctor droned on in mingled Latin and Dutch now, as he disrobed the cadaver down to its pink bones. The audience murmured with the revelation of each new part as the commonplace body gave way to the secret body. The Dutch were more respectful in this regard. The audience in Padua often grew rowdy with discourse and raillery, which on occasion required a few sturdy men to push back the crowd and restore order or to remove some jeering youth from the balcony while the doctor waited, scowling, with his finger on a crucial tendon.
I glanced at the half-hidden face that I’d avoided, as if to test myself. From this angle I could see that the chin was unimposing and the lips generously curved even in their rigid state.
Wielding the scalpel with great precision, Dr. Zuyderduin proceeded, after finishing with the abdomen (as the viscera were the most susceptible to putrefaction) and the torso (displaying the lungs and heart), on to the head (sinking his hand deeply between the lobes of the brain, searching for the pineal gland, which corrupts so rapidly, though he didn’t find it) and then approached the sinewy arm.
As the demonstration progressed, the effluvium of the cadaver caused
us to press handkerchiefs and sleeves to our faces. The sprigs of rosemary cast about the floor did little to help, for the organs reeked with an acidic, musky, almost palpable stench. Fortunately the good doctor motioned for his assistants to remove the entrails in a bucket provided for that purpose. He turned down the flaps of skin to cover the abdomen and drew the linen sheet up around the cadaver’s chest.
He began to dissect the arm and the hand, which lay half-open, loosened from its previous state of rigor mortis, in a manner that seemed to invite a handclasp.
Let my death, then, be your gain. Let the touch that wounds, heal; the incision, instruct. These words, unbidden, seemed to come from my father, though I couldn’t recall the exact occasion on which he had spoken them—but some other presence that was not my father burdened me too. I struggled to push it out of mind.
Under my breath I recited the Latin names along with the doctor as he described the flexor muscles and their insertions into tendon. This calmed me. The corpse-fingers curled as he lifted the muscles. My father once told me that the great Vesalius and his fellows blindfolded one another and fingered bones from the charnel house outside Paris in order to memorize every one by touch.
In my lap, my left hand lay within the right, and I felt the fasciae, muscles, ligaments, and tendons as Dr. Zuyderduin communicated their placement and sectioned each part, turning back one palmar muscle and then another until the hand fairly bloomed upon the table among the scissors, pins, and clamps. How odd to be the subject of one’s own inquiry, as if the hand had an existence of its own, like a small, clever animal that carried out my wishes or clenched itself against me. According to Galen, the hand truly exemplified the whole. From the hand of God to the hand of flesh . . .
Professor Otterspeer touched my arm. The demonstration was over. The doctor, his assistants, and the viol and viola da gamba players were leaving. Only the lutenist remained, staring up at me.
My body trembled. Something was wrong.
“What is it, my dear?”
I quickly stepped down to the table, to the left side of the corpse, and noted his hair tied back with a thin red thread. I turned him on his side before anyone could stop me and felt him open in front, unexamined parts slipping out.
“What are you doing?” cried Professor Otterspeer.
There it was on the left leg. The small puckered mouth of the healed ulcer. I pressed my palm over the scar, scarcely able to breathe as I spoke: “I know this man.”
The professor pulled me away from the table. “How could you possibly? You’re overheated, my dear. Come outside, the brisk air will do you good.”
“No, I’m certain. He was no vagrant!”
“You’re mistaken, my dear. Come, I will take you home—”
“I know him, he is Wilhelm Lochner!” I cried, feeling sick. “That is his name!”
The men and women in the lingering crowd gawked at me. I stumbled ahead, refusing the professor’s dark blue sleeve, with its many small slits flashing russet cloth beneath. For the first time, I saw in that fashion a mockery of dissection.
I too owned such a blouse, and as I stumbled outside, gasping to draw in the cold air and clear my head, I vowed I would never wear it again.
CHAPTER 14
The Patient Owns the Remedy
Olmina put her arm around my shoulders as I sat shivering on the bed. “Are you ill, signorina?”
“No!” I said angrily, and I wept. “Wilhelm was on the slab, it was him they cut.”
“Oh no!” She put both hands to her face. “My dear. Are you sure?”
I turned my fierce face to hers. “I have no doubt.”
“Such a lively young man!”
“If it weren’t for my abrupt departure . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
“He must have followed me here. Remember what Signor Gradenigo said?”
It was her turn to be fierce. “You’ve got nothing to do with it.”
“I don’t know. I carry bad luck, like one of those plague women who survive while others die around them.”
“We don’t know what they carry . . . Maybe it’s a blessing so that they may help others.”
“Oh? And what about my father? He has fled me. Maybe he too has died.”
“Now your wits have gone astray, signorina. You’re no maiden-bane. No one holds the threads that tie us to this life. Not even God, if you ask me.”
“The Fates, then?”
“Maybe, yes—the Spinner, the Measurer, the Cutter.”
“But I feel my father now like a small ghost, as if he lived in the medicine chest in a bottle. What does it mean, if not that he’s gone?”
“It means you’re bereft of your reason, grieving for a living man. Let’s give Wilhelm his due and let the living be.” She lit a small candle, placed it in the window, and murmured a prayer for the young man of extravagant colors. Then she said, “You should sleep now, Gabriella.”
But I barely dozed that night. The next morning, I decided there was no longer anything to keep me in Leiden, for Dr. Otterspeer was the only one who’d truly communicated with my father during his stay. And I now found the closeness of Wilhelm’s body unbearable, for he couldn’t even be laid to rest in a pauper’s grave. The ground was frozen solid. His corpse would be slumped in the icy cellar of a university building near our cottage, waiting for spring, when he would be buried, along with the other dismembered dead from the anatomy theater, outside the town walls.
“That winter of your father’s solitude,” Dr. Otterspeer told me a few days later, “there was more to it, dear child, than I first told you.” He glanced at Olmina and she discreetly left us alone in the kitchen. Lorenzo had gone to the marketplace.
“Once, early on in his stay, when I brought him some supper, he answered the door fully clothed but discalced.” He lifted his eyebrows and opened his gray eyes wide, reliving the moment. “He said that he was effecting a new cure for his own malady. Understand—it was December—the stone floors were cold as ice.”
“What sort of cure?” I asked.
“He said that he meant to draw strength from the earth and shoes were an impediment. They blocked the elementals. I replied that he stood upon stone paving—was that not an obstacle? Then he marched through the frozen garden in his bare feet!”
The peculiar spectacle of my father deliberately striding in full dress but discalced upon the crackling white paths of the botanical garden reminded me of the solar man, in lesser measure. “But when he departed, was he wearing shoes?”
“Boots, boots for the journey, he said. But no more interference from soles when he was residing in a place! ‘If the monks can walk without shoes in observance of spirit, then I can walk without shoes in observance of cure and vigor,’ he explained.”
I envisioned my father pressing dark footprints between the rows of sleeping plants. If only he’d left such prints for me to follow.
“I didn’t understand what he was doing,” said Dr. Otterspeer. “But he was so convinced of his rarefied logic that he almost persuaded me that his experiment—if that’s what it was—might be of benefit. That is, until he became so solitary he was unapproachable.”
I penned a brief note to notify Dr. Fuchs of Wilhelm Lochner’s death, though I delayed sending it. Most likely he would blame me for a double theft, the death of his student and the spiriting away of my father’s papers. Though worse by far would be the loss of his excellent student, for a good mentor like Dr. Fuchs often doubled as a father to his several scholar-sons. At last I sent the letter with a desolate heart. Even though Wilhelm hadn’t been, nor would be, lover, I thought of him as friend. And that word lay like a hand on my heart. Friend. I might have corresponded with him or simply recalled his wonderful, gaudy presence. Now he was butchered, an instrument of science. And I was more alone in the world than before.
Olmina and I began packing while the fog curled and uncurled around us, appearing and disappearing through the gate to the frozen ga
rden. I packed my father’s things in a small satchel within my larger one. Shoes, glasses, notes.
As she packed, Olmina complained, “Signorina, it’s the middle of December. Can’t we wait until March? You’re courting your death with this blind will of yours!”
“What did you say?” I asked, turning away from the window where I stood.
She began moving about my room in a sudden burst of activity, opening drawers and pulling out clothes from the depths of the armoire. Then she spoke again. “You want to force your father out of the thicket! You want the world to yield to you, but you’re no princess or queen! And even queens sometimes hang by their ankles!” Olmina went red and then abruptly thrust her face into her blue apron and ran out of the room, weeping.
I opened the window and stuck my face into the cold air. Shingles of ice slid from the roofs, heated by the chimneys. Icicles shattered like glass or thudded upon the snow. Passersby with miserable faces slogged through the cold slush and mud of the street below. Olmina was right.
Truly it was odd to be gripped by urgency to find my father now, when he’d been gone for so many years. What difference did waiting a month or even a year make? I felt my father to be in some form of danger from a rambling mind, but was I perhaps the one in danger from the opposite? A mind clenched, fixed upon this search?
We should wait until spring and then make our way to Edenburg in Scotia.
I’d almost set my mind to this course of action, when Lorenzo returned from trading words with a few sailors as he gathered our supplies. They’d warned against waiting till March, when the winds gust fiercely in the German Sea.
In the end we compromised: we waited a week to obtain ship’s passage to Edenburg.
In the meantime I wrote a letter to Dr. Hamish Urquhart, professor of natural philosophy in that city, requesting his help with lodging. My father had recommended him highly.
The Book of Madness and Cures Page 17