The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  Draw out the pain. I had come to accept that I was driven away from Venetia as much as I was driven toward my father. I had presented myself in every city with such admirable aims: to follow his journey and discover his whereabouts. Did I wish to surpass my father in the art of physick, while lacking the full breadth of his skills? Was I truly a fraud without him? No, I was less experienced and yet I had within me a kind of observation and instinct that failed in him.

  Here in the academy I remained a shadow, consoled by the long, polished tables, podiums, great chairs, and benches that harked back to the library of Padua. This was where it all began, the sanctuary of my father. Perhaps the only way I’d ever really know him would be through words and their spent heat. For it was my father who had taught me to love books for themselves, the smell of the vellum and paper, the rare authority of the pages. Here, do you see this marvelous book? The skins of one hundred and eighty-two sheep! he once pronounced, as he slapped his hand down on the stamped leather cover boards. The book is a flock, a jewel, a cemetery, a lantern, a garden, a piss pot! Pigments ground of precious minerals, charred bone, lamp soot, rare plants and insects, pigments formed of the corrosion of copper plates suspended above urine.

  One afternoon, Hamish interrupted my reading of a gem-like book of hours, a page where I often lingered, San Geronimo in the Wilderness, his psalms compiled for the sick and the infirm. “I’ve worried for you.” Hamish lightly clasped my left shoulder. “Worried that the shadow of the father also lay upon the daughter. I sent a note a week ago inviting you to walk with me but never received an answer.”

  His hand pressed gently through several layers of wool, my cape and sweaters, a linen blouse. A heat rose in my shoulder to his hand as if to a warming brick. There was no one else in the library, and the darkly paneled walls seemed to draw nearer like the sides of a wooden box; the precious volumes also conspired, like heads nodding closer, to overhear our words.

  I turned upon the bench and saw only the curved lips in his beard, then felt the rimmed moisture of his mouth upon my forehead, then my lips. He sank next to me and fumbled with my bodice.

  I held Hamish’s face between my hands. I sought out his blue eyes. I could paint him now, so carefully did I see his face: his complexion pink as the saint’s in the illumination, the carmine flush of his chest where the shirt flap opened, dangling its careless string. The light saffron hairs. I laid my ear to his chest and he held me. I wanted to know his music. The lute, the sound box, the fretted ribs.

  Some women think of love as a rising thing, but I’d always known it as a descent where I might lose myself or my beloved. A sweetness and then a severance greater than original solitude. And so, I feared joy. Yet there in the library, Hamish and I climbed the bright ladder of the body, as if it were sky and we a deafening, twisting flock of birds that could never fall to earth.

  CHAPTER 17

  Sorrow Be Banished

  Olmina planted herself directly in front of me. “If you’re going to pace the room all day, you may as well come to the market with me and cover some distance.” She thrust a basket at me.

  I shook my head. “I’m not going out in that bone-chilling mud. Does it ever stop raining? Oh, Olmina, I don’t know what to do!” I sat down hard, ballooning my skirts on a chair before the fire.

  Lorenzo grunted as he whittled there in the opposite chair.

  Olmina sighed. “Let me tell you something. At the New Year’s dinner, Isabella said . . . ‘I don’t know if this will help, but please tell your mistress that her father, before he departed Edenburg, insisted that he must find the bezoar stone in the desert.’ ”

  I repeated these words in amazement. “Olmina, why have you waited over two months to tell me this? I’ve been swerved from my journey, but if Isabella said—”

  “Oh, signorina, pardon my saying it, but what Isabella said proves nothing! She also called him ‘a man of two minds, fleeing and returning, who thought a stone would help him to find peace’! If we are to go anywhere, our best course is home.”

  “There is a doctor with whom my father exchanged letters in Montpellier, and he is an expert on the correspondences of stones, the indigestible sorrows. I should write to him, or perhaps we should take up the journey again . . .”

  Olmina took my hand and said, “Maybe you’d rather stay here and choose some small happiness? That Hamish is too handsome for my liking, but he stares at you as if he would devour you. Not many northerners are given to that kind of want and devotion.”

  Devotion. The word seemed unattainable. The memory of the afternoon in the library crackled within me like the atmosphere of approaching thunderstorm, distant and very near at once. I was mute, deafened. Hamish had called upon me afterward and we were dazed, couldn’t speak of it, yet knew that it seared and united us. We were hungry for each other. But how to make a life out of this? Had my own mother and father known one another this way? If they had, was their life together afterward one of rancor and long mourning for what was lost?

  I wondered how to come to devotion. The devotions. Habit, prayer, observance of the other. I thought of Mauro. What good was the fidelity of touch and attention? He was gone. I sank into sadness and could see no way around it. I wouldn’t admit that I lacked the plainest kind of courage. Instead I leapt into my habit of a different form of bravery (daring the journey again). We would leave in a fortnight for Montpellier. I didn’t tell Hamish but left him a letter of farewell, explaining that we’d found a new clue to my father’s whereabouts, the bezoar. And all around this truth, he must have felt the blatant untruth, for he didn’t accept what I wrote.

  We set off in the gray uncertainty of morning, with the Water of Leyth to the west. There were no flocks of jackdaws or linnets. They must have been sheltering in a sturdy oak—or at least that’s how I wanted to see them. I felt the oak nuts that Gerta had given me, pressing against my leg in my pocket, and fingered them like lumpy prayer beads. The tarocchi card was there as well. Am I doing the right thing? I asked myself. Should I turn back?

  We spoke little and rode through one winding river valley after another to the southwest. Most of the hills remained moth-brown, though it was early March. The trees were our constant silent witnesses, for no one but cider or ale fools would’ve been out and about in the raw, knuckling weather. Am I a fool or a madwoman?

  After over a week of trudging through mud and dismal weather, sleeping in earthen houses with turf roofs and nothing more than hides for doors, we stopped near the river Derwent close to Cockermouth. We planned to rest for a week or two to recover our strength in the blue stone house of a baron, a lodging recommended by a solitary farmer who passed us on his way to town.

  The lady of the house was pleased to have us, for this was not the season when they usually welcomed wayfarers. The men had all gone hunting with the baron, and the women remained scattered and apart in their stone houses. As I spent my time writing, she quickly learned to leave me be, though she did send little things up to my room to cheer me: pungent heather or the broken cups of wild birds’ eggs. She pressed me to accompany her on excursions to meet the baron for a day or two at the stones of Long Meg and Her Daughters, or Wast Water, a black lake to the south, but I refused her invitations. Her life forced me to consider another way I might have lived, where a deep and varied music moved between a woman and her husband. I recalled my conversations with Hamish, his fervent body, and regretted everything I couldn’t keep.

  Lorenzo and Olmina, on the other hand, amused themselves with chores, songs, and games. They visited the markets on Wednesday and Saturday mornings to buy supplies and sample the ale that everyone seemed to drink morning, noon, and night. I meanwhile remained behind, dull as a stone, feeling heavy and tired. But I wrote.

  LA NAUSÉE DE FLEUR:

  A Vernal Disease That Causes One to Lose Appetite and Withdraw into the Darkest Closet of Her House

  Every year when spring splits the world open with fragrance and color, many unfortunates
suffer this ailment. Winter still holds them even as seedtime pulls them. My mother once mentioned an aunt Taddea, whom I scarcely remember, who endured la nausée de fleur every year. She couldn’t pursue her work in the binding shop when her body revolted against spring. The guild, however, allowed her to assist her husband in the craft from her shuttered bedroom for the duration of the illness. Taddea directed helpers from the dark, and they brought the boards and paper presses, various papers and glues, and brushes and clamps she needed. She could not even bear to gaze upon a flower design, so the assistants avoided papers decorated with rosettes, trefoils, lilies, or leaves. Taddea worked more by feel than by sight in the continual candlelit dusk of her room. All went well unless the assistants or women in the family forgot to scrub off any scent they’d applied before they visited or delivered her food. She winced at their approach, coughing dryly, as she complained that scent attached itself more readily to women, that one sympathetic vapor would mingle with another. Red poppies, jasmine, orange blossoms, and all manner of wildflowers distressed her greatly.

  I never understood her suffering until I treated a young Scotswoman, Emily, who, upon first spying drifts of narcissus in the fields, took to her bed and refused to taste any food. When I entered her room and observed the gauzy canopy of her bed delicately painted with violets, I immediately ordered it to be removed. Likewise the nightdress she wore, which was embroidered with yellow primroses. She showed marked improvement but still couldn’t go near her window without catching the scent of narcissus. If she even distractedly glanced at them, she was unsettled for days. “The flowers are fatal and no one else knows,” she would whisper in a panic. “They pull you down into their poison.”

  I calmed her as best I could and began administering simple broths of violets, briar, and gentian, even narcissus from which the petals were strained. Like cures like. Flowers cure the unwitting maiden. The household lay under a strict order of silence regarding the true ingredients of the broth. Little by little, Emily improved, her wan face gaining color again, her limbs gaining strength. We knew she was well when she craved dandelions and threw her casement wide open.

  Spring arrived, and one Sunday afternoon Lorenzo and Olmina insisted we all go to the village fair. I accompanied them, but while they danced in the village common to the barrel organ, bagpipe, and tabor, I felt thumped by dull clubs. My skin ached. Lorenzo and Olmina amused the English with their lively Friuli dances, Lorenzo kicking up his heels like a gangly grasshopper and Olmina spinning like a peg top. Not to be outdone, the English also danced by hops, frisks, and leaps as they made their circles round and round with clasped hands.

  “Signorina, come and join us!” Olmina cajoled me. “You’re so marvelous a dancer, you could show us the contrappasso!”

  She held my hand and pulled a little.

  I shook my head and sat back on the wooden chair brought me by a kindly old vendor woman. “My feet are too leaden just now, but I’ll watch,” I said, trying to appease her, keeping in mind the awkward circumstance of my presence among the countryfolk—I didn’t want to become an object of speculation or mischief.

  I was sitting near the cheese stall at the end of many food stalls lined up on the west side of the common, their gaudy awnings billowing in waves at the slight breeze that brought the first scent of the warming fields. The vendor hollered out her wares, some of which she patted with her stubby hand, as if coaxing them to further ripen.

  Lorenzo tried to jolt me by bringing an aqua vitae. “Drink up, dear Dottoressa. Here’s the medicine! Time to banish your troubles and follow the dance!” he cried, his eyes bleary with cheap ale.

  “I’ll drink and dance the day you sew a wound!”

  “Come along.” Olmina tugged his arm. “Mustn’t get too forward with our lady.”

  Embarrassed, he bowed low, doffed his woolen cap. “I meant no harm, signorina.” And then because he’d bowed so low, he kept going and fell over, finding himself embracing the dirt common, much to the amusement of all who witnessed him, including me.

  “Oh, Lorenzo, I’m not angry.” I smiled at his long face as he lay squinting up at me. “I’m just not a dancer anymore.” After I said this, I felt I’d gone suddenly old.

  At that moment a Fool strutted up with exaggerated, dangling sleeves trimmed in bells trailing the ground. He wore only stockings full of holes, no shoes or breeches, and a raggedy bicolored tunic of russet and white split vertically down the middle. His cap hung crookedly to one side, with three floppy horns tipped with bells. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed me with audacity, then grimaced at Lorenzo.

  “That’s no way to treat a lady, now. No falling at the feet, man. Kiss her hand, that’s what they like!”

  As he moved toward me, Olmina landed a good swift kick in his shin.

  “Aaaah, aaaah!” He bawled like a babe and clutched his leg, playing it to the fullest. The small crowd that had gathered clapped and laughed, and the bagpiper sped up his tune. The Fool now hopped on one foot toward the center of the dancing. He let go of his leg and clutched a morris dancer in women’s garb, who’d appeared, jingling bells at his knees, swaying a large farthingale back and forth in imitation of abundant hips. Unfortunately one of his stuffed breasts fell, though the Fool was quick to help him push it back up, at which moment the faux lady released a hearty fart. The nearby dancers hooted and groaned, giving her wide berth.

  The stench drifted over to where I sat—unless it was some other reveler stinking up the air, for there were plenty of them vomiting and relieving themselves under the poplar trees that grew near the road. I’d witnessed a few rustic fairs in the Italian countryside (and courtly festivities as well), where taking one’s pleasure meant dance and drink and bodily evacuations of all sorts.

  Lorenzo managed to sit up, grinning, while Olmina helped him rise the rest of the way.

  Against all better judgment, I allowed myself a little sip of the aqua vitae he’d left on the stool next to me. It was enough to warm me to the fair. I watched the children beyond the alehouse clustered in games of blindman’s buff, leapfrog, and bowls. Runlets of ale and ivy beer spilled upon the earth. Pretzels and goat pies steamed upon the tables. Carter’s bread and butter. And bowls of a foul-smelling porridge with lumps of sodden meat, probably a tough mutton.

  Olmina offered me a flower of marchpane, knowing my fondness for almonds, and I nibbled it slowly, feeling my hunger for sweets return. Ring o’ roses, somersaults, and trundling hoops. The children didn’t care if their parents pulled their hair or swatted them with ladles or the flat side of a hand. It was fair day!

  Churlish men strode about on stilts and whooped, some using a stilt to lift a skirt, others stalking up to the alehouse and purposefully bonking their foreheads on the crossbeams of the doors, just to make the children laugh. I found myself laughing, then quietly crying with an empty glass in hand. Olmina and Lorenzo were nowhere in sight. Mortified, I decided to slip away and walk back to the stone house alone, for it wasn’t far from the town. When I stood up, the white-haired vendor came over and slipped a small cheese in my pocket. When I fumbled through coins I emptied onto my palm from a clever purse tied to my skirt, she picked a small one (which I didn’t think was enough) and refused any more. Then she hugged me. “So, even ladies must weep in this life, eh?”

  “No help for it. Thank you for the cheese, Grandmother.”

  “Oh, I’m not a grandmother anymore. Lost ’em to the pestilence two years ago.” She stared off into the budding trees as if she might find them there.

  Now it was my turn to hug her.

  Halfway back to the manor, a few men near a twisted oak leered at me. I walked a little faster. One gadder dressed in green presented me a nosegay that I kept for fear of offending and later tossed in the hedgerow. Every now and then I heard a snuffling behind me, as if a man mimicking a wolf was stalking me. When I abruptly turned at the top of the hill to confront the one behind me, I saw the Fool, who promptly bowed widely and said, �
��Just looking after ye, milady.” A plump little pig was beside him, dressed in a ruff collar. The pig trotted up to me and grunted. The Fool struck a staff that resembled a long femur on the ground three times. “May the cause of yer sorrow be banished!” Then he turned, somersaulted, and ran back to the dancing, the little pig scampering after him as fast as it could.

  If my father was dead, I would have his grave. I would have his ghost if I believed in such things. We’d been traveling for eight months, and all my inquiries had led nowhere. One by one I was ticking off the places empty of my father. Though I now possessed his glasses, his shoes, and the description of a man unraveling in Edenburg. Perhaps I was the one unraveling? I had rested enough. I turned to my notes for comfort before urging our departure for Montpellier, where three of my father’s letters had originated. Each time I touched the book, I regained the center of things. I found purpose in text and taxonomy.

  PORPHYRIA:

  An Abhorrence of Light That Causes One to Suffer Cankers and Grow the Fur of a Beast

  From the time she was a very young girl, a woman in Lucca cringed at the light of the sun, the moon, even candle glow. Her hair began to grow in such thick waves from her face and body that from a distance, Irmina was sometimes mistaken for a small costumed bear escaped from the traveling carnival. Her poor, terrified mother begged a family friend, my father’s cousin Signor Giovanni Albani, to send for a doctor. I accompanied my father to Lucca and met the young woman as she cowered in her mother’s wooden closet. As she spoke to us through her pelt, I got the impression that Irmina was an anchoress deprived of solitude. She spoke in short, broken whispers. “I want to go away from people!” I remembered a deer I sensed one morning as the animal stood hidden in a thicket, its attention directed toward me, its stillness an opening in the landscape that led to some refuge.